Tag: Judgment

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Jesus Dead and Buried (Luke 23:44–56)

[Listen to an audio version of this sermon here]

For some reason, the death of my Grandmother, Dorothy Basham, in November of 2022, has been particularly sobering for me. I have one Grandparent left, my Grandfather David Keith. Once he is gone, that entire generation of grandparents will be gone. For some reason, my Grandmother’s death made me think on this more deeply. Perhaps it’s because I have often thought of saying something or mentioning something to her or asking her something, and then I remember that she’s gone. All this reminds me of the fact that I am headed to the grave, and one day I will join them.

Death is not the way it is supposed to be. God did not create humans to experience death but to live in joy forever. Nowhere is this more poignant than the death of a child. We always expect that our children will outlive us. I was with a woman recently who experienced a joyful occasion where everyone was happy and rejoicing. But . . . it reminded her of the death of her son. She was weeping uncontrollably and had to leave. My heart went out to her both because I saw that everyone was happy and yet I realized that this reminded her of that which hurt her more than anything else in the world could.

We need to think about this. It is part of life, and it has extreme significance. Here, in this passage we encounter a death. It is the death of Jesus, the Son of God. What does this event tell us about death? Does it help us in any way as we process our own death and the death of those we love? That’s what we want to consider here. There are two aspects to this story that will be our two points, the death of Jesus and the burial of Jesus. Then, I will conclude by making some points about the suffering of Christ in general.

The Death of Jesus
There are two things that happen in our text which indicate opposite things, the darkness and the rending of the temple veil. Let me explain.

First, consider the darkness. Think about what it must have been like to see the crucifixion. Jesus had already been crucified, and then thick darkness comes over the land. The sun stopped shining. Here is a scene where Jesus was crucified and the movements of the weather cause it to be black and dark. The weather, which is under the control of God, demonstrated the blackness of the whole event, the reign of darkness, as Jesus said.

However, there is something more. In the Bible, the darkness and clouds represent the judgment of God. Joel, for example, describes the day of judgment as a “day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness” (Joel 2:2). However, this day of darkness and gloom was always coming upon people because of their sin. As Zephaniah the prophet said when he was speaking of another such day, it was “because they have sinned against the Lord” (Zeph. 1:16).

The question here is, why would the judgment of God come against Jesus? He was the beloved Son in whom the Father, just a short time ago had said, “He was well pleased.” Jesus had not done any wrong. He was so sure of this that He said that none of them could show where He had sinned. This may seem prideful, but it is not. Humility is an accurate estimation of what we are and that is almost all there is to it.

So, again, why would the black clouds of judgment come against Him? Because He was there as the representative of sinful humanity. He was there as their substitute. He died because “they have sinned against the Lord,” and He was experiencing judgment on their behalf so that they would not have to. His death in place of ours.

That leads us to the second image here. The veil of the temple was torn in two. It was a thick heavy curtain, and, miraculously, it was ripped in two from top to bottom. Now the veil guarded the way to the holiest place in the temple. Only the high priest could enter there where the ark of the covenant was, and that only once a year! It was a symbol of God’s grace and the sacrifice of atonement that Jesus would make, but it was also a reminder that the way had not yet been opened. They were still shut out from the presence of God unless the true sacrifice took place.

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The God Who Rights All Wrongs (Obadiah)

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There are many things that we can suffer in this world, but none is worse than what we can suffer from our fellow human beings. Animals may fight for food, territory, and mates, but the imagination of human beings can come up with endless ways to inflict cruelty on one another. The injustice of humans toward one another is truly astonishing.

Once people get their eyes on something, they can commit almost any cruelty in order to achieve it. They can harm anyone without mercy. I spoke to a person not too long ago who started a business after years of hard work. Then, their spouse left them for another person and stole everything they had. The business collapsed. They went to court, but there was no way to get it back because both their names were on the account. The world is filled with things like this.

These things justly make us angry. Anger is a legitimate response to injustice and prepares us for action. However, in many, many cases, there is nothing we can do about it. Then, it just sits in our hearts. When it does this, it eats away at us and can embitter everything in our lives. We know about some of this anger, but we also have a lot of anger hidden in the depths of our spirit.

The question is, what do we do with it? How do we keep the wrong-doer from harming us twice? From the wrong that they commit against us and from turning us into bitter, angry people? The prophet Obadiah provides for us a vision of God that can enable us to move past the injustices of the past, not by ignoring the wrong but by committing it to the God who rights all wrongs. We will see this here in the wrong of Edom, its reckoning with God, and the restoration of Israel. So, we will see the wrong, the reckoning, and the restoration.

