Slandering God

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. John, the sixth chapter.

On the next day the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there and that Jesus had not entered the boat with His disciples but that His disciples had gone away alone.

Other boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there nor His disciples they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum seeking

Jesus. When they found Him on the other side of the sea they said to Him, Rabbi, when did You come here?

Jesus answered them, Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking Me not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves.

Do not labor for the food that perishes but for the food that endures to eternal life which the Son of Man will give to you for on Him God the

Father has set His seal. Then they said to Him, What must we do to be doing the works of God?

Jesus answered them, This is the work of God that you believe in Him whom He has sent. So they said to Him, Well, then, what sign do you do that we may see and believe you?

What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness as it is written He gave them bread from heaven to eat.

Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven for the bread of God is

He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. And they said to Him, Sir, give us this bread always.

Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to Me shall not hunger. Whoever believes in Me shall never thirst.

This is the gospel of the Lord. What must we do to be doing the works of God?

That's a big question, isn't it? What must we do to be doing the works of God? And kind of behind it is an interesting assumption.

Let me explain. In fact, the assumption is really bad, really, really, really bad. And you're thinking,

How bad can it be? It's the worst kind of bad you can possibly imagine. You see, to be doing the works of God, the thing that you're thinking is,

Well, I've got to save myself. You see, you know, the world is full of bad people.

I need to apply myself to being intentional, to being good, to, well, being good enough, pious enough, praying enough, obeying enough.

And note the word enough. When do you fulfill the word enough?

Now, my parents are here today, so I have to do a little bit of group therapy to get some of the baggage out of my system from when

I was being raised. But I will tell you this. My parents will tell you that I wasn't the easiest child to raise.

It's absolutely true. In fact, when I was in fifth grade, that was when I had my first bout with depression,

I decided I would just stop going to school. I did. I just up and stopped. And so I found other things to do during the day, and my mom had no clue that I had stopped going to school.

And I missed quite a bit of school, more than a week, when she got a phone call. Is Chris okay?

Because he hasn't been coming to school. He hasn't what? He hasn't been coming to school? And, well, you know, let's just say that I got disciplined thoroughly for this offense, and rightfully so.

But because I had missed so much school, guess who had to do makeup work during the summer?

Me, right? And guess who was my teacher? Mom. All right.

And boy, okay, she was the toughest teacher I ever had in my whole life. And she had very strict rules.

Strict rules went something like this. You cannot have your friends over. You cannot play until you do your homework.

Okay. So she would make me read books. We would go to the library. We'd check out books. And then she'd make me write five -paragraph thesis summaries on what

I read. And, of course, my handwriting was miserable, but that's a different story altogether. It still is.

If you want to read clear handwriting, I have to write it in Greek, so I hope you read Greek. But anyway, the whole point then went something like this.

I would write out my homework, and I would turn it in to my mother for her to review.

And, oh, my word! She would take a red marker, and by the time she was done with my paper, it looked like evidence from a murder scene.

All right. And she would say, Not good enough.

Rewrite it. Oh! Okay. Not good enough.

Rewrite it. Okay. All right. And then my parents, they gave me chores.

I had to, like, wash cars and stuff like this. And after I would wash cars, there would be inspections.

Inspections. So my mom would come out and look at the car, and she'd always have her nose up, looking like through her glasses.

Oh, you missed a spot. Oh, there's spots on the window here and stuff like this. And what would she say?

Not good enough. Rewash it. No! I have plans.

I have people to play with. I've got... Right? And the thing is, we've all had experiences like this.

We all have. But here's the thing. At no point have I ever questioned my mom's love for me because she disciplined me.

In fact, her discipline showed her love for me. The fact that she was involved in my life showed that she cared.

And so at no point did I ever do chores or do homework or rewrite things in order to earn my mom's love.

I just had it, right? In fact, what she was doing was showing me that she loved me. But here's the thing. When it comes to God, we have a different approach altogether.

And the thinking goes something like this. Well, God's a meanie poopy head.

I mean, you ever read the Bible like the Old Testament? God, he just seems like he's always grumpy.

And he's always out there to... Well, you know, you step out of line and lightning comes from the sky and zaps you dead.

And so in order to get on God's good side, I've got to do enough.

You see the difference here? Basically what you're saying is, is that in order for God to love me,

I have to earn that love. In order for me to be saved,

I have to earn that salvation. And over and again, we kind of think of like the old scales, right?

