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Text: Psalm 22, Luke Deliver Us from Evil.
Amen. In the name of him who on this day
suffered and died for our sins, dear friends in Christ: in our midweek Lenten devotions this year, we’ve
been going over the topic of Christian prayer in general – and doing that
specifically by meditating upon the various petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. I think it’s fair to say that in the process
we’ve covered a lot of ground. We have,
for example, highlighted the most important truths about prayer: that our heavenly Father loves to hear us
pray and he invites us to come boldly before him with our requests as his own
dear children confident that he will for Jesus’ sake give us the wholesome
desires of our hearts. At the same time,
hopefully we’ve managed to put to rest some of the prevalent myths about prayer
such as that it has some kind of power
in its own right, or that prayers are kind of like votes – that’s the idea that
says if we can get enough people to pray for something, the Lord is sure to do
what we want because after all, “the people have spoken”. The fact is that we cannot stuff the ballot
box with prayers, nor is the kingdom of heaven a democracy – and for that we
can be thankful. If we were in charge,
we’d only mess it up. Regarding the Lord’s Prayer itself, we saw that there’s a
certain prioritization in the way the petitions are laid out. That is, Jesus directs us to concern
ourselves first with the things that matter most to our eternal salvation. Namely that we would receive God’s Word in
it’s truth and purity, that the kingdom of God would come to us by the
enlightenment we receive by Holy Spirit who enables us to understand and
believe the things that God speaks to us in his Word, and then that we would be
enabled to put to death our own sinful, selfish wills and by faith in Christ
live according to the will of our heavenly Father – and so doing, follow the
example of our Lord who prayed on the night of his arrest, “Not my will, but
yours be done.” These are the things we
ask for in the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. Then having put the first things first, Jesus teaches us to
pray for the more immediate concerns of our day to day lives, such as the
things we need to sustain our bodies, “our daily bread” – that is the food,
clothing, shelter, possessions, and what not that we need to keep on living. Then he would have us ask for the gift of forgiveness;
both for ourselves and the sins that we are constantly committing, and also for
the grace to be able to forgive those who sin against us. And then finally last week we came to the
sixth petition: “Lead us not into temptation”.
And what we’re asking for there is not that we be free of temptation
altogether; but rather that we be given the strength and will to resist
temptations when they come, the wisdom to find the escape that our Lord opens
for us when we are tempted, and also grace to be kept free of the sin of
tempting God by taking advantage of his mercy and using it as a license to keep
on living in sin all the while thinking, “It’s no problem. God will forgive me. He always does.” That’s a terrible abuse of God’s grace to us
in Christ – one that we surely want to avoid.
But in any case, all of this is what’s included in the second three
petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. And so, like I said, we’ve covered a lot of ground together
– and hopefully while doing so we’ve come to a greater appreciation of just how
much there is in this comparatively short prayer that Jesus taught us—that, and
also how keenly attuned our Lord is to our most pressing needs. Clearly he understands us and our fallen condition
a whole lot better than we do ourselves.
And by giving us this prayer he teaches us to ask his Father for the
things that he knows we need the most. Now having said all that, it seemed fitting to me that we
conclude this series of devotions this evening with the last and summary petition
of the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil”, for it is on this holy day that
we commemorate the great length to which our Savior went to answer that very
request; for surely it’s in his passion and death on the cross that we see
Jesus doing the mightiest of all his works to complete the mission that brought
him to this earth in human flesh: to
deliver us from evil. But what does that mean exactly? A question most pastors get now and then is
this: “If God made everything good, then where did evil come from? Who created that?” The implication is that if God created
everything, and evil exists, then God must be responsible for it somehow. However, the very question betrays a
misunderstanding of what evil is. Evil
is not a substance. It has no tangible existence
in itself and therefore doesn’t require creation to begin with. You see the Hebrew word we normally translate
“evil” really means “something that’s supposed to be there is missing”. So evil is not so much a something as it
is a lack of something. It’s a
shortage, or an incompleteness, or a deficiency. The same word that we translate evil is, for
example, in the proper context, also translated “famine”. It’s “an evil” because there is a lack of
food. Likewise a natural disaster of
some kind or an invasion by an enemy army would be called “an evil” because if
a tornado comes and blows your house down, or if the enemy burns your crops and
village and steals your children to be their slaves that would cause there to
be a pretty big hole in your life. That
hole – the part that’s missing – is the evil. In the same way when we speak of moral “evil” we’re really
not talking about some black, satanic substance stuck to people’s hearts that
makes them do bad things – even though metaphorically we may speak of it that
way. No, what we’re talking about is the
lack of something that’s supposed to be there.
