The Festival of Ash Wednesday (Observed)

The Festival of Ash Wednesday (Observed),

18 February 2018.

Concordia Lutheran Mission,

Terrebonne, Oregon.

“The Focus of God is Mercy Toward Sinners

for Christ’s Sake.”

And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.

Joel 2:13.

Introduction.

Here the Lord reminds again the point of all His actions: His Mercy in Christ-Crucified. In the time of the prophet Joel Israel suffered a great pestilence of locusts because of their disobedience to God’s Word. The Lord, however, makes plain that the point of the pestilence is not their destruction for their sin but their repentance from that sin that they might take advantage of His Mercy in Christ. After all, were God desirous of Israel’s destruction, he wouldn’t need to send incremental and limited difficulties their way but with a simple glance He could reduce them to ashes forever in an instant. Thus we see God’s patience with sinners for the sake of their salvation.

Such is the case in any of the Lord’s dealing with any and all men. He calls men to repentance in order that they might take advantage of His Mercy in Christ, not that they be forever consumed.

This patient and gracious disposition, this slowness to anger, was purchased with the Blood of God Himself[1] on the Cross. Because Christ paid for Israel’s sins and the sin of all men, He is patient and longsuffering with men in order to allow them time to take advantage of His Mercy in Christ that delivers from sin, saves, and gives life eternal.

The Mercy of God in Christ and Him Crucified for the sins of all men justifies sinners and saves. That Saving Mercy is God’s focus in the time of the prophet Joel[2] and always.

I. The Cross of Christ Reveals God’s Longsuffering toward Sinners and Mercy in order to Save.

A. God calls men to repentance.

This Wednesday past (14 February 2018) was the Festival of Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the season of Lent, a penitential season, i.e, a season of repentance .

The application of ashes on the Festival of Ash Wednesday reminds us we are mortal because of sin. Sin ultimately reduces man to the permanent destitution, darkness, and death, because sin reduces men to ashes and dust.[3] Sin introduced death to mankind and reduced man to dust and ashes.[4] Even though Lent is a penitential season and popularly misunderstood to be a miserable time in the Church calendar, it is actually a delightful time because it returns us to God’s boundless Mercy and Grace in Christ and Him Crucified for the sins of all men. God’s Mercy and Grace in Christ refreshes men in life with God now and unto life eternal, the resurrection of the body, and boundless joys and riches.

We gain a glimpse of the dreadful Day of the Lord’s judgment of sin in the days of the prophet Joel. Israel had departed from the Lord in Joel’s day. The Lord finally sent a great pestilence of locusts to call the people back to His Mercy and Grace in Christ and to reject their false worship and righteousness. This result of their infidelity should have come as no surprise for them. Moses made it plain that were the people to depart from the Lord, they could expect ill not good. Moses writes:

But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statues which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee. ... the LORD shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou guest to possess it.[5]

In the case of the days of the prophet Joel, it was a tremendous locust plague that beset Israel. The locusts devoured crops and overran homes. The Rev. Dr. Theodore Laetsch writes of aspects of this kind of pestilence, recounting a similar locust plague in 1915 reported in National Geographic:

The first swarms of locusts in February, 1915, came “in such thick clouds as to obscure the sun for the time being” (National GeographicMagazine, 1014, p. 513). And later the newly developed fliers passed over the Jordan Valley “in clouds sufficiently dense to darken the sun” (p. 544). “The morning,” literally, the dawn; picturing either there swift advance, as the morning light speeds from crag to crag; or their greater number; or the semidarkness of the twilight, the dusk preceding the brightness of the day. “Great,” “strong,” both terms denote numerical or physical strength, their great number and their power to destroy. ... “Disastrous as they were in the country, equally obnoxious they become about the homes, crawling up thick upon the walls and squeezing in through cracks of closed doors or windows, entering the very dwelling rooms. – Women frantically swept the walls and roofs of their homes, but to no avail. – They even fell into one’s shirt collar from the walls above. – A lady, after being away from home for half a day, returned with 110 of them concealed within the skirts. Whenever touched, or especially when finding themselves caught within one’s clothes, they exuded from their mouths a dark fluid, an irritant to the skins and soiling the garments in a most disgusting manner. Imagine the feeling (we speak from experience) with a dozen or two such creatures over an inch long, with sawlike legs and rough bodies, making a race course of your back!”[6]

While this plague is not the worst of it, it gives men an idea of what lying under the wrath of God is like: Everything is unhinged and goes amiss. When we consider one of our worst days when nothing comes together and everything goes awry, then, we begin to understand what the people of Israel experienced in Joel’s day and what all men experience when they lie under the everlasting wrath of God. The prophet Isaiah writes of that fate:

And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.[7]

B. Christ removed the everlasting pestilence of sin by Atoning for the sins of men on the Cross.

God, however, delivered man from the everlasting pestilence of sin by Himself bearing these everlasting plagues for men on the Cross. David writes of Christ bearing the consequences of men’s sins for them:

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath born our griefs, and carried our sorrows: ye we did esteem him stricken of, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.[8]

Because Christ bore the guilt of our sin, He bore the pestilential consequences of our sin. Now no pestilence for men because of sin, of which the pestilence in Joel’s day is a glimpse, remains because Christ removed them by His Atoning for the sins of men through His Passion. Thus we see in the Passion of Christ that Mercy toward sinners is God’s focus, not the destruction of sinners.

II. The Passion of Christ Refreshes Men with Life Eternal.

A. Meditation upon the Passion of Christ refreshes the soul.

Meditation upon the Passion of Christ does not lead mean to melancholy and make men downcast – only our sin does that – but rather refreshes the souls of men because He delivers from pestilence emerging from sin. The prophet Joel writes:

And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil. Who knoweth if he will return and repent, and leave a blessing behind him; even a meat offering and drink offering unto the LORD your God?

To be sure, the Passion of Christ does reveal the gravity of our sin because the cure for the problem reveals the magnitude of the problem.[9] The Lutheran Church confesses:

Yea, what more forcible, more terrible declaration and preaching of God’s wrath against sin is there than just the suffering and death of Christ, His Son? But as long as all this preaches God’s wrath and terrifies men, it is not yet the preaching of the Gospel nor Christ’s own preaching, but that of Moses and the Law against the impenitent. For the Gospel and Christ were never ordained and given for the purpose of terrifying and condemning, but of comforting and cheering those who are terrified and timid.[10]

Luther writes:

But now bestir yourself to the end: first, not to behold Christ's sufferings any longer; for they have already done their work and terrified you; but press through all difficulties and behold his friendly heart, how full of love it is toward you, which love constrained him to bear the heavy load of your conscience and your sin. Thus will your heart be loving and sweet toward him, and the assurance of your faith be strengthened. Then ascend higher through the heart of Christ to the heart of God, and see that Christ would not have been able to love you if God had not willed it in eternal love, to which Christ is obedient in his love toward you; there you will find the divine, good father heart, and, as Christ says, be thus drawn to the Father through Christ. Then will you understand the saying of Christ in Jn 3, 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” etc. That means to know God aright, if we apprehend him not by his power and wisdom, which terrify us, but by his goodness and love, there our faith and confidence can then stand unmovable and man is truly thus born anew in God.[11]

Meditation on our sins produces melancholy. Meditation on the Passion of Christ inspires joy and refreshes the souls of men.

B. Mediation on the Passion of Christ produces the joy of Lent.

Because we meditate on the Passion of Christ during Lent, we are refreshed and cheered. The prophet Isaiah describes the Gospel as a place of refreshment and joy in the wilderness of a sinful world:

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the LORD, and the excellency of our God.[12]

Luther writes:

The wilderness shall be glad. Thus the field, the meadow, is properly called happy when the year looks its most beautiful. By this picture he also describes the flourishing church, though there is a desert there. The church flourishes inwardly, not in power, in the wisdom of the flesh, in the gleam of splendid works; but it walks along in a simple form, not in ostentatious holiness, and therefore appears to be quite forsaken and without any glitter. Yet there are internal flowers and delights there, but these are not visible, namely, confidence, peace, life, a cheerful conscience, things that are not seen. But it does shine outwardly with obedience, love, humility, etc., which do not seem great in the eyes of the world. The world considers this to be a common run of people, meanwhile looking up to exalted things, to feasts, fasts, to a unique prayer, to ceremonial rites. to cowls, tonsures, and similar things of this kind, while it disdains the church which looks so very insignificant. Therefore the shape of the church must be discerned by the Spirit not in the wisdom of the flesh. For here the church is in the wilderness, though it is compared with tilled and happy fields, tilled, that is, not by our merits, but by the grace of God.[13]

