Text: Isaiah 45:1-7 (Matthew 22:15-21)                                                        W 22^nd Sunday after Pentecost

Give to God What Is God’s

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, dear friends:  The Gospel lesson we just heard is usually used by pastors to teach on the subject of God’s gift of civil government.  It’s a good text to explain that all authority comes from God and how he delegates it to certain individuals to exercise on his behalf.  So today throughout Christendom pastors are standing in pulpits and explaining how the Lord works through his appointed human authorities to maintain order and peace in society for the good of all.  And as a consequence of that, they are admonishing their congregations to fulfill their obligations toward God’s appointed authorities by rendering proper obedience and respect, and most of all, by faithfully paying their taxes. Like Jesus says:  “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”

Of course, he goes on to say, “Give to God what is God’s”; and I don’t know, maybe it’s just out of a desire to be different, but that’s what I’d like for us to home in on this morning:  giving to God what is his.  And as we do, I’m reminded that in Jesus’ day, the Jewish people owed two different kinds of taxes.  One they paid (reluctantly) to the Roman government – that’s the one mentioned in the text.  But every Jew was also required to pay an annual Temple tax.  The revenues of this tax went to pay for the ongoing ministry and maintenance of the House of God in Jerusalem.  And the interesting thing about this tax was the way it was paid.  Every place in the Roman Empire, people were required to use standard Roman coins to conduct their business and pay their debts; but there was one place that Roman currency was considered unacceptable, and that was within the Temple in Jerusalem.  Roman coins typically carried images and inscriptions that referred to the gods and goddesses of Rome.  They were therefore judged to be forms of idolatry, so you weren’t allowed even to bring them into the Temple courts – it would be an offense to God. Instead, before you came to the Temple, you had to exchange your Roman money for Temple coins:  a sort of specially minted holy money, which was used exclusively within the Temple to pay the Temple tax.  Remember the story in which Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the Temple?  He was mad at them for two reasons:  one, because they disgracefully overcharged people for Temple coins; but two, because they were conducting their business in the outermost courts of the Temple itself, and as a result, the forbidden, idolatrous, Roman coins were indeed being used within God’s House.  Jesus drove the moneychangers out for their thievery, but also as if to say, “The medium of exchange that runs the world is no good in here.  In the kingdom of God we deal with a different kind of currency.  You pay what you owe to God in holy coin, for to him nothing else is acceptable.”

With this in mind, I’d like to ask the question, what is it that God wants from us today? What is the holy coin with which we are to give God what we owe him?  Obviously we don’t have any special sacred coins like the Jews did.  Besides, they were only a picture of the idea that the Lord requires of us something different than the medium of exchange that runs the world.  So again I ask:  What does God want from you?

Usually when I ask Christian people what it is God wants, they tell me that above all God wants our religious devotion in the form of praise and worship.  That is to say, he wants us to devote some time each day (and of course a significantly longer time on Sunday) rendering him the honor, respect, and praise he deserves just for being who he is.  He’s the Creator.  We are the created.  We owe everything to him, and so it’s not too much for him to expect a little worship and praise in return for all he does.  And for people who hold such a view, the time spent in worship and praise, especially what we do here on a Sunday, is a kind of tax: an obligation we have to come to the church and give God his due.  This is pretty much the philosophy behind the whole worship and praise movement within Christianity – and according to this philosophy, the more heartfelt and animated the praise we offer the Lord, the better it is.  By contrast, those who offer dull, lifeless, liturgical worship are sort of cheating on their taxes.  Of course, it doesn’t end there; praise without anything else is just lip service.  Besides worship God wants our obedience, our willing service, our time, treasure, and talent, and whatever else we might see fit to offer.  That’s what God wants from us.

But I have to ask, is that really what God wants?  At least in a primary sense?  It’s funny, I can’t think of a place in the Scripture where God says to anyone, “Hey you: drop what you’re doing and come over here and praise me.  I want you to worship me.  That’s your duty.  Bow down. Sing me a song; yes, even you who don’t have such nice voices.  That’s what I want you to do.”  Never happens.  Rather, whenever we see a call to worship, the Lord is always referred to in the third person.  That is to say, somebody else says, “Let’s worship the Lord, let’s praise him.”  Sometimes it’s the speaker telling himself, “Praise the Lord, O my soul.” But never do we hear the Lord demanding it of his people.  Come to think of it, the only character in the Bible who ever demands praise for himself is Satan when he says to Jesus, “Fall down and worship me.”  Now, please don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not saying it’s wrong to worship the Lord – it’s a very good thing.  What I’m saying is if that’s primarily what the Lord wanted from us, you’d think he’d say so directly; but he doesn’t.

