Emmanuel Baptist Church of Nipawin Sermons

We are halfway through December already. And we are most of the way through this section of our series. I’m not sure how that happened! But here we are.

It’s been such a joy to preach on Christ and His coming during this time of the year. I’m so glad our series lined up this way. And so here we are today, hearing about Jesus as the Son of David.

We first considered the story of David back on October 28. And we saw there how the most important event in David’s life happened after most of the stories we tend to tell. After he was anointed by Samuel, after he killed Goliath, after all of the years of running away from Saul, and after he finally became king over all Israel.

After all of this, when he was finally secure and had rest from all his enemies, God made a covenant with him, and said to him that “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom… And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:12,16). 

We don’t have time to go over it all again, but back in October we dug into these words and traced out the different lines in the story and saw how in this promise, God was saying that one of David’s offspring was going to be king of the whole world, who bring blessing to the nations as he ruled them with justice and equity.

And connected with this, we saw how the Son of David is spoken of as the fulfillment of each of God’s previous covenants.  The whole storyline of the Bible converges and come together in this one promised person, the Offspring or Son of David.

And so the Son of David is the main character of the whole story of the Bible. He is the one the whole story had been rushing towards.

And so, after God made this promise, the people waited. Solomon let them down, and so did every other king that came afterwards. And as the centuries slipped by and the people lost their kingdom and were thrown into exile, all of their hopes were focused on the coming Son of David.

This is the hope we hear of in well-known prophecies like Isaiah 9:6-7: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given…Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore.”

It’s because of this hope, this longing, that we have the word Messiah. “Messiah” in Hebrew, or “Christ” in Greek, means “anointed one.” In other words, a king—because kings were anointed when they became king. But through these promises and prophecies, the phrase “anointed one” or “the Lord’s anointed” came to be strongly connected with the promise of the Son of David, and so it took on this special meaning of saviour, deliverer, promised one.

And so for centuries they waited for the Christ to come.

The Son of David in the Gospels

And then it happened. One day, literally out of the blue, Gabriel came to Mary, and greeted her, and said, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end’” (Luke 1:30–33). 

Oh, what precious words. Gabriel is directly quoting the words from the covenant with David, and saying that Mary’s baby will be that promised, long-awaited Son.

And then when Zechariah’s tongue was loosed after John was born, what did he say? 

“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David” (Luke 1:68–69). 

This is why the angel referred to Joseph as “Joseph, son of David” (Matthew 1:20). It’s why the shepherds were told that “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). 

And then the magi from the east came and worship Him with gifts, fulfilling the words of Psalm 72:10 which call all the nations to come and bring tribute to the Son of David.

And so, with all of this in mind, we shouldn’t be surprised to read through the gospels and see Jesus referred to as “Son of David” over and over again.

“And as Jesus passed on from there, two blind men followed him, crying aloud, ‘Have mercy on us, Son of David’” (Matthew 9:27). 

“And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David’” (Matthew 15:22). A Gentile woman saying that!

“And behold, there were two blind men sitting by the roadside, and when they heard that Jesus was passing by, they cried out, ‘Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!’” (Matthew 20:30). 

Notice how it’s the needy and the desperate calling out to Jesus by this title? Psalm 72:4 talks about the Son of David “[defending] the cause of the poor of the people, [giving] deliverance to the children of the needy, and [crushing] the oppressor.” And by the way, that’s where the words to the song “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed” come from.

All of this also explains why people were constantly expecting Jesus to destroy the Romans. After all, Psalm 72 says that He will “crush the oppressor” (Psalm 72:4)! And there was no bigger oppressor than Rome.

So this is likely why, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the crowds shouted “Hosanna [which means “Save us!”] to the Son of David!” (Matthew 21:9). 

Jesus was the Son of David, and here He was, riding into the capitol city of His kingdom. Look out, Romans.

But then Jesus shattered all their expectations. Because by the end of the week, those Romans had arrested Him and beaten Him and then killed Him in the most degrading, shameful way imaginable.

Peter’s Sermon

So why does all of this mean? Was Jesus really the Son of David? How was this possible when He was nowhere to be seen and the Romans still had free reign in Jerusalem?

The answer to those questions comes from the Apostle Peter in his sermon to the Jewish crowds on the day of Pentecost, which we read from earlier.

This was the day that the risen and exalted Jesus poured our His Holy Spirit upon His followers in Jerusalem. And they started speaking about Jesus in all these other languages. And this drew a crowd. So Peter got up and preached a sermon which masterfully demonstrated that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the ascension of Jesus to the right hand of the father were both foretold in the promises about the son of David.

In other words, what had happened to Jesus was exactly what the Scriptures had always said would happen to the Son of David.

The Resurrection

So, first, let’s listen in as Peter speaks about the resurrection of Jesus in verse 25. He does this by quoting from from Psalm 16, which was written by David. And there, David said this: “For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption” (Acts 2:27). 

He’s talking there about dying. And so when he says “corruption,” he’s talking about there is the corruption of death. The decomposition of our bodies in the grave.

And in the flow of the Psalm, it would be easy to think that when David said “Holy One,” he was talking about himself. In fact, that's probably how most people took it in Peter’s day. David was saying that God won’t let him die and decompose.

But then listen to what Peter says in verse 29: “Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day” (Acts 2:29). 

In other words, this Psalm can’t be talking about David, because David did die, and he was buried, and he stayed there. In other words, his body saw “corruption.”

So who is this “Holy One” David writes about? Who is this person who didn’t see the corruption of death? Verse 30:

“Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses” (Acts 2:30–32). 

David knew God’s promise, and more than that, David was a prophet. So when he wrote that “you will not… let your Holy One see corruption,” he was talking about His own offspring, the Messiah, who would not see corruption, because God was going to raise Him up from the dead and make Him reign as king forever, just like He promised.

And Peter says, this is exactly what happened to Jesus. God raised Him from the dead—we’re all witnesses of this. That means He is the promised Son of David.

The Ascension

But there’s still another big question. “If Jesus is the king, the Son of David, then where is He now? And why are the Romans still around?”

This would have been a tough one for many people. Their whole lives, they had expected the Christ to be like His father David: “a king on a throne full of power with a sword in his fist,” like Andrew Peterson sang for us last Monday. And so now they’re trying to understand that He is the Son of David, but he left and went back to heaven.

And so once again Peter goes back to a Psalm that David wrote to show us that the ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God in heaven was a part of the plan all along.

That’s what Peter’s doing in verses 34-35. He’s quoting Psalm 110 verse 1: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool’” (Acts 2:34–35). 

This is kind of hard for us to understand in English, but in the original Hebrew, there’s two different words here for “Lord.” The first “Lord” is Yahweh. This is God’s personal name. And the second time we see the word “Lord,” it’s from Adonai. Which is more of a title, like master, which could be used for God or other people.

So in Hebrew it would sound like this: “Yahweh said to my Adonai, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’”

And most people in Peter’s day understood that “Adonai,” this second Lord, is the Messiah. The Son of David. So in other words, This verse is saying that when the Messiah comes, there is going to be a time of waiting before He has total victory over all of His enemies. He’s not going to storm in and take out all of His enemies all at once. 

And so in that time, while He waits for them to be placed under your feet, God the Father invites Him to sit at His right hand.

And Peter says, this is exactly what has happened. Verse 33: “Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” ’ Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (Acts 2:33–36). 

Jesus is the Son of David, Lord and Christ, and is exactly where the Scriptures say we should expect Him to be: enthroned at God’s right hand, waiting to have total victory over His enemies.

King of the World

I hope you understand that Jesus being enthroned at God’s right hand in heaven doesn’t make Him any less of a king than if He were enthroned in Jerusalem. God’s right hand is a place of privilege and power. From that place, Jesus reigns over everything. Like the song we sang last week says, “Enthroned at God’s right hand, the world at His command.” Or just like Jesus said before He ascended to Heaven: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). 

And from there He rules, and He waits until the time when He will return to earth and stand in complete victory over all His enemies.

And friends, that’s where Jesus has been for the past 2,000 years, and is right at this very moment. Reigning. And waiting.

And I hope you know why He’s waiting. It’s not because His enemies are too strong for Him. He could put all His enemies under His feet right now. Revelation 19 tells us that when He finally arises to crush all opposition, no-one will be able to stand before Him.

But Jesus waits, because He wants to do more than just crush all His enemies. He wants to save some of them.

And so He’s commissioned His church to go to all nations as His ambassadors, and offer them this peace treaty that we call the gospel. And as people accept those terms of peace, they become a part of the empire of King Jesus.

And it is only when we’ve finished this mission of bringing the good news to all nations that the end will finally come (Matt. 24:14).

And what that means is that we have a job to do. We have a mission to fulfill on behalf of our king.

Thinking like Subjects of the King

But why is it that it seems so hard to really get this? Why is it that we don’t often really live like there’s a king waiting for us to finish our job before He returns?

I wonder if it’s because we don’t really understand what it means for Jesus to be our king.

What I’m getting at is that none of us have ever lived under the rule of any other king. We’ve never had someone over us who has absolute power. And in fact, we’ve been trained to think that this kind of power is a bad thing. Dictators, people with absolute authority, are bad things.

And so we tend to think about King Jesus the same way as we think about Queen Elizabeth. Oh, sure, she’s our queen, but she doesn’t actually have any real power.

But friends, this is not what the kingship of Jesus is like. Jesus is a real king with real authority.

Jesus is a dictator. He is good and loving dictator, with absolute power. Just listen to these words He said before returning to heaven: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations… teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:18–20).

Can you imagine anybody else saying those words? Some political leader saying, “I have all authority in the universe. So go, my followers. Go, teach people all around the world to do everything I’ve told you to do.” We’d think that person is delusional and dangerous.

But Jesus says these words without blushing. He has the imperial power to command and send as He pleases. He is a real king.

I used to think Herod was being silly when he got all paranoid about the new king who had been born. I kind of thought, “Don’t worry Herod, Jesus isn’t that kind of a king.” Actually, He is. Herod probably understood the kingship of Jesus better than any of us, and he was right to fear it.

The kingship of Jesus is one of main reasons early Christians were persecuted. Because they proclaimed that “Jesus is Lord.” And this was a direct hit on the Roman Empire which proclaimed that “Caesar is Lord.”

And when the Romans tried to make the early Christians say that “Caesar is Lord,” the Christians didn’t say “Well, sure I can say that, because we all know that Jesus isn’t Lord in the same way that Caesar is Lord. Jesus is just, you know, Lord of my heart.”

No, that’s not what happened. The early Christians knew that if Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not Lord. And so they refused to say it, and many of them were killed as a result.

Friends, Jesus is king, and His kingdom is real. The kingdom of God isn’t just some club that we join. When Paul said that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), he really meant it. We are real citizens of a real kingdom with a real king who has absolute authority over our lives. 

And so we don’t relate to the world around us the way that everybody else does.

That’s what I was pointing to a couple of weeks ago when I talked about immigration. Because when we hear that word, “immigration,” our first instinct shouldn’t be to just think about that issue like a citizen of Canada. Our first instinct should be to think about that issue, and every other issue, as a citizen of the kingdom of Jesus. And as we do that, we’ll find that some of the things that are important to us as Canadians might not be that important to King Jesus. And vice versa.

But let’s be honest: thinking like a subject of King Jesus first and foremost is hard. It’s easy to just think like a Canadian who happens to attend church on the weekend. It’s hard to think like a fully-orbed citizen of the kingdom of God.

But it’s always been this way. Which is why Paul had to tell the Colossians, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:1–2).

Paul understood that thinking like a subject of King Jesus doesn’t happen by itself. We have to intentionally do this. We have to intentionally set our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

That means we need to be careful of what we think about. We need to be careful of the gravitational pull of things that tug our minds down to earth. We need to be careful about money and politics and social media and television and entertainment and sports and things that don’t ultimately matter. We need to be deliberate about setting our minds on things above. 

And this is just one more reason why regularly reading or listening to God’s word, and then thinking seriously about it, should be a non-negotiable part of your life.

Submitting to the King’s Authority

Now we’re almost done here. But I have one more stop. One more question to ask. And the question is this: How does King Jesus, the Son of David, exercise His authority in our life? What does this actually look like?

One answer is that we read His word, the Bible, and we obey it. And that’s a good answer. That’s 100% true. But that’s not the full picture.

Because King Jesus has a representative on earth. And it’s called the church. Jesus exercises His authority on earth through the church.

And one of the clearest ways we see this in the New Testament is the area of church discipline. When someone claims to follow Jesus but refuses to obey Him, the local church is to take decisive action to set the record straight.

Listen to these words from Jesus in Matthew chapter 18:

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18:15–20). 

Do you see what Jesus is saying? As Christians, when it comes to issues like sin, we should listen to our church. And if we refuse to do that, our church has the authority to say, “This person is not acting like a follower of Jesus, and we are going to treat them accordingly.”

And it’s in this context that Jesus talks about binding and loosing, and how what we do on earth mirrors what is happening in heaven, and that when two are three are gathered He is there, exercising His authority among us.

In other words, He’s not talking about being there for our prayer meeting. He’s talking about being there in authority when His church practices church discipline.

Listen to how Paul fleshed this out with a man in the Corinthian church who was in a relationship with father’s wife. Paul told the church, “When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 5:4–5). 

