1.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from
God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The
message from God’s Word as we celebrate the Baptism of our Lord is taken from
Exodus 14:10-31 and is entitled, “In the
Father’s Care,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
Have you ever been scared? I mean
terrified that you weren’t going to come out of some situation in one piece. I’m
not talking about troubles that might come up over the course of some time. I
mean something immediate, right now. It could be a medical problem, an accident
of some sort, or maybe a result of severe weather. These things happen. They
give you a rapidly sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. Life-threatening
situations, we call them. They are scary.
3.
We can be scared in other
circumstances, too. Take that sinking sensation we were just talking about, and
draw it out over days, weeks, months, or even years. Sometimes this drawn-out
feeling is called “the tragic sense of
life.” Psychology classifies it as anxiety, not fear. Yet it remains scary.
You walk around basically keeping up with your responsibilities and putting one
foot in front of the other. With every step you take, though, you are waiting
for a piano to fall on you. That is, you anticipate that all the good and
beautiful things in your life are going to unravel. You expect everything
you’ve worked for and everything you love to be taken away from you. This is
one way God’s law dogs people’s footsteps all our days in this life, even
people who don’t read it in Scripture. The law gives us a sense that there is
something dreadfully wrong with this world.
4.
But God’s law isn’t finished with
us. For it shows that the very fears besetting us are themselves sins. We’re
not simply victims of outside forces. No, we ourselves form part of the
problem. Whenever we look at something and become scared by it, we are seeing
it in only one dimension. We might fear people who oppose us or reverses in
this life, financial and otherwise. Or we might be scared of suffering or
trial. And, of course, there is death itself. When these things scare us, the
question arises whether we are trusting in the Lord. Or are we looking
for relief only in our own resources? What we find there comes too little
and too late. In other words, we can end up forgetting the Lord and what he can
do.
5.
Our text provides a striking example
of this attitude. The Lord had just brought Israel out of Egypt by a series of
ten plagues. The Israelites saw what he did. He had shown himself more powerful
than they could possibly imagine, and quite willing to use that power to help
his people. Yet when Pharaoh changed his mind about letting the Israelites go
and sent his army to chase after them the Israelites seemed very quickly to
have forgotten all about the Lord and everything he could do. They grew
convinced that they would die with their backs to the wall, caught between the
onrushing army and the sea. They even suggested to Moses that they never wanted
to leave their slavery to the Egyptians! The Israelites were forgetting about
the Lord, his plan, and the prospects he was laying before them.
6.
What about you and me? How do we
react when our backs are to the wall? Yes, the Lord promises, “Call on me in the day of trouble. I will
deliver you, and you will glorify me” (Psalm 50:15). But when we get
scared, aren’t we in effect saying that the Lord either can’t help or will not?
If he cannot help, he is not nearly as powerful as he says he is. If he will
not help, he is neither as merciful nor as faithful as he says. Either way, we
give the Lord an enormous slap in the face by doubting him and his promises. So
now, in addition to everything else we have to fear, we have him to fear as
well. In truth, there should be room in
the hearts of God’s people for only one fear, “the fear of the Lord.” It should be noted that Scripture uses this
term in two different ways. “Fear of the
Lord” can be either slavelike fear or childlike fear. God wants his people
to have only one of these “fears” in
the long run.
7.
A house fire trapped a little boy in
his second-story bedroom. From the ground below, his father called up, “Andy, jump out the window. I’ll catch you.”
Through the smoke, the boy cried: “I
can’t see you.” His father replied, “But
I can see you. Jump!” Andy said, “Okay, Dad. Just don’t go away!” Slavelike fear is afraid that God will come.
Childlike fear is afraid only that he will go away. With childlike fear, Andy could go through
his window and wind up in the arms of his father, safe from the danger of the
flames. With childlike fear we can go through our lives safe with our heavenly
Father. This is “the fear of the Lord”
that our God wants us to have in the long run. It is the fear of which
Scripture speaks when it says repeatedly that the fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom (see Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7; 9:10).
8.
Only God can turn slavelike fear of
him into childlike fear. He does so by rescuing his people, as he did in the
text. Moses told the people that they had only to stand still and see what the
Lord would do for them that day. First, he moved between the Egyptians and the
Israelites the great pillar of cloud with which he had been leading Israel.
