The First Sunday of Lent
March 9, 2014- Pastor Adam Moline
Genesis
3:1-21 Romans 5:12-19 Matthew 4:1-11
Grace, mercy and
peace to you from God our Father through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our text today is from the epistle lesson we just read, especially these
words, “by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.” Thus far our text.
Dear friends in
Christ. Dear friends, we all know the
story of creation. In the beginning, God
created the heavens and the earth – a miracle - and when he was done, he
declared that it was very good. And as
the pinnacle of His creation, God created man and woman, and put them in the
garden. And thus the history of humanity
began. Man and wife living together in
harmony. Humankind living in the Garden
of Eden with little to worry about.
Everything was very good. As that
seventh day of existence came to a close, one wondered what could possibly go
wrong.
But things didn’t
last that perfectly for very long. In
our Old Testament lesson we see how a good and wonderful gift could be so
easily be destroyed by sin and selfishness.
Adam and Eve, given so many good gifts from God’s loving hand wanted
more. They didn’t just want to receive
God’s gifts, they wanted to be like God Himself, to give gifts. They wanted to judge right from wrong
themselves, and to make their own decisions.
And so, they disobeyed God, and through
one man and his disobedience, sin
entered the world. Through one man
condemnation entered the world.
That sin entered
through Adam and Eve, and because of it death began. Each person now faced the knowledge that
because they had disobeyed God, that one day their heart would stop beating and
their lungs would stop breathing. One
day they would die, and until that day, their world would be one of suffering
and death, pain and sorrow.
And this sin
didn’t affect them only. It also
affected their children and grandchildren.
You see when Adam and Eve disobeyed, we disobeyed right along with them.
We are just as guilty as they are. We
only need read a few paragraphs further in Genesis and we learn that that sin
we committed with Adam has caused Cain to stab to death Abel. That one seemingly innocent bite of fruit has
now caused blood to be shed in their own family, and in ours. Sin now reigns in a world that once was very
good. Death and the devil are now the
ruler of God’s holy creation. And this
evil will continue until the world is brought to its end some day in the
future.
Therefore, just as sin came into the world
through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because
all sinned. And Death reigned from Adam
until Moses and yes even unto today.
That same sin is still in your life.
That same sin affects the way that you live, and the way that those
around you live. Adam’s sin infects us
down to our very core. It makes us
selfish, wanting to keep for ourselves countless blessings which God still
gives to us in our sin. We store up for
ourselves treasures of gold and silver here where moth and rust can destroy. Adam’s sin makes us hate and fight and murder
as we interact with our brothers and sisters in the faith, killing them in our
thoughts words and deeds. Yes friends,
Adam’s sin still has a firm grip in our world.
And because that
very first sin has a grip on us, so too does death. It is something that we all will face one day
or another, sooner or later. We will
face the sickness and death of loved ones.
We will face the even our own sicknesses and death, and it all stems
from that very first sin. Yes friends,
one day each one of us will lay on our death beds. And no matter what the scientific reason for
death may be, the spiritual reason is the same:
sin has come into our world through Adam, and brought death to each of
us with it.
Friends, all
mankind is guilty. All mankind has
fallen short of God’s eternal glory. All
mankind deserves death. Let me say it
plainly. You deserve death. You have sinned right alongside Adam and
Eve. You have fallen into slavery to
Satan, because you have not wanted to obey God’s word. And your slavery leads only to eternal death
and damnation, and no matter how hard you try, no matter how many “good works”
you do, you cannot save yourself. You
are trapped, and you have no way to escape.
On your own you are doomed.
But you are not on
your own. God does not leave you alone in
your sin, for where you have fallen short and fallen into temptation, Jesus has
not. In our Gospel lesson, three times
Satan tries to pull the same shenanigans with Jesus that he so successfully
pulled with us in the Garden of Eden.
Satan tries to get Jesus to fall into the same slavery of sin and death
that you and I are under. But Jesus is
firm; Jesus stands up and says, “No, I will not turn against my God and my
Father.” And so Jesus does what you
cannot, and because of it, God rescues you.
God doesn’t rescue
by giving you a set of steps to follow, or by giving us the ability to earn
forgiveness. In our sin, that wouldn’t
work, we couldn’t do the things God asks.
Instead God rescues by having Jesus submit to the punishment we deserve
for our sin. God rescues by having his
own son give himself over to the power of death and the devil in our
place. We are rescued by Christ as he
goes into Jerusalem, and suffers and dies so that original sin which infests
you and me might die with him. For as by the one man's disobedience the
many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made
righteous.
Where we did not
listen to God, Jesus did. Where we did
not love God more than ourselves, Jesus did.
Where we did not submit to God’s will, Jesus did. Jesus completed what we could not on our
own. Jesus submitted, even to the point
of having nails driven through his hands, as his beaten and gruesomely bloodied
body was nailed on a cross. By the
obedience of Jesus, by his submission to His heavenly Father, you are made
righteous.
You are made
righteous as you are washed in his blood in baptism. You are made righteous as you hear what you
loving God has done for you because you could not. You are made righteous, because God loved you
so much he was willing to suffer and die, even when it was you who deserved
that punishment. You have rescue on a
lonely hill, on a Friday we call Good.
You have rescue as your God dies on a cross to give you His life and His
holiness and righteousness.
Friends, we are
sinners. We are guilty. But in the blood shed Jesus, we are made
clean. We are made holy and blameless
before God. We are rescued, and we have
life. Yes, one day you may leave this
earthly life behind, but on that day you will be raised with Jesus into an
eternal life that this life cannot even compare to. A world much like the world Adam and Eve
enjoyed before the fall into sin, only better.
A world apart from tears and pain.
A world apart from fighting and sin.
A world of peace. Dear friends,
Jesus saves. Jesus rescues. And by his death, you are brought back to
that original holiness that God gave to us in the beginning.
THROUGH ONE MAN,
THE GOD MAN JESUS, YOU ARE BROUGHT LIFE.
Amen.
