There was an old man who was giving advice to a younger man about the subject of elections. “Always vote,” the older man said. “Always vote. There may not be anyone you want to vote for on the ballot, but you can always be sure that there is someone you want to vote against!”
I was telling this story to someone recently and someone else spoke up: “This year you get double the fun. There’s TWO people you want to vote against!”
Our elections. I’m so glad our founding fathers decided to only hold elections every two years and presidential elections every four years. I’m not sure we could take an election every year. But it would be good for the news channels' bottom lines with all the extra advertising dollars.
Did you hear that the NFL television ratings are down? The people that understand these things are blaming the election. It seems that that the election is more brutal than any of the NFL games...
And so I’ve had people approach me, wondering what I think about the election. My answer is this: The Bible says that God appoints our leaders so that we get the leaders we deserve. It should be noted that God provided Israel with David and Solomon. David, a man after God's own heart and Solomon, the wisest man to ever live. But God also provided Israel with Ahab and Jezebel at a different time, two people whose names have become proverbial for evil.
Human judgement is fallible. Abraham Lincoln was elected with slightly less than 40% of the vote. Three out of five people voted for someone else because Lincoln was considered too inexperienced, a loser, and a rather stupid country hick by most people. Yet he was the man God decided we needed. And it should also be noted that Abraham Lincoln was widely considered to be our second greatest President, behind only George Washington. Would you have voted for Lincoln?
So as we go into the election, I say to you: vote! We have five candidates to choose from – Trump of the Republican Party, Clinton of the Democrat Party, Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Stein of the Green Party, and Castle of the Constitution Party. At least we are not at the point where we only have one candidate, like some countries.
How should you vote?
I’ll suggest you make your voting decision the same way you should make all decisions – by following Jesus. Take a moment in the parking lot where it is quiet. Read some scripture. Ask Jesus: “Who do You want me to vote for?”. Then listen for an answer. And then get out, get in line, and vote.
And that is how you make a difference. If more Christians listened carefully to what the Holy Spirit tells them, we would have a different country. Remember to let your children see how you make your decision.
So as we go into the election, I say to you: vote! We have five candidates to choose from – Trump of the Republican Party, Clinton of the Democrat Party, Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Stein of the Green Party, and Castle of the Constitution Party. At least we are not at the point where we only have one candidate, like some countries.
How should you vote?
I’ll suggest you make your voting decision the same way you should make all decisions – by following Jesus. Take a moment in the parking lot where it is quiet. Read some scripture. Ask Jesus: “Who do You want me to vote for?”. Then listen for an answer. And then get out, get in line, and vote.
And that is how you make a difference. If more Christians listened carefully to what the Holy Spirit tells them, we would have a different country. Remember to let your children see how you make your decision.
And after the election? Our scripture today reminds us that Christians have lived through good times and bad times. Paul, writing to the church at Thessalonica in Greece, is dealing with a particular issue.
The Thessalonians had listened to some people who had a mistaken view. They believed that “the day of the Lord has already come. “ They believed they had missed the boat, they had missed the last trumpet.
Isaiah spoke of the great and terrible day of the Lord. The day when God judges the world and makes things right, with the evil being judged and punished and the righteous being rewarded. There were people who thought this day of the Lord was the day Jesus arose from the dead. But Paul and the apostles had heard differently from the Holy Spirit – and perhaps from Jesus Himself:
Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.
According to Paul, the day of the Lord will not come until someone sets himself up in God’s temple and proclaims that He is God. Jesus, while claiming to be God, always pointed to the Father as ultimate authority, and furthermore, Paul had heard from Jesus or the other disciples that the time was in the future, so Christians should be on the lookout for a bad time to come.
And a bad time did come. In AD 70, the Temple and Jerusalem were destroyed by the Romans. But neither the conqueror, the future Roman emperor Titus nor Tiberius, his second in command, proclaimed themselves as God in the temple. And the temple has not been rebuilt. Ever.
And so we still wait for the great and terrible day of the Lord. It cannot come until God’s temple has been rebuilt in Jerusalem.
