Archived Sermon

This is the Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity -- July 29, 2012 at

Shaped by the Cross Lutheran Church
Laurie, Missouri

Therefore, thus says the LORD, “If you return, then I will restore you – Before Me you will stand; And if you extract the precious from the worthless, You will become My spokesman. They for their part may turn to you, But as for you, you must not turn to them. Then I will make you to this people A fortified wall of bronze; And though they fight against you, They will not prevail over you; For I am with you to save you And deliver you,” declares the LORD. “So I will deliver you from the hand of the wicked, And I will redeem you from the grasp of the violent.”

Jeremiah had a problem. He was sent as the prophet of God to Israel at the very height of their unbelief and rebellion. They did not believe that they did not believe, that is how bad it was. Since Jeremiah had nothing good to tell them, they did not want to hear it. Jeremiah was given the news that the people unto whom he was to preach were going to die, horribly. They were going to die by starvation and by the act of war, by disease and by animal attacks. Their pain and their misfortune were not going to make sense to them, because they did not know the Lord, and they could not fathom that this ‘religion’ stuff was actually all that powerful or important.

Jeremiah was told that the people would come to him, cry to him, plead with him, ask him to intercede for them with God. In other verses, God told Jeremiah not even to pray for the people because He would not listen to Jeremiah when he did. Jeremiah was told that when they came to him and asked him what they could do, he was not to answer, and when they said, “Where can we go?”, he was to tell them, “'Thus says the LORD: "Those destined for death, to death; And those destined for the sword, to the sword; And those destined for famine, to famine; And those destined for captivity, to captivity."' Our text says that he was to show them no pity, no mercy. They for their part may turn to you, But as for you, you must not turn to them.

From the point of view of the residents of Jerusalem, there is no good news in this text. They are destined to die. The lucky ones will go away into captivity as slaves. The good news is for Jeremiah. God tells him that He will protect Jeremiah. All Jeremiah has to do is remain steadfast and faithful. Our theme for this week is, “Stand Firmly in the Truth”.

The text raises the question I call “the problem of pain”. It is a question that most people don’t want to consider very closely, and who can blame them? Pain hurts. The problem of pain may be stated like this, “If God is good and God is all-powerful, how come we suffer?” The technical term for the general subject area of that question is “theodicy”. It is the question, “Why is there evil if God is both good and all-powerful?”. The question of human suffering is part of the question of theodicy. Jeremiah is in the middle of the answer, and answer is provided by God.

First, why is there pain? The answer to that comes wrapped in both the doctrine of sin and the gift of God to mankind of the power to choose. Pain is a fruit of sin. If mankind had never sinned, there would be no pain, presumably. There might be something analogous to pain, as a warning system of danger of one sort or another, but it likely would be perceived in a different way, and not as pain or unpleasant. Pain, as we know it, is a consequence of sin.

Sin is the result of mankind’s inappropriate use of the ability to choose. Adam and Eve chose to disregard God and His Word, and sin was the result. The famous couple was once able to choose not to sin, or to choose to do that which was sin. They made their decision, and the world we inhabit is at least socially and culturally the reflection of and result of their choice. By choosing to go down the road of rebellion and sin, they closed off the other option for all their descendants. We are locked into a world where sin is natural to us, and natural for us, and one of the fruits of sin, and one of its negative consequences, is pain.

Why is there pain? The causes of pain are as varied as the pains we suffer, but the ultimate cause is sin. The reason we have pain is that mankind once had the ability to choose. God doesn’t explain in any detail why He gave mankind the ability to choose, but our reason, connected to what the Bible tells us, gives us some ideas. God used to walk with Adam and Eve in the Garden and talk with them. That suggests that we were created to be in communion - or at least in a relationship with God. A relationship with someone is not terribly meaningful or fulfilling without some element of freedom. If you doubt me, have a conversation with a tape recorder.

If you structure the recording carefully enough, you can create the appearance of a conversation. I have a vinyl record like that at home. It has a script, printed on the record jacket, so that when I play the record, if I read the script at the right speed, pausing for the recording as it plays, I sound like I am participating in the conversation on the record. The problem is, that it is always the same. I cannot vary my words with a meaningful result. I cannot change the speed I am speaking. The recording is just that - a recording. It produces precisely what it is programmed to produce, and nothing else.

Human beings without the ability to choose would be just as predictable. A relationship with such a being would be just as satisfying as a conversation with a recording. It might be fun a time or two, but after a bit, it would cease to amuse and stop being even marginally satisfying. That is why you generally don’t have conversations with your chairs and tables at home. Even when you do, you are not really speaking to those articles of furniture, but to yourself, or to the air, and not anticipating a response. If you actually got one, it would be creepy.

God created us for a relationship. That only really works when both parties can participate. Adam and Eve used their freedom and ability to choose in order to sin, and closed off that relationship. Part of the answer of God to our sin is pain. It is, like all things in our fallen world, part blessing and part curse. Pain serves us as a warning of danger, a signal that something is wrong, be that injury or illness, and a reminder of what we have done to ourselves - and continue to do to ourselves - in sin. The curse part is the sensation of pain itself, and I don’t need to explain that to anyone here. We have our own personal experiences of pain to fill in the blanks, as it were.

