The very Life and Love of God — the Life of the Holy Trinity, the Love of the Father for His Son and of the Son for His Father in the Holy Spirit — that Life and Love of God Himself have come into the world in the Person of Christ Jesus, the incarnate Son, conceived and born of St. Mary. He is the Light of the world. He is the Light who has come to shine in the darkness, that the world might be saved through Him; that you might be saved through Him, unto eternal Life with God.
To believe in this one Lord, Jesus Christ — to trust in Him, to cling to Him, to rest and reside in Him — that is already to have Life with God in Him. And to live in Him by faith is also to live and walk in love within all of your callings and stations, in your relationships and conversations.
This faith and life that are yours in Christ Jesus are in sharp contrast to the sin and death that you otherwise pursue apart from Him. For in your native sinfulness you are a child of wrath, ensnared by the lies of that old serpent, the devil, who has bitten you with his fiery sting. But all the while you are chasing after life on the basis of his wicked lies, the fact is that his bite is killing you.
Apart from Christ, you dwell in the darkness of your sin, yet you don’t even realize that it’s dark. You persist in your sin, despite the Lord’s grace and mercy toward you, in spite of His good gifts, His Word and promises. And in this you are no different and no better than Old Testament Israel.
In view of the Red Sea, through which the Lord had brought them out of Egypt by His miraculous and mighty power — along those very shores where they saw Pharaoh and his soldiers drowned in the depths of the sea — they complain and bemoan the misery of the wilderness. On the one hand they say, “We have no bread,” and on the other hand they say, “We hate this miserable food,” that is, the daily bread from heaven which God was providing even in the midst of the desert.
It’s like when your children tell you that they have nothing to do. They actually have plenty to do; they just don’t want to do it. And it is the same for all of you, no matter what your age. You have things to do, and you do have things to eat, but you are dissatisfied with what the Lord your God has provided. Although His Word and promises ring within your ears and His good gifts are set before you in the Liturgy of His Gospel, you complain that it is not enough, that it’s not what you really need or what you want. You thus despise His gracious Providence, the Food and Drink, the Word and Works of Christ Jesus, your Savior. You grow weary and impatient with the journey.
It’s taking too long. It is too hard. It is either too hot or too cold. There’s not enough of the food that you would prefer to eat. The work that you are given to do is too bothersome. The neighbors you are given to love are not very loveable. And so you get doubtful, perhaps you even despair. You fall into disbelief and hardness of heart. And you disobey the Word of the Lord your God.
In all of this, you follow in the footsteps of your first parents, Adam and Eve — who had the Word, the Promise, the Command, the entire Garden, and Life with God — who were given everything — and yet, they wanted more. Thus did they acquire death for themselves and all their children.
That is your legacy. Stung by the serpent’s venom, dissatisfied, discontent, and disobedient, your end is not life but death. That is all you have deserved and gotten for yourself, for all your striving and complaining. And yet, despite all that, in response to all of that, faith and life are wrought in you by God. That is His work, and you are His workmanship, by His grace alone in Christ Jesus.
Whereas sin and death are your work and wages, faith and life are worked in you by God, by the preaching of the Cross of Christ, that is, by the preaching of repentance for the forgiveness of sins in His Name. That you should be and live as a Christian disciple of Jesus, you are thus called to bear His Cross and follow Him. And to that end, the preaching of repentance crucifies you, puts you to death, and buries you: to yourself, to the world, and to your sins of thought, word, and deed.
As surely as God sent those fiery serpents to bite the people of Israel, so does He expose your sins, and He puts you to death by the Cross of Christ, in order to raise you up with Christ through His forgiveness of all of your sins — forgiveness that likewise comes from that same Cross of Christ.
It is an ironic paradox. It is foolishness to the world, a stumbling block to Jews and Greeks alike, and so also to your own old Adam. For it is very strange that Life should come by way of death.
Consider that bronze serpent in the desert, the means that God provided through Moses, by which the people were spared the punishment of their sins, that they not die but live. A bronze serpent! An image of the very thing that was killing them! That was the means of grace that God provided by and with His Word, so that whoever looked at that serpent, lifted up on that pole, would live.
So, too, it is by the Cross of Christ that God works faith and life in you, by way of repentance and forgiveness of sins. The Crucifixion of the incarnate Son is the Light of God in the midst of the deep darkness. For Christ Jesus, the Son of God, bears and becomes the Curse of sin and death. He becomes the Serpent lifted up on the Cross, in order to undo sin and death, the devil and hell, in Himself, in His own Body — to defeat those ancient enemies, those terrifying enemies, and to release you from their reign of terror — to bring you out of the darkness into His marvelous Light.
That is what Christ Jesus does and suffers and accomplishes for you by His Cross and Passion. He is lifted up by God the Father to the glory of His holy Name. It was Moses who lifted up the serpent in the wilderness; it is God who lifts up His own dear Son upon the Cross — who lifts Him up as the priestly Sacrifice for the sins of the world — who lifts Him up like Incense, as Prayer and Intercession for you and all the children of Adam, for the whole world, unto Life and Salvation.
His Self-sacrifice is your Atonement and the Propitiation for all your sins. His Body given and His Blood poured out are your Redemption from sin and death and your Reconciliation with God.
