|
Text: Matthew
7:15-29 2nd Sunday after
Pentecost How Firm a Foundation? In the name
of him who is the Rock of our Salvation, dear friends in Christ: As many of you probably know, my undergraduate studies were in the field of civil engineering, which means that I learned about how to design civil works: things like buildings, roads, bridges, dams, airports, all kinds of neat stuff. And as part of my studies, I had to learn a lot about foundations. It turns out that buildings, bridges, and dams aren’t much good for anybody if they sink or sag or break apart because they aren’t properly supported underneath. Well, one
of the courses I so fondly remember had to do with what they call “deep
foundations”, which are those that consist of piles driven into the
ground. These piles might be made of
timber, or reinforced concrete, or steel, and you pound them into the ground
with a big hammer called, appropriately enough, a “pile driver”. Piles are needed where soil conditions are
such that they can’t bear the weight of a heavy structure on concrete
footings. For example, soils that
consist mostly of clay or silt are so soft that over time they creep and deform
– kind of like what happens when you squeeze a tube of toothpaste. And because this kind of deformation is
usually uneven, what’ll happen if you build something on such a soil is that
some parts of it will sink more than other parts, and the resulting stresses
and strains will cause your project to break to pieces. So what you do instead is support the weight
of the building on lots of piles that reach through the inferior soil to
transmit the load to something down there that’s strong enough to take it – and
ideally, that would be the bedrock. So far so
good? All right then, well it happens
that when studying civil engineering, you also spend an awful lot of time
examining case studies of projects that failed for one reason or another. We used to call them “engineering horror
stories”. The idea is to find out what
kinds of things can go wrong and learn from the mistakes of others; but I think
it’s also to scare the students into doing all their homework: you don’t want to be known as the engineer
who designed something that fell down.
It’s really bad for your career.
And you don’t want to become famous among future generations of civil
engineering students who will study your starring role in an engineering horror
story. One case
study I remember quite well had to do with a large multi-story building that
was being constructed on what had been the flood plain of a large river. They drilled a number of exploratory soil
samples and found what you might expect on a flood plain: namely, lots of alternating layers of silt
and clay. They also discovered that at
about fifteen feet depth there was a harder layer of calcified soil about a
foot or so thick, but it wasn’t strong or thick enough to hold the weight of
the building. So they decided it would
be best to use a deep foundation that went all the way down to the bedrock,
which, as I recall, was at about thirty feet below the surface. So the design called for specially treated
timber piles that were thirty feet long.
(Thirty feet of soil, thirty-foot piles. See? Isn’t engineering
easy?) Well, when
they were driving the piles they got pretty much what they expected. The first fifteen feet went in pretty easy,
and then things got tough when they got to that hard layer. But they just kept right on pounding with
the pile driver to punch the piles through it, and sure enough, after a foot or
so, the driving got easier again. But
as it turns out, in general, the piles didn’t go down the last fifteen feet as
easily as they expected they would. No
matter: after all twelve hundred or so
piles were driven, the foundation was finished and the rest of the building
went up without a hitch. The ribbon was
cut, the happy customer moved in and started doing business, the engineer got
paid, and everything was just hunky-dory … … Until a
couple of months later when the cracks started to appear … and people noticed
that some doors were becoming harder to open and close. And then some windows broke – some huge
panes just shattered for no apparent reason; and then they had a tough time
getting new windows to fit because the apertures weren’t square. And then there were leaks springing up in
the plumbing and the cooling systems caused by fittings coming apart. And eventually some of the structural cracks
grew so large that the building was deemed no longer safe. It had to be condemned. It was torn down less than a year after its
completion. Why? What caused its failure? Well, after the building was removed, they
started to excavate the foundation, which everyone (except the engineer)
naturally assumed was the culprit. And
what they found was that less than ten percent of the piles they had driven
actually rested on bedrock. The vast
majority of them had not punched through that hard layer fifteen feet below the
surface as anticipated. It was a little
harder than they thought. Instead, the
piles had splintered and fragmented under the soil. The driving hammer had simply pounded them to pieces. So the building had no support. Everyone thought it was resting securely on
bedrock, when in fact, most of it rested on shattered sticks stuck in the mud. All of
which brings me to this morning’s Gospel lesson, and the parable Jesus tells of
the wise and foolish builders. One of
them built his house on the solid rock – that is, he applied the teachings of
Jesus to his life; and the other one built on the sand (or perhaps we could say
“alternating layers of silt and clay”).