He’s talking there about putting the man outside of the church, which meant that he was back in the kingdom of Satan. And there’s so much there we can talk about, but the big idea here is that the assembled church exercises the authority of the Lord Jesus, and Jesus is there exercising His power through them.

This is one of the reasons why church membership is so important. Because when we become a member of a church, we are saying, “I’m not just going to slip out the back door and run away to another church. I’m not just going to be a free agent. I commit to submit to the authority of this assembly.”

Formally joining a church is one of the most practical ways that we actually submit to the authority of our real King Jesus.

Conclusion

So, there’s a lot there, isn’t there? Jesus is the son of David. He’s the king. He was raised from the dead and seated at the Father’s right hand, just like the Scriptures promised.

And the amazing good news is that when He was on the cross, this king died to pay for our very treason against Him. And He offers us a royal pardon when we lay down our weapons and receive His forgiveness.

If you have never done that before, please don’t leave without doing that.

If you have bowed your knees to King Jesus, then the summons for us is to really live like citizens of His kingdom. To set our minds on His throne room. To obey His word. And to submit to His authority.

So, what does that look like for you this week? Does it look like spending more time with God’s word, instead of some other distraction? Does it look like finally obeying Jesus on some issue you’ve been holding out on? Does it look like sharing the gospel with someone else? Does it look like talking to me about coming to the next membership seminar we’re going to be doing in the new year?

Each of us has opportunities this week to submit to the loving rule of the Son of David. And as we do that, we look forward to the day when His enemies are put under His feet, and He reigns from sea to sea with no opposition. That’s what we get to celebrate now in song.

This past Tuesday I got to speak to the kids at Awana. And what I said to them there has been on my heart throughout the week, and so I’m actually going to share a short version of it with you before we get to the sermon this morning.

I told the kids a true story—a really sad story, which I think surprised some people—which I read a few years ago about some new parents who were having a birthday party for their baby. It was winter time, and as their house filled up with friends, their closet got full and so they put all of their guest’s coats on the bed in the bedroom. And then it came time for the party, and they couldn’t find where their baby was. And that’s because the baby had been sleeping on that very bed, and it had suffocated under that pile of coats.

It’s a terribly sad story, and it illustrates what I fear often happens this time of year. Christmas is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of Christ. And so we do all this stuff to celebrate Jesus. And yet doesn’t it often feel like Jesus Himself gets too easily lost lost under all of our stuff? And we end up suffocating the whole reason we’re supposed to be celebrating in the first place.

I learned a lot about this dynamic when our son was born on Christmas Day a few years ago. We had to miss our church’s Christmas Eve service to get to the hospital, where we walked around empty halls all evening timing contractions. And then we were up all night and spent Christmas morning in the delivery room, and the next few days were full of the haze of exhaustion and sleeplessness and vulnerability that come with a newborn.

And as we got to the end of December, I remember feeling like we had missed Christmas. It just felt like it never even happened, because we had missed out on most of our traditions and normal Christmas stuff.

But then it clicked in how ironic this is, because our experience that year was actually a lot closer to the first Christmas than any other Christmas of my life had ever been. Because the first Christmas would have felt nothing like what we think of when we think of “Christmas.” 

We often think about Christmas as something that’s cozy and homey with plates of baking within arms reach, but the first Christmas would have felt uncomfortable and painful and exhausting and messy.

We often think about Christmas as a family time, where we need to be surrounded by those we love, but the first Christmas was all about Jesus leaving His Father’s side in heaven to come and serve people who were so different than Him.

And then of course there’s all the presents and all the stuff, whereas the first Christmas was all about Jesus losing everything and becoming poor for us.

Those are just some ways that Asher’s birth helped me see how much, in my own experience, the real story of Jesus had slowly been getting buried under a pile of feels and cultural trappings.

And so I’ve just come to realize that while these trappings and traditions can be good and helpful, they can also be dangerous and can easily begin to obscure and replace and smother the real thing. And a way to discern that is just to ask, “Could I celebrate Christmas without this?”

Because if I need a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Jesus, then it’s not about Jesus anymore. If I need presents to celebrate the birth of Jesus, then it’s not about Jesus anymore. If I need certain music, a certain mood, to celebrate the birth of Jesus, then it’s not about Jesus anymore. If I need a certain cultural experience or a certain set of feels to celebrate the birth of Jesus, then it’s not about Jesus anymore. If my Christmas traditions or activities or expectations cause me to feel anxious or stressed or angry or sad, then they’re not about Jesus anymore.

So all that to say, I want to encourage us to be really intentional about keeping Jesus the main thing. We need to work hard to not be conformed to this world (Romans 12:2), with all of it’s consumerism and materialism and sentimentalism. And let’s not be afraid to really examine the way we celebrate the birth of Jesus, and be willing to let certain things go if we suspect they might be obscuring the truth about Jesus.

Because if it’s about Jesus, then it’s about Jesus. 

So, that’s more or less the gift of what I shared with the kids on Tuesday and what’s been bouncing around in my heart ever since, and I hope you find that helpful this morning.

And now, on to the real message this morning!

The Mosaic Covenant

Back in October, as we journeyed through the story of Scripture, we came to the story of Moses and the Exodus. And we saw there the way that God fulfilled His promises to Abraham by rescuing His people from Egypt and bringing them to Himself in the wilderness and making them His treasured possession, a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.

And there at Mount Sinai, God entered into covenant with His people, and He gave them His Torah, his covenant instruction.

And we saw how a major part of this convent and this instruction had to do with God’s presence with His people. In the tabernacle, God was coming to dwell with His people, to walk among them. It was a step closer to what He did with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.

But it wasn’t all the way back to Eden. God’s presence was restricted to the Most Holy Place in the tabernacle. And the people couldn’t just come and be in His presence whenever they wanted, because they would die. God is holy and they were not.

And so the way this worked, the way that God could dwell among this sinful people, was the priests and the sacrifices. The priests were the mediators, the go-betweens, and they would represent God to the people, and they would represent the people to God. They were the only ones allowed into the tabernacle. And once a year the High Priest was allowed to enter God’s direct presence in the Most Holy Place.

And what the priests did was make atonement for the sins of the people. They came bearing the blood of animals to pay for the people’s sins.

The point was that sin deserved death. And if God was going to come and be close to them, that would mean judgement and death for their sins, unless, something else died in their place. And that’s what happened at the tabernacle. The priests were butchers making continual animal sacrifices to pay for the sins of the people, every single day.

But the atonement never lasted very long. There was always more sin. And so there was always another sacrifice to make. Always another animal that needed to die. The priests never finished their work.

And according to the author of the book of Hebrews, this is proof that the sacrifices never really took away anybody’s sin. Hebrews 10:1-4 says, “For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1-4). 

Verse 10 of that chapter says that “Every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins” (Hebrews 10:11).

The animal sacrifices could never take away sin, because they needed to keep happening. And so the writer of Hebrews says that this is because this covenant, with it’s sacrificial system and temple worship, was actually never meant to be the real thing. It was never meant to be the real solution to our sin. It was just a shadow, stretching out from and pointing to the real solution to our sin.

Promised New Covenant

And we don’t have to wait until the New Testament to find this out. Because right before the exile into Babylon, God promised through the prophet Jeremiah that there was a New Covenant coming that was going to finally deal with our sins.

We read, in Jeremiah 31:31, “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:31–34). 

This new covenant was going to be different than the covenant He made with the people at Sinai. God’s instruction is going to be written on people’s hearts instead of just on tablets of stone. His truth will be inside of His people. They’ll be transformed from the inside out. And so, these transformed people won’t break the covenant like they did in the Old Covenant again and again and again.

And it won’t be just a few people who get in on this inner transformation. Everyone will get it. Unlike the Mosaic covenant, where people just got born into it, everybody in this New Covenant will have this inner transformation and truly know the Lord.

But the capstone of all of this is the final phrase of verse 34: “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34b).

The New Covenant will finally deal with the real problem, the real problem that we’ve seen all along, the problem that a global flood and all the promises and threats in the world couldn’t fix: the problem of our sin. In the New Covenant, the people will be transformed from the inside, and their sin will finally be forgiven.

In other words, something better than the blood of bulls and goats is coming. The real thing, which the blood of bulls and goats was only pointing to, is finally coming.

We know that it didn’t come right away. After this promise, almost 600 years went by. And the people waited. Waited to be forgiven, waited to be saved from their sins.

And then it happened. A young woman named Mary, engaged to a man named Joseph, was found to be with child. “And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins’” (Matthew 1:19–21). 

Do you hear what the angel is saying? “This baby in your fiancée’s womb? He is the one who is going to save His people from their sins. He is the one who is going to bring real forgiveness. He is the one who is going to bring the New Covenant.”

And that’s what we get to focus our attention on in the rest of our message this morning. How Jesus fulfilled the words of the angel. How Jesus saved us from our sins. How Jesus was the real thing that the Mosaic Covenant was only a shadow of.

He Is the Real Sacrifice

And so first thing we’re going to see is that Jesus is the real sacrifice for sin. The Old Covenant with it’s hundreds of thousands of animal sacrifices, offered over and over again, day in and day out, never really taking away sin, was just a shadow cast by the real thing, Jesus Christ, who offered up Himself as the true and real and permanent sacrifice for our sin.

We’re introduced to this idea in the gospel of John, when John the Baptist sees Jesus for the very first time, and he says, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). 

The Jewish people understood what this meant. Lambs took away your sin, at least temporarily, by dying in your place as a sacrifice. And so Jesus is the lamb of God. He is the true and the real sacrifice for sins.

Sacrificial lambs needed to be perfect. And so is Jesus (1 Peter 1:19). He has no sins of His own that need to be paid for. He was the first man who actually could give His life to atone for another. And because He is God, He could die for not just one person, but for the world. He could lay down His life for all of His people. And that’s what He did when He went to the cross.

And on the cross, He was sacrificed for our sins, once and for all.

1 Peter 3:18 says, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.”

Hebrews 7:27 says, “He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.”

The passage in your bulletin puts it this way in verse 12: “He entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12). And then, in verse 26: “he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26).

In many ways, it’s easy for us to miss out on what a revolutionary idea this is. We’ve never seen the temple in operation, with animal carcasses everywhere, the smell of blood and burnt flesh in the air, a never-ending cycle of death. And then comes Christ, who dies once. And the sin of His people completely paid for—past, present, and future. 

As Hebrews 1:3 says, “After making purification for sins, he sat down” (Hebrews 1:3). The priests in the old covenant never sat down, because there was always another sacrifice to make. But Jesus can sit down because His work is complete. One sacrifice, done. Jesus paid it all.

And this is how He saves His people from their sins. This is how our sins are finally and fully forgiven in the New Covenant. Because they’ve been paid for in full.

This helps us really understand the words of Jesus in the upper room the night before He died, which we read every time we celebrate communion: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Corinthians 11:25). The New Covenant, with it’s perfect and full forgiveness of sins, comes through the blood of Christ, which pays for our sins completely.

There’s this idea that in the Old Covenant, they had sacrifices, and in the New Covenant, we don’t have sacrifices. That’s not really true. In the New Covenant, we had one sacrifice, and that sacrifice was enough for everybody, forever. Jesus paid it all.

He Is the True High Priest

Now there’s a second idea tied up in here, which we’ve heard hints of already, which is that in addition to being the true sacrifice, Jesus is the truer and the better high priest. That’s actually the title of our message this morning: that Jesus is the high priest of the New Covenant. 

That might sound strange to some people. I suspect that some Christians think that the Old Covenant had priests, but in the New Covenant we just don’t have any.

But again, that would be a mistake. In the Old Covenant, they had many High Priests, whereas in the New Covenant, we have one. And He is enough for us all forever.

Listen to these words from Hebrews chapter 7: “The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:23–25). 

If you are a member of the New Covenant, then you have a high priest. He sacrificed Himself for you, and now he always lives to make sure that you receive the benefits of that sacrifice.

In the Old Covenant, on the annual Day of Atonement, the High Priest would take that blood of the sacrifice into the presence of God on behalf of the people. And Jesus did the same, entering into the presence of God in heaven, where He remains even today, right now, where He is representing us before God. Like verse 24 in your bulletin says, “Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Hebrews 9:24). 

Right now, as you and I speak, there is a Man in heaven who is representing you before the presence of God. He is, right now, interceding for you, praying for you, asking the Father to give you what He paid for.

And when we get this, and when we believe this, it can’t help but have a powerful effect on our souls. It can’t help but bring an experience of peace and rest and comfort and safety and confidence.

Listen to these incredible words from Charles Wesley, celebrating the sacrifice and priesthood of Christ, and what it means for us today:

Arise, my soul, arise;

shake off thy guilty fears;

the bleeding Sacrifice

in my behalf appears:

before the throne my Surety stands,

my name is written on His hands.

He ever lives above,

for me to intercede,

His all-redeeming love,

His precious blood to plead;

His blood atoned for all our race,

and sprinkles now the throne of grace.

Five bleeding wounds He bears,

received on Calvary;

they pour effectual pray'rs,

they strongly plead for me:

"Forgive him, O forgive," they cry,

"Nor let that ransomed sinner die!"

