1.
Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation
of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our
Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word is taken from
Joshua 24:15-18 (READ TEXT), it’s entitled, “Relevance
or Remembrance?” Dear brothers and
sisters in Christ.
2.
One of the late 20thcentury
watchwords that remains with us into the 21st is “relevance.” The idea is: If you are
telling me something, relate it to me. Make it as personal as you can. People sometimes
say, “Give me something I can use.”
For sermons and Bible studies, a priority on relevance can translate into a
desire to find things in the Bible that people will find immediately applicable
to their lives today. The quest for relevance often takes the form of a desire
to identify principles that people can readily put into practice in the
Christian life.
3.
Maybe you’ll be surprised to hear
that in the text Israel didn’t choose relevance. When Joshua put an alternative
before God’s people, they wanted to go the way of remembrance instead. Remembrance was the Lord’s way. On the
other hand, relevance was the way of
the Canaanites and their false gods. On
this Second Sunday in Lent, the traditional name of which is “Reminiscere,” we consider the alternative:
relevance or remembrance?
4.
By this time Joshua had fought and
won many battles and Israel was the dominant military power in the land of
Canaan. It had been carrying out the Lord’s command to wipe out the Canaanites,
putting men, women, and children to the sword. Sometimes people today think of
this command as awfully cruel. One scholar thought so before he started doing
archaeological work in Palestine. But, in his work he uncovered evidence of
child sacrifice that had been going on for centuries before Israel took the
land. He began wondering why the Lord hadn’t wiped out the practitioners of
child sacrifice even earlier than he did.
Child sacrifice had been part and parcel of Canaanite religion. Like a
great many other ancient religions, the religion practiced in Canaan was a
fertility cult. It assumed that the activity of the gods affects the forces of
nature in this world. Specifically, according to Canaanite religion the rain
falls and the crops grow because the gods engage in sexual activity. The
religion also held that human activity in this world could influence the gods
and their behavior. The conclusion was simple: if you want the rain to fall and the crops to grow, then give the gods
an idea of what they should be doing by first doing it yourself.
5.
Now this was a relevant religion! The
main concern for the average Canaanite farmer than getting the crops to grow.
Canaanite religion seemingly offered a way to do this. This way was easily
understandable. It required no great amount of learning or study. And it was
enjoyable! Of course, Canaanite religion
was idolatry, dedicated to the worship of false gods. Actually, “worship” hardly commends itself as the
right word, for Canaanite religion really amounted to an attempt to manipulate
these gods. At harvest time, Canaanite farmers could pat themselves on their
back not only for their work in the fields but also for their efforts to get
the gods to do their part in making the crops grow. Like all idolatry,
Canaanite religion led people to idolize themselves. They had found a relevant
and meaningful way to fit religion into their lives.
6.
The alternative to this relevance
was remembrance. The Israelites were talking about remembrance when they told
Joshua in the text, “Far be it from us
that we should forsake the LORD to serve other gods, for it is the LORD our God
who brought us and our fathers up from the land of Egypt” (Joshua
24:16–17). These are remarkable words. By the time they were spoken, there was
hardly anyone left from the group of Israelites that had left Egypt. The people
who were speaking with Joshua had been born during the forty years of
wilderness wandering. Notice what they said, though: “the Lord brought us out of Egypt.”
7.
These people weren’t trying to fit something
into their lives as they deemed it relevant. Rather, they were realizing how
the Lord fit them into the pattern of deliverance that he’d already established.
This, biblically speaking, constitutes a good example of “remembrance.” Such
remembrance becomes important for us as we examine God’s Word today. We shouldn’t
be trying to figure out how the Bible fits into our lives. Rather, we should be
attentive to the way the Lord fits us into the pattern of life revealed by him
in Scripture.
8.
Let me give an example: same-sex
marriage. We might think of this as a relevant topic. People can recognize
immediately that the Bible has something to say about it, even if they don’t
like what it says. If we like what it says, we can fit this bit of the Bible into
our lives rather easily by not getting married to someone of the same sex. But, there is a great deal more to this
iceberg beneath the surface. For what the Bible tells us concerning same-sex
marriage actually includes many aspects of biblical teaching, going all the way
back to creation. The Lord made mankind male and female. He didn’t make a blob
that was neither male nor female, then split off one part to become male and
the other part female. No, Adam was male from the first moment of his life, and
Eve from the first moment of her life was female. God made people male and
female. Even if we realize this fact, when was the last time you and I
appreciated it? When did I last thank God that I am male? Or when did many of
you thank God that he made you female? In other words, are we seeing how God
fits us into the pattern he has established?
