Text: John 3:1-17
(Isa 6:1-7, Rom 11:33-36)
In the name of + Jesus. Amen.
There’s not much that we can know about God unless He reveals Himself to us, unless He teaches us about Himself.
Our reason teaches us that He exists, that there is a God. Since there is a creation, there must be a Creator. If you see a building, you may not know who designed it and who built it, but you do know that it didn’t just appear in nature or by accident. You do know that someone planned it and someone made it. And when you see a building, you might be able to draw some conclusions about the designer, but you probably can’t tell much about him personally, what his motivation in making the building was, or what his future plans are. If you want to know all of that, you need to interview the designer, or read a book about him. You will only know these things if he wants you to know them.
Our Creator has indeed revealed Himself to us, and left us a book. He also broke into our world as well, as our Teacher. He did this because He wants us to know Him. He wants us to know ourselves. But since He is all-knowing, and we are limited, we can’t know everything about God. Some things are simply unknowable, dear friends. Even if a three-year old wants to know everything about everything, and asks “Why?” over and over, his mind is still limited. We can only answer his questions so far.
St. Paul praises God for His exalted nature: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord?” We cannot understand everything about God, because we don’t have the mental capacity to do so. Our pets cannot understand everything about us, but they do know that we provide food and love for them, we take pleasure in them, and that we take care of them. And they respond with love and trust.
There is a huge gap between what we would like to know about God, and what we are capable of knowing. And that gap, dear friends, is made up with faith. God reveals a lot about Himself to us, and what we can’t understand we simply accept, and we trust that God is good, and that He tells us what we need to know, and what we can know.
God revealed something normally hidden to the prophet Isaiah. He “saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up.” He was given a glimpse of a reality normally hidden to us. He saw the seraphim, the angels, serving in the heavenly temple. He heard their song of praise: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts,” with the word “holy” being repeated three times. God is “holy,” meaning “separate.” God is not part of His creation, but is the Creator. And there is a Threeness to Him, just as there is a Oneness to Him. And this three in one and one in three nature – this Holy Trinity – is not something our minds can understand. So we fill this gap with faith, with trust.
Isaiah fell on his face, and his reason told him that he was “lost.” He responded with woe, being aware of his sinful nature. For God did not create us to be sinful. We are broken. And Isaiah could not stand in God’s holy presence without being aware of his brokenness. Isaiah thought he was doomed.
But God did something remarkable. One of His servants came to Isaiah with a burning coal from the altar, and he placed it on the lips of Isaiah, saying: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”
God used this vision to teach Isaiah, who then taught all of us, something about God. He is merciful. He atones for our sins. He takes away our guilt. And He uses a sacrament to do so – something that His servant brings from the altar and places upon our lips.
God has the power – and even the right – to destroy us. For He is a God of justice. We know that we deserve His wrath. But God loves His creatures and provides a way to save us from what we deserve. “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, the Lord of hosts.” We sing this hymn of the angels as we approach the altar ourselves to receive the same gift upon our lips in the Divine Service. We come to worship His majesty as the Most Holy Trinity – though we cannot understand His unknowable and inscrutable nature. But we certainly know that He is merciful and purges away our sins. And we sing, “Holy, holy, holy.”
And though we cannot grasp what it means that God is three and yet one, God nevertheless places His triune name upon us at our baptism. We are born into creation in the usual way by God’s design, through the marriage of a man and a woman and the physical generation of children. But there is also a re-generation, a second birth, as Jesus says, to be “born of water and the spirit.” We don’t understand how this works, but we fill the gap with faith, with trust. Jesus said to make disciples by baptizing them “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” And this is how we are born again and “see the kingdom of God.” And so we trust God, and we do this, believing it – even if our reason cannot grasp it.
We know from scripture and from the testimony of the apostles that Jesus is God, just as the Father is God. We know that the Holy Spirit is God, and Jesus teaches us that the Spirit comes to us like the wind, which “blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” And indeed, “So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” To be a Christian is to deal with what project managers call “known unknowns.” There are things that we don’t know and can’t know, and we know that we can’t know them. We fill this gap with faith, with trust, dear friends. For we worship a God very different that the “watchmaker god” of Thomas Jefferson, whom he believed created the universe, and then just walked away. No indeed, the Father loves His children, He sends His Son to rescue us, and He sends His Spirit to gather us – and we don’t understand all the details, but, like little children, we know how to receive His gifts!
We know about God mainly because God “became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
There are things we know about God from the incarnation of Jesus and from the inspired writings of the Scriptures. And we receive both the testimony of who God is, as well as His grace, by faith.
And like Nicodemus, we are sometimes baffled, and wish that we could understand more. And Jesus replies, “Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen,” and “if I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?”
Jesus then reveals the most central thing about God that we need to know: that God Himself takes flesh and dies on the cross to save us from our sins – just as God saved the Israelites from deadly snakes by having them look upon a bronze serpent lifted up on a pole. Jesus is lifted up upon the tree of a cross, and by His wounds, we are healed, made worthy to stand before God.
For this is the God who created us, dear friends, the God who redeems us, and the God who sanctifies us: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who loves us and washes us in His name in baptism, who reveals Himself to us in His Word, and who comes to us by sending His servants to place the burning coal of Holy Communion upon our lips, freeing us from our corrupted, sinful nature, and making us worthy – because of the Son’s worthiness – to stand before His throne in the eternal, heavenly temple.
For here, dear friends, is the revelation of the Most Holy Trinity – one that cannot be understood apart from Jesus and the Scriptures: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.”
“Holy, holy holy.”
Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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