Video of the Divine Service is here. The sermon begins around the 25:35 mark.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Our God is a God of order, and not of disorder (1 Corinthians 14:33, 40). From the beginning, He puts all things in order. In the beginning, when He made the heavens and the earth, He ordered all things as He willed them. He opened up in His creation spaces of heaven and earth, land and sea, and then He fills them all according to His own good order. At the end, the top, the crown of His creation, He makes male and female, and He makes them all in His own image, in His image who is the Image of God. And everything is in order, everything is very good. He speaks, and it is. But then disorder comes slithering into His creation, and disorder comes by another voice. Adam and Eve hear the voice of the serpent, and it speaks of disorder as if it were order: You shall not surely die. God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be as God, knowing good and evil.

First, the doubt, then the rebellion, then the death. By a man comes death. In Adam all die. And everything is disordered: male and female, husband and wife, parents and children, life and death; brother murders brother; the creation itself disordered and knocked out of its very-goodness. By a man comes death and disorder, but we have contributed more than our fair share. In all that time, we haven’t been able to put things back in order. Like a toddler trying to make a tower out of blocks, it keeps falling down. The way of this creation and our lives is not toward order, but toward disorder. The way of our bodies is toward disorder and death, not order and life.

But our God is a God of order, and not of disorder. So at just the right time, in His own perfect order, He sends His Son into the world, born of a woman, born under the Law. Everything in perfect order; every command and every sacrifice, perfect obedience. The order of God appears again in the world, in the Man, Jesus Christ. But we don’t just need an example or a picture or an image of order. We have no shortage of people or laws or examples telling us what needs to change, or how to put things back in order. We’ve been trying for thousands of years, and still haven’t figured it out. In order to put things back in order, Jesus takes the disorder of His creation into and onto Himself. The origin of disorder is sin, and it leads to death. So that’s what Jesus, in His own order, takes as His own. He bears all your disordering lusts, all your disordering greed, all your disordered desires; all your sin and death, and He bears it as if it were His own, as if He were Adam. He allows Himself to be disordered, His own life brought into the disorder of death. His body dies, and His corpse is laid in a grave. The life of God undone in death. But God would not let His Holy One see disorder and decay. The order of God cannot be undone, even by sin and death.

Jesus rises from the dead on the third day, the firstfruits of all who have fallen asleep. This is the beginning of the new order of God’s good creation, made concrete in Jesus’ own body. As by a man came death, so by a man came the resurrection from the dead. As in Adam all die, so in Christ will all be made alive. He gathers you, in all your sin, death, sickness, and disorder, into His own life. And then the end will come, and He will bring all His own and present them to His Father, the Kingdom of His redeemed. Here, Father, all My holy ones, righteous and remade in My Image, recreated and re-ordered. That is the end for which we wait, and of which the end of the Church year reminds us: so the Church of all times and all places prays, Come, Lord Jesus! Come quickly, Lord Jesus! And He will. But the end is not yet.

We still see disorder around us and in us; we still see death. So the resurrected and ascended Lord must reign. Yahweh said to my Lord: sit at the right hand of My power, until I make all Your enemies Your footstool (Psalm 110:1). God is putting under the order of His glorified Son all His enemies: all authorities, all powers, all rulers. He will reign and rule until it is done, but not in the way that we might want or expect. He doesn’t rule in a flash of divine glory, in a demonstration of raw power. He rules as He did when He was walking around on earth, in humility, even in the humility of the crucifixion. He does reign, but He reigns in the humility of hiddenness, in water, and words, and bread and wine. He brings more and more under His rule, by these means that He has chosen. This is how He undoes the disorder of death, by bringing into the order of His life you and me and any who hear and believe and call on His Name and our saved. Because the last enemy to be subdued, the last enemy to be destroyed, is death. The final and ultimate disorder is the enemy of God’s life in Christ, and He intends to finish what He started.

So death itself will be destroyed, when the Life is revealed in glory, and resurrection becomes the order of the day. And then all things will be delivered to the Father, who ordered all things under His Son. And then the incarnate Son Himself will be subject to the Father, and God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—will be all in all. Only order, only goodness, only the perfect love of God and His people, people and their God, forever in a creation re-ordered by the presence of God in the New Jerusalem, the Tree of Life, and the water of the River of Life. Then death will be no more; no more crying, or pain, or suffering, or sickness, or sin anymore. He will wipe every tear from every eye. Our God is a God of order, not of disorder. Look! He says, I am making all things new.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, ESV). Amen.

– Pr. Timothy Winterstein, 11/24/23