9.
Or do we recall that the Bible says
that homosexuality is a consequence of idolatry? When people gave up the
worship of the Creator and started worshiping creatures instead, the Creator
himself gave them up to shameful lusts and desires that lead people to want to
enter into same-sex marriages (Romans 1:24–27). Maybe you and I have never been
involved in homosexual behavior. But, we’ve all been involved in idolatry,
especially idolizing self. This is something for which we must repent as the
Lord fits us into the pattern of life he has revealed in Scripture.
10.
Many of the arguments for same-sex
marriage are about equality. When was the last time we looked into Scripture to
see what equality before God truly is, and is not? The point of this little
digression is that there is much more to applying the Bible to our lives than
finding some principle that seems relevant and simply plopping it into the
middle of our activity. We should look instead to the pattern of life that the
Lord has established for us in Scripture.
It isn’t always pleasant to do so. For one thing, it involves prayerful
study. It requires us to love the Lord our God not only with heart, soul, and
strength but also with our minds. Sometimes we don’t want to hang around long
enough for mental engagement.
11.
Moreover, when I look to the Lord’s
pattern of life, it’s inevitable that certain ideas I cherish or some of my pet
ways of operating will be held up to challenge—yes, even judgment—compared to
God’s way. Those things have to die. I have to die to those things. Being fit
into the Lord’s pattern of life involves repentance. As one preacher put it: It’s in fact more important for us to know
what God did to Israel, what he did to his Son Jesus Christ, than to inquire
into what God is going to do with me today. That Jesus Christ died is more
important than that I will die, and that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead
is the only foundation of my hope that I also will be raised on the last day.
Our salvation is “outside of ourselves”.
. . . I find it not in my life history, but alone in the history of Jesus
Christ. Only the one who lets himself be found in Jesus Christ—in his
incarnation, his cross and his resurrection—is with God and God with him.
12.
A hymn asks, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Strange as it may
seem, the answer to the question is both no and yes. First, no, we weren’t
there. Christ was crucified nearly 2,000 years ago. Still more, even the people
standing at the foot of his cross weren’t there, not in the sense of really
knowing what the Lord was suffering and going through. In prophecy the Messiah
was depicted as the One who would do his work alone (Isaiah 63:3). Everyone
forsook Christ, even his Father. So, no, in one sense we were most definitely
not there when they crucified our Lord. On
the other hand, there’s a sense in which we can say yes, we were there. We were
there by substitution. For Christ was bearing your sin and mine. He was
suffering and dying under the weight of that sin before the Father raised him
from the dead. The Lord fits us into the pattern he has established and shown
us in Scripture. It’s a pattern of life. Just like the Israelites could tell
Joshua, “Yes, we were there when the Lord
saved us by taking us out of Egypt!” so you and I can say: “Yes, I was there because Jesus was there for
me!” In the biblical sense, then, we “remember.”
How can it be any other way for us, baptized as we are into union with Christ
in his death and resurrection?
13.
When Jesus instituted the Lord’s
Supper, he said: “Do this in remembrance
of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24, 25). Here we don’t have to pull something out
of the Bible that we think is relevant. The Lord himself makes it relevant for
us. He traverses the years and the miles to place into our mouths the very body
and blood with which he redeemed us. So
we remember him when we eat and drink his supper. This remembering him means,
first of all, not to forget him in unbelief but to receive him and his
blessings in faith.
14.
Second, remembering him means
proclaiming what he has done. The Israelites did this in speaking with Joshua,
and we do so every time we receive the Lord’s Supper. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the
Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). Finally, remembering
means celebrating that the Lord has had such great mercy on us to place us into
the pattern that he has given in Scripture. It’s not his law but rather his
forgiveness in Christ that makes this truly a pattern of life for us.
15.
We don’t make the Bible relevant. We
can’t. Relevance should never be the church’s main concern anyway. For we aren’t
simply picking up various commands and precepts from the Bible and plugging
them into our lives as we consider them to be relevant. Rather, in remembrance,
we stand under the full weight of God’s condemnation for sin, but still more we
stand in all the sunshine of the forgiveness brought about by the crucified and
risen One. We don’t study the Bible to figure out how to fit it into our lives;
rather, via Scripture, the Lord fits us into his pattern of life by killing us
with his law and making us alive with his good news of Christ. Only then can we
say, “As for me and my house, we will
serve the LORD” (Joshua 24:15). Our lives and service can be relevant only
after we have been reverent, reverent in the Lord’s kind of faithful
remembrance. Amen. The peace of God that
passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life
everlasting. Amen.
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