Along the Lenten Road: The Road Begins

February 28, 1993

Download Sermon

Scripture: Genesis 12:1-8

Where does the road to Calvary begin? Does it begin with the Via Dolorosa, the tearstained way of Roman Catholic liturgy, the traditional route from Judgment Hall to Golgotha, over which Jesus limped painfully, dragging His Cross of execution?

Where does the road to Calvary begin? Does it begin with the entrance to Jerusalem that bright Sunday morning we now call Palm Sunday, when He rode into town on a donkey to the exultant shouts of misconstruing bystanders?

Where DOES the road to Calvary begin? Does it begin when He left the plush region of Galilee, where for 3 years He had enjoyed almost unlimited success and approbation and turned His face steadfastly toward Jerusalem?

Does it begin when He came down from the Mount of Transfiguration and into the Valley of growing opposition?

Does it begin the day He went from His Baptism out into the Wilderness to wrestle agonizingly with the implications of what it would mean to be a suffering Messiah?

Does it begin as far back as the journey to Bethlehem His mother and father made when they had to go to that village to be enrolled because of a decree from Caesar Augustus?

WHERE DOES THE ROAD TO CALVARY BEGIN? I suppose you could make a case for any of these as starting points on the road to the Cross. Jesus passed along them all on His way to death for our salvation.

But isn’t the Lenten road, at least in a sense, older than any of these? The physical sites I’ve just mentioned are only points, way stations, along the near end of it. We pass by a number of those points every year when we retrace the steps of Jesus up from the Lake, where He could have stayed, and where the disciples pleaded with Him to stay, to the thin, cold air of the hill of the Skull, where they crucified Him.

The near end of the road is familiar to all of us.

Yet doesn’t the road to Calvary really start long before the fateful, final week of Jesus’ earthly life, long before the solemn trudge to Jerusalem, long before the public ministry, even before the birth in a manger.... I don’t know how many of the specific details about what He was in for Jesus Himself knew ahead of time. Was His omniscience such that He was aware in advance of everything that was in store for Him from the outset of His ministry, from the time He was 12? Did He know then, as early as that, that He was destined for Crucifixion?

Reputable scholars can’t come to an agreement about it. The Church has never been able to speak here with a single voice. In Watergate language,[1] WHAT DID HE KNOW, AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? I certainly don’t know.

It does seem to be, for what it’s worth, and that may not be much, that attributing to Him perfect foresight too early undercuts both the drama and the deepest meaning of that awful struggle in the Garden the night before they nailed Him up. Even at that late moment, it would appear, He hoped and prayed passionately that it wouldn’t have to be that way.

Knowing everything ahead of time, having an hour by hour, minute by minute timetable would rob Him of that about Him which is most poignantly human....AND THAT WHICH MAKES HIM MOST HEROIC. From the human side, here is the true splendor of the Passion Story. HE PRECISELY DIDN’T KNOW...and yet, He went ahead anyway, trusting in the character and integrity of the Father.

So we’re thrown back to the unfolding plan of God, and obviously over our heads. Where does the road to Calvary begin? Was the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth in 30 A.D. on a particular plot of land, on a hill, outside a particular city wall, by the edict of a particular Roman administrator the culmination of a plan that was fixed at Creation? How presumptuous to think we have either the knowledge or the capacity to penetrate that kind of mystery.

Better a more modest perspective. Let’s trace it back as far as we can see, as far as the Biblical record allows us to see.

The Bible, our Book, is the story of human redemption, or at least the first part of that story, the cosmic drama of the divine rescue of a fallen and lost humanity....

That’s the plot line, and as the Bible tells it, that story begins with a man and his family pulling up stakes from their old place of residence and moving out under the direction of God to a site unknown, with resources undisclosed, for a purpose unrevealed.

All they took with them was an invitation to be a part of something big and noble, and a promise that the One who invited would be with them. Not much to go on, in a sense. The whole subsequent saga emanates from that small, but courageous opening. The road to Calvary really begins in Ur of the Chaldees.

All before that is really prologue to the main story. We spent some time last year, you remember, on those early Genesis stories. They deal with the human situation apart from God, when people are cut off from God....

