Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; May 17, 2026
Readings: 1 Kings 13:1-6 (children’s talk); Isaiah 29:1-6; Luke 19:41-44; Secrets of Heaven §5480;
Video:
Text:
There are a lot of places in the Word where God warns his people that bad things will happen if they take certain actions. We’ve already heard two different warnings from God today. The first was in the recitation from Deuteronomy (30:15-18), in which He says that if His people walk in His ways He will bless them, and that if they turn from Him and serve other gods they will perish. That formula is repeated many times in the Old Testament: the people are told in no uncertain terms that they will be blessed if they follow God, and will be wretched if they do not.
The second warning was in the reading from 1 Kings. Jeroboam was standing beside the altar that he had made for the worship of golden calves (see 1 Kings 12:28ff), when a man of God came to him to say that that altar would be desecrated: the priests who sacrificed on it would die, and human bones would be burned on it (1 Kings 13:1, 2). And as a confirmation of this prophecy, the altar broke and its ashes were spilled (vv. 3, 5). The warning was clear: what Jeroboam was doing was profane, and it would lead to ruin.
These warnings make sense, in that they’re consistent: the Lord says that bad things will happen if His people turn away from Him, and then His people turn away from Him and bad things happen. But that doesn’t make the warnings easy to digest—at least not for everyone. The Lord’s words are fair, but they can seem so harsh. The consequences for disobedience are often violent and ugly—the prophecy that the priests of the golden calves would be killed is just one example. And when we hear warnings like these, we can be left with a distinct impression that God is out to get His people.
One solution that we sometimes turn to is to avoid the passages where God says these kinds of things—to gloss over them when we hear them, and even to ignore the Old Testament entirely. But that’s not a good solution. Tuning the Lord out when we don’t like what He’s saying is not a recipe for developing a deep understanding and a real relationship with Him. We have beautiful teachings about who the Lord really is—He is our Heavenly Father, He is love itself and wisdom itself—and then we have these warnings. But there is only one God. Can we learn to hear the voice of the true God, or to feel at least a hint of His presence, even when we’re listening to the warnings? That question is at the heart of today’s sermon.
We turn now to a pair of readings, one from the Old Testament and one from the New. In both readings, the Lord warns the city of Jerusalem of the ruin that’s going to come to her, because of her people’s sins. We begin with the reading from the Old Testament, which is from Isaiah. This reading uses the name “Ariel” a number of times; Ariel is a poetic name for Jerusalem. We read [29:1-6].
That reading is characteristic of the prophetic warnings in the Old Testament. Because Jerusalem has forsaken the Lord, she will have “heaviness and sorrow” (v. 2). Now we turn to the reading from the New Testament, which is from Luke. This reading, like the one before it, says that Jerusalem will be besieged. The reading is part of the Palm Sunday story. The Lord has been approaching Jerusalem; He’s in the midst of a crowd of people who are shouting “blessed is the King (19:18); and now the city—His destination—comes into view. We read [vv. 41-44].
Those two readings have a common theme, but there are at least two very significant differences between them. First of all, both readings say that Jerusalem will be destroyed, but in 1 Isaiah the Lord says that He will destroy the city, whereas in Luke He says that someone else will do so. In Isaiah He says, “I will lay siege against you with a mound, and I will raise siegeworks against you” (29:3). He also says, “You will be punished by the Lord of hosts” (v. 6). Whereas in Luke He says, “For days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side” (19:43).
The second difference between these two readings is that in Luke, the Lord reveals how He feels about the destruction that’s coming to Jerusalem. When He sees the city, He weeps for her (v. 41). The things He says about Jerusalem are not said with anger; He’s not saying that Jerusalem is “going to catch it” because He’s had it with her people and their faithless ways. He does not despise the city, and there is no satisfaction in His voice—He is not exulting because Jerusalem is finally getting what she deserves. Those are all things that we might read or project into the text, if the text didn’t tell us how the Lord really feels. But they don’t belong. The Lord is simply sad.
When the Lord was born on earth, He made it possible for us to see Him more clearly. So of the two readings, it’s the one from Luke that shows us more clearly who He really is. But the New Testament doesn’t show us a new God: it reveals who God had been all along. This means that we’re meant to look for the God of the New Testament in the Old Testament.
And specifically, because the subject matter in the readings from Isaiah and Luke is so similar, we can treat these two passages as two versions of the very same message—or even as two different ways that people hear a single message that proceeds from the mouth of God. When we hear the passage from Isaiah, we can take what the Lord reveals about Himself and His heart in the passage from Luke, and use that truth as a lamp to illuminate what He’s really saying in Isaiah. When we do this, we notice things we might not otherwise have noticed. For example, the first word in the reading from Isaiah is “woe.” “Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! (29:1). “Woe” means grief. The Lord isn’t wagging His finger at Jerusalem: He’s lamenting for her.
