Jeremiah 31:31-34
Reformation Sunday
Shiloh Lutheran Church
In July, 1505, a young man named Martin Luther was traveling on the outskirts of a Saxon village when he got caught in a thunderstorm. A bolt of lightening struck nearby, knocking him to the ground, and he was so shaken he cried out in terror, "St. Anne help me! I will become a monk." He became an Augustinian monk, and poured his whole heart into the work of saving his soul. One biographer says, "He laid upon himself vigils and prayers in excess of those stipulated by the rule. He cast off the blankets permitted him and well-nigh froze himself to death. At times he was proud of his sanctity and would say, ‘I have done nothing wrong today.' Then misgivings would arise. ‘Have you fasted enough? Are you poor enough?'" (Roland Bainton, Here I Stand, p. 34).
He was working with all his might to please God and to save his soul, but no matter what he did, no matter how hard he worked, he could never be sure it was enough. But that wasn't the worst of it; he realized that the greatest commandment is to love God, but all his efforts had only made him see God as a demanding, stern taskmaster. He said, "I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated him!" (quoted by Bainton, p. 44). The more he tried to save his soul through diligent monastic discipline, the further he was from his goal. In the midst of seeking to please God, he discovered that, in fact, he hated God. He resented all that God was asking of him.
Here's what he was discovering: the Fall has rendered us dead in sin, incapable of restoring ourselves to a right relationship with God and the harder we try by observing the Law, doing all the right things, the further we find ourselves from God. The Gospel is not about working to save our souls, seeking God and finding Him, or learning to live in a way that pleases Him. It's about God seeking us and making a way for us to return, supplying everything we need to live in a restored relationship with Him.
The problem is that we want our efforts to count for something. We'd like to think that we can at least receive some credit, that God will recognize all our hard work and that this will somehow weigh in the balance in our favor. But the truth is that we contribute nothing toward a restored relationship with God. Jeremiah lists some of the things that characterize Israel's spiritual efforts. "They broke my covenant," (v. 32). They broke His covenant, even though He "was a husband to them." They committed spiritual adultery. They were guilty of wickedness and sin (v. 34) and were in need of forgiveness. Romans 3 takes this same theme and applies it to all of us: "There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one. Their throats are open graves; they use their tongues to deceive. Then venom of vipers is under their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery are in their paths, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes" (vv. 10-18). We want to respond, "oh come on, Paul, you've gotten carried away. Surely it's not that bad." But the problem with this is that these are not Paul's words; all he's done here is bring together a series of quotations from the Psalms and Isaiah.
What we bring to the gospel, our whole contribution, is emptiness, neediness, sin and guilt. As we read earlier in the service, "Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For ‘no human being will be justified in his sight' by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin" (Romans 3:19-20). We are alienated from God. We are "dead in trespasses and sins" and are powerless to do anything about it. This is what Martin Luther discovered: the harder he tried, the worse things became. He was incapable of restoring himself to a right relationship with God.
It's a pretty depressing picture, but thankfully that's not the whole story. The next point is that God responds to our neediness by supplying everything needed for our restoration and healing. He says to Jeremiah, "For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more" (v. 34). The problem with trying to save ourselves through obedience to the law is that we're not starting from a place of neutrality. We're not starting with a zero balance. If we were, all we'd have to do is start earning points. But we already have a negative balance, and that balance is so large that we couldn't pay it off even if we had all eternity to do so.
The Old Covenant, the Law, shows us our guilt. "They broke my covenant." The gospel provides a way for us to be forgiven: "For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith" (Romans 3:22-25). God, through the sacrifice of Christ, wipes away all our guilt and forgives all our sins. All our guilt is canceled out as a free gift through Jesus Christ.
But it doesn't stop there. The gospel is not only about forgiveness. The bumper sticker "Christians are not perfect, only forgiven" is wrong. It's certainly true that Christians are not perfect, but they are not only forgiven. The gospel wipes away our guilt and, at the same time, renews us to live in a restored relationship with God. The new covenant is a different kind of covenant: "not like the covenant I made with their forefathers" (v. 32). They broke that covenant and failed to keep it. All it accomplished was to reveal their guilt and lostness.
Here's what the new covenant is like: "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts" (v. 33). In the gospel, we become new creatures, declared not guilty and enabled to live in growing obedience, regenerated and given a new nature. "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" (2 Corinthians 5:17). God, through His Spirit, makes us new creatures. We find, in embracing the gospel, that we've entered a new world: "What this means is that those who become Christians become new persons. They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun!" (2 Corinthians 5:17, NLT).