Why does God permit pain? It is part of allowing us to make choices, and therefore making it possible for us to have the hope of a relationship with Him. He even uses our pain to awaken us to our need for Him and speaks to our pain with the promise of rescue and forgiveness and the hope of salvation and eternal blessedness. For God to step in and eliminate pain, as many suggest that He ought to do with His omnipotence, He would also have to eliminate our ability to create the circumstances that cause our pains. He would need to eliminate even the appearance of freedom. That would also eliminate our abilities to create the circumstances that cause pleasure - or the ability to appreciate pleasure, or joy, or happiness. We would need to be a different sort of being than we are.

And one day, we will be. We will be free beings, able to choose what is right and good and to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain. That is part of the promise of salvation - eternal life without and beyond death, pain, sorrow, and sickness. How God is going to do that, I cannot imagine, but I do know the promise. He demonstrated the promise in Jesus Christ, showing us that what we see in this world today as impossible for us – rising from the dead – is possible for Him, and He has promised to share it with us because of Jesus and what Jesus Christ has done for us on the cross and in His rising from the dead.

And what has Jesus done? He has redeemed us from our sin and guilt. He has paid the price of sin without costing us our own lives. He did it by paying the cost with his life in our place. Your sins are forgiven! The reason for your pain - and the cause of death - has been taken away for you by Christ. Not only are your sins forgiven, but you are given eternal life. You will rise from the grave to live, body and soul united beyond death, forever!

God said to Jeremiah, “I am with you to save you And deliver you,” declares the LORD. “So I will deliver you from the hand of the wicked, And I will redeem you from the grasp of the violent.” Those words also apply to us. They tell us the answer to the problem of pain. God is with us, to save us and deliver us. Because of sin in this world, as long as we live in it, we will face pain, suffering, and trouble. But it is not the last word. This world is not the only life we have, but we also have life in eternity because of Jesus Christ and in that life there is an end to pain.

The words of God to the Prophet speak of redeeming Jeremiah from the grasp of the violent. Those words did not mean that Jeremiah would not suffer in this life. He did. The book of Jeremiah tells us and the accounts of Scripture teach us how Jeremiah was misused and abused by the people to whom he prophesied. History tells us that after the deportation, Jeremiah was killed by being placed inside a hollow log and then the log (and Jeremiah) was sawed in two. The redemption of Jeremiah came in and through Jesus Christ. He was rescued and saved for eternity by Christ. The grasp of the violent came to an end, but the grasp of God on His servant did not.

That is our hope as well. This life will have pain. It is present due to sin, although not necessarily due to specific sins. Sometimes you can trace a pain to a specific sin, but not often. Because sin is so pervasive in our world, pain is too. And pain is a problem. It hurts. And it tempts people to wonder why God permits it. Because we know the goodness of God and His good will toward us, we must conclude that pain has its positive purposes and uses in the hands of God. There is pain which has no good to it, just as some people have no good to them. Those who live without God, and without faith, and die in unbelief, will find that their pains finally served no good in their lives, and the pains of hell will serve no good – no pleasure – from their perspective in eternity. It will be simply punishment; what you get for rejecting the goodness and salvation of God.

But for those us that believe, we see in everything our Father permits to come to us His good will and purpose. We cannot always define it or describe it pain by pain, but we know Him, and we understand and believe that even pain, as in all that God does for us, is good. Not necessarily pleasant, but good. And whatever the pain is, it has a limit. And we trust that we will discover the truth of the words of the Apostle Paul, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

Some will still finally say, “So, why doesn’t God just end pain and rescue everyone, period, particularly if He is both good and almighty?” The answer is in what I have already stated. He has already done that, but in accord with justice and truth – the truth in which our theme speaks of standing firmly within! Meanwhile, the repeated question is an act of unbelief itself. It accuses God of injustice and says, in effect, “I don’t believe in your God.” “Why doesn’t God do things the way I want God to do them, instead of the way He wants to do them?” The answer is, because He is God and you are not. Either you trust Him or you don’t, and acting all reasonable and pious doesn’t alter that dynamic. When we are confronted by the temptation to continue to question the wisdom of God, we want to pray, with the father in Mark 9, “Lord, I believe, Help thou mine unbelief!”

With Jeremiah, we look forward to the fulness of that which our God has promised, and which we have seen worked out for us on the cross of Christ. Your sins are forgiven. You shall rise again. The promise is fulfilled, and we simply await the fulness of its fulfilment in our bodies also: “I am with you to save you And deliver you,” declares the LORD. “So I will deliver you from the hand of the wicked, And I will redeem you from the grasp of the violent.” So, we wait upon the Lord, and, listening to His Word through Jeremiah, we Stand Firmly in the Truth.