©2006 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

04-16-06

Getting The Ending Right

4/16/06 Getting The Ending Right

There is far more going on

in the Easter account given to us by our God

than we allow ourselves see.

There is far more our God is seeking to say to us

than we sometimes allow ourselves to hear.

I understand this all too well

because I am a worrier, a fretter, and churner by nature.

I have the most remarkable ability

to create within my mind

disasters that have not yet taken place

and then invest huge amounts of mental and emotional energy

into trying to cope with them.

Or taking disasters that have already taken place

and then allowing them to define my expectations for the future.

It’s one of the things I do best.

And I do it at least in part

because I have seen my share of real tragedies,

both in my own life and in the lives of those I love,

and I know they happen.

I know the rules of life,

at least the ones we humans have written for ourselves.

I know that this world in which we live

is saturated with evil,

an evil that will at some level

touch every life

and leave behind scars or open wounds.

I had a lunch with a good friend of mine some time ago

and in the course of our conversation

I shared with him some things I’d been wrestling with in my own life recently.

He obviously understood my struggles,

and then he started chuckling

and said he had a bit of a confession to make.

He said that years ago, when he first started listening to me teach

he simply couldn’t believe I lived in the same world he did

because I keep talking about this God who is so incredibly GOOD

and it seemed to him as if I must know nothing

about the “real world” in which people live.

I understood exactly why he said that.

I can recall a time in my own life

when I wondered wether the preachers I listened to

had any understanding at all

of the world I lived in,

or the struggles I faced,

or the pain I felt.

And there certainly is a kind of religion swirling around us

that tells us that bad things only happen to bad people,

and if we would just give our lives to Jesus,

and do what He says,

then He would make all the pain go away

and make us healthy, wealthy, and wise.

But that isn’t even remotely what our God says to us,

and it certainly hasn’t been my experience as His child.

And yet...and yet my belief in

and commitment to a God who is truly, absolutely GOOD

is more deeply imbedded in me now than ever before,

because, now, more than ever before

I understand what happens

when we take the evil that enters our lives

and place it into the hands of a God

who has both the power and the love to reshape it into good.

And the proclamation of a God who is truly GOOD

is not the denial of the evil that surrounds us,

it is something else altogether,

something we cannot begin to see

until we first understand why I say that

there is far more going on

in the Easter account given to us by our God

than we allow ourselves see,

and far more our God is seeking to say to us through it

than we allow ourselves to hear.

So let’s start there.

Let’s start with their world, back then,

and see if we can see the truth in their lives

before we try to see it in our own.

Let’s start with their expectations,

with their dreams,

with a group of people who just knew they had found hope for the future

as few had ever known it before.

You know some of there names - Andrew, Peter, Mary, Lazarus, John, James, Martha...

The fact that they all lived 2000 years ago

doesn’t really change anything.

Their culture was different than ours,

but they were people just like us.

They had their tiny lives,

their tiny goals,

their tiny victories and defeats in life just like we do.

No one noticed them,

just like no one really notices us.

They were not the big people in the world,

the important people,

the ones whose names everyone knew.

They lived in small towns, most of them,

just like us.

And they lived small lives, just like us,

small by the standards of society.

Unlike us, they had a rigid religious system around them,

a system that outlined for them

exactly what God expected from them,

even down to the distance they were allowed to walk on the Sabbath Day.

And those in authority over them

assured them that God would “bless” those who kept the rules,

(whatever that meant,)

and curse those who did not.

But in truth

they saw very little affect in their lives

from all of their religious activity,

apart from the social implications of their actions, of course.

But then this man, this person entered their lives,

and all of the sudden

their lives began to fill with purpose, and with hope.

He seemed to understand life as no one had ever understood it before.

He understood relationships,

and money,

and politics,

and...well, and LIFE and GOD Himself,

and when He spoke

it all seemed to make sense.

But that wasn’t all.

In fact,

that wasn’t even the biggest thing.

The truly remarkable thing

was that He didn’t just know things,

but He cared.

He cared deeply about the people who reached out to Him.

No, it was more than that.

It wasn’t just that He cared,

what He really did was love.

He loved those who came to Him.

And that love gave life purpose and hope as nothing else had ever done before.

There is nothing else in all of human experience

that has the power to bring healing and hope to the human spirit

the way being loved does.

We may not call it “love”,

especially in our society today

where more often than not “love” is used in a way that makes it synonymous with sexual attraction.

