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Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. Amen. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear Conrad, you are baptized, which means Jesus has taken all of your sin, all of your death, all of your affliction, all of your distress, and he has said, “I’ve got it. It’s mine. It belongs to me. I will suffer in your place.” And all of his righteousness and all of his perfection belongs to you. You are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. You are covered with his perfection. You are adopted into his family. You are claimed as his own dear child.
Behold what manner of love the Father has given unto us that we, that you Conrad and all of us baptized, should be called the children of God. He has separated you. That’s what we prayed, Conrad, in the prayer with your baptism. He has separated you from the multitude of unbelievers and brought you into His kingdom. And that’s what Jesus has done for all of us, for all of the baptized. He’s separated us, separated us from sin, separated us from death, separated us from the rule and reign of the devil and made us his own.
Now that’s what Jesus does in our baptism, but we know that in this text he’s actually talking about his own baptism as well, and this baptism that he’s talking about is something quite different. Now that’s, dear saints, what we want to get our heads around this morning, this fire that Jesus wants to kindle on the earth, this baptism that he wants to be baptized with and that he’s in distress until it happens.
Now what is, what’s that talking about? Back a few years ago, I had the privilege of visiting Istanbul and we went to see the Tapani Palace. It’s the, it was a palace but now it’s a museum and in that museum there’s a building or a room or something that has all of the old relics of the old Ottoman Empire and it is quite an impressive collection that they’ve got there. They, in fact, have in the collection, if you believe it, the staff of Moses. It’s interesting, in fact, to see because it was a, you know, a Turkish, the Ottoman Empire was a Muslim empire and yet they believed all the old Bible prophets were in fact Bible prophets. So right next to the staff of Moses, they also had the sword of Abraham and the sword of David and the sword of Elijah with which he slew the prophets of Baal, and then about five or six swords of Mohammed, along with parts of his beard and things like this.
And I was looking at those swords because it’s true. Remember Abraham waged war and he went to rescue Lot, and you remember that King David was a soldier, Saul killed his thousands, David his tens of thousands, and Elijah who slew the prophets of Baal, and Mohammed who killed unnumbered thousands, no doubt. I’m thinking about all the blood that, if these were authentic, all the blood that these swords had shed, and yet it occurred to me then, no sword of Jesus. And not because they couldn’t find it, it’s because there was no sword of Jesus. Jesus did not come to wage war. He didn’t come to go to battle. He didn’t come into Jerusalem on a war horse. He didn’t rally the troops.
In fact, when Peter pulled out his sword to defend Jesus in the garden and cut off Malchus’s ear, Jesus restored the ear and told Peter, “Put away the sword. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” No, Jesus came to bring peace. Jesus. Isaiah calls Jesus the Prince of Peace. Imagine that for a title. The angels sang when Jesus was born, the angels sang to the shepherds on the hills outside of Bethlehem, peace on earth. Jesus preached to the disciples, blessed are the peacemakers. He said to them, “Peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you, not as the world gives do I give to you,” John 14. Paul writes, how about this, Ephesians chapter 2 verse 14, Paul says, “He, Jesus, he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances.” Or again, St. Paul, this most beautiful text, Romans chapter 5 verse 1, “Therefore since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Peace is what Jesus always preached. Peace to you, don’t be afraid. Peace I give to you, especially after the resurrection. He said peace to you, peace be yours. Jesus doesn’t come in violence to make war, but in peace to make peace, and yet still He preaches to us this morning from Luke chapter 12, “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth?” We say, yes. And Jesus says, “No, no, I tell you, rather, division.”
Now what is going on? What is Jesus talking about? I want to take three runs at it, three runs at the text, to see if we can get around what Jesus is preaching. And the first is this: we want to notice that Jesus is talking about his work. He’s talking in this little sermon about what he is doing. Now so far, the reason why this is important to point out is because, so far as we’ve been studying together Luke chapter 12, last week, the week before, the week before, Jesus has been preaching to us about our own works. He’s been preaching to us about what we’re supposed to do. He preached to us last week about how we’re not supposed to worry, remember? I was worried about that sermon. He preached to us the week before about how we’re not supposed to worship the idol of money and mammon.