The Father hears Him pray,

His dear anointed One;

He cannot turn away

the presence of his Son;

His Spirit answers to the blood,

and tells me I am born of God.

My God is reconciled;

His pard'ning voice I hear;

He owns me for His child;

I can no longer fear;

with confidence I now draw nigh,

and, "Father, Abba, Father," cry.

Conclusion

Do you see it? Do you feel it? Forgiveness and confidence before God not because you’ve done the right things, not because you’re nailing it, but because Jesus was nailed to a cross for you, and God forgives your sins for His sake.

In my experience, many Christians struggle to really live in this experience. Many Christians feel like it’s a sign of spiritual maturity to walk around with a sense of low-grade guilt. Always feeling just slightly guilty for not doing enough, slightly guilty for the things we feel ashamed of. And we carry this low-grade guilt around like ankle weights into every part of our Christian lives.

But please hear this morning: Jesus did not die once for all of your sins so that you could walk around feeling guilty all the time. Your sins are paid for. And if you have confessed your sins to the Lord and asked for His forgiveness, then you genuinely have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.

That sounds radical, doesn’t it? But that’s just the gospel.

And yet it’s right here that people say, “But I thought that I’m supposed to care about my sin, and try to sin less, and become more like Jesus.” Yes, of course. We need to put our sin to death. But we can only do that effectively when we start by recognizing that our sin has been paid for and we are forgiven. We start with a clean conscience. We start guilt-free. We start with unrestricted access to our Father in Heaven. And from that position we work to kill of that paid-for sin.

Listen to how Hebrews 10 explains it:

“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” (Hebrews 10:19–25). 

We start with the clean conscience. And then we move into walking with God and stirring up one another to love and good works and fighting our sin together.

So if you’re here this morning, and you know Jesus, the most practical thing you can do in terms of living out this next week of your life, and—beyond that—the rest of your Christian life, is to really believe that Jesus paid it all. To really believe that if you have confessed your sins to God, He is faithful and just (1 John 1:9), and He has accepted the sacrifice of Christ for you, and you have nothing to feel guilty about.

And to really believe that Jesus is your High Priest before the Father, and so none of this will ever be forgotten. None of God’s promises to you will ever be forgotten. You must and will receive everything He died to give you.

I know that I need to regularly ask God for the faith to believe this. I know that I need to regularly read God’s word to be reminded of this. So let’s draw near to God today and ask God for the full assurance of faith, to go out from here walking in the freedom that Christ purchased for us.

If you’re here and you don’t know Christ, please know that this forgiveness could be yours. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Please don’t leave without calling out to Jesus and asking Him to forgive you. You can leave here today with a clear conscience through the blood of Christ.

Let’s pray.

If you’re with us for one of the first times this morning, you should know that we’re working our way through a sermon series called “You Are Here: Finding Your Place in the Biggest Story Ever Told.”

In this series we’re exploring the fact that the Bible is one story, and that Jesus Christ is the main character of this story, and that we are a part of this story today.

We spent September and October exploring that first statement—that the Bible is one story. We walked through the Hebrew scriptures and saw how the storyline of the Bible is built on a series of covenants that God made with His people, and how those convents all fit together and point towards one Person who would fulfill them all.

And so in November and now into December we’re digging into all the ways that Jesus perfectly fulfilled each of these covenants and proved Himself to be the main character of this story.

Today we’re remembering God’s covenant with Abraham, and how Jesus fulfills that covenant as the promised offspring of Abraham.

We first looked at God’s covenant with Abraham back in October, and we saw that this covenant was the next major step in the story after Noah’s flood.

God called Abraham out of a place of chaos—the land of Chaldeans, the land of the Tower of Babel. And God promised Abraham to make him a great nation—to give him lots of descendants. He promised to give him a land for all those descendants to live in. And the irony here is that Abraham, whose name means “exalted father,” is a 75-year old man with no kids.

Because that’s how God works. He creates things out of nothing.

Most significantly, God promised blessing to Abraham. He said, “I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2–3). 

And we saw what a significant turning point this is in the storyline of the Bible. Because from the fall of Adam and Eve up until that point, the storyline of the Bible had been dominated by cursing: God’s curse on the earth, the curse on Cain, the curse of the flood, the curse on Ham and Canaan, the judgement on Babel—it was one big downward spiral.

But now God picks a man and says that He will bless him, and through him, the whole earth.

And so, in the biggest story ever told, God’s covenant with Abraham is the moment where the tide turns. This is the moment when the curse begins to be pushed back. This is the moment when God begins His work of reconciling the world to Himself and repairing the damage caused by our sin.

Connected with this, the covenant with Abraham shows God’s heart for the nations. God uses Abraham to create one special nation—the nation of Israel—for the sake of blessing all the nations.

And finally, the last part of the story we need to remember comes after God has given Abraham a son Isaac, and after Abraham has proved his love for God by being willing to sacrifice Isaac. And it was only after this that God made one of His most important promises to Abraham in Genesis 22:

“I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice” (Genesis 22:17–18). 

Did you catch how specific this promise becomes? “Your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies.” It’s a very subtle shift in the grammar there, which is why some translations miss this and say “gate of their enemies.” But a literal translation like the ESV is carefully following the Hebrew text, which is certainly speaking of one offspring.

It is through this one Offspring that the promises to Abraham will be realized and the nations of the earth will be blessed. 

And we believe that this one Offspring has come, and His name is Jesus Christ, and that through Him all of God’s promises are being fulfilled.

And in the rest of our time this morning we’re going to see how two different New Testament authors make this case: how they demonstrate for us that Jesus is this promised offspring, and what He’s done and is still doing to bring blessing to the nations. And then we’ll see some of what that means for us today.

Heart for the Nations

We’re going to start with the gospel of Matthew, the very first book in the New Testament. Matthew opens up in the very first verse with a statement that Jesus is the son of Abraham. And immediately he moves into a genealogy which traces Jesus’ human ancestry back to Abraham, demonstrating that He really is a legitimate offspring of Abraham.

But Matthew also does something highly unusual in this genealogy. Four times he breaks the typical pattern of only listing fathers, and he specifically highlights four gentile women who were a part of the lineage of Jesus. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba (Matthew 1:3, 5, 6). This would not have been subtle to the first readers. It was an obvious way of highlighting the relationship of Jesus to the Gentile nations.

And then in chapter two, we read about how three Gentile wise men from the east come to worship Him (Matthew 2:1-12). Even as a young child, Jesus is already extending His reach beyond Israel to the nations.

In Matthew chapter four, right after His temptation in the wilderness, Jesus begins his ministry in “Galilee of the Gentiles” (Matthew 4:15). And the end of that chapter highlights that people were coming to Jesus from the Gentile regions of Syria and the Decapolis (Matthew 4:24-25). And it was to these mixed crowds of Jews and Gentiles that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5).

And almost right after he finished that sermon, we hear about Jesus healing the servant of the Roman Centurion. And it was about this Roman man that Jesus said, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west [in other words, from the Gentile nations] and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:10–12). 

And we could go on and on. We could talk about the healings He did for Gentiles. We could talk about how it was in the Gentile city of Caesarea Phillipi where Peter confessed Jesus to be the Christ (Matt 16:13-20). But I hope you see it. I hope you see the way that Jesus brought blessing to the nations in His ministry.

Christ’s greatest act of blessing the nations, however, happened not in His life but in His death. And to hear this explained for us, let’s turn to Galatians chapter 3, which was just read for us. It’s here that the Apostle Paul unpacks for us why we should understand Christ to be this promised offspring of Abraham, and how it is that blessing comes to the nations through Him.

The Blessing is the Gospel

The first truth we want to see from Paul’s words in Galatians 3 verse 8 is that “the blessing” that God promised to the nations is the gospel, the good news of justification by faith.

Justification by faith is the glorious truth that God counts us righteous, counts us to be in right standing with Him, by our faith in Him, and not by our works. 

This is the good news. This is what we mean when we say the word “gospel.” This is what we mean when we tell people to believe in Jesus. It’s not about just having an accurate belief system—it’s about relying on God to justify us instead of trying to justify ourselves.

We’re not going to have time to get into all of the reasons and rationale behind what Paul writes in verse. 8, but his point is clear: “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Galatians 3:8). 

So when God promised Abraham that all of the nations would be blessed in Him, the blessing He was talking about was the blessing of the gospel. The blessing of a right standing with God by faith.

Acts chapter three gives another example of this kind of reasoning. Listen here as Peter makes a very similar point as Paul about the blessing that God was speaking of:

“You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness” (Acts 3:25–26). 

So the blessing that will flow to the nations is the blessing of the gospel: of repentance and forgiveness and justification.

Blessing Instead of Curse

The next question we want to ask is, “how does this blessing of justification by faith actually come to us, when what we really deserve is a curse for our sin?” And the answer to that question is found in verses 13-14: 

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (Galatians 3:13–14). 

Paul’s point is that all of us deserve God’s curse for our sin, and this is especially true of those who are relying on the law of Moses to save them.

But Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. He was cursed by God for our sin when He hung on the tree. He took our curse for us.

We were prepared for this, weren’t we, by Genesis chapter 15? Do you remember, how God made a series of promises to Abraham, and then he had Abraham take three animals and cut them in half (Genesis 15:7-10), and God’s presence came and passed alone between the animal pieces (Genesis 15:17)?

This was a familiar covenant-making ceremony in that part of the world. Except that typically both parties in the covenant ceremony would walk between the pieces. And what they were essentially saying is, “May I be killed in this gruesome manner if I do not keep my end of the covenant.”

But by passing alone through the pieces, God was promising that He would pay, by death, for Abraham’s failure to be a faithful covenant partner.

And the Son of God made good on that promise when He willingly went to the cross and His body was broken and His blood was shed. For Abraham’s sins. 

This is what Romans 3:26 speaks of, when it talks about the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, and says, “This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins” (Romans 3:26).

God passed over the sins of Abraham and David and so many others. They did not receive the curse they deserved. And that’s because God was waiting for it to fall on Christ.

So this is how the blessing of justification comes to us. It comes to us, despite our sin, because Jesus took the curse for our sins onto Himself on the cross.

And so we read, in verse 13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us,” and then in verse 14, “so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles” (Galatians 3:13–14).

Offspring, Not Offsprings

So, the blessing God promised to Abraham is the blessing of the gospel, and this blessing comes to us on account of the sacrifice of Christ. Is it not clear, then, that Jesus must be the promised offspring who brings blessing to the nations?

And this is exactly what Paul says in verse 16. “Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but referring to one, ‘And to your offspring,’ who is Christ” (Galatians 3:16). 

This is crystal clear. There’s one offspring, and it’s Jesus. And He brings blessing to the nations by dying on the cross for their sins so that they can be justified by faith.

This is the point being made in passages like Revelation 5:9-10, in which the heavenly choir sings to Christ:

“Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9–10). 

That passage is describing the fulfillment of the covenant with Abraham. The blessing of salvation flowing to the nations through the death and resurrection of Christ. That’s how this all comes together.

"Go Ye"

But we haven’t quite closed the loop. We’ve seen that Jesus died for people from every nation so that they can be justified by faith. This is the blessing promised to Abraham.

But in order to receive this blessing, those people from every nation still must believe. They must have faith. “And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?” (Romans 10:14–15). 

You see where we’re going with this? In order for the nations to be blessed in Jesus, people need to go tell them about Jesus.

And so with that thought firmly lodged in your brain, turn back to the very end of the gospel of Matthew, to what is probably one of the most important passages in the whole Bible in terms of understanding how God’s promises to Abraham are fulfilled.

Matthew chapter 28 verse 18, right before Jesus ascends to Heaven. And He says this to his disciples:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:18–20). 

Did you hear that? “All nations.” In the original Greek, this is the exact same three words as we find in the Greek translation of Genesis 22:18: “and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”

Do you see it? The Great Commission—the command to go make disciples of all nations—is the way that the covenant with Abraham gets fulfilled. The nations of the earth are blessed in Jesus when we go and make disciples of them.

And that means that the Covenant with Abraham is still not fulfilled, completely. It’s still a work in progress. Because there are still peoples and nations where we haven’t made disciples yet. We haven’t finished the great commission. 

And this is the reason why there is an “already” and a “not yet.” This is the reason that there is a gap in between the first and the second comings of Christ.

Because of the mission. Because Jesus entrusted the fulfillment of His covenant with Abraham to us. And there are still people from tribes, languages, peoples and nations whom He died for on the cross and who have not believed yet because people haven’t gone to tell them.

And this is our job: to get to work to play our part in fulfilling this 4,000 year old promise.

Our Heart (Or Lack Thereof) for the Nations

Now there’s a lot to say here, and much of it will need to wait for the new year, when we’ll spend more time exploring what this all means for us.

But I want to touch on two of those points for us this morning. The first one is this: if we as a church are really going to play our part in fulfilling the promises to Abraham, then we cannot be content to just be a church that supports missionaries. We must strive together to be a church that sends missionaries, and I would add, to unreached peoples. Our success and faithfulness should not be measured by our seating capacity but by our sending capacity. We must embrace a culture of going, a culture of leaving for the sake of the gospel. And again, more on this in the new year.