They deal with what happens when people try to live as if God doesn’t matter. They’re a brilliantly written, terrifying accurate portrait of God’s good creation gone amok through human pride and arrogance....When the prologue ends, life is a MESS, an absolute DEBACLE, torn apart by chaos and confusion. It always happens that way when God is left out. No subsequent artist has ever painted the inevitable deadendedness of estrangement from God more probingly than the writers of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.

BUT THEN, the real story starts. Against that bleak, grim background, God begins His rescue operation. What astonishes you immediately, is the subtlety and restraint of it. It’s as if God has all the time in the world...which, come to think of it, I suppose He has....

BUT IT DOES SURPRISE YOU---all that work to do, all that mess to untangle, and all that unlimited power to do it with, yet it’s so muted, His approach, that’s the astonishing thing, it’s so downplayed. There is such a respect for human freedom. HE GETS HOLD OF ONE MAN, one lone, solitary individual, and finds enough responsiveness to plant a dream. That’s all there is at first.

STRANGE! The road to Calvary both begins and ends with one man. Between those twin poles in the Biblical saga, the pioneer of God, and the Son of God, there would be the elapse of centuries, the coming and going of countless players, twists and turns in the story line, moments of stunning breakthrough, and moments of depressing setback, radiance and gloom, progress and apostasy, insight and falling away, BUT AT BOTH THE OUTSET AND THE CLIMAX OF THE DRAMA OF HUMAN REDEMPTION, as the Bible tells it, THE PLOT FOCUSES ON A SINGLE PERSON.

Jesus took with Him to the Cross the culmination of an evolving story, a complex story with many ramifications, but held together a unifying cord---THE RESCUE OF A LOST WORLD.

There’s the Bible story in briefest synopsis form: SALVATION HISTORY...through the calling of a people to live in Covenant relationship with God, to be witnesses, to be testifiers, to be sufferers, to be servants for the benefit of all people...God’s plan. It’s a high, tough calling, easily misconstrued, easily twisted, easily diluted, as the Bible shows it was, over and over, a calling attractive at first only to those with a touch of heroism in their hearts.

The realization of it finally found embodiment in ONE MAN. It took literally millennia before it could come, before God was ready to send Him. The time wasn’t ripe, for a long time. But when it was, and God did finally send Him, in the fullness of time, He not only fulfilled the Old Testament calling, He overflowed it, pressed down and running over. The crucial moment of the rescue—“crucial” being the exactly precise word---the crucial moment of the rescue was affected in Him...as the old hymn puts it, “on a green hill far away, without a city wall.” THE POWER OF SIN TO ENSLAVE WAS BROKEN ON THAT HILL.

That’s the climax of the story, a story, of course, still going on, with you and me, now, in the cast of characters.

But as it centers on one Man at its focal point, so it also begins, way back there, in the heart and responsiveness of a single, human individual.

How do you account for someone like Abram? Where do people like that come from? If you look at his story from the perspective of common sense, from a secular point of view...if you try to evaluate his motivation from any standard other than the spiritual, his conduct is preposterous. What else can you call it?

You don’t just pack up everything and move out without some idea where you’re going. You don’t just leave home, and property, and neighbors, and country to go somewhere you never heard of, with no notion of how long you’ll stay, and what you’ll do when you get there, and even why it is you’re going in the first place. AND WHO IS THIS GOD WHO COMES CALLING LIKE THIS OUT OF THE BLUE? What kind of credit rating does He have?

Abram was either the most faith-filled person in the early part of the Bible, or he was the biggest fool. It takes the rest of the story to supply the answer.

Isn’t it interesting that in the record we have, the narrative left for us by the ancient writers, there is no mention anywhere of any dialogue between Abram and God, at this point. Nowhere here, nowhere in the story does Abram ever say anything. Right at the end of the passage, it does tell us that he called on the name of the Lord, but that’s later, and at best it’s indirect.

How different from most Biblical encounters....Remember Moses, and Gideon, and Samuel, and Jeremiah, and Jonah, how they argued with God before they acquiesced. They struggled long and hard before they yielded, made excuses, tried to back out, tried to say NO. That’s the Old Testament norm.

Abram’s grandson, ol’ Jacob, kept up a running fight with God nearly all his life.

There’s no evidence of that in Abram’s call. The Word from this strange, mysterious God comes, saying, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you....”