This is what Jesus has been doing. He has been preaching to us about the cost of following Him, the cost of discipleship, what it means to be a Christian. But now when He gets to this text, He is talking about what He has come to do, His works, His doing, His effort. In fact, He is not only telling us about what He came to do, but He is telling us about how He feels about the work that He came to do. This is one of those rare, very special texts where we get a glimpse into the emotions of Jesus. It’s helpful for us because, and this is maybe just an aside, sometimes I’m tempted to read the stories of Jesus because He so comprehensively understands the will of God and knows the Scriptures and that He’s free from original sin that He somehow kind of goes through this life on cruise control. I mean like there’s no question, like there’s no emotion or no drama in it. That is not the case. It’s never the case, and especially in this text, look at what Jesus says. He says, “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and look at how great my distress is until it’s accomplished.” Jesus is feeling it.
But more to the point here, we want to remember that Christianity is not chiefly about our works, about our doing, about our efforts, the things that we accomplish, but Christianity is chiefly about the work of Jesus, and most especially it’s about the work of His suffering and death on the cross and His resurrection. Now this is important just to kind of pin down and remember because I think there’s a great deal of confusion about this simple fact both inside the church and also outside the church. Now I wonder, we were talking about this this morning, I wonder what people outside the church think we’re doing in here. Like what do I know? I don’t just, we should just go and ask them what our neighbors over here think. We go and we park by their fence and we walk, we get out of the car dressed up, you know, we tell the kids, “Okay, best behavior.” You know, this kind of thing. We come and we come and we sit in here for, I don’t know, three hours or something, depending on the sermon, and we go out and leave. I just wonder what they think that we’re doing in here.
Now my guess as to what people think we do in church is this: I think that the world thinks that we come in here to talk about how good we are and how bad they are, and to talk about how we’re getting better and they’re getting worse. I suppose that might happen in some churches, God forbid it, but we want to recognize that the church is built around the cross, around the work of Jesus, around His death and His resurrection, not around you and your works, or me and mine, but about what Jesus has accomplished and what He continues to accomplish. We have a cross here, and here, and here, and here, and everywhere else in this building; that is why we have the building. And that cross, if it says anything, says at least this: two things, if Jesus died to save me, then I must need saving. If Jesus had to die on the cross, then I must be a pretty wretched sinner. If Jesus had to go through all of that to rescue me, then I must not be that good of a person. I must not be able to earn my own salvation. I must be a sinner. Indeed, I am a sinner.
That’s the first truth of the cross, and then the second truth: if Jesus died to save me, then I am saved. I had someone, can you believe this? I had someone write me a note last week. They were criticizing something that I said in a video of mine, and they said, “How long are you going to continue to teach salvationism?” Salvationism, I’d never heard of that word; I had to Google it. Salvationism is the doctrine that we have to be saved by someone else. Yes, I’m glad that he criticized me because he understood exactly what we’re about. We are salvationists apparently. Who knew? We know that we cannot save ourselves, that we cannot redeem ourselves, that we cannot rescue ourselves, that we cannot attain eternal life by our own efforts. We need someone else to save us, and we have someone else to save us, Jesus Christ the Righteous One.
Christianity is about the works of Jesus; that’s the first point, and that’s what Jesus is talking about here in Luke 12. He’s talking about His works. He’s talking about specifically His suffering and death, which lets us look at it the second way, and that is to understand that Jesus, in the text, uses fire and water to describe His suffering and death. Jesus says, “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled. I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished.” Do you think that I have come to give peace on the earth? No, I tell you, not peace, but rather division.
Now why? What’s Jesus talking about? Fire and water is judgment talk in the Bible. Remember the first time God decided to judge the whole world, it was with water, with the flood of Noah. And He put a rainbow in the sky and we see it every so often to remind us that we wouldn’t die that way, that the judgment wouldn’t come like that again, but there will be a second judgment, and that judgment is a judgment of fire. Look at how Peter describes it, 2 Peter chapter 3, after he talks about the flood of Noah, he says, “But by the same word the heavens and the earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and the destruction of the ungodly. We are waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn.” Fire is judgment talk. Jesus often talked this way; remember He talked about the vine that didn’t bear any fruit so it was cut off and thrown in the fire?