The Thessalonians had listened to some people who had a mistaken view. They believed that “the day of the Lord has already come. “ They believed they had missed the boat, they had missed the last trumpet.
Isaiah spoke of the great and terrible day of the Lord. The day when God judges the world and makes things right, with the evil being judged and punished and the righteous being rewarded. There were people who thought this day of the Lord was the day Jesus arose from the dead. But Paul and the apostles had heard differently from the Holy Spirit – and perhaps from Jesus Himself:
Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.
According to Paul, the day of the Lord will not come until someone sets himself up in God’s temple and proclaims that He is God. Jesus, while claiming to be God, always pointed to the Father as ultimate authority, and furthermore, Paul had heard from Jesus or the other disciples that the time was in the future, so Christians should be on the lookout for a bad time to come.
And a bad time did come. In AD 70, the Temple and Jerusalem were destroyed by the Romans. But neither the conqueror, the future Roman emperor Titus nor Tiberius, his second in command, proclaimed themselves as God in the temple. And the temple has not been rebuilt. Ever.
And so we still wait for the great and terrible day of the Lord. It cannot come until God’s temple has been rebuilt in Jerusalem.
About 15 years ago, a group of people in Jerusalem, after long litigation, gained permission to go up to the Temple Mount and have a symbolic cornerstone-setting ceremony for the Third Temple. After the ceremony, though, they had to pick up the cornerstone and leave the Mount to avoid trouble with the Palestinians. They have not gone back.
So for almost 20 centuries, people have been born, they’ve believed in Jesus Christ, they’ve been baptized, and they’ve died. And still we wait, knowing that the great and terrible day of the Lord is in our future.
What a recipe for hopelessness this could be! Everything is going to fall apart someday. And this is true. The world will fall apart; war will happen again, plagues will kill untold numbers of people, famine will starve many, and destruction will cover the earth.
But that does not mean we are without hope. For we know that we will live because we have the resurrection! But how are we so sure?
The group of Jews who ran the Temple in Jesus’ day were called the Sadducees. The Sadducees were convinced that there was no resurrection of the dead, because they only accepted the first five books of the Old Testament as Scripture, and it is very difficult to find a reference to resurrection in those five books. And since they did not believe in the Resurrection, they were sad, you see…
One day a group of Sadducees came to Jesus. They asked a question:
“Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
Don’t you love it when people try to catch up Jesus in a logical trap? The Sadducees were saying that this woman, who was married seven times during her life – legally and properly, following the Law of Moses – who would she be married to after the resurrection? The question shows the narrowness of the Sadducee’s outlook – they were trying to prove that there is no resurrection because they figured a woman can only have one husband at a time. It’s like saying that a person can only have one home at a time or only one telephone at a time. But I once read in National Geographic magazine of a group of people who live in the Himalayan mountains who regularly practice a form of marriage where one woman maintains a home while her five or six husbands, who are usually brothers, travel with their flocks. This is not to say it doesn’t create problems. But it is what works for that group of people. But the Sadducees could not even think of the possibility.
In the Law of Moses, a man must marry his brother’s widow if the brother dies childless so his brother and the woman will have children who can inherit his property. The focus of this rule is the inheritance of property. The basis for this Law was to keep the land well distributed in families. And the whole idea is based upon the idea that, in a subsistence farming society, husbands are needed to work the farm and take care of the women. In that society, widows without sons died from starvation.
Jesus pointed out that “in this age”, people get married. Then He goes on…
But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.
Okay. Jesus tells the Sadducees and us that marriage is not an institution of the next age. So the Sadducee’s reasoning doesn’t matter. Jesus says that there is no need for marriage, since people don’t die. Have you ever considered that marriage might exist because people die? Notice the precise wording: “Those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead” are the people Jesus is talking about. “They are God’s children,” Jesus says. They are "children of the resurrection.” Jesus appears to focus upon marriage as a way to determine who the fathers are for the purpose of determining who gets the property. But if people don’t die, there’s no need to prove you are someone’s son or daughter for property inheritance reasons. In the next age, everyone is God’s child, an heir to everything God has. We don’t need to farm “by the sweat of our brow” to survive. We have access to everything God owns and the concept of a starving widow is gone forever.
