Word of Salvation – July 2010
THE PROBLEM, John de Jongh
A Sermon on Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 2
Reading – 1 John 1:8-10; 4:7-12
Singing – BOW 389, 454, 517, “Lift up your heads”, “He was pierced”
Outline (Could be used for the Bulletin)
1: God’s law reveals our misery
We are miserable, whether we realise it or not
God’s word reveals our misery cf Genesis 1,2; Revelation 21,22
God’s law diagnoses the cause cf Exodus 20; Matthew 6ff
God is the law-giver
The relationship between good and evil
2: What is God’s law?
The heart of God’s law cf Mt 22
Love God cf Deuteronomy 6:5, love others cf Leviticus 19:18
What is love? For others. For God
3: We have a natural tendency to hate God and others
We don’t love like this
Our natural tendency cf Romans 8:7; Titus 3:3
We need help
And so: Realise your problem! Look to Jesus for the solution!
Dear Congregation
You may know someone who has had the problem – the car begins to lose power as you’re driving. You have no idea what it is. It’s time to limp off to the mechanic. And they spend days on it – trying one idea after another, cancelling out one possibility after another. Eventually, they even have to call specialists in, with special computerised diagnostic gear, and finally settle on what the problem must be.
It just shows you how hard it can sometimes be to diagnose the cause of a problem. You know there’s a problem. But what’s the cause? And how do we fix it?
You probably have similar stories with your health. You know something’s not right – you don’t have the energy you usually do, you’re off your food, you’re always tired, and you don’t know why. And so eventually you go to the doctor, only to discover that these are the symptoms for a thousand different possibilities. The doctor recommends a barrage of tests, with still no guarantee that you’ll know what the problem is at the end of it all.
The Lord’s Day before this one, Lord’s Day 1 introduced 3 things. Our ultimate and most basic problem – the root cause of all our problems. The solution to that problem. And our appropriate response to that solution. Tonight we think some more especially about the problem.
Point 1
In fact, sometimes you don’t even realise you have a problem, do you? It creeps up over a year or two as the valves of your car slowly carbon up, or as your arteries slowly clog with cholesterol. It’s only when you finally compare how things are performing compared to a few years ago, or a doctor compares you to what could be expected, that you’re told there’s a problem.
In the same way, some people don’t realise how miserable their lives really are. As far as they can tell, this is just normal – this is just the way things are – everybody they know has the same sort of destructive, purposeless, lifestyle. We all think the way we grow up, eat, conduct ourselves, is just the way things are, until we’re old enough to stay at a friend’s house, or eat out, or mingle in another level of society, and realise that there’s a whole universe of possibilities out there that we weren’t aware of. And some of those possibilities are better than the ones we’re used to.
And so some people accept that this broken and suffering world we live in is just the way things are. The pain and tears and struggle is the only alternative. We can’t hope for anything more or better. And when we die, well that’s the end. Consistent Atheists have no choice but to take that approach. Modern secular philosophy takes that approach. Read up on Nietzsche, the philosopher, some time. He’s considered the father of post-modernism. He lived out this approach to its logical conclusion of despair, and suffered a mental breakdown at age 45 from which he never recovered.
So why do Christians believe that this isn’t the way it has to be, and that there is a problem? Why do we believe that things could be better? Why do we believe that there is a solution?
And we only believe it, because like the mechanic and the doctor, we have original plans and specifications that tell us what things should be like. We have a diagnostic tool that tells us that something is wrong and needs to be fixed.
We can go to passages in the Bible like Genesis 1 and 2, and Revelation 21 and 22. These passages give the plans for the way creation was intended to be. And as we compare the way things are now with the way things are described there, we come to realise that our existence today is a pretty miserable one. Things aren’t the way they should be. Suffering and misery aren’t meant to be part of God’s good creation.
But then, what do you do when it comes to diagnosing the root cause of the problem? What tool do you use? And as the Catechism reminds us, the diagnostic tool to use is God’s law. You can go to passages in the Bible like the Ten Commandments, and there we have a diagnostic tool for our problem. You can see those commandments developed and applied in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Old Testament prophets, Jesus’ teachings, like the Sermon on the Mount – and in all of that we are given a diagnostic tool so that we can understand the problem.
You see, God is a law-giver. He is the law-giver. As we study the universe, we discover that it’s governed by laws – laws of physics, laws of chemistry – the universe runs moment by moment according to universal laws.
Societies realise that, and apply the same approach when it comes to how their society is conducted – some things are defined as good and right, some things are defined as bad and wrong, and law breakers are punished for their crimes. People instinctively follow in the footsteps of the Creator – the law-giver.
But as you look at different societies and the laws they put in place, you discover that they all put the line between good and bad in a different place. They understand that there needs to be a line, but they can’t agree on where the line should be.
In fact, if you ever attended good worldview lectures, you probably understand that there are 3 different basic understandings of how good and evil relate to each other. Some worldviews, like deism and atheism – which we’re pretty familiar with here in the West – have simply accepted that both good and evil have always existed. They just are – which leads to a dualistic understanding of things.
Other worldviews, like eastern mysticism and the New Age – which we’re becoming much more familiar with here in the West – believe that good and evil are one and the same. They hold that the distinction between them is just an illusion, or that they exist in balance, and we should just embrace them both.
And then some worldviews, like Judaism and Christianity believe that evil is the perversion of created goodness. Evil wasn’t there in the beginning – it’s something to be eliminated.
We shouldn’t be too surprised if many non-Christians take a completely different view from us about evil, and what we should do with it. We need to carefully go back to the diagnostic tool God has given us, if we’re going to even understand our sin and misery and evil the way it really is.
So how do we come to know, and accurately understand, our problem – our sin and misery? Only by going back to the Bible – to God’s description of the way things could be, the way they were originally intended to be, and the way they are now. Only by going back to God’s law, and carefully coming to understand things in the way the Creator God – the original law-giver – describes them to us.
Point 2
Now, when it comes to diagnosing why your car isn’t running properly, mechanics are smart, they try to narrow the problem down and start there. There’s a thousand things that are happening as your engine runs, but chances are a problem is to do with one of a few basic systems, like the electrical system, or the fuel system.
It’s the same with your health. If you come to the doctor not feeling very well, he’ll quickly try to narrow it down to your digestive system, breathing, nervous system, blood circulation, or something like that.
And once the problem has been narrowed down to one of these basic systems, you move on from there.
And fortunately for us, God’s law can also be distilled down to a couple of basics on which everything else is built. So even though it’s important to read and understand God’s entire law as it’s given in the Bible, as you work at understanding how it all fits together, you can build your understanding on a couple of basics that make up the foundation.
Jesus gave that foundation himself in Matthew 22 when the Pharisees tested him on these things. He said the greatest commandment is to love God completely with everything that we are, and the second is to love our neighbour as ourself. All of God’s law, and the writings of the prophets, are built on these two commandments. Jesus lifts these two laws out of Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18.
A good question to ask though, is: what is love? Love, nowadays, is used to describe everything from the mushy feeling a teenager gets, to the way I feel about my new printer, to the sense of dependence someone has toward their abusive partner. But what does God mean by love?
And you realise from the Bible that God means a lot more than a feeling when he talks about love. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives the second great command as the Golden Rule: ‘Do to others what you would have them do to you.’ Love is a selfless attitude towards others, followed up by appropriate action.
Paul gives some detail to that in 1 Corinthians 13 – the passage on love that we probably all know so well, “love is patient, kind, it doesn’t boast, it isn’t proud …” and so on. God’s idea of love is deciding to humbly relate to others in the way that works for their best – putting them and their welfare ahead of our own. Love is a selfless commitment to the well-being of others.
If we want to see the ultimate example of love, we only have to think about what God was willing to do for us. John says in his first letter, ‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’
And because we have now seen a love in practice that is so much greater than our own love for ourselves, Jesus raises the bar. In John 13 he calls us to love one another, not just as we love ourselves, but as he has loved us – willing even to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others.
And that’s thinking about the second great command. But, what about the first great command – love for God. When you apply all of this to our relationship with God, you begin to get a clearer understanding of what worship really is – total selfless commitment and devotion to God as our King and heavenly Father – total selfless unquestioning obedience to him as our God, as our Master.
Apply this kind of relationship to God, then you understand true worship. And when you apply this to others, then you understand true fellowship. When you apply this to creation, then you understand true stewardship.
Thinking back to where we started, when you compare humanity’s relationship with God, each other, and the world, with this possibility, then you begin to understand the depth of our sin and misery – just how far we have fallen from the way things originally were.
Point 3
You also start to realise that the world generally has no interest in loving God in this kind of way. People generally don’t want to give total selfless commitment and devotion to God as their King in unquestioning worship and obedience.
And people generally don’t want to love others in this kind of way. People don’t want to selflessly and sacrificially love others in the kind of way that God through Jesus has loved us. They want others to love them that way.
And people generally don’t want to love planet earth in this kind of way. People generally don’t want to tend and care for the world – they want to exploit it for their own benefit.
But that would also mean that we’re not inclined to love God, our neighbour, and creation, but to hate them.
I know that people generally wouldn’t put it that way – that sounds a bit harsh.
It’s not that they hate God, they just ignore him, neglect him. Some would even say they believe there is a God, they just don’t know who he is or what he’s like, they’re not sure that we can even know him well enough to really know what he wants.
It’s not that they hate other people, they just prefer not to associate with too many of them – people expect too much, they’re too demanding, holding down close relationships is too difficult, serving others is too demeaning.
And they don’t hate the earth. In fact they’re green at heart. They think it’s a real pity about the hole in the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect. But it hasn’t affected how they live their lives, how much energy they consume, how much carbon is pumped into the atmosphere on their behalf.
The thing is, we might prefer to tone down the language, but God just calls it as it is – if you don’t love, you hate. And so Romans 8 describes humanity’s basic attitude towards God in contrast to his basic attitude towards us, ‘the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.’ And Titus 3 describes humanity’s basic attitude towards each other as one of, ‘malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.’
We have a natural tendency to hate God and our neighbour. Instead of being naturally inclined to love in the selfless way that God does, we have a natural tendency to go the other way since the fall into sin in Genesis 3. And it’s from this basic orientation, that goes completely against God’s nature and his will for our lives, that our sin and misery flow. Our problems stem from a broken relationship with God, each other, and creation, caused by sin.
Conclusion
All of this leaves us with a pretty negative picture. But the positive thing about getting a negative diagnosis from the mechanic or the doctor is that at least you now know you have a problem. You know what the problem is. And you know what you can do about it.
We’ve only had hints today about the solution. The following Lord’s Days look at that a lot more. But of course the solution lies in the one who was willing to come to earth, sent by his loving Father, loving us enough to sacrifice himself for us in total obedience to his heavenly Father.
Jesus became one of us, loving his Father as we should love him, loving us as we should love each other, and loving creation as we should love it, so that we might have the solution we need to our problem. As we put our faith and trust in Jesus, as we commit ourselves to obeying him and our heavenly Father without question, then we come to have the solution that we need for our sin and misery. We may still be naturally inclined to go the wrong way. But we have peace with God. And by the power of the Holy Spirit the tide of our sinfulness has turned. We have the ability again to begin to love in the way that God wants.
Amen