Romans 7:7-13

11/28/10

Romans 7:7-13

Hudson UMC

Today is the first Sunday in the season of Advent.  The word “Advent” literally means “arrival,” and the church has celebrated this season for a very long time in a twofold way.  First, we remember the fact that God has come among us in and as the man Jesus.  That is to say, Advent celebrates the arrival of God among us in human flesh, both one of us and one with us.  The second thing that we remember and celebrate during Advent is that, though Jesus, after His death and resurrection, was ascended to heaven and we can no longer see Him in a physical way, He promised His followers that He would come back some day.  It is important that, as we get ever nearer to Christmas, the end of Advent, we remember that we are not just remembering the waiting and groaning of the world before Jesus was born, but to identify with it because we find that, once again, the world is waiting and groaning, this time for Jesus to return and bring final deliverance to the world.

You may find that the theme for the sermons during this season of Advent are somewhat different than you might expect.  Traditionally, throughout the four Sunday’s of Advent, the story of the Virgin Birth is told, sometimes four different times, or else one account will be stretched over the four weeks.  As helpful as that approach can be, and as comforting as it might be to dedicate Advent to such a deliberate remembrance, I have felt led to take a different approach and focus on a particularly interesting, and particularly neglected theological theme of Advent.

I want to focus on what happens to human beings when God draws close to them.  This is important because, in Christ, we have an amazing drawing near of God to us, coming among us in a unique, powerful and personal way.  The thing is that, as Christians, as people who find ourselves in the church, whether we have spent our entire lives in the church, as I know many of you have, or if you, like me, are much more of a convert to Christianity rather than having been raised in it, can find ourselves focusing on some things to the exclusion of others.  I think that, unfortunately, we have done this when we think about God coming among us.

You see, our tendency is to say true things without always realizing the fullness of what they mean.  For example, we say, “God drawing near to us is good,” and we are right to say so.  However, it is very common to flatten that out so that we mean, “God drawing near is always and everywhere good for everyone in every sense of the word.”  When we examine the Biblical witness, we find that this is simply not true.  I believe that God drawing near is good for everyone, but it definitely has some implications that we might find are in conflict with some of our culture’s understanding of “good.”

It does not take much effort to find, throughout the Old Testament, but particularly in the first five books and the books that focus on the history of Israel, examples of people who consider a negative side to their encounter with God.  Over and over again, when people encounter God, or even an angel or a vision of God, their response is that of terror.  They walk away from the encounter rejoicing that they have seen the Lord but utterly amazed because they have not been consumed.  One time I was in a group discussion about a text where Moses goes to meet with God in the Tent of Meeting but everyone else stood at the entrances to their tents, not daring to follow.  One person said, “Why wouldn’t they want to go meet with God, too?”  The simple fact is that they did not want to die.  It is easy to take for granted the fact that Jesus has broken down the barrier between us and God, but the ancient people of God always remembered that God told Moses, “You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live!”

The reason why people could not see God and live is not because God was more angry than compassionate.  It has to do with the fundamental difference between God and human beings.  To meet with God is an intense experience.  Even people who have been Christians for a very long time will tell you that to really meet with God is very powerful.  Even when God’s presence is gentle, it can still be draining.  And this is all for people on this side of Christ’s life, death, resurrection and ascension, not to mention Pentecost.

One of the single most formative moments in Israel’s history is the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, after God had dramatically delivered them from Egyptian oppression.  It was at this point that God more completely fulfilled the promises that He had made to Abraham, that he would be a father of great nations.  By giving the people a law, God truly defined them as a nation, by binding up the people’s national identity and ethnic identity with their religious identity, God made them more than a nation, but also made them a people, a people set apart in every way.

We could say that, in the giving of the law to Israel, God was drawing close to that particular nation in a way that He hadn’t with any other group of people.  No other nation in the Ancient Near East, or even in the entire world, was as completely defined by God as Israel was.  There are two main implications of the giving of the Law to Israel that I want to lift up here.

The first of these is what happened in the actual lawgiving.  The Israelites had just been delivered from Egypt with mighty miracles.  They owed their freedom and their lives to this God.  After only about fifty days, Moses went up Mount Saini to meet with God and, ultimately, to bring that law down to the people so they might know what God wanted them to do.  While Moses was up on the mountain, the people got very antsy, begging Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make them some gods to worship.  The result was the infamous “golden calf.”  Imagine that; less than two months after you had your entire life, both as an individual and as a community, radically transformed by the power of this one God of your ancestors whom had never allowed images to be made of him, you were to say, “Enough of this, let’s make our own gods.”  It seems astonishing.  At the very moment when Moses is receiving the law that is going to set the Israelites apart from the other nations, the people are doing exactly the opposite, insisting that they be just like the other nations, even though their God had just overcome those other nations.

The other implication of the law brings us, finally, to the text from Romans for this morning.  The Jewish law is full of commands, many of them expressed in the well-known formula, “Thou shalt not.”  Paul had just been spending a fair amount of time showing how the law was not effective at bringing about our salvation and emphasizing how God has done what the law was not able to do.  Paul pointed out that, so far from liberating us from sin, it seemed that the law actually increased the sinfulness of the people.  Paul says, “If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.  I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’  But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.  Apart from the law sin lies dead.  I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.”

