Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; September 8, 2024
Readings: Judges 2:11-19 (children’s talk); Secrets of Heaven §1820.5; Divine Providence §279
How long are our spiritual struggles supposed to last? How long should we expect to battle against the same spiritual enemy? If we make a change for the better, and then our old demons re-emerge, okay that’s normal; if we try again, and then the demons resurface again, okay that’s still normal. But how long is that cycle meant to go on? Is there a point at which it’s no longer normal for us to still be wrestling with the same old issue?
Today we’re talking about the children of Israel’s cyclical struggles against their various enemies: they would be delivered, and then they’d be enslaved again, over and over. In the spiritual sense of the Word, the children of Israel symbolize the church, and their enemies symbolize the hells. So the stories of the book of Judges are about our struggles with evil. This means that they’re about temptation and repentance: temptation and repentance are processes in which we wrestle with and reject the evils that we find in ourselves. When this sermon is over, all of you will be invited to take the Lord’s Holy Supper. The Holy Supper doesn’t have to be a sacrament of repentance, but it can be. There is a connection between Holy Supper and repentance (see TCR §§526, 530, 567.7-8, 722). The Holy Supper is an opportunity for each of us to come to the Lord with our struggles and with our commitments to continue to strive for what is right. It’s an opportunity to ask Him for His strength. This is just something to bear in mind, as you listen to the sermon.
When the children of Israel were stuck at the edge of the Red Sea, and the Egyptians were coming after them, to kill or enslave them all, Moses said to them: “Do not be afraid. Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which He will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall see again no more forever” (Ex. 14:13). That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great if all of our victories could be like that? If we, with the help of the Lord, could escape from our spiritual enemies, and know that we would see them again no more forever? Isn’t that how it’s meant to be? Isn’t there supposed to be a point at which we actually finish the fight—actually escape from our problems, and move on, with no need to ever look back? That is what the Lord wants for us.
We get a similar impression from the description of the process of repentance that we find in the book True Christian Religion. We read: “The question then is, How are we to repent? The answer is, we are to do so actively. That is, we are to examine ourselves, recognize and admit to our sins, pray to the Lord, and begin a new life” (§530). Beginning a new life sure sounds like moving on, and, perhaps, seeing our enemies again no more forever. And in fact there are passages in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church that say, in about so many words, that once we’ve overcome a specific spiritual enemy, or a specific hell, that enemy loses its power over us, and can trouble us no more. Our next reading is an example of such a passage. The passage discusses temptations, and victories in temptations, and then it says: [read SH §1820.5].
That passage sure sounds like it says that if we, from the Lord, receive the strength to withstand an evil that we’re inclined to, that evil loses its ability to trouble us—forever. But when we look at the battles against evil that we have fought, is that what we see? The children of Israel made the same mistakes over and over. And some of their enemies—for example the Philistines—troubled them again and again. And the children of Israel symbolize us. That is, to the degree that we’re trying to be part of the spiritual church that they represent, they symbolize us.
Many people have said that they see themselves in the children of Israel. They’ve said that they used to shake their heads in disbelief, marveling at this group of people who just can’t seem to learn—that is, until they were smitten by the rod of self-awareness, and they realized just how many times they themselves have had to be taught the same lessons. It’s also pretty normal for people to talk about struggling with the same fundamental issues for years, or even for their entire lives. Does that mean that those people are failing at repentance? Was there a final victory that they were meant to experience a long time ago that they just didn’t obtain?
This is a painful line of thought, because the evils that we’re trying to uproot from our lives are usually things that we really want to be rid of. This isn’t an arena in which failure is easy to swallow. When we sincerely try to do better, and we make forward progress, and then we see that old enemy—that old habit, that old behavior—come out again, and drag us down again, it’s easy to lose heart. Those stubborn old enemies can become sources of tremendous shame. And I think that people sometimes fear that they’re broken—that they should have kicked their bad habit a long time ago.