SO ABRAM WENT...and in the going, without question, without quibbling, without hesitation becomes for us as he has become for all the Jews and all the Christians and all the Muslims, too, of the intervening years, the first and in many ways ideal symbol of obedient faithfulness. It was all God needed to start. When Abram said YES to God, SALVATION HISTORY HAD BEGUN.

Where does the road to Calvary begin? For the Bible writers, it’s all of a piece, all one single, gigantic tapestry. Whether each thread was already fixed in God’s mind before it was sewn into place, or whether God lovingly wove the tapestry with the human materials at His disposal as the story unfolded is probably beyond our capacity to discern. Equally committed saints may not see it exactly the same way. Maybe some day we’ll all be surprised.

Certainly Abram, way back there, had no inkling of the scope of what was being started through him. He didn’t have to know. It was enough that God had laid His hand on Him. That’s always the posture of faith.

But we now, through the eyes of His successors, those who are heirs of His commitment, who have been blessed by it, and have written about it, can look back on their account of the first steps of salvation history, and see the broad outlines of God’s great, gracious plan to bring His wayward children home.

It’s our story now. If you don’t want to call it quite Gospel yet, at least call it the FOUNDATION OF GOSPEL...the Old Testament foreshadowing of the Easter miracle that lay ahead.

3 THINGS, all with insufficient elaboration. Any one of them deserves a sermon by itself...or a book, or a volume of books. Maybe...some day...if there’s time.

1. FIRST, the Bible sees the call of Abram, the start of the Rescue Operation, as being rooted and grounded in the DIVINE INITIATIVE. That’s what’s behind everything. It’s God’s doing, this salvation business, it’s all God’s doing. From Ur to Golgotha, from beginning to end, the story of salvation is God’s story.

Notice how they tell it. As great and noble as Abram is, as respectful as they are of his role, as necessary as he is, given God’s propensity for restraint, they leave no doubt that it’s God’s hand really running the show.

Abram had to agree, had to be willing to cooperate, but apart from the Divine initiative, nothing would have even left the ground.

Why did God begin there? Do you ever wonder? Why did God pick him? Why not somebody in Heliopolis, or Carchemish, or Cuzco? ?Quien sabe? Who knows? It wouldn’t have occurred to them to ask questions like that. God picked Abram because God picked Abram. That’s how the Bible understands it and tells it. Paul’s interpretation perfectly fits the Old Testament understanding---

THE ELECTION OF ABRAM IS AN ACT OF GRACE, an act of God’s sovereign freedom. God did it that way because God wanted to do it that way. Whose business is it, anyway? Arbitrary? Well...Yeah, I guess so. Undemocratic? The Kingdom of God is not a democracy.

What the Almighty God of the universe does or doesn’t do isn’t a matter of majority vote, nor is it based on public opinion polls. GOD IS NOT HERE AT OUR DISPOSAL...Isn’t it the other way around? God help us if we ever forget it.

The Bible never argues it; it simply operates from the premise that only God can be God, and our business is not to try to bend God into accommodation, but, like Abram, to hear, and to respond.

Salvation begins with God’s initiative. Religious EXPERIENCE begins with God’s initiative. Ask any saint in the world, even minor saints; they all say the same thing---NEVER, I found God, through this experience, as a result of that discipline....in authentic religious experience it’s always the reverse: GOD FOUND ME. That’s how they tell it, right down the line.

“I once was lost, but now am found”, said John Newton.

“I felt my heart strangely warmed”, said John Wesley.

“I was surprised by JOY”, wrote C.S. Lewis. NOT something they did; something God did IN them.

The window into Abram’s inner heart is not open to us. We can’t gaze into the depths of his soul the way we can into Jeremiah’s, who is so open and candid, or into David’s, who bleeds all over the floor in repentance, or into Paul’s, who flashes at white heat the agony of his struggle.

With Abram the veil is drawn tighter, maybe deliberately so by the writers, to show us the lesson of DEPENDENCE, blessed dependence, the foundation stone for all subsequent spiritual truth.

THE ROAD TO GOD BEGINS WITH GOD. Way back there they’d been grasped by it. Before we even know we want God, God is reaching out to us. If it’s not quite Gospel, it’s pretty close to it. The Good News of salvation rests on that rock.