We may just call it friendship,

or caring,

or genuine concern for another person.

Or maybe we don’t even try to put a name on it,

but if we’ve ever experienced what it is

to have another person in our life

who truly, deeply cares about us

then we can understand a little

how Jesus’ entrance into those people’s lives affected them.

And we can understand, too,

at least a little of how they responded,

of what happened inside them

when Jesus was suddenly removed from their life.

From a human point of view

it was tragedy, and emptiness, and loneliness, and pain

beyond anything they had ever known before.

And it was all the worse

because it was all so wrong.

This man, this Jesus was good as no one had ever been good before.

All He did with both His words and His actions

was to give hope.

There was no evil within Him, ever.

In Matthew 12:18-21

Matthew quotes a fascinating prophetic passage from Isaiah about Jesus.

Quoting God, he says, “Behold, My Servant whom I have chosen; My Beloved in whom My soul is well-pleased; I will put My Spirit upon Him, And He shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not quarrel, nor cry out; Nor will anyone hear His voice in the streets. A battered reed He will not break off, And a smoldering wick He will not put out, Until He leads justice to victory. And in His name the Gentiles will hope."

He will not quarrel, nor cry out...a battered reed He will not break off, and a smoldering wick He will not put out...

You know what the prophet is doing there, don’t you?

He’s using poetry

to describe the depth of absolute goodness

that flowed out of everything Jesus did,

everything He said,

everything He was as a human being.

A battered reed He will not break off, a smoldering wick He will not put out...

But being good does not mean a person will not be hated.

In fact, in this present world,

with so much evil,

so much greed,

so much jealousy,

so much hatred,

so much guilt,

it often works exactly the opposite.

And with Jesus

it was very much that way.

In fact, do you want to hear something remarkable?

These are the two verses in Matthew 12 just before that passage from Isaiah.

Then Jesus said to the man, "Stretch out your hand!" And he stretched it out, and it was restored to normal, like the other. But the Pharisees went out, and counseled together against Him, as to how they might destroy Him.

The leaders of that society

responded to Jesus’ miraculous act of kindness

by plotting together for His destruction.

Welcome to real life!

And in the end,

from a strictly human point of view,

eventually the evil won.

JOH 19:1-6, 17-19, 28-30, Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged Him. And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on His head, and arrayed Him in a purple robe; and they began to come up to Him, and say, "Hail, King of the Jews!" and to give Him blows in the face. Jesus therefore came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them, "Behold, the Man!" When therefore the chief priests and the officers saw Him, they cried out, saying, "Crucify, crucify!" ... They took Jesus therefore, and He went out, bearing His own cross, to the place called the Place of a Skull, which is called in Hebrew, Golgotha. There they crucified Him, ... And Pilate wrote an inscription also, and put it on the cross. And it was written, "JESUS THE NAZARENE, THE KING OF THE JEWS."... After this, Jesus, knowing that all things had already been accomplished, in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said, "I am thirsty." A jar full of sour wine was standing there; so they put a sponge full of the sour wine upon a branch of hyssop, and brought it up to His mouth. When Jesus therefore had received the sour wine, He said, "It is finished!" And He bowed His head, and gave up His spirit.

Evil triumphed over good.

And from a strictly human point of view,

so often that’s what happens in this world.

Innocent, powerless, helpless children are abused,

sometimes even by parents or other family members.

Those few, remarkable, courageous Jr. or Sr. high school students

who try to live lives of moral integrity

are socially crucified and emotionally isolated by their classmates.

Fathers and mothers

sacrifice their own children

on the alters of their own career ambitions

or in their own desperate, frantic efforts to get what they think will make them happy in life.

Those in business who are honest with their customers

and fair to their employees

see those around them who cheat, and lie, and deceive

accumulate far greater wealth.

Leaders who hold public office

or other positions of power over others

use their power for their own corrupt gain

at the expense of those they have promised to care for.

And that’s just a very tiny bit of the evil around us.

In truth, every one of us in this room this morning

have had some places in our lives

in which the evil around us

has brought loss and suffering into our own private world.

But there is far more going on

in the Easter account given to us by our God

than we sometimes allow ourselves see.

And there is far more our God is seeking to say to us

than we sometimes allow ourselves to hear.

Because, you see, with all evil in this world,

with all evil that touches our lives,

there is within that evil a lie

placed there by Satan himself,

a lie that tells us

that this evil is the end of the story.

