Stagnation or Redemption?
Originally preached on March 3, 2024
We all know J.R.R. Tolkien for his Lord of the Rings. When he was writing his stories, as part of that, he wrote his own fictional creation story. In it, God initiates His creation in the form of a cosmic song. He is the writer and the orchestrator and He invites His angels to play His melodies. The melody that He directs is beautiful and clean and happy. The angels are in unison and the perform it perfectly.
But then one of God’s angels decides that he ought to have his own part in the creative process. And he goes off script and tries to add what he thinks sounds good to him. But He doesn’t have the skill that God has, and the resulting music is not a melody. It’s a discord, and it’s halting and coarse and constantly changing, and it cannot unify itself with the melody that God created. And some of the angels become confused, and follow the discord, such that there are two competing streams of music without sense or direction.
And God looks at the angel, but His face doesn’t show wrath. Instead, He smiles, and He introduces a new melody, that is different from the first. This melody is also beautiful, but it is slow and sorrowful, and Tolkien writes, that it was principally from it’s sorrow that it’s beauty came. And somehow, in all the skill of God, this new melody is able to unite the original melody with the discord of the angel and produce a song that is once again ordered and beautiful.
To this, the angel should have responded in goodwill and accepted God’s gentle response to embrace the new melody. But instead, resentful that his own music has been overtaken, the angel responds in a new and greater discord, loud and brashful. And this time God’s face is wrathful. And God introduces the third melody, a thundering and powerful song, that no other melody can compete with. And the other angels, unable to even be heard, submit in silence to God’s final melody, and the music comes to an end.
The story is fictional, but it’s meant to be a reflection on the reality of our world. The first melody is the Garden of Eden. It is the world as God first created it, without pain or futility or confusion. Life was simple and pure, without confusion or discord. The discord and the second melody represent our world, from the fall in the garden until now, when Satan rebelled by introducing his own plan into the world and when man cooperated with Satan’s plan. And our world contains all the elements of the second melody. The goodness of God’s creation has not been undone; the world is still a beautiful place; but it is corrupted, and our lives are complicated by the discord of every type of sin and failure. When this happened, God did not respond strictly in wrath. He did not end the music and stamp the world out and start over, or abandon mankind to the intentions of Satan. But God did introduce a new melody; an impossibly sophisticated and beautiful melody, that was able to make sense of the discord, the sin and futility, albeit only through suffering and sorrow. And that melody, in the real world, is most principally expressed through Jesus Christ, in whom, in the words of Colossians 1:16-17, “all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” The story of Jesus Christ, who descended from heaven to come into the world with us, who showed us a better way of living, and who took on the sins of the world to himself so we could be free, has changed the world we live in. Even though sin and failure is still present, we can make sense of it, we can live with it, and we can see the beauty in the song and hope for an eternal future.
We can take the weak response, which is to resent that God allowed the discord to happen. We can resent God for the problems in our lives and the harm that’s been done to us. But the discord did not come from God. To be angry about the pain in the world is neither productive nor fair: we can’t change it, and we have ourselves been a part in creating it. So what is our other option? We can choose to participate in the second melody: the melody of Christ, the melody of redemption. God offers us the same choice as the angels, to be partakers and players in the music of life, either for discord or for redemption.
Surely we should be thankful that God is patient and withholds His judgement. As Psalm 130:3-7 sings, If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.
My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption.
And the fact is, deep down, we all want this. We see this in the kinds of stories that we like to listen to. I want you to think about western movies. What’s the basic, stripped down plot of a western movie? Well, there’s a good guy, and there’s a bad guy, and the good guy has to fight for justice. Probably, the odds are stacked against him in some way. Probably, he’s going to need to make some sort of sacrifice to get the happy ending. And by being courageous and persevering, the good guy gets his victory. It’s not a bad story. But it can be kinda shallow. And if that’s all the western movie ever was, the western movie probably wouldn’t have been popular for so long.
Now, A Fistful of Dollars is an excellent western movie. Who’s seen A Fistful of Dollars? Anyways, A Fistful of Dollars does not begin with a cookie cutter good-guy cowboy. The protagonist is actually not a very good man at all. He’s a gun for hire that finds a little Mexican town that is divided between two feuding crime families. And he looks at that situation and decides, I can make a lot of money by playing these sides off each other. But what happens through the story is that he starts to pay attention to the injustice that’s going on around him, and something changes in his heart. Despite his own inherent wickedness, he comes to the decision that he is going to set aside his own selfish pursuits, and he’s going to try to make the situation around him better rather than worse. And it seems like an impossible task and he nearly pays with his life for it. But at the end, redemption wins out, and his decision makes life better for everyone around him.
And that’s the better story than the good-guy cowboy story. Because none of us are simply good guys. We are all conflicted and troubled and incompetent. But stories like A Fistful of Dollars tell us that as messed up as we are, if we just choose to seek redemption, we can make things way better than they are. And that’s the Christian story. Colossians 1:20-22 puts it this way: “[Through Jesus, God has reconciled] to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death, in order to present you holy and blameless and without reproach before Him.” And what is the practical effect of this? Verse 10 tells us that we are “to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.”
That’s what the second melody in Tolkien’s story represents. The third melody in Tolkien’s story , the powerful melody which drowns out all rebellion, will be the final judgement at the end of this world, when God’s patience with angel and man alike must come to an end, and he will divide those who chose redemption from those who chose discord. The point is not who sinned, or even who rebelled; we’ve all been born into sin and none of us are without fault. The point is who chooses to pursue the goodness of God. And none of us are able to do that as a bystander. We are all partakers in this life, and mere mental recognition of God will not save us. We must decide that we are going to participate in the type of redemption that Jesus modeled for us. And this sort of choice expresses itself in the choices we make in our families, in our jobs, in our churches, and in every aspect of our lives.
This is what I mean: if we are pleased to receive redemption in Christ, the kind of redemption that promises us forgiveness from sin and eternal life in heaven, then we must also offer redemption to the people around us. 1 John 2:6 demands that “Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” So how to we respond to the colleague who is rude to us, to the homeless man that we think doesn’t deserve a handout, or the friend who does not reciprocate our grace? We have no difficulty in finding rational reasons to reject and separate from these type of people. And this is the way of the world. How often do we hear a psychologist or an influencer or one of our friends tell us that we have to ‘remove toxic people from our life’ for our own mental health? That is not the attitude of Christ. The attitude of Christ is to die for those who hate us. It’s a given that we are a long way away from living out that ideal. But how often are we even honest about that ideal? How often do we instead justify our cold response and ignore the example of Christ?
For example, what if we have a spouse who doesn’t treat us right? Maybe we’ve been married for a long time and we decide, they’re not going to change. If they’re not going to treat me correctly, I’m going to stop putting in the effort. I know there’s some people here going through this, because I’m pretty sure this happens in every relationship to one degree or another, and not just marriages. Are you really satisfied with that kind of life? Are you really ok letting your relationship languish where it is? You can’t control what your spouse does. But you get to choose how you react to life. You get to control your own actions. What could things be like if you decided you were going to starting treating your spouse like it was your wedding day? If you decided that you were simply going to be the best spouse you could be regardless of how they react to you? That sort of behavior can redeem relationships. I know that it can, because the bible talks abut it. As a single example, 1 Peter 3:1 admonished to wives, “be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct.”
And even if they never do respond to your goodwill, what about you? Wouldn’t it be infinitely better for you to be in a mindset of pursuing goodness and hope for better things than for you to give up hope and languish in disillusionment? What kind of life do you want to live? You have control over that.
And what about the church? I have a lot of friends who have left the church because they have been treated badly at one time or another. And I think every one of us in this congregation is sympathetic to that. We’ve all been in crummy church situations. But every one of us who experiences such a situation has a choice: do we abandon the people and the institution that Jesus loves, or do we choose to be a part of redeeming it? In the words of Ephesians 5:23, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.” You all know that I’m not much of an institutionalist. I don’t get very excited about church traditions and church routines and the superficial things that public perception associates the church with. But I am excited about Christ and I love what Christ loves. If Christ established with His death an institution by which the saved are to be associated with, I’m going to be a part of that institution. And I’m going to contend for the best and most Christ-like form of that institution that I read Christ teaching about. Because if we see inadequacies in the church, why would we abandon it and leave it as it is? Why would we insult it and seek vengeance against it? Why would we not try to do our part to make it better?
Look. Jesus lived through one of the crappiest situations that a person can imagine. He was rejected by His own people and His own religious leaders. He was oppressed by His political system. His enemies plotted to have Him killed on false pretenses. One of His closest friends betrayed Him to those enemies. And He looked at all that hatred and betrayal and failure and He decided He was going to choose redemption. He didn’t choose revenge. He didn’t throw up His hands and give up. He didn’t isolate Himself and leave people to their own devices. He chose to do everything He could to make something wonderful in the midst of a crappy situation. And in life, what separates the men from the boys is when we encounter hatred, betrayal, failure, selfishness, and incompetency in the people around us and we choose whether we will respond like Jesus would. That’s the kind of Christian that God is looking for. That’s the kind of person the writer of Hebrews has in mind when he describes men of whom the world was not worthy. And to be that kind of person, we don’t have to be intelligent. We don’t have to be saavy. We don’t have to be free from mistakes. We just have to make a choice, today, about whether we are going to pursue redemption.
Turn with me to Romans 3. A pop culture view of Christianity might say that the good go to heaven and the evil go to hell. That’s not only simplistic; it’s also just wrong. In the words of Romans 3:23, “All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.” How does verse 24 say that we are justified? By our innate goodness? No; we are justified “through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” For what reason did God do it this way? Verse 25: “This was to show God’s righteousness, because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
There’s no point in us comparing our lives or our performance to one another. We all have our own flaws and shortcomings and we each have a different ethical journey. There will be no grandstanding at the final judgement; we will not get into heaven by impressing God with our achievements. There is no bar or standard by which we will make the cut. The only condition will be that we sought God’s redemption and that we responded in faith to His guidance. As Romans 3:28 says, “For we hold that is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”
The wonderful news in that statement is that we don’t have to live in fear from our sins and shortcomings. If we walk in the light, God is faithful to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. But the caveat is that redemption is not an idle task. If we have avowed ourselves as Christians, God will hold us to our promise. And it’s time for us to participate in the music. What work of redemption could there be in your life that you have been idle on? What person have you been avoiding? What unforgiveness have you been harboring? What good works have you neglected? Only you are able to evaluate what you should be undertaking in your own life. We must remember that James 4:17 warns us, “Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”
This shouldn’t be a difficult thing for any of us to accept. Why would we want to be spiritual couch potatoes? If we love reading about redemption in books, seeing redemption in movies, and worshipping the redemption that is in Christ, we should be eager to pursue it in our lives as well. And the best part of it is that we are not doing it alone. When we do what is right, God is present and active in our lives; he works through us. Philippians 1:6 says, “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
Our lives can be so much better if we trust God to help us pursue redemption. You have control over whether you want to do that or not. But we should not doubt that it is possible. Remember Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”