The Sanctuary Downtown / Relentless Love Peter Hiett

At youth group in 1978, I saw the end-times movie "A Thief in The Night." Folks got "raptured" with the rest "left behind" to deal with the Antichrist. It definitely made me want to "accept Jesus" (for the 50th time), but it sure didn't help me to like Jesus . . . at all.

When I was a youth pastor and trying to make a point one night at youth group, I introduced a series on the Revelation in the following way: I just made up a bunch of stuff, talked for about 10 minutes or so, and then unveiled the name of the antichrist who would appear on the world scene in 1991 (It was 1991.)

It turned out that the antichrist — according to my "cleverly devised myth" — was our new summer intern sitting in the back of the room. We dragged him to the front of the room, held him down, and checked for the "mark of the beast." With an electric razor, I shaved the thick, curly, black chest hair from the left side of his chest, revealing a big black number six. And then, another number six. And then, a number . . . five. I then apologized to our new youth intern and asked the kids, "Was I off by one, or more than one? How do we know the Truth?"

The ruse worked far better than I imagined; actually, it terrified me. These were smart kids. There were about a hundred in the room. They weren't shy, but up until we started shaving chest hair, they were deathly silent and totally buying everything that I said. So, this is what terrified me: I could've utterly exploited them if I had so desired.

2 Peter 1:12, "I intend to remind you of these (faith, love, manifestations of the divine nature), though you know them and are established in the truth that is present (parousi) to you." Peter uses this same verb to describe the second coming (parousia), first coming, and the presence of the Truth to each one of us right now.

The Truth is hanging on the tree in the middle of the garden. How will you know "the Truth”?
• If you simply take Him as an object to use as you see fit, you crucify "the Life," there is no truth, and everything dies.
• If you surrender to the Truth who is the Life, you know because you are known by the Good —God alone is good — and everything has meaning and everything lives.

The only way to objective truth is subjective encounter with the Truth; that is, being honest.

2 Peter 1:13-14, "I think it right as long as I am in this body (skenoma, tent, tabernacle) to wake you up... I know the putting off of my body (skenoma) will be soon... so that after my departure (exodus), you may recall these things." In three more verses, he'll mention "The Holy Mountain."

What is Peter picturing? I think Peter is picturing the eighth day of the Feast of skenopogia, in Greek, "Tabernacles."

Israel was commanded to celebrate three great pilgrim festivals.

The first of these was Passover, commemorating the night the angel of death passed over homes with the blood of the lamb brushed on the doorpost. In this way, the Israelites began their journey to the Promised Land. Passover was also a commemoration of the firstfruits of the barley harvest.

The second of these was Pentecost, commemorating the giving of the law on the 50th day (one week of weeks) after the Passover sacrifice. Pentecost was also a commemoration of the firstfruits of the wheat harvest.

The third of these pilgrim festivals, and last of seven annual feasts, was the Feast of Tabernacles (skene, skenoma, skenopagia). It commemorated camping in tents (tabernacles and booths) on the Israelite's journey, the exodus, and then crossing over into the Promised Land where the Israelites were instructed to assemble on the "Holy Mountain" — the Holy Mountain where Jerusalem was built, destroyed, and comes down new from heaven; the mountain where Adam was made and remade at a tree in the middle of a garden; the mountain where we will all be transfigured and party without end (Isaiah 25:6-9).

The Feast of Tabernacles is also called the Feast of Ingathering, for it commemor

If at a party, someone approached you and said, "Tell me about yourself," what would you tell them? At our service this week, I asked folks to quickly write that down: their successes on one side of a piece of paper and then what they wouldn't want to share, their failures, on the other side. This piece of paper, this record, we made our offering this week in our worship service. It turns out that we are the offering, the sacrifice, that our Lord desires.

Then we began preaching through 2 Peter. Some have argued that 2 Peter isn't written by the same person that wrote 1 Peter. They say this for a variety of reasons, one of them being that 2 Peter is scary. I think that both letters were written by Peter, and the reason folks struggle with 2 Peter is that they don't believe that paradigm shift that we found in 1 Peter. There are many ways to say it: You are not the Creator but the created; you are not salvation but saved; reality is not what you know but Who it Is that knows you.

2 Peter 1:1-3, "Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ... May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has granted to us all things... in the knowledge of him...."

I hope you can see that Peter thinks that this "knowledge" is important.
But whose knowledge is Peter talking about? And is knowledge good or evil?

