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In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints of God, we constantly face judgment, and I want to put these two things in contrast with one another: the judgment of the world and the judgment of the Lord. Now, Paul, if you could – I’d like you guys to maybe look at the Scriptures that we’re looking at, so I’m on page 5 for the Epistle lesson; I want to start there.
So Paul knows that we’re in the midst of all of this trouble, but he says to us who are facing this constant barrage of trouble and affliction and consternation and even rejection and mockery: Paul says, “We do not lose heart.” You might say, “Well, Paul, we might lose a little bit of heart.” And he says, “No. We are not of those who lose heart. We are not of those who shrink back. We are not of those who wither away.”
It’s true. Our outer nature is wasting away. We’re getting older. The gray hairs are coming in more furious. Every day it might be harder to wake up. And we feel the pressure of the world more and more every year, do we not? And yet, at the same time, our inner nature, Paul says, is being renewed day by day. And then, to us who are afflicted, St. Paul says, “For this slight momentary affliction.” Now, I don’t think Paul means to insult you with these words or me because we want to, what, brag about how heavy our afflictions are? We want to boast about how much trouble we have in this world. We think about it all the time. We have this sympathy for ourselves and our own difficulties, and Paul knows those difficulties.
I mean, Paul, of all people, knew them. He’ll list the troubles that, I mean, you know, how many times he was stoned, how many nights he would float on the open ocean after being shipwrecked, how many times he was whipped and beaten, how many times he was thrown out of cities and thrown in jail. Paul knows, and yet he calls it a light, momentary affliction.
Your trouble in this world. And he goes on to say, not only is it light and not only is it momentary, but it is also working in you. He says, this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory that is beyond all comparison. We’re tempted to look at the things that we see, but there are things unseen, and these things are eternal.
And then Paul says — and this last verse on the top of page 6 is a little bit of a riddle — he’s fighting against the Gnostic idea. You know, the Gnostics had this idea that we are souls that are trapped in bodies, and then once we die, our bodies are put aside, like leaving a tent, and then we’re free. Paul takes that picture, but he reverses it, and he says that we know that when this tent, which is our earthly home, is destroyed, we have a building, which is from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
This is the resurrection of the body. So that we don’t lay aside the body — I mean, we do lay it aside for a little bit, but then the Lord gives us back… gives us the body back in eternal life, in the resurrection of the flesh, and we rejoice in this promise.
Now this verse… these are verses that I would love for you to meditate on all week as you think about the troubles of this life, that you would just label them, light, slight momentary afflictions preparing us for glory.
Now let’s take that in mind as we go back to the Old Testament lesson: Genesis chapter 3. We’ve spent some time studying this text together in Bible class, during our Advent midweek services and so forth and so on, so we don’t want to go through everything, but we do want to make sure we get this text because we could probably spend our whole lives meditating on it.
The verse starts with Adam and Eve already hiding. Now, we want to remember what happened before this. The devil came to Adam and Eve and tempted them to eat the fruit that the Lord had forbidden, and they ate that fruit and recognized their nakedness, and so they made garments to cover the shame of their nakedness, fig leaves. And I think that they were probably content, maybe even pretty impressed with their own fig leaves. They thought that they were going to be good enough.
In fact, I’ve told you this joke before. The only joke I wrote, this is the Adam and Eve joke. Have I told you this? I’m looking at it to see how many eyes are rolling because now they’re all about to… Eve comes out from around the trees when she’s got her fig leaves on and she says to Adam, “How do you like my outfit? These are my fall colors.” Thank you, Joe, for laughing at that.
Now here’s the point, though, is that Adam and Eve are pretty impressed with what they’ve managed to do. I would like for you to see in the fig leaf garments of Adam and Eve, I would like for you to see all of humankind’s attempts to cover up our own shame by our own works. I would like you to see in the fig leaves every world religion, from Buddhism and Hinduism and all the Eastern religions to even Judaism and Islam and even the religion of atheism. It’s all an attempt to cover our own shame by our own works.
And as long as God is not walking around, it seems like it works until, verse 8, they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and then they realize that the fig leaves are not enough.