Second, if we as a church are going to play our part in fulfilling the promises to Abraham, and if we are going to follow the example of Jesus in His heart for the nations, that means that we must begin by having a heart for the nations here at home. And therefore, there must be zero tolerance among us for attitudes of racism or nationalism.

I’m a white Canadian and I have grown up here in Western Canada surrounded by mostly white people, and my experience tells me that there is a lot of racism in the Canadian church.

Think about this in the context of immigration. I’ve heard Christians say things like “We need to be careful with all of these people coming over here from other countries, changing our way of life.”

It’s one thing for a citizen of Canada to talk that way. But we are not primarily citizens of Canada. We are citizens of the kingdom of God. And so we can’t just think like the rest of the world does.

We should have zero interest in preserving some perfect idea of a white Canada. We should have zero interest in protecting “our way of living.” Jesus told us to lose our lives for His sake. And so we should be welcoming people from other countries, whoever they are, with open arms. 

Because the truth is that if more of us were more obedient to Jesus, we would be going to them long before they were coming here to us. Could it be that God is using immigration to keep His promise to Abraham in spite of our disobedience?

And here’s what’s perhaps the most ironic fact of all: if your skin is white, you’re the children of immigrants to this land. There were people here before us. And you’d better believe that your forefathers changed their way of living when they came here.

Which just makes any hint of racial prejudice towards the First Nations peoples that much more disgusting.

As the people of God we have zero excuse for racism and we must have zero tolerance for it. And my experience tells me that the Canadian church has a long way to go on this file.

So what do we do about this? What should you do about this?

It starts with confession and repentance. We need to ask God for forgiveness, and ask for a change of heart. And then, we go do something about it. It’s not hard. This week, just go talk to someone who’s different than you.

I had a life-changing conversation several years ago when a man who was a different ethnicity sat down beside me on a park bench. And as soon as he sat down a bunch of other people around us got up and left. And he just opened up to me about how hard that was—what it was like to have people avoid him and keep their distance everywhere he went.

And since that night I’ve made a point of intentionally not avoiding people who look different then me. If I’m at the grocery store, and there’s two lanes open, and in one of the lanes there’s someone who is from a different ethnicity than me, I’ll pick that one. And I won’t keep my distance. And I’ll do my best to be friendly and say “hi” and just treat them the way I’d treat anybody else.

And I’m not doing anything special when I do that. Jesus did something special when He died for people from that nation. And so it should be normal for His people to care about the nations and go out of our way to show His love for them.

So we’re going to pray here to close. And then we get to celebrate another baptism. This person has had the blessings of the gospel come to them through the death of Jesus, and we're going to watch them make His faith in Christ official.

And then we’re going to end by singing a familiar song. “Joy to the World.” But I hope this song has a different ring after this message. Because that song is about how Jesus fulfills the covenant with Abraham. Jesus is the saviour of the whole world, and He has come to “make His blessings known far as the curse is found.”

And as we sing that song, think about God’s heart to bless the nations right here in Nipawin, and what you can do about that even this very week.

Did you catch those words we sang just a few minutes ago? “Rise, the woman’s conquering Seed, bruise in us the serpent’s head.” We don’t often sing that fourth verse of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” And I suspect it’s because that line, and some of the other lines in that verse, don’t really make sense to most people. The truth is, they don’t make sense, until you know the story of the Bible.

But if you’ve been around this fall, you should understand that line. Because “seed” is just another way of translating the word “offspring.” And so that line is simply echoing the words from Genesis 3:15, where God said to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise [or crush] his heel.”

This is a passage we looked at back in September when we talked about the Fall of Adam and Eve into sin. Our first parents were tempted and deceived by the serpent, who was Satan, and so God promised that one day the serpent would be destroyed by an offspring of Eve. Satan would try to strike at that offspring—he would bruise his heel—but in that very act, that very heel will come down on his own head and crush it. The Offspring of Eve will destroy the serpent.

For centuries, Jewish and Christian interpreters understood this to be the first mention of the Messiah in the Bible. This is the first time we find out that a saviour is coming; someone is going to be born who will destroy our deceiver.

And it’s because of this promise that this word “offspring” becomes really important in the story of the bible. It shows up again and again in the story. All throughout the Old Testament, the line of offspring is traced from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Jacob to Judah to David. And all along the way, with each important person that comes up, we ask, “Could this be him? Could this person be the promised Offspring of the woman who will crush the serpent?” And each time we were painfully disappointed.a

But the writer of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” understood what we are celebrating this morning: that the promised Offspring of Eve was finally born, and His name is Jesus. And today we’re going to be seeing how Jesus perfectly fulfilled this promise. Jesus of Nazareth is the one who crushed, is crushing, and will finally crush His ancient enemy Satan.

The way that we’re going to be seeing this truth today is by walking through the gospel of Luke and highlighting a few key passages there that speak about Jesus and His mission to conquer and defeat the Devil.

Angel Armies at His Birth

The first passage that opens this theme up to us is one you may not expect: Luke chapter 2, the familiar passage that tells about the birth of Christ. Listen to these words from verses 8-10:

“And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David [the warrior-king], a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host” (Luke 2:8-13)  - stop right there.

What comes to mind when you hear the word “host”? In many of our songs and pictures of the birth of Christ, we picture this to be a men’s choir, with, you know, matching choir robes that have little holes for their wings. But what we often miss is that the word “host” is a military word. It means essentially the same thing as “army.”

That changes things a bit, doesn’t it? “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army.” 

And by the way, this is what’s going on in the Old Testament when God speaks of Himself as the “Lord of Hosts.” That essentially means Lord of Armies—angel armies. 

And it’s just like what Jesus said to His disciples, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53). Legion is another military word, pointing to angels as soldiers in an army.

All throughout the Bible angels in the Bible are repeatedly identified as warriors. In fact, you could almost say that should be the default way we think about angels—as soldiers, warriors. They fight for God against His enemies. And so on this night that the king is born, His birth is announced by an army of angels, “praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!’” (Luke 2:13–14). 

What I’m suggesting is that we should view the birth of Christ as a military invasion. The Offspring of Eve has come with His armies to do battle with His ancient enemy.

Facing Off

The next place we see this come up in Luke’s gospel is at the end of the next chapter, where Luke records Jesus’ genealogy. I won’t read it for you, but this genealogy traces Jesus’ ancestry all the way back to Adam and Eve. When scholars compare this genealogy to the one in Matthew’s gospel, many think that this one in Luke’s gospel is likely tracing the line of Mary, who was the physical mother of Jesus. And so it goes from Mary all the way back to Adam, and thus, Eve. In other words: Jesus really is the promised Offspring of Eve.

And so it’s significant that right after tracing Jesus all the way back to Adam and Eve, we read these words at the beginning of Luke chapter 4:

“And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil” (Luke 4:1). 

For years this passage baffled me. We know that God doesn’t tempt anyone (James 1:13). Jesus taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation” (Luke 11:4). But here is Jesus, right after being baptized, full of the Holy Spirit, being led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil for forty days.

What’s going on here?

What’s going on here is that the Son of God, the Offspring of Eve, is going to war. He is intentionally beginning His ministry with a head-on confrontation with the serpent.

And like Tim explained for us last week, there are some strong parallels between how Satan tempted Eve in the garden and what he does with Jesus here. But unlike Eve, and unlike Adam, Jesus resisted Satan. He fought back. He clung to the truth of God’s word instead of letting it be twisted by Satan.

I wonder if panic seized the kingdom of darkness in those moments as Satan and all his legions realized that for the first time in history, their game wasn’t working. Jesus was not caving in. Exhausted and hungry and alone, in a place of complete weakness, where most of us would have long since given up, Jesus dug in and “answered him, ‘It is said, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test”’” (Luke 4:12). 

Think about your own life, and how easily you’ve given in to temptation over and over again. Think about how easy we’ve made it for Satan to deceive us, and what little effort he’s needed to put into leading us astray.

And now look at Jesus, weakened from forty days of starvation, with subtle, alluring little temptations being dangled in front of his face—ones that most of us wouldn’t even think are sin—and he says “no.” No discussion. No negotiation. No wavering. Solid, unflinching strength. And Satan can do nothing but to back down.

Marvel at Jesus in these moments. Be amazed.

I Know Who You Are

Verse 14 tells us that “Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee” (Luke 4:14). And if you just look a little bit further down in that chapter, you’ll see the very first miracle that Luke records for us is a confrontation with the enemy.

Luke 4:31-34: “And he went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee. And he was teaching them on the Sabbath, and they were astonished at his teaching, for his word possessed authority. And in the synagogue there was a man who had the spirit of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Ha! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.’”

Did you hear that? This demon—one of Satan’s soldiers—is quite comfortable being in a synagogue with all of these religious people. But then Jesus shows up, and he is terrified. He fears that his judgement day has come. “Have you come to destroy us?”

He knows who Jesus is—the Holy One of God. And He knows that this Holy One of God is going to crush the head of Satan, and that means that as a member of Satan’s army, he’s in big trouble.

“But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be silent and come out of him!’ And when the demon had thrown him down in their midst, he came out of him, having done him no harm. And they were all amazed and said to one another, ‘What is this word? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out!’” (Luke 4:35–36). 

The idea of casting out a demon from someone wasn’t new to these people. There were exorcists among the Jewish people, but they used all kinds of weird rituals, and it was always a question whether they actually worked or not. And so the people had never seen anything like this. Jesus just tells this demon what to do and it just obeys. 

Never before had anyone showed this kind of authority over the forces of darkness. 

Plundering the Devil’s House

Now this comes into even clearer focus in Luke chapter 11, which is the passage we read at the beginning of the message. Please know that as we move to chapter 11 we’re skipping over a few things. We’re skipping over the time when Jesus cast the legion of demons out the man. We’re skipping over chapter 10, where Jesus said, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). But our passage in chapter 11 records some of the most important words that Jesus spoke about this topic.

The background here is that Jesus’ had cast a demon out of someone, and people was amazed again, but Jesus also had some enemies by now, and they were saying that Jesus was casting out demons by the power of Satan instead of the power of God.

And so what Jesus does in verses 17-19 is show just how silly that idea is. It makes no sense to say that Satan would be casting out Satan. Why would he do that? There’s no logic there. It’s plain silly.

And then after making that point, Jesus said these words in verse 20: “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20). There it is again—the kingdom of God. If Jesus is able to cast out demons with this kind of authority, then He is the long-promised king, the Offspring of Eve and Abraham and David. And that means that the kingdom has arrived.

And then Jesus makes this astounding claim about Himself in verses 21-22: “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are safe; but when one stronger than he attacks him and overcomes him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and divides his spoil” (Luke 11:21–22). 

Who is the strong man Jesus is talking about? Satan. Who is the one stronger than him, who has attacked and overcome him and is dividing his spoil? Jesus.

That’s what Jesus was doing in His whole ministry, and most visibly every time He cast a demon out of someone. It’s like He had walked into Satan’s house and said, “This is mine now.” And just started taking his stuff. And Satan was powerless to do anything about it, because Jesus had overcome him and destroyed his defences.

He had been completely overwhelmed by the power of Jesus, and so there was nothing he could do to stop Jesus from taking people out from under his domain and  transferring them into the kingdom of light (Colossians 1:13). 

The Decisive Victory

Everything we’ve seen so far this morning was just preparation for the final showdown. Because even though he was defeated in the wilderness and hopelessly overpowered by Christ, the ancient serpent wasn’t ready to give up yet. In fact, back in Luke 4, after Jesus resisted him in the wilderness, we read that “when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). 

In other words, he wasn’t giving up. He was waiting for another chance. And that chance came on the dark night that Jesus was betrayed and led away to be killed.

We read in Luke 22:3 how Satan entered into Judas, and this led Judas to go arrange to betray Jesus to the authorities. And there in the garden of Gethsemane, after Judas’ awful kiss was planted on his cheek, and the other disciples had abandoned Him, “Jesus said to the chief priests and officers of the temple and elders, who had come out against him, ‘Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs? When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness’” (Luke 22:52–53). 

That was the hour of the power of darkness. This was Satan’s hour. And so it’s very likely that in this whole process of entering into Judas and getting Jesus arrested and killed, Satan thought he was winning. Maybe he thought that if he couldn’t get Jesus to sin, then he’d have to settle to shame Him and ruin His reputation and destroy the faith of his followers and kill Him before He could actually rule like a proper king.

But he had no idea.

He had no idea that Jesus had outmaneuvered Him. He had no idea that as he moved in for the attack, he put himself into a checkmate. He had no idea that Jesus still had the upper hand even as He was whipped and beaten and led up the hill and nailed to a cross and hung up to die. 

Because this was God’s plan. What looked like Satan’s greatest victory actually became the very thing that sealed his doom. It was in His death that Jesus destroyed the power of Satan.

He reached out to strike at Jesus, but in so doing he was destroyed. He bruised the heel of Jesus, but in that very action, that bruised heel crushed his own head.

How Satan was Undone

Now let’s think for a few moments about how this actually happened. We need to start by understanding a few things about Satan and his conflict with God. First, we should realize that Satan’s power is quite a bit more limited than many of us think. He doesn’t just go around doing whatever he wants. The book of Job shows us that he’s on a pretty tight leash.

