Preparing for Worship - April 3, 2022

All of our Scripture readings this week have to do with the ending of the old and the coming of the new, in Jesus and what He does for us in this Lenten/Easter season.

The Old Testament lesson is from Isaiah 43:16-21. God says through Isaiah not to focus so much on the old things, because He is “doing a new thing,” with “drink” for His chosen people, like life-giving “water” and “rivers” in a desert wilderness. This is ultimately prophetic of Jesus, as he came and said, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink” (John 7:37-38).

For that to happen, God brought a remnant of His people back to the promised land, out of captivity in Babylon. Psalm 126 celebrates that joyful freedom, when God “restored the fortunes” of His people. There were still “tears” and “weeping,” but God “did great things for them” and finally sent, from them, the promised Savior, Jesus.

So sadly, many of His own people rejected Jesus when He came, and most of the religious leaders wanted to “destroy” Him, seeing Him as a threat to their old ways (Luke 19:47). In the Gospel lesson, Luke 20:9-20, Jesus then told a parable about God being like the owner of a vineyard who hired tenants, the people of Israel, to care for that vineyard for him. When he asked for “some of the fruit of the vineyard,” the tenants refused again and again, and even harmed his messengers. Finally, he sent his own son, and the tenants killed the owner’s son. In this parable, Jesus was predicting, as God’s Son, sent from God the Father, His own death, brought about by His own people (and our own sins, too). He quoted Scripture, saying that He was the “Cornerstone” of the new life and new way that God was bringing through Him, but if people kept rejecting Him, they would be “broken“ and “crushed.”

In the Epistle lesson, Philippians 3:4b-14, Paul speaks as one who had been a prominent Jew and had rejected Jesus and followed the old Jewish ways. He had tried to be “righteous” by keeping the “Law” and old Jewish ways. The risen Lord Jesus had turned his life around, though, and “made him His own” and he found “the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ as Lord” and Savior. He then had the perfect righteousness that came to him “through faith” in Jesus. He “forgot what was behind” and “strained forward to what was ahead” in His new and eternal life, confident in the risen Christ Jesus.