The parable confronts you with the question, “Which will you be, a wise
or a foolish builder?” And in light of
the engineering horror story I just told, I’d like to add this question, “How
will you know if you’re building on solid rock or on something else that
only looks or feels like it?” They are
important questions, especially since at the beginning of today’s Gospel
reading, Jesus warns us about the false prophets who will surely
come. He says they will come disguised
as sheep; that is, you will not be able to recognize them by just looking at
them. They’re going to be friendly and
charismatic. Their words will be
peaceful and reasonable. Their
teachings will resonate with the sound of truth. But, Jesus warns us, inwardly these false prophets are ravenous
wolves. Their teachings snatch people
away from the flock of God and ultimately destroy their souls. And just to
be sure we know what we’re talking about, it’s important to understand that
these false prophets honestly believe that they are doing the Lord’s work. Sure, there are some false prophets who are
con men. They teach things they really
do not believe only in order to fleece the flock, as it were. And while we might include such deceivers
under the general heading of false prophets, they are not primarily whom Jesus
refers to here. He’s speaking of the wolves. And when a wolf takes a sheep, it is acting
according to its nature. Its behavior
is destructive, yes, but the wolf is not conscious of doing anything wrong or
evil. And neither are the false
prophets Jesus warns us about. They
believe their foundation is bedrock – but they are wrong. Jesus says they will stand before him in
shocked surprise on the last day pleading their case: “Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name? Wasn’t it your word and your truth that we were teaching? And didn’t we accomplish great things for
you?” But Jesus will send them away,
“Depart from me, you lawless ones. I
don’t know you. I never did.” And, Jesus tells us, their houses will come
down with a great crash. Now, there’s
an engineering horror story for you. It’s a
pretty frightening scene that Jesus describes.
But more than that, it should give all of us cause for sober
reflection: if they could be so
sincere, and so convinced that they were teaching the Lord’s truth and doing
his will … if they were so certain that they were building on the rock, and
were so mistaken … how do you know for sure that you are building on
the bedrock? We can be
grateful that Jesus does not leave us guessing. He’s given us the method to determine which teachers of his word
are true and which are false. He says,
“By their fruits you will recognize them.
Do people pick grapes from thorn-bushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit,
but a bad tree bears bad fruit. … Thus,
by their fruits you will recognize them.” Now, that
seems simple enough; but here’s where we have to be very careful that we don’t
end up sinking our piles into the soil only half-way to something that seems
pretty solid, and end up breaking them to pieces without ever reaching the
bedrock. Many people make that mistake. They assume that what Jesus means here about
recognizing good trees by their fruit is that you have to look at the outward
behavior of the teacher of God’s Word, or perhaps the relative success of his
ministry. If the teacher or prophet
appears to be a decent sort, who’s well known for all kinds of good and godly
deeds, or if he’s packing the pews every Sunday, the church is growing, and
they’re raising lots of money for mission projects, well, then you can be sure
that he can’t be a false prophet because you can see the all good fruit he’s
producing. Likewise, if the teacher is
known to have faults, if you are aware of certain sins in his life, or if his
ministry always seems to be beset by problems, then you can be sure he’s a
false prophet. This is how
many (perhaps most) people understand these words of Jesus. But hopefully such reasoning makes you
squirm a bit. Surely you can see the
problem: if we know anything about the
history of the true prophets of God, we know that they all had manifest faults,
and we know that the vast majority of them had ministries that we would have
called failures by the standards I just mentioned. Taking it a step further, if this is what Jesus meant, then the
best way to be sure that you were getting God’s message straight would be to
look for a teacher who clearly lives a righteous life. And at the time of Jesus, that would have
included the Scribes and Pharisees.
