From the Archive: Idols, Invitations, and the Immortal
Their God has been going before them, but they want something different.
Israel wanted images of their new gods. Their God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses was invisible. The living God could be seen through fire and cloud, plague, passover and parting the sea, but the people wanted something they could look at. In their short-sighted haste, they trade the invisible for the visible, the one true God for a false idol, the omnipotent for the impotent.
Sermon: Is the LORD Among Us or Not?
Jesus tells them that tax collectors and prostitutes are getting into the kingdom of God ahead of them. His cousin, John the baptizer, came with the good news and the religious elite didn’t listen but the social outcasts did. Birthday parties for prostitutes, receptions for tax collectors, banquets for lepers and sinners and ragamuffins. The mercy of God has been on full display with all of the wrong sorts of people getting in like Flynn to the kingdom of God and it has not moved the religious crowd toward conversion, confession, or conviction.
Instead, their hearts have calcified.
He says: And even after you saw it, you didn’t change your mind and believe.
Again, I ask, Is the LORD among us or not?
Sermon: Are You Envious Because I am Generous?
And of all the audacious acts that Nineveh could conceive, it never occurred to Jonah that they just might accept the invitation. Despite his eventual willingness to see the mission through to completion, Jonah had not wrapped his mind around the great grandiosity of God’s graciousness or the magnificent might of his mercy.