Sometimes it’s nice to know that even felons can get their records expunged — and for sinners it happens all the time.
Matthew 14:22-33; Romans 10:5-15; Psalm 85:8-13; 1 Kings 19:9-18
Humans like rules. Humans like rules even better when you call them laws. Did you know there are nearly 5000 federal crimes out there? There’s even more if you count state and local things as well — and this doesn’t even consider nigh-innumerable subsets of those crimes. So I think it’s fair to say that, given the high number of laws we have, humans like rules. In our culture, new laws (new rules), are made all the time. We have 535 federal lawmakers whose sole job is to come up with these new laws, and 104 in Utah.
Given our human love of these rules, it makes sense that for God to have used a set of laws to interact with humanity for over 1000 years. They’re all recorded in Exodus through Deuteronomy — with their stated purpose to bring life to those who follow them, as Paul quoted in Romans 5:5. But like any system of laws, it’s nearly impossible to never break one.
Now in our culture, what happens when you break a law? Well, you become a criminal. Some crimes are considered minor, so you don’t really lose any privileges, and only have to pay a fine. There’s another level where you have to start worrying about that box on an employment application, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime in a court of law?”. For more serious crimes, like a felony, one usually loses the right to vote, are unable to qualify for certain federal assistance programs, and often are limited in how and where you can travel, among many other things.
In the same way, breaking God’s law makes us a criminal in God’s eyes. God’s law, while seemingly complicated, is really quite simple when you get past the specifics — God wants us to follow and trust Him. As Jesus himself sums up the law, there are 2 major commandments, and the second is like the first: “Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” They are alike because in doing the first, you will do the second.
So we have these two deceptively simple rules to follow, but we’re quite incapable of doing even this. Luckily for us, God knew this, and he had a way out for us, in modern legal terms a way for our record to be expunged. Now, in an expungement, the records of a crime are either sealed or destroyed, and the crime is considered to have never happened. Up until Jesus’ death and resurrection, the only way for us to get out of breaking one of God’s law was to sacrifice an animal who took on the punishment for the lawbreaking. When Jesus died and rose again, however, everything changed.
Jesus was the sacrifice that ended the sacrificial system, as he took on the punishment due to us because of our lawbreaking — and did away with our “record” in God’s eyes. So, this is great news right? But the question always is, how do we take advantage of this. In our culture, to get an expungement is a long and drawn out process, so we’d kind of expect God to make us go through even more hoops than the government, because the consequences of breaking God’s law are a lot more severe than breaking human law.
Well if you expect that, you’d be wrong. As Paul writes in Romans 10:9, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” You don’t get much simpler than that. In making that confession, we make public something that God has already done in us — wiping away all the times that we broke His law and turned away from Him.
So this is great and wonderful news! Through Jesus Christ we are no longer criminals. But that’s not all there is. You see Paul sees another complication to this very simple confession. As he writes in verses 14 and 15, “How… can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent?”
That’s where things get interesting for us. At some point in our lives, for all of us gathered here, someone told us about Jesus, and the work of the Holy Spirit, through that telling, brings us to a place where we confess Jesus as Lord. So there’s another step for us, that Paul uses rhetorical questions to get his reader to understand. You see, Jesus himself sent us out to preach in Matthew 28 — “Go and make disciples of all nations” — so that others can know the same thing that we do: that there is a God who sent his Son to pay the ultimate penalty of our lawlessness, so that we may be set free and have life.