Who Goes with You into Surgery?

Sidney Herald religion column published May 5, 2013

 

One of my vain ideas was to reach 60 without being an inpatient of a hospital. Didn’t work. Two Januaries in a row, I was hospitalized. I was a suffering puppy, though still nothing like many around me. My condition meant many trips to Billings this past year for surgeries.

 

It’s amazing how nurses and doctors, besides providing medical treatment, comfort their patients. As great as they are, I hope none of them will take offense when I say, they can’t hold a candle to Marilyn, my wife. She is my companion in suffering. She goes with me everywhere I hurt. She is there in every emergency room, every surgery room, every hospital room, and in my heart.

 

Probably more than anything else, suffering causes us to doubt or question God. Why must people suffer, especially those we consider to be good people. We want answers. In my medical sufferings, Marilyn gave me a lively experience of the truth that there is something better than an answer: a companion.

 

You can’t hold hands with an answer. You can’t share a pillow with an explanation. Reasons don’t shed tears with you.

 

But Jesus sheds tears with you. Yes, He does. In that He has suffered, He knows you in your suffering. Jesus defines sympathy and companionship. Jesus suffered continually in body, mind, and soul. He said, “I am with you always.” (Matthew 28:20)

 

As bad as most sufferings are, worse is the suffering of temptation. As unfair as sickness is, our being sinners from conception forward seems more unfair. We have inherited sin from Adam. This inherited sin nature, to say nothing of our particular sins, brings defeat, guilt, condemnation, the wrath of God, and his threats to punish sin. Death is no escape, because eternal hell follows. I’ll admit it. I have questions.

 

But, what is true of other sufferings also is true of the suffering of temptation. Better than an answer is a companion. Jesus suffered from relentless and fierce temptation. In that He suffered temptation, He knows you in your temptations. He is able to save you, and a Savior is better than an explanation.

 

“We do not have [in Jesus] a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” (Hebrews 4:15-16) “He had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” (Hebrews 2:17-18)

 

The question of suffering is answered in the sufferings and sympathy of Christ. Jesus goes with us in all sufferings, even into the surgery of temptation.

 

 

 

How Can We Expect This To Work?

The first time my Dad sent me out seeding alone, a feeling of pessimism overcame me. That night I said, “How can we expect a green, leafy, lush crop from this? We are dropping dry seed through dead iron machinery into dirt.” He said, “It’s made to work.”

 

That gave me something to think about. There is a Maker. He made seed and soil. He made them work. He could have made things some other way, but He chose this. In creation, “God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed.’” (Genesis 1:11). God’s Word made it happen.

 

It is the same with baptism. The natural question is, “how can new life come from plain water? How can water do such great things?” Had it not been for God’s Word, it wouldn’t.

 

God could have said whatever He wanted. But once He did say, “Baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3:21), it does. The Word makes baptism do what it does. Without the Word, there would be only water and no baptism.

 

The Word does in the new creation what it did in the first creation. In the first creation, the Word created life. In the new creation, the Word creates new life when by faith we use the means God said to use. He told the Apostles to baptize in the whole world.

 

God says what He does in baptism repeatedly because it’s important. “He saved us ... by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.” (Titus 3:5) “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:4)

 

It works because God is at work. “Having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses ... God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses.” (Colossians 2:12-13)

 

The story of Naaman pictures baptism. He had leprosy. He came to the prophet Elisha to be cured. Elisha told him to wash in the Jordan River seven times. The Jordan was a dirty river. Naaman was angry. He could not see how that would work. But his servants said, “it is a great word the prophet has spoken to you.” (2 Kings 5:13) Naaman was looking only at the water. His servants were looking at the Word with the water. “So he went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God, and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.” (2 Kings 5:14) Because of the Word of God, the water of baptism does this for us spiritually, even though it looks as foolish as washing in the Jordan River.

 

 

One Word in Absolute Darkness

Sidney Herald religion column published 3-10-13

 

With the oil boom, it seldom is dark anymore at our farm. There is usually some light from gas flares. It’s not like the experience of darkness we used to have in the field when walking back to a truck or the yard. On nights with no moonlight, the going could get tough. One night the sky was overcast and a fog rolled in. My eyes were little help, but the lay of the field through the soles of my boots gave enough sense of where I was to make it back.

 

Blacker still was the night I learned that the wife of someone close to me was going to divorce him. The suffering coming on him gripped me. I was trapped for some hours staring into a bottomless pit of darkness that both pressed in and fled away at the same time. It was the menacing horror of being forsaken.

 

Much of Christ’s suffering on the cross was in daylight. People saw what was visible to the human eye. But then, there was an eclipse of the sun, and it got dark. “From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.” (Mathew 27:45; Mark 15:33) During those hours, the sufferings of Christ were out of sight. They were invisible transactions within the Trinity. It is impossible to look into them.

