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Because of our sin — our rebellion against God in the garden, our desire to make ourselves our idol god and eat that forbidden fruit — fruit, the plenty and bounty of the earth, no longer comes easy: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground” (Genesis 3:17b–19a).
Notice, please, that God does not give us the Marie Antoinette line in Genesis: “Let them eat cake.” God is not giving bread as a punishment as if we are going to be given second best. This is a Gospel promise. You shall eat bread. God will provide daily bread. But it will come by your own sweat — through the vocation God gives you. Bread, fruit, our daily sustenance, will not be simply sitting by in abundance ready for the picking without any effort on our own as it was in the Garden of Eden.
I fear that too many of us are so far removed from where our daily bread truly comes from, that it is hard for many not to think that food just appears for them, ready to eat. We no longer even pass cash or coin from our wallets and hands over to a store or restaurant in exchange for food. It is reduced down to a simple swipe of the card with the magnetic strip — a computer transaction.
Yet, as the ease with which our daily bread and other material possessions can come into our possession with less and less pain associated with the transaction, comes more and more anxiety. He who has more has more to worry about. In our society and culture, he who has more toys does not really win as those evil bumper stickers say. Often, having more comes at the cost of great amounts of credit lent and great amounts of interest to be paid in the future to the lender. I have often listened to a radio show hosted by a Baptist christian, Dave Ramsey, out of Nashville. He counsels people over the air on responsibly using their finances, how to live within one's means, how to get out of and stay out of bad debt. He is fond of quoting Proverbs 22:7: “The borrower is the slave of the lender.” He's right, because God's Word is right.
It is no accident that proverb comes immediately after, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6) We should be training ourselves and our children not to use bad debt like credit cards whenever possible; we should be training our children not to covet and idolize material possessions. What God ordains is always good — that we work for our daily bread and our possessions, that we learn how very valuable all the good things that God gives us in this life truly are. In our sinfulness, we reject the intrinsic value that comes from something being a gift to us from God. We take the position that we simply are owed what's coming to us, because we value ourselves too highly. Our neighbor has this or that possession, so why can't we have it too, we ask. So we take what is in front of us without truly paying for it, using whatever means necessary, which especially means in our culture going into debt to a lender. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble — much less extending our trouble down the line.
Jesus says, “No one is able to serve two Lords! For either the one he will hate and the other he will love, or one he will be devoted to and the other he will despise. You are not able to serve God and mammon!” (Matthew 6:24). We cannot serve ourselves and God. We cannot serve our possessions and God. We cannot serve our jobs and our paychecks and God. We cannot serve our families and God. We cannot serve banks and credit card lenders and God. We cannot serve the things of this life that become our idols and God. We cannot have idols. As our catechumens have been learning this week, we are to “fear, love, and trust in God above all things”; and “:all things” means “all”. It means God alone. It means God without any competition, not even “God in first place”. It means God is a jealous God, and He desires our complete fear, love, trust, faith, and devotion. He will tolerate no other.
Therefore, our faith and trust in God is not just the “first thing”. It is the “only thing”. Since we cannot serve two Lords, two Gods, since there is only room for one God in our life, it means we must repent of putting our faith, love, trust, and devotion into the material things of this life. We must turn from these idols and humbly repent before God for our lack of faith in His promises to provide what we need for this body and life.
Do you remember just a few years ago the terrible devastation of New Orleans by the hurricane? Do you remember how the people who did not evacuate were stuck in practically lawless and unsupervised shelters in the stadium and the convention hall, mired in filthy squalor and oppressed by heat? How people had only the clothes on their back and were fighting each other for scraps of food and water until the government was finally able to bring supplies and restore order? Another hurricane is coming. Everyone is worried again about the gulf coast. One wonders if Americans are worried about the physical and spiritual well–being of those in the path of the storm or if we worry about them because they might lose their material possessions! Few will remember that island countries in the Caribbean have already been hit. I received this email from a brother Lutheran pastor in Haiti this past Friday evening:
Dear brothers in Christ!