They were honored and respected by all the people for their dedication
in trying to observe the Law of God in every detail. They were the best of the best – and yet, Jesus always reserves
his sharpest and most critical comments for them. They are some of the wolves he’s been talking about – so clearly
by “good fruit” Jesus cannot mean simply doing good things and being popular
and successful. So what does
he mean? Well, it’s important to know
that today’s Gospel reading is the closing of Jesus’ well-known Sermon on the
Mount. It is the longest discourse of
Jesus that we have on record, and many people would say it’s the most
sublime. But unfortunately, most people
look at it and think, “Here’s Jesus giving us the rules for Christian
living.” Now, there’s a sense in which
that’s true; but if that’s as far as you go, then your piles are only halfway
to the bedrock. Very early in the
Sermon, Jesus tells his hearers that unless their righteousness exceeds that of
the Scribes and Pharisees, they will not get into the kingdom of God. And then he starts to unpack that law by
law. “Take murder”, he says, “you’ve
been told that’s wrong, and you think if you haven’t actually strangled someone
to death you’re not guilty. But I’m
telling you that just being angry with someone is murder. It places you in peril of eternal hellfire. Or adultery, you know that’s not right; but
I’m telling you that just thinking about it makes you guilty”. And so it goes, law by law, Jesus taking the
recognized standards and raising them to unreachable heights. If you actually took the teachings of Jesus
in the Sermon on the Mount and tried to apply them to your life – which is what
building on the rock is all about – far from impressing yourself with all the
good things you’ve been doing, you’d only see how wretched and evil you really
are. It would be painfully obvious that
your house will collapse when the storm of judgment comes. And that’s
the point: you have to drive deeper
into his message to rest on bedrock.
The point of the sermon is to show you that you cannot stand in the
judgment if your life is built on the sand and mud of your own attempts to be
righteous by the law. It should cause
you to despair, and prove to you that you need something a lot firmer and more
reliable than that – and that’s the righteousness of God that comes by faith in
Jesus Christ to all who believe.
There’s the bedrock of faith:
not what you do, but what Jesus Christ has done for you. “For all have sinned and fall short of the
glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that
came by Christ Jesus. God presented him
as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood …”. The righteous life of the Lord Jesus, his
death for our sin, and his resurrection together are the Rock on which we can
stand through any storm or flood. So, going
back to recognizing the false prophets by their fruit, we see that it’s not
their actions or the relative success that we should focus upon, but rather
it’s the content of their message.
The fruit of a teacher is what he teaches. And just like in the Garden of Eden, there are two trees from
which a teacher can select fruit to give to you. First there’s the Law tree.
If the teacher gives you only this fruit he spends all his time telling
you how to live a good, clean, godly life.
It’s attractive fruit – it looks tasty and, so we believe, eating it
makes us wise unto salvation. We all
want to hear about what wonderful things we can do to please God; and we like
to deceive ourselves into thinking that we’re doing it. “If I do this and this, I’ll be more holy –
I’ll be more like God.” But to eat of
that fruit is death. The fruit of the
Law tree can only kill you, and if that’s all your teacher gives you, you can
be sure he is a false prophet. The Law
tree’s only purpose is to give you the knowledge of good and evil;
specifically, it’s to show you that you are not good but evil and under
the curse of eternal death. But if your
teacher is a true prophet, he will also feed you the fruit of the Tree of
Life. Now, the fruit of this tree
appears rather foolish, and it’s certainly not very attractive – in fact, it’s
rather horrifying, because that Tree is a cross, and its fruit is the bloody,
crucified body of the Lord Jesus. But
it’s when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, the Lord’s own righteousness
that comes through faith in his blood, that we are filled. The fruit of this tree, the body and blood
of Jesus, is what cures hungry, dying souls, and strengthens and preserves them
to everlasting life. Thus, by their fruits – the fruit
they serve you – you shall know whether your teachers are true or false. And if true, that is, if your teacher is
directing your trust always only to Jesus Christ and him crucified, and if you
build your life upon that, you can be sure that you are building your life upon
the Foundation that will firmly support you in time and eternity. There will be no sad surprises for you on
the Day of Judgment, because, as Scripture says, “He who trusts in this Rock will never be put to shame.” May the Lord who has given us this power of
discernment, continue to feed us with this precious fruit and so keep us firmly
founded upon the Rock of our Salvation.
In his holy Name. Amen.
|
