Lent Midweek I
John 6:35-40
March 12, 2025
“I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent me.”
At the center of our Lord’s coming to earth, taking on human flesh, suffering and dying on the cross is obedience.
Now, we talk a lot about obedience, especially if you’re parents. You hope to raise your children to be obedient, to be children and adults who follow the laws of the land, who obey the speed limits, who play fair on the team, who listen to their teachers and take their tests without cheating, who work hard to make a fair and honest living. Parents want their kids to be obedient.
But parents also know that they were once kids, and as Christians we are also keenly aware of our nature. Fact is that my dog, Scooby, is more obedient to me than I was to my parents. I suspect most of us could say the same when it comes to how obedient we were to our parents. And so, parents, you may look at your kids now and realize that they, like you, aren’t always as obedient, and are sometimes outright defiant.
We say that’s life; we say that’s normal, that kids rebel, it’s part of growing up, part of becoming an individual adult, that it’s nature that the offspring separate themselves from the parent by acting out and learning to go their own way.
And yet, the Lord has a commandment for our children, and for each of us adults who are also children of parents: “Honor your father and your mother.” These six words put to rest any question or doubt, they silence the sociology or psychology of the matter. There is no place for rebellion in a family. Children are not to rebel against their parents; children are not to rebel against any authority placed over them be it teachers or police or employers or coaches. It doesn’t matter if the son or daughter is trying to “find themselves,” or is “just growing up,” or is just trying to be an individual. The Lord permits no rebellion or back talk or disobedience on the part of the children of men.
This is a steep, steep hill to climb. No rebellion, no disobedience. Well, think about how things were in the Garden of Eden.
God created Adam and Eve. They were perfect in every way. Perfectly obedient to the Lord, perfectly loving of one another, perfectly willing to sacrifice for one another, there was no thought of rebellion, no thought of adultery, no thought of theft or lying or gossip, no thought of hate or violence toward each other, they loved the Lord fully with all their heart and mind and strength, and they loved each other perfectly as God intended. If the Lord would have thrown the 10 commandments in front of them, they would have followed them perfectly because they already were. Adam and Eve were created to perfectly abide by God’s Law.
But what happened? A grain of doubt was introduced into the mix. The serpent, Satan taking on creaturely flesh, asked a simple question of Eve: “Did God really say…” and all hell broke loose.
Did God really say what He said, or perhaps God lied. Is God’s Word truly trustworthy and eternal, or could there be a flaw, a misspelled word, a misspoke verb or noun or adjective? Did God create the heavens and the earth as perfectly and “very good” as He said, or was there perhaps a slip of the tongue?
You know what’s amazing? Modern science is a product of many centuries of refinement and of changing definitions. Our version of science was born from metaphysics, a branch of philosophy which examines reality and how reality works. Science, as we know it, is more limiting than metaphysics, but at the core of modern science is still the question, “what is reality and how does it work,” and it is but one of several methods of examining reality and drawing conclusions.
However, what makes modern scientific study work is skepticism. If you remove skepticism from the scientific method, you no longer have science, but you have ideology – you have a religion. For example, some scientists like to say that the earth is billions of years old. And they will sell it as absolute gospel that the earth is 4.6 billion years old, no question, and anyone who questions it is a fool. But that’s not science, that’s ideology.
Using the scientific tools we have, there is no real way to know, absolutely, the age of the earth. There’s just too many variables, there’s too many presuppositions that must be employed in the testing, and the conclusions must be interpreted by people, and people get things wrong all the time. Add to that the rebellious nature of man, and it is a perfect prescription for all sorts of mischief.
And the reason that good science, the good use of the scientific method is corrupted is because of what happened in the Garden of Eden. “Did God really say…” And this rebellious seed doesn’t just exist in the scientific community, it exists in the church. The division we have in the Christian church exists because of what happened in the Garden of Eden. “Did God really say…” that He created the universe in 6 literal days? “Did God really say…” that He created only male and female? “Did God really say…” that a piece of fruit from the tree of life was the means by which He gave eternal life to humanity? “Did God really say…” that the bread is His body and the wine is His blood? “Did God really say…” that baptism saves?
Our answers to these sorts of questions reveal our rebellious, disobedient nature. It’s not “different interpretations,” which is an excuse to be disobedient and feel good about it. It’s precisely what Eve did in that Garden! She listened to the serpent who said that God didn’t say what He said, and she rationalized it out. Rather than trusting in the Lord with all her heart and not leaning on her own understanding, her own “interpretation” of the words – and by the way, the Lord’s words were very clear, “Do not eat of that tree or you will die. Period” – she trusted in her own ability to reason and feel and draw conclusions. She became a skeptic of the Lord and a defender, an apologist of Satan. And then she handed a piece of fruit to her husband and he joined her.
As Paul writes in Romans 5, as we just heard in our reading, sin came through one man and because of Adam’s sin, all sin. All people, all who are children of Adam, are born rebellious, disobedient, hostile, because it is the new way of being. Rather than being grounded in the Lord and His Word, man is born grounded in Satan and his word. See, sin didn’t just come to Adam; sin came to the whole world through Adam. It’s nature.
So, I don’t look down on the scientists who blindly and rebelliously deny God’s Word and truth when they say things like “the earth is billions of years old” or “there are more than two genders” or “man is descendant of another species.” They are simply living by the rebelliousness and doubt established long ago when Eve and Adam saw that the fruit of the forbidden tree was good for food, a delight to the eye, and profitable for gaining wisdom.