Now, I just want you to imagine what should happen when Adam and Eve hear the sound of God walking in the garden. How happy their hearts should skip a beat for joy, the One who created them and who gave them the garden and everything that they ever could have possibly asked for. That God, the Father, is coming to visit them. Even God the Son, let’s say that, is coming to visit them. And they should have heard the sound of the Lord in the garden, and they should have run toward that sound as fast as they could, hand… Adam and Eve holding hands and running together through the garden to find where the Lord was, to tell him all that they’ve seen, and to fall down and worship Him, and to receive more gifts from Him.
But instead of that, instead of that, they hear the sound of the Lord in the garden, and they run away from Him. They run and hide. And Adam and Eve are now deep in the bushes, faces in the dirt, quivering, holding their breaths, hoping that the Lord won’t hear their heart pounding inside of them because they are truly terrified of God. That, by the way, is what it means to be a sinner. That’s what we’ve inherited from Adam and Eve.
And as terrible as this is, I want to just tell you that Adam and Eve were right. They knew that the presence of God was their destruction. They knew that because of what they had done, that God had become their enemy.
And just, if we can just pause the scene there and just think, if you could go and interview Adam and Eve as they’re in hiding from the Lord, in the bushes, hoping that God wouldn’t find them, and you just could ask them this: You’d say, “Who is your friend?” Adam, what friend do you have? And Adam would say, “Well, God’s not my friend, not anymore. Eve’s not my friend, not anymore. Creation is not my friend, not anymore. The only friend I have in the whole universe is this dragon here.”
The only friend that Eve has is there, the devil. Can you imagine the situation? That is death, by the way. Spiritual death. To run from God instead of to run to God. But God comes and finds them. He tracks them down. “Where are you?” he says to Adam. “Who told you you were naked? What is this you have done?” he says to Eve. And then after he gets the story from their own lips, kind of a half-hearted confession, more probably passing the blame, the Lord turns to this dragon, to the serpent, to the devil.
He takes off his legs and makes him a snake, and then he speaks directly to the devil. Now, this verse is the most important verse of the Old Testament. I think I can say that with confidence. This verse is called in Latin the Proto-Evangelion, which means the first gospel. And it is in the form of a riddle, but we can unravel it pretty quickly. It’s God talking to the devil, and he says this: “I will put enmity between you and the woman.”
Now, just remember, Eve has enmity with everybody but the devil. Adam has enmity with everybody but the devil, and the Lord says, “This will not stand. I will… I will not let it stand that there is a war between me and you, Adam, and between me and you, Eve, and between you two, Adam and Eve. I’m going to take this battle, this enmity, and I’m going to put it, between the devil and Eve, and between the devil’s seed and the seed of the woman. And we know the devil’s seed is not… it’s the devils, and the angels don’t have little baby devils or little baby angels. The offspring of the devil is sin and death.
And the Lord here says that I’m putting now a battle, a fight, a war, enmity, a never-ending strife between the seed of the woman and between sin and death.” And then it says this: “He”—that is the seed of the woman, this is talking about Jesus—“He will bruise your head and you will bruise his heel.”
It’s the picture of a farmer out in the field harvesting the crops barefoot, and out of the field comes a snake, and this snake bites his heel as he stomps the snake’s head with his foot. It’s a picture of the cross, a picture of the death of Jesus and the subsequent destruction of the devil.
Now just remember, and this is quite an amazing thing, that when the Lord warned Adam and Eve about the fruit, He said, “On the day that you eat of it, surely you will die,” that the eating of this fruit that was forbidden brought death into the universe, the death of Adam and Eve and the death of you and I and the death of the stars and the death of the animals and the death of everything else in the cosmos. Everything is dying because of what Adam and Eve did, but now the Lord comes along and says, “On the day that you eat of it, I also—the Lord your God— I too will die.”
So the Lord shares in our death so that we might share in his life. The Lord crushes the head of the serpent so that we could be set free. And this head-crushing work of Jesus has begun already in the gospel reading on page 7. Jesus was traveling around casting out demons quite marvelously, but the people start to wonder how in the world He’s doing this, and the scribes and the Pharisees who know that Jesus is winning a bunch of people, a crowd that’s coming around Him, they want to put a spin on it so that the people will think that Jesus is crazy. And so they say that Jesus is able to cast out demons because He Himself is possessed by a demon, by Beelzebul, the Lord of the flies, the Lord of the demons, that is, the devil.
