Reformation Day: The Good Old Days

A. Today is Reformation Sunday, because October 31 st marks the 496 th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses tacked onto the Wittenberg door in Germany, which is widely considered the best marker of the beginning of The Protestant Reformation. Ordinarily, in the past, I’ve preached on some Bible theme made famous by the Reformation, but this morning I’m taking a very different tact.
B. Ecclesiastes 7:10 Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
1. From this verse I’d like to reflect on the Christian temptation to live in the past and to dwell on the superiority of the past to the present.
2. Explanation of Ecclesiastes 7:10
A. Say you had a time machine and could go back and live in any time in history. Where would YOU go? I can tell you something you’d find. Well, whatever time you go back to, I can tell you one thing you’ll find: you will find people saying, “The old days were better than these.”
1. Absolutists: OK, not in Eden before the fall, but surely afterward
2. Here we get to listen in to conversations from thousands of years ago, and they’re talking about the good old days and how much better they were.
B. The fact is, the world changes.
1. Ps.102:25-27 talks about how the creation is like clothing which God changes, while He remains the same.
2. Everything else changes; God stays the same. A lot of times we don’t like things changing.
3. But people often get attached to a specific time period and wish it could always be so .
C. Even in the Bible we find the people of God looking back longingly on the days of the past. E.g.
1. Psalm 44:1-3 O God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us, what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old: you with your own hand drove out the nations, but them you planted; you afflicted the peoples, but them you set free; for not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm save them, but your right hand and your arm, and the light of your face, for you delighted in them.
2. Judges 6:13 And Gideon said to him, “Please, sir, if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us, saying, ‘Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the LORD has forsaken us and given us into the hand of Midian.”
D. Don’t get me wrong. There is a time to ponder yesterday.
1. For purposes of evaluation
a. Repentance
b. Lessons to learn, e.g. Deut.8:2-5, 11-16
2. For testimonies of God’s faithfulness, e.g. Ps.78:3-4
3. For purposes of petitioning God
a. E.g. Psalm 68:28 Summon your power, O God, show us your strength as you have done before!
4. Remembering is actually an important Christian discipline.
a. Remembering what God has done
b. Remembering mistakes you don’t want to repeat , learning wisdom
E. And yet, Eccl.7:10 informs us that it is tempting to have an unhealthy bond with the past.
1. In other words, nostalgia can be a sin .
F. Something like this is going on in Jeremiah 29, which contains Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles who, having been removed from their homeland by a cruel enemy and forcibly relocated to Babylon, were so bitter and uneasy that they were unable to move on in their new place, unable to accept that God had placed them there, and, because of their fond memories of the past, could see nothing positive about their new situation.
1. The misery of these exiles can be seen in Psalm 137:1–6 “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!”
2. And so God spoke to them through a letter of Jeremiah in 29:4–7 “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
3. This letter is the context in which, a few verses later, God says the famous words of Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”
a. In other words, when we are not content with our lives as they are, when we don’t like where we are or what’s happening around us or who we’re with, God says to us, “Trust Me. I have plans for you here, good plans, plans for your welfare and not for your harm, plans to lead into a good and hopeful future.
3. There are so many applications of this preference for the past.
A. There is the tendency of some Christian groups to get locked in to one time period and fight to maintain and prolong it, what we might call Amishism.
B. There is the tendency many of us have to think back on our youth or childhood with fondness and wish we could go back to those days again.
C. This also happens with regard to church experience a lot. Someone has a great experience at one church and can never duplicate it again.
1. It’s happened to people who come here to GPC and don’t find what they had elsewhere.
2. It’s happened to people who left this church and don’t find what they had here.
3. It’s also happened to people who’ve stayed here but feel like things aren’t like they used to be in the old days.
D. Many Christians wish they could live in the old days when God did mighty miracles and wonders.
1. But if you study the Bible, you realize that the times of miraculous signs and wonders were rare even in those days.
2. In fact, the Bible is full of people who are wishing they lived in the days of mighty miracles, e.g. Judges 6:13.
3. In other words, the vast majority of believers are called to live in a time when there aren’t a lot of spectacular signs and wonders going on around them.
4. Many more are called to live in a time when there are tragedies and famines and wars and epidemics.
5. But mostly, it seems to me, God calls His people to live in the mundane world of working and eating and ordinary survival.
