Author: Monica Berndt

As I perused the Advent hymns looking for something to write about this month, this hymn caught my attention. Its plaintive melody is similar to other Advent hymns and evokes a contemplative mood which is appropriate for this Advent season. Advent is often an overlooked season, especially when living in today’s society. With radio stations blasting Christmas music as early as Thanksgiving, and stores full of candy, presents, and festive decorations, it can be hard to remember the plainer season of Advent which draws our attention not only to the wonderful coming of Christ, but also to our fallen, sinful condition which was the reason Christ needed to come in the first place.

The night will soon be ending; the dawn cannot be far. Let songs of praise ascending now greet the Morning Star! All you whom darkness frightens with guilt or grief or pain, God’s radiant Star now brightens and bids you sing again.- LSB 337 v.1

In these days, it is hard to miss the darkness that surrounds this world. The stories of violence, famine, disease, and death that we hear are not new, and they will continue to exist long after we are gone. However, it can be exhausting to look around and see the pain and suffering caused by Sin, Death, and the Devil and through our own sinful thoughts and actions. We cannot find hope or comfort in this world because there is nothing but darkness. However, the prophet Isaiah presents us with a glimmer of hope: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined” (Isaiah 9:2). This light, as we know, is Christ Jesus who came into our world of darkness with the light of salvation and His Word. Christ’s light pierces the darkness of this world and brings hope and comfort to all who are struggling under the weight of their sin, or who are grieving the consequences of sin.

God dwells with us in darkness and makes the night as day; yet we resist the brightness and turn from God away. But grace does not forsake us, however far we run. God claims us still as children through Mary’s infant son.- LSB 337 v.5

However, even though Christ has come into the world with the light of hope and salvation, we who have walked in darkness for so long often despise the light for the uncomfortable truths it reveals. We do not like being confronted with our sin or the reality that we cannot save ourselves from our sin. We are not comfortable with the truth that we love, serve, and obey things other then God, and would rather spend Sunday morning sleeping, or watching TV rather than sitting in church and receiving God’s gifts. We actively run away from God, sprinting to other idols and hiding ourselves from the light. We are dead, deserving nothing but God’s eternal wrath for all our sins of thought, word, and deed.

But grace does not forsake us. What better comfort do we have than this? What could be better than knowing that when we run, when we fall away, when we doubt, and when we are lost in grief that God’s grace is always present and will always be there to sustain us. God has washed us clean in Baptism and claimed us as His children for all eternity. Not just for the times when we feel like we are doing the right thing or when things are going well for us. No! He is there as well in the times when we do falter. He will hold on to us because we are already His through Christ: the child whose coming we prepare for both at Christmas and at the end of the world.

Gone the bliss of Eden’s garden, gone the age of sacrifice; ours the time of grace and favor, ours, the call to paradise! Ever, Lord, impress upon us: only You can cover sin – take our worthless self-made garments clothe our shame and cleanse within. -LSB 572, Verse 6

We live in the time of grace, the time of the Church. Unlike the Children of Israel, we believe in the Messiah who has already come and fulfilled every minute piece of the Law. While mankind no longer lives in the perfect garden of Eden, we have no need for animal sacrifices or the ceremonial law that God gave to the Israelites. We live in the time of grace. Everything Jesus did He did so that we may live for God and for our neighbor free from the guilt of the Law. God has given us His Word, His holy sacraments, and the most precious gift of all: the forgiveness of all our sins. We live in the sure and certain hope that all those who are baptized and believe will be raised to new life with Christ in the resurrection! This is our comfort while we are here. God Himself gives us forgiveness and promises us eternal life.

Everything we do now as baptized and forgiven children of God is seen through the blood of Jesus. His blood cancels everything we have ever done and covers us with His righteousness. This thought is both relieving and sobering. We now know that even the things we are most ashamed of, the things we think cannot be forgiven, and the things we try to hide are all paid for. We cannot be so selfish as to think God cannot forgive that one extra special sin that is ‘bigger’ than God’s mercy. No, He forgives ALL sins. This applies not only to our own sins, but the sins that are committed against us by our neighbors. God forgives your neighbor’s sins just as much as He forgives yours. What then can that say about how we should treat our neighbor? We ought to treat our neighbors with grace and mercy knowing God forgives them too. God’s grace is such a wonderful gift that it cannot be contained! Once we have received it, this grace flows out from us sometimes without us even realizing it. We are now free to love, serve, and daily forgive our neighbor as we recognize God’s grace, mercy, and love towards us received through His word and sacraments. We no longer need to worry about how to make ourselves right with God, and that leaves us free to take our focus off ourselves and think about others.

