Jesus speaks in your hearing today, saying,
“And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who
sold;”
Because of this, your catechism
teaches you Confession; that “…when the
called ministers of Christ deal with us by His divine command, in particular
when they exclude openly unrepentant sinners from the Christian congregation
and absolve those who repent of their sins and want to do better, this is just
as valid and certain, even in heaven, as if Christ our dear Lord dealt with us
Himself.”
When we deal with God in His
majesty, we come up against very hard things. One of those is the anger of God.
What further grinds our gears is that the Bible is apparently contradictive on
this subject, saying both that God is angry and that anger is not found in Him.
In attempting to ponder God on
His throne, you have no recourse but to think about it in a way you understand:
that is, human anger. In doing so, you hear God being cruel, unjust,
oppressive, and angry. At that point in your reasoning, God either must be
appeased with a sacrifice or He is not a true god at all.
So, seeing Him as a volcano god
set to blow at any moment, you amend your thoughts and your ways to line up
with His thoughts and ways. You attempt to give God all the glory and obey Him
in true submission. Thinking that you are giving your whole life to appease
this angry God, you feel secure in your choice.
Yet, God’s commands continue for
your life and come like a whip. If you go this way, and its wrong CRACK. If say
this and its wrong CRACK. If you make a wrong choice, hoo watch out boy, here
come that scourge of cords to keep you on the straight and narrow.
All you can rely on is your own
feelings as to which is God’s will and which is the opposite. You have no
divine intervention; you have no direct revelation and God has stopped speaking
to you in your prayers. Conscience must now dictate what the volcano-god says
and it must not be bound to the letter, lest you quench the spirit.
Repent. Your conscience no more knows God’s will than a
mosquito knows he’s about to meet your windshield at 70 mph. You pondering God
in human terms does not bring you closer to the truth, but closer to unbelief,
because God is angry with sin. He will not relent, and He does demand
sacrifice.
God says to His own people, “And I myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with
a strong arm, even in anger, and in fury, and in great wrath.”
(Jer.21:5)
Now it would be different if it were directed at those other
folks, but at His own people??
Dear Christians our enemies are sin, death, and the devil.
When Jesus fights; when Jesus goes to war, it is against these things that He
directs His wrath. When God becomes angry, it is because there is something
else that is trying to usurp His place as the true Shepherd.
It pleased the Lord to crush His Servant. When Jesus scoured
the Temple , He
wasn’t just throwing His weight around. Jesus was showing us what was going to
happen to Him. That He was going to become unclean, for our sakes, and that He
was going to endure the wrath of God against His enemies, on our behalf.
As Jesus offers Himself as a sacrifice on the cross, the
true Temple is
purified. The earthly Temple
needed Jesus to come back more than once and chase these blasphemers out, but
Jesus only needed once upon the cross.
The Temple
is an earthly sign that points to Jesus. The Lamb of God is the True Temple
He then rises three days later without sin, or spot, or
wrinkle. Jesus, in His resurrected glory, ascends to the Right Hand of the
Father, lives and reigns to all eternity.
In this work of Jesus, salvation is offered to the entire
world. You are purchased by this innocent suffering and death, because those
sins were not Christ’s. It was your anger that Jesus paid for.
What this has to do with you is this: Just as Jesus went
into His own Temple to cleanse it, instead of all the pagan ones in the area,
so today does Jesus come to His own Church to purify her.
There is no sacrifice for sin outside of the Church and for
this reason, Jesus sends pastors. These are the men of whom Jesus says,
“Whoever hears you, hears me.” Because of the Word of God, the pastor has this
authority, and only because he would speak the words of Jesus.
In the Church, Jesus offers communion with Himself. Thus,
the Church is not to believe the words of the pastor, but the Word of Jesus. In
the Word we hear of absolution freely given. IN the Word, we hear of the Blood
that purchases us and In the Word we believe and so we receive.
By Faith alone does the sinner grasp that it is saved by
grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. So that when faith hears
God’s anger, repentance is produced and the sinner falls to his knees as a
beggar.
He falls in faith and is rewarded, for his Savior does not
leave him in the death of his sins, but cleanses and purifies. Jesus does not
destroy the Temple
He sanctifies it. It is destroyed, but the True Temple
Thus, in baptism, you have been incorporated into the
scourged and purified Body of Jesus. The scourge of God’s wrath has flown
through and removed all sin, all pain, and all sorrow. The holy place you stand
in now, by the Word of God, has been cleansed and is offered to you.
For today, as we look at the cross and commune in the Lord’s
sacraments, we find that the anger of God is not directed at us, but at His
Son. Jesus bears the stripes, the wounds, the lies, and the mockery and yet
replies, “All this I gladly suffer.”
Jesus, Who built the earth’s foundation, is laid into the
grave, for by His passion we share in the fruit of His salvation. When you
hear, with your physical ear, the words of Christ’s absolution, spoken by a
man, it is Jesus speaking.
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