So what does God wants of us?  The answer is given (indirectly at least) in today’s Old Testament lesson.  What we’ve got here is a fascinating text from Isaiah in which the prophet foretells the coming of King Cyrus of Persia.  Isaiah prophesies that the Lord will raise up this Cyrus, who will come from the land that is Iran today, to be the leader of the great Persian Empire, and he tells how the Lord will use Cyrus to deliver his people from their captivity to the Empire of Babylon.

And what makes this prophecy so interesting is that as Isaiah writes it, there is no Persian Empire – there isn’t even a Babylonian Empire yet. Isaiah writes this when it’s still the full heyday of the Assyrian empire, and at a point in its history when there are no contenders on the horizon.  This prophecy comes no less than 150 years before its fulfillment, and the world changes a lot in the time in between.  To put this in perspective, it would be like someone coming to Abe Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War and talking to him about the current conflict we are fighting in Iraq, with no mention of the world wars, the great depression, the cold war, and all the other earth-shaking events in between.

That’s what we’ve got here in this prophecy.   There’s no mention of all the world changing events that led up to the coming of Cyrus and the Persians.  The only exception is that elsewhere Isaiah foretells how the nation of Judah will be destroyed and led away captive into the empire of Babylon – which, as I said, didn’t yet exist.  The Babylonian captivity, the prophet warned, would be the ultimate wake up call that the Lord would bring against the people of Judah on account of their continued unfaithfulness.  But apart from that, all the history and all the things that would come in between are just skipped over; and yet, there is such precision in the prophecy that Isaiah can even give the name of the coming king more than a century before he’s even born in an empire that does not yet exist.  It’s really quite amazing.  But we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking of this as just sort of a “pin point prophecy” in which the Lord intervenes at one time and one place to fulfill his promise. The point is that it’s not just the end result, Cyrus coming to set the captives free, but all the steps in between that lead up to it that the Lord is governing and controlling.  He is driving all of human history, not just poking his finger in now and then.  He raises up and strikes down kings, he topples nations and empires, and sets new ones up again – the whole world is in his hands, just like in the song.  But he’s not just holding the world and watching to see what happens; no, he’s making what happens happen.

Another notable thing about this prophecy is the way that Cyrus is described in such christological terms.  He is called the “Lord’s anointed” – which in Hebrew is the “Lord’s Messiah”; or in Greek, the “Lord’s Christ”.  And so he is, for he comes as the conquering hero to save Israel with the power and help of the Lord.  And the Lord describes how he will level mountains before him – which makes us think of the mission of John the Baptist to prepare the way for Jesus.  Elsewhere the Lord calls Cyrus the “shepherd of his people Israel”.  Again, it’s a very christological title; but it all fits because Cyrus fills a very christological role:  he’s the one who sets God’s people free from their captivity that fell upon them on account of their sin, and he opens the way for them to return to the Promised Land – the estate they had lost due to their sin.  And what’s particularly intriguing about Cyrus being a Christ figure is that he’s an idol-worshipping pagan.  We don’t have too much trouble seeing how Christ is pictured in the lives of certain faithful people in the Old Testament like Joseph, Moses, and David; but here we have a “Christ” who does not even know the Lord.  The point is that he doesn’t need to in order to do what the Lord raises him up to do.  Emperors and rulers like Cyrus may think they’re doing whatever they please, but in fact they are doing exactly what the Lord wants them to do because he is always the One in control. 

There’s more that could be said here, but I want to go to final part of Isaiah’s prophecy where speaking for the Lord he says, “I am the Lord, there is no other.  I form the light and create darkness; I bring prosperity and I create disaster”.  You may remember how the King James Version translates that last part.  It says, “I make peace and I create evil.”  Believe it or not, that’s actually a better translation of the Hebrew text.  And too often theologians try to explain that away claiming that God cannot possibly be the creator of evil.  The trouble is, that’s not what the Lord says here.  So rather than simply deny it, we should try to understand what he means by it.