Of course, the truth is that spiritual growth is complicated. It’s true that the best time to kick a bad habit is right now. Actually, the best time to kick a bad habit is before you ever start it. It’s true that there are easier and harder ways of doing things—shorter and longer roads to the Lord. And we should try to take the short road. But if we find that we’re on the long road, it is what it is. No one takes the short road every single time. And we really need to remember that the Lord isn’t shocked by our mistakes. He watched the children of Israel make the same mistakes over and over—and He kept working with them. He knows how complicated we are. He knows—far better than we do—just how much is involved in the regeneration, or rebirth, of a human being.
And there are a lot of passages in the Heavenly Doctrine that talk about this: a lot of passages that say that deliverance from evil is never instantaneous. Our final reading is one such passage. This is from the book Divine Providence: [read DP §279].
If evils can be removed only gradually, then what are we to make of that passage that was read earlier—the one that said that spiritual victories make it so that evil spirits do not dare to trouble us? To reconcile these two teachings, we need to understand just how complicated our spirits are, and just how complicated a single bad habit actually is. The reading from Divine Providence goes on to make exactly this point. It says that “there are thousands of lusts which enter into and compose each evil” (§279.5). Another passage says:
Every evil appears to a person’s sight as a simple entity. That is how hatred and vengeance appear, theft and fraud, adultery and licentiousness, arrogance and haughtiness, and so on. But people do not know that every evil contains countless constituents—more than the number of fibers and vessels in a person’s body. (DP §296)
So when we fight against hatred, for example, we aren’t fighting a single entity. We’re fighting thousands of different lusts. And we fight them one after another. This means that there’s no way for us to overcome all hatred forever with a single spiritual victory. But it also means that the victories we experience really are victories. Every time we feel an urge to act with hatred, but instead we reach for the Lord and say “I will not do this, because it is a sin against God” (cf. TCR §567.5), and we turn away from that hellish path, we have achieved a victory. A little piece of hell has lost its power over us. And yes, hell is big. There’s a lot more work to be done. But the Lord is bigger. He can see us through the process, one step at a time.
His will is to make us new, one piece at a time. The reading from Divine Providence says that our thoughts and affections are simply changes in the states and the forms of the organic substances of our minds (§279). The word “minds,” in this context, doesn’t refer to our physical brains—it refers to the spiritual minds that inhabit our physical bodies. The thing is, our minds are just as complicated as our bodies. In fact, the human body is an image of the human mind. Thoughts and affections move through our minds just as blood flows through our arteries, just as electrical impulses move across the synapses in our brains. And the Lord is causing our minds to be regenerated, or reborn. He is making us new. If you were to replace every fiber in the human body, every vessel, every synapse, with a new fiber, a new vessel, a new heavenly synapse, how long would that take? That’s exactly what the Lord is doing. So long as we walk with Him, He’s renewing us piece by piece. It’s okay for that process to take time.
This doesn’t mean that we can tell ourselves that it’s okay to be evil for a while. Regeneration does take time, but we shouldn’t turn that into an excuse. Each of us only actually lives in the present, and in the present we choose good or evil. We can’t choose both at the same time. If we’re actually going to reject evil and choose the Lord, we have to put our hearts and our souls into that choice, in the here and now. If repentance is to be real, it has to be wholehearted. If, in the backs of our minds, we give ourselves permission to hold onto our evils, because we know we’ll get another chance to repent later, that isn’t really repenting. And yes, even if we put our hearts into rejecting an evil, some cousin of that evil is going to rear its head somewhere down the line. Repentance is not a one and done. There is no spiritual victory to end all victories. But every little victory counts.
I spoke to the children about the cycle of the judges—about the children of Israel turning to the Lord and away from Him again and again. I’m going to end this sermon by looking at the other side of that picture—by looking at what the Scriptures say about the Lord who watches His people turn towards Him and away from Him, the Lord who guides us through this whole, long process. There are hundreds of Scriptures that touch on this theme, but here are three of them.
From Isaiah:
I have blotted out, like a thick cloud, your transgressions, and like a cloud, your sins. Return to Me, for I have redeemed you. (44:22)
From Jeremiah:
“If you will return, O Israel,” says the Lord, “return to Me; and if you will put away your abominations out of My sight, then you shall not be moved. (4:1)
And from Malachi:
“Yet from the days of your fathers you have gone away from My ordinances and have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord of hosts. (3:7)
Amen.