“While You Wait” pt. 1

Greetings to you on this day that the Lord has made—a day for us to rejoice and be glad! Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Apostle Paul declared: “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” (Romans 13:11) When you don’t know the hour or the day of the appointed time, you have to settle for just knowing that the time of waiting is getting shorter. None of us like waiting. One of the funniest comedy routines I’ve ever heard was by Ken Davis on waiting. One beauty salon, he said, was capitalizing on people’s impatience. They’d posted a big hand-written sign announcing: “Ears pierced while you wait.”

Though waiting for the main event—that is, waiting for the coming of the Son of Man arriving on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory to gather the elect—though waiting for that event wears us down, Jesus warns: “You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.” Be watchful, be ready, be prepared—these are the qualities expected of those who wait. Just like disaster preparedness, there is no end to the experts who are willing to sell you advice or market their products to you so you can be appropriately watchful, ready, and prepared for the coming of the Son of Man and be numbered among the elect.

For two thousand years there’s been one religious prescription or another as proper preparation for the end times. Various times in church history have called for retreat to the desert; isolation in monasteries, holy pilgrimages, sacred duties, giving your heart to Jesus, working for peace and justice, etc. Martin Luther saw through the pretense of all these sorts of labors to their uncomfortable truth: these prescribed labors were more about the maintenance of the religious institution and its enrichment than about doing God-given work. Luther lumped all the labors prescribed by the religious leaders into one category: self-chosen works—that is, those things people choose to do as demonstrations of their own holiness or preparedness for their being one of the elect.

In contrast, Luther held that we do not get to choose our works but that God gives work to do while we wait. He called for people to be busy doing the things God had created humanity to be doing. This work is delivered through the three estates God established: family, church, and government. These things were readily available in the first chapters of Genesis. The first people, Adam and Eve, had been given three estates—three arenas or “institutions”—in which to be doing the things God had given over to them. The very first estate was that of family: established with the “marriage” of Adam and Eve and continued through the instruction to them “Be fruitful!” The second estate was that of church: established by the Word of God which set limits upon them “You shall not eat!” while at the same time giving them everything they needed “You may eat freely…” The third estate was that of government and came after they’d been expelled from the Garden. Force and coercion was now necessary to restrain sin; read how God handled Cain after the death of Abel.------