This is not to say that we will not sin, nor is it a free license to go out and sin however we want. We will sin daily because our sinful nature will never leave us this side of heaven. We will constantly struggle with sin and the consequences of living in a post-Fall world. The law of God is still written on our hearts and convicts us every time we go against what God has commanded of us. We must continually remember that Jesus came to die for us and took away the punishment for sins, so even as we continue to sin, we can come before God without the fear of His eternal wrath and repent. Remembering that God took on human flesh, suffered and died the most painful death imaginable also helps us pause and reflect when we are going astray from God’s law. He died, rose, and will come again to judge all of us at the end of the world, so that should make us think twice before we brazenly disobey Him. Only God can forgive our sins and cleanse us from all evil. There is nothing we can do, both good or bad, to get ourselves “back on track.” This is not a game of trying to figure out how much better we can be, nor should we despair when we fail to keep the Law. Instead, let us fix our eyes on Jesus knowing that everything we need for forgiveness, life, and salvation comes from Him. Let us rejoice that we not only receive God’s love, but that we get to share it with all the world.

Taste and see the bliss of heaven known by saints around the throne, where the Lamb, in closest union, lives to love and feed His own. From His riven side forever flows the purest stream of love, love that robes us with the raiment worn by all who feast above. -LSB 572, Verse 5

The Lord’s Supper is not simply an individual meal. As we approach the communion rail, we partake in a meal that unites the body of Christ past, present, and future. Yes, this is forgiveness for you, but it is also forgiveness for all who confess the name of Christ and His saving work. This is another great joy and blessing in Holy Communion. We commune with those in our own physical church building of course, but we also commune with Christians around the world and all the saints who have died in the faith. Every Sunday, you are surrounded by the people of God who sit in His presence- grandparents, parents, siblings, etc…. In some Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches, the communion rail is shaped in a half circle. This symbolizes fact that we are only a part of the attendance at communion. The rest of the circle is completed by those who we cannot see, who are no longer with us here on earth, but who are in the presence of God and still attend to His Word and receive His gifts in the courts of heaven.

These gifts that Christ freely gives to us He gives out of love. As John 3:16 tells us so beautifully, it is God’s love for His creation that brought Him down to earth in the person of Jesus Christ. All that Christ did during His ministry here, He did because He loves us and does not want us to spend eternity enslaved to the powers of sin, death, and the Devil. His sufferings and death on the cross put Him through the greatest pain man could ever experience on this earth. Yet all this was done because of His great love toward us.

When the soldier pierced Christ’s side after He was already dead, blood and water came flowing out. The blood that flows from Christ on the cross washes away all our sins and makes us holy before God. This blood clothes us with the righteousness of Christ: the righteousness He won for us. With this new garment of salvation, we can now come before God and receive His gifts both here on this earth and in heaven after our time on earth has ended. This is how we are saved and can know that we will be with God in heaven. Just as God promised Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden that He would send a savior to crush the power of the Devil, so now God promises to us that all who are clothed in the precious, redeeming blood of Christ will enter into His eternal kingdom and live with Him forever.

Lamb of God, once slain for sinners, Host, who spreads this meal divine, here You pledge our sins are covered, pledge received in bread and wine: “Take and eat; this is My body, given on the cross for you; take and drink; this cup of blessing is my blood poured out for you.” -LSB 572, Verse 4

When Jesus breathed His last on the cross, the punishment for sin was gone. God had poured out His divine wrath on His Son against all sins- past, present, and future, and now that all sin was atoned for, God could bestow the gift of the forgiveness of sins upon His people. The Old Testament sacrificial covenant, which had sanctified the Children of Israel and set them apart from the rest of the world, was no longer necessary. No new blood needed to be spilled on altars to atone for sin because the blood of Jesus now covered all sins. All God needed to do was give His people access to this new, life-giving blood. Therefore, Jesus instituted a new covenant just before He went to the cross which would pass the forgiveness He won for His people to His people.