In the verses above, the preposition "of" doesn't appear in the text, but the translator has rightfully inserted it in order to represent the fact that the words, "God," "Jesus," and "him" are all in the genitive case in the original Greek. That "genitive" can be what's called an "objective genitive," which would mean that the knowledge is our knowledge "of" God as an object or a "subjective genitive," meaning that God is the subject that does the knowing. So, Peter could be talking about knowing or being known or both.

That may seem like an unimportant distinction until you realize that it could be the distinction between "hell" and heaven, for in the middle of the garden was "the Tree of Life," and in the middle of the garden was the "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." "The day you eat of it, dying you will die," said God.

"God alone is good," said Jesus. So if God, "The Good," was incarnate and hanging on a tree in a garden like fruit, wouldn't it look like Christ crucified and hanging on the cross in the garden of Calvary?

"I am the Life," said Jesus. So, if Jesus, "The Life," was incarnate and hanging on a tree in a garden like fruit, wouldn't it look like Christ crucified and hanging on the cross... or perhaps His body broken and blood shed, given to you the night before — fore-given to you before you even had a chance to take it?

In Scripture, there are two ways of knowing:
1. You can take knowledge, like fruit from a tree. It's great for knowing objects that you can analyze and then use in service of yourself. Some people think that this is the only kind of knowledge that there is. And so for these people, everything they know is dead by definition. And they are utterly alone; they are alone — a lone subject in a universe of nothing but objects. Which to me, sounds like hell. Or...
2. You can know because you are known by a subject, that is, a person. This is the only way that little children can know anything; they must trust another person who may then teach them about themselves and all things. Jesus said that we must become like little children to enter. There are some who in many ways always remain children. We call them disabled." Maybe they are, and maybe they are not.

1. There is one way of knowing that leads to death.
2. There is another way of knowing (to know because you are known) that leads to life . . . and even babies.

If we took the Life from the tree, everything would die, and we would have gained objective knowledge of the crucified Christ, knowledge of evil. But if He rose from the dead, and we surrendered to Him as t

Twenty-six years ago, I was standing in line for Alien Encounter with my eight-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and nine-year-old son, Jon. Elizabeth was lecturing Jon on courage. Jon had been asking me, "Daddy, will I be OK?" He wanted my judgment. Elizabeth didn't think she needed it.

Alien Encounter was an animatronic "ride" at Disney World. They would strap you into a seat and feed you a story. The president of XS Industries explained that he would now beam himself into the room from the other side of the Galaxy and materialize in the transportation module in the front of everyone. A startled technician suddenly yelled, "I've locked onto another planet in our transmission path… Oh no, It's an alien! It's carnivorous!" A dragon-like creature appeared to materialize in the glass tube in front of us.

In that moment , I look at Jon. He looks at me. I smile. He's OK. He knows it's a lie.
I look at Elizabeth. She won't look at me. She's looking at the thing in the tube.

Suddenly there's a supposed power outage. "Get the alien back in the tube before it eats somebody!" yells the technician. Then we each feel a puff of warm moist air on our neck. Some warm fluid drips on our faces. We hear the sound of something feeding on something. And Elizabeth screams, "We have to get out of here... NOW!"

I looked at Elizabeth and started screaming, "Elizabeth! Look at me! It's not real! It's not real!" But she wouldn't look at me. She was trapped in a lie. The puff of air was real. The warm water was real. The plastic shaped like a beast in a tube was real. But the lie was not real. And yet, lies can kill, and people who believe lies often do kill. Nightmares are not real, but they are very real for the one who is dreaming the nightmare and so is trapped in their own lies.

1 Peter 2:11, "Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh." The flesh always desires to exalt itself. Maybe this whole world is like Alien Encounter, except that we're the aliens, for this world — or at least the world we perceive — is not our home. And we need the Word of our Father to wake us from the illusion that it is.

1 Peter 5:5, "Be clothed with humility toward one another. Be humbled... having cast all your cares on him for he cares for you. Wake up. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him firm in the faith."

Along with my wife, over the last 30 years, I've prayed with many people struggling with demons and witnessed our Lord's victory over evil. In at least four of these people, something other than that person has often taken over their body, spoken to me, and I to it, while that person later had no recollection of what had happened. In two of those people, over the course of many years, the thing that spoke, claimed to be Satan (the devil), and Jesus confirmed that this was so.

