Sermon 9-8-24

Pastor Ray Lorthioir

Trinity Lutheran Church

W. Hempstead, NY

Based on the Second Lesson for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost, James 2:1-26.

A Contradiction in the Bible?

In order to understand the Reformation, we have to understand that in the late medieval period, there was a very strong connection between heaven and earth in the average European’s mind. However, the so-called Enlightenment that began in the late 1600’s changed all that. The Enlightenment mocked the idea of the heaven/earth connection, and dissuaded people from thinking that way. At first, the privileged classes adopted Enlightenment thinking. It took centuries for such thinking to work its way down to the common people. But it did. And that’s where we stand today.

As a result, there’s a deep separation between heaven and earth in the average Western person’s mind. For us, if the dimension referred to as heaven even exists, it’s remote and inconsequential in our worldview. Likewise, if the God of heaven even exists, He is remote and inconsequential. In our worldview, something called, “Mother Nature” has taken His place.

Another difference between now and even a hundred and fifty years ago is the quality of medical care. As a result, the average infant easily makes it into adulthood. Parents rarely have to bury an infant or a child. In addition, the number of adults that successfully make it into old age and deep old age constantly increases. Neither thing was so even a hundred a fifty years ago. Thus, death is no longer the ever present threat that can sneak up on us unexpected. We don’t think about death much. We even celebrate it at Halloween. And our thinking of what happens on the other side of death has become a great mish-mash of quasi-Christian thinking and outright paganism. How many people consult psychics to find out if a loved one is OK? And that’s a laugh. Who’s going to pay a psychic good money for saying, “I see your loved one in hell and there’s nothing that can be done”?

Capitalism and the industrial revolution have made a huge difference. Most Westerners no longer have to struggle to survive. Dependence on heaven for survival is not on our minds. And transportation has made the threat of death by famine nearly non-existent in the West. If one area goes into drought, food easily can be transported from another area not in drought. There is little need for community prayer for rain.

As for morality, we no longer consider there to be a totally righteous being supervising our every thought, word and deed. If such a God exists, He certainly doesn’t enter our calculations of what is good and evil, and what we desire to do. We may know that in the past the God of heaven has supposedly given humanity strong moral commands. However, such commands hardly enter into most people’s calculations, especially in sexual matters. And in psychiatry, we have a whole industry devoted to making people feel less guilty for their actions in life.

The consequence of violating commands supposedly given from heaven is not much on our minds either. We only think about hell when facing an opponent — yelling at them to “go to hell.” In most minds, the only people in hell are their opponents and Hitler. It’s not a very crowded place. “Good people” don’t go there. And certainly the average Westerner thinks of himself as a “good person.” In fact, when street preachers preach hell, they’re often confronted by moral indignation for doing so. Are you saying that just because I don’t believe in Jesus Christ I’m going to hell? How dare you tell me I’m going to hell! Who do you think you are?

There’s one more feature of our time that was not present in Reformation times. This is a pervasive religious niceness that results in statements like, “there are many paths to God, but all get there.” This is a pleasant way of overlooking the fact that the positions every religion has historically taken usually contradict the positions of other religions. It’s also a pleasant way of overlooking the conflict over contradictory positions within the same religion.

It’s understandable that we don’t want there to be violent conflict over religion. For, brutal conflict has occurred in the past. And it continues into our time. It’s chic to ignore that the 9/11 attack on America was a religious conflict. But it was most definitely a religious conflict.

In fact, the 9/11 attack gave what is called “The New Atheism” reason to become evangelistic. In the wake of 9/11, you would see signs like: “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.” The new atheists promised that if millions of people would leave Christianity and become atheists, the West would become more rational and the quality of life would greatly improve. In effect, they promised the salvation of the world. And so millions did leave.

But what has happened since 9/11? Has the West grown any more rational, any safer, any more prosperous? Let’s check. Does it make any sense to permit males identifying as females to use a female bathroom, or to compete in female sports? What should we think of a Supreme Court justice who can’t tell us what a woman is? Should we permit the mutilation of children who have a fancy that they might have been born the wrong sex? Is any of this rational?

There are some saying that the irrationality of atheism and the Enlightenment worldview has finally been exposed for what it is. And the number of people searching for an alternative is increasing. Indeed, there seems to be an increasing interest among young people to look into the historic claims of the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. From our perspective as Christians, this is a good thing.