6. And God is the One who determines where and when each person lives, as it says in Acts 17:26 “He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined the allotted periods and boundaries of their dwelling place.”
7. If it would have been better for us to live in the good old days, God would have put us in the good old days. And if it was best for your good old days to last your whole life, God would have made them last your whole life.
8. The fact is that we do live in an age of miracles and wonders. It’s a miracle that an enemy of Christ can be subdued by His grace and adopted as His precious child. It’s a miracle that in the face of secularism and pluralism, God’s children still acknowledge Him and put their faith in Him. It’s a miracle that people whose lives are filled with suffering can also be filled with joy. It’s a miracle that circumstances which would drive most to bitterness are accepted by His grateful children, who know their Father has a good purpose for all that He allows. Whether or not people walk on water or still storms or part seas, God’s wonders are here for us to behold.
E. Some Christians look back at a period of church history, like the Reformation. And it’s as if they’re in mourning that things aren’t like they were in those days, just like the exiles in Babylon.
1. And, of course, there is a time for mourning, but not 500 years later. After a while it’s time to move on.
2. Some Christians recoil at anything modern.
3. I would argue that God doesn’t call us to be anti-modern.
4. God is not hampered by modernity. He is not caught in the web of the contemporary age, unable to move.
5. He is not held back by technology or postmodernism or globalism any more than He was held back by the Tower of Babel or ancient empires or pagan idolatry.
6. Christ wants to show forth His glorious grace in this world as He has in the past. The key to the great things God has done in the past is not in the times themselves, but in the God of glory. He is just as able to show His glory today as He was in the past.
4. Why is the past so appealing?
A. I think partly it’s because we have selective memory about the past.
1. Sure, some people remember all the bad stuff and have a jaded view of the past. But others have a rose-colored, romanticized view of the past.
2. It is easier to look at the past through rose-colored glasses than to look at the present that way.
B. The fact is, man is man and since the fall has always been as he is. He’s not getting better and he’s not getting worse (though his tools are certainly becoming more powerful). And that’s what we’re stuck with. Every age is just a reconfiguration of human action and reaction.
5. Fantasy world
A. I would suggest that there is another application of this principle. Some folks don’t live in the past, they live in a fantasy world.
B. There are many fantasy world that people live in. E.g.
1. Video games
2. TV shows / Movies
3. Internet
4. Novels
5. History
6. Sports
C. Probably we all struggle with this. Our minds escape to another world which isn’t so unpleasant . And it’s paralyzing. It detaches us from the world around us because we’re focused on some alternative reality.
6. Conclusion
A. We were made to live in paradise. But in this life, we only get tastes of paradise, not the real thing.
1. It’s hard to accept that there is no paradise or utopia in this world.
2. It’s tempting to go after the tastes in an earthly pursuit of ‘the real thing.’
B. The author of Ecclesiastes has also learned this the hard way. He’s tried over and over again to find the secret to a safe and happy life, the secret to life the way it was meant to be lived. But everything which looked like it was going to work ended up in vanity. And so as an old man, he’s testifying to us that you have to accept life as it is instead of putting all your hope in some key to supreme earthly happiness.
C. In the NT, we have the awesome privilege of knowing Jesus Christ, a reality that not only gives us the sweetest taste of the paradise we were created for, but promises an imminent fulfillment of those longings, when He returns to remake this world into paradise.
D. Yes, knowing Christ is certainly a wonderful thing. But it doesn’t remove us — yet — from this broken, fallen, cursed world.
E. For now, we still groan within ourselves as we wait, as Paul says in Romans 8:22-24 “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.”
1. But it’s tempting to flee from the groan.
2. Ecclesiastes calls us to face the groan, to practice the groan, not in bitterness, but in humility and thankfulness and trust.
3. And in Romans 8 Paul calls us to groan in hope as we wait for the day of paradise, the New Jerusalem.
F. For now, this world – as it is – is where God’s called us to live and serve Him. And today is the day God has called us to live in. “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it!” (Psalm 118:24)
1. We don’t meet Christ in another world. We WILL meet Him in another world. But right now we can only meet Him here in this world. He reveals Himself as our Helper and our Companion here today in our real lives in this world.