Preparing for Worship - March 3, 2024

The Old Testament lesson for the Third Sunday in Lent, March 3, 2024, is Exodus 20:1-17, one of the two accounts of the giving of the 10 Commandments. These are the very Words of God, and notice that He begins with what He has already done for His chosen people. It is Gospel, Good News that He has rescued His people from slavery in Egypt. It is His doing, by His grace. The commandments that follow are how God’s people are now to respond in thanksgiving to their Lord and to know what will be best for them and for their lives and future.

Different groups number these commandments differently. We see v.3-6 as all relating to the first commandment, having no other gods, but the One true God. We divide v. 17 into two commandments about coveting. Others see v. 4-6 as a second commandment and see all of v.17 as the 10th Commandment. The content is the same. The difference only comes in some churches saying that there should be no images or artwork of any kind, even in churches. We believe that artwork is acceptable and good if it communicates messages about our Lord and His Word, as was done in the Old Testament, but we should worship no object or artwork, but only our Lord. As Jesus described, the first three commandments talk about love for God, and the other seven talk about love for our neighbor (anyone God has placed around us).

The psalm is Psalm 19. It begins with words about the amazing universe God has created and how it gives glory to Him and gives us a kind of “natural knowledge of God” and His power and majesty that we experience on a beautiful day or evening in nature. We need more than that, though. We need the Word of God, including the 10 Commandments, for guidance and direction for our life and understanding what is right and wrong. The Law of God also shows us our errors and sins when we meditate on it, and why we all need our Lord to be our Savior, our Redeemer, in Christ, and the Rock on whom alone our eternal future depends.

This is why our Epistle lesson, 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, reminds us that in terms of our life and future, we cannot depend upon human wisdom, our own or others, and we cannot demand signs or proofs from God, on our terms. We simply trust “the Word of the cross," the “preaching of Christ crucified,” by which we have been called to faith in Jesus, who is now for us our Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, and Redemption. He has already accomplished all we need, for this life and for eternal life, through His crucifixion and death and, as Paul talks about later in I Corinthians, His mighty resurrection from the dead. This may seem like foolishness to many, but it is the power and wisdom of God at work in Christ Jesus for us, and we simply “boast in the Lord,” and trust in Him, by His calling and grace.

In our Gospel lesson, John 2:13-22, (23-25), Jesus comes, early in His ministry, to Jerusalem for Passover and sees what is going on in the temple and chases out the sellers and money-changers and animals and says that the Lord’s house is not to be “a house of trade.” Fellow Jews challenge Him to give a sign or proof that He had the right to do these things. He gives them only a message of His death and resurrection, which even His own disciples did not understand until He had risen. Jesus entrusted Himself only to His Father and His plan for the salvation of the world. That would later take him back to Jerusalem and to a second cleansing of the temple and then to the cross and then to the empty tomb, in victory, for us.