Who's Your Daddy?: Thoughts on Lent 5

The Jews are not the true children of Abraham because they did not do what Abraham did. Abraham rejoiced to see the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Jews didn't. Abraham is not their true father. QED. (For more on this theme see last year's post HERE.)

Children demonstrate that they are their father's children by what they say and do. "Christ shows that in no way were [the Jews] to be regarded as the children of Abraham because they did not not follow in their father Abraham's confession of faith nor in his conduct" (Gerhard, Postilla, 276). In other words, fathers are important. Who your father is, what he does, and what he says is important. It molds who you are and what you believe.

Fathers are to be the spiritual heads of the household. They are to hand on the faith they learned from their father before them. They are to teach their children to pray by praying themselves. They are to teach their children to read and study the Scriptures by reading and studying the Scriptures themselves. They are to teach their children to confess their sins and receive absolution, that is forgiveness, by confessing their sins and receiving absolution themselves. They are to teach their children to receive the holy things of God the Father by receiving these things themselves. They are to discipline their children, not provoking them to anger or provoking them to become disheartened so as to lose motivation, but to bring them up in the way of the Lord, in an education that is founded in the Lord, that is inspired and moved by the Lord, that is focused on the Lord, and that is appropriate to the Lord. Fathers are important. They teach sons how to be men, and they teach daughters how men are love women, they teach them to be loved by a man, and what kind of man to look for in a husband.

But this has gone out of style. Nowadays, fathers and mothers are interchangeable parts. Men and women are interchangeable parts. And if truth be told, the major theme that runs in today's discourse on fathers and mothers, men and women, is that whatever a man can do a woman can do better. Or whatever a father can do a mother can do better. Or whatever a husband can do a wife can do better. This is false and destructive. False, not because the opposite is true. False and destructive because man and woman, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives are not in competition. They are complementary. They are created for each other, to be together, to love and support each other. And by pitting man against woman, husband against wife, and father against mother, we have separated what God has joined together. We pervert God's good order created to bless us for the prevailing thoughts and feelings of our day.

This is the culture in which we live. But it is also the culture of which we are a product. It is our culture. We are a part of it. And so our thoughts and feelings are affected by it. Which of us doesn't either cringe or get a little uncomfortable when we hear passages from the Scriptures like: "Wives submit to your husbands" or "I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man" or "your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you"? The fact that this strikes us as old and outdated shows that we think and see things in the same way our culture thinks and see things. It demonstrates who we are and who our father is. For the culture and its prevailing thoughts have become our father. And it is destroying our families and our relationships with one another. But most of all, it is destroying the church. For when the church thinks and acts like the culture of the world, Satan has won.

For this we need to repent. We need to confess that we have listened more to our culture than to the Word of God our heavenly Father as it is revealed in the Scriptures. God's good order is not misogynistic. God's order is instituted to bless us. His order says nothing of superiority or inferiority. To say a father is to be over his children means that a father is to bless them by teaching, by disciplining, and by loving. To say that a husband is to be the head of his house, and that a wife is to subordinate herself to her husband, does not say that he is better than she is or that she is less than he is. It is to say that the husband is to bless his wife with his sacrificial love. That he is to give everything, even his own life, for her, and she out of respect for him is to receive this love with thanksgiving. To reject this order, God's good order, is to reject His blessing.

And this is why Christ came. This is why we, like Abraham, are to rejoice. For Christ re-establishes this order in His incarnation, death, and resurrection. He re-constitutes this order so that we may receive God the Father's blessing to us and for us. In becoming man, Christ subordinates Himself and His will to the will of His Father. And He does it for the sake of His Bride, the Church. In obedience to His Father, He loves us, His Bride. This love is a sacrificial love. By the giving of Himself to die on the cross for sins He did not commit He loved us so that we would be free from the Law's condemnation and death's wages. He does it willingly. He does it for our sake, so that we would be reconciled to the Father as His children and reconciled to one another to live within the order that blesses us all. In Christ, death is overcome by life, sin by righteousness, hatred by love, darkness by light, and chaos by order.