You take your good works, you put them on one side of the scale. You take your bad works on the other side of the scale.

And there on the day of judgment, you know, things are being weighed in the balance. And if the good outweighs the bad, well, you're in.

And God goes, good job. You have earned my love and favor. What kind of deity is that?

What kind of deity is that? That's a pretty horrible, savage, abusive deity.

That's not what God is like at all. You'll note that Scripture teaches us that God is our father.

Do children have to earn their father's favor? No, not at all.

And so with that, I want you to consider this. And that is that the word devil, you know, devil or Satan, the word itself means slanderer, the accuser or the slanderer, right?

And so you'll note that the devil, all the way back in the Garden of Eden, all the way back, you know, remember that first question he asked

Eve? That's the second. First question, first question.

Is it true? Is it true that you can't eat from any of the trees in the garden?

Let me rephrase it for you because the question itself just has this nasty slander attached to it.

I've heard that God's not even feeding you guys and making you work. Is it true he's not even feeding you?

You're not allowed to eat? See the slander? What was the devil doing?

Painting God out to be, well, a meanie grumpy pants, right?

That's the whole point. But God isn't like that at all. And so you'll note then that in our

Old Testament text, I'll just kind of point this out. In our Old Testament text, you have the children of Israel in the wilderness.

And let's put this back into a bigger context, shall we? In the bigger context, they had just been set free after spending 400 -plus years in slavery in Egypt.

The United States isn't even 400 years old. We're like halfway there, just a little over halfway to the 400 -and -something mark.

The children of Israel spent in slavery in Egypt. Generation after generation after generation died in absolute poverty and slavery and subjugation.

But God remembered his promises because God always keeps his promises. His promises to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob that he would send a deliverer.

And so God sent Moses. Moses is kind of a stand -in for Christ. And through ten powerful acts of judgment, the plagues of Egypt, God tore the children of Israel out of the grasp of the

Egyptians, judged their deities, judged their false god -king. And they all came up wanting.

And the children of Israel marched triumphantly out of slavery in Goshen on towards the promised land.

Then, of course, they run into the Red Sea. And the armies of Pharaoh are chasing them.

And they meet at the shores of the Red Sea. And God puts himself between the army of Egypt and the people of Israel and then miraculously rescues the children of Israel by opening up the

Red Sea, creating a chasm down the center of this thing. And the children of Israel walk on the bottom of the sea as on dry land.

And this is where aquariums first showed up, right? And then when the armies of Egypt went into the

Red Sea, God destroyed them. Do you think for a second that in that context the grumbling makes any sense?

I mean, we tell stories. It's in our movies. It's in our storybooks of some fellow who was walking down the street about ready to be hit by a bus because he had a couple of AirPods in his ear.

He wasn't even paying attention. He was texting his girlfriend. And some guy sees the danger, pushes him out of the way, saves his life.

And what does he say? I am eternally grateful, right? And so that person feels like he owes the person who saved his life a huge debt.

God went above and beyond that with the children of Israel, saved them spectacularly.

And when the first rumblings of hunger came up in their bellies, out comes not real grumbling but slander.

I want you to hear the slander. The whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.

And the people of Israel said to them, Oh, would that we had died by the hand of Yahweh in the land of Egypt when we sat by the meat pots, ate bread to the full, for you've brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.

Are you kidding me? So at this point, you'll note our

Old Testament text, Moses rightly says your grumbling isn't against us, it's against Yahweh. And what are they doing?

They're accusing Yahweh of having the intention of bringing them out of slavery for the purpose of killing them in the wilderness.

That is absolute slander. And you'll note how quickly, how easily we human beings slander

God just like the devil does. We do. And when it comes to our salvation,

I'm going to postulate this today, and that is that if you think you can save yourself by your good works, by your piety, you know what your core problem is?

You think the worst of God. Let me explain. God has made it clear that salvation is a gift given, purely out of his love, his mercy, and his grace.

Because God is nothing like the devil paints him out to be, and nothing like those who do not know their

Bibles paint him out to be. When people say, oh, that God of the Old Testament, he just seems so, so full of himself.

And he just is so angry all the time. You know nothing about the God of the Bible. Nothing. You're slandering him when you speak that way.

But when you say, I'm going to save myself, what are you saying? It's up to me. Because I know that God says salvation is a gift.

I totally get that. And that Christ died for my sins. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Heard it a thousand times.