 

But, in the darkness, the word of God was spoken. Near the end of those hours, when it was about the ninth hour, Jesus quoted Psalm 22:1, crying, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34) R.C.H. Lenski says, “The darkness and the agonized cry of Jesus go together.” Darkness and forsakenness.

 

Because of the Trinity, because the words Father and Son are not just two titles for one person, Christ’s cry of forsakenness is not just negative psychological self-talk. It is not a cry of self-alienation. This is the Father, who praised his Son when He was baptized, and who praised him on the Mount of Transfiguration, forsaking him. The Only Begotten Son of God, who had always been in the bosom of his Father (John 1:18), is deserted in darkness.

 

The Father did not forsake him because of any loss of faith. Jesus still called his Father, “My God.” Not long after that He said, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” These are words of faith, just as in Psalm 22 where Messiah believes that God will deliver him in the end.

 

What, then, caused the Father to forsake his sinless, faithful Son? This was the forsaking that our sin deserved. “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) This is mystery upon mystery: the mystery of Christ’s forsakenness explained by the mystery of Jesus being our substitute.

 

 We cannot see in the darkness, but we can hear and believe the Word.

 

 

 

What Do We Seek at Church?

"If we see ourselves as sinners (damned by our thoughts, words and deeds) we will go to church to hear the Gospel Word and to be gifted the forgiveness of sins in Christ. However, if we reject original sin and see ourselves as morally neutral, we will go to church to be encouraged in our pursuit of being more moral. In the first scenario, the churchman goes to church hungry knowing that he will receive free warm bread. In the second scenario, the churchman goes to church denying both his need of the free bread and the gift of the free bread, yet wanting recipes and pointers on how to make the warm bread himself." -- Pr Matt Richard

 

 

 

The Saddest Face I Ever Attempted To Paint

Sidney Herald religion column published January 27, 2013

 

Artist Francis B. Carpenter said Abraham Lincoln had “the saddest face I ever attempted to paint.” His law partner said Lincoln’s “melancholy dripped from him as he walked.” His life was an unceasing litany of sorrows, tragedies, and dangers leading to the Civil War. With many assassination threats, finally he was shot on Good Friday, 1865.

 

Jesus died on Good Friday. He too was a man of sorrows. His life was constant suffering, opposition, and threats.

 

Jesus would “suffer many things and be treated with contempt?” (Mark 9:12) People said He was a sinner, glutton, drunkard, blasphemer, was insane, and had a demon.

 

In his home town, people ridiculed Jesus for his family’s low station. Authorities ridiculed him for lacking education. A Samaritan village refused him lodging. The Gadarenes begged him to leave their region. “Not even his brothers believed in him.” (John 7:5) His own family “went out to seize him … saying, ‘He is out of his mind.’” (Mark 3:20-21)

 

During infancy, King Herod tried to kill him. In his home town, “They rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff.” (Luke 4:29) Crowds picked up stones to kill him. (John 8:59; 10:31) After a trip to Judea, he “would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him.” (John 7:1)

 

The Pharisees conspired how to destroy him. (Matthew 12:14; Mark 3:6) When he healed a man with a withered hand, the scribes and Pharisees “were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.” (Luke 6:11) “The scribes and the chief priests sent spies, who pretended to be sincere, that they might catch him in something he said, so as to deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor.” (Luke 20:19-20)

 

A crowd cried crucify Jesus and give us Barabbas. That name says two things about the rejection of Jesus. “Bar” means “son of,” and “abbas” means either “his father” or “the father.” Translating it as “son of his father,” what man is not the son of his father? That name signifies the most generic man, to say “Give us anybody but Jesus.”

 

Translating it as, “son of the father,” once more, the Trinity is at the center. “This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because … he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” (John 5:18) They hated Jesus for revealing the truth of the Trinity, the truth that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, though three persons, are one God and equally divine. To choose Barabbas as “son of the father” is to reject Jesus as Son of the Father and to reject the Trinity.

 

The saddest face is the Savior’s, when people refuse the forgiveness of sins through the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

 

Predestination is for Praying when Under Trial

In response to the posting, When Are Thoughts on Predestination Useful?, a friend asked me this question on Facebook. "So what do you think about Predestination, Mr. Halvorson." His is an earnest question, asked in godly sincerity, warranting the following reply:

 

We may believe that when God moved our parents to bring us to Baptism, and Christ's Church baptized us in the Triune Name, we received the gifts of repentance, forgiveness of sins, the Holy Spirit, and adoption as a son of God.

 

We may believe that when we receive the body and blood of our Savior with the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper, we receive with them what his body was broken for and what his blood was shed for, the remission of sins.

 

We may believe that when we hear the announcement of the Gospel that God for Jesus' sake forgives us all our sins, it is true for us.

