God’s Word of Warning for His Children – Trinity 10

Words of Warning for God’s Children

Luke 19:41-48 T Trinity 10

INI

Throughout the Scriptures, God is constantly acting like a Father to His children who’ve lost their way. He does so in our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah 7, or when God’s visitation comes to the Jews in Jerusalem in Luke 19, or when we worship in our churches today. God has one message for all His children that transends space and time: repent and believe in My Son. Don’t be zealous for establishing your own righteousness. Be zealous for Christ Jesus and His righteousness. Believe and live in Him.

God invites sinners to have this faith. That they turn from their wicked ways and live. And that’s not just for the unbelieving world – but also for His children who should know better. In Jeremiah 7, God warned His children in Israel the due justice of their actions. They claimed to be God’s children, yet acted against God and His ways. In the text, God called out their various sins.  He cited their lack of justice by oppressing the sojourner, the orphans, and the widows. He cited their breaking of the 10 commandments – how they stole, murdered, committed adultery, and swore falsely. They acted in this way without hardly a prick against their conscience because they broke the first commandment. They made offerings to Baal and other false gods. The Israelites tried to combine their faith with the power of the nation’s gods that surrounded them. God couldn’t condone this syncretism of false religions with Him. Such false faith will be punished. But God gave them a path forward that they may live with Him. As their Father, God gave this promise to His children: “Amend your ways and your deeds, and I will let you dwell in this place.”

What do you think they did? Did they amend their ways? Did they respond to God’s word with faith? Did they clean up house and refuse to make God’s dwelling place into a refuge of robbers? If God were to visit His people, what would He find?

Fast forward to the time when God did take on flesh in the person of Jesus, what did He find? Did they amend their ways and their deeds? Did He find faith in His people?

Well, not much was fixed. When Jesus came upon Jerusalem, the holy city of God, He found a lost people. He even echoed what God said to them through the prophet Jeremiah – “My house shall be a house of prayer, but you’ve made it into a den of robbers.” And quite literally, they did. There were merchants in the Temple, selling sacrificial animals for various required sacrifices.  But the problem was that the money changers exchanged foreign currencies for the required Temple coin at unreasonable rates, effectively stealing from God’s people. They were still oppressing the sojourner. They still neglected the needs of widows and orphans. And instead of sacrificing to Baal, they sacrificed to themselves. They sought their own rightlessness instead of living in the righteousness of God. So, as you can see, not much had really changed for God’s people in the last 600 years.

Knowing this to be the case, Jesus wept when He approached Jerusalem. He was supposed to be welcomed by His children. Yet, they would eventually kill Him in this very city. He was so distraught after seeing His children ignore His words of warning, that out of compassion and pity, He broke down. It’s like when a father or mother sees their child doing something you’ve warned them not to do. You can’t really do much, all you can do is sit back, wishing you could change their fate, but you know that they’re already on a collision course towards destruction.

Due to their lack of repentance, Jesus prophesied Jerusalem’s inevitable doom. He said, “For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” Israel didn’t repent from the sin of neglecting God’s Word. Despite God’s word of warning, they continued in their unbelief of the Son of God. This resulted in the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD to the Romans. The temple, which even from the days of Jeremiah was treated as their good luck charm, was destroyed.

For us Christians, who are God’s children not by flesh and blood, but through the adoption of God’s grace in baptism, we should heed God’s warning too. Because Jesus isn’t talking to non-believers here. He’s not talking to the pagan Roman empire. He’s talking to Jerusalem – the city and people with whom He had made a covenant. He’s talking to the people who should know better. He’s talking to His children who’ve lost their way. They needed to repent, to amend their ways, and seek Christ and His righteousness if they were going to be spared when God visited them.

Though we are members of God’s kingdom by grace, repentance is still a part of the Christian life for God’s church. Like the Israelites, we in the Christian church can lose our way. In our Revelation bible study, we’ve examined Jesus’ message to the churches in Asia Minor in chapters 2 and 3. His message? Repent. Meaning, turn from sin, be changed by God through the renewal of your minds by the Holy Spirit, and live a God-pleasing life. Repent from following false teachers and idolatrous worship, synchronizing together worldly teachings and Godly teachings to form a new religion, a new Gospel. Repent from the ongoing breaking of the 10 commandments. Repent, and hear the Word of the Lord once again. For the Lord will come to visit His people.

That’s what we confess in the Creed – that Jesus will come back again, to judge the living and the dead. And what shall he find? At God’s first visitation in the flesh of Jesus, there were some who had faith in Him. Many came to the Son of God to be healed, to be forgiven, and to receive His teachings. They knew the works of their flesh only brought death. But this Son of God brought life. The 12 disciples, and many more, followed Jesus because they truly believed Him to be the Son of God. Though they weren’t without sin, they constantly humbled themselves to the grace and mercy visited upon them in Jesus.

This is the type of faith the Lord Jesus invites us to have. To constantly see the need for repentance, and to hear the Word of God preached. For God looks upon us with compassion and mercy, seeking to visit us here today with the forgiveness of sins won by Christ on the cross, given through Word and Sacrament. Having faith in the mercies and promises of Christ, His second visitation won’t be met with the due justice that our sin deserves. Rather, He will see a faith that receives Christ and His righteousness. For we realize our righteous acts are as dirty rags before the Lord. But when we live in Christ and His righteousness, our sins are put to death. In faith, we don’t treat God’s gifts and promises as good luck charms or ‘get out of hell for free’ cards, like the Israelites treated the Temple. We treat the grace of God as the costly gift it is. It cost the Son of God an unjust death, a death reserved for you and me.

Jesus invites you to repent, because He loves you. He has given up everything He has to claim you as His own. He has humbled Himself to the point of a servant, that He might take your frail flesh upon Himself, and satisfy God’s wrath on the cross. And just like when Jesus casted out the unrighteous money changers out of the Temple, and set Himself in the center of the Temple to teach the people, so does Jesus cast out the unrepentant sin we cling on to in our hearts, so that He might reign in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Living in this grace by faith, God visits us with His Word, His grace, and His blessing, that we might be prepared for when He visits us again.

Come in repentance now and receive the riches of God’s grace given in His body and blood.

INI

Pastor Joshua Ralston