God Says, "The Earth Will Wear Out Like a Garment"...

I told Pastor Lassman on the way out of church this morning that his and P. Mankin's sermons of late remind me of the corny Dale Carnegie aphorism, "Excellent but improving."

There is, of course, critical messaging in The Bible about which most people, even many who call themselves Christians are completely misconstrued.  As we enter an ever-increasing laissez-faire phase of America's cultural dialectic, God's True Word becomes more and more at odds with the cultural norm of our society.

Our traditional Lutheran church holds that God's Word is throughout the Bible, not open to varying and "evolving" interpretations and the Word of God, by orders of infinite magnitude, takes precedence by over contemporary political and culture correctness, which is very temporary by comparison.  Sophist societies/empires have come and gone by the Word of God remains, unchanged, for thousands of years.

We also believe that the Old Testament is just as much about Christ and His Coming as is the New Testament.  I would venture that many, perhaps most old-line and liberal Protestants and Catholics construe the Old Testament as a separate contract for Pre-Christian Jews who were saved by keeping the Law (Ten Commandments).  The truth then as now was that all are saved by faith in the coming (OT) or the arrived and crucified Messiah (NT), Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the third person of the triune God (The Trinity).

Nobody can save him/herself by adhering to God's Law because no human other than the perfectly sinless Jesus Christ has done so.  Not Moses nor the other prophets, not the apostles, not you, not me.

I want to share just one tiny example of our reading this week from the Old Testament book of Isaiah, that flies in the face of many, especially radical environmentalists*.  

First a little context... Isaiah lived in the 8th Century BC, almost a full millennium before Christ.  Yet this Old Testament prophet predicted (prophesied) with uncanny accuracy many details of Christ's short life, three year ministry, persecution and crucifixion.  No credible historian, Christian or otherwise, doubts that Isaiah lived during this time (800 BC) and wrote what he wrote.

Isaiah also wrote about the ultimate end time of our universe.  God, btw, does not promise to destroy the world at the Judgment Day but actually the whole universe.  Many so-called evangelicals (TV Preachers, Community Churches that stem from a 19th century exclusively American tradition) share another common misconception is that "the end times" are somewhere in future and there are predictive formulae as when the world or universe will end.  Wrong, again.  The end times began with the death of Our Savior on the cross.

We are living in the end times now but we do not know when the actual end will come.  Could be today, tomorrow, December 21 (unlikely) or a thousand years from now.

Back to Isaiah.... In the 51 chapter, verse 6, Isaiah tells us about the end times when we pass from the "Church Militant" (these days) to the Church Triumphant, when Christ returns to earth to take His believers home and non-believers to hell.  (Yes, hell.  Many liberal "smorgasbord  Protestants", like to believe that there really is no hell, because a loving God would surely never allow anyone to suffer eternally.  So much for the pacifist Jesus.  A heaven without a hell is simply not supported anywhere in scripture, only in contemporary wishful thinking.

Isiah 51: 5-6...  *(parens/italics are mine)

5. My righteousness draws near, my salvation has gone out (Christ post-crucifixion), and my arms will judge the peoples (all nations); the coastlands hope for me, and for my arm they wait.

6. Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for the heavens (whole universe) vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and they who dwell in it will die in like manner; but my salvation (Christ speaking through Isaiah before His birth on earth) will be forever, and my righteousness will never be dismayed.

When will this happen?  Again, we are not to know (Mark 3:32)  More about that in the full sermon, "Waiting at the Airport for Jesus."  when I posted to that link after Tuesday.  It contains more of the good  news about what I have written above.

Amen.