Trinity 1
Dear friends in Christ. Today we bring to a conclusion our celebration of the Feast of the Holy Trinity. It celebrates the great mystery of God—there is one divine being but yet three distinct Persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Now in the second half of the Church Year, the Time of The Church, a time which looks at the various teachings and doctrines Christ taught His Church and entrusted to her to teach to the world, we will begin our review of the basics teachings of the Christian faith; each Sunday during this second half of the Church year we will again review a section of Luther’s Small Catechism. As did Luther, so too, will we begin with the review of the holy Ten Commandments.
The holy Ten Commandments begin with the most basic and seemingly simplest of the commandments: You shall have no other gods. And then Luther’s explanation: We should fear, love and trust in God above all things. Notice, how this flows so beautifully with our celebration of and rejoicing in the great mystery of the Trinity: God in grace has revealed Himself to us; in the pages of Holy Scripture He has taught us Who He is—Father, Son and Holy Spirit; 3 Persons and yet one God. So now we have the first “piece of the puzzle”: We are to have no other gods than the Holy Triune God.
Although this doctrine of the Trinity is difficult to understand—one God and yet 3 distinct Persons—it is basic in our Christian lives: Whom do we worship?
In today’s Gospel reading, the rich young man thought he had fulfilled all of the commandments perfectly because he outwardly lived a decent life. Although he may have lived an outwardly decent life in his own eyes and others, Jesus shows that rich man that he was really an idolater, a worshipper of the god of money: "If you want to be complete, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
The First Commandment to fear, love and trust in God above all things is really the first and greatest commandment and the one from which all the rest flow.
1. As part of Moses’ farewell sermons to the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land, our text begins simply enough: Hear, O Israel: The LORD, our God, the LORD are one! Notice that first word: Hear! How vital for us that we heed that simple word and command: Hear! That’s why we’re in church—to gather around our Lord’s Word to hear Him teach us about Himself. That’s why we read at home our Bibles and doctrinally correct devotional books—so that we may be silent and let the Lord speak to us in His word. We will never grow in our knowledge of the Lord and in our faith if we are the ones doing all the talking—telling God what we think He should do; telling God what we think is right and fair; telling God how to be more “relevant.” For our part—silence is best; we can only hear if we’re silent.
The glorious thing when we’re silent and the Lord speaking is that only then can we hear the Lord tell us about Himself; only then through the word that we hear can His Holy Spirit create, strengthen and preserve faith in our heart.
This faith/ trust in the Lord, the one true God, is the highest worship. That’s what God requires of us in the First Commandment. Faith is silent and hears what the Lord says to us in His word and simply receives all that God says and reveals about Himself and says “Yea and Amen” to it. We may not understand it all, but by faith we know the one true God is the Triune God and in the divinely worked faith, we—however feebly it may be—fear, love and trust in Him above all things.
What does the Lord reveal about Himself through Moses in our text? What is it that the Holy Spirit says here through Moses? Hear, O Israel: The LORD, our God, the LORD are one! Here is the doctrine/ teaching of God—Who He is. Notice: three times in a row you have the Lord. When you have that in a verse that’s a Trinitarian reference. Through Moses, God is revealing Himself as Triune: one God, three distinct Persons. To flesh out this verse a bit more, we can read/ understand it this way: Hear, O Israel: The Lord [that is, the Father], our God [the Son, Christ Jesus], the Lord [the Holy Spirit] are [a united] one. Like we have heard before: there is no “generic” God; God is not merely a “force”. Instead, God is a personal being, a distinct personal being. And here and elsewhere in Scripture He tells us Who He is; He tells us His name—Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Remember, Moses tells this to the Israelites just before they are about the enter Canaan, a land filled with people worshipping many different false god/ idols. It was a message the Israelites needed to hear before entering that environment: the one true God is the great Three in One. Hear, O Israel: The LORD, our God, the LORD are one! That’s the same message we need to hear as we live in a land with competing notions and ideas of God. There is only one true God; the others are false gods/ idols/ demons. God in grace has revealed Himself to us; by faith we believe and receive what He has revealed about Himself. The First Commandment is the most basic because it demands worship of the one true God; and as the most basic all the rest of the commandments flow from it. And, if we could keep the First Commandment, we could then keep all the rest. To put it differently, each sin we commit is also a sin against the First Commandment.
