February 22

February 22, 2009

Celebrating the Pardoning Grace of God
a sermon on Micah 7.11-20
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

Who is like you, O God, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgressions? No one! Nothing compares to God, and today’s scripture reading gives us one more reason why: the pardoning grace of God. We have a God worth celebrating! If you have tasted his grace, you know that. If you haven’t, … well, it may sound too good to be true. I assure you it is true.

This sermon is another in my sporadic series on great passages of the Old Testament. It is from the book of Micah. Micah was of course one of God’s prophets. He spoke a message of judgment and hope. The judgment was important because God’s people had a special place in God’s plan. But when God’s people are as bad as everyone else, they can’t do their part. So God judged them, not because he didn’t love them, but because he loves the world and his plan is to save the world. God also loves his people too much to let them stay on the wrong path for long. Hope was important because God never gives up on his people. He probably ought to, but that’s not his way. He is full of grace and love.

I know today is Transfiguration Sunday. I am preaching this passage instead of the transfiguration for a good reason. During Lent this year I am going to preach about the cross. “What?” you ask, “Every Sunday?” That’s right. Every Sunday. Every sermon will be unique and fresh. Yes see, Jesus’ act of love for you on the cross is so profound and deep, one way of thinking about it just isn’t enough. I explain this in the March newsletter where I compare the cross to white light. White light contains every color of the rainbow. Shine it through a prism and you can see all the different colors. In the same way, the New Testament gives us many different ways to think about the cross. Each way is like a color, beautiful and distinct in its own right; complementing, not contradicting, the others.

So I am going to preach the cross during Lent, but on this last Sunday before Lent I wanted to preach grace from the Old Testament. I want to stamp out once and for all the old lie that Jesus is loving and kind and forgiving but his Father is not; the lie that God is gracious in the New Testament but stern and mean in the Old. Try selling that to Ananias and Sapphira! (If you don’t know who they are, read Acts 5.) Jesus and his Father are one. Their character is exactly the same. The cross shows us God’s love—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yes, God did something new and exciting in Jesus, but what he did fulfilled an old, old plan that was there in the Old Testament all the time.

God is a God of grace. God is worth celebrating. The Old Testament reveals that as well as the New. There is a word the Old Testament uses to describe God. It is the Hebrew word hesed. If you only learn one Hebrew word in your life, make it this one, because there is no way to pin this idea down in just one or two English words. It’s all over the Old Testament, but you can’t see it because it gets translated in so many different ways. Hesed means steadfast love, faithfulness, mercy, compassion, loyalty, and grace. It is a covenant word, a relationship word. Hesed describes God’s character as one who will not let you down. God is hesed. God is steadfast love. He is full of grace and kindness. These are not just words that describe some of God’s actions. They describe God’s character. Therefore you can trust God. Hesed is the word the Old Testament uses when it wants to say, “God is love.” Everything in the New Testament confirms what the Old Testament kept shouting all along: God’s hesed. God sent the Messiah because of his hesed. He poured out his Spirit and opened the covenant to all nations because of his hesed. He was keeping all those old promises. The cross, therefore, is the most exalted and beautiful example of the hesed of God. His steadfast love endures forever, even if that is its cost.

The word appears twice in our scripture reading. In verse 18 God delights in showing steadfast love. Grace is not something God extends grudgingly, as if he feels guilty for having made us. God delights in loving us. Verse 20 speaks of God’s steadfast love toward Abraham. Where does Abraham come into this? He lived roughly a thousand years before Micah. But that’s God, you see. He never forgets a promise. He never lets go of the love he has. Micah is confident God will forgive his people and restore their joy because God’s love is steadfast. There is no other god like him.

Micah’s name, by the way, means “Who is like Yahweh?” Yahweh is the name of God. It means “I AM.” It is the name God revealed to Moses from the burning bush. So the opening line of this passage is a play on Micah’s name. Who is like God? The answer: no one.

This line started me on a train of thought. We live in a secular culture. Most of the time, though, when people do not practice a specific religion, they are not atheists. They simply make up their own religion to suit their tastes. On a hospital admission form, one patient wrote “pick and mix” when it asked about her religion. I thought about the way people do this and the kinds of god they usually end up with, and it struck me that with the three most common forms of god people invent, forgiveness is impossible. These gods may be nice and easy-going, but they are incapable of grace. As a result, if you sin, there’s no forgiveness. Let me explain how it works.

