Advent 4
Deut
18:15-19
12/20/20
The focal
point of my HO gauge model railroad is the steel mill complex, and the railroad
yard that serves it. It takes up a large area – it is about sixteen feet long
and three feet wide. Compactly arranged,
just like the real thing, it includes all of the large buildings that one would
need to produce steel and roll it out into a finished product.
Undeniably,
the focal point of the steel mill is the blast furnace. This is a large and impressive model – it is
two feet high. It towers over everything
else. The steel mill engine switches special railroad cars that carry the
molten iron from the blast furnace to the open hearth furnaces of the steel
mill. They also take away another kind
of car that carries the slag – the molten waste metal – that is dumped out at
the slag dump elsewhere.
Now as a
plastic model in a setting that is a 1/87 scale version the real world, the
blast furnace is fascinating industrial structure that provides all kinds of
interesting model railroad operation. It
needs to be constantly fed with hopper cars carrying iron ore, coke, and
limestone. The molten iron and slag must
be regularly switched. And of course all
of this provides the reason for trains to arrive at the railroad yard and
depart. It provides constant switching
interchange between the railroad yard and the steel mill itself.
However, in
the real world, a blast furnace is a massive, frightening, and deadly thing.
It is a fiery cauldron that is constantly melting the iron ore, coke, and
limestone into liquid iron that flows out the bottom at a temperature of three
thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It is place of superheated and pressured gases. It
is a setting where accidents happen, and workers are killed. It is one of the last
places in the world I would ever want to be.
Like the
setting of a blast furnace, Israel had experienced something that was frightening
and deadly. And they didn’t want any part of it either. This is the background
for the verses of our text as Moses says, “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from
among you, from your brothers--it is to him you shall listen-- just as you
desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you
said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God or see this
great fire any more, lest I die.’”
Yahweh brought Israel out of Egypt
in the exodus. And then just as God had
promised Moses when he called him in the setting of the burning bush, he had
brought Israel to Mt. Sinai. There God
came down to Israel as he brought them into a covenant with him.
The holy God – the almighty Creator
– descended upon Mt Sinai. And it was
terrifying. On the morning when he arrived there were thunders and
lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet
blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled. Moses brought the
people out of camp to meet God, as they took their stand at the foot of the
mountain.
And that’s when the real show
started. We learn that
Mount
Sinai was wrapped in smoke because Yahweh had descended on it in fire. The
smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain
trembled greatly. There was the sound of the trumpet that grew louder
and louder. Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder. Yahweh came down
on Mount Sinai, at the top of the mountain.
And as he was present in this way, Yahweh told the people through Moses
that they were not to approach the mountain any closer or else they would die.
Exodus chapter twenty tells us that when
the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of
the trumpet and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled, and
they stood far off and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will
listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” They had been in the
presence of God and they couldn’t’ handle any more of it. They didn’t want to
hear Yahweh directly. They wanted Moses to serve as the intermediary with
God. Moses told them, “Do not fear, for
God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you
may not sin.”
This description of God reminds us
about the deadly reality of our sin. As
we do each year, in Advent at the beginning of the new church year we have
shifted to using Divine Service Setting One.
And so at the beginning of this service you just confessed to God: “We
have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done
and by what we have left undone.” Notice
that the sin that piles up in your life is not merely the violation of some
abstract rules. It is not something that
merely shifts you from the “nice list” to the “naughty” list. Instead, it is sin committed against God
– against this God - the holy Creator
of the cosmos. And of itself, sin
against this God can bring only one possible outcome – death and eternal
punishment, because this God is a holy, consuming fire.
In our text Moses recounts what had
happened. Then he adds, “LORD said to me, ‘They are right in what they
have spoken.
I
will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I
will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I
command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall
speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.’”
God said that this plea by the
people was a good thing. Moses would
play this role. And then he promised
something more. He promised that he
would raise up a prophet like Moses from among the people. God would put his
words in his mouth and he would speak all that God commanded.
“A prophet like Moses” – now there
was a tall order. The book of
Deuteronomy ends with these words: “And there has not arisen a
prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to
face, none like him for all the signs and the wonders that the LORD
sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to
all his land,
and
for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in
the sight of all Israel.”
Certainly, there were great
prophets. Elijah and Elisha immediately
come to mind. But even Elijah did not interact with Yahweh the way Moses did,
such that the face of Moses was shining after he spoke with Yahweh, and he had
to put a veil over his face because of the glory, when he then went and spoke
to the people.
But God had promised another prophet
like Moses, who would speak his word. He promised that this prophet would come
from the midst of the people – from their brothers. During Advent we are preparing to celebrate
the fact that God did indeed send this One.
Now we are more used to thinking about
Jesus as the Messiah, the One who descended from King David. And of course this
is the obvious truth demonstrated on Christmas when Jesus was born in the
Bethlehem – the city of David. Jesus is
the Messiah who fulfills all of the wonderful promises God makes in the Old
Testament about the one who descended from David.
But another way that Scripture
describes Jesus is the promised prophet like Moses. Like Moses, and Elijah, and Elisha, our Lord
preformed mighty miracles. In last
week’s Gospel lesson we heard Jesus say, “Go and tell John what you hear and
see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are
cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have
good news preached to them.”
Like the mighty prophets before him,
Jesus did these things. But here is the
thing that was also true about the prophets: they suffered; they died. Moses was constantly being rejected and
attacked by the people. Jeremiah was thrown into an empty well, because royal
officials didn’t want to hear the truth that he spoke. Jezebel killed the
prophets of Yahweh.
Jesus came forth as the promised
prophet like Moses. Yet Jesus was also more than just a prophet. While Moses may have talked with Yahweh face
to face, Jesus was Yahweh – he was the Second Person of the Trinity who
had eternally been with the Father and the Spirit. During Advent we prepare to celebrate Jesus’
birth – the birth of the One conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the
virgin Mary.
Jesus entered into our world in
order to suffer and to die. He came to
be numbered with the transgressors. He
came to die a death for us by which he has won forgiveness. Luke tells us that after his resurrection,
Jesus opened the disciples’ minds to understand the Scriptures, and said
to them: “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and
on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and
forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all
nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
You have been baptized into the
death of Jesus the risen Lord, and therefore your sins have been washed
away. By faith and baptism you have
received forgiveness and eternal life. You know that death has been defeated
because Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, and you too will share in this
resurrection when Christ returns on the Last Day.
In our text Yahweh promises to raise
up a prophet like Moses. He also says, “And
I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I
command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall
speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.”
This is what Jesus did. He spoke what the Father gave him to
say. Our Lord says in John’s Gospel, “The
one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that
I have spoken will judge him on the last day. For I have not
spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given
me a commandment--what to say and what to speak.” And because he did this, to reject Jesus and
the Gospel is to reject the Father. It is to reject the forgiveness that God
has given through his Son who was the prophet like Moses. It is to meet the God
Israel saw at Mt. Sinai as one who has sinned against him. And that can
end in only one way.
Yet to listen to what Jesus says is
to hear the good news that Jesus obeyed the Father by suffering and dying for
us. It is to hear the good news of the forgiveness that we have because Jesus
gave his life for us and rose from the dead.
It is to listen to Jesus’ words as he tells us what this means for our
lives: "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved
you”
No comments:
Post a Comment