Here’s a brief passage from the Heavenly Doctrine that talks about weeping, and the deeper meaning of the parts of the Word in which the Lord is said to weep. This reading is printed on the back of the handout: [read SH §5480].
Weeping is an expression of grief and love; so it is an expression of mercy, because mercy is love that is grieving. The Lord has mercy on us—His love grieves for us—when He sees that we’re far away from Him, because when we’re far away from Him we are in hell. And the really important thing to understand about that is that hell is not some fantastical punishment that God has cooked up for us—it’s not a dungeon that He chucks us into when He’s ticked off with us. Hell is simply what we’re left with when He is removed from our lives. He is love itself, He is wisdom itself; He is the source of every blessing and every living thing, in us and around us. When we distance ourselves from Him (which is what happens when we break His commandments) all of those things recede from our lives. And what we’re left with is wretchedness. All of the ugly things that are described in the warnings that He gives throughout the Old Testament are pictures of what we’re left with when we distance ourselves from His spirit: we’re left with enemies that surround us, with hopelessness, with weakness; our voices whisper out of the dust (Is. 29:4). That’s not what He wants, but it’s what happens when we won’t let Him near. And He can’t truly be near to us unless we live in such a way that He can be part of our lives; and that’s why He warns us—urges us—to keep His commandments. And He grieves when we don’t.
The point is that we can choose to read everything written in the Word in this light. When we recognize what the Lord is like in His heart, we can choose to hear His heart in everything that He says—even the tough passages, even the warnings and the descriptions of punishments.
There are some stumbling-blocks that we’re likely to run into when we try to do this. First of all, why does the Lord sometimes say that He is the source of the bad things that happen to us? For example, in Isaiah He says, “I will lay siege against [Ariel]” (29:3). What He says in Luke is closer to 2 the truth: “your enemies will … surround you and close you in on every side” (19:43). No evil ever comes from God: it comes from the hells. So why does He speak as though He is the source of our punishment?
The answer, in brief, is that to a certain state of mind it seems that He is the source of our punishment, and the Lord works with that state of mind. It takes humility and spiritual maturity for us to recognize that the consequences of our bad choices are things we bring upon ourselves, and sometimes that’s just not where we are. Picture a man who’s facing a prison sentence because of a string of burglaries that he committed. He might say, “I’m here because I chose to break the law;” but he also might say, “I’m here because the police caught me, and the unsympathetic jury found me guilty.” Making bad choices and deflecting responsibility often go hand in hand. And if we’re not responsible for what happens to us, but our actions still have consequences, the only thing left for us to believe is that someone else is out there enforcing the consequences. The Lord is willing to stand in that space, if that’s what it takes for us to believe that our bad choices won’t make us happy. There are two truths that He wants us to learn: the first is that in His kingdom there is justice, and bad choices have consequences. The second is that He never punishes anyone, but that evil is its own punishment. In His wisdom, He teaches us those two truths in that order. The Old Testament tends to focus on the first of them.
Another thing that we might wonder about, as we try to hear the Lord’s heart in the hard things He says, is why He’s so intense about the bad stuff. Why the vivid, violent imagery? Why the prophecies about human bones burning on profane altars (1 Kings 13:2), and so on? One answer to those questions is that He wants us to see that the stakes aren’t low. Evil isn’t a cute little monster. We don’t need to dwell on evil; but it is useful to every now and then see evil in its nakedness and feel appalled by it, and recoil from it. We’re not meant to be comfortable with the images of evil that we’re given in the Word—that’s really the entire point.
And it’s important to remember that an overwhelming number of the passages in the Word that describe the consequences of evil are paired with clear reminders that the Lord offers us something better, and that He is always willing to forgive. In the story from 1 Kings, the Lord restores Jeroboam’s withered arm (13:6). He’s clear with Jeroboam about the awful consequences of the kind of worship that he’s chosen, but He also makes it clear that He still wants to heal him.
The reading from Isaiah consisted entirely of unhappy messages—but we didn’t hear the whole chapter. Here are some of the things that the Lord says later on in that same chapter:
In that day the deaf shall hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity and out of darkness. The humble also shall increase their joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. (29:17-19)
His warnings are never that far away from a reminder that He is able to heal and to save. Which means that the warnings are not there so that we can get bogged down in them. The Lord wants us to see the truth. The whole truth: hell is real, but so is heaven. He shows us two paths, and for the sake of our freedom it’s important that we see both of them. But with all His heart, He urges us to take one and not the other. The chapter from Deuteronomy that today’s recitation was taken from goes on to say:
… I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live. (30:19)
Amen.