The god most people like to imagine when they pick and mix is the god I will call “Grandpa in the Sky.” He’s what Santa Claus would be if he didn’t keep a list of the naughty children. Grandpa is nice and sweet, you see, and his chief aim is to make his little creatures happy. He is very different from the God of the Bible because the God of the Bible loves us enough to give us rules, because he knows we tend to make a mess of things. He will also bend us over his knee if we need it, because his chief aim is to make us holy. He knows we can only be truly happy and satisfied, not if we get what we think we want, but when we become like him. The Grandpa god can’t forgive because he never judges. Anything you do is fine with him, if it makes you happy. So you act selfishly and hurt other people. Grandpa doesn’t seem to mind.

“Well,” you say, “there’s no problem then. No rules. No sin. No need to be forgiven.” You might think that, but I’ll wager your own heart will call you a liar. I suspect we have all done things for which we feel guilty—and rightly so. Maybe not a lot, maybe just one or two really big things. For instance, I read the memoirs of a man haunted by a thoughtless, stupid thing he did decades ago. When his daughter was young, he was under a lot of financial stress and tended to drink too much. One day he was in a foul mood and he had had a bit too much to drink, and his little preschool daughter said something that exasperated him, and he hauled off and hit her. He instantly felt remorse. He never did it again. In fact it pushed him to drink less. She grew up to be a successful, normal person, and they have a good relationship. But he still feels shame and guilt. He did wrong, and he knows it. This man happens to be a Christian, and he confesses that even though he believes God has forgiven him, he has trouble forgiving himself. Do you have any idea how he feels? I do—not for that reason—but I do. I suspect all of us do.

When you are guilty, and you know it, the God of the Bible can help. He judges and forgives. He gives grace. He wipes the slate clean. He suffers the penalty himself. All you have to do is repent, throw yourself on his grace, and ask for forgiveness. What good is a Grandpa in the sky who says, “Hey, that’s OK. No big deal. Do better next time”? If you are a Christian, your sin has been nailed to the cross. Without the cross, what do you do with it?

The other two gods have the same problem. They tell us we don’t need forgiveness, but we know better. Deep down we know, and so they can never give us what we need the most. The second one is god as an impersonal force, like in Star Wars. God is this sort of mystical force that affects things, and maybe you can tap into. But it is impersonal, and therefore has no opinions and makes no judgments. An impersonal god is incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, which is why it is popular. When we are trying to get away with things we know deep down are wrong, a god like this is handy. When other people try to get away with things at our expense, it’s not so handy. And when the truth hits us in the face that we are guilty, that we are part of the problem. And we realize we need forgiveness and grace. What do we have? No hope, with an impersonal god.

The third popular conception is the god or goddess within. Some people believe we each have a spark of the divine within us; each of us is a little god or goddess. Anyone with low self esteem can see the appeal, although I think the cross does more for low self esteem than anything else. After all, if God loves you that much … But people will believe what they want to believe and some like this “little god within” idea. But what happens when you need forgiveness? You might say, “Well, I’ll just forgive myself.” But it doesn’t work, does it? It might work for petty offenses: “I really should recycle more” or “I shouldn’t have told that lie.” For some reason, it doesn’t work for the big stuff. My guess is, we all have a sense of right-and-wrong and fair play that deep down we know is independent of us. We didn’t invent it. We found it. And because we didn’t make the rules, we can’t suspend them or forgive violations.

The result of all this is, if you like to pick and mix your religion, and you choose one of the popular gods people seem to go for these days—the Grandpa in the Sky, the Force, or the goddess within—you are out of luck if you ever get to the point where you need grace. If you need forgiveness and a fresh start, you have nowhere to turn.