But Jesus goes even farther to talk about resurrection. “But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ “
Jesus is quoting from Exodus Chapter Three - one of the first five books that the Sadducees accepted. And Jesus makes this declaration turn on the precise tense of Moses’ statement, “for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ The Lord is God of all three men at once!
So for almost 20 centuries, people have been born, they’ve believed in Jesus Christ, they’ve been baptized, and they’ve died. And still we wait, knowing that the great and terrible day of the Lord is in our future.
What a recipe for hopelessness this could be! Everything is going to fall apart someday. And this is true. The world will fall apart; war will happen again, plagues will kill untold numbers of people, famine will starve many, and destruction will cover the earth.
But that does not mean we are without hope. For we know that we will live because we have the resurrection! But how are we so sure?
The group of Jews who ran the Temple in Jesus’ day were called the Sadducees. The Sadducees were convinced that there was no resurrection of the dead, because they only accepted the first five books of the Old Testament as Scripture, and it is very difficult to find a reference to resurrection in those five books. And since they did not believe in the Resurrection, they were sad, you see…
One day a group of Sadducees came to Jesus. They asked a question:
“Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
Don’t you love it when people try to catch up Jesus in a logical trap? The Sadducees were saying that this woman, who was married seven times during her life – legally and properly, following the Law of Moses – who would she be married to after the resurrection? The question shows the narrowness of the Sadducee’s outlook – they were trying to prove that there is no resurrection because they figured a woman can only have one husband at a time. It’s like saying that a person can only have one home at a time or only one telephone at a time. But I once read in National Geographic magazine of a group of people who live in the Himalayan mountains who regularly practice a form of marriage where one woman maintains a home while her five or six husbands, who are usually brothers, travel with their flocks. This is not to say it doesn’t create problems. But it is what works for that group of people. But the Sadducees could not even think of the possibility.
In the Law of Moses, a man must marry his brother’s widow if the brother dies childless so his brother and the woman will have children who can inherit his property. The focus of this rule is the inheritance of property. The basis for this Law was to keep the land well distributed in families. And the whole idea is based upon the idea that, in a subsistence farming society, husbands are needed to work the farm and take care of the women. In that society, widows without sons died from starvation.
Jesus pointed out that “in this age”, people get married. Then He goes on…
But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.
Okay. Jesus tells the Sadducees and us that marriage is not an institution of the next age. So the Sadducee’s reasoning doesn’t matter. Jesus says that there is no need for marriage, since people don’t die. Have you ever considered that marriage might exist because people die? Notice the precise wording: “Those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead” are the people Jesus is talking about. “They are God’s children,” Jesus says. They are "children of the resurrection.” Jesus appears to focus upon marriage as a way to determine who the fathers are for the purpose of determining who gets the property. But if people don’t die, there’s no need to prove you are someone’s son or daughter for property inheritance reasons. In the next age, everyone is God’s child, an heir to everything God has. We don’t need to farm “by the sweat of our brow” to survive. We have access to everything God owns and the concept of a starving widow is gone forever.
But Jesus goes even farther to talk about resurrection. “But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ “
Jesus is quoting from Exodus Chapter Three - one of the first five books that the Sadducees accepted. And Jesus makes this declaration turn on the precise tense of Moses’ statement, “for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ The Lord is God of all three men at once!
Jesus is saying that Moses could have told us the Lord said, “I was the God of Abraham, etc.” or even “I am the God that Abraham worshiped. But instead Moses reported in chapter three of Exodus the Lord said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, etc.” Even accepting only the Sadducee version of what scripture was canonical, the resurrection is there in scripture - to God, at the time of Moses, all three of the patriarchs are alive.
Jesus’s conclusion? “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”
And so we find out two things. Jesus truly believed in the resurrection, and Jesus took Scripture in the original languages very seriously. What about yourself?