 

The Word and Sacraments have been revealed and are certain. These are visible things which God has given us for our assurance, and no hidden thing ever can take away their truth, reality, or power. God invites us to come at any time to these means of grace, and in times of immediate, acute need, He further invites us to Private Confession and Absolution, wherein Christ would have us believe the word of the Pastor absolving us as his own word. The Pastor in this act of Christ is like the water of Baptism or the bread and wine of the Holy Supper, in that all of the visible things of Word and Sacrament appear weak and foolish, but are the power of God and the wisdom of God to save us.

 

God has chosen these foolish things to confound the wise of this world.

 

Predestination has been revealed only in part and for a limited purpose. We should use the part revealed when the purpose of the revelation is upon us, and we should use it only for its purpose. It is part of the armor God has provided against fiery darts of the Enemy attacking our faith and diverting our eye to ourselves rather than clinging to Christ. It is useful only when under fire of those darts. This happens when we are under the Cross and the specific suffering of the trial of our faith. For this suffering, Christ has added the revelation of his election and predestination unto salvation as a defense against the enemy. The temptation of the Enemy is to have faith in faith, rather than faith in Christ. The revelation of God's predestination unto salvation helps recover our focus onto Christ and away from ourselves.

 

We may know at all times that whatever else about predestination has not been revealed, and that we might question, never will change what has been revealed or take away the revealed power of Baptism, the revealed power of the Lord's Supper, the revealed power of the Gospel, or the revealed power of Absolution.

 

The Christian uses what God has revealed about predestination like he uses Baptism, Communion, the Gospel, and Absolution, as visible assurances against doubts and against the unseen or hidden things of God. Though we might otherwise be in absolute darkness, these rays of light are enough for us. In fact, they are an embarrassment of riches, an overflowing treasure. If the superabundance of the revealed things will not satisfy us, then the unrevealed, hidden things of God will not add anything to our health. When we are drowning and a lifeguard throws us a rope, we hold on to the rope without asking what other ropes there might be.

 

God revealed his predestination unto salvation only in his tender, fatherly care of his dear children, not to satisfy philosophy. In short, predestination is for praying, not for philosophizing, much the same way as the Creed is useful as a prayer.

 

See "Election," Epitome of the Formula of Concord, Article XI.

When Are Thoughts on Predestination Useful?

The New Testament text for January 19 in the Treasury of Daily Prayer is Romans 9:1-18. In chapters 9-11, among other things, Paul teaches God's predestination.

 

In context, this doctrine is a comfort to sinner-saints whose lives are cross and suffering.

 

Of course, the enemy of our souls does not want us to have this comfort. He has stirred up all kinds of red herrings, bogus issues aside from God's purpose in revealing his election unto salvation. The Church has divided over the Devil's issues, and the ordinary Christian suffers without the comfort this doctrine could provide, while the needless disputes continue as a sideshow grabbing most of the attention.

 

Once more, Dr. Luther is an especially brilliant light, keeping a strategic and pastoral eye on the comfort of ordinary souls, paying no notice to the distracting issues, and zeroing in on the goodness of the Good News. He says:

 

In chapters 9, 10, and 11, [Paul] teaches of God's eternal predestination ... in order that our salvation may be taken entirely out of our hands and put in the hand of God alone. And this too is utterly necessary. For we are so weak and uncertain that if it depended on us, not even a single person would be saved; the devil would surely overpower us all. But since God is dependable – his predestination cannot fail, and no one can withstand him – we still have hope in the face of sin.

 

Here, now, for once we must put a stop to those wicked and high flying spirits who first apply their own reason to this matter. They begin at the top to search the abyss of divine predestination, and worry in vain about whether they are predestined. They are bound to plunge to their own destruction, either through despair, or through throwing caution to the winds.

 

But you had better follow the order of this epistle. Worry first about Christ and the gospel, that you may recognize your sin and his grace. Then fight your sin, as the first eight chapters here have taught. Then, when you have reached the eighth chapter, and are under the cross and suffering, this will teach you correctly of predestination in chapters 9, 10, and 11, and how comforting it is. For in the absense of suffering and the cross and the perils of death, one cannot deal with predestination without harm and without secret anger against God. The old Adam must first die before he can tolerate this thing.

 

Luther, Martin, Luther's Works. American Edition. General editors Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 35, p. 378 (St. Louis: Concordia, and Philadelphia: Muhlenberg and Fortress).

 

When we are struggling in temptation and suffer in defeat, our faith is tried. We wonder, "Am I saved. I am failing. I must be ruined and doomed. How will I fare in death." But, dear one, it never depended on you or your victory, but on God's will and work, on which you may depend. Take your gaze off yourself and put it back onto the Word of Christ.

 

Jesus said, "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand."

 

While our lives remain under the cross and suffering, our destiny is secure. God revealed his election unto salvation through Paul as a Word of the Gospel, news that is good, to secure our faith when it is under trial, and comfort our sorrows over sin through confidence in him. (John 10:27-29)

 

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In reply to a question about this posting, see: Predestination Is for Praying when under Trial