But at the end of the day, I'm not going to believe that. I'm going to go ahead and, well, get out the scrubbing brush and shine myself up like a shiny penny.

Because you don't want to show up because, you know, maybe, just maybe, God isn't all that merciful.

Maybe he's really not kind. Maybe he's not loving at all. Maybe what he's really like is he's capricious like everybody paints him out to be.

And so I can't trust him. I can trust myself. You see the issue?

Those who are trying to save themselves are explicitly saying that God is a liar.

That his promises of the forgiveness of sins are a pipe dream. His promise of eternal life as a gift because of his great mercy isn't true.

And that God really isn't loving. He isn't kind. He doesn't forgive. He's not slow to anger.

He's not abounding in steadfast love. And he truly doesn't pardon iniquity. And this is how we grumble against God.

And so you can see this in our Gospel text when you kind of learned what to look for. In our Gospel text, it says that on the next day, the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone.

Now, a little bit of a note. I love the fact that during this part of the three -year lectionary, we get the feeding of the 5 ,000, and we're not moving far from it.

Last week we heard about Christ walking on the water. And the whole reason why he was walking on the water is because they were going to make him king by force.

The big miracle of all of these Israelites in the wilderness being miraculously fed by God.

Their eyes are open. They know exactly who Jesus is. And they're basically saying, hold still.

In fact, why don't we just bind you up? We're going to put a crown on your head and we're going to march you to Israel. We're making you our king whether you want to be our king or not.

Is that what Christ came to do in his first advent? Nope. Not at all.

He didn't come to establish his kingdom in that way. He came to bear your sin in his body and go to the cross and to die for the ungodly.

That's me. That's you. And so Jesus, the whole walking on the water bit was kind of a way of like throwing them off the trail because there was no other way to leave.

And so how did Jesus get away? We were going to make him king today. How did he get away?

Well, he took a route that nobody can take. He walked across the Sea of Galilee, and that was the point. So when the other boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the

Lord had given thanks, so when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, his disciples, they themselves got into boats and went to Capernaum seeking

Jesus. So when they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here?

And now Jesus, well, he starts saying some tough things. He said,

Truly, truly, I say to you, you're seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.

In other words, if you kind of summarize it, Jesus is saying you ate your fill of the loaves and you want to make me king by force because you want me to be a bread king.

And what a good bread king Jesus would have been. He would have solved the world hunger problem in a short amount of time indeed.

I mean, every day being able to miraculously produce food, there would never be a hunger problem on earth again.

But the thing is that Jesus didn't come to fill our physical bellies. And so Jesus says,

Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the

Son of Man will give to you. Give.

He's going to give it. Well, they hear the words of Jesus and they're a little confused. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life.

What's that? But Jesus says he's going to give it to them. So they said to him, All right, what must we be doing to do the works of God?

They're thinking we've got to labor for this eternal food. And you can almost see

Jesus a little bit annoyed because he made it clear he's going to give it to them.

He said, This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent. Believe.

Believe in the one whom he has sent. You see, we are saved by grace through faith apart from works.

Think of it this way. In Romans chapter 4, Paul talking about the fact that we are saved by grace through faith apart from works.

He makes an interesting distinction by pointing to Abraham. He says, What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh?

If Abraham was justified by works, and justified means to be declared righteous by God, he has something then to boast about, but not before God.

For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was counted or credited to him as righteousness.

Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as is due. And we all know this, that never ever have we received a gift of being paid by an employer for the work that we've done.

Always and again, when we get paid, that's something we've earned. Salvation isn't a wage.

Salvation is a gift. So to the one, though, who does not work, but the one who believes in him, in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, just like Abraham's.

So think of it this way. The work of God is to believe. To believe in the one whom the

Father has sent, Christ, who goes to the cross and bleeds and dies for you.

And we then hear these important words again, that God justifies who?

The ungodly. And yeah, that's you.

That's me. You're part of that group. If you don't think that you're part of that group and you think, well, it's really not that bad.

I mean, after all, I pay my taxes and I work really hard at my job. You still don't understand the magnitude of your sin.

Christ didn't die for good people. Good people do not go to hell. Ungodly people go to hell.

And each and every one of us has earned that. And so it's time for you to speak the truth about yourself and stop slandering

God. God is not a meanie pants. He is not somebody who's grumpy.

He is not somebody who sends people to hell unjustly. Each and every one of us fit in this category of the ungodly.

