Ash Wednesday
Dear friends in Christ. What “role” does God have in the hearts and minds of people around us? Is there even a place for God there? As we look around us today, we sadly note that God—the true God, the holy Triune God—is not at the center. He is ignored, pushed to the fringes. If people do think about God, they stick Him in a little compartment in their lives; and they live most of their lives as if He isn’t even there. That’s what it is to live in a secular society where man makes his/ her own god; where man is his / her own god; where people do what is right in their own eyes; where people make their own laws and judge by their own standards, blindly following the godless world around them.
Even many purported Christians fall are like this. They go along with the self-centered worldly way of thinking—I, man, humanity is the center of all; they sprinkle in a little talk about some generic god and think they are good faithful Christians. They look on God as their “buddy” and expect God, to bow to their every wish and grant them their every desire. The attitude of so many--even purported Christians—is “I deserve everything good; my way. God must serve me and my felt-needs. And I am too good to be damned.”
But then there’s Ash Wednesday and Lent—the call to repent. Christ, through His Church, is calling us all back to reality; calling us to recognize who God is and who we really are. Ash Wednesday/ Lent are a drastic and necessary wake-up call for us which we need to hear and heed today and every day. But as drastic and “offensive” as Lent’s call to repent is to society’s focus on self, the call to repent is really nothing but God’s mercy for the sinner.
That’s what we’ll see as we examine our text from Isaiah we will see: God calls us to sorrow over our sin so that He may be merciful to us and forgive us our sin.
1. It begins: For thus says the High and Lofty One Who inhabits eternity, and Whose name is holy: I dwell in the high and holy place... Who is God? He is the high and exalted One; the eternal one; the holy One. If people around us think of God, what do they think of Him—Someone they can choose to ignore or accept/ take or leave; Someone who doesn’t matter to them in the supposedly “enlightened” age.
But the one true God, the holy Triune God, sits in incomparably great divine majesty ruling everything in heaven and earth. He is the one and only Almighty; His knowledge is without limits and His understanding is unfathomable. He is eternal, having neither beginning nor end, while we and everything in the world crumble and decay. He is not bound by time and space. As the One Exalted over everything earthly, He carries out His holy will and accomplishes all He sets out to do—all we can manage is to live in fearful apprehension of the unknown.
What role, then, should the Lord rightly have in our hearts and lives? He puts it into the proper perspective as He asks [40:25]: To whom then will you liken Me, or to whom shall I be equal? Says the Holy One. What, then, should our attitude be toward the Lord? The prophet puts it this way [Hab. 2:20]: The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before Him. He is exalted; we are merely weak, lowly creatures. He is the One alone worthy of honor and praise; He is to be recognized for who He truly is: Exalted, almighty, eternal.
What does all this have to do with Lent and Lent’s call to repent? For thus says the High and Lofty One Who inhabits eternity, and Whose name is holy… God is holy. He Himself is sinless, separated from all sin, spotless, blameless. He dwells in the high and lofty place and is infinitely exalted above all sin, all unrighteousness, all that is unholy; He is divinely holy and perfectly sinless. And He demands that we, too, be sinless. All that God demands in His law that we do; all that He demands in His holy Law that we are not to do is the glorious expression of His holy will.
Lent’s call to recognize and to sorrow over our sin is a call to recognize that our sin IS a big deal because it is going against the holy will of the only true God, the exalted, almighty, eternal and holy God before whom we are to stand in fear and awe Therefore no sin is to be taken lightly; and not only is no sin to be taken lightly but we are to recognize that there are consequences, dire consequences, for going against the holy Law of God. The High and Exalted One, the Eternal One, is also the Holy One, who hates and abhors sin and must condemn the sinner.
We hear Lent’s call to repent and are reminded that we have sinned against the holiness of God and His will and that our sins cut us off and separate us from God. We are reminded that for our sin we deserve nothing but God’s eternal wrath and displeasure and we earn nothing but death. Today has the name Ash Wednesday. By “ashes” we are reminded of our frailty and death, that from dust we are and to dust we shall return. “Ash Wednesday” is our confession that we recognize the due consequence of our sin and our sinful dire condition.
The Law of God calls us to recognize our sin and its true seriousness; it calls us to recognize against Whom we have sinned and Whose holy will has been offended. It drives home to us that by our sins heaven is shut to us and nothing but the wrath of the holy, almighty, exalted God awaits us. When God’s law has done its work and we now very much feel our sin and sorrow over that sin, our text describes us as being crushed by those sins, having a contrite and humble spirit. We are bowed down and humbled by our sorrow over our sin—that we have gone against the holy, sinless, will of God.