The main way that Satan works is by doing what he did with Adam and Eve—lying and deceiving and tempting people into sin. Revelation 12:8 calls him the “deceiver of the whole world.” He tries to make us sin. And then, when we have given in to him and committed our sin, he turns on us and begins to accuse us for that sin before God. And that’s why Revelation 12:10 calls him the “accuser of our brothers” who “accuses them day and night before God.”

That’s his M.O. Deceive, and then accuse. Just like the White Witch in the Chronicles of Narnia, he allures us with Turkish Delight and feeds us lies until we commit our crimes, and then he turns coat and becomes our prosecutor who tries to make sure that God gives us the full punishment we deserve.

And as a prosecutor, he has a good case. He’s right. We’ve sinned. We deserve God’s judgement.

But on the cross, the Offspring of Eve stepped in to our place and took that judgement onto Himself. “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). And right before He died He said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). The sentence had been served. Justice had been satisfied. Our sins had been paid for in full.

And we have nothing left to fear. We don’t need to fear God’s judgement. We don’t need to fear death. We don’t need to live with a guilty conscience.

And that means that there are no sins left for Satan to accuse us for. There are no fears left for Satan to manipulate us with. 

The Accuser of the Brothers is out of work.

Listen to how Hebrews chapter 2 describes this: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:14–15).

The Final Victory

So, on the cross, Jesus won the decisive victory over Satan.

Now that’s different from saying that He won the final victory over Satan. The final victory is still in the future. We read about it in the book of Revelation: 

“When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Revelation 20:7–10).

The devil will be vanquished and will never be able to tempt or deceive or oppose or accuse again. And when that happens, then the prophecy of Genesis 3:15 will finally be fulfilled in it’s all of it’s fulness. That will be Christ’s final victory. That will be the end of the war.

But on the cross, Jesus won the decisive victory. That’s another military phrase, that refers to a victory which doesn’t end the war, but decides who the victor will be. It’s like D-Day in WWII. When the Allies successfully landed on the beaches of Normandy, the war was not over. There was still more fighting to do. But the war was essentially won. It was the beginning of the end for Hitler and his forces.

And so it was with Christ’s victory over Satan at the cross. It was the decisive victory. It was the fatal blow. Satan’s doom is sealed. He’s been stripped of all of his authority over God’s children. He can do no real, eternal harm to us. And so even though he tries to make us forget this, and there may be some battles to fight in this regard, the war has already been decided and essentially won. Jesus is victorious.

It’s the already-but-not-yet thing again. Satan has already been crushed, even though he has not yet fully been crushed.

Conclusion

And that’s where we live today: in this time between the already-and-the-not-yet. In between D-Day and VE Day. Satan is still around, and he still tries to deceive and tempt us, even as God’s children. And so 1 Peter 5:8 tells us, “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). But then it simply says, “Resist him, firm in your faith” (1 Peter 5:9). 

Just like what James tells us. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). 

So in other words, just like Jesus in the wilderness, when we resist the Devil—which we can, with God’s power—the Devil will free from us. Because he has no real, lasting power over us. Our sins have been paid for, and we have no reason to fear death. You belong to the Snake-Crusher. You are protected by the King and His armies.

And in the New Year, we’re going to spend a whole morning talking about what this means for us today, and the whole idea of spiritual warfare. That Sunday we’ll consider the incredible words of Romans 16:20, which say that “the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20).

But for our purposes today, our focus is more simply Christ and His victory, and the way He fulfilled God’s ancient promise. I want us to marvel at Christ today. To worship our snake-crushing, Satan-pillaging Saviour, whom God promised to send, and then did finally send.

Unlike Adam, unlike Noah, unlike Abraham and Jacob and Moses and David and Solomon, this Saviour perfectly resisted the temptations of the serpent. He did not give in once.

And in His ministry, He proved over and over again that He was vastly stronger than Satan and all of his forces.

But it was in the weakness of death, when Satan thought he had the upper hand, and reached out to strike at Jesus, that he found the heel coming down upon his own head. On the cross, Jesus destroyed Satan’s real power once and for all.

And so while we need to be wary, we truly have nothing to fear.

Now if you are here this morning and you don’t know Christ, if you haven’t trusted in Jesus, please hear the sobering truth that you do have reason to fear. Satan still does have power over you. He can accuse you and manipulate you with legitimate fear.

But it doesn’t need to stay that way. You can turn to Christ, today, for safety and salvation. God’s word promises that “The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned” (Psalm 34:22).

So please don’t leave this morning without turning from your sin and believing in all that Jesus is and promised to be. Please come talk with me or someone else here who knows Jesus.

If you do know Jesus this morning, then know that you can walk out of here into whatever is ahead of you this week with absolute safety and absolute confidence. Not because we are strong, but because we belong to the Snake-Crusher, and He is strong. And as Colossians 1:13 says, God “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13). 

And so we’re going to end by singing a rousing old hymn to celebrate this truth. 

Did we in our own strength confide

Our striving would be losing;

Were not the right Man on our side,

The Man of God’s own choosing;

Dost ask who that may be?

Christ Jesus, it is He;

Lord Sabaoth [the Lord of Hosts], His name,

From age to age the same,

And He must win the battle.

If you’ve been with us for any number of Sunday’s since the beginning of September, you’ll know that we’re going through a series called, “You Are Here: Finding Our Place in the Biggest Story Ever Told.” If you’re here for the first time this Sunday, welcome!

This series has been split into three parts: the first part ended a couple weeks ago, and it was a journey through the narrative of Scripture, and specifically the progression of the covenants God made with His people. 

Last Sunday, Chris began the second section of the series, which takes a look at Jesus, and how He perfectly fulfills each of the covenants, and how His Kingdom has been established through those covenants. This section will last until the end of December. 

The third section, which will begin in January and take us all the way through April, will explore how we fit into this story, and how we can live in light of it.

Today, we’ll be going all the way back to the beginning, and seeing how Jesus is the Last (or Second) Adam, and how He fills all the roles Adam had, and surpasses Adam in the fulfillment of those roles.

Biblical Comparisons

In the Bible, there are two places that make a direct comparison between Christ and Adam. The first one is Romans 5:12-21, which Chris just read for us. The other is found in 1 Corinthians 15:45-49. This is where we get the phrase “the Last Adam”: “Thus is it written, ‘The first Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit.” The Scriptures invite us to draw this comparison between Adam and Christ. Paul knew the Scriptures like the back of his hand, so he knew exactly how Adam and Christ were similar, and how they differed.

Where Adam Failed, Jesus Succeeded

Romans 5:14 says, “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam who was a type of the one who was to come.” A “type,” in the Bible, is used to foreshadow a similar but greater thing that’s coming. An easy example is that the tabernacle was a “type” of the temple. The temple served the same purpose as the tabernacle, but it was more splendid and marvellous than the tabernacle, and it was permanently in one place. It is in these passages—Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:45-49—that we’re introduced to the idea that where Adam failed, Jesus succeeded. Throughout the New Testament, we see several ways that Jesus succeeded in ways that Adam failed, and how Jesus surpassed Adam in everything else.

 First, we’ll see that Jesus perfectly fulfilled in a far better way than Adam did, Adam’s roles of prophet, priest, and king. Second, we’ll see that although each was tempted, while Adam failed and gave in, bringing sin to the entire world, Jesus resisted all temptation to sin, and even defeated the power of sin and darkness forever. The third thing we’re able to see is that while Adam’s disobedience brought death and condemnation to all of mankind, Christ’s perfect obedience brings life and forgiveness to all who believe in Him.

Fulfilling Adam’s Roles

Nearly two months ago, Chris preached about creation. In that sermon, he outlined three roles that Adam played. Those were the roles of prophet, priest, and king. So for our first point, we’re going to consider those roles and how Jesus fulfilled each of them.

Prophet

When we looked at creation, we considered how Adam was a prophet. Looking back to Genesis, we can see that Adam was a prophet in a couple of ways.

First, we can see that Adam was a prophet in that he communicated God’s word to God’s people. Now, at the beginning, God’s people were only two: there was Adam himself, and his wife Eve. So even though “God’s people” was a small community, Adam still brought God’s word to them. God gave Adam the command not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And we can assume that Adam communicated that very command to Eve. We have no account of God saying the command in Eve’s company. We don’t have an account of Adam telling Eve the command either, but it’s safe to assume that he told her the command. Adam brought the word of God to the people of God.

We also know from the books of prophecy that one of the roles of the prophets was to bring God’s word to His people, so that they would turn back to Him. The prophets had the job of turning people away from their sin, and back toward God. The word for this is repentance. They were to bring the people to repentance, and warn them of coming judgment.

Now, Adam knew that if they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they would surely die. That was the coming judgment. Yet, when Eve offered Adam the fruit, he didn’t rebuke her. Genesis 3:6 says that “[Eve] gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” Adam failed to remind his wife of what would happen if they sinned. What’s more, he even fell into the same sin as she did.

When we look at the life of Jesus, we know that He was a prophet because He brought God’s Word to His people. In fact, He is even called “The Word.” John 1 tells us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We know that that Word that John was talking about is Jesus Himself.

Hebrews 1:1-2 tells us that “God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…” Jesus brings us the Word of God, and is Himself that very Word!

Yet Jesus wasn’t just like Adam in the prophetic sense. Jesus surpassed him as a prophet. Where Adam failed to bring God’s people to repentance and remind Eve of the truth, Jesus successfully did that for all of us. Jesus spent a lot of His time on earth preaching, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” And not only did He preach repentance, He also resisted temptation, and lived His whole life perfectly sinless. He provided the only way for God’s people to truly and eternally turn back to the Lord, for “no one comes to the Father except through [Jesus]” (John 14:6).

Where Adam failed as a prophet, Jesus succeeded. And where Adam did succeed, Jesus surpassed him marvellously.

Priest

Another way we can see that Jesus is like Adam and better than him, is in the role of priest.

Again, referring back to the sermon on creation, you’ll remember how Adam was like a priest. The most obvious way we see this is through the similarities between the tabernacle/temple and the garden of Eden. There were many parallels that invite us to view the Garden of Eden as a sanctuary for God, just like the tabernacle and the temple would be.

The priests’ main task in the tabernacle—and later in the temple—was to work it and keep it. These are the exact same two words that God told Adam when He commanded him about the garden. Adam was to work and keep the garden. So the priests were like Adam because they worked and kept the tabernacle. They were priests in the line of Adam. If the garden of Eden was the first tabernacle, then Adam was the first priest.

Yet, we know that Adam failed to do that well. Adam may have worked the garden, but he sure didn’t keep it very well. In the very fact that the serpent was able to come into the garden and so easily deceive Eve tells us that Adam didn’t do his job in keeping the garden.

However, we know that Jesus did crush the head of the serpent when He died and rose again. Next week, Chris is preaching about how Jesus is the promised offspring of the woman, and all the ways He took on the serpent, so for today, we only need to know that Jesus succeeded in keeping the serpent out, whereas Adam failed to do so.

There are several texts in the New Testament that tell us that Jesus is a High Priest—Hebrews 5 and following and 1 Timothy 2:5-6 are a few that tell us about the priesthood of Christ. Further, where Adam’s sin separated us from God, Christ’s perfect obedience tore the veil in the temple and gave all of us access to the Most High God, forever.

Where Adam failed as a priest, Jesus succeeded. And even where Adam did succeed, Jesus surpassed him marvellously.

King

There was one more role that Adam played, and again, didn’t quite fill properly, and that was the role of king.

The first way we know that Adam was a king, comes from knowing that he was made in the image of God. You’ll remember that in the cultural norms around the time that Moses wrote the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible—in those days, kings referred to as being “images” of the gods that they worshiped. So when the people read that God made Adam in His image, they would have made the connection, and understood Adam to be a king who would rule on earth as God’s representative.

The second way we know that Adam was a king comes from what God commanded him: in Genesis 1:28 God says to Adam, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” God commanded Adam to be the king over all of creation.

We know that Adam failed in this because when the serpent tempted Eve, Adam did not have dominion over it. He did not exercise the authority that God gave him, and instead allowed the serpent to have some measure of dominion over them.

Jesus, as we know, is the perfect King. In Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she would bear the Saviour, he told her that “the Lord God [would] give to him the throne of his father David, and he [would] reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:32-33). It’s pretty clear there that Jesus is the king.

Jesus’ kingship is one of those “already-not-yet” things. He is the king, and He reigns in our hearts, if we’ve decided to follow Him. He is sitting at the right hand of the Father, as we speak. We know that from Colossians 3:1. Yet, we also know that there is a coming fulfillment of the kingdom of God, where Christ will rule completely.

There’s another similarity here, that tells us that Jesus is the king. The Scriptures tell us that Jesus is the image of God, just like Adam was. So, for the same reason that being God’s image made Adam the king, it also makes Jesus the king. Yet Jesus is not only like Adam, but He surpasses Adam here, too. Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the “radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he uphold the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). Hebrews 1 actually tells us a lot about the Kingship of Christ. But, we can’t explore too much of that now, because Chris is going to be preaching a whole sermon on how Jesus is the promised king in the line of David, so we’ll hear more about that then.

For now, it’s sufficient for us to know that Christ not only fulfilled the Adamic role, but far surpassed Adam in His fulfillment of it.