In this new covenant, God comes to His people and brings them justification through the blood of His Son. This blood covers us just as the blood of the old covenant covered the Children of Israel. We no longer need to sacrifice animals on human altars to atone for our sins. Instead, we now come to the altar of God where we receive this cleansing, atoning blood along with Christ’s body in, with, and under the bread and wine at the communion rail. In the Lord’s Supper, God freely offers us the forgiveness of our sins and life eternal and promises that because of Christ’s payment for sin, we can know for certain that our sins are forgiven forever.

This is why Lutherans value communion so highly. Through receiving communion, we gain access to Christ’s salvific blood and are made holy before God. This is not a meal where we fondly remember that Jesus died for us. No! This is a meal that give you eternal life, forgives all your sins, and sanctifies you. My home congregation offers two services, and once I asked my pastor if it was alright to commune in the second service after communing in the first service. He responded by asking me if I had sinned after receiving communion, and when I responded that of course I had sinned, he said that I absolutely could take communion again. The Lord’s Supper is not a question of how many times we go, but a question of whether we need forgiveness. The answer to that question will always be yes on this earth. It is right that we treasure this gift for all the blessings it gives to us.

What these sacrifices promised from a God who sought to bless, came at last – a second Adam – Priest and King of righteousness: son of God, incarnate Savior, son of Man, both Christ and Lord, who in naked shame would offer on the cross His blood outpoured. -LSB 572, Verse 3

The sacrifices and sacrificial covenant of the Old Testament were never intended to be a permanent solution to sin. They were a promise which pointed ahead to the sacrifice that God would send in fulfilment of His first promise to Adam and Eve. For hundreds of years, God’s people waited and watched for the coming of this Savior. As they waited, some of them lost sight of who this Savior would be and His true purpose. When Christ Jesus became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary, was born into this world, and began His ministry, many of the Jewish people did not recognize Him as God. They were looking for a temporal savior- one who would free them from political and religious oppression, and they missed the deeper issue of sin and eternal damnation. They did not understand that all the sacrifices of the priests pointed to this Jesus who now lived and taught among them.

Yet Jesus came to make His people holy before God, not to free them from any temporal condition. Jesus humbled Himself and took on human flesh because this was the only way that sin could be removed from mankind bringing us back into fellowship with God. By living a sinless life, Jesus accomplished what we can never do no matter how hard we try. Imagine never sinning against God or your neighbor. We cannot even begin to comprehend what Jesus’ life would have been like, because we are so corrupted by sin that we cannot escape it even for one moment. Jesus never feared, loved, or trusted in anything apart from God, and He always loved His neighbor as Himself. If He had sinned, He would not have been able to redeem us.

Jesus is the second Adam because He obeyed God’s word whereas the first Adam did not. Adam took the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and immediately enslaved the human race and the world to sin, death and the Devil. Jesus, the second Adam, perfectly fulfilled the law of God, and through His death on the cross He crushed the Devil, broke the chains of captivity, and freed His people from their sins. How was this possible? When Jesus took on our sin, He became sin for us. When Jesus died on the cross, sin died as well. The wages of sin is death and in Jesus’ death, sin’s wage is now paid in full. With Jesus death, the promise of God to Adam and Eve was fulfilled, and the sacrificial covenant ended paving the way for the new covenant God established with His people.

Days and months and years unfolding clearly showed what sin had wrought: fallen Adam’s children learning lessons fallen parents taught. All these sacrificial offerings crested as a crimson flood: Patriarchs and priests atoning for their sin with cleansing blood. – LSB 572, Verse 2

We have always lived with the consequences of the Fall. That may sound like a simple, obvious statement- we do not know what it is like to live without the pain of sin, death, and the power of the Devil. However, Adam and Eve had lived in that perfect Eden, and so every sin, every withered plant, every ache, sickness, and human death came as a shock to them as they saw exactly what the price of their disobedience cost themselves and their descendants. Sin was not just a misstep, one small action taken too far, or an accident. Instead, the Fall destroyed the perfect man God created. God, as the perfect father to Adam and Eve had passed on His image to them, yet Adam as an imperfect and sinful father to the rest of humanity passed on his fallen image to all his descendants. The curse of the fall was not just for Adam; it was for the whole human race which was now born innately corrupt and sinful, separated from God forever.