The Wrong of Edom
The kingdom of Edom was to the south of Israel. There lived the descendants of Esau, the twin brother of Jacob. If you read the book of Genesis, you will find that Jacob and Esau wrestled with one another. Even in the womb, they were so active that Rebekah, their mother, considered them to be wrestling in the womb. This continued throughout their lives, and this wrestling manifested itself in their descendants and their nations. Just look up the word Edom in a concordance or on Biblegateway.com, and you will find that their relationship was not a good one.

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The Lion Roars (Amos)

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    Does God care about this world at all? Sometimes we look at the world, and it feels like God is completely silent and unconcerned. For the prophet Amos, the world looked very different. For Amos, God was speaking. He was concerned about the world and His words were like the roaring of a lion. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel put it, “Most of us who care for the world bewail God’s dreadful silence, while Amos appears smitten by God’s mighty voice” (The Prophets, 35).

    At first sight, we might think that God’s concern for the world will comfort us, but this might not be the case. We assume God is on our side, but God is on His own side. He is the Lord. He is the commander. He is the lion. When the Lord comes, He will challenge us in our complacency. What have we made of ourselves? What have we done with what God has given us? Meeting God might not be so easy or comforting as we think. That’s the power of the vision of Amos, and it’s one that we want to explore in this sermon. Here, I want you to see some important points about the context of the book and then a summary of the content of the book. After that, there are important considerations we should take from the book. So, the context, content, and considerations.

    Context
    To appreciate this prophecy, we need to understand three things about the context.

    The first thing is to understand that the people of Israel were divided into two nations. Remember that God had raised up David to reign over His people and that under his son, Solomon, the united nation had done amazing things. However, when King Rehoboam son of Solomon succeeded to the throne, 10 of the tribes revolted. They formed the northern kingdom which was called “Israel” with its capitol in Samaria. The tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained loyal to the house of David. This is the southern kingdom, and it is called “Judah” with its capitol in Jerusalem. This is crucial background information for much of the work of the prophets.

    The second thing to understand is that Amos was from the southern kingdom of Judah, but he preached a severe message to the northern kingdom of Israel. So, why would Amos go to those who would regard him as a foreigner and give a message they would almost certainly not like? Answer: God told him to. In chapter 7, we read, “Then Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent a message to Jeroboam king of Israel: ‘Amos is raising a conspiracy against you in the very heart of Israel. The land cannot bear all his words'” (7:10). We then read, “Then Amaziah said to Amos, ‘Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there'” (7:12). Here is what Amos replied, “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees. But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel’” (Amos 7:14–15). Amos had a message from the Lord, and he could not hold it in. As he said, “The lion has roared—who will not fear? The Sovereign Lord has spoken—who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8). He would do this in spite of the challenge of being from a different kingdom.

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The God of Hope (Joel)

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In 2016, fires from Chimney Tops sped down through the mountains into Gatlinburg, TN. All around the Parkway, the fire blazed and threatened to consume the town. The fire moved quickly toward Pigeon Forge. The result was thousands displaced, more than a dozen killed, and countless structures destroyed. People here had never experienced anything like it. By the morning of November 29, people were in shock and uncertain of what or who had survived.

In such times, we need comfort as we feel the loss of the normal things that support us. But these tragedies are the sorts of events that can transform us and shape our lives. These sorts of events can help us see beyond our ordinary daily lives and look to the end of life and eternity. They can help us think more seriously about who we are and what we are doing and should be doing.

That’s just what happened with the prophet Joel and with other prophets. They considered the tragedies of life deeply, and as they looked, they got a vision. They saw beyond the ordinary. They saw the big issues of life. We want to look at one particular vision today, that of the prophet Joel. I want you to see three things in this book: the God of wrath, the call to repent, and the God of Hope.

The God of Wrath
We do not know much about the prophet Joel at all. What we do know is that something terrible happened in his lifetime, an event like they had never seen. “Hear this, you elders; listen, all who live in the land. Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors?” (Joel 1:2). And what had occurred? Locusts or grasshoppers had come into the land and were eating everything. They were leaving nothing behind. “What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left other locusts have eaten” (Joel 1:4). These people depended on the yearly crops just to survive, and now the locusts were eating everything. “Despair, you farmers, wail, you vine growers; grieve for the wheat and the barley, because the harvest of the field is destroyed” (Joel 1:11). This is a disaster on a scale that is difficult for us to imagine.

I always had a hard time visualizing what this sort of thing would look like until I lived in South Dakota. One year, the grasshoppers just kept multiplying. They covered everything. There were literally dozens of them per square foot in our backyard. Our kids didn’t want to go outside because they would be wading through grasshoppers. The spiders also multiplied greatly because they could eat the grasshoppers. I had never seen so many in my life. This was a small taste of what it was like to experience this terrible plague of locusts that the people of Israel experienced in the time of Joel.

So, what did they do with such an experience? The prophet Joel reflected on this event, and it enabled him to see the wrath of God coming on this world. He saw it as a vision of the final judgment where God would come back and settle all accounts and deal with every wrong in every human heart.

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