This evil is all there is.

Life, our life is always, only a closed system of cause and effect.

Evil is the cause

and the destruction of our lives is the effect.

And our only hope

is accepting this truth as the great reality of life

and then finding some way of coping with the consequences.

Is it any wonder

that we live in a world

filled with people all frantically trying to find something,

anything that will dull the pain?

Alcohol,

drugs,

power,

sex,

adrenaline,

buying something, anything new...

there has to be something to dull this pain

and quiet this agony within.

And if we believe that lie imbedded in the evil,

then what possible difference does it make?

In the fall of 1999

Sandee and I were in Washington,

driving our daughter, Joni, back to Canada

for the beginning of her second year of college.

Her first year was, for all three of us,

the most pain-filled year we had ever lived.

For a number of reasons beyond her control

Joni had spent that first year

in an intense emotional isolation.

She fought her way through it

and came out far stronger because of it,

but that fall of 1999

the memory of the year before

was still intensely real in her mind.

I was driving,

Joni was sitting next to me,

and as we neared the Canadian border

I glanced over at her

and saw tears streaming down her face.

I asked her what was wrong

and she responded with just four words.

“There’s so much pain.”

I knew she was remembering the year before

and said,

“Sweetie, this life we are called to live

is not a circle, it’s a line.

You are not going back to anything,

you’re going forward,

and what you’re going forward to

will look nothing like where you’ve been.”

I wanted her to know

that this life, our life is not simply cause-and-effect in a closed system.

And once we allow our God into our lives

our past never determines our future,

and the evil that has that has touched us

is never the end of the story.

And for my precious daughter

this truth became a wonderful reality within a matter of weeks.

Her second year,

and her third,

and her fourth were nothing even remotely like her first

because her life was not a circle,

it was a line moving ever forward under the careful hand of her God.

And when it comes to the things our God is saying to us

through the account of the Easter story,

the power of GOD over evil

is at the very top of the list.

Those few days following the death of Christ

were certainly the most hideous days His followers ever lived.

They were days without hope,

days when the absolute triumph of evil was the only reality,

days in which, behind every thought,

behind every action,

behind every conversation,

behind every memory

there was a backdrop of blackness,

and emptiness,

and hopelessness,

and loss,

and pain.

And right now some of you

are living in your own personal post-crucifixion agony.

Something huge has died in your life as well,

something upon which you had built your hope for the future.

But now that hope,

whatever it was,

is gone,

and you simply cannot imagine

anything that could ever happen

that would bring it back again.

Well, if that describes you right now,

if you hear nothing else I say this morning,

I pray you will at least hear this.

God’s stories never end with the crucifixion,

they never end with death,

and they never end with the triumph of evil in our lives.

You know, of course, how that Easter story ends.

MAT 28:1-10 Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave. And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. And his appearance was like lightning, and his garment as white as snow; and the guards shook for fear of him, and became like dead men. And the angel answered and said to the women, "Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying. And go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead; and behold, He is going before you into Galilee, there you will see Him; behold, I have told you." And they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy and ran to report it to His disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and greeted them. And they came up and took hold of His feet and worshiped Him. Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid...”

You know how that story ended,

about how God brought life out of death,

a life that began with Christ Himself,

but a life that then spread literally across the world

and across the ages.

But what you do not know right now

is how your story will end.

And if you are like me, a fretter, a worrier, a churner by nature,

then right now you are probably brooding

over what other disastrous story line evil will write into your life.

But even though I still fret, and worry, and brood far more than should,

I have lived long enough with my God,

and seen enough of His ways

to know the truth.

Although evil plays a part in all of our stories,

once we place our lives into God’s hands

evil is never permitted to choose the plot

or to determine how the story ends.

God alone will do that,

and bringing life out of death

is one of the things He does best.

Though I don’t think he knew it at the time,

when the Prophet Isaiah wrote these words

he was writing the perfect description

of the work of Jesus Christ in the lives of those who come to Him.

And I could find no better way

of expressing what our God is trying to say to us through the Easter account

than to close by reading these words for us.

ISA 61:1-3 The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, Because the Lord has anointed me To bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to captives, And freedom to prisoners; To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord, And the day of vengeance of our God; To comfort all who mourn, To grant those who mourn in Zion, Giving them a garland instead of ashes, The oil of gladness instead of mourning, The mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting. So they will be called oaks of righteousness, The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.