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“God
Is My Help”
a sermon by
Thomas L. Jenkins
Text: Luke 16:19-31
“The
poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.”
The reason I titled this sermon “God Is My Help” is because that is
the literal translation of the name Lazarus.
Lazarus means “God is my help.”
And this is the only parable Jesus ever told where he used a
person’s name.
When Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount, as it is written in
Matthew’s Gospel, he began with the words, “Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn for they shall be comforted.”
Why? Because God is
their help! Jesus has
a totally different vision and understanding of who we are and what we
are going through. A very
clear prayer that we may continually have to Christ is profoundly to ask
him to help us understand our lives as he does.
God’s ways are not our ways. And,
what we often think of as prosperity and wealth, based on worldliness,
is actually even close to a curse, in comparison to God being our help. God being our help is far more glorious than anything we can
do for ourselves.
The very sufferings that we experience, in this world, are almost
heavenly compared to the hell God has already saved us from.
What we think of as evil is light-years above real hell.
Jesus is telling this parable to the Pharisees who are mad at Jesus
because of his saying to them, “you cannot serve God and money.” Jesus then said to them, “You
are those who justify yourselves
in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by
human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.”
There are a lot of commentaries about the wickedness of this rich man,
being that he did not do anything to help Lazarus that he did not even
care. (I went to a spiritual retreat conference one time when I was in
college. And a well known
preacher, at that time, Tony Campolo, stood up in the pulpit and said,
“40,000 human beings are dying every week in certain parts of Africa,
due to hunger, and most of us don’t even give a ‘shit.’
And what really bothers me, is that most of us are more upset
that I just said the “S” word from the pulpit, instead of the fact
that 40,000 humans are dying weekly due to hunger.”)
It is true; this rich man did not reach out to the poor man lying
at his gate.
There is another aspect of this rich man that we need to notice.
Even while he was in Hades, he was the one who thought he knew
how things should be done to get what he wanted.
He didn’t look up to Abraham, and ask him a question,
“Father, is there any way I can be helped?” No, he looked up and called out, “Father, Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of
his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these
flames.”
In how the book of Genesis elaborates on the original sin, it simply
shows that Adam and Eve made the decision to serve themselves instead of
obeying God.
Yes, this rich man, manipulatively, did use the words, “I beg you,” to send
Lazarus, but when Abraham told him that they already have Moses and the
prophets, the rich man argued with him, telling Abraham how it is.
This rich man turned to himself as his own god.
That is what the Pharisees were doing in their legalistic
religion. Religion can be an idol when we desire to keep it under our
control and serve ourselves through it, to make ourselves right with
God.
Another truth that the Pharisees did not get, and we probably do not see
real quickly, either, is that Abraham, having the authoritative words,
pointing to Moses and the prophets, is not the ultimate figure of Christ
(or God) in the parable. Lazarus
is the vision of Christ.
Yes, God is the strongest, the most powerful right handed ground of all
being; there is no being with the strength, authority, sovereignty,
wisdom, spirit, life and energy as God.
But, God did not save us with his powerful right hand.
God’s salvation is left-handed.
The cross reveals the left-handed power of God; the will to lie
down for us.
Good mothers have to use both right-handed and left-handed power.
If a mother is crossing the street with her four—year—old she
will say, “You must hold on my hand and come with me: this is a
dangerous road and I’m not having you sit down in the middle of it.
And, “No, you cannot have a box of matches to play with.
I don’t care if your best friend’s mother lets him play with
matches. YOU ARE NOT; so
that’s the end of it, and let’s have no argument.”
But, let her try that kind of power in ten or twelve years, and
she’s going to have lots of trouble.
And, so at that point there has to be a turn—around, a totally
different power game, one in which the power wielder has to be the one
who is willing to be defeated, if that is what will help the child.
God was willing to be defeated by evil’s most powerful blow in
order to bring us to where God wants us to be.
Lazarus is a figure of the kind of human God became in Jesus Christ, in
order to bring us into God’s eternal life.
Jesus was a worldly poor, 33 year old man, who was persecuted and
nailed to death on a cross.
And another amazing way to see this is that Jesus was not the tool God
used to fix the world. Jesus
is not the pair of pliers that God held in his hands, reached down into
the world, and then used to fix it so that if people believed in his
work, they would then be saved.
Jesus Christ is the new world that we and God are all in. Here are some of Paul’s prophetic words of Jesus, “He
is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation…all
things have been created through him and for him.
He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold
together.”
At the end of the parable, as Abraham was correcting the rich man, he
told him about his brothers: “If
they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be
convinced if someone rises from the dead.”
The ultimate truth of the Bible is about who Jesus Christ is, what
became of him, and what that has to do with us.
God the Father elected God the Son to become us, to die on the
cross so that the old Adam and Eve could be done away with, and then
raised him to be seated at his right side, which means that in Jesus
Christ, God is with us on our left side, our weakness side.
And we have already been blessed with all the treasures of heaven
in Jesus Christ. This has
already been accomplished.
This is what we need to continue to know and believe in, and have in our
minds and hearts as we continue to read the Bible.
As this is the framework in which we continue to read God’s
scriptures, listen to Moses and the prophets, we will see one raised
from the dead.
As we begin to have profound vision of the good news in Jesus Christ,
then when we read Bible verses like Roman’s 6:10, “The
death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he
lives to God. So you also
must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God,” it speaks
to us in what we believe is our reality.
Jesus died to sin, once for all.
That was the only one death that was needed, and he died that
death for every one of us. And
now, the life he lives, he lives to God. And that is exactly how you and I are to consider ourselves.
We are dead to sin and alive to God.
That is the definition of who we are; which is why we may cry
out, GOD IS MY HELP.
Let us pray…
Amen
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