So we know from these three roles that Adam fulfilled, that Jesus was like him. And Jesus wasn’t only like Adam. He fulfilled those roles in a far better way than Adam could have. As the last Adam, Jesus fills all three of those roles, in a way that Adam couldn’t.

Their Temptations

Another way we can see from the Scriptures that Adam and Christ are similar, is in the fact that they were each tempted by Satan. It is here that we can see the greatest failure of Adam, and also one of the greater triumphs of Christ.

Adam’s temptation is quite well-known. The third sermon in our series highlighted it specifically, and its implications on our lives. In the great catastrophe of what we call “The Fall,” Adam and Eve were tempted to eat a fruit which God had commanded him not to eat, and they ate it. Genesis tells us that this fruit was “good for food, . . . a delight to the eyes, . . . and was to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6). The book of 1 John tells us not to love such things, which he says are “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life” (Genesis 2:16). There’s a parallel there, which we also heard about when we went through 1 John this summer. And when Adam and Eve saw this fruit, which they were commanded not to eat, they took it and ate it.

Jesus, as we know, was also tempted. Just before beginning His ministry here on earth, He was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by Satan. Satan tempted Jesus with three things: bread when He was hungry; safety in times of danger; and dominion over the whole world, if only He would bow down and worship the devil. These three can also be sees as being “good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable for wisdom,” and “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life.”

Jesus resisted all the temptations that Satan brought to Him. We also know from Hebrews 4:15 that Jesus was tempted in every way, yet remained without sin for the entirety of His life. 

Not only did Jesus resist temptation. He also defeated the serpent once and for all, which Chris is looking at next Sunday.

“In Christ” or “In Adam”?

And that brings us to our most important stop this morning.

There’s one way in which Adam and Christ are compared that brings all of us hope. All of the things we’ve considered so far don’t really mean anything for us until we consider this last point.

This last comparison, though, is actually a contrast. Where Adam did one thing, Christ did the exact opposite.

Let’s look again at Romans 5. We know from earlier, that Adam was tempted and gave in, bringing sin and death into the world, and to the entire human race. What we haven’t considered yet is the consequences of that for all of humanity.

And this is it: the consequence of Adam’s one sin is that you and me are both condemned to death. It says it right here in Romans 5: “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned . . . many died through one man’s trespass . . . For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, . . . because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man . . . one trespass led to condemnation for all men . . . by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners. . . .” 

So because of Adam’s sin, you and I are literally damned. We are all destined to suffer eternally because of Adam’s (and our own) sin.

Yet, we know that even though Adam was a type of Christ, Jesus is so much greater than Adam. Whereas Adam brought death to all of mankind by way of his one act of disobedience, Jesus Christ, by His one act of perfect obedience (and by His life of perfect obedience), brings life to all who find faith in Him.

1 Corinthians 15:22 tells us that “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” This is the greatest way in which Adam failed, and the single most wonderful way that Jesus succeeds and surpasses Adam. We all can have the reward that Jesus won on the cross, instead of receiving the punishment that Adam incurred through his sin. This is not only because of Jesus’ active obedience in dying on the cross. This is also because of Jesus’ passive obedience, or His entire life of perfect obedience. So we can have the reward that Jesus won through His perfect life of obedience and sacrificial death on the cross.

And the best part is, we don’t have to do anything except believe. Believe, and this free gift is yours!

Because of what Jesus did on the cross—He died, laying down His life for us, His bride—we have the forgiveness of our sins. And, while we once were damned, we now are set free!

For those of us here who are in Christ, this is wonderful news. And it’s wonderful news for those who don’t know who Christ is! Anyone can come to Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins

Baptism

I can’t think of a better way to end today than by what we’re doing next. Two people are being baptized this morning. By doing this, they are declaring to all of us here that they have believed in Jesus Christ, and that they trust Him for their salvation. They are also proclaiming that they will follow Him and obey His commands, and in doing so they’re asking us to hold them accountable to that.

Further, baptism is incredibly symbolic. We just talked about how in Adam all are dead, but in Christ, all are made alive. Baptism is symbolic of someone putting to death their old sinful self, and being raised to new life in Jesus Christ. Romans 6:4 says, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

Could there be any better way to end this morning by celebrating the new life these two have found in Christ? I don’t think so! So, let’s pray, and then we’ll celebrate the baptism of these two!

We ended last week in the darkness of the exile. Israel, once again under foreign oppression. God, silent. And the people had nothing to do but hope that the Son of David would finally come for them like God had promised He would.

We pick up the story today on one ordinary day in Jerusalem about 7 BC. It’s been almost 60 years since the Roman occupation began, and 400 years since the last prophet spoke. And on this day, an ordinary priest named Zechariah had his name drawn to enter the temple and burn incense.

This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—it’s extremely likely that this was his first time ever inside the temple.

And so he would have stepped inside the dark, gold-plated room, with a ceiling 60’ above him. And he would have approached the gigantic curtain that separated the Holy of Holies, and stopped before the altar of incense. And with hands likely shaking from fear, he would have began to burn the incense.

And then he realized he wasn’t alone. There was another person in there with him.  But this other person was not a human. This was an angel.

And I don’t know what comes to your mind when you think about angel, but don’t think about a cute little baby or a blonde lady in a white dress and wings. We don’t know exactly what angels look like, but we do know that they are terrifying. That is the consistent reaction that people in the Bible experience when they see an angel: terror. And that’s what happened to Zechariah. “Fear fell upon him” (Luke 1:12).

“But the angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared’” (Luke 1:13–17). 

Did you catch that? Anything sound familiar there? Do you remember last week when we read the last words of the last prophet Malachi?

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (Malachi 4:5–6). 

And after 400 years of silence, Gabriel appears and quotes those exact words to Zechariah, and says, it’s happening. The day of the Lord is at hand. God is coming to visit His people.

Six months later that same angel appeared to the cousin of Zechariah’s wife. And with everything we’ve learned in our series so far, let these words sink in to your ears:

“In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!’ But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end’” (Luke 1:26–33). 

Do you hear it? The Promised One we’ve been waiting for, the king, is about to be born to you, Mary.

Mary understood what was going on. Do you remember her words of praise to God when she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth? She said that “He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever” (Luke 1:54–55). 

I read the Bible for years, and never really understood what was going on here. I never really understood how these words from Gabriel and then from Mary connect up with the rest of the big story of the Bible, and show how Jesus is the fulfillment of this story. He’s the promised king. He’s the one that this whole story has been about from the very beginning. He’s the offspring of Eve. He’s the offspring of Abraham. He’s the son of David. And He finally, finally, came.

But oh, the irony. That this long-promised king was born with the animals, and placed in a trough, and grew up in a town with no reputation, working alongside Joseph in obscurity for three decades. Not what we would have expected.

But finally the time was right. After thirty years, we read in Matthew 3 that: “In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’” (Matthew 3:1–2). 

And soon afterwards came the day for the king to come forth and be anointed. No oil was poured on His head, but He was baptized by John, and coming up out of the water, He was anointed by the Spirit of God, and “a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’” (Matthew 3:17). 

And then after forty days of being tried in the wilderness, Jesus began his ministry. Mark 1:14 tells us that “Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’” (Mark 1:14–15).

The Kingdom

It’s ironic that this language of kingdom is so strange and foreign to so many Christians today. Because as we’ve seen this fall, the whole storyline of the Bible is a story about the kingdom of God.

Now it’s true that we haven’t seen that exact phrase necessarily until now, but the idea has been there all along.

We saw how Adam was made in the image of God and given a commission to have dominion, which meant that he was to reign over this world as God’s representative. He was a king, and this world was God’s kingdom. Same thing with Noah.

We saw how royal language was used of Abraham, and then how Israel was commissioned to be a nation of royal priests, or priestly kings. Through Israel, God was going to reign on the earth. And then this theme was so clearly obvious in the story of King David.

The whole storyline of the Bible up until now could be summed up as the story of God establishing His rule on earth. In other words, it’s a story about the kingdom of God.

And the way He establishes His kingdom is through covenant. God made covenants with Adam and Noah and Abraham and Israel and David, and it’s through those covenants that He built His kingdom and carried forward its program into the world.

God’s kingdom comes through God’s covenants. And not surprisingly, this is actually the title of one of the books that I’ve found most helpful in understanding how to put together this big story of the Bible: Kingdom Through Covenant.

And all of that has culminated now in Jesus. He is the king, and in Him the kingdom has arrived. And so we shouldn’t be surprised to hear Jesus talk about the kingdom over and over again.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). “Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10). “The kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28). And don’t almost all of the parables began with the words, “the kingdom of heaven is like”? And we could go on and on. 

But for whatever reason, many of us miss this. We don’t notice the kingdom.

And as a result, we are unfairly hard on hard on Jesus’ disciples and the other Jewish people of his day for their expectations of Jesus. Because as you read through the gospels, it’s clear that Jesus’ disciples expected Him to ride into Jerusalem and destroy the Romans and give the kingdom back to Israel. They thought He was going to be a political messiah, a political saviour.

And if you’ve gone to church for any length of time you’ve probably heard people criticize this kind of thing, and maybe even talk about how silly Jesus’ disciples were, or how worldly their thinking was. Because we know better, and we know that Jesus didn’t come to be a political Messiah to wage war on His enemies. He came to be a spiritual saviour to rescue us from our sin.

But what I want to suggest to you that Jesus’ disciples may have actually understood some elements of the storyline of the Bible better than many of us today. Because they understood the idea of the kingdom. And they believed that the king had arrived. And the most natural thing for the king to do would have been to march on Jerusalem and destroy his enemies and reign. That’s what David did. That’s what kings do.

And guess what? That is what Jesus is going to do. We’re going to get there later on in the series, but Scripture is very clear that Jesus is going to do what kings do and what His disciples expected Him to do. He’s going to come and vanquish His enemies and reign as a king here on earth. It’s really going to happen.

Already, but Not Yet

What Jesus’ disciples did misunderstand was the matter of timing. Along with most of the Jewish people of their day, they thought that the kingdom was going to arrive, in its fullness, all at once. 

And when the kingdom of God came in it’s fullness, then this present age of human history would come to an end, and the kingdoms of this world would pass away, and the Age to Come would begin, where the righteous would be resurrected and God would create a New Heavens and a New Earth and the Messiah would reign forever.

But what Jesus tried to help His disciples understand was that even though the kingdom of God had arrived, it had not arrived in its fullness all at once. That was the point of the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast (Matthew 13:31-33). The kingdom of God had arrived like a seed planted in the ground, or a little bit of yeast added to a lump of dough.

In His first coming, Jesus was dealing with the real problem with the world, which was not the Romans, but was the sin in our own heart. And so in Him, the kingdom of God had broken in to this world and was at work in the hearts of people, transforming them from the inside out and causing them to submit to and obey King Jesus. 

And it is only after every tribe, language, people and nation have had a chance to hear and respond to this saving news that the kingdom will finally come in it’s fullness.

But make no mistake: even though it’s not here in it’s fullness, it is still here. If you have been saved by Jesus, if you’ve placed your faith in Him, you’re in His kingdom.

Here’s a way of trying to understand all of this. Think about the way that we celebrate Christmas. My mom grew up in a very straight-laced Dutch home. They understood that Christmas was on December 25. And so when do you think they celebrated Christmas? On December 25. They would literally put up their tree on Christmas Eve.

Because that’s the way they thought. Christmas was either here in all of its fullness, or it wasn’t here at all. Black or white. All or nothing.

That’s the way Jesus’ disciples and the other Jewish people thought about the kingdom of God. Nothing, and then everything.

But many of you understand it’s not quite as cut and dried as this. Because for many of you, Christmas starts doing its thing in your life long before December 25. By the time December 1 rolls around, Christmas will already be at work, transforming your home decor and your playlists and your intake of unhealthy sweets.

Christmas arrives and starts doing its thing long before the calendar turns over to December 25 and we get to take a day off and open your gifts and so on.

And this is just an imperfect way of trying to understand the arrival of the kingdom. The first coming of Christ was like the day you set up the Christmas tree. The kingdom of God broke into this world and began its saving, transforming work even though it would be some time before it arrives in its fullness.

When Jesus was born, and especially when He rose from the dead, there’s a sense in which the Age to Come began, even though this present age hasn’t come to an end yet.  And Jesus commands us to come and live under His reign and authority, even as we wait for His kingdom to arrive in its fullness.

The kingdom is already here, but not yet here. Already, but not yet.

Next Few Weeks

We’re going to come back to this idea of the already-but-not-yet kingdom many times in the next weeks and months. It’s a very important truth we need to understand in order to really grasp the big story of the Bible. The whole last part of our series, from January to April, will really be asking the question: how do we live as citizens of a kingdom that is already here, but not yet here?

But first, in these next seven weeks, we get to focus entirely on Jesus. And we’re going to do that by going back and seeing how Jesus is the main character of the storyline of the Bible.

Next week Tim is going to preach on Jesus as the second Adam. The week after that, we’ll hear how Jesus is the promised offspring of the woman who crushes the serpent. Then we’ll spend a week each hearing about Jesus as the offspring of Abraham, and the high priest and sacrifice of the New Covenant, and the Son of David, and our true temple, the One who rescues us from spiritual exile, and finally as the judge and life-giver, the Son of Man who brings us into the age to come.