Yet God is merciful to His people. He does not allow us to remain separated from Him no matter how much our sinful nature would prefer to have nothing to do with God. All through the Old Testament, we see the Patriarchs (Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob among others) offering sacrifices on altars to God. They offered them in times of thanksgiving and in times when they knew God had spared them despite their sin. They understood the extent of God’s justice as well as His great mercy, and so they offered their sacrifices to Him in repentance and faith in His promise to send a Savior.

This continued with the sacrificial covenant God made with the Children of Israel. After bringing them out of Egypt, God set out the specific rules regarding sacrificial offerings: when they needed to be made, the amount of the offerings, and the rituals surrounding them. These sacrifices reminded the Children of Israel that God delivered them from slavery and preserved their lives both physically and spiritually. The blood of the animals slain on that altar covered the sins of the people and reminded them that God was not only just, but He was also merciful and did not hold their sins against them. From the outside, the blood of hundreds of animals scattered on the Children of Israel seems gory and unfair, but the price of our sin is death. It always has been since the time God killed the first animal to cover Adam and Eve’s shame. Yet these sacrifices were made in faith that God would in time send a Savior to fulfill His promise to Eve and crush the Devil.

Much to the delight of many youth across the country, the Higher Things conference season is fast approaching. This is always an exciting time for church youth groups who have been fundraising all year for these trips as every conference provides wonderful opportunities to learn and grow. The plenary speakers expound on the conference theme, breakout speakers present on a variety of topics, the multitude of services provide a theological foundation grounded in the liturgy, great hymns, and sermons to meditate on, and yes, there will be some time for fun and games as well. Another aspect of conferences that I especially love is learning the conference hymn. If you were not aware that Higher Things has a specific hymn chosen to fit the theme of each conference, now you know! This year the hymn is “In the Shattered Bliss of Eden” (LSB 572) which ties in with the conference theme – “Sanctified.” The text of this hymn covers the entire story of our salvation from the fall into sin, through the Old Testament sacrificial covenant, onto Jesus’ death and the New Testament sacramental covenant given to us in the present day.

In the shattered bliss of Eden dawned the day of sacrifice, as our primal parents shuddered – Sin had caused this dreadful price! Faith embarked with this discernment: Only God can cover sin, as He took their leafy garments and He clothed their shame with skin. –LSB 572, Verse 1

In Genesis chapter 3 when Adam and Eve took that fateful bite of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the wonderful paradise that God created for them was gone. They achieved what they were promised by the serpent: to know the difference between good and evil just like God, yet with this newly acquired knowledge came the realization that what they had just done was evil. They broke God’s law, and immediately their sin and shame were visible. As they desperately tried to hide themselves from God with fig leaves, God came to them, showed them their sin, and gave them both a curse – the punishment for sin – and offered them a promise, that their sin would eventually be crushed by the seed of Eve.

The scene that followed is highlighted in this first stanza of the hymn: God took an animal and killed it in order to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve. What a shock this must have been to our first parents. This was Eden! Nothing had ever died, or withered, or been sick, or been killed before. God’s warning to Adam in Genesis 2 where He said Adam would die in the day he ate of the tree in the garden was visibly carried out in front of Adam. Adam would eventually die, and all creation took on his curse and would die with him. God killed this first animal to cover the sin of Adam and Eve, and what a horrible price it must have seemed at the time. They could not have foreseen the thousands of animals that would be sacrificed to cover the sins of Children of Israel nor the painful, terrible sacrifice of Jesus Christ – the seed of the woman sent to crush the serpent’s head. Instead, what they saw and learned on that day was that God alone could cover their sin and that all their attempts to cover up what they had done were futile. Sin came at a price, and that price was death.