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Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to dyour father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” The Jews answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” Jesus answered, “I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks it, and he is the judge. Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.” The Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon! Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say, ‘If anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death.’ Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? And the prophets died! Who do you make yourself out to be?” Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ’He is our God.’ But you have not known him. I know him. If were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” So the Jews said to him,” You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” So they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple (John 8:42-59).

A CHRISTIAN FREED FROM LIES

A book about certain politicians published a few years ago in the United States was entitled, Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them. The title reflects the anger people feel at being lied to by their leaders. When an elected official lies, it is worse than being deceived—it is also being betrayed. The betrayal is worse when people lie to shore up the original lie. Far worse, though, than the lying of politicians is lying in the name of God. Such liars not only deceive and betray their hearers, who think that the liar knows God. He actually murders their souls, all in the course of polite conversation. This kind of lying goes on daily. People lie in God’s name casually, and no one gets very upset about it, even though this kind of lying not only profanes the highest good, but also ruins those who believe the lie for eternity. The religious liar is the most dastardly, most destructive liar of all.

That liar is you.

Baptized into the name of the Trinity, you and I bear the name of God. Even if we never once in our lives open our mouths in the name of God, every moment in our lives speaks either the truth or a lie about the God whose name we bear. “Anyone who teaches or lives contrary to God’s Word profanes the name of God among us. From this preserve us, dear Father in heaven!” writes Luther. As those who are baptized, we can never stop making our confession about who we believe God to be. And again and again, we have lied about God.

The lie you and I all to often have believed and confessed is that there is a way to God apart from Christ. We have not wanted to hear Christ speak in judgment of us. We have changed his judgment of us as a slave of sin so that it no longer condemns us. Instead, we have ignored the voice of Christ which condemns sin, as something which no longer applies once we have heard about his forgiveness. By avoiding Christ’s judgment, we have avoided his Gospel as well. We have tacitly agreed with the devil that one can come to God in some other way than faith in the Crucified, whose death alone takes away sin and death.

To truly believe that Christ is God, we must also believe that he is our only savior. The two go together. The Jews could not stand this man who stood in front of them, who called them slaves of sin, so they called his words the teaching of demons. They were scandalized by the true God, because he came to them in weakness, allowing himself to be ignored, making himself weak enough to be killed. I Am made himself subject to death because it was impossible for the Jews, and for you and me, to be saved in any other way. Now I Am is ignored in the church. He comes to us in scripture, in water, in bread and wine, to give eternal life. Life can be found nowhere else. The same Jesus who spoke in Judea two thousand years ago comes to us today in these things. It is the same Jesus who gives us the Bible as his word, apart from which he will not speak to us, who offends our reason with this anachronistic book. It is the same Jesus who offends our morality by coming to us only through his Church, whose 2,000 year history is sullied with all kinds of sins of bigotry and intolerance which our age finds unforgivable. That is the same Jesus who is speaking with you today, who declares himself your God.

God and life are found nowhere else. This same Jesus condemns your unwillingness to hear his Word. “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him” (John 5:44).

We prefer religion to the living God who comes to us because we cannot come to him. That is the way we have been since the devil lied to us and led us astray to kill us, telling us, “Take what God has forbidden.” Even the person who has come to life through believing that God has come to us, still is prey to the devil’s religious lies. “Get behind me, Satan,” says Jesus to Peter, who only a moment before had called Christ the Son of God. One second he knew God, the next he was speaking the religious lies of Satan, trying to tempt Jesus. He spoke the same lie he speaks to us—“Jesus need not die, because there is another way to God besides the death of the Son.”

But now Satan’s lying mouth has been stopped. Jesus was not deceived by Satan. He went forth willingly to become what we are and to take our inheritance of death upon him. He was murdered by the devil, who sought to murder us by his lies. The devil sought to kill us, but he found the invincible life of I Am between him and us. Because Christ has died, we have been freed from the devil’s kingdom of death and misery. His lies can no longer separate us from God.

This means that the day of human religion is over. We are no longer divided from God, and there is no need to seek to undo sin and death on our own. You need not hide from your sin and God’s judgment because I Am has borne the penalty of death for you. Life is yours because of Jesus. Let Satan’s lies no longer enter your ears and tell you that you must appease God. The Baptism you have received has ended religion. You have died, and now you are alive to God in Jesus Christ, and will never see death. The flesh and blood Christ puts in your mouth testifies that death has come once to Christ and so will never come to you.

Because of this, nothing is as it appears to be in this world. Our age, which seems to be beyond the reach of Christ, is really not only under his Lordship but is also redeemed by him. Our world, which appears to be ruled by death and misery and sin, is really ruled by Christ, who died once and now can never die again. Do not let Satan deceive you with appearances and entice you with his religious lies. Cling to the life which I Am has won for you, and which is guaranteed you in his word.

A year before he died, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in prison meditating on the possibility of speaking of Christ to a world which had abandoned religion. “How do we speak,” he wrote, “in a ‘secular’ way about ‘God’? In what way are we ‘religionless-secular’ Christians, in what way are we the ecclesia, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world” (Bonhoeffer, Letters and Paper from Prison, 280-81). The fact that the world around us has ceased to be religious is really no more a barrier to Christ than was the false religion of the Jews and Greeks to whom the first Christians went. The good news of Christ is not a religious heirloom, a set of facts, a worldview, or a particular piety. Because Christ has saved all men from death, he is the savior of the irreligious as much as the pious. We do not need to fear the fact that our neighbors are closed even to the concept of God. If Christ is I Am, and that means I Am has given all of himself to share our nature and suffer our death, there is no reason to hide from anything in the world. Rather, as those who know the Lord of the universe as father and deliverer, we can face this world which appears to be dominated by sin and death without any fear. We can go forward into this world which has given up on the very concept of truth as something dangerous, and say that there is indeed Truth, and he is for us. We can be free of the selfishness of religion, which always is concerned with itself and keeping itself pure. Knowing that we have received life as a gift, we can face the depths of despair and death and even Satan with the words of Jesus, which destroys these enemies. We know very well that we can and will be resisted just as he was. But we will also know, when we cling to Christ’s word, that we are actually bringing the victory over every evil as a pure gift. This is true as surely as Christ is I Am—the creator and sustainer of the world.

It is a certain truth that Christ in his word shares God with us, and with him, everlasting life. That life is yours today and forever. Amen.

Karl Hess