Later on, Jesus Himself resurrected several people, most notably Lazarus, and then Jesus Himself was resurrected by God. The disciples and many others saw Lazarus resurrected after four days dead, and over 500 people saw Jesus after His resurrection. Four of the disciples wrote down detailed accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection – these are what we call the Four Gospels, the four Good News accounts that form the first four books of the New Testament – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. At least five other disciples mention the resurrection or eternal life – Peter, Paul, James, Jude, and the unknown author of the Letter to the Hebrews. It is a core doctrine of Christians everywhere. Without the resurrection, Christianity becomes just another wise man’s idea for a society living together. But with the resurrection…we find the hope of eternal life – and we are faced with the idea that Jesus, who claimed repeatedly to be God, was indeed speaking as God, divine, eternal, and therefore His statements are far more important than those of Plato, of the Buddha, of prophets, of philosophers, of politicians. He deserves to be listened to and followed.
In fact, the resurrection is something which connects us together, the knowledge that people who believe in Jesus Christ have existed in the flesh in the past, exist today, and will exist in the future. We have picked up the faith from Christians who have simply transferred to the Church of Heaven and we will pass the faith onto these children we see here today and they will pass on the faith to their descendants long after we are gone – unless Christ returns sooner. And then we will all come together to meet and worship the One we follow. It is through this that the Church remains One Body of Christ, eternally connected through our worship and service to the God who created us.
And so, with all the company of Heaven, we celebrate the feast of bread and wine, the Holy Communion where God reaches down and touches us through the veil for just a moment, connecting us together as we celebrate the body and blood of Jesus Christ, assuring us that we will share in His eternal life with all of those saints who are awaiting the resurrection, awaiting the return of Christ, awaiting the great and terrible day of the Lord, when all shall be rebuilt and all tears will be wiped away.
Remember who we are. Remember those who came before us and remember those who will follow us and our responsibilities to transmit the faith to them.
Now to the only wise God, who brings rain and sunshine, winter and springtime, death and life, and lives forevermore! Go forth and tell of God’s love and be blessed!
Jesus’s conclusion? “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”
And so we find out two things. Jesus truly believed in the resurrection, and Jesus took Scripture in the original languages very seriously. What about yourself?
Later on, Jesus Himself resurrected several people, most notably Lazarus, and then Jesus Himself was resurrected by God. The disciples and many others saw Lazarus resurrected after four days dead, and over 500 people saw Jesus after His resurrection. Four of the disciples wrote down detailed accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection – these are what we call the Four Gospels, the four Good News accounts that form the first four books of the New Testament – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. At least five other disciples mention the resurrection or eternal life – Peter, Paul, James, Jude, and the unknown author of the Letter to the Hebrews. It is a core doctrine of Christians everywhere. Without the resurrection, Christianity becomes just another wise man’s idea for a society living together. But with the resurrection…we find the hope of eternal life – and we are faced with the idea that Jesus, who claimed repeatedly to be God, was indeed speaking as God, divine, eternal, and therefore His statements are far more important than those of Plato, of the Buddha, of prophets, of philosophers, of politicians. He deserves to be listened to and followed.
In fact, the resurrection is something which connects us together, the knowledge that people who believe in Jesus Christ have existed in the flesh in the past, exist today, and will exist in the future. We have picked up the faith from Christians who have simply transferred to the Church of Heaven and we will pass the faith onto these children we see here today and they will pass on the faith to their descendants long after we are gone – unless Christ returns sooner. And then we will all come together to meet and worship the One we follow. It is through this that the Church remains One Body of Christ, eternally connected through our worship and service to the God who created us.
And so, with all the company of Heaven, we celebrate the feast of bread and wine, the Holy Communion where God reaches down and touches us through the veil for just a moment, connecting us together as we celebrate the body and blood of Jesus Christ, assuring us that we will share in His eternal life with all of those saints who are awaiting the resurrection, awaiting the return of Christ, awaiting the great and terrible day of the Lord, when all shall be rebuilt and all tears will be wiped away.
Remember who we are. Remember those who came before us and remember those who will follow us and our responsibilities to transmit the faith to them.
Now to the only wise God, who brings rain and sunshine, winter and springtime, death and life, and lives forevermore! Go forth and tell of God’s love and be blessed!
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