However, if people in the West are newly seeking the connection between heaven and earth through Christianity, the controversies of the Reformation again become pertinent. And when everything is said and done, those controversies arise right out of Christian holy scripture. What is the correct way to interpret various sections of Scripture?

As a Lutheran, I’ll make a bold claim. Lutherans came out of the Reformation with the best understanding of what it means to be the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church of Jesus Christ. This came about in the crucible of conflict with Rome.

It’s unfortunate that in the present time huge swaths of Lutheranism throughout the world have capitulated to the forces aligned against Christianity in general. We can now generically call this wokeism. There’s even blatant, rank apostasy among those claiming to be Lutheran. However, there are still groups of Lutherans loyal to the historic formulations of the faith. We claim to be part of such a group here at Trinity.

Now, all of this is leading up to a study of this morning’s second lesson. The second chapter of James is central to the main Reformation dispute. But before we examine the controversy, a little history.

Between the publishing of Luther’s 95 theses in 1517 and 1530, Evangelical Catholicism — that’s what we’ll call Lutheranism — had grown tremendously in the many central European states that would later comprise the country of Germany that we know today. The princes and rulers of those states had become Evangelical Catholics. And this posed a problem for the historic political entity then known as the Holy Roman Empire.

Charles V, king of Spain, was also Holy Roman Emperor. In 1530, he made an attempt to get all of Germany back into the Roman Catholic fold by calling a conference in the city of Augsburg. In preparation for the conference, the Evangelical Catholic Lutherans wrote a document called the Augsburg Confession. It proclaimed 28 articles of faith drawn from Scripture that were in controversy with Rome. Chief among the articles was the doctrine of Justification by Faith through Grace.

The Evangelical Catholic princes presented the Augsburg Confession to the emperor. In response, Roman Catholic theologians wrote for the emperor what is called the Confutation of the Augsburg Confession. He accepted the Confutation. However, in an effort to dissuade the emperor from accepting the Confutation, Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s right hand man, wrote what’s called The Apology of the Augsburg Confession. In theological language, apology means a defense. As far as we know, the Emperor did not read the Apology.

The Apology is a long document. In it, Melanchthon systematically tackled the arguments and citations of the Confutation. This included the second chapter of James.

OK. Enough history. Let’s get to the setup. Everything revolves around the word, righteousness. Righteousness is goodness unstained by any evil or unrighteousness. While the word righteousness may be out of fashion, nevertheless, it’s on many people’s minds. Why do so many want to think of themselves as “a good person?” In a dispute, why do both parties seek the high moral ground? Each wants to be the only righteous one left standing. So, in life, righteousness is more important than we realize. 

Now, Yahweh, the sole Creator God of the universe and all the creatures in it, claims to be entirely holy and righteous. What is more, He claims to be the only source of righteousness for all His creatures. Therefore, for any of Yahweh’s creatures to stand before Him, that creature must be as righteous as Yahweh is. We read of this in 1John 1:5-6, “This is the message we have heard from him [Jesus] and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.”

Now, because of Adam’s Original Sin, Scripture tells us that every human alive has a problem with darkness. Paul explains this in the first three chapters of Romans. In chapter one, Paul explained how the whole world of his time had departed from Yahweh into darkness by denying that Yahweh is the Creator of the heavens and the earth. In chapter two, Paul explained how the only people of his time who had accepted Yahweh as Creator God — the Jews — had nevertheless been caught up in darkness by disobeying Yahweh’s righteous commands. Therefore, this conclusion is reached in Romans 3:23, “. . . all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. . . .” This means that the most righteous person alive on this earth at this very moment, nevertheless falls short of Yahweh’s righteousness because of Original Sin. That’s the darkness.

As I’ve often explained, Original Sin forces us to play God, defining good and evil for ourselves. And since Original Sin separates us from the total righteousness of Yahweh, we are not only capable of defining evil as good and vice versa, we’re also wholly incapable of truly walking in Yahweh’s righteousness. Jesus made this clear in the Sermon on the Mount by saying such things as, Matthew 5:28, “. . . ‘I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’” So, how can there be any kind of connection between us and our righteous Creator if Original Sin has this stranglehold on us? That’s the problem.

But, there is no problem Yahweh cannot solve. Therefore, we read in John 3:16, “‘For  God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.’” We also read in Ephesians 1:7, “In him [Jesus] we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.” And then there is Romans 3:22-25, “22. . . For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”

Two things about this passage from Romans: First, propitiation means to be a substitute. On the cross, Jesus substituted Himself for every human who will ever live. On the cross He suffered the wrath of Yahweh for our sake. On the cross, He satisfied the wrath of God against our sin.

