Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church

Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church
9 E Homestead Ave. Palisades Park, NJ 07650 201-944-2107 Sundays 11:00 a.m. We preach Christ crucified (1. Corinthians 1,23)

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Romans 11,33-36. The Feast of the Holy Trinity

✠ One Message: Christ crucified and risen for you ✠
The Word of the Lord Endures Forever
Verbum Domini Manet in Aeternum

Romans 11,33-36 3116
Tag der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (Trinitatis)  045 
Constantine, Emperor, 337 ✠ 
22. Mai 2016 

1. О Lord God, Heavenly Father: We poor sinners confess that  no good thing dwells in our flesh, and that, left to ourselves, we die and perish in sin, since that which is born of the flesh is flesh and cannot see the reign of God. But we beseech You: Grant us Your grace and mercy, and for the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, send Your Holy Spirit into our hearts, so that being regenerate, we may firmly believe the forgiveness of sins, according to Your promise in Holy Baptism; and that we may daily increase in brotherly love, and in other good works, until we at last obtain eternal salvation.  Amen. (Veit Dietrich for Trinitatis). 
2. O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways! »For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor?« [Job 15,8; Isaiah 40,13] »Or who has given a gift to Him so that He might be repaid?« [Job 41,11] For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever.  Amen. 
3. Trinity Sunday brings with it the Athanasian Creed and thoughts about the Trinity. If you look through the pages of the Bible, you will not find the word „trinity“ in the Holy Scriptures. While the word may not be found in the Bible, the concept and the doctrine of the Trinity is woven into the complex and beautiful tapestry of the Holy Scriptures. 
4. We catch a glimpse of the Holy Trinity in the Apostle Paul’s prayer we heard in today’s Second Reading. He prays: »O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.« St. Paul lists three Divine attributes and parallels them with three Divine Prepositions. 
  5. The Athanasian Creed is much more verbose in its confession of the Holy Trinity, and it specifically deals with two doctrines about God: 

1. The God we worship is the Triune God comprised of One God made up of Three Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and 
2. We worship Jesus who was incarnate of the virgin Mary, thus adoring Him as both God and man in one Person. (Athanasian Creed 15-16.25-28). 

8. The Triune God is deep in riches, wisdom and knowledge. It goes without saying that the Almighty God is rich. All of creation is His handiwork from the artwork of the Milky Way Galaxy to the engineering of human DNA. God blesses us from the immenseness of His riches, and those blessings are merely a drop of water in the ocean to what God has available to Him at any moment. God is also wise. Human wisdom is obtained from years of study and experience. Wisdom is that which guides us when making decisions. Our wisdom is finite, but God’s wisdom is infinite. He understood the risk in giving mankind free will, a risk that involved the possibility that mankind might reject Him as God and strike out on their own path of apotheosis. He thus created human beings instead of androids because God want mankind to be more than sum of programs acting as they were written to act. God wanted humans to love, desire and strive for something more just as He does. God decided that the risk of mankind falling into sin was worth the freedom He gave us. We are still learning to comprehend the vast knowledge of creation, like genetics, F=ma and quantum physics. God knows all these things and much more. He created the natural laws and put them together to work seamlessly. God also has the knowledge of good and evil, but He forbade Adam and Eve to uncover the knowledge of evil. In His Divinity, God knows what evil is but He is not evil nor can He be corrupted by evil. Adam and Eve only had knowledge of good; they were forbidden to peer into the darkness of evil because they could not remain untainted with such knowledge. Since the Fall, we have had the knowledge of evil and we have never mastered that knowledge but more often have been enslaved by such knowledge to the great suffering of mankind throughout the ages. 
6. But at the dawn of creation, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit counseled together and decided: »„Let Us make man in Our Image, after Our Likeness. And let them have dominion over ... all the earth.“ So God created man in His Own Image, in the Image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.« (Genesis 1,26-27.31). God knew that man would rebel against Him and seek the forbidden knowledge of evil, and still He created us with free will because He is does not fear the risk and He is more powerful than sin. 
7. The Apostle Paul tells us in his Epistle to the Corinthians: »Christ is the Power of God and the Wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men« (1. Corinthians 1,24-25). And like Job: »We know that You, O Lord, can do all things, and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted« (Job 42,2). In Christ Jesus, »The Lord restored our fortunes, and the Lord gave us twice as much as we had before« (Job 42,10). 
8. Yes, the Athanasian Creed boldly proclaims that salvation is grounded upon the confession that there is only One God who is comprised of the Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Furthermore, this Second Person known as the Son of God is Jesus Christ, and He is the only way unto eternal life and salvation. In Christ alone are true riches, wisdom and knowledge. Jesus is God the Father’s response to fallen mankind. 
9. »The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life, breath and everything. And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward Him and find Him. Yet He is actually not far from each one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being [Job 12,10]; as even some of your own poets have said: „For we are indeed his offspring.“ [Phaenomena 5]« (Acts 17,24-28). 
10. We worship this Triune God who has worked out our redemption from all sin and brought us eternal life and salvation. God the Father sent His Son Jesus Christ into this fallen world. The Son of God merited the world’s salvation by suffering, dying and rising again. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, speaks through the Prophetic and Apostolic Scriptures and through those Scriptures reminds us of all that Christ has done and said. In this we rejoice in the riches, wisdom and knowledge that is the Triune God’s Glory, a Glory He has revealed to us in Jesus, the Son of God.  Amen.
11. Let us pray. O Christ Jesus, You are worthy to be praised for Your mighty deeds; pour out upon us a rich measure of Your Glory so that we may with our finite wisdom and knowledge comprehend and fathom Your Divinity to the best of our human capability.  Amen. 

To God alone be the Glory 
Soli Deo Gloria

All Scriptural quotations are translations done by The Rev. Peter A. Bauernfeind using the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 4th Edition © 1990 by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, and the Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland 27th Edition © 1993 by Deutsch Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart.  
All quotations from the Book of Concord are translations done by The Rev. Peter A. Bauernfeind using Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 12. Edition © 1998 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 

   Nagel, Norman. Selected Sermons of Norman Nagel: From Valparaiso to St. Louis. Frederick W. Baue, Ed. Copyright © 2004 Concordia Publishing House. 

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