Coming to the Light

March 9, 1997AM

Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3; 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

The scripture lessons this week are a study in contrasts that bring a wonderful message of God's grace. There are contrasts of judgment and mercy, contrasts of death and life, and, as in the gospel passage, contrasts in darkness and light.

The Old Testament story of the fiery serpents and the brass serpent on the pole gives a glimpse into both the justice and the mercy of a holy God. God permits the murmuring Israelites to be bitten by snakes— in fact the story says God sent the serpents among the people. But even as they came to the point of death, God in mercy was listening to their cry and sending a remedy. You know the story— don't you? God told Moses to make a bronze or brass copy of the serpents, and put the bronze serpent high on a pole where it could be seen even from a distance. Then God said that everyone who would simply look to the serpent would be healed.

God does not excuse sin. His holy nature is a rebuke to wickedness. But as the Psalm (107) says, even when "fools" have brought themselves to the gates of death through their iniquities, when "they cried to God in their distress" he brought deliverance and healing. I have faced many times when I felt absolutely powerless, and my prayer seemed to go no higher than my head. But still I believe that no cry to God, no genuine cry for mercy, goes unheard or unheeded. Even God cannot remove the scars of sins of the past. But God can and does bring forgiveness and healing and forgiveness and life. God is not looking for ways to keep people out of heaven. Far from it, in His mercy He is seeking ways to bring us all to Himself.

The gospel lesson, from John 3, picks up on the story of the serpent. Jesus told Nicodemus that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, just so He would be lifted up between heaven and earth, and that he would draw all people to himself.

In this passage there is the additional contrast between darkness and light. Nicodemus came to Jesus in the darkness, out of the shadows. Jesus abruptly interrupted Nicodemus to tell him that he had to be "born again" in order to be able to see the kingdom of God. Then Jesus told him that heaven's light has come into the world.

"The Message" translates those final verses of our Gospel passage this way:

'This is the crisis we're in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won't come near it, fearing a painful exposure. But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is.'

[Justice and mercy— God-light and darkness— but there is one more contrast in these lessons this morning: the contrast of death and life!]

In Ephesians 2 Paul says you were all dead, but God has made us alive together with Christ.     What is this "death" Paul is talking about? Certainly it is not physical death. What is death, anyway?

"By and large, most of us pretend that death is something which happens to other people. Somehow, it's like the husband who said to this wife, 'If one of us dies, I think I'll move to Paris'."

But this death is something we have all experienced. In verse 3 Paul says, "All of us lived among them— the spiritual dead—and were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else." What does it mean to be spiritually dead— and how can we know if we are truly alive unto God?

One definition of death is a total inability to respond to the environment. Those who are spiritually dead have no idea that there is a world of glory and light and love. Prayer and the cross and worship are foolishness or worse, because they simply have no correspondence to reality.

Paul defines spiritual death as (1) following the course of this world. The Message puts it this way (Ephesians 2: 1- 6)

'You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. Its a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us.

But then comes that contrast of death with life:

"Instead God, immense in mercy and with incredible love, he embraced us. he took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. he did this all on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.

Contrasts in death and life, in light and darkness, struggling to balance what we see of God's justice with what we are told of his mercy, these contrasts tell the story of every one of us. We have all been bitten by the fiery serpents of sin and guilt. But we can be saved by a look at the cross. Of course, the cross itself does not save. The look does not save. But God!! . . . comes down the pathway of that look— the power released from the cross of Christ is God's redeeming love.

Prayer

Hymn No. 327 Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus

Exhortation

"Justifying grace is what we experience when we choose to stop closing our eyes to God's love in any aspect of our life

We experience the grace of God from even before we were born. There is not a moment of our lives when we are not surrounded by the grace of God. But for some reason either deliberately or through our stubbornness or just because we are too busy we often don't realize that God is there.

It's probably not so much a that we walk around in pitch black but we walk around in the light but with our eyes closed, or with a blindfold on.

Try something for me: Close your eyes as tight as you can. While you are forcing them closed, try opening them with your fingers Now, instead, relax your eyelids. And now try to open them with your fingers. That's a bit like what goes on as we experience justifying grace.

God is always trying to open our eyes to see the light that is always there.

Sometimes we are forcing our eyes closed because we don't want to look at ourselves. We think that we are not able to be accepted.

The LIGHT, the MERCY, the LIFE of God in Justifying Grace is about us realizing that God accepts us just as we are.

Jesus said that he did not come into the world to condemn, but to save.

It is our job to believe Him. It is ours to surrender to His love. It is His job to save us, and take us where he wants us to go.