Some Things I Learned During Lent:

Crucial Faith

John 3:14-21

Numbers 21:4-9

Rev. Stephen H. Wilkins

Georgetown Presbyterian Church

March 26, 2006

In an old Dennis the Menace cartoon, Dennis and his little friend Joey are leaving Mrs. Wilson’s house, their hands full of cookies. Joey says, "I wonder what we did to deserve this." Dennis answers, "Look, Joey. Mrs. Wilson gives us cookies not because we’re nice, but because she’s nice."

Today’s lesson from the gospel of John presents us with a similar truth. Because you see, the gospel reminds us that salvation does not come to us because we are good, but because of God’s great mercy and love. The gospel is not about our being good enough to earn our salvation; it’s about God being good to us.

There is, of course, in the middle of these verses from the third chapter of the Gospel according to John, that scriptural nugget that is perhaps the most well-known, the most memorized verse in all of holy writ: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Martin Luther called that little verse "the gospel in a nutshell," and he’s right. It tells of God’s undying love for you and me, and indeed for all the world; it tells of how God deals effectively with our sin by sending his Son; and it tells of the eternal hope that we have because of God’s love for us.

There you have it – the gospel message in a nutshell.

The verse comes in the middle of a conversation that Jesus is having with Nicodemus, a leader of the Pharisees who has come to see Jesus in the dark of night. Nicodemus is curious about Jesus; he knows that there’s something special about Jesus. During the conversation, Jesus and Nicodemus talk about being born again, a concept that is foreign to Nicodemus. Nicodemus is curious as to how a person can be born again, and Jesus replies that it’s not something that a person can do; rather, it’s something that happens from above. They go back and forth a couple of times, and finally, in the verses just before John 3:16, Jesus tries to explain it in terms that maybe Nicodemus, the Old Testament scholar, can understand.

Jesus uses the story we just read from Numbers. It is a strange story, of grumbling Israelites and an angry God and an infestation of snakes, and a bronze snake on a stick. Yet the story provides a near-perfect parallel to the way that Jesus makes it possible to be born from above.

You see, the Israelites had set themselves against God. They grumbled against God. By their attitude they rejected God, because in their mind God had not come through for them as they had hoped. So God sends some snakes into the Israelite camp. Lots of snakes. Kind of like in the room of snakes in one of the Indiana Jones movies. Clearly, more snakes than the Israelites could handle. It didn’t take them long to realize that only by the hand of God could they be delivered from the snakes, and so they appealed to Moses, who appealed to God. God then instructed Moses to craft a snake out of bronze, and lift it up; if the people were to look upon the snake, they would be saved.

This was no magical snake on a stick. This was no special medicinal antivenin. Not even the people of Israel would claim those kinds of powers for this bronze snake. No, they understood that by the turning of the head toward the uplifted serpent, they were acknowledging whence would come their help: their help would come only from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. The turning of the head toward the uplifted bronze serpent was a turning of their heart toward the mercy and power of God. The physical act of looking up at the snake was meant to acknowledge their dependence upon the mercy of God. Their healing, their salvation, did not come from the bronze snake, nor from anything that the people could do on their own; their salvation and healing could come only from God.

And that is precisely the point that Jesus makes to Nicodemus and to us: Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. And in that statement, Jesus underscores for us the necessity of at least two things for our salvation: he points us to the necessity of the cross, and he points us to the necessity of faith as our response to the cross.

The Son of Man must be lifted up... For the disciples that statement would become clear after the death of Jesus, for it is a reference to the cross. The Son of Man must be lifted up, on the cross. The cross is crucial for Christianity. That is never seriously debated among Christians. In fact, so central is the cross to Christianity that its centrality has crept into the everyday vocabulary of the English language. For example, whenever we say, "the crux of the matter is..." we are emphasizing some central point. And the word "crux" is the Latin word for cross. The same thing happens whenever we use the word "crucial," for "crucial" has "cross" as its root meaning. In terms of the Christian faith, the cross of Christ is crucial.

It is crucial, because it is on the cross that Jesus paid the price of our sin; it is on the cross that Jesus hung in our place. Forgiveness comes to us through the grace of God as a gift, but it is in no way free, for reconciliation cannot come without the satisfaction of justice. In his book about the cross of Jesus, Leon Morris says, "we must never overlook the fact that sinners have broken the law of God, and that that is serious. If sinners are to be saved, the fact of that broken law must be taken into consideration." You see, God can’t simply forgive sin by looking the other way and ignoring it; the sin and its consequences still must be dealt with. To ignore the sin is to violate the holiness of God. The grace of God cannot come at the expense of the holiness of God.

The grace and forgiveness of God come only because the righteous demands of the law are satisfied by Jesus Christ on the cross. Your sins and my sins were nailed to the cross for us. "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." What we were unable to do for ourselves, Jesus Christ has done for us. If salvation is to come to us, the Son of Man must be lifted up. There can be no other way.

The cross is crucial.

But so is our faith.

"Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life." The cross is crucial, but so is the way we respond to the cross. Just as the bronze snake meant nothing to those who refused to look upon it, it’s the same way for us with the cross of Christ; the cross does nothing for us if we have no faith, if we do not believe.

Five times in our verses we find the word "believe." In the Greek, the word is , and it can be translated as "believe," or "have faith." Belief and faith in the New Testament are the same. It’s about more than a momentary agreement or intellectual assent to something. It entails a commitment of the will, and an emotional trust. It is a surrender of the self.

If you’re at all familiar with the twelve-step method, you’ll realize that AA borrowed heavily from the New Testament concept of faith in putting those steps together. In AA, the first step is to admit powerlessness over alcohol, or whatever addiction it is that is enslaving a person; it is the admission that a person’s life has become unmanageable because of the addiction. The second step is to believe that there is a Higher Power than ourselves that can restore our sanity and make us whole. The third step is to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.

That really is a wonderful picture of what faith is. For Christians, the concept of faith begins when we recognize our helplessness against sin; faith starts when we realize that our war against sin must be won from beyond ourselves, that it will take a power greater than our own to win the war against sin. Faith continues to develop as we understand that Jesus’ death on the cross makes possible for us forgiveness and reconciliation with God. It’s not until a person actually accepts personally that what Jesus accomplished on the cross is all that is needed for eternal life--only then does faith actually become faith.

It is an act of surrender to Jesus Christ. Faith happens when you say, "I realize that I am a sinner, and I am unable to conquer sin on my own. I understand that Jesus suffered and died in my place, that his death paid the penalty for my sin and opened the door for forgiveness and reconciliation with God. I realize that it is only by God's amazing grace that I am redeemed, and I fully accept and embrace Jesus Christ as my Savior."

I need to add here that faith must be personal. That is, faith has to be something that is your own. Your parents’ faith is not sufficient for you. Just because you know some people of great faith, their faith doesn’t appropriate eternal life for you. Your faith must be something to which you have committed personally. For faith to be genuine it has to be your own. Harry Emerson Fosdick once said, "So many church members are secondhand Christians. They have inherited it from their families, borrowed it from their friends, married it, taken it over like the cut of their clothes from the fashion of their group." Jesus calls us to be firsthand Christians whose faith is as alive as our Savior.

This morning we celebrated the baptism of two beautiful children. Every time we baptize an infant, we recognize that for the infant the baptism symbolizes the beginning of their own journey of faith. It is the faith of the parents that brings the children forward, but it is always our prayer and our commitment to see that the faith that the parents profess will one day become the faith that the children will appropriate for themselves. As the church, we have this holy responsibility to nurture our children in the faith, with the hope that one day they will see the Son of Man lifted up, and believe for themselves.

When you look at the cross, what do you see? Do you see forgiveness? Do you see victory over sin? And the man who hung on the cross--is he your Savior?