This joy only gets better as we meditate more upon Christ through our lives and gets better in yonder life. The Apostle St. John writes;

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.[14]

Conclusion.

God’s focus is Mercy towards sinners in the Passion of Christ. Were God’s goal the destruction of man, He would not use slow, creeping pestilence like the locusts in the prophet Joel’s day, to ruin people. He would simply condemn them immediately. Rather, God calls men to repentance through such difficulties so that the take advantage of His Mercy in Christ.

Meditating upon God’s Mercy in Christ makes the season of Lent not melancholy and miserable, but a time of refreshment and cheer that extends into life eternal in Christ’s Kingdom of Glory.

Amen.

1

[1]“Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.” Acts 20:28, underscore added.

[2]“Joel was active probably during the first two decades of Joash’s reign (877-837 [BC]), while the latter was under the guidance of the priest Jehoiada (2 Kings 11:12) ... .” The Rev. Dr. Theodore Laetsch, Bible Commentary on the Minor Prophets, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, no date, p. 112, amplification in brackets added.

[3]“The ancient act [of the imposition of ashes] is a gesture of repentance and a powerful reminder about the meaning of the day. Ashes can symbolize dust-to-dustness ... .” The Rev. James L. Brauer, Lutheran Worship: History and Practice, editor, the Rev. Dr. Fred L. Precht, Authorized by The Commission on Worship of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, p. 166.

“And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes ... .” Genesis 18:27. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it was thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Genesis 3:19. Hence, we read in The Order for the Burial of the Dead, “FORASMUCH as it hath pleased Almighty God, in His wise providence, to take out of this world the soul of our departed brother, we therefore commit his body to the ground (to God’s acre); earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself.” The Lutheran Agenda, p. 95, underscore added.

[4]“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned ... .” Romans 5:12. “... till thou return unto the ground; for out of it was thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Genesis 3:19.

[5]Deuteronomy 28:15, 21.

[6]Bible Commentary: The Minor Prophets, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, no date, pp. 119, 120.

“So faithful is Joel’s account that even today its accuracy and vividness is freely acknowledged. In the December, 1915, issue of The National Geographic Magazine (XXVIII, NO. 6) John D. Whiting writes of an interesting manner an eyewitness account of a similar locust plague covering all of Palestine and Syria, from the border of Egypt to the Taurus Mountains. After quoting Joel 1:2-6 he begins his article: ‘Thus Joel, writing some seven or eight hundred years B. C., begins his description of a locust plague, which then as now must have laid waste this land. We marvel how this ancient writer could have given so graphic and true a description of a devastation caused by locusts in so condensed a form’ (p. 511).” Bible Commentary: The Minor Prophets, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, no date, pp. 119, 120.

[7]Isaiah 66:24.

[8]Isaiah 53:3-5.

[9]“Anselm, Cur Deus homo [Why God became Man] ... : ‘The debt was so great that though no one but man had to pay it, yet no one but God could pay it, so that the same one who is God would be man. For that reason, it was necessary for God to assume man into the unity of His person, since He who had to pay the debt and was unable to do so would be in the person who could. ... No one could make satisfaction except God; no one had the debt except man. If he is only man, he will not do it because he will not be able to pay. If He is only God, He will not do it because the debt is not His. ... Therefore God became man in order that He who was able to pay might owe the debt and that he who had the debt might be able to pay it.’” The Rev. Dr. John Gerhard, p. 40, Theological Commonplaces ... On the Person and Office of Christ, tr. Richard J. Dinda, edited with annotations by Benjamin T. G. Mayes, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, no date, p. 40, translation of the Latin in brackets is mine.