So Jesus calls them together and He says, “Please be very careful.” Such accusations are very dangerous. And he goes on to say that this sin that they’ve committed is a blasphemy of the Holy Spirit and that this sin is not forgiven.
If you look in verse 28, this is one of the tough texts of the Bible, and I want to make sure that we at least address it so that we don’t get it too wrong. I have people coming to me all the time convinced that they’ve committed this sin, that they have blasphemed the Holy Spirit, and therefore they are beyond hope of redemption, that they can’t be forgiven, that the Lord Jesus has now written them off. But I want you to notice very carefully that Jesus does not speak of the unforgivable sin but rather of the unforgiven sin.
And there’s a big difference between those two things. If we think of the unforgivable sin, we think of a sin that’s so bad that maybe Jesus can forgive everything else, but that thing is so bad that Jesus can’t forgive that.
It’s like a stain in the carpet that no matter what you do, it simply won’t come out. Every other thing that you do, Jesus can wash away, except for this thing. He doesn’t have the strength or the power; His blood is not strong enough to forgive it. It’s unforgivable. That is not the case. Every sin is forgivable. Every sin.
Because Jesus is that kind of Savior. His blood is strong enough to wipe away, to cleanse every single sin. But some sins, in fact one sin, is not forgiven. Jesus says, “Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. And he said this because they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’”
Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is unforgiven because it is the Holy Spirit who brings forgiveness to us. It is the work of God, the Holy Spirit, to bring the gospel to you, to have it planted into your ears and to convert your heart so that you believe it. And if you reject, curse, and do everything to resist the Holy Spirit, then you are cutting yourself off from the Lord’s atoning work of forgiveness.
I was trying to think of an example. After church first service, someone asked me about it, and I was working on this picture. I don’t think it’s a good one yet, but it’s as far as I’ve gotten. It’s like… it’s the difference… if you could imagine talking about the uneaten dessert. And you go to a restaurant and someone says, “There’s an uneaten dessert.” Well, it’s because you told the waiter to buzz off. It’s not because the dessert itself is not edible; it’s because you have rejected the person who brings the dessert to you, and so it’s remained in the kitchen. You can’t eat it, not because it’s inedible, but because it’s not been brought to you.
So the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy and Blessed Trinity, is the one who brings the forgiveness of sins to you and the victory of Jesus to you. So it’s not as if you can be so strong to somehow manage to commit a sin that God can’t forgive. I don’t know how many times I’ve had this conversation where people have said to me, “Pastor, I think I’ve done it. I think I’ve sinned so much that the Lord can’t forgive me.”
And my answer to them is, “Wow, that’s pretty impressive. You must be pretty good. If you can sin in such a magnificent way, in such a glorious way, in such a fantastic way, that the death of the Son of God on the cross for all the sins of the world doesn’t cover that? No. He is a Savior who is strong to save.” And that’s the parable He wants us to have in our minds and hearts, especially as we leave here, verse 27.
Now, there’s one more text I want to look at. It’s this little one-sentence parable in chapter 3, verse 27 of Mark, where Jesus is telling the story about how He deals with the devil. This is what He says: “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strongman, and then indeed he may plunder his house.”
Now, dear saints, Jesus is not giving you instructions for becoming a cat burglar, even though that’s what it looks like. If you want to go and steal from someone’s house, you better first tie the guy up. Jesus is not giving instructions but rather He’s giving a description of what He has done. The strongman is the devil, and the plunder, the goods that the devil keeps, that’s you, but Jesus is the stronger one and he has come, and by his death and by his resurrection, he has bound the devil so that he might have you.
Jesus is the stronger one. The devil wants you to think that he is the strong one, that he is the one who rules the roost. Jesus is stronger. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, and his death and his resurrection are the destruction of the devil, the destruction of sin, the destruction of death, the destruction of the grave, the destruction of all that stands between you and the glory of God.
Because when Adam and Eve were running away from the Lord, the Lord Jesus was running to you, to rescue you, to deliver you, and to have you as His own. I know we’re in the midst of trouble. I know the devil hates you, and he’s after you. I know this world is a difficult place for Christians, but Jesus, your Jesus, has prevailed. He’s forgiven your sins. He’s overcome death and the devil, and he has you as his own dear children.
God be praised. Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord.