Or Jesus warns whenever He talks about hell, He talks about the fire. I mean, He’ll talk about a lot of different pictures: outer darkness, the worm not dying, but always there’s a burning there, there’s a fire. Fire and water now stand for the wrath of God. But look, Jesus in the text is talking about the fire that consumes Him. He’s talking about His baptism, and that baptism that He’s talking about is a baptism of blood. The fire then and the flood of the judgment of God will fall on Jesus. Now let’s be very clear on this doctrine: Jesus in His suffering and in His death is suffering the wrath of God for the sin of the world.
When we think or when I think of the suffering of Jesus, I normally think about the whip and the nails and the beard being torn out, and I think about the Roman soldiers and Pilate and the Jewish Sanhedrin mocking Jesus and all this sort of stuff. But we want to remember that the true suffering of the cross that wins for us salvation is not handed out by the soldiers. It’s not handed down by Pilate. It’s not given to Him by the Jewish rulers. The true suffering of the cross that wins for us salvation is given by God. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s how Jesus prays on the cross. Or listen to this from Isaiah 53; now, this is stunning stuff. Isaiah says, “Surely, He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and by His wounds we are healed. Oh, we like sheep have gone astray; we’ve turned every one to his own way. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
Did you get that? The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. It was the will of the Lord to crush him. He, the Lord, has put him, Jesus, to grief when his soul makes an offering for guilt. So that the true suffering that wins for you and for me, the salvation of our souls, is Jesus suffering the eternal judgment that you and I deserve, the fires of hell poured out on Him, the baptism of blood that you and I deserve. Jesus drinks the cup of God’s wrath to the dregs. He stands between you and the fire of God’s wrath to save you.
I remember one time, now I can’t remember if I told you guys this story or not; I’m sorry, I’m getting like an old man. I haven’t had that many times to tell the story; hopefully, I haven’t, but I had the privilege of preaching in Botswana, and I was preaching to the congregation there, kind of on the edge of the bush, and we were preaching about this doctrine of the atonement. And I was preaching, and the missionary was translating the sermon, and I said, “I’m going to give you a picture of how this atonement works.” One time I had my son, he was just a baby, and I put him in the shower, and he was there in the water, and he walked over and grabbed the cold water and turned it all the way off.
So now he’s standing in the water and the hot water is coming, you know? And I saw that, and I panicked and I went and I leaned over him so that the hot water would go on my back instead of on him. And when the hot water was going on my back and covering him, I was turning back on the cold water so that it wouldn’t burn him, and then I backed away, and he didn’t even know that this was coming to burn him like this. Someone said, I told that story one time, and they said, “Why didn’t you just grab him and pull him out of the water? It would have saved you a lot of hassle.” I didn’t think about it. But I was telling that story in this little church in Botswana, and the translator kind of looked over the missionary, and he looked at me with this funny look on his face. I said, “Is everything okay?” And he says, “Yeah, there’s just, there’s no word for shower.” But that’s the picture. Jesus, you have invited upon yourself the wrath of God, and Jesus is going to stand between you and the wrath of God.
This is a favorite phrase of Philip Melanchthon, that Lutheran father, who says it over and over again in our Book of Concord. He says, “Faith sets Christ between us and the wrath of God.” Faith sets Christ between us and the wrath of God so that Jesus is like our shield who is taking all of God’s anger in your place so that you wouldn’t suffer. That’s the fire that Jesus is talking about. There’s a fire kindled. There’s a baptism to come and oh, I wish it were accomplished. But Jesus doesn’t stop there, and now this is our third run of the text because not only does Jesus use fire and water to describe His suffering and death, but He also uses fire and water to describe His kingdom, that is the result of His death and His resurrection, and how it will be in the church.
