Sermons/Discussions

"The First Temptations of Christ: Part 3"

Sermon: The 3rd Sunday of Lent year A

The Rev. Matt Kennedy

The Church of the Good Shepherd

How many people here have heard of Jim Jones and I don’t mean Chris’ dad?

For those of you who haven’t he was a pastor of a small bible church in the San Francisco during the 1970’s. At first he was a good pastor. His sermons were based on the scriptures and they were interesting, engaging, and his people were being nourished and fed. But something happened. About midway through his ministry at this small church, he became convinced that he was the messiah. This is was not good. But what was even worse was that his people, good Christian people, people who’d gone to church their entire lives, believed him. They thought that he was the messiah too. First his own small congregation, then a great number of people from all over the country, even the world, believed that he was Christ come again.

Pastor Jones led his flock from California to South America in the 1970’s. There he established a commune and promised to bring peace and love to the entire world. To usher in this new era of peace and love he dismantled the family unit. There were to be no exclusive husbands and wives. All the men were to be the husbands of all the women. Of course the way this worked out in practice is that pastor Jones amassed his own harem. Children too were part of this breakdown. Children became communal property. They were no longer under the authority of their biological parents, they were “community” children. They were to be taught and reared by the village, not by their parents. Jones and his followers thought that the breakdown of the nuclear family would usher in a new utopian reality where love reigned supreme; where jealousy, violence, strife, and discord ceased to exist.

In reality, by ripping families apart, Jones destroyed the very institution that according to the scriptures God designed and intended to be the foundation of love and unity in society. The result, ultimately, was violence and murder. When government officials and the press visited the Jones compound and promised to reveal to the world what was going on there, Jones had them murdered. Realizing then, that it was all over, Jones persuaded each and every one of his followers, men women and children to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. One hour later, all of them had died.

How could something like this happen?

Why do people follow men like this? How could they be so deceived?

Did you know that from the very beginning, Jones backed up everything he did by appealing to the scriptures?

When he claimed to be messiah, he quoted from Revelation. When he began to break down the family unity he quoted 1 Corinthians chapter 13, the famous love chapter, love shares all things. When he moved his people to South America he, quoted passages from Exodus about God’s people and the promised land. Jones always used the bible to persuade people that his words were true. And his people swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Why?

There is one reason why, because they themselves did not know the bible well enough to refute him. Their ignorance of what the bible really says, made them susceptible to false teaching from it and, in this case, their ignorance ultimately proved fatal.

Actually the story of the Jonestown massacre is as old as humanity. Satan twisted God’s word in the garden and Adam and Eve’s ignorance of it contributed to their fall.

Turn with me if you will briefly to Genesis chapter 3 verse 1,. So far in Genesis God had given only one command. It was very simple. Don‘t eat fruit from the tree in the center of the garden, that was it. Don‘t eat the fruit. Now look what Satan does with that command

“Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden.”

Did God say that? No? What is Satan trying to do here? Sow confusion and doubt in Eve’s mind about the content of God’s Word.

Last week we said that the bible is like food. You need a well balanced daily diet to grow and mature in your faith. Without it you begin to starve. I ended my sermon last week by saying that the more you are rooted in the word of God the easier it becomes to recognize the lies of Satan. I was referring to the protective aspect of being rooted in the bible. The more good food you eat, the easier it becomes to recognize bad food.

If Eve had fed on God’s word then she would have easily seen the serpent’s trick. She would have known right off that Satan was twisting the word of God. Instead, well, let’s see how she answers:

“We may eat of the fruit from the trees of the garden but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden (so far so good), and you must not touch it or you will surely die.”

Did God say that? No, what did God say? God said don’t eat the fruit, he didn’t say anything about touching the tree.

The first thing Satan does is seek to confuse Eve about what God really said, to convolute or to fog up the Word of God. That having been done her fall was inevitable.

Now that she‘s confused and perplexed, he goes on to question God‘s love and his motives. “So God won’t let you even touch the tree huh? Well, you know why don’t you? Because he doesn’t want you to have any power over your life. He wants to keep you down. He knows that you could be like him if you eat that fruit. C’mon, break his shackles, be free, live how you want to live.”