We give thanks to God for His Love and Mercy every day in our life as His children. The hurricane was very terrible for us in Haiti, especially [in the city of]: Jacmel, many houses have been destroyed, animals have been killed, no more gardens, no more plantain [a larger type of banana, a staple in the Haitian diet], people are looking for food and clothes.
I receive more than 100 calls a day asking for help, especially for food.
Please pray for us, God will continue to guide us according to His love.
May God bless all of you and your ministry,
Pastor Marky Kessa
One can read in the email Pastor Kessa's desperation as he attempts to reach out in love to those around him who are hurting, even while I know he and his family are likely suffering just as much. Yet, food and clothes and possessions are no idol god for the people of Haiti. They have idolatry, for sure, but material wealth is not to be had in Haiti. Haiti is all about subsistence farming for each family. One, also, reads a calm certainty coming from Pastor Kessa — “We give thanks to God for His love and mercy every day in our life as His children…. God will continue to guide us according to His love….”
Pastor Kessa is preaching a sermon of his own to us right now: even in the most desperate of situations, we need not be anxious about these worldly things. He has taken our Lord's words to heart: “Do not be anxious in your life, what you might eat, or what you might drink, or on your body what clothes you might wear! Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?” (Matthew 6:25) Even in the most desperate of circumstances, God is still the first thing and only thing in our life, because we are God's first thing and only thing. We are more than the birds of the air to God; we are more than the field grass to God. He cares for these things of His creation. True. So, how much more does He care for us? We are God's special creation, made in His own image, made to be the objects of His love.
So, God's eternal Son came and took on our flesh, our humanity, and all the cursed baggage that goes with it. He came down from heaven and lived in our flesh. He walked more than a mile in our shoes. He became well familiar with all our sorrows and infirmities. He weathered every storm and calmed them. He knows our cares and anxieties over daily bread. He knows we are constantly tempted to bow down to them. He was tempted with the hunger for daily bread by Satan himself in the wilderness. He knows we are cursed because of our cares and anxieties over the material things of this life. He was there in the Garden of Eden, and He was there in the garden of Gethsemane, and He carried the weight of it all to the cross at Golgotha's garden of death.
There, our cares and anxieties, our shame and our hurts, our sufferings and sorrows, our cursed sinning and temptations, were all crushed and banished forever. There, a perfect life lived free of sin was exchanged for ours, and all of our true debt was paid in full. We are no longer the slave to the lender of death, the old evil foe, who first offered that false credit to Adam and Eve. He is crushed and defeated. We are free of his chains.
How do we know this is true? Because Jesus broke the chains of death and burst out of His three–day prison, and so, the faith of Adam and Eve — of Elijah and the widow; of you, Pastor Kessa, and me; and of all the faithful who ever lived — has not been in vain. We, too, will break the earthborn shackles of death, and we will rise out of our tomb in the same glorified flesh that rose from the Easter tomb, in the same glorified flesh that ascended into heaven, leading our way there.
Jesus first sought God's Kingdom and God's righteousness, perfectly, for us, on our behalf, because we were cursed by sin and could not. And all these things were added unto Him — you and me, our children, the faithful in Haiti, and all who by faith reside in the Body of Christ. He loved us that much, because we are His first thing and only thing, the object of an immeasurable, bounteous, immovable, eternal love.
That love frees us to seek first God's Kingdom and God's righteousness by putting our full trust and confidence in Christ. This means that, as God gathers us around the preaching of His Gospel, the feeding of His Body and Blood, the washing away of sins by Water and His Word, our faith in Christ receives these great and free gifts for our eternal good. These gifts are the coming of God's Kingdom and God's righteousness in our lives. It is God's first thing and only thing to continue to bless us with His love and forgiveness. There, in that love, in that Body of Christ, we truly have no other God. There, we are, by faith, free of all anxiety for this life, and we look with full certainty for the life of the New Heaven and the New Earth to come that our Lord has prepared for us from all eternity.
May it be our Lord's will to come again soon to take us to be His own for eternity, and in His good time, we pray He relieves quickly the suffering and anxiety of His people in Haiti and wherever disaster has befallen His saints. In Jesus' name we pray it. Amen.
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