✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit ✠

When we read God’s Word, there’s always the potential that we could misunderstand it. Not simply get the meaning wrong—that happens, too—but we misinterpret its purpose. If we read a book about the history of the ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, or the Ottoman Empire, we will certainly learn things that we hadn’t known before—facts, history—becoming more knowledgeable. To be sure, when we read Scripture, we learn facts and history. But Scripture isn’t primarily for the purpose of giving us factoids. We don’t read the Scriptures in church or at home simply to learn facts about a distant past. 

How does our Lord want us to understand what we read in the Bible? How should we understand everything we just heard right now? Consider what God said to Israel in the wilderness, before and after their 40 years of wandering. 

you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, like the days of the heavens above the earth. (Deuteronomy 11)

This is what we are to do with God’s Word. For the truth of the matter is, it’s not we who read and interpret God’s Word; it’s the Word of God that reads and interprets us. God’s Word tell us who we are. It bestows upon us our identity. It tells us our history. It places us within the narrative of God’s relationship to His people. This is why, we are to read it all of the time, to surround ourselves with it, to inscribe it on hearts. 

Tonight, we haven’t read about the distant past of some foreign people. It is our history. It is our identity. It’s our story. We, we are the children of Adam, created by God—alienated from God and from each other because of our gross, disgusting, selfish, irrational, and idolatrous sins. 

But the most important feature of our identity, is that we are children of God—we are children of the promise, children of God’s salvation. And what our forefathers experienced in the dessert, in the sacrifice of Issac, in David’s conquering of Goliath, in the Lion’s Den, in Nebuchadnezzar’ fiery furnace, and in countless other events, what they experienced in brief, as foretaste, you and I have received in full. It is not a ram in the thicket that dies for us, but the eternal Son of God. We are not saved from some Egyptian Pharoah, or the Red Sea, or a fiery furnace, we are saved from the devil, from sin, from death, from the eternal fires of hell. 

This is our story. This is our identity. We are gathered here tonight because you and I are children of God’s redemption. We are sons and daughters of the Crucified Lord. We are children of the resurrection, and we will follow where our Lord has gone: through death, into the resurrection, to life with God. We are here because Christ is risen: He has conquered death—our death. 

Let us never tire of telling this story—our story. Each time we gather together around altar and pulpit, in our homes in prayer around God’s Word, our identity is strengthened as we become more and more conformed to our crucified and risen Lord. His Word, His absolution, His Body and Blood, inscribe them in your heart and in your soul, bind them as a sign on your hands, as frontlets between your eyes, teach them diligently to your children, eat them, drink them, consume them day after day, month after month, year after year—for this is who you are: children God, children of the promise, children of salvation. 

Alleluia, Christ is Risen.

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit ✠