But no man can hope to truly live as God intended while he lives in such a rebellious and disobedient state. Disobedience to God means judgment and death. God is our creator and giving our Creator the middle finger is simply not going to cut it. But what can we do? It is our nature and there is no will strong enough, no prescription pill powerful enough to change our nature, our being. The cure is not found within the fallen world.
Thus, it always had to be God. The Creator must also be the Redeemer. He cannot disobey Himself; He cannot be untrue to Himself. And so, to save humanity, He had to become human. To set free the prisoners, He had to come into the prison.
And when the holy and righteous nature and being of God takes on human flesh, He personifies the truly obedient, perfect, righteous, and holy human which Adam was supposed to be and failed, Jesus comes for you to do His Father’s will for you.
People get confused about the whole Jesus being God and praying to God His Father, and talking about God as if He is not God, even though He says He is God…and it’s quite confusing. But the whole point is that Jesus is the true Adam. He is what Adam was before the fall, a true Son of God, the perfect image of God who obeys His Father even to the point of death on a cross.
If the Father says, “You must die,” then the Son says, “I must die.” If the Father says, “You will suffer,” then the Son says, “I will suffer.” If the Father says, “You will rise again on the 3rd Day,” then the Son says, “I will rise again on the 3rd Day.” For, Christ Jesus and the Father are one.
They cannot be in conflict with one another because they are one God. Jesus cannot disobey because God cannot disobey Himself. Jesus cannot rebel because God cannot rebel against Himself.
Perfect God in perfect flesh who has come to do His Father’s will.
And what is the will of the Father? That Jesus should lose nothing of all that His Father has given Him, but raise it up on the last day. The will of the Father is that everyone who looks on the Son and believes shall have eternal life and be raised up on the last day. And Jesus cannot defy the will of His Father.
And how is the connection made; how does the blood of Jesus the perfect sacrifice for sins, how does His blood bring us from death to life, from prison to freedom, from rebelliousness to faithfulness?
The common answer is to say that the individual must will it, must choose it, and thus we who believe must present the faith in a way that would make the individual WANT to choose it. This is the reason why many evangelical type churches, churches born in the 1800’s from the 2nd great awakening, they always put forth a great worship experience, they go after the emotion and make people feel as though they must choose Jesus. They say faith relies heavily on the emotion, even to the point of confusing faith with emotion.
But the problem is that – and you can look at the statistics – the problem is that those folks who go up for those altar calls or to sit on the wailing benches (as they used to be called) who say the sinner’s prayer and commit their lives to God…they’re in it emotionally, sure, but there’s no faith. There’s no Word of God changing the heart. Their flesh is tantalized just like teens who go to a rock concert or a football game, it’s the same adrenaline-filled, dopamine ignited emotions turned up to 11 on the dial.
And we know, most of those folks who have that “conversion experience,” when it all dies down and the dopamine levels off, they go right back to living as if it never happened. I mean, if this worked, if growing the church and making disciples meant giving people dopamine highs and adrenaline rushes, the American church would not be in decline.
Perhaps this is what John means when he writes in his Gospel, that those who are truly born of God are born, “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” We cannot be reborn because of bloodline. No one is born a believer because his father was a believer. We cannot be reborn because of flesh. Even if we can excite the flesh and give it a great experience, this does not mean one is reborn. We cannot choose to be reborn, because our will is enslaved to sin and death. A slave cannot say, “I’m free because I will myself to be free”; he’s still a slave until someone sets him free. This is why it must be of God that we are reborn.
So how are we reborn? Jesus tells us in John chapter 3. He says, “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, He cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” Jesus’ own words through the evangelist John come to us right out of Genesis chapter 1. Permit me to read the word for word translation from Hebrew because it’s very cool:
And the earth was without form and empty, and darkness was over the face of the deep, primeval ocean, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
And we know the rest of the story. The Lord spoke into this saturated nothingness over which the Spirit hovered, and light and life was created.
God showed us how He saves us in creation, through water and the Spirit, and Jesus reaffirms this in John 3, and in John’s apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, it’s reaffirmed yet again in the very last chapter of the Bible where John writes, “The angel showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb, and there in the midst of that street, on each side of the river, was the Tree of Life.”
This is why Peter could so boldly say, “Baptism Saves,” and why Paul could proclaim, “We are buried with Christ in our baptism and raised to walk in newness of life.” This is why Jesus Himself was baptized. He had to undergo our death in every way so that He could be our light and life.
In baptism, we die to that old being of sin and slavery, and we are born again, set free, and covered in Christ. It is in baptism where the light of God illumines our hearts and stirs faith and from this faith we bear much fruit, good fruit, fruit that will last because it is planted in the Word of Christ, fed by His blood, and the light of the Spirit shines upon it.
And our Lord asks nothing from us but to abide. Remain in Him. Jesus has taken care of the difficult task of defeating sin, death, and the devil. He has washed us clean and brought us into the holy ark, the Christian church.
And so, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, His life, suffering, and death is for you. God has given you this freedom and light so that you might be forever in His kingdom and living by His light. Only do not forsake His gift; do not squander it as the people of old did in the desert and were poisoned by snakes and died. Remain in His love. Do not jump ship and return to the deep and void waters of darkness. Repent of your longing for the world and its trifles and lean on Christ who forgives you and gives you the riches of heaven. For the devil will come dressed in fine clothes, popularity, money, sex, entertainment, fleshy fulfillment dopamine highs, and try to convince you that God is the liar who wants to kill your joy. But do not lean on your own understanding; trust in the Lord for He will never leave you or forsake you. Amen.