Remember humans were originally created in the image of God. They were made to be like God – and God is
loving, God is compassionate, God is merciful; he is constantly giving and
serving his creation, and he does these things sacrificially and willingly. When people choose not to act like God, that
is when they are hateful, and self absorbed, and rude, and unthinking, and
unforgiving, and greedy, in these ways they are evil – the goodness and kindness that’s supposed to be there is
not. With this in mind we can see that the ultimate evil is hell because it is the absence of
everything good that comes from God. In
hell the flames are never quenched and the flesh-burrowing worms never
die. In hell there is no light, no love,
no compassion, no mercy, no caring, no comfort, no rest, no relief … no end to eternal
suffering, and no hope for the demons and damned souls assigned a place there. It is the ultimate evil not because of what’s
there but because of what is not. And to
that evil place will be condemned those people who in life on this earth were
evil – who were incomplete … who were in a moral sense less than what God
created people to be. And so when we pray, “Deliver us
from evil”, we are praying to be kept from every great need, affliction,
calamity, and crisis that has the capacity to rob us of our faith and trust in Jesus. We are praying that we not become so overwhelmed
by grief and despair by the things we suffer in this life that we lose our
confidence in God’s love for us in Jesus and the great salvation he achieved
for us – the work he did to make us whole and acceptable before God. Most crucially, we are praying to be
delivered by God’s grace from the ultimate evil. We are praying that our own evil, our
tendency to stray and to abuse God’s grace, and our unfaithfulness to the Word
and promises of God not prevail over the loving kindness of God and the work of
his Spirit to keep us in the saving faith until we die. We are praying for nothing less than to be
delivered from hell. And that is why it’s so appropriate
that we discuss this particular petition this evening, because all the evil
that is hell is precisely what the Lord Jesus suffered for us on the cross when
he gave himself as the atoning sacrifice for our sin. To deliver us from evil he himself had to
endure all evil. A short while ago we
recited the verses of the twenty-second Psalm.
And what we hear in those verses is the prayer of Jesus on the
cross. It is the prayer of a righteous
man suffering evil unjustly. In it we
hear the confusion and bewilderment of someone who has lived in perfect
communion with God all of his life, who knows what it is to be always confident
that he is surrounded by the love of the heavenly Father, and who knows that
God is pleased with him – who now suddenly finds himself rejected and cut off
from the perfect unity he’d always known.
The opening sentence, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” is a cry of
absolute desolation; it’s the lament of a soul bereft of comfort, calling out
in the darkness to the now silent God whose goodness and grace have been
unaccountably revoked leaving behind an emptiness – an evil, I should say – so vast, so limitless as to defy
description. You know, in discussions of Christ’s passion on Good Friday
there’s often a focus on the physical torments he endured. And let me say that they were indeed horrific;
the unrelenting brutality of the beating, scourging, nailing, and hanging from
the cross—we’ve been over it before: Roman crucifixion was designed to be the
worst possible way to die; but what we often fail to consider is the spiritual
evil Christ experienced within himself.
I’m talking of the yearning and thirst for some positive sign of God’s
gracious presence, some feeling of a divine hand on his shoulder saying, “I’m
with you in this, my Son, and I will see you through it.” But no – even that was denied him. This is what Scripture means when it says,
“God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” It means that he was utterly forsaken – that
he became an object of loathing and wrath and hatred—not just to the people who
put him to death; but to God. I am
absolutely certain that of all the deprivations our Lord suffered on our
behalf, for him that was the worst. But
that’s the evil he had to face to save us because that’s the evil we
deserve. And by taking the entirety of this
evil upon himself he did what he set out to do:
he delivered us from all evil. And I want you to see that he did through faith. We have spent the past seven weeks talking about
prayer. And prayer is really nothing
more than the response of faith to the Word and promises of God. He opens his arms and says, “Ask me for what
is good for you, because I’m your loving Father and for Christ’s sake I want to
give you my gifts.” But we often don’t ask. Or if we ask, we hedge our bets. We really don’t expect to receive. We think that God is not listening to us or
that he is angry with us – no sense in asking because he’s only going to say no. But isn’t it interesting that when Christ our Lord was on
the cross completely cut off from his heavenly Father, he still prayed to him –
he still prayed in faith expecting to receive.
I know I’ve made this point before but it bears saying again: our Lord Jesus, though he is God, truly lived
and suffered as a man. He had to live
and die as one of us to be sacrifice for our sins – he had to be the perfect substitute, both sinless and yet
like us in our limitations. What that
means is that in his earthly life, he did not use his divine power and
foreknowledge to see past the grave to the resurrection. No, all he had is what you have now: the Word of God recorded in Holy
Scripture. The difference is that he
believed it. He trusted in God’s
goodness and loving kindness. He trusted
in the promise of the resurrection. Even
when he was literally experiencing all hell, without the slightest inkling of
favor or goodness from above, he trusted in God’s Word. And he prayed. How much more should we pray knowing
that through Christ we have been delivered from all evil? —that because of what he did we will never be
forsaken? How much more should we pray
in confidence the prayer the Lord himself taught us to pray knowing that they
are God’s own priorities for us? It’s
what he wants us to ask for. How much
more should we give a hearty “amen” – yes, yes it shall be so – to the prayers
we offer to our heavenly Father in Jesus’ name?
On this day we commemorate exactly what our Lord Jesus did to open the
way for our prayers to be heard and to answer our prayer to deliver us from evil,
how much more should we pray to be remade in his image and restored to what we
were created to be? Having given his Son for us, can we have any doubt that our
gracious Father will withhold anything good that we ask of him? No. Therefore let us
pray earnestly, faithfully, and daily, in Jesus’ name. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |