Preparing for Worship - March 10, 2024

The Old Testament lesson for this Sunday, the 4th Sunday of the Lenten season, is Numbers 21:4-9. God’s people were not to take lands from the descendants of Esau, the Edomites, and so they went around Edom. The people became impatient with the extra travel and spoke against God and Moses, saying that they had “worthless food” and no water, even though God was continually giving them enough manna (bread from heaven) and had recently given them plenteous water from a rock. It was pure rebellion again, and God sent fiery serpents among them, and many began to die. They confessed their sin and asked Moses to pray to God to take away the serpents. Moses prayed, and the Lord told Moses to make and set up a fiery bronze serpent on a pole. If the people were bitten and would look at the serpent, trusting God’s promise, they would live.

This unusual story was actually a prophecy of what would happen to Jesus, as told in John 3:14-21, the Gospel lesson for this week. Jesus would be lifted up on a pole, on the cross, so that everyone who would believe in Him would not perish but have eternal life. God the Father, in His great love, sent His only Son into our world, not to condemn but to save. Jesus was and is Light, but many would reject Him and continue to live in darkness and evil and condemnation. Those who believed in Him would be saved, through Him and His sacrifice for them.

Paul also tells of God’s plan and way of salvation in our Epistle lesson, Ephesians 2:1-10. We all started off our life dead in our sins and trespasses, under the power of Satan and our original sin, our sinful nature,  as “children of wrath.” God, however, in His great love and mercy, made us alive together with Christ. It was purely by His grace that we were saved. Our salvation is so certain, in Christ, that it is as if we were already in the heavenly places. We will see the fullness of all that in the future, but we have the promise that we have been saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus and what He has done for us. This salvation is not our doing at all but is a gift of God, not by our works. We are now re-created in Christ so that we can do some good as we walk through this life to honor Him and love others.

Our life now in the Lord, as His “redeemed” people in Christ, is described in prophecy in Psalm 107:1-9. We had been in the wilderness, lost and hungry and thirsty, fading away, on our own. The Lord saw our cries and delivered us and led us “to a safe place, a city to dwell in,” the city of God. We can only “thank” our Lord for “His wondrous works” and “goodness” and “steadfast love that will endure forever” for us. (The rest of the psalm uses other picture images of the Lord, rescuing people in all sorts of circumstances in life, and we are called, as people “wise” in Christ, to pay attention to all this and keep on considering and trusting the steadfast love of the Lord for us, too!)