Precisely that is the the purpose of Ash Wednesday / Lent. Yes, such a thought is not popular in the “feel-good” world around us; not popular in a world that tries to force God out of the picture; not popular in a world that thinks it has no need of God and makes “self” God. Yet precisely the knowledge of our sin and the consequence of our sin—damnation—is the prerequisite to saving faith. Lent’s call to recognize our sin and to repent is actually God’s gracious working on us! Remember, He is the High and Lofty One. If only we could see our need as God can! But we can’t; we are blinded by our sinful nature; so God, through His holy Law brings us to recognize our sin; and through that Law He calls us to sorrow over our sin. The beginning of salvation for us is recognizing our sin and its results. Then when we are crushed, bowed down and humbled by our sin, we then utterly despair of ourselves and our ability to save ourselves from God’s wrath and damnation! Lent’s call to repent, Ash Wednesday’s ashes are God’s mercy to us!
2. That we are crushed and have a contrite and humble spirit is the blessed result of our daily repentance over sin, and of Lent in particular. Of the ones crushed and humbled by their sin, Jesus says in the Beatitudes [Mat. 5:3]: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Our holy Triune God calls us to recognize and sorrow over our sin so that He can be merciful to us. Only when we are crushed, poor in spirit, when we realize that there is no way we can save ourselves from God’s just punishment for our sin, can God be merciful to us and forgive us our sin. If we think we have no sin to confess; if we think we are better than most and too good to be damned; if we think we have no need of God and His grace; we will not and cannot go to God seeking His grace. But if we recognize our sin and our utter inability to save ourselves, that is, if we are crushed by our sin and its enormity, then will seek God’s mercy as our only help.
Here’s the blessed promise of our text: For thus says the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, with him who has a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. The almighty, exalted, holy God dwelling in the glories of heaven also dwells in His dear Christian, those heeding Lent’s call to repent. And so recognizing and lamenting their sin they then throw themselves on the mercy of God.
The exalted, holy and all-knowing God knows who are His; He knows the hearts of his dear Christians who in sorrow over their sin long for His mercy and for a Savior from their sin. Not only does He know who are His, but He also delights to dwell with them in grace. The reason why the Lord dwells with him who has a contrite and humble spirit is in order to to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. In other words, God dwells with grace in the hearts of His Christians that are greatly troubled, humbled and crushed because of sin precisely so He might comfort them and restore them. There is no greater blessing to the heart of the Christian oppressed by sin than the presence of the living God who comes with His grace and every blessing.
What a glorious theme of Lent: how differently God acts than we would expect Him to act!—but because He is the High and Lofty One Who inhabits eternity His thoughts and ways are far above ours. Our sinful, corrupt way of thinking tells us that we make ourselves good by our works so that God has to accept and welcome us. Our sinful, corrupt way wants us to try to minimize or explain away our sins and so stand before God on our own two feet with our own holiness.
God’s way, the right and perfect way, is the way of Lent: to recognize our sin and cling to the mercy of God. This is God’s way and God’s way alone gets rid of sin! Not recognizing and confessing our sin means that our sin remains.
Because God is Holy, He hates sin. Because He hates sin, He wants to destroy sin by destroying its power! That only happens by His mercy and forgiveness.
Lent is not just recognizing and being sorry for sin; it also means trusting in Jesus and His holy, innocent life and bitter sufferings and death. This is the mercy of God that destroys sin and its power! In mercy on us sinners, the Father sent His Son into the world to obey perfectly for us His holy Law—and Jesus did that beginning with His conception in the womb of the virgin Mary and continuing all the way to His death on the cross. Now God’s holy Law has been kept—just as He demands. Sin cannot now rise up and accuse us. Jesus is our righteousness.
But we do sin! Yet, the sins we commit day in and day out, God has also done away with as in mercy He loaded all of our sins on His Son on the cross; there Jesus suffered the Father’s wrath for every single one of our sins, paying the penalty of our sins for us. In His grand way, and in His mercy, the Holy God, has taken from sin its power to condemn us: the sin we do has been paid for and the holy Law God demands be kept has been!
Lent’s call to recognize and sorrow over sin, serves a glorious purpose: so that God can be merciful and forgive us our sin, so that our sin no longer stands before Him, the holy God who hates and must punish sin; so it no longer can condemn us. When in our sorrow we are crushed and sorry for our sin, God comes to us in mercy to revive us, to bring us back to spiritual life. He came to us first in the waters of holy baptism creating faith in Him in our hearts; He continues to come to us in His word and absolution giving us that forgiveness and life that Jesus brought about for us on the cross; He comes in the Holy Supper to gives us that forgiveness in our very mouths as with the bread and wine we eat and drink Jesus’ very body and blood.
What a glorious / amazing working of God as He carries out His grace to us. He, the High and Lofty One Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy, who dwells in the high and holy place of heaven but also dwells with the repentant Christian, who crushed by his sin and its consequences, has a contrite and humble spirit in order to give us new spiritual life. Lent is a time for a renewed spiritual life of enjoying God’s mercy to us sinners.
In the Name of Jesus, Amen.