Second, to be justified means to be declared righteous. In this case, Yahweh will declare righteous every person who by faith receives Jesus of Nazareth as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. As we saw in Ephesians 1:7, we have forgiveness of our sins through His blood. And where sin is forgiven, it is entirely removed. And where sin has been entirely removed, only righteous remains. This is how our lives are justified before the living God. The result of justification is that righteous Yahweh can now make His home with the believer in Jesus, and the believer can be at home with Yahweh. The connection between heaven and earth is re-established by faith in the work of Jesus. And this connection is forever.

OK. Having established the setup, I now place before you passages of Scripture that look like a contradiction. First, here is the Apostle Paul. Romans 3:28, “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.” Galatians 2:16, “yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” This is the Holy Gospel in a nutshell. And Paul is very straightforward about it. Only faith in the substitutionary work that Jesus performed on our behalf can justify our sinful lives before righteous Yahweh. We can’t do any righteous living or righteous works to add to the perfect and complete work Jesus has accomplished. These passages and others like them form the basis for the Evangelical Catholic Lutheran doctrine that we humans are justified before the living God by faith alone, and not by works.

Second, here’s James, the Lord’s brother and leader of the Jerusalem Church. James 2:20-26, “Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? 21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works; 23 and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness’ — and he was called a friend of God. 24 You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. 25 And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? 26 For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.”

Doesn’t this sound like a contradiction? For this reason, this section of James was jumped on by the writers of the Roman Catholic Confutation of the Augsburg Confession to prove that the Evangelical Catholic Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone was in error.

But in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Philip Melanchthon struck back. He rightly identified how there is no contradiction between Paul and James. Think about it. When an unrighteous sinner has been declared righteous before Yahweh by faith in the holy work of Messiah Jesus, how should such a person live? An unrighteous person has been declared righteous by no less than Yahweh Himself. So, shouldn’t living in righteousness be the aim of that person? And if the power of the living God has declared an unrighteous person to be righteous, shouldn’t living righteously now be a possibility through the same power of God?

Paul unequivocally answers yes. As an example, let’s use a passage that appeared as our second lesson several weeks ago. Ephesians 4:19-24, “19 They [the Gentiles] have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 24 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 25 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” This means that after — and that’s the key word, after — a person has been justified before Yahweh by the gift of faith in Jesus, they continue to show that they have been justified by the way they now live. Paul implies here that if there isn’t a change in living, but a clinging to the old Gentile ways, the person has what James calls a dead faith and what John says is trying to live a lie before God.

The Old Testament people James gives as examples — Abraham and Rahab — confirm the very same sequence. In order for Abraham to almost sacrifice his son, he had to first believe Yahweh. In order for Rahab of Jericho to sell out her own people and side with the Israelites, she had to first believe Yahweh.

So, there is no contradiction between Paul and James. For both, faith in Jesus comes first and alone. However, because faith in Jesus justifies a person as righteous before Yahweh, it must be immediately accompanied by righteous living and righteous works. True faith does not and cannot remain alone. Scripture declares that righteousness must follow. This is the proof that Melanchthon gives in the Apology.

Unfortunately, Roman Catholicism continues to misinterpret James by insisting that righteous living and righteous works are necessary before — and that’s the key word, before — a person can come to faith and be declared righteous before Yahweh. The problem with putting our own righteous living into the equation is that we can never know if we have done enough to merit justification. On the other hand, Scripture is absolutely clear that faith in the righteous merit of Messiah Jesus is totally sufficient in order to be forgiven, cleansed, declared righteous and sent on our way into a new righteous way of life.

So, for those who have discovered that there’s something incredibly wrong with the worldview of atheism and the Enlightenment; for those who are exploring Christianity as an alternative, you need to know that there is serious error in the Roman Church. I won’t be polite about it. Instead, I encourage you to investigate Evangelical Catholicism. And do it among the Evangelical Catholics who hold fast to Scripture as the Word of God. Otherwise, you’ll be among those who have fallen into apostasy.

May the Lord give faith to believe His Truth to all who are seeking Truth. There is a definite connection between heaven and earth to be had. He is Jesus. Amen.

All Bible quotes are from the ESV.