And God does not will for us to perish. This is why he sent his son, so that he would bleed and die for our ungodliness in our place.

So that rather than get what we deserve, he can give out of his mercy, his grace, his kindness and his love.

Forgiveness to all ungodly sinners like you and like me. And so the one who believes his faith is counted as righteousness.

And then he goes on just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one whom God counts righteous apart from works.

Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the

Lord will not count his sin. And indeed, everyone who believes receives from God the forgiveness of all of their lawless deeds.

And they receive from God blessing rather than, well, punishment.

This is most certainly true. So the question is, do you believe this? Well, Jesus said, the work of God is that you believe in him whom he has sent.

So the crowd talking to Jesus, they kind of put two and two together and say, all right, well, Jesus here is talking about himself.

And so you're saying God wants us to believe in you, Jesus. So they said to him, all right, what sign then do you do so that we may see and believe you?

Sign. This is not a bad question, by the way. I mean, remember when Moses was commissioned by God in the early parts of Exodus?

And he said, well, what if they don't believe me? What if they don't believe that you're the one who sent me? What do I do? And God gave him three signs.

Sign number one, he can turn water into blood. Sign number two, he can take his staff, throw it on the ground, it becomes a serpent.

And then when he picks it back up, it becomes a staff again. And then sign number three, he could take his hand, stick it in his cloak, and it comes out leprous, put it back, and it comes back out fine.

So those were the three signs given to him. So the people of Israel here, these Jews are asking Jesus, all right, what sign can you show us so that we may believe you?

What work do you perform? And with bread still on the brain from the miracle that Jesus performed just yesterday, they said, our fathers ate manna in the wilderness, as it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat.

And here Jesus gives them the sign, the sign of the new covenant. Jesus said to them, truly, truly,

I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven, but my father, he gives you the true bread from heaven.

Note again the important verb, gives, he gives. You don't earn it, it's not a wage, it's a gift given.

He gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.

Who's Jesus saying is the bread of God? Himself. So they said to him, all right, sir, give us this bread always.

And here it comes. I am the bread of life. Wait, what? Huh? You're the bread of life?

But Jesus then gives this promise. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger. Whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

And when you read the rest of the chapter, and we'll read more of it next week, you can see that they really are having a tough time with this.

Super tough time. Because how can this guy give us his flesh to eat? But that's the sign.

You want a sign? Here's the sign. Jesus is the bread of God that comes down from heaven.

Remember when the children of Israel went out in our Old Testament text after God had caused the manna to fall from heaven overnight.

They woke up and they looked out there. And they call it manna, but the word itself is just a

Hebrew phrase. And here's what they did. They opened up their tents and looked out and went, manna, manna, manna.

What is it? They had never seen anything like it. I would note that every time we have the

Lord's Supper, there's a big question that comes up. And here's the question. Manna. What is it?

It is exactly what Jesus says that it is. Today we will feast on the bread given by the

Father from heaven, Christ himself, his body and blood given and shed for us for the forgiveness of our sins.

Do you believe this? Do you believe that you are a sinner who needs the bread that comes down from heaven?

Christ. This is what we're called to believe. To not believe in ourselves, but to believe in the one whom the

Father has sent. And Christ promises the bread of life that he is. Whoever comes to him shall never hunger.

Whoever believes in him will never thirst. In fact, Jesus goes on to say, All who come to me

I will never cast out. All. So what does this call for us to do?

To repent of our slander. To repent of trusting in the most stupid thing you can trust in on planet

Earth. Yourself. And instead, believe in him, the one whom the

Father has sent. Because note the word, Father. You do not have to earn

God's love. Your heavenly Father loves you. He is your creator, and he knows that you have fallen into sin, and he knows that you cannot save yourself.

He doesn't love you because you've earned his love. He loves you because he truly is your

Father. He is a kind Father. He is a merciful Father. He is gracious, and he cares for you so much that he does not want you to face his anger or his wrath.

And so he has given Jesus his only begotten son. He sent him to humble himself, and he was perfectly obedient in your place so that you can receive forgiveness, mercy, grace, and life.

What a great and kind Father we have. And that is the God that you find throughout all the pages of the

Bible. Don't listen to the slander. The slander about him is just that. And it all has its origin in the devil and those who are the devil's children who want to justify their evil, justify their self -righteousness, justify, well, their unbelief.

But God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever, you included, me included, whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

All is a gift. Trust. In the name of Jesus, amen.

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