And so we get seven more weeks of seeing clearly how the story of the Bible culminates in Christ, in whom all the promises of God are yes and amen.

I am so thrilled about these next weeks. I’ve been looking forward to them for so long. And my heart for us as a church in these weeks is that we would behold our saviour. I want us to see and be stunned by the glory of Christ. I want us to love Jesus more than we ever have before.

This has been my experience as I’ve grown to understand how Jesus fulfills the story of the Bible. Jesus is my personal saviour, but He’s so much more than that. And the more I’ve seen that, the more I’ve seen His glory, and the more I’ve grown to love Him in ways I never have before.

And I want that to keep going, and I want us all to experience that. And so that’s been my prayer for us as a church as we head into these weeks: “Lord, let us see your glory. Holy Spirit, show us Christ. And leave us stunned.”

Would you join me in praying that for yourself and for your church in these coming weeks? I can’t imagine God would not want to answer that prayer. 

The Lord’s Supper and Baptism

In terms of this morning, I can’t think of a better way to conclude our time than by what we’re about to do next, which is to celebrate the Lord’s Supper and then witness a baptism.

In the Lord’s Supper, we’ll celebrate that in Christ, the New Covenant has arrived. Full forgiveness for our sins has been secured once and for all by the sacrifice of Jesus.

In the Lord’s Supper we also look to the coming fullness of His kingdom. Jesus said that He wouldn’t drink of the fruit of the vine again until the kingdom of God had fully come (Luke 22:18). And so, as we eat and drink, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes (1 Corinthians 11:26). We remember that the king has come, and shed His own blood to atone for our sins, and we proclaim that He is coming again.

And then, baptism. Baptism is such an important part of being a part of the kingdom of Christ. In Matthew 28, Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. [Do you hear the words of the king of the world there?] Go therefore and make disciples of all nations [do you hear the words of the Abrahamic covenant there?], baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age [when the kingdom comes in it's fullness!]” (Matthew 28:18–20). 

Baptism is the sign that we have entered the Kingdom of Jesus. It’s our citizenship ceremony. We get to witness one being baptized this morning and at least two others next week. And there’s probably not a better way for us to celebrate the kingdom this morning.

This morning brings us to the final week in this first section of our “You Are Here” series. You’ll remember that this series had three distinct movements, and this first movement is centred in what we call the Old Testament. And that’s what we come to the end of today.

To review, last week talked about the covenant with David, and God’s promise to raise up David’s offspring and establish his kingdom. We saw the connections that link this offspring of David to the offspring promised to Abraham and the offspring promised to Eve, and how the entire storyline of the Bible has built up to this one person who will come and crush the serpent and break the curse and bless the nations and establish the kingdom of God on earth.

And we saw that David had a son, King Solomon, and many of the things God promised seemed to be fulfilled with him. But then our hopes were dashed when we saw Solomon beginning to go after other gods and abandon the one true God.

We read about this downfall in the heart-wrenching words of 1 Kings 11: “And the Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice and had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods. But he did not keep what the Lord commanded.

“Therefore the Lord said to Solomon, ‘Since this has been your practice and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and will give it to your servant. Yet for the sake of David your father I will not do it in your days, but I will tear it out of the hand of your son. However, I will not tear away all the kingdom, but I will give one tribe to your son, for the sake of David my servant and for the sake of Jerusalem that I have chosen’” (1 Kings 11:9–13). 

And after Solomon died, it happened just like God said. Ten of the tribes of Israel rebelled and chose their own king, and the house of David was left as a shell of its former glory, with just Judah and Benjamin and likely Simeon staying loyal to the crown.

And those ten northern tribes that broke away immediately fell into wholesale apostasy. Their king didn’t want people going to worship at Jerusalem, so he set up a couple of golden calves for the people to worship—just like Aaron did at the foot of Mt. Sinai, even repeating the exact same phrase that Aaron spoke: “Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 12:28). 

It could not have been more deliberate. It was like they were spitting directly in God’s face. And God would have been just to destroy them right then and there.

But he was patient with Israel. For two hundred years He sent them prophets like Elijah, and he gave them every possible opportunity to turn and repent. But then He finally did what He promised to do, and He gave them what they deserved. The Assyrians invaded the land in 722 B.C., destroying their cities and taking their people into exile.

See, when the Assyrians conquered a land, they essentially tried to erase the identity of the people who had lived there before, to make sure that they would never be able to band together and rebel against them. So they would deport mass amounts of the population out of the land and settle them in other places, and they would take people from other places and settle them in the land instead. Israel wasn’t just conquered by the Assyrians; they essentially ceased to exist as a nation.

In the south, the kingdom of Judah under the house of David did slightly better than the northern kingdom. Many of their kings followed Solomon into rebellion against God, but every once in a while a king would come along who would be more or less faithful to the Lord. And under their leadership the people would serve God again. So they had these short little seasons of faithfulness, but they never lasted for long. The overall picture was bleak.

And so the southern kingdom only survived about 140 years longer than the north before they too eventually received what God promised. In 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came and destroyed Jerusalem. The temple was burned, the city was destroyed, and thousands of the people were taken into exile, just like we read about in 2 Chronicles 36:15-20 at the beginning of the message. That passage reminded us that God had warned the people over and over, but they wouldn’t listen, so they finally received what they had deserved all along.

And so began the exile.

What Was the Exile?

The exile should not be a surprise. It was promised as a part of the covenant curses in Deuteronomy 28. If God’s people Israel broke their covenant with the Lord, He promised them that He would “bring you and your king whom you set over you to a nation that neither you nor your fathers have known. And there you shall serve other gods of wood and stone” (Deuteronomy 28:36). 

And further down in the chapter it says, “And the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known” (Deuteronomy 28:64).

So the exile was a part of the covenant curses, but I think it’s easy to see that it was different from all the others. It was the endgame, the capstone. Instead of people coming to them and oppressing them, they were the ones being removed from their land. The land that God had done so much to give them. It was as if God was pressing “undo” on the exodus from Egypt, and sending Israel back to being a people with no land and no leader.

But the worst part of the exile was being away from the presence of God. You’ll remember that God manifested His presence to them in the tabernacle, and later the temple. That was the dwelling place of God where they would go to be near God and worship Him.

You read over and over in the Psalms about the desire to be with God, to be in His presence. And it’s easy for us to forget that most of that is talking about the temple. That’s where God’s presence was at that stage of redemptive history. The people who loved God wanted to be there in that physical location with God.

And so to be ejected from the land was to be cut off from the presence of God. They were back in the place of Adam and Eve, kicked out of Eden and sent east. The exile essentially rolled back all of the ways that God had been working to remove the curse and bring His people back to Himself. All of it, gone.

Promises in the Darkness

But not quite gone. Because as we’ve touched on before, just two chapters after the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 28 came words that spoke of hope and forgiveness and restoration, even from exile. Listen to these words from Deuteronomy 30:1-4:

“And when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God has driven you, and return to the Lord your God, you and your children, and obey his voice in all that I command you today, with all your heart and with all your soul, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have mercy on you, and he will gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you. If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there he will take you.”

And as the exile approached and then actually took place, God continued to speak to His people through the prophets, reminding them of these promises, and reminding them that He had not abandoned them. Even in the darkness of exile there was hope.

There is so much that the prophets said in this time, but for our purposes this morning I want to highlight three messages that they brought form God to His people.

1) First, the exile will not be permanent. Many of the message that God sent to His people through the prophets were reminders of His promise to restore them and bring them back from exile and establish them in the land again. He even gave them a timeline. Through the prophet Jeremiah He told them that the exile would only last for 70 years (Jeremiah 29:10). They could almost count it down. They knew that it would end before it even began.

2) Second, the prophets told that the Son of David was still coming. And this was so important, because when Jerusalem was destroyed, it made people ask questions like, what happened to God’s covenant with David? Does an empty throne in Jerusalem mean that God is finished with us? And so through the prophets, God assured His people that He hadn’t forgotten the covenant with David.

Writing around the time of the exile of the northern kingdom, God gave Isaiah those famous words, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this” (Isaiah 9:6–7). 

A century or so later, with the armies of Babylon surrounding Jerusalem itself, Jeremiah prophesied, “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely. And this is the name by which it will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness’” (Jeremiah 33:14–16). 

And we could go to so many other places that say the same thing. Right in the midst of the darkness of exile, God was promising to keep His covenant with David. The promised son was still coming.

3) Third, the prophets foretold that a new covenant was coming. And this was also such an important message for them to hear. Because the exile was the final proof that the people could not keep the covenant God had made with them at Mt. Sinai.

And the reason for this wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the covenant. It’s that there was something wrong with them. This is the dynamic that the Apostle Paul explains in Romans chapter 7. And it’s what we’ve seen all along in the series: the problem with the world is us. It’s our sinful hearts. We want the wrong things and love ourselves more than God. Our hearts are desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9).

And the covenant God made with Israel, for all its glory, did not cure this problem of our sinful hearts. In fact, by requiring faithfulness and obedience, it really just served to highlight the fundamental problem. It showed us that all of the promises and threats and second chances and 500th chances aren’t enough to change our hearts. We need something more.

And so God promised through the prophets that something more was coming. He was going to establish a new covenant that would finally deal with this problem.

Through the prophet Jeremiah, writing in the shadow of the Babylonian invasion, these incredible words came:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:31–34). 

We could spend a whole morning on this passage, but do you hear the big idea here? A new covenant is coming, and it will finally deal with our sinful hearts. It’s not going to get broken like the old covenant. God is going to ensure that this covenant is kept.

And He’s going to do that by putting His law on our hearts. So we’re going to obey Him from the inside.

And so what that means is that all of the members of this new covenant—from the least to the greatest—will know the Lord. You won’t have this covenant full of people who don’t actually know God, which is what had happened before.

And God promised to forgive His people’s sins and remember them no more.

Similar things were spoken some years after this by the prophet Ezekiel, who was himself one of the exiles, carried away to a far-away land. And from the place of exile itself God spoke through Him and promised, “I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules” (Ezekiel 36:24–27).

Those are such important words that we will return to later in this series.

The Return

And so in the darkness of the exile, these promises were there on the books, waiting to be fulfilled. And after seventy years of exile, just like He promised, the Lord began to fulfill some of these promises.

We read about this in the book of Ezra—how the new emperor Cyrus told the Jewish people to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, and even made the nations around them give them materials and supplies so they could do this.

And as we read through Ezra, we see all these amazing things happening: exiles returning to Jerusalem, the temple being rebuilt and dedicated, the priests returning to their service, and the passover being celebrated again. 

Things are finally looking up again. But then we read the pit-in-your-stomach words in Ezra chapter 9: the people are breaking the covenant again. It’s almost unthinkable. Seventy years of wrath and desolation, and then unfathomable grace and mercy as they return and rebuild, and it's still not enough.

And so the book of Ezra ends with the people repenting and coming clean. And then after Ezra comes Nehemiah, which is chronologically the last historical book in the Old Testament. And Nehemiah was used by God to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and cause the city to be populated again. And we read about all the people gathering in the rebuilt Jerusalem to dedicate the city to the Lord, and to have His law read and explained to them, and to pray and confess their sins.

They go so far as to draw up an official document in which they pledge themselves to obey the law of God and be faithful to his covenant (Nehemiah 9-10). If all of that happened today, we’d call it a revival.

So then Nehemiah goes back to Persia, because he had a job there. And after a few years, he made another visit to Jerusalem (Nehemiah 13:6-7). And he found the people obediently following the Lord and keeping the covenant. Right?

Wrong.

Nehemiah chapter 13 is the last recorded history in the Old Testament. And it is gut-wrenching. Nehemiah comes back and finds that the sworn enemies of Israel had moved in to the temple itself. The people had stopped giving to the priests like God had commanded, and so the Levites had to abandon the temple and go work in the fields just to survive. People were working on the sabbath in direct disobedience to the law, and many—including the High Priest's own grandson— were once again disobeying God by intermarrying with the pagans around them.

And one last time again Nehemiah cleans house. And then the book ends. 

Now Nehemiah is the last book of history in the Old Testament. If you turn to the actual last book in the Old Testament, you’ll find the book of Malachi. Malachi was a prophet whom God raised up at the time of Nehemiah to support his reforms. 

And so Malachi, the last prophet in the Old Testament, was prophesying at the time of Nehemiah. And it shouldn’t surprise us that Malachi did not have a very warm and fuzzy message. Malachi is the final warning that if things do not change, then irreversible judgment is coming.

We read these words in Malachi chapter 4, the last prophecy of this last prophet:

“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts. 

“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (Malachi 4:1–6). 

And that's it. The book is closed. God has spoken, giving one last final warning. And then, heaven was silent. Years stretched into decades which stretched into centuries, and God said nothing.

400 Years of Silence

History tells us that a lot of important things happened in these so-called four hundred years of silence. As Malachi was speaking in Jerusalem, a philosopher by the name of Socrates was doing his thing in the halls of Athens. His student Plato passed on his teaching to another guy named Aristotle, who became the personal tutor to a man we know as Alexander the great. And one hundred years after Malachi’s time, Alexander the Great began to conquer the known world.

