Malachi 3:1-3 “See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty. But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness.

God’s promises to send two people: the messenger who would prepare his way. That is John the Baptist. Then “the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple.” That was Jesus. The Lord they were looking for was going to come, just as they asked.

But it can be a dangerous thing to ask for God to come. Refining and laundering are both pictures of cleansing. This isn’t a relaxing shower or a soothing bath. This is burning away the impurities in a blast furnace. This is soaking the pants in lye and rubbing them over a washboard and maybe beating them over a rock until the stain comes out. This is the painful process of leading people to surrender to God and repent of their sin.

There is a scene in the C.S. Lewis book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in which one of the characters, Eustace Scrubb, has discovered a dragon’s treasure on an enchanted island. It fills him with all kinds of greed, and he plots how to take it all for himself without anyone else finding out. As he plans and plots, he falls asleep, and when he awakes, he has become a dragon himself. It is all a picture of how our sin and selfishness make us like THE Dragon. They spoil our hearts. They ruin us as human beings, turning us into creatures of an entirely different sort than God made us to be.

Eustace is desperate to become a little boy again. It occurs to him that scaly dragons are snake like. Perhaps he can shed his skin and become the boy he once was. Three times he scrapes the scales off his body, only to find that he hasn’t changed underneath. He is still the dragon. That should come as no real surprise, because that’s what happens when a snake sheds its skin, too, isn’t it. It remains a snake. It can’t really change itself.

Then Aslan the Lion, the Jesus character in the book, appears. He tells Eustace, “You will have to let me undress you.” And Eustace is afraid of his claws. He knows it will hurt, but he lets him do it. So Aslan goes to work pulling the dragon skin off. It hurts worse than anything Eustace has ever felt, but it is the only way to escape the dragon body he has become. In the end Aslan has stripped Eustace of his dragon body, and washes him up, and gives him new clothes to wear.

When John the Baptist and Jesus came to God’s people, the people had been looking for them. They wanted the Messenger and their Lord to come. But this is what God wanted to do to his people through them: burn and scrub away their sin and selfishness, tear away their dragon scales, turn them back into his children. For some the process was too scary, too painful. They didn’t go through with it–the Pharisees, the Priests, Judas.

For us, the Lord wants the same thing. He doesn’t want us to peel off our own scales, softly and gently, when we make the easy choices and give up the vices we never really liked anyway. That is a limp and weak repentance, no real repentance at all. He wants to get his claws deep into our souls. He tears through our favorite sins and underneath them. He gets to the heart that is the root of the problem. Tearing the old creature away is necessary for us to become people of God.

Then he can wash us in Jesus’ blood. Then he can dress us in Jesus’ righteousness and love. “Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.” So cleansed can we live and love and give as the Lord wants us to do.

Malachi 2:17 “You have wearied the Lord with your words. ‘How have we wearied him, you ask?’ By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them,’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?’”

            People are confused about the kind of God they want. Sometimes they want a “just” God. Then they complain that he isn’t “just” enough. People have told me they can’t believe in a God who lets innocent children be abused or go hungry. At the very least he should see that the perpetrators are punished. One person who took my Bible information class balked at the idea that God could forgive a murderer and let him go to heaven. I heard comedian Bill Maher take exception to certain Christians who thought that the assassination of terrorist Osama bin Laden was the wrong way to serve him justice. Certainly, he thought, a just god should find this acceptable.

            On the other hand, when the Lord does display his justice, many get upset about that, too. They accuse God of atrocities and war crimes for the way he dealt with the Canaanites in the Old Testament–urging their annihilation. They don’t consider that violence and sexual perversion had infected almost every feature of their culture. For most of them, their worship involved prostitution. For others, they burned their own children alive in the fiery arms of the false god Molech. This was considered an acceptable, normal part of their daily life.

And the Lord was patient with these peoples and cultures for half a millennium or more. But people criticize him when, after hundreds of years, his patience ran out and he served justice on the whole society. What do they think a just God is going to do when Judgment Day comes?

Four hundred years before Christ, Israel had the same confused ideas about God that many people have today. Through Malachi the Lord addressed some of their specific complaints. “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord.” It seemed to them that God somehow favored the people with the worst behavior. They wanted the Lord to bring down justice on their less than holy neighbors. Justice on their own lives? Not so much.

            So, with many people, the Lord can’t win. They are against him when he is gracious and patient, and they are against him when he is just and firm. Here is the irony: a God who is both gracious and just is the kind of God we need. Deep down inside, he is also the kind of God we want. Where is he? In the words of prophets and apostles, and the preachers who preach their message today.

Jeremiah 33:16 “In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord our Righteousness.”

When we think of being saved, we think especially of the cross. We think especially of the blood of Jesus’ paying for our sins. We think of God’s grace forgiving every fault and sparing us of the hell we deserved as a gift of his love, and rightly so. This is what Jesus came to do for us.

But when Jeremiah wrote, those were not details the Lord had shared with his people yet. They had hints and pictures of it in the prophecies and in the sacrifices of their temple worship, but the details of Jesus saving us would still wait hundreds of years to be seen.

So Jeremiah pictures God’s saving work another way. You may remember that he is writing at a time when the Babylonians had taken over the land of Judah and surrounded the city of Jerusalem. God’s people were under attack. It was not a safe time to be a Jewish citizen.

This future King from David’s line, however, would make God’s people safe again. The Hebrew word for “saved” pictures a person being delivered to a wide a spacious place, where you are free to move and roam. There are no threats, no enemies to be seen anywhere around. The Hebrew word for “safety” describes a person so free from any danger that they have this absolute sense of confidence and trust. That is just about the opposite of the experience of the Jewish people to whom Jeremiah wrote, surrounded by their enemies.

Since that time, neither Judah nor Jerusalem have literally been so “saved” or “safe.” After the Persians let them go back home, Alexander the Great and the Greeks swept through and subjugated them. At the time of Jesus, it was the Romans. To this day the literal land of Israel is surrounded by enemies who would like nothing more than to squeeze them out of existence.

But if this is a picture of the work of King Jesus, then we aren’t talking about a national, political safety anyway. This is a spiritual picture of the results of Jesus’ work. Under Jesus we are safe from the enemies of our faith, safe from sin, safe from death. That’s why the people of God will be called “The Lord our Righteousness.” We are righteous and safe from sin and hell because Jesus has taken it all away. And ultimately, this is the safety all God’s people will have on the day that is coming, when Jesus returns to take his people home to the New Jerusalem in heaven.

Jeremiah 33:15 “In those days and at that time I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line; he will do what is just and right in the land.”

Do you ever get depressed about our current crop of leaders? Politicians make all kinds of promises to get elected. Then it seems their main concern becomes getting re-elected. Sometimes it seems as if they would sell their souls to stay in office. They aren’t concerned with doing what is right for the country. Personal morals and decency don’t concern many of them at all. Between 2010 and 2020 more than 105 members of our congress came under investigation or had to resign due to issues ranging from bribery to sexual harassment to ethics violations.

Ancient Israel had its own leadership problems. King David, the good king, the model king, committed adultery and murder while in office. It went downhill from there. As Jeremiah wrote, King Zedekiah was the spineless puppet of special interest groups in Judah fighting an unwinnable war and driving the nation toward catastrophe. I have to think that a faithful Jew in 600 B.C. complained as much about the state of their government as we do, maybe more.

That being said, the Lord tends to give a nation the kind of leaders it deserves. It’s not as though the typical Jewish citizen was a model of godly behavior in Jeremiah’s day. They were materialistic. They took advantage of the poor. They were sexually promiscuous, considering themselves “liberated” from God’s standards. They had stopped attending temple or abandoned the Bible faith for other strange religions. Sound like the citizens of any country you know?

Against that backdrop, the Lord’s promise is that much more striking. “I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line. He will do what is just and right in the land.” To be “righteous” in Bible terms means that one’s life and actions conform to God’s standards. The Lord was promising a leader who was guided, not by what was popular or trendy. It would not be his goal to please people or conform to the culture. His only guide would be the law of God, the morals laid out in the 10 commandments, that standard of right and wrong recorded in the Holy Scriptures. His life would be consistent with that standard with no exceptions made for anyone, ever.

That description fits Jesus to a “T,” who was “tempted in every way just as we are, yet was without sin. When he laid down the challenge to his enemies to convict him of some sort of sin, they had no reply, because they had nothing with which to accuse him. Even when they tried to pay false witnesses to accuse him, they couldn’t get their accusations to line up. He was the righteous Branch from David’s line.

He was the kind of King we need. You can trust that a leader like that “will do what is just and right in the land.” Earthly, material, political kingdoms don’t work like that, not in this world. There is little tolerance for consistent justice and integrity. Scandal and power seem to go hand in hand.

Jesus did not aspire to set up a material, political kingdom anyway. As it was, his righteous life got him crucified by those in authority. But he was and is a King nonetheless. He set up his kingdom in human hearts. He still does. He rules by faith. He turns enemies into subjects by winning them with his love. He does not pander to his constituents. He does forgive them when they stumble. As he changes hearts from defiant rebels to willing followers, he leads them toward the same kind selfless, serving, righteous, loving behavior that marked his own life. When we look at the day that was coming for Jeremiah and his people, the one that has come with Jesus, a righteous Branch has appeared. “He does what is just and right in the land.”

Jeremiah 33:14 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will fulfill the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah.”

Ever wondered about God’s promises? Our experience with his short-term promises may leave us in doubt about the long-term ones. “Don’t worry about food or clothes or necessities of life,” Jesus says. “Your Father in heaven will take care of all that.” But we know Christian people who have faced eviction, bankruptcy, or hunger. Maybe the person you know is yourself.

“If you make the Most High your dwelling–even the Lord, who is my refuge–then no harm will befall you, no disaster will come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways…” Psalm 91 promises. There is no asterisk in the text, no small print stating, “Offer excludes Oklahoma tornadoes, Alaskan earthquakes, California wildfires, various car accidents, and other unspecified or man-made catastrophes.”

As a pastor I depend daily on God’s promise in Isaiah 55, “My word will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” I have shared that word with thousands of people during my ministry. Sometimes it feels like that word is coming back empty.

How do we reconcile these promises with our experience? None of these promises intends to disprove or contradict other things God tells us in his word, like “In this world you will have much trouble,” or “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” Having the necessities to live is not the same thing as never experiencing hunger, poverty, or pain. And God never promises we will live in this world forever. He has to use something to end our lives here and take us home. As for his word, while he wants everyone to be saved, his purpose in any individual case when his word is heard may not necessarily be some person’s conversion.

 For our doubts, we still have the big, world-changing promises like the ones he gives here. The Lord promised to send his people a Deliverer, a Savior, the Messiah. A hundred years before Jeremiah he gave the promise to Isaiah. Three hundred years before Isaiah he had given the promise to King David. In other forms the promise had existed for thousands of years before that.

Then Jesus came. It may have been hundreds, even thousands of years later for some of these men, but he came. The Lord fulfilled “the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah,” just as he said. The details of Jesus’ coming fulfill at least 300 prophecies about the circumstances. In 1952 Peter Stoner, Professor of mathematics and astronomy at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, worked out the statistical probabilities of one man fulfilling just eight of those prophecies, and the chances are one out of 10 to the seventeenth, or one out of 100 quadrillion. For the believer, of course, the fulfillment of all 300 plus has always been a given, because God keeps his word.

That reassures us as we wait for the next big prophecy, when Jesus comes again. The passing of thousands of years did not prevent the fulfillment of his first coming. We can be confident the Lord will fulfill his promise when we look at the day that is coming, because God keeps his word.

Psalm 136:1 “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love (or mercy) endures forever.”

The goodness of God for which we give thanks does not come only because we need what he does for us. A little over 15 years ago, when I was still in school, my car ran out of gas on my way to work one night. I was traveling along I-43 in Milwaukee, WI. It was a cold night in January. I wasn’t sitting on the side of the road long before a policeman stopped to see what was wrong. Since I really didn’t have many other options considering the weather and the distance to a gas station or pay phone, he gave me a ride to get some gas for the car. He took care of what I needed, but I could tell from the way he talked to me and his whole demeanor that he considered this some sort of imposition. He was a little bit irked about having to bail me out this way. He was doing it only because I needed it.

Could you or I get by for a minute without our Lord’s help? Our gas tanks are perpetually stuck on empty when it comes to our needs, both spiritual and physical. Our Lord never fails to stop and give us whatever we need, but he doesn’t see it as an imposition. In fact, he has command us, “Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.”

So it is that all the good things he does for us are tokens of his love and affection. You know, when we give to God, we don’t do it because he needs anything from us. He tells us in Psalm 50, “I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills.” Still, the Lord desires our gifts as tokens of our love. He wants them to be expressions of our hearts.

The fact is that we do need God’s gifts, but that doesn’t change the fact that his gifts are still tokens of his affection for us. Those gifts, whether spiritual or physical, express the love in his heart that never changes. The gifts of forgiveness and faith, the promise of heaven and the hope that it gives us right now, are not cold, unfeeling functions he performs. They are expressions of love no less than the flowers, candies, gifts, or surprises shared between lovers. He does not supply us with food, family, and friends like some cosmic paymaster, some other-worldly company bookkeeper, disinterestedly, dispassionately processing the payroll for the millions and billions of employees here on earth. These are God’s personal expressions of love and mercy.

That love and mercy extend back through the centuries. They gave Noah reason to build an altar, David and Solomon reason to build a temple, Jesus’ disciples reason to spread a message, the Pilgrims reason to start a holiday, and us reason to set aside some time and offer the Lord a prayer of thanksgiving today. That love and mercy, which have always been there for us, will endure forever, and that is what we pray on Thanksgiving Day.

This prayer is not unique to this psalm. It is repeated in Psalm 100, 106, 107, and 118. It was used as a part of every Passover feast. Jesus would have spoken these words at some point during the Last Supper. King David used them in his prayer when he brought the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem and made that city Israel’s official place of worship. How fitting that we pray them at Thanksgiving, because the Lord has been good to us, and his mercy endures forever.

Revelation 1:5-6 “To him who loves us, and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father–to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.”

Are you proud to be an American? Maybe you take exception to some decision or other our leaders make from time to time, but for the most part we like being part of this nation. I once spent part of a day with a visiting pastor from China. We were comparing our two countries. One difference he pointed out: “You Americans love your country.” We are proud to belong to the most powerful nation on earth, the nation strives to stand for what is good in this world, which provides its citizens with the highest standard of living, that expends its resources to try to bring freedom and a better life to others. There is a sense of privilege that goes along with being a citizen of the United States.

The citizenship Jesus has given us in his kingdom is a far higher one. He makes us all royalty. Even now you are a “blue blood,” a part of the nobility of heaven. The Apostle Peter echoes these same words in his first letter when he calls us a “royal priesthood.” Now everything serves you, because God promises that in all things he works for your good.

Do you like to trace your family tree to know who you are? By faith you are now part of a royal family that can trace its roots through Adam and Abraham, David and Daniel, Peter and Paul, and especially our dear brother Jesus. That’s your lineage, your heritage, your ancestry by faith. Jesus has ennobled you and me by making us part of his kingdom.

In that kingdom we all serve God as his priests. That is a privilege because it means we have direct access to God. Sometimes people come to me as pastor, and they want me to pray for them because they believe I have some kind of “in” with God. They suspect that I have God’s ear in a way that others do not.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to pray for you. But pastors have no special access to God. John doesn’t say that Jesus made a few of us priests. He made a whole kingdom full of priests. Every one of you enjoys this direct, individual, personal relationship with God. When you come to God he’s not going to say, “Who sent you? What are you doing here?” He welcomes you as one of the priests whom Jesus has called and ordained by faith.

This is also a privilege because God has entrusted his sacrifices into our hands. They aren’t bloody. We don’t sacrifice animals. Jesus made the sacrifice for sin once for all. But God has entrusted us all with sacrifices of praise. We offer our bodies as living sacrifices when we use them to serve. We share our faith with others. We let our hands and feet become God’s tools for loving those he has placed in our path. This sacrifice of praise continues as long as his kingdom: “to him be power and glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

Revelation 1:5-6 “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.

John begins this little word of praise with “to him (that is, Jesus) who loves us.” I want you to notice something about the word “love” right away. It is in the present tense. John says, “To him who loves us,” as in “right now.” He does not say, “To him who loved us,” as in “thousands of years ago when he was still alive.” Jesus is not merely a great hero from the past whom we study as a part of history. Jesus is just as alive as your living friends and family members today, only he loves you more. Even though we have never seen him with our eyes, he is someone that we know and love personally, only he loves us more. Jesus rose from the dead, body and soul, and is very much alive and well at this very moment, loving you more than anyone else ever has or can.

Of course, you knew this already. But let these words sink in. When the Apostle John first wrote them over 1900 years ago to Christians living in what is now Turkey, he was writing to people who might have wondered whether they were really true. The Church was going through some terrible times. The Roman Empire was rounding up pastors of churches in some parts of the empire and beheading them or sending them away to exile. John himself had been exiled to the island of Patmos. Under such conditions it would have been easy for Christians to wonder whether Jesus really was alive and in control. Even if he was, did he really love them anymore? They needed to hear, “Jesus loves you right now.”

What about you? Jesus loves you right now, but I suspect you could come up with (so-called) evidence to the contrary. A few years ago I received a phone call from a man who asked me, “Where can I find a gracious God?” “Jesus shows us God is gracious,” I told him. “But where can I find him”? He was convinced that God did not love him, that God’s promises applied only to other people who had happier lives. In a single year, his wife had left him and taken the children, he had lost his home and his job, and he was left with nothing. In his heart he was agonizing over whether Jesus really loved him anymore.

This is why your pastors come calling when you are in the hospital, or when there has been a death in the family. We need to hear that Jesus loves us right now, even when he has decided to take that child who seemed too young to die away from us, or that husband, wife, friend, or family member we always leaned on suddenly isn’t there anymore. Jesus still loves you, right now, even when the doctor tells you the pain isn’t going to go away. In fact, it’s likely to get worse.

Or how about after you or I have committed the “Big One”? Or how about the steady stream of ordinary sins we churn out like a factory running at full capacity. our assembly line steadily turns them out, each one an unimaginative copy of the other. Once again this week I deserved to go hell. Most of the sin looks a lot like last week’s. Shouldn’t God get tired of it? Don’t we make ourselves impossible to love?

But there is one thing steadier than my sin, and that is Jesus’ love for us. More than anything else it is that love– the same love with which he loved me yesterday, the same love with which he loves me today, and the same love with which he will love me when I have passed from time into eternity– it is that love which invaded my heart and conquered this piece of real estate for his kingdom. Jesus is our king because he loves us, today and always. Surely, he deserves our praise!

Romans 2:3-4 “So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?”

A biblical sense of right and wrong has fallen out of fashion in many places. Gossip is celebrated as a form of entertainment on a half-dozen or more TV shows dedicated to exposing every celebrity’s most private moments. It is defended as the public’s “right to know,” whatever that means. Fornication is embraced as a rite of passage, a harmless pastime, or a necessary experience to prepare for marriage. Obscenity is nothing more than a way to say it with an exclamation point. Defying authority is cool. In some circles, even violence earns you “street cred.”

But when Jesus says, “Judge not, lest you be judged,” everyone’s head nods in agreement. And how can we argue, if Jesus said it? “Judgmentalism” is something everyone condemns, mostly unaware of the irony of the position they have taken.

The first two and a half chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans is merciless in attacking human pride and rebellion. This is God’s judgment, not Paul’s. Chapter one concluded with a rapid fire exposé of humanity’s crimes: willful and knowing rejection of the truth, idolatry, homosexual perversion, envy, murder, malice, slander, arrogance, inventive evil, heartlessness and ruthlessness to give just a sampling. As we watch Paul’s assault on immorality, anyone with moral sense is tempted to stand in his corner, cheering him on. “You go, Paul! Let ’em have it!”

But we aren’t getting Paul until we see his fingers pointing at us. Survey after survey shows that we Christians are practically indistinguishable from our non-Christian neighbors. We destroy our marriages at the same rate as the world around us. We watch the same trash on television that everyone else does. We abuse alcohol and drugs at about the same rate as the unbelieving world. Research by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith suggests that there is little or no difference between the belief system (the belief system!) of a typical American Christian teen and his non-Christian counterpart.

The point is not to let us breathe a little sigh of relief because we aren’t worse than everybody else. The point is not to excuse or defend ourselves. Chances are that, if we take an honest inventory of our own lives, we don’t come out smelling so pretty. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” the saying goes, and the same thing is true in God’s court. But at least my non-Christian neighbor could plead ignorance in certain cases. I can’t. “So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?”

Romans 2 convinces us that our sins deserve one thing: God’s judgment. But that’s not the life we have experienced. “Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?” The kindnesses of God in our lives are impossible to enumerate. When I take a breath, it is not the burning, sulfurous atmosphere of hell I inhale, but air that is pure enough and rich enough to sustain my life a few moments longer. I am surrounded by friends and family that care for me. I am served in a society filled with people who watch out for my safety, assist with my health, and produce the products I need to survive. I am not alone among jeering demons celebrating a misery I share with them. I have lived in a smallish, one bedroom apartment as well as 2000 square foot houses. Both were comfortable and pleasant enough places to live. Neither one was the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels Jesus describes as the final fate of the lost.

Just for the sake of argument, take all of that away, and still God has been tolerant and patient with me in the extreme. Each new sin is still forgiven. I am a believer by God’s grace, but getting my heart and mind in line with God’s own has come slowly. Eruptions of anger, pride, lust, doubt, impatience, worry, greed, and envy are far more common than I care to admit. Still, God forgives. Still, he works with me. Still, he isn’t too disgusted or frustrated to claim me as his own child and let me claim him as my own Father. It seems as though his patience is inexhaustible!

When I compare these two things–the judgment of God against sin, and the goodness and forgiveness he continues to show me–there is only one conclusion, one “judgment:” I have been the recipient of a love I don’t deserve. This is the repentance to which Paul says God’s kindness wants to lead us–not just regret over our sins, but an awareness of the great grace we have been shown. Here we find an unshakable confidence in the God who has shown us such love.