It needs to be made as clear as possible that Paul is saying that, if it were not for the law, we would not be as outwardly bad as we are.  I remember reading, in high school, a book that suggested that it would have been better if the Ten Commandments were written in positive, rather than negative, language.  For example, instead of saying, “Thou shalt not commit murder,” it should have said, “Thou shalt affirm and support life.”  To put the commands in a negative way, it was argued, is to set the people up for failure because nothing makes us want to do something more than being told not to do it.  A poem by Carl Sandburg asks, “Why did the children put beans in their ears when the one thing we told the children they must not do was put beans in their ears?  Why did the children pour molasses on the cat when the one thing we told the children they must not do was pour molasses on the cat?”

However, we must also be equally clear that Paul does not pin the blame for this evil behavior on the law, but on sin.  “What then should we say?  That the law is sin?  By no means!”  “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.  Did what is good, then, bring death to me?  By no means!  It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.”  What Paul is saying here is that the law is good, but has been twisted by sin, sin that was lying dormant until the law came along and provoked it to show itself.  The law did not create sin but exposed it for what it is.

So, in response to the concerns that the law makes people more sinful, Paul would respond that people are already sinful; the law just showed us that this was so.  In fact, part of the purpose of the law in the first place was to unmask our secret sinful desires.  Maybe its true that saying, “Thou shalt not…” makes us want to do evil.  But perhaps we must think about it as a way to expose that, while the law is good, we are not always good.  After all, who will say that keeping God first in our lives, allowing ourselves to rest regularly, honoring our parents, and avoiding things like killing, adultery, stealing, lying, and jealousy, are bad things, even if we don’t always do them?  Maybe the big problem we have to deal with is not with the law, but with ourselves.

The point that I really want to make is that God drawing near to us is a good thing, the very best of all things, in fact.  If God did not draw near to us, we would remain untouched by grace, we would not know what it means to be forgiven, to have the very life of God implanted into us.  If God never drew near to us, we would be hard-pressed to really say or believe that God loves us.  After all, who loves us and yet insists on remaining far away?  God’s drawing near is the one thing that will truly transform our lives and break the power of evil in this world of ours.

However, it is also true that this drawing near to us of God is also something that can be very uncomfortable.  When God first moved to free the Israelites from Pharaoh, the immediate response was for the workload, that was already too heavy for the people to bear, was increased.  God setting His people apart and giving them a good law by which to govern their lives resulted in their continual rebellion, doing precisely what the law said they shouldn’t do.  When God drew close to the Israelites by sending His word to them through the prophets, as we will consider next week, calling the people back to the Lord, the people responded by being even more like their pagan neighbors and by treating those prophets badly, often having them killed.  When God came among us in His most personal way yet, in the Incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus of Nazareth, it had catastrophic implications; so much so that the New Testament often uses words reserved for earthquakes and other natural disasters to describe portions of the life of Christ, ultimately provoking the sinfulness of humanity to its highest pitch.

It is tempting to think of the giving of the Law to Israel, if we understand it this way, as the act of a vindictive God who wants to set people up for failure and then punish them for it.  However, the very history of Israel shows us that this is not at all the case.  Remember, the giving of the Law that provokes Israel to sin is not given at the end of the Old Testament but at the beginning.  Moses was not the last great leader of the nation of Israel but the first.  The very fact that we have hundreds of years of Jewish history, where God is continually interacting with the people, both warning and bringing comfort to them, never giving up on them, even in their sin, shows us that the failure of Israel to keep God’s law was not grounds for God abandoning them.  On the contrary, we can see that God stuck to Israel all the more ferociously, not even allowing them to abandon Him.

This is amplified for us as Christians because we can see that God was so far from rejecting sinful people that He chose to come among us personally to accomplish the forgiveness and salvation that the law could not bring.  The Law shows us many things.  It shows us that God and His commands are good, it shows us that we are not particularly good at following them, and, proving that God really isn’t like spiteful and vindictive human beings, it shows us that, though God knows everything that is wrong with us, He still refuses to let us go.

That is why the world was waiting for Christ to come, that is why our God is worth following, and that is why we are waiting for Christ to return and finish healing the world of all its brokenness.  The harshness of God is actually more tender than we can even imagine.  God is good and though His coming often brings us a certain amount of pain, it is never pain for pain’s sake, but always to bind us all the more closely to Him, to redeem and renew us and to heal us from our own self-destructive tendencies.  It is something like the work of a surgeon, who cuts into the flesh, inflicting pain, but so that healing might take place.

As we continue to gather together in anticipation of our celebrating Christ’s birth, let us trust, not in ourselves, but in the mighty power of God to transform both our lives and the world in which we live.  Our God is a God who draws near to us and makes His life our own, not just for our sake, but for the sake of our community and the sake of our world.  Let us pray.

AMEN