His voluntary suffering and death — bearing your sins in His Body and taking upon Himself all the punishment that you have deserved — that is the Love of God with which He loves you.
It is common to hear St. John 3:16 as though it meant something like this, “God loved the world so much that He was even willing to give His only-begotten Son.” And to be sure, that is true. He did love the world that much. And for the sake of His Love He did give His only-begotten Son. But that is not what St. John has actually written; it is not what Christ our Lord has spoken here. The sense of it is rather, “God loved the world in this way — by giving His only-begotten Son.”
The Love of God is not separate from the giving of Christ Jesus. The Love of God is embodied and manifested, personified, and given in, with, by, and through the giving of Christ Jesus, the only-begotten Son, in His Body on the Cross. And this same Love of God in Christ the Crucified — this Love of God which is your Light in the darkness and divine Life in place of death — that is what is preached and given to you in the Ministry of the Gospel. That Ministry of Christ Jesus in His Word and Sacrament is now also the way in which God loves you, the way and the means by which He saves you from your sin and death and gives to you Himself and His divine Life.
The Lord your God has thus loved you with Himself in the waters of your Holy Baptism, in which you are united with Christ Jesus in His Cross and Resurrection. And the Lord your God now loves you with Himself in the Body and Blood of Christ Jesus, given and poured out for you to eat and to drink in the Holy Communion. These means of His grace and mercy and forgiveness are your Food and Water in the wilderness; the Red Sea in which the Lord has drowned and destroyed all your ancient enemies; and your Manna from heaven, the living and Life-giving Bread of God.
These Holy Sacraments of the Gospel are the Fruits of the Tree of the Cross, in which Christ Jesus is still being lifted up for you. He is no longer being sacrificed; for He died once for all, and He has risen from the dead, never to die again. But now He is lifted up and set before you precisely as the One who has been sacrificed. His Body and Blood — the Meat and Drink of His Sacrifice — are now lifted up for you as the Sacrament of Salvation in the midst of this wilderness.
I know the way of repentance is hard. The way of faith and life to which you are called is difficult. It is a journey through a dry, hot desert wasteland. There is pain and hardship, heartache, hurt, and disappointment, because you live in a fallen world and both you and all your neighbors are fallen, sinful, and mortal. Even your nearest and dearest neighbors, whom you are given to love and serve and care for, sin against you; they speak unkindly, or they don’t speak, they don’t listen, they don’t help. And you also sin every day, against your neighbors and your God, in heart, mind, and body.
So the journey is long and hard, the way set before you is arduous, tedious, and exhausting. And all the while, your faith and life in Christ Jesus are contrary to the wisdom, reason, and desires of your old Adam, whereby you specialize in sin and death, pride and despair, idolatry and unbelief. Vis-á-vis all those challenges, the waters of your Holy Baptism and the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper seem like miserable food and drink indeed, pathetically inadequate to your needs.
Nevertheless, these means of grace — for that is what they truly are — the Word of the Gospel, the waters of your Baptism, the bread and wine which are the Body and Blood of Christ Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, crucified and risen from the dead — these are in fact the ways and means by which God calls you to Himself in Christ, who is lifted up that you might look to Him and live.
So, then, it is by these Fruits of His Cross that He brings you through death into Life. And so does He make of you a brand new creature — no longer a child of wrath, but a child of peace, a child of God. Not simply a son of Adam, but a son of God in Christ Jesus, with a new legacy, a new inheritance, a new way of life in the Resurrection and Ascension of the same Lord Jesus Christ. For just as He has died your death upon the Cross, so does He share with you and give to you His rising from the dead and His ascending to the Right Hand of His God and Father in heaven.
He has been lifted up, not only in His death upon the Cross, but also from death and the grave to the Right Hand of the Father. And so, by His grace, through faith in His Gospel — through the waters of your Holy Baptism and by daily repentance — you are lifted up from the dust of the desert and seated with Him in the heavenly places. Your life is hidden with Christ in God!
Safe and sound in heaven with Christ Jesus, that is where your life is found. That is where you live — even now, by faith, while you journey through the wilderness in and with the same Lord Jesus.
You live and walk in Him, in holy faith and holy love, because your faith in Christ is a gift, a gracious work of God. And your life, also, both now and forever, is a gift of God; it is purchased and won for you by Christ; it is given to you freely through His Ministry of the Gospel. It is all a gift, as surely as Christ Himself and His whole Gospel are a gift. And this is God’s Love for you.
Daily He disciplines you, because that is what a father does in love for his children. So your God and Father disciplines you, as He disciplined Old Testament Israel, not for destruction but unto salvation. He calls you daily to repentance by and with the Cross, putting you to death with His Law, in order to resurrect you by His Gospel. Not to condemn you or cause you to perish forever, but in order to lift you up from sin and death to this faith and life which are yours in Christ Jesus.
And so it is that He daily and richly forgives you all of your sins. He freely and fully takes them all away. And He feeds you daily with His own dear Son, His Word-made-Flesh, who is the very Bread of Life come down from heaven, that you should not perish but be saved for Life eternal.
Therefore, hear and heed His Word to you. Listen to Him — look here to Him — and live in Him.
In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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