Now fire does two things: it destroys, and it also purifies. Remember how the prophets would preach, “Your word is like a refining fire?” Water is the same thing; it can destroy or it can cleanse. Remember the crossing of the Dead Sea? We heard about it in the Epistle, Hebrews chapter 11. The Israelites make it through safely and the Egyptians are drowned. So it is with baptism. So it is with your baptism, Conrad. You are dead and alive. Your old Adam is crucified and your new man is risen to live with the Lord. And this is how it is with the kingdom of God. It brings this division. It separates the living and the dead.
It cuts; the Word of God cuts. And Jesus intends for this cutting to be a blessed cutting. Now let’s make no mistake about it; Jesus intends with His Word to separate you from death. He intends with the coming of His Kingdom to separate you from sin and the consequences of sin. His intention with His Word is to separate you from the devil and from his darkness and from all the effects of the fall; that’s where Jesus wants to cut, that’s what He’s aiming for. That’s why He has you here today, so you can slice off your sin, so He can cut away the punishment that you deserve and all of that.
But if the Word of God does not cut there, it will cut somewhere else, and oftentimes it cuts right through families. That’s what Jesus says. You think that I came to bring peace? No, I tell you, I come to bring division, for from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two, two against three. They will be divided, father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. If the kingdom of—watch what happens—if the kingdom of God, if the Word of God does not divide you from your sin, then it will divide you from your unbelieving friends and neighbors, or the other way around. If it doesn’t divide you from your sin, it will divide them from you.
And all of us know this sadness. I mean, all of us know, all of us have members of our own family that don’t know Jesus. They don’t believe the Scriptures. They don’t trust the Lord’s promises. I don’t know if there’s a worse suffering in this world than this. I don’t know a single, I don’t know a single one of you, a single parent, a single Christian parent who wouldn’t suffer everything so that their Christians would be saved. Remember how Paul says of the Jews, he says that I would give up my own salvation if they would be saved? We think how stunning that sort of thing for Paul to say is, and yet which one of us would not say the exact same thing for our own children, that we have those that we love and we care for who have walked away from the church and walked away from the faith, and it hurts. Jesus says mother will be set against daughter, daughter against mother, mother-in-law against father-in-law, and that’s where He stops, just leaves it out there for us, and He says this is how it’s going to be.
Now this is tough, but Jesus is giving it to us for a reason, and what’s the reason? There’s probably lots, but I think at least I want to consider two. Jesus tells us this so that we would have courage and Jesus tells us this so that we would be encouraged. First, courage. Jesus says that if the preaching that you hear does not bring division, it is not the true preaching of Jesus. If the Jesus that’s preached from this pulpit does not bring division in your own family, it’s not the right preaching. Jesus is saying that the true Word of God will cause division, and He knows that these divisions are going to tempt us to change the doctrine, to change the practice, to change His Word, and He wants us to have courage to stick to it.
Example: it’s easy to practice closed communion when everybody that you know and love is welcomed at the altar, but when suddenly your parents or your children or your brother or your in-laws can’t come and commune with you, then it’s tough, and the devil wants to tempt us to change the doctrine, to change the preaching, to make it easier. Jesus says, “Look, divisions will come.” Or, maybe even more profoundly, it’s easy to confess and to believe in the doctrine of hell and the eternal suffering of the unbeliever if everybody you know is baptized and believes in Jesus. But when there are people who you love, who you think do not believe in Jesus and are afraid that if they were to die they would end up in hell, now that doctrine becomes difficult to confess. So Jesus says, “Be of good courage. My kingdom brings division. I didn’t come to bring peace, but division,” and if these fights are happening and if these temptations are coming, then you know you’re in the right spot. Have courage.
But secondly, there’s an encouragement also here. Jesus hears your prayers; Jesus knows who you’re thinking about. He knows who I’m thinking about right now as I talk about the family members that we love who don’t go to church, He knows about them. He knows about the unbaptized granddaughter. He knows about the son that quit church. He knows about the sister who refuses to talk about spiritual things. He knows them, and He loves them. Do you remember the story of, remember the story of the paralyzed man who was brought to Jesus on a mat by his four friends? Now these guys are going to be our example. They wanted to bring their friends to Jesus, but the crowd was so pressed in that they had to go and tear through the roof, and they lowered him down on a mat, and they put him before Jesus, and Jesus looks at them, and he marvels at their faith, and he blesses the man.
