Sermon Pastor Ray Lorthioir Trinity Lutheran Church W. Hempstead, NY. Faux Righteousness

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1 Sermon Pastor Ray Lorthioir Trinity Lutheran Church W. Hempstead, NY Faux Righteousness Virtual reality it s a thing created by computers. These days you can put on a set of special goggles and have a computer create a whole world before your eyes. As you move your head up, down and sideways, move around and even turn around your view of this computer created world changes as if it were real. For all your eyes know, you re living in a real world. Only your consciousness knows that it s not real. This is virtual reality as we have currently developed it. Then there are holograms. My dictionary depines a hologram as a threedimensional image formed by the interference of light beams from a laser or other light source. In the original 1977 Star Wars movie some of the characters are playing a form of chess with 3D hologram projected Pigures instead of playing pieces. The world of theoretical physics is currently speculating that the universe we experience is probably a virtual reality projected like a hologram from some outside source of information processing. As with all theoretical constructs this is the latest and greatest and it will no doubt change. But the very idea that this may be reality tears asunder the ideas about the world that we have grown up with. Indeed, the generations who come after us will likely see things with a very different mindset. Philosophical Naturalism or Materialism, the worldview we ve grown up with, says that the universe is comprised of unconscious matter that just is. It was here before us. It will be here after us. It doesn t need us to exist. By sheer accident long ago some matter stuck together for unknown reasons and here we are, residents of this universe. This is the worldview we were taught. It is most depinitely an anti- Christian worldview and consequently the life of the church has suffered greatly in the last hundred years. So, thank God that science is now beginning to turn away from the Philosophical Naturalist conception of the universe. On Youtube there is A World Science Festival panel discussion of digital physics 1. One of the distinguished participants, Edward Fredkin, raised this issue: if the universe is a digital simulation, who is the programmer and where is the computer? In response the moderator, obviously a good philosophical naturalist, immediately put his hand to his head and exclaimed disparagingly, That s the Catholic Church, for God s sake. (For Who s sake, Mr. Materialist? See. Even when the Creator is not supposed to exist, He s there.) Anyway, There is considerable scientipic evidence that our reality is digital that it consists of minute pixels of information that cannot be broken down into anything smaller, just like the pixels on your TV screen. Only the digital simulation is in 3D. And if this is so, Mr. Fredkin s question is spot on. Who is the programmer and where is the computer? And there are many more questions besides. 1 Start at (39:00) 1

2 From of old, Genesis says Gen 1:1-3, 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And it says in the Gospel of John, John 1:1-4, 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. Paul preached to the Athenians in Acts 17:26-28, 26 From one man [Adam] he [God] made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and Pind him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28 For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, We are his offspring. Verse 28 contains two quotes, the Pirst from the Greek poet Epimenides, the second from Cleanthes. Then there is this strange saying of Yahweh in Psalm 82:6-7, 6 I said, You are gods ; you are all sons of the Most High. 7 But you will die like mere men; you will fall like every other ruler. All these verses say that there is a continuous and mysterious interaction between Yahweh and His universe; Yahweh and His creatures. He is not far from each one of us. The universe does not exist on it s own. It exists for us. Even science as esoteric as Quantum Physics is proving this. And the digital universe theory is beginning to corroborate these great truths of Scripture. Now, as we saw in Psalm 82 we, as Yahweh s children, were meant to participate in Yahweh s divine qualities of incorruptible righteous and immortality. Instead, we are corrupted and we die and great curses are upon this creation on account of rebellion and sin. The restoration of Yahweh s children to righteousness and immortality is the great saga of salvation. And that s what we focus on in Lent. At Christmas we rejoiced that to accomplish our salvation, Yahweh the Father sent Yahweh the Son to be incarnated in uncorrupted Plesh from His mother, Mary. This was the Pirst step Yahweh took to become God for us. Here at the beginning of Lent we see the second step taken for us, Yahweh the uncorrupted Son was subjected to the test of real temptation for us. Lent begins with the Pirst temptation of Jesus in the desert and ends with His Pinal temptation on the cross. Temptation is most important because it was the means by which Adam and Eve were corrupted and eventually died and the universe was corrupted with them. However, on the day Adam and Eve fell into sin, Yahweh cursed the tempting serpent in their hearing. It says in Gen 3: So the LORD God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. Yahweh s promise in verse 15 is all important. A male offspring of Eve would one day endure a vicious strike on the heel from the serpent but would crush the serpent s head for all time. Jesus is the male offspring incarnate and born from His mother, Mary. He is the one who endured the Piery strike of crucipixion. But by being 2