Once Satan clouded and obscured God’s Word he was free to lead Adam and Eve wherever he chose. In this case he broke the connection in Eve’s mind between God’s Word and His love. God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit because he loved them and he didn’t want them to get hurt, like a loving father might tell his kids not to play in the street.

But Satan focused their attention on the limit not the love behind it; on the “NO” rather than the reasons behind the no and he succeeded in characterizing God’s word as a straightjacket and a hindrance to personal fulfillment. Had they had been rooted in the Word of God Adam and Eve would have seen through the serpent’s lies from the very beginning and Adam, who was with her the entire time, would have been confident enough to stand up for her and help.

Instead, they fell and Satan has been using the same trick ever since. Twisting the word of God works so well for him that Satan even tried it with Jesus. Matthew 4 verse 6. Satan quotes scripture, but he takes it out of context and he twists it to serve his own purpose. He wants Jesus to use his power to impress people rather than in the service of God. And to get Jesus to do this, he uses the bible. “Throw yourself off this tower Jesus. Doesn’t the bible say that God will send his angels to protect you?”

Just like with Adam and Eve, Satan rips God’s word out its proper context, where it is a metaphor for God’s protection of his people and uses it as a pretext to get Jesus to disobey his Father. Notice the words the serpent uses, “Didn’t God say this?” But Jesus knows his bible far better than Adam and Eve, well enough to refute any lie and he defeats Satan here by applying God’s word correctly. God is to be trusted not tested. Because Jesus was rooted in the word of God, no lie had the power to draw him from his Fathers arms.

If Adam and Eve had done this imagine where we would be as a race. If the people who followed Jim Jones had known their bibles, they would have known that while Jones may have quoted scripture, he was twisting it and warping it to suit his own ends. They would have tested his words in light of God’s word and found them to be lies.

That is the beauty and the strength of a people grounded and rooted in the Bible. No lie of the devil, no deceit of the flesh, no way of the world will ever move them out of the arms of the God who loves them and who gave them his word as a light to their feet and a guide to their path. That’s why it is so vital for you all here at this church to know and study your bibles.

Now, I don’t think that anyone could persuade you to drink poison or to follow someone like Jim Jones. But I do think, in fact I know, that ignorance of God’s Word can and does set churches up for deep and serious trouble (we’ve seen that in the Episcopal church over the last few years) and set individuals up for misery and failure in the Christian life.

It’s very easy once you’re persuaded that God’s Word doesn’t address you personally, or this church collectively, that what it says is too complicated to understand, or doesn’t address the issues of the modern world, or that it’s just for pastors and theologians to be led into a very dangerous place. It’s really very simple, if you disregard the roadmap, you’re going to get lost.

All this means that you cannot and should not just trust me to read it for you and tell you what it says. I get it wrong sometimes. All of my words, all of the Church’s words, all human teaching should and must be tested in light of what God says. As Paul says to Titus, the leaders of the church “must hold firmly to the trustworthy message…so that they can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.”(Titus 1:9)

Where the church’s teaching is out of line with God‘s Word, the church is wrong. Where my teaching is out of line with the word of God, I’m wrong.

Pastors have a responsibility not to give you their opinions or thoughts or words, but to pass along His word. No, Pope, bishop, priest, pastor, elder or deacon stands over God’s Word, we all stand under it. And you do too. You have a great and grave responsibility.

As the children of God you are yourselves responsible for knowing what your Father says, not just what the church says the Father says. And more than that you’re responsible for making sure that your children know and that they are brought up under sound teaching. Their future and our future depend on our passing on the truth of God faithfully. How can you do that if you don’t know this (hold up the bible). How can you test what I say or what the church says unless you know what He says? Jesus has shown us in his confrontation with Satan that the bible is a loving gift from our Father, given not only to nourish our souls and for encouragement and guidance, but also to refute those lies which if accepted can and will lead us and our children into spiritual and physical danger.

This God-given responsibility falls on all of us, men and women, pastors and people, the whole church. Join with the people of this church who have already taken it up and God will use it to set you, your family, and this whole church on the right path.

Amen