God Loves Us Too Much To Leave Us

Saturday of the 2nd Week in Advent

Recently it was time for me to prune a couple of grapevines growing in our garden. We don’t actually harvest the fruit; they provide attractive foliage on our two arbors and give the birds something to eat. The psalmist speaks of God’s people, Israel, as His grapevine. Jesus would pick up that visual in His preaching, telling us to never detach ourselves from Him, who is the stock of our grapevine, the Church. A pretty image it is, but so much more.

As we read through the history of Israel in the OT, we keep running across this kind of passage: “Omri [king of Israel] did evil in the Lord’s sight beyond any of his predecessors. He closely imitated the sinful conduct of Jeroboam. . .causing Israel to sin and to provoke the Lord. . .to anger by their idols.” Over and over we read that, just substituting the name of one king for the previous one. Instead of worshiping the one God, the Lord, they made temples and sacrificed to the gods of Canaan, those of the people displaced by Israel many decades before.

And so, time and again, the kings were replaced and foreign kings invaded and slaughtered the people or deported them as slaves. God didn’t ignore the treason. He stirred up prophets, with Elijah as the paradigm for that office. And they didn’t mince words. They called Israel, and the southern kingdom of Judah, to repentance, to return to right worship and right moral conduct. Elijah’s wonder workings were legendary, as were those of his successor, Elisha. We all can picture Elijah being carried up to heaven with a whirlwind of fire and chariot. God’s people would turn back to Him from time to time, but they kept apostatizing, and ultimately were carried off to Babylonian exile, their Temple in ruins. When the vine produced no useful fruit, it was cut back, over and over again. God wants a holy people, worshiping rightly and living rightly. He loves us too much to leave us in sin.

So in the fullness of time God raised up a new Elijah, John the Baptist, to turn the hearts of the people back to God as their only desire, to encourage them to repent. He pointed the way to the true Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord and Redeemer. But as in the days of Elijah, the political forces of Jerusalem and Rome were not ready to turn to the true God and live in love. So first they murdered John, and then they murdered Jesus. But they could not keep the God-man in the ground. On the third day He rose, as the Scriptures predicted, and after His ascension He sent the Holy Spirit to empower His Church to preach His good news and perform His healing works all over the world. Political powers will always oppose Him, and us, but we believe that He has already won the victory, and has given us what we need to be holy and live in the love of the Blessed Trinity forever. Blessed be His holy Name.