People have often said, "Don't share those stories. They shrink the church. People think you're mentally ill. And they freak us out." Yep. I totally get that. But Peter just wrote "Wake up! Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion. Resist him." It's hard to resist him firm in your faith if you don't believe he exists. And he does. But maybe, in a weird way, he — the Evil One — also doesn't?

Evil is a problem, philosophically and existentially. How could the Truth make a lie? How could the Good make evil? How could the Light make dark? How could the sun make a shadow? Well, it can't. And yet, perhaps, the sun could make the earth, then shine on the earth, and cast a shadow called "night." Perhaps the moon, which is normally a "faithful witness" to the sun, could occasionally eclipse the sun and thereby cast a shadow. Perhaps God could make man, and man — Adam — would cast a shadow... at least until Adam and all things were filled with light, and there would be no more shadow. When Jesus bore our sins on the tree, the sky grew black. And yet, it reve

On Easter, as a special guest preacher, Simon Peter preached our message on the topic of Easter and his epistle, 1 Peter. He came with fishing gear to demonstrate his trade and shared with us that for him, Easter was all about fish.

"Fish is Life" had been the bumper sticker on his boat. "I saw that fish was good for food, a delight to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise," he shared. "I'd see the fish, take the fish, kill the fish, and consume the fish, and then crave more fish."

He actually caught a fish in the sanctuary, and then he caught a woman (he said that she was his wife). He reeled her in — in Greek: "helkuo." It means "to draw" as with a line or a net, and metaphorically it means "to romance." He caught a woman but shared that loving her was more of a challenge; just as he consumed the fish, he could consume his wife. He caught friends, like his fishing partner, John, but jealous of John, he couldn't know or be known by John.

"Imagine if I could catch God," he mused. "For me, Easter meant ‘Fish, friends, God, and glory,’ because that is just what I got in John 21 after Jesus rose from the dead."

He had been fishing all night and caught nothing. A man called from the beach, "Try casting the net on the right side of the boat." When he did, he caught a boatload of miracle fish. He shared that pastors often spoke of the great obedience he demonstrated in casting the net on the other side of the boat — something that, to a fisherman, would've seemed entirely absurd. Faithful obedience is righteousness, and righteousness is glorious, and Simon Peter reminded us that many considered him to be the first Pope.

"On Easter, people come to church wanting to know how to catch miracle fish, how to get this Easter thing to work for them, how to get eternal life. Well, in case you missed it," he said. "We didn't know it was Jesus on the beach, so we didn't get 'it' to work for us. And, secondly, in case you think I was being so obedient or righteous, in case you think that I was dressed like the Pope on Easter morning, you need to know that . . . I was naked."

John 21:7, John wrote, "When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes for he was naked, and jumped into the sea."

Peter then clarified some things: "1. I wasn't being sexy; it was normal to only have one set of clothes, and fishing is messy. So, we often kept our clothes in the front of the boat. 2. I didn't want to be naked. In our day, clothing meant honor, and nakedness meant humility and vulnerability. And 3. John was a poet, and he knew me. He was pointing out that I was naked like Adam was naked, like a newborn baby is naked, and a man, crucified on a tree, is naked."

"I was naked," Peter said. "But this time was not the first time I had cast my nets at the direction of Jesus and caught a boatload of miracle fish. The first time, I wasn't naked," he shared. "And the first time, I knew it was Him — actually, I was putting him to the test."

The first time (recorded in Luke 5), Peter fell at the feet of Jesus and begged Him to leave, saying, "Depart from me. I am a sinful man."

"I obeyed. I cast the net where He told me to cast it. And I received fish, friends, God, and glory. And I begged Him to leave... Why?" asked Peter. "I got everything I wanted and couldn't want anything I got, because all of it was free. And I knew it. And so, it sunk my boat and ripped a giant hole in my psyche," said Peter. "You build a self, a soul, a psyche (in Greek) by catching things in your net. I suddenly realized that I didn't make the fish swim into my net; and I couldn't pay for any that had or pay for the One that would make them do so. God was in my nets, and He was ripping them to shreds."

Jesus then said to Peter, James, and John, "Fear not, I will make you fishers of men (and women)."
"I think I heard, 'I will give you knowledge to make yourself a fisher of men,'" said Peter.
Jesus once told Peter, "You are rock (petros), a