Advent: Knowing God's New
Isaiah 42:5-10a and Matthew 9:14-17
I know Thanksgiving is over but I wish I’d had this recipe for cooking the turkey. But it and the turkey will have to wait till next year. The recipe’s from 5-year-old Angelita Christia Pena. It calls for a live turkey. Here are her steps:
1. Cut skin off
2. Cut off head and eyes
3. Cut tail off
4. Add salt and pepper
5. Pull feathers
6. Set oven to 35 MPH . . .
and the final step . . .
7. Kill the turkey
It
sounds tasty but what’s so amazing about it is it’s new. New can be good. That’s how God felt about everything he
created. Genesis says that
at the end of each day God looked at all the new stuff: And God saw that it was good. Think about it, God is always consistent and never
changes, but does he ever do the same thing twice? (I can’t think of anything.) It’s a fantastic part of who he is and how he relates to us.
We can expect new things from God
all the time. If we look to him for an instant replay, we’ll be disappointed. If we ever get in a rut, it’s not God’s
fault. This scripted anticipation
of Advent should continue in a more a spontaneous fashion the rest of the year.
Isaiah
42:5-10a. Page 489.
5 God created the heavens and stretched
them out; he fashioned the earth and all that lives there; he gave life and
breath to all its people. And now the LORD God says to his servant (the Messiah or the Christ),
6 “I, the LORD, have
called you and given you power to see that justice is done on earth. Through
you I will make a covenant with all peoples; through you I will bring light to
the nations. 7 You will open the
eyes of the blind and set free those who sit in dark prisons.
8 “I alone am the LORD your God. No other
god may share my glory; I will not let idols share my praise. 9 The things I predicted have now come
true. Now I will tell you of new things even before they begin to happen.” 10 Sing a new song to the LORD; sing
his praise, all the world!
In these verses we see the juxtaposition of the two most amazing results of God’s doing something new: creation and salvation. They’re the beginning and the end in the same sense that Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End (Revelation 22:13). There is no need for more. Creation and Salvation are like the banks of a river with a steady stream of God’s new wonders flowing between them.
Looking ahead to the coming Messiah, the prophet realized there would be something lacking in singing the old songs of praise. The only remedy was to sing a new song to the lord. We can do that by literally singing or through real-time interaction with God. Advent puts us on alert that God is doing something brand new.
Matthew 9:14-17. Page 1143.
14
Then the followers of John the Baptist came to Jesus, asking, “Why is it that
we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples don’t fast at all?”
15 Jesus answered, “Do you expect the guests at a wedding party
to be sad as long as the bridegroom is with them? Of course not! But the day
will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will
fast.
16 “No one patches up an old coat with a piece of new cloth,
for the new patch will shrink and make an even bigger hole in the coat. 17 Nor does anyone pour new wine into
used wineskins, for the skins will burst, the wine will pour out, and the skins
will be ruined. Instead, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins, and both will
keep in good condition.”
People
had started to notice Jesus wasn’t the same
old same old. They’d expected his disciples to fit the Pharisees’ cookie
cutter. When they didn’t, the Jews
challenged Jesus. He could’ve said
the disciples were newbies; that in the near future he’d teach them to fast,
but he didn’t. He didn’t agree
with the premise that being religious was the right way. Instead he gave a short dissertation on
comparative religion.
First:
“No one patches up an old coat with a piece of new
cloth, for the new patch will shrink and make an even bigger hole in the coat.” Judaism was the old coat. The Jews were God’s people. He had given them the law, but the law was not able to save anyone,
Jew or Gentile. Clearly no one is justified before God
by the law, because, “The righteous will live by faith (Galatians 3:11).”
In other words, the law
had a hole in it. It needed
fixed. Many had thought God had
patched Judaism up with Jesus. But
it couldn’t be done. John
explained the difficulty with these words: the
law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (John
1:17).
The law of Moses was incomplete as a means of salvation. No one was capable of obtaining righteousness through the law. Righteousness could only come through faith. And salvation could only come by grace through faith. The old way could not accommodate the new way. Here’s a modern example:
Robby and Rachel just got a car with a stick shift. Who would think of adding an automatic transmission into their manual transmission? Neither one would work. So Jesus was not expecting his disciples to do the Jewish religious thing and he doesn’t expect us to do the religious thing either. Instead he offers grace and truth.
In the first analogy Jesus explained why Christianity couldn’t reform Judaism. In the second analogy Jesus explained why new philosophies and ideas couldn’t reshape Christianity or make it their home base.
Jesus said, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins, and both will keep in good condition. But both are God’s. His grace is the wineskin and his truth is the new wine: the truth of the gospel, all truth wherever it’s found and Jesus, the way the truth and the life. Or the other way around.
Christianity, the gospel, salvation, grace and truth are a completed package, a house that doesn’t need additions, a story that needs no editing, a recipe that needs no extra ingredients, a resume with no gaps, software with no need for add-ons. (Of course, none of us has the complete picture.)
But the world always has an attractive alteration or alternative to offer. It began when Eve, a mere mortal, believed that she could determine what was good. Up until then only God had ever made a determination like that.
Since Eve there have been dozens who have given it a whirl. They formulate ways to please god. Or they show how to become one with the universe through spirituality or superior insight or humanitarian accomplishment. They just rearrange the details. They have nothing to teach God.
That doesn’t mean though that religious innovators and leaders have stopped trying. They still try to pour Christianity into their wineskins but their using the same old wineskin Eve tried.
Their minds come up with an idea and it looks good to them so they start to develop it and test it and pretty soon they have a new religious twist to offer. We call them heretics. First came the Gnostics and then a whole string of them down to the more modern ones: Joseph Smith and the Mormons, Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Scientists. And the various denominations - including our own – have spilled gallons of good wine onto the ground.
Check out the web. Some bloggers claim the religious right has hijacked Christianity. Some claim it’s the left-wingers. Almost every cause (from the Crusades to those championed by Liberals and Conservatives) hopes to use Christianity as a platform. And enthusiasts try to pour their sacred and political issues into Christianity.
We should have listened to Jesus. It doesn’t work. What works is Jesus – He’s new every day. So during this season of Advent, don’t revisit your pet peeves about the way people celebrate. Don’t get nostalgic. Don’t try to recreate your childhood. Start each day with the thought that God is about to do something new in your life and in the world with his grace and truth.
Youth Message
A Lifetime of Learning
After you were born, what were some of the first things you learned. Most of us learned many important things like walking and talking while we were still at home.
What’s the next stage of our education? Preschool then Kindergarten. Then elementary, Middle and High School. After that college.
So after you graduate from the last school you’re going to attend is that the end of your education. I hope not. I hope you will be a student your whole life.
There is a ton of information on the Internet. Over 100,000 books are published each year. A guy named John Orwant figured out that as of September 8th there were 168,178,719 different book titles or editions. That means there’s a lot more we could learn. Just be careful not all of it is true but a lot is. Like when I was in school I read a book that said there were nine planets. Now Wikipedia say there are eight planets and five dwarf planets. So just be careful. The only book you can rely on completely is the Bible.
Do you agree to be a student for the rest of your life?
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