I worked with a guy named Steve on the U.S.S. Piedmont. He was so hostile to Christianity that he would sometimes hound me with questions, badgering me to answer, then when I'd finally respond (which I tried to avoid doing) he'd yell at me about how Christians try to shove the gospel down people's throats. I usually didn't want to talk to him, but he'd seek me out and wouldn't let it go. After I got out of the Navy, friends told me he had become a Christian, and I was able to spend some time with him when I visited the ship 6 months later. Everything about him was different. It wasn't just that he had changed his mind and come to agree with us in areas where he formerly disagreed; even his face was transformed. He was a different person. It was still Steve, but there was something different about him; there was something more to his life than there had been before. A Christian is not someone who has adopted a new philosophy and is trying to follow it. A Christian is a new creation through the work of the Holy Spirit.
The third thing is that in restoring us to Himself, God begins healing our relationships with one another. The gospel is not just about the salvation of individuals, "Christ died for me." Notice the plural pronouns: "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people" (v. 33). In being reconciled to God we become united to His people, the Church. He speaks about making a new covenant with "the house of Israel and with the house of Judah." By the time Jeremiah is writing, these two kingdoms have long been divided; no one is now living who remembers a time when the kingdom was one. The northern kingdom has been deported to Assyria and will never return. But the new covenant looks forward to restoration and healing. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts [these people who have been enemies for longer than anyone can remember]. I will be their God and they will be my people."
We can see this in Ephesians, where Paul is describing what God is doing through the gospel: "With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (1:8-10). God is not only saving individual souls. He's at work restoring the whole created order that has been out of sync since the Fall. Shortly after the Fall, Cain murdered his brother; after that, humans became so proud and self-important that God confused their languages and scattered them across the face of the earth. The prevailing tendency in this world has been toward alienation, separation.
James describes the problem: "Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?" Is it just a matter of simple, honest disagreement, different personalities and ways of going about things? No. "Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts" (4:1-2). The Fall has driven a wedge between us. We are all seeking our own way and inevitably end up in conflict. All we have to do is listen to the evening news to hear more evidence of this than we want to know about. G. K. Chesterton said original sin is the only part of Christian theology that can really be proved (Orthodoxy, chapter 2). How can it be proved? Just by looking around at things going on in the world, and by looking honestly into our own hearts. The Fall has alienated us, separated us from God and from one another. And what God is doing in the gospel is undoing all this. He is restoring His creation, gathering up all the broken parts, making us all one in Himself. And the first step in this healing process is that He makes us part of His Church.
A few years ago I was discussing with my former bishop a pastor who was on the point of retiring and he said, "I think he'd be great in a twenty-something church." In his view each church should target different groups and tailor their programs to market whichever group they're interested in. He was in the process of moving his whole region in this direction, and his argument was that it works. People like spending time with those who have similar interests, so it makes sense to organize the ministry of the Church in this way. But this misses the point of what God is doing; He is breaking down all those barriers. He wants us to learn to live together with others who are different, and who think differently. He has called us together as part of the same body. This approach to the church is at odds with what God is doing in His work of redemption: "And this is his plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ – everything in heaven and on earth" (Ephesians 1:10, NLT). We don't have the right to organize the Church in a way that is moving in the opposite direction just because we think it will be more effective in the short term.
The gospel is about God seeking us and making a way for us to return, supplying everything we need to live in a restored relationship with Him, and not only us, but everything that has been ruined and defaced by the Fall. God is doing a work of restoration and He has graciously included us in what He is doing. What Luther discovered, much to his delight and surprise, was that God was the One doing the seeking. Thirty years after his vow to become a monk, Luther wrote: "Only Christians possess this victorious knowledge given from above. These two terms, grace and peace, constitute Christianity. Grace involves the remission of sins, peace, and a happy conscience. Sin is not canceled by lawful living, for no person is able to live up to the Law. The Law reveals guilt, fills the conscience with terror, and drives men to despair. Much less is sin taken away by man-invented endeavors. The fact is, the more a person seeks credit for himself by his own efforts, the deeper he goes into debt" (Commentary on Galatians, Kindle Locations 118-121, Kindle Edition). He was speaking from experience, and he went on to say: "I must listen to the Gospel. It tells me, not what I must do, but what Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has done for me" (Ibid. Kindle Locations 579-580 Kindle Edition). Early in his life he had been obsessed with what he needed to do, but then he made the delightful and surprising discovery that God had made a way for him to step back and relax, to receive the free gift, and then spend the rest of his life on this earth learning to live in the freedom purchased by the sacrifice of Christ.
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