Next, the Lord parted the waters of the sea over a wide enough area to permit
all the Israelites to go across in one night. Luther quipped that if the Lord “had not parted the sea, he could have moved
the mountains or transported the people high up in the air.” The psalmist
put it vividly: “The sea looked and fled”
(Psalm 114:3). Israel may have had its back against the wall, but the Lord
proved both ready and willing to deliver them.
9.
Finally, the Lord permitted the
Egyptian army to pursue. Then he allowed the waters to flow back together, thus
bringing an end to that army and the threat it posed to Israel. “If it had not been the LORD who was on our
side,” another Psalm added, “then the flood would have swept us away, the
torrent would have gone over us” (Psalm 124:1, 4). As it was, the Egyptians
were drowned. The Lord defeated the enemies of his people, and thereby saw to
their safety. Through this mighty act of
deliverance the Holy Spirit won the hearts of the Israelites, and they believed
in the Lord. They broke out in a song of praise to him in the next chapter of
Exodus. The entire Old Testament echoes this song, and this saving event. Years
later King David observed that “Some
trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our
God” (Psalm 20:7). The prophets repeatedly called attention to the Lord’s
deliverance of his people, particularly this miraculous crossing of the sea
when he made himself a people and set them on the path to their true home. The
exodus from Egypt was the great saving event of the Old Testament.
10.
Jesus at his transfiguration spoke
with Moses and Elijah, discussing the exodus—so the Greek text says—that he
would accomplish in Jerusalem (Luke 9:31). What was about to happen in
Jerusalem, of course, was the death and resurrection of Christ. This is the
great saving event of the New Testament and of all time. As Moses and Elijah
spoke with Jesus, with this great event of his death and resurrection coming up
soon, there was only one occurrence in the Old Testament even close enough to
compare to it: the exodus from Egypt. Of
course, at the heart of the exodus stood God’s deliverance of his people at the
sea. In the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the Lord has done much the
same thing for you and me. He has seen to the safety of us fearful, doubting
sinners and defeated our enemies. As he did at the sea, in Christ God provides
the basis for our faith and the grounds for our future deliverance. He gives us
something to celebrate in praise.
11.
St. Paul wrote that “our fathers were all under the cloud, and
all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and
in the sea” (1 Corinthians 10:1–2). In terms of personal application, there
was only one thing in the New Testament that could be compared to the
experience of the Israelites going through the sea, namely, Baptism.
For each of us Baptism brings it
about that we are saved, our enemies are defeated, and hope is provided.
Therefore, our fears can be laid aside. In Baptism the Lord speaks right to our
fears, even our fear of death. On this Sunday when we observe the Baptism of
our Lord, let us recall that the really important death in the case of
Christians lies not in our future, but rather in our past. It is the death we
have already died with Christ in Baptism. “For
if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be
united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). Now, there is a
remedy for fear!
12.
One of the most popular professors
at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, during the 20th century was Dr.
Alfred Rehwinkel. For almost 30 years he taught there in his very direct,
no-nonsense way. But, he was helpful to everyone and he was beloved by many.
After he retired, someone asked him why he was able to be so friendly to all he
met. He replied, “Because I feared none.”
13.
You and I have no promise that the
Lord will take us out of every difficulty and danger in this world. He doesn’t
guarantee that all the troublesome waters will part before us. But, he does
promise to take care of us, and finally to take us home to heaven. We should not fail to note that Christians,
too, can have anxiety disorders. These are forms of mental illness more than
faithlessness. Mental illness is a reality of living in a sinful world, a
symptom of the fallen creation that Christ came to re-create.
14.
In any case, as sinners in a
sin-filled world, we will never rid ourselves of all fears. But the more they
are minimized in the forgiveness, love, and care of the Lord, the more time and
energy we can spend on constructive things like serving our neighbors. A man rushed onto a subway train at the last
moment, and found himself surrounded by tense and impatient people. He also
heard a great deal of noise: the clatter of the train, the squeal of breaks,
and the sounds of conversation all around him. He had the hunch that someone
was watching him. He glanced down and saw a 6 month-old baby in his father’s
arms, looking straight up at him. Despite the noise all around, the baby
remained totally undisturbed. He was in his father’s arms, which was all he
needed. We are placed into our heavenly Father’s powerful and loving arms by
our Baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ. That is all we need. The
Lord delivers his people when their backs are to the wall. Now the
peace that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus
until life everlasting. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment