The View From 1776

Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was preached by Pastor Larry Fullerton, who confessed that sometimes he wishes God were different. 

How satisfying it would be if God employed His awesome power to smash Satan and his emissaries of evil.  How gratifying if God alleviated all the suffering in the world.  How uplifting for the whole world if God simply changed everyone’s spiritual life instantly, making all mankind believers in Jesus Christ.

Clearly Jesus’s ministry on earth satisfied none of these desires.  The Jews expected a military messiah who would overthrow the Romans and re-establish David’s earthly kingdom.  Even Jesus’s disciples, after living with him every day for four years, expected some sort of earthly kingdom, failing to grasp fully Christ’s Divinity and the nature of His mission until after the crucifixion and resurrection.

What emerges from scripture is the reverse of what people expected of the Messiah.  Jesus used, not the powerful rulers or the established religious leaders, but the poor and lowly to demonstrate His power and to convey His message.  Even when challenged directly by Satan, Jesus was remarkably restrained. 

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. 

The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone.’”

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’”

The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here.  For it is written:


 ‘He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’

Jesus answered, “It says: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’"   

When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time. (Luke 4:1-13)

John Milton makes Christ’s temptation by Satan a central element in his Paradise Regained. Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in the celebrated parable of The Grand Inquisitor, pictures Jesus condemned to death because, rather than destroying Satan, Jesus in effect had left us with free will to chose between Satan and God.  The Grand Inquisitor thought that humans are too weak to live under that obligation.

Jesus elected not to play the game by Satan’s rules.  His restraint, instead, gives us the opportunity to resist temptation and to follow Him of our own free will.

We are to follow Jesus and to spread the Gospel.  But attacking non-believers, verbally or otherwise, is the opposite of the restraint Jesus displayed in the desert and throughout His earthly ministry.  We can convey God’s word to unbelievers, but they must choose to accept it.  We are to be lampstands of light in the darkness radiating God’s love.

If I speak in human or angelic tongues, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body [to hardship] that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.  When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:1-13)