3 obedient unto death Jesus crushed the head of the serpent. His resurrection from the dead conpirmed the whole thing. Temptation always involves God s righteous plan for human thought, words and deeds. It always involves His Word. It did in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were created righteous beings as Yahweh our Creator is righteous. They were free to eat from the tree of life and become immortal. But they were also created free to have things some other way if they wanted. Yahweh indicated this to them by creating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden. For them to remain righteous, Adam would have to embrace Yahweh s righteousness freely, fully every moment of his existence. By so doing, He would protect Eve and all their descendants. All he and Eve had to do was leave that one tree alone. And that was easily done until a tempter came. God knows about evil. By depinition evil is anything He doesn t want in His Creation. And He knows all of what can be done against His will. But by depinition God cannot be evil. For, how can He want something He doesn t want in His own Creation? On the other hand, Adam and Eve could want something their Creator didn t want and Satan knew this. However, Satan had a problem to solve. How can uncorrupted righteous beings be tempted so that they succumb to rebellion against Yahweh and become unrighteous? Temptation to revel in the gutter of lust doesn t work with righteous beings, only with those already corrupted. Therefore, Satan cleverly solved it this way by tempting Adam through Eve to what appeared to be a higher righteousness. He promised Eve that if she ate of the fruit she would thereby become more like God through the knowledge of good and evil. Satan cleverly disguised unrighteousness as a false righteousness. Satan is still doing the same thing to this day. The Nazis and Communists of the 20 th century proclaimed a false righteousness in the form of materialist utopia. The Islamists are doing the same thing right now with the same bloody results. Romans 8:3 tells us that Law is utterly powerless to build utopia on earth because the sinful nature is more powerful than any law. And false righteousness is also utterly powerless to build a utopia. Only a community of people born again under the gospel stand any chance of building a utopia, and even that chance isn t very good because the sinful nature still clings to believers. For instance, the Puritans settled New England to build a born again society apart from the evils of merry old England, but they ultimately failed. The best we can do here is to build a community of humble sinners saved by grace through faith and living for the future righteousness they will have when Jesus the triumphant Messiah returns. Beware of all those who preach any kind of utopia. For, they do not want peace and reconciliation on earth. The only peace they desire is the elimination of any opposition and the ultimate victory of their utopia. If blood needs to be shed, that s just the price. So unrighteousness disguised as false righteousness was the means that Satan used to reach Adam and Eve. He s not called the great deceiver for nothing. Satan used the same procedure with Jesus the righteous Son of God. Under the Law of Moses Jesus didn t have just one command stay away from a tree He had 3

4 633. Plus He had all the prophetic Word about Messiah. Now, Satan knows Scripture very well. Therefore, he tried his old trick of disguising unrighteousness as righteousness to see if Jesus could Pind His way through the maze of Scripture. We read in Luke 4:1-3, 1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. 3 The devil said to him, If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread. This statement appears righteous enough on the surface. Exert your righteous divine powers to overcome a great evil in this world: hunger. Start with yourself. But as Jesus explained in John 5: I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. 20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. So, Jesus wasn t about to do anything that wasn t in the Father s plan. He answered with a quote from Deuteronomy 8:3, man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. If Yahweh the Father didn t say to do it, Yahweh the Son was not about to do it. Score one for Jesus. The next temptation in Luke 4:5-7 is based on prophecy. Scripture prophesies in numerous places that the victorious Messiah will rule eventually rule all the nations of the world. Therefore, Satan offered Jesus a novel way to accomplish this righteous revealed will of God. Jesus could do it simply by worshiping Satan and Satan would give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. In this way Jesus could also avoid the cross prophesied in Scripture. In response to the devil s most gracious offer, Jesus quoted from Deut 6:13-14, 3 Fear the LORD your God, serve him only. 14 Do not follow other gods. Score another for Jesus. Finally, Satan brought Jesus to the lovely Messianic promise of Psalm 91:11-12, 11 For he [God] will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; 12 they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone. With this Word Satan challenged Jesus to accomplish a great good to get the people of Israel to believe in Him as Messiah. Satan proposed Jesus do this by jumping off the highest point of the temple and in the sight of the people getting the angels to visibly rescue Him. This scheme would also have the added benepit of avoiding the cross. In reply, Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy 6:16, Do not test the LORD your God. Score three for Jesus. Three times He did not succumb to the promotion of false righteousness. In this way He proved that He is the true second Adam, the one who will restore us to righteousness having smashed the serpent s head. Our gospel lesson ends with these important words. Luke 4:13, When the devil had Pinished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time. This means that in the face of the Word of God Satan had to retreat until another opportunity presented itself. And this is important for those baptized in Christ. For it means that we can successfully resist temptation and make the devil leave us for another time. As we saw in Acts 17, in a digital universe Yahweh is as close to us as the reality He creates for us. As we saw in our second lesson this morning in Romans 10:8, The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart. When God s Word is near us in our hearts and in our mouths, it not only saves us but causes Satan to withdraw. When we believe the righteousness Christ has worked for us through His 4

5 cross, we participate in the life of Christ. When we participate in the life of Christ Satan is pushed back. This happens not only when the Word is near us but also the blessed sacraments of baptism and holy communion that the Word proclaims. We read in Titus 3:4-7 4 when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that, having been justipied by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life. This washing of rebirth is baptism. Included in baptism is renewal by the Holy Spirit. This renewal is a renewal of Christ s righteousness in the life of a believer. It s our identity in Christ. We become the righteousness of God. Therefore, whenever we apprehend by faith God s Word and what God has done for us in the Sacraments it changes us on the inside. Jesus is that near to us. Besetting temptation is pushed away and Satan himself withdraws looking for a better moment. The Word and the Sacraments are God s powerful gifts to us to live in the true righteousness who is Jesus our Lord and Savior. Amen. All Bible quotes are from the NIV. 5

Why Is Life So Hard?

Hebrews 11:6 6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. Why Is Life So Hard? John