2. The result, the consequence of, Hear, O Israel: The LORD, our God, the LORD are one! is: And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. If we truly love the holy Triune God alone, above all things, with all our heart, soul and strength then we will do His will as He tells us what His holy will is for us in the Ten Commandments. But what happens? We daily sin—and much! The rich young man in today’s Gospel reading thought by his outwardly decent life he kept the commandments; but he was really sinning against the true God by replacing Him with his money and possessions and putting his hope for heaven in himself and his works; so too each time we sin, we are putting our old sinful nature, our sinful desires above the Lord, the holy Triune God. Each sin we commit is a sin against the First Commandment because we are loving self and sin more than the Lord our God; we are not loving Him as He demands and as He should be loved—with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength.
As simple and basic as this First Commandment is, it is the one most sinned against: for example, if we teach or believe false doctrine we are rejecting God’s word and placing our imaginations above God and His Word; if we sin against parents and others in authority, we are rejecting the Lord and those He has placed over us and placing self in authority; if we steal or covet, what we steal or covet becomes our god, etc.
Although it is easy to blow past the First Commandment and say, “I’m a Christian. Of course I obey this commandment—it’s easy”, let us stop and pause at it recognize how often each day we sin against it; because if we really obeyed it and fear, love and trust in the Triune God above all things, loving Him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, then we would have no sin to confess. What a call to humble ourselves in repentance when we hear our text: Hear, O Israel: The LORD, our God, the LORD are one! And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. These are words calling us to self-denial because they call to fervent love and desire, without any love of self and the world. None of us can do that!
But although our text leads us to recognize our sin of not loving God as we should and ought—He is, after all, the only true God, the Triune God and He has given us the Holy Ten Commandments—and to be sorry for our sin against Him and His holy will, nevertheless these are not dreadful words: And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Instead, they are glorious words pointing us to the grace and love of the holy Triune God to us first.
Remember, through Moses, God first spoke these words to the Israelites—the Israelites whom God had promised the land of Canaan and was about to bring them in; the Israelites whom God had brought out of slavery in Egypt and led through the desert for 40 years, showing them grace and mercy even in their sin and rebellion. Now, the Lord through Moses in our text tells us: And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. We have just remembered and celebrated in Lent and Easter our Lord’s work in saving us, rescuing us, from sin, death, devil and hell. The Lord has called us to faith and created faith in our hearts in holy baptism; He daily and richly forgives us our sin; He strengthens us in the faith by His holy Word; He gives us His very body and blood to drink in Holy Communion. Because the Lord is the one true God Who also loves us, it is as the Apostle [1 Jn. 4.19] writes: we love Him because He first loved us.
The one true God, The LORD, our God, the LORD are one, He is the God who loves us. Not only does He love us, He revealed Himself to us and told us who He is and what He has done to save/ rescue us from our enemies and to bring us to Himself one day in heaven. Through that faith that He works in us by word and baptism, we begin to love Him, Who first loved us. Now knowing Him rightly, how can we not love Him? We in faith know Him as the God of our salvation. This love we have of the true God is His work in us. Now, as Christians, we feel within ourselves that struggle to do the Lord’s will; to live our lives according to His holy Ten Commandments; to show Him our live by living our lives according to His will.
It is a struggle because we have within us, not only that new self, the Christian, created by God in us in Holy Baptism, but we still have that old sinful nature that wants us to serve self, sin and devil. That’s why we feel that struggle within us against sin; that’s why we still sin, but feel bad when we do—we have sinned against the one true God, the Almighty, and Who loves us and saves us.
But knowing that The LORD, our God, the LORD are one, means for us that the God of our salvation, the God who saved us, is still there for us daily, richly and abundantly, with His grace and mercy. The glorious thing is that although we are far from loving Him with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our strength, He, for Jesus’ sake, the Son, forgives us all our sin. We do not/ cannot love Him, and fulfill His will, the Holy Ten Commandments, but what we do not/ cannot do, Jesus has done for us; and we are forgiven our sin and given Jesus’ perfect righteousness. So before God, because of His grace, because of Jesus’ work, it is as if we perfectly love Him and do His will; it is as if we have perfectly kept the Ten Commandments. And Who has so declared? The holy Triune God, the one true God! His word stands! No sin is too great. Heaven stands open to us and hell is shut to us. As Christians, we live by grace—constantly in faith receiving the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Faith is the highest worship of God for by it we are recognizing Him to be Who He says He is—the one true God but three distinct Persons—and we are saying “Yea and Amen” to His gifts and blessings to us.
The first and greatest commandment: Hear, O Israel: The LORD, our God, the LORD are one! And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. INJ Amen