2. SECOND, a clear element in the call of Abram, and the start of Operation Rescue, as these old writers tell it, involves the PROMISES, the abiding and eternal promises of God.

God comes to Abram with a command--Go to the land that I will show you; but with the command is a series of mighty promises: “I will make you a great people; I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing...by you shall all the peoples of the earth be blessed...”

That is, a wonderful thing---WHAT GOD ASKS OF HIS FOLLOWERS NEVER EXCEEDS WHAT THEY RECEIVE. Way back there, they were grasped by it.

Now, mandate and blessing go together. You can’t separate them. They knew that, too. The Bible doesn’t promise any cheap blessing. We’re never encouraged in either the Old Testament OR the NEW to look for some kind of prize in the package.

But from this point on in the Biblical narrative, the incredible, unlimited, unbound generosity of God always accompanies His injunctions. Whatever God asks of you, God gives back, double and double again. Ask anybody in the Book.

Decision for God brings enlargement of life. Serve God faithfully and you get more than you bargained for...COUNT ON IT.

Obedience brings blessing---not always physical, not always material...

Tithing, for example, won’t make you rich—it’ll just make you BETTER...because it will open you so God can shower more riches on you. Someone has said that the reward of generosity is that it makes you more generous. That ought to be in the Bible. It’s TRUE.

I’m not sure Abram benefitted materially from responding to God’s call. He’s portrayed as a man of wealth, I know, but for the rest of his life he lived in a tent...no settled permanent dwelling....

He became a nomad, a wanderer. He saw strife in his family and had discord on his flanks. He had enmity without and jealousy within. By any secular standard he would have fared better if he had stayed in Ur.

He didn’t have much. BUT HE HAD THE PROMISES. He trusted the promises, and clung to them. He didn’t live to see the results, but he believed there would be results. “I will bless you, so that you may be a blessing...By you shall all the peoples of the earth be blessed.”

Was he cheated? I don’t think he would have said so. There is no satisfaction in life greater than the satisfaction of knowing that in someway you have been helpful to somebody else.

Don’t feel sorry for those who belong to the Lord. Their lives are wrapped in the promises. If it’s not quite Gospel, it’s pretty close to it. The Good News of salvation rests on that rock.

3. Now, one more thing, very quickly. We’ve said the road to Calvary begins with one man. Abram’s call and his faithful response way back there set in motion the mighty saga of salvation history. God’s initiative underlies it, God’s promises enrich it, and the writers of the story, who themselves have seen part of the unfolding assure us that sooner or later, in His good time, God’s ultimate triumph WILL CROWN IT.

It’s here only in embryo form, but it’s here. Salvation history has a direction, a purpose, a goal. It’s going somewhere. God is guiding it. He can be trusted to guide it, and He can be counted on to bring it to glorious consummation.

These verses in Genesis, then, are a foreshadowing of what is to come. “I will make of you a great people.... By you shall all the peoples of the earth be blessed....” everybody, everywhere, for all time. We see it now. It’s going to happen.

Abram didn’t know what it meant. The early writers only sensed what it might mean. BUT NOW WE CAN SEE IT, AND LIVE IN THE LIGHT OF IT.

We live on the near side of the battle that settled it, the cosmic clash on the hill, where the cruel grip of sin was broken and crushed forever. GOD IS GOING TO WIN. The war is still not over, but the outcome is assured. What was merely hinted in implication in Ur of the Chaldees, is now a triumphant certainty.

I have read that Winston Churchill planned his funeral which was conducted in St. Paul’s

Cathedral in London. He included many of the great hymns of the Church and used the eloquent Anglican liturgy. At his direction a bugler, positioned high in the dome of St. Paul’s following the benediction, played “Taps”, the universal signal that says the day is over.

But then came the dramatic turn. At Churchill’s instruction, as soon as Taps was finished, another bugler, placed on the other side of the great dome began to play Reveille, “It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the morning.”

It was his testimony that at the end of history, when the curtain finally is rung down, the last note will not be Taps; it will be Reveille.

The worst things are never the last things. The God who began the rescue of humanity with one man in the dim recesses of yesterday, and who broke the powers of darkness through one Man on Calvary, will someday—count on it---bring all His children home in glory.

And that IS the Gospel. The Good News of salvation rests on that rock.

--

[1] Watergate was a major political scandal involving President Nixon that led to his resignation