It comes into focus for us when we understand that the word for peace or prosperity here, Shalom in Hebrew, means completeness or wholeness.  The idea of Shalom is that everything is as it should be.  The opposite of Shalom is the Hebrew word Ra which we translate evil or disaster, but it what it really means is that something is missing.  Evil is not a substance.  It’s not something that can be picked up and carried.  Rather it is the lack of something necessary to have a state of peace and wholeness.  So, the lack of good health or of good weather is evil in this sense.  Likewise a famine, the lack of food, is evil.  So the idea is not that the Lord is the creator of moral evil, of sin; but it’s rather that when he withdraws his hand of blessing, the result is that something’s missing and so he creates an evil. Again, the point is that the Lord is in control of all things, not just the affairs of people and nations; but all things that happen in this world.

In the wake of natural disasters like the tsunami last year in the Indian Ocean, or the hurricanes that ravaged the Gulf Coast, journalists always flock to the well-known theologians of our day looking for answers.  I think in many cases they are trying to embarrass them by suggesting their beliefs are wrong because no decent, loving sort of God would permit such things to happen.  So amidst the rubble and carnage they ask with much skepticism, “Where is God in all this?”  With very few exceptions the theologians always try to make excuses to get the Lord off the hook.  They’ll say things like, “Well, the Lord had nothing to do with this” or “God didn’t want this to happen; he’s as sad about it as we are.”  Those who give such answers obviously haven’t read what the Lord said through Isaiah lately.  Listen: if God doesn’t have anything to do with what goes on here on earth, then he’s not really God.  Another way they’ll try to get the Lord off the hook is by saying, “Well, sometimes God allows such things to happen”, as if now and then things are just beyond his control – he doesn’t want things to go awry, but he’s juggling so many balls that once in a while one of them drops (it’s not easy being God, you know).  But again, that’s not what our text says.  Either the Lord is in control, or he isn’t – and he clearly says that he is.  If not, you end up with a weak and bumbling “god” who keeps slapping his head saying, “Whoa, I didn’t see that coming!” or one who looks down from above and says, “My, how awful!  Oh how I wish there was something I could do about it.”  Those theologians can keep this pathetic god of theirs.  We want the One of the Bible who really is in charge of all things and who controls both good and evil in this sense.

We want him because, as he says, he’s the only Lord there is; but also because he explains to us exactly what his motive is for controlling all things the way he does.  He says he is exercising control over kings, empires, peace, prosperity, evil, and disaster – everything that takes place on this globe – “for the sake of his servant Jacob”—by which we understand Old Testament Israel, and more importantly for us, its greater manifestation today, which is the Church of Jesus Christ.  That is to say that the Lord controls all things for the good of his faithful people whom he promises that he is using all means necessary to deliver them from the captivity of their sin and bring them to his Promised Land.  That is what all of human history is about.  That’s the goal toward which the Lord is driving all things.  And if you’re still having trouble with this idea that the Lord uses even evil as a tool to accomplish his will, consider that it was through the most horrendous evil of all, the death of his Son at the hands of sinful men, that he brought about the greatest good for his people: the forgiveness of their sins and their deliverance from death and hell.

Which brings me back to where we started, with the question:  what does God want from you?  Though it is not specifically stated in this portion of Scripture, what is stated here practically screams the answer that is stated elsewhere: the Lord wants our trust.  He wants us to see his hand in all things and know with certainty that whatever happens:  the good, times of good government and peace and prosperity and health, and the evil, times of war, want, sickness, unrest, storms, floods, and famines … all are directed by the Lord God for the good and ultimate salvation of his people.

God gave to us what is his:  his Son, Jesus Christ.  In response, he wants us to give what we owe him:  hearts that trust that he who gave what he valued most and who uses the most extraordinary means to accomplish his will, will certainly not stop giving us whatever we need to be faithful to the end.  There is no greater offering you can bring him than to say, “Yes, Lord, I believe your promises and I am here to receive what I know you will give me through Jesus Christ:  forgiveness, life, and salvation.”  And the amazing part is the Lord himself gives you such trust in him when you come to receive his Son whom he continues to give you in his Word and Sacraments.

Let us therefore give to God what alone belongs to him:  our trust.  And let us give it to him at all times; but most especially when we face tragedy and disaster, loss and sorrow, for it is at such times that our trust in him is purified by the fires of adversity and becomes the holy currency he values most – the currency that bears the portrait and inscription of his Son, Jesus Christ; to whom be our thanks and praise forever.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!