Now these guys are our example in this specific case. Those family members that you love that are not here next to you, those neighbors that you love that are not in church with you, that do not share your faith, we want to carry them to church with us in our prayers. We want to bring them here and drop them off at the feet of Jesus. If you want, you can imagine you’re just bringing them all the way to the altar and putting them over the rail as you entreat Jesus to separate them from sin and death and to give them eternal life. And Jesus hears your prayers. He wants to do it even more than you desire it of Him. And as we pray and as we bring our family and friends to the Lord in our prayers, we want to remember that we too were once far from the kingdom of God. You too were once not sitting in church, and yet, look, the Lord has brought you here, and He’s given you faith, and He’s given you joy, and He’s given you the forgiveness of all of your sins. Christians, Jesus has done it for you, and the same Jesus who did it for you is after your family, and He’s after your neighbors, and so we pray for them with this confidence, and we don’t get weary. That’s the picture that Hebrews has for us, and now here we are into the bonus sermon.
Hebrews 11 tells us about the faithful that have gone before us, and then it ends with this great picture in Hebrews chapter 12. Hebrews 12 says, “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, knowing that we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, and fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” And let me paint this picture for you because I don’t know a more beautiful thing to say. It’s talking about the struggles of this life. It’s talking about the difficulties of this life. It’s talking about the constant fight against the world and the flesh and the devil. It’s talking about being mistreated and afflicted for believing in Jesus. It’s talking about all the troubles that we have as a Christian, and it pictures it like a marathon, like a long-distance race in the Texas sun.
And you run, and maybe at first it seems like you’re going to make it, but at some point in the middle of the race, you think, “Boy, oh boy, this is not going well. I don’t—I mean you can, your feet are so heavy, you can barely lift them. You went from running to walking to staggering to barely standing.” But like the end of all of these old races in the Olympics, like the marathon and stuff like this, they had the finish line in the stadium. And so you come around the corner and you start to see the stadium in the distance, and you hear the people crying out, “You can make it. You are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,” and you hear them cheering you on, “You can make it.”
And so now all of a sudden you are able to pick up the pace, “I am almost there. I am almost to the end.” And as you get closer and closer you start to see some of the people that are in the stands. There’s your grandma and grandpa, “You can make it; you are almost there.” And sitting behind them, well there’s the pastor that baptized you, “You’re almost there.” And then behind them, look, there’s Luther and Melanchthon and Walther and, and look, there’s St. Augustine and the church, and then look, there’s Paul and Peter, “You can make it,” they say. “You can get it.” And now your feet start to feel light, and you’re picking up the pace, and then there’s Isaiah, and there’s David, and they are—you are surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses. We heard about—there’s Isaiah, and there’s Jacob, and there’s Joseph, and there’s Judah, and there’s Israel, and there’s Abraham, and there’s Noah, and there’s Adam, and there’s Eve, and there’s Seth, and they’re cheering you on. “You can make it, you can get there.”
And then you turn around the corner, and you see at last the finish line, and on the other side of the finish line is Jesus waiting, with his arms stretched like this. “Let us,” it says in the text, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of the faith.” He’s run the race already; he’s finished, and he’s waiting for you, and Jesus says, “You can make it.” We were at the state cross-country finals last year, and we were watching the girls run the race, and it was an amazing thing because they had at the end of the race all of these volunteers who were there to catch the racers as they finished the race.
And there was one girl, I think she was the last one to run the race, and she came to the finish line, and her feet just stopped on the finish line, and she collapsed over it into the arms of this person who then carried her into the tent, so they would give her the water and make sure she didn’t die. It’s incredible, really. This is the picture of Hebrews 12 for you and for me. Jesus is there waiting to catch you. You can make it. His kingdom brings division. It separates the wheat and the chaff. It separates the sheep and the goats. But it separates you from death. And it separates you from sin, and it separates you from the wrath of God. He is your Prince of Peace. Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Please stand. May the Lord Jesus who loves you, who has died for you, who has rested in the grave for you and has risen for you on the third day, may he grant you his Holy Spirit so that we would endure to life everlasting. Amen.