So who will our father be? Will it be the culture or will it be God? Will it be the good order that the Father established from the beginning, or will it be our own self-seeking order? Will we live as children in the Father's house, blessed with His good order and with the truth? Or will we live under a subversion of that order, an order that is both false and destructive to us?

Who's your daddy? The Lord is. He created you. He sustains you. He redeemed you. He loves you. He teaches you to pray. He gives you His Word and He blesses and sanctifies you with the Sacraments. He feeds both body and soul. He chastens and He heals. And He will never leave you or forsake you. Nothing will come between your heavenly Father's love for you in Christ Jesus. God is your Father. You are his Children and the holy Bride of Christ. Fathers are important. So are husbands. Let us then subordinate ourselves to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Thoughts on Lent 5

To keep the word of Jesus is to do what Abraham did. Abraham saw and rejoiced. The Jews didn't. Will we?

Abraham rejoiced to see His day and saw it (Genesis 22:14; Jubilees 16:20-30; 18:12-19). Abraham saw Jesus' day when He saw his son, his only son, whom he loves, raised from the dead on Mount Moriah (Genesis 22; Hebrews 11:13-19). For on that mountain, the mount of the Lord, He (that is Jesus, the Lamb of God) will be seen (Genesis 22:14 MT|LXX; John 1:29). He was seen by David in that very place when Mount Moriah was appointed the sight of Solomon's Temple (2 Chronicles 3:1). He was seen when the cloud of the Lord's glory filled the Sanctuary within Solomon's Temple (1 Kings 8:4-11). He was seen when the Son of man was lifted up, glorified on the cross, entering once for all into the Sanctuary made without hands to secure an eternal redemption with His own blood (Hebrews 9:11-15). 

The Jews didn't rejoice; they hated and sought to kill. They were slow to hear and keep the Word and quick to kill. They didn't see because they didn't hear and keep the Word which spoke of Him (John 5:35ff). They wouldn't live, they would see and taste death because they didn't taste and see that the Lord is good, that He keeps His promises, that He is faithful, and that His Word is both Spirit and life (John 6:53). 

And so on the Temple mount, the place of the obedience and rejoicing of Abraham and the sacrifice of his only son, Isaac; within the Feast of Tabernacles that affirms the worship of Israel's one God and commemorates the seeing and rejoicing of Abraham (Jubilees 16:20-30; 18:12-19), Jesus shows the seed of Abraham that they are not truly Abraham's seed. For they are disobedient--they do not keep His Word and they don't rejoice to see Him. They don't do what Abraham did. And what they do do proves them to be the seed of their Father the devil, a murderer, persecutor, and blasphemer.

Jesus is the new Temple not made with hands. He is the dwelling place of YHWH, the very glory of God, the Word and Name of God, the Love of God in the flesh. He will be torn down but after three days be raised back up. He savored the taste of death in our stead instead of quenching His thirst. He saw the birth of the church in His mother and the beloved disciple. He spoke His Word that made it all come to pass: it is finished.

"For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.” Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel" (Hebrews 12:18-22).

And thus the Father is worshipped in Spirit and Truth by receiving the poured-out and sprinkled blood of Jesus. For there we enter the Sanctuary of the Temple not made with hands, and we see and rejoice with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven. That the Lamb who was slain lives and reigns forever. This is our hope, our strength, our comfort and our vindication as we live as fallen men in a fallen and broken world.  

And so back to the beginning: To keep the word of Jesus is to do what Abraham did. Abraham saw and rejoiced. The Jews didn't. Will we? Will we be the children of God born not of the will of the flesh nor of man but of God? Will we hear and keep His Word? Will we taste and see that the Lord is good so that we don't see and taste death? The Lord will always have his church, He will always have His people, He is able to raise up offspring of Abraham from stones. The question is will we be a part of it? (Small Catechism on Petitions 1-3 of the Lord's Prayer).