I took the trouble to spell all this out, not because I think most of us here are tempted to these idolatries, but mainly in order to highlight God’s grace. You should not take it for granted! You should celebrate! You have something to get excited about. God has compassion for you. He will cast all your sins into the sea. I can’t ever hear that line without thinking of Corrie ten Boom. She spoke about that verse at the Bible study where the guard from her concentration camp asked for her forgiveness. I usually think about that story from her perspective, how difficult forgiving can be. Think of it the other way, if you were that guard. “Can God forgive me? Can he make even me clean?” He can. “Why would he do that?” Because he is compassionate, merciful, abounding in steadfast love. That’s why. And that’s something to celebrate!

Since we are talking about grace and forgiveness and the Old Testament, I want to say something about the Day of Atonement. I think it will help you to understand the cross. The Old Testament sacrificial system, including the Day of Atonement, foreshadows the cross. The sacrifices Israel offered symbolized the one great sacrifice God would make on Israel’s behalf—and for the sins of the whole world, yours and mine included.

How were sins forgiven in the Old Testament? If the New Testament way cost God so much, why not stick with the old way? For the simple reason that forgiveness was never purchased with the blood of sheep or goats. Forgiveness depended on the grace of God and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. They were forgiven the same way we are, but of course Christ had not come yet, so the sacrificial system was in place to point toward Christ and prepare God’s people for his coming.

The idea behind the sacrificial system was this: Sin separates people from God. Sin, by definition, means doing things that damage your relationship with God and other people. If we loved perfectly, as God does, we would have no need for rules of any kind. We would always do what’s right. Love God with all you heart, mind, soul, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus got those right out of the Law of Moses. He said they contain all the commandments. We do neither, however, so we have a problem, just like God’s people in the Old Testament. Sin comes between people and God. But, guilt and punishment can be transferred to a substitute. We see this in the Day of Atonement rituals.

The Day of Atonement came once per year. It was the only day anyone could enter the holy of holies—the innermost sanctuary of the tabernacle and later the temple. Only the High Priest could enter. Before he could do anything about Israel’s sin, he had to do something about his own. So he selected a young bull. He bathed and put on clean robes and vestments. He sacrificed the bull. He entered the holy of holies burning incense. The smoke from the incense filled the room, so that he could not see the ark of the covenant. He took some of the blood from the bull and sprinkled it on the lid of the ark seven times. Then he went back out and selected two goats to bear the sins of the people. One was sacrificed. It was offered on behalf of all who truly repented, and its blood was sprinkled on the lid of the ark. This goat was a substitute for the people, just as the bull had been a substitute for the high priest. Here we see a clear picture of Christ, who gave himself on our behalf.

The other goat was the scapegoat. The high priest laid his hands on it and confessed all the sins of the people. When he had finished, this goat was given to a man to take deep into the desert where it was turned loose so far away that it would never be seen again. This represented God removing Israel’s sins as far as the East is from the West.

Don’t you marvel how God teaches his people in ways we can understand? When he wants to prepare his people for Christ, he gives them the Day of Atonement. When he wants to help his people know the cross was for them, he gives us the Lord’s Supper. It’s all very hands on.

We might recoil from the old sacrifices. Thankfully we do not have to continue them now that Christ has come. They seem so bloody. But this is precisely the point. According to the Old Testament, “The life is in the blood.” Meaning, of course, that if you take the blood out, death results. When the priests of old drained the blood from sacrificial animals, they made a dramatic point: the wages of sin is death. Sin leads to death as invariably as draining out the blood does. Sin causes both physical and spiritual death. That’s why the substitute had to be killed, not just spanked and sent to bed without dinner. The sacrifices made the point: Your sin costs something. You may not have to pay the price yourself, but it costs something.

We don’t tend to talk about the blood of Christ very much. We talk about the cross or his death, but we don’t use the word blood much. Our squeamishness, is not very biblical. The New Testament uses the phrase “the blood of Christ” three times more often than “the cross of Christ” and five times more than “the death of Christ” [Walt Kaiser, The Majesty of God in the Old Testament, p. 83]. We read about those sacrifices in the Old Testament. We picture in our minds Jesus on the cross. We drink from the cup he called a new covenant in his blood. And we know that our sin cost God dearly.

He said, “I am going to forgive all who will repent and come to me. I am going to heal them. And I don’t care what it costs!” … That, dear friends, is a God worth celebrating! That is a grace worth celebrating! Amen.

rev_mauldin@yahoo.com back to sermons