Sunday Sermon

 

Rest in God

Isaiah 57:1-2

1 Those who are right with God may die, but no one pays attention. Good people are taken away but no one understands. Those who do right are being taken away from evil 2 and are given peace. Those who live as God wants find rest in death.

Has anyone else thought about how thick the Bible is? Think about all the words that God has written down and how much material we have to direct us into the kind of relationship God wants to have with us. We have a God who wants to talk to us and wants us to know how the world works. God hides nothing and speaks about the human condition with clarity and certainty. The more time I spend in God’s word the more my faith grows just because of the sheer volume of stuff God talks about. From the very beginning God discloses how broken we are but instead of letting us be destroyed by our sin God then spends millennia explaining how He can fix us if we will let Him. One of the things that used to be a problem for me was the law and all the commands’ God gives but I have come to understand that those commands are there to teach us how to be the people God made us to be and we desperately need that guidance. This is what astounds me about God, that God even cares about us after we have rejected Him and we have chosen our destruction over Him and the life He wants to give us. That God does not just command us to obey Him but He allows us to choose Him or not is so great. Instead of demanding obedience God spends the effort to persuade us that He is the answer to the questions and problems in our lives. God teaches us and speaks to us about how life should be lived. Those commands God gives are there to explain to us the reality of how the world works. There are simple things like promoting life over the death that sin brings. And then there are harder issues about owning things but also sharing the things we own. Thousands of years ago God addressed the male-female issue we face today because we needed guidance on how to live and work with other people. I always go back to the Ten Commandments because it is such a great example of God explaining how the universe works. Nothing has changed since those words were written thousands of years ago. When we live by those ideas that God expresses in such simple language the world is better and when we ignore those concepts the world is worse off. The Bible is thick because we are not very smart and God has had to spend a lot of time and effort explaining things over and over to us. There is real blessing in the fact that God wants to speak to us and tell us things we need to know. To know the hope that flows from learning from God about how to live our lives is such a wonder and fills our lives with a joy that is hard to grasp at times. Listening to God and learning from Him is not easy but it is worth the effort because our God is a redeeming God who longs for us to find peace instead of struggle and power to live lives that bring goodness and righteousness into a broken world.

On our property we have a shed filled with equipment and products designed to foster the well being of animals. All of that stuff is not there because we like having it but those things are there because we need to use them in the process of taking care of animals. In short all of that stuff is there because it is part of a life style we have chosen. God’s words to us are the same kind of thing. The Bible does not exist because God just wanted to tell us things about the world and how it works. Scripture is there because it is designed to foster a life style that we have to choose. Being people of faith is not about some rules we have to obey if we want to get to heaven but it is about living a life directed by God because the ideas and concepts God teaches us cause us to want to choose that life. In the book of James we find a discussion about what our faith means and James writes that if our faith does not shape how we live then what is the point of that faith. The idea here is that we have to do more then just say we believe in God because even the enemy believes in God. Faith in God is a willingness to take what God tells us and to have it direct our lives in a real and meaningful way. God has gone to great lengths to restore the broken relationship we have with Him so that we can come to Him and know he wants to bring healing to us and not condemnation. We don’t just read God’s words but we read them so they can frame how we live. This is one of the great things about God and why I praise and worship the living God Jesus. Knowing what God says allows us to choose to live as He calls us and in doing so we find hope, peace and joy.

It is not clear to me if it is because I am getting older or if it was always there and I just missed it because God wanted me to focus on other things but I find that I see God speaking about our pain more. To see it best all you have to do is go to the Gospels and see Jesus at work. Just thinking about how much time Jesus spent dealing with the painfulness of life impresses me and tells me so much about the God I worship and serve. The verse we are looking at now speaks to the pain of loss and the end of life and what God has to say is interesting. People who have chosen to live by the precepts and laws about life that God gives find blessing even in death. Again the idea is not that a person’s obedience gives them peace but the faith in God that caused them to live by God’s commands brings peace. We see both the human side of our faith and God’s side. In this verse we see the human side of not noticing people being gone and not understanding why people are gone when we do notice. I love that God speaks right to the great fear most people feel when we think of death. Losing people is a terrible thing and to think about our own death is even worse. The whole idea of people not noticing is such an interesting thing because if we are not noticed in life we hope that someone would notice that we are gone. That sentence “Good people are taken away but no one understands.” was written thousands of year ago but we still ask that same question today. God does not hide that there are things we don’t understand that bring pain to us and this is where we have to learn to trust God in this. We have a God who addresses the issue of death and loss and the pain that flows from that which gives us hope but not in the way we always want. Dealing with the grief and sadness that rises from death is not something God hides but instead He puts the subject out there to invite us to come to Him and seek hope and peace in Him. Humans struggle with the problem of death and so God tells us things and show that even in death God knows what is going on. Our fear and pain are answered by God because it is God who knows how we are built and wants to let us know we can trust in Him. Let us look to God not because it will make our pain go away but because it will deepen or faith in God.

Now we get to the God side of things and we learn God’s thinking. Our pain and our suffering is seen in a very different light by God and I have to say that I like God’s take on this more then my human thinking. From God’s perspective there is a real and concrete blessing that comes from doing good but it is not what we as humans want to hear. God blesses people who do good by removing them from this reality. Think about that, God clearly thinks there is blessing in death and His reasoning makes really good sense. Death by God’s thinking is not punishment but ransom and relief which to some degree takes my breath away. When I first read this verse it was a long time ago when I was starting out in ministry. I came across it when I was preparing a funeral. It seemed odd at that time and almost unfair. At the same time it did give hope in a way that I could see would give people grieving the loss of someone something to hang onto. Only after years of spending time with God in prayer and devotion did I gain a deeper understanding of what God was getting at here. Our hope is not in this life and as a matter of faith we have to deal with the evil and pain of life and God sees the death of those who seek Him as a change of status to a new and better place. Look at the words used here. First is that death takes us away from evil. Because we have built a relationship with God it is such a simple thing to be translated from this evil world to the glory of the throne of God. Those who trust in the things God tell us about how to live then give us hope in death. Next are the words peace and rest. We could send years on the word peace but let it just be stated God is the source of all peace so to be with God is to be at peace in a very real way. The word rest is important because God is very concerned about rest. God Himself takes a day to rest after six days of creation. When we look at the law the concept of the Sabbath is all about rest. Every seven years a whole year is to be spent in rest and every fifty brings two years of rest. The basic idea is that rest is the stopping of striving and to sit in the hope of God. Death for those who trust God is a place of rest from the battles of sin and evil and that is such encouragement.

We cannot miss the key component here in this verse. Three times we are told that it is those who are living as God calls us to that find the peace, rest and removal from evil. Our faith and trust in God calls us to learn how to be the people God wants us to be and there is real hope in that. Be careful here it is not our obedience that makes this happen. Jesus condemns people that just follow the law but miss faith in God. Our learning who God is and our seeking to be people who trust in the living God cause us to then live by what God teaches. What is really cool is that the more we learn to live as God teaches our faith will also increase. Finding rest in God is all about trusting in God and knowing even death is a blessing if we will be what God longs for us to be. Seek God with all of our might because when we do there is nothing that God can not use as a blessing to us and the world even death.