The readings for the second Sunday after Pentecost are taken from Hosea 5:15–6:6; Romans 4:13-25; and Matthew 9:9-13.
“Let’s Go!!!!” Now that the half year of festivals that celebrate the essential/big events of Jesus’ life and redeeming work have been observed, it’s time to see how His redemption works out in the lives of people and across space and time.
Hosea urges us to pursue the knowledge of the Lord, just as Jesus calls Matthew to follow Him and Abraham followed where the Word of the Lord directed him. The consequences of contradicting God’s design for us and the fatigue of pretending to be our own god work to turn us back to the Lord, who heals us and revives us. Note well Hosea’s explanation that God raised us all up with Jesus on the third day after He died as the substitute for us all.
In Romans Paul points us to Abraham as an enduring witness of a person who follows where God leads. The promise of enduring life to Abraham and Sarah (who had no ability to live on, due to their inability to have children) was what brought Abraham to rest in honesty about dependence on God AND conceived Isaac, who is a witness to God’s work of regenerating the soul of each one of us.
Matthew never refers to himself as Levi in his Gospel. God gave Matthew a new life in his regenerate soul and atoned for his old life as a tax collector. Matthew’s Gospel is a powerful witness to the fact that God desires mercy, not sacrifice–except for the once for all sacrifice of Jesus, which fulfilled the law and from which flows every blessing to us through the means of grace. Like an earthquake that sets a tsunami in motion, so the sacrifice of Jesus made the earth quake, broke open tombs, raised the dead, and flows forward around the world and through time to raise us up by the power of the living water of God’s Word and Spirit!