So the city of Jerusalem in the tiny province of Judea now became a part of the Greek empire. And after Alexander died, his empire was divided up into four, and Jerusalem eventually found itself under the control of a king named Antiochus. He was vicious with the Jews, and did everything he could to force them to stop practicing their religion and to worship the Greek gods instead. He even sacrificed a pig on the altar in Jerusalem to stop them from using the temple.

But there was a revolt. The Maccabean revolt—you may have heard of it. It’s what’s celebrated at Hanukkah. And in 160 BC, after seven years of fighting, the Jews finally won their freedom. For the first time since being conquered by Babylon almost 400 years before, they were free to rule themselves and worship God as they chose. 

But you probably won’t be surprised to hear that things did not go well. The Jewish rulers became increasingly seduced by Greek culture and religion, and over the next decades they became more and more corrupt and even pagan.

And in 63 BC, two brothers were fighting over the office of High Priest, which had become a very politically powerful position. And this fight actually turned into a literal civil war. Just think about that—fighting and killing over who gets to intercede before God for the people’s sin.

But it’s what happened next that is the most staggering. Both brothers turned to the new world superpower—the Romans—and asked for the Romans to come and settle this dispute. I remember learning this for the first time, and almost being unable to believe that the Romans didn’t just choose to invade and conquer the land. They came by invitation.

And so those decades before the birth of John the Baptist, the people of Israel once again found themselves oppressed by a foreign power. And it was their own fault.

Conclusion

The reason I took this time to give this history lesson is to demonstrate a really important point: Israel never really came back from the exile.

Yes, many of them physically came back from Babylon. But Babylon was still in them. In other words, their hearts were still far from God. So even when they were free, they really weren’t. Their hearts still hadn’t been changed. They might have returned from physical exile, but they were still in spiritual exile.

And so what could they do now? Nothing. Except wait. Wait, in the words of Luke 2:25, for the consolation of Israel. And hope against hope that God had not just finally forgotten about them and left them there for good. Hope against hope for the promises to finally be fulfilled. For the Son of David to finally come.

And that’s where we end this morning.

I know this is not a typical place to end a message, but I’m doing this intentionally. Because I want us to feel it. I want us to feel the waiting, the longing, the hoping. I want us to feel how desperately the people needed a saviour, and how bleak and hopeless everything would be had God not stepped in to keep His promises.

Because this is not just about them—it’s about us. We need to remember how desperately we need a saviour, even today.  We need to feel just how much at God’s mercy we are. How helpless we are apart from His initiative and grace.

And I also want us to remember how much of this world is still living in that place of desperate lostness. We are surrounded by people who are without hope because they are without God. And it’s good for us to be reminded of what that feels like.

Now if you are here this morning and you don’t know how this ends, you don’t know who this saviour is that I’m referring to, please don’t leave today without talking to me or someone else here about this. You need to know who this is.

But for those of you here do know who this saviour is, I’m inviting you this morning and even into this week to taste again how badly you need a saviour.

We’re going to end this morning by singing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” These words were written about Israel in exile. And yet they were written for all of us. We are all hopeless apart from Emmanuel, God with us. We so needed Him to come and we so need Him to be with us today. And it’s good for us to remember that this week.

For the past few weeks of this series  we’ve been walking through each of the covenants God made with His people in what we call the Old Testament. And today we come to the Covenant with David.

But before we can jump into the story of David and consider the covenant God made with him, we need to go back and pick up the story where we left off last week, when we talked about the covenant with Israel.

And what we saw last week was that God’s covenant with Israel that He made through Moses, with all of its incredible blessings and terrifying curses, didn’t fix the real problem with the world, which is our sinful hearts. Our hearts that want other things instead of God, and want to do our own thing instead of follow God.And so in spite of all of God’s grace and mercy to His people, they continued to break His covenant over and over again, which is why God punished them by making them wander around in the desert for 40 yers. 

But when they finally do arrive in the promised land, they have a good season. We read this in the book of Joshua—how Joshua led them to be faithful to the Lord, and under his leadership things were good for a time. And it’s in that season that we see God fulfilling many of His promises to them as they take possession of the land.

And when we turn over to the book of Judges, we read this in chapter 2 verse 7: “And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel.”

But then Joshua and the rest of his generation died. And so we read in verse 10, “And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth” (Judges 2:10-13)

And having read Deuteronomy 28, and knowing what the covenant curses are, we are not surprised to read what happens next: “So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for harm, as the Lord had warned, and as the Lord had sworn to them. And they were in terrible distress” (Judges 2:14-15). 

And so begins the book of Judges, which tells us about a long period in Israel’s history where they would turn aside from God, and they would suffer the covenant curses, and then they would repent and turn back to the Lord, and He would forgive and deliver them, like He promised in Deuteronomy chapter 30. And then they would follow Him and receive His covenant blessings for a time, but before long they’d turn aside and the cycle would start again. And it just goes around and around and around.

And as the book of judges wears on, you kind of get sick and tired of this. And you’re hoping there’s going to be a way out. And it’s toward the end of the book that the author begins to suggest a part of the reason why Israel is stuck in these cycles, and begins to point to a possible solution. And it comes in these words: “In those days there was no king is Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 16:6). And this kind of phrase comes up three more times in the book. In fact, it’s how the whole book concludes. The very last verse just says, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

And so the book of Judges suggests to us that if there was a king in Israel, then perhaps things would be different. Maybe a king would lead people do follow the Lord instead of just doing whatever was right in their own eyes. Maybe a king is the way off of this merry-go-round.

The Demand for a King

And so with all of that in mind we turn over to the book of 1 Samuel, where the story continues. And as it begins, Israel is being oppressed by a new enemy, the Philistines. And God raises up the prophet Samuel to lead Israel for a time, and under Samuel’s leadership the Philistines are subdued and Israel has peace (1 Samuel 7:13-14).

But Samuel gets old and it becomes clear that he is going to die, and Israel realizes they will need a new leader. And it’s at this point that they decide they don’t want just another humble judge like Samuel. They want to be just like the nations around them. They want a king (1 Sam. 8:19).

Now maybe you’re thinking “Great! That’s just what they need!” But not so fast. Because as you read that chapter it’s very clear that Israel’s reasons for wanting a king were all messed up. They didn’t want a king to help them follow God. They wanted a king instead of God (1 Samuel 8:7-8). Their reasons were totally wrong.

But God is going to use their evil desire for a good purpose. Just like when Joseph’s brothers sold him into Egypt, what they mean for evil, God means for good. And so He says to Samuel in 1 Sam 8:22, “Obey their voice and make them a king.”

Introducing David

So we read in chapter 10 that Samuel anointed Saul to become the first king of Israel. And things go well for a time. But the success and the power seem to get to Saul’s head, like they have for so many people throughout history. And it’s not long until Saul is acting just like the other Israelites, doing whatever he wanted instead of what God wanted.

And so the Lord rejects Saul as king (1 Sam 15:26). And this is so important, because it shows that even though Israel wanted a king for all the wrong reasons, God is going to make sure they get the good king they need instead of the bad king they deserve.

And so He says to Samuel in 1 Samuel 16, “How long will you grieve over Saul, since I have rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go. I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons” (1 Samuel 16:1). 

So Samuel goes on a stealth mission to Bethlehem, and there he anoints David, the youngest son of Jesse, as the next king.  

And so begins David’s long journey to the throne. Along the way we watch him kill Goliath, fight for two different kings, and rule over a band of outlaws in the wilderness as he ran away from Saul. It would be twenty years from the time he was first anointed by Samuel until he began to rule over all of Israel in Jerusalem.

But it’s in those twenty years that David proved that he was a man after God’s own heart, just like God had said (1 Samuel 13:14). David is the king that Israel needed.

God’s Covenant with David

And so we come to the heart of this morning’s message. Because it’s not long after David begins to reign in Jerusalem that we read, in 2 Samuel chapter 7 verse 1,

“Now when the king lived in his house and the Lord had given him rest from all his surrounding enemies, the king said to Nathan the prophet, ‘See now, I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwells in a tent.’ And Nathan said to the king, ‘Go, do all that is in your heart, for the Lord is with you’” (2 Samuel 7:1–3). 

We see David’s heart for God shine through here. He’s bothered by the fact that he’s living in a nice house while the ark of the covenant, where God’s presence was manifested, was still in a tent. And so he wants to build a real temple for the Lord.

And initially Nathan the prophet said, “Go for it.”

But that night, things change. Verse 4: “But that same night the word of the Lord came to Nathan, “Go and tell my servant David, ‘Thus says the Lord: Would you build me a house to dwell in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent for my dwelling. In all places where I have moved with all the people of Israel, did I speak a word with any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”’”

This passage doesn’t explain right away why God doesn’t want David to build Him a house. We do find that out later. But that’s not the real point. The real point is everything God unexpectedly says to David after this point, beginning in verse 8, which we read already this morning.

And it’s in these verses that God makes a series of promises to David which Scripture later refers to as his covenant with David ( 2 Samuel 23:5).

Rest From Your Enemies

So let’s think about these promises that God makes to David in this covenant. The first main promise is that God will use David to give safety and security to Israel. We see that in verse 10 & 11:

“And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may dwell in their own place and be disturbed no more. And violent men shall afflict them no more, as formerly, from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel. And I will give you rest from all your enemies” (2 Samuel 7:10–11). 

Now don’t forget that having safety and protection from your enemies was one of the blessings of the covenant God made with Israel. We saw that last week in Deuteronomy 28. And so if we read this passage in the context of this bigger story, we realize that God is going to use David to fulfill His covenant promises to Israel.

David is going to do what the book of Judges prepared us for: he is going to lead Israel to follow the Lord and be faithful to His covenant. And so they will receive the covenant blessings of rest and peace.

Building You a House

The second thing that God promises is that instead David building Him a house, God will build David a house. That’s at the end of verse 11: “Moreover, the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house” (2 Samuel 7:11). 

There’s a play on words going on here, because the word “house” is being used in two different ways. David wanted to build God a physical house. But God promises to build David a different kind of house—a dynasty. Which means a family line of rulers.

So, for example, the royal family in England is called the “House of Windsor.” Same thing with the “House of Saud” in Saudi Arabia. When the king or queen dies, one of their offspring inherits the throne.

And that’s what God means by “house” in verse 11 here. God is going to give David a dynasty, establishing his family line as the perpetual rulers over Israel. But this is not just going to be any ordinary dynasty. God goes on to make promises to David about this dynasty that are nothing short of mind-blowing. 

In verse 12, God promises to raise up David’s offspring and establish his kingdom. There’s that word “offspring” again, which has been so important in the storyline of the Bible. Then, in verse 13, God promises that this offspring will build a house for His name. David’s son will build the temple instead of David.

Next, also in verse 13, God promises that He will establish the throne of this son forever. That word “forever” comes up two more times in verse 16. “And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:16). 

Just think about this. God is promising to David not just a long dynasty, but an eternal dynasty. David’s kingship is not just a blip on the radar screen of history. David’s dynasty is going to be a permanent fixture in the plans of God for planet earth from that point on. This is massive.

Father and Son

And then, in verse 14-15, God promises that He is going to have a special father-son relationship with David’s offspring. “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son” (2 Samuel 7:14–15).

Now this is a really important idea that we need to think about for a few minutes.  I suspect that for many of us, when we hear the words or phrase “son of God,” we immediately think of Jesus, who is God’s only begotten son.

But we need to be careful that we don’t jump to that conclusion too soon. We need to ask, “how would the original readers of this passage have understood this truth?” And what we find when we do some research is that this idea of God being a father to the king was not a totally strange idea in David’s moment in history.

It was actually very common idea in the ancient Near East for people to understand the king of a nation as being the son of the god of that nation. They didn’t really think that they were the physical offspring of that god. It just meant that they were like that god in some way and had a special relationship with him or her.

Now related to this is their belief that there were all of these different gods who ruled over different countries and groups of people. Each god had their territory. And so if someone was a son of that particular god, then they had the right to rule over that part of the world as the god’s representative. So in other words, there was a real connection between being a son of a god and being a king over that god’s turf (KtC, 550-551).

And this was a very common idea in the world in David’s day. And it’s against this backdrop that God tells David that he will be a father to his royal offspring.

And David knows that God, Yahweh, is not just the God over the tiny patch of land that Israel lived on. In the Exodus, God had proved that He was the Lord of the entire earth (Exodus 19:5). And so the implication is that if God takes someone to be his son, then that person gets to be king over all of God’s territory, which is the entire world.

And this explains David’s words in verse 19 when he is praying in response to God, and he says, “You have spoken also of your servant’s house for a great while to come, and this is instruction for mankind, O Lord GOD!” (2 Samuel 7:19). David understands that this father-son relationship between God and his offspring is not just for Israel, but for all of mankind.

And we know we’re on the right track because when we turn over to the Psalms, we see all kinds of statements about the son of David being king of the entire world.

In Psalm 2:8, God speaks to the Davidic king and says, “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” 

Psalm 72 opens with these words: “Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son!” (Psalm 72:1). And then it goes on to say, in verses 8-11, “May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth! May desert tribes bow down before him, and his enemies lick the dust! May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands render him tribute; may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts! May all kings fall down before him, all nations serve him!” (Psalm 72:8–11). 

So don’t miss this point: when God says that He will be a father to David’s son, that means that he will be the king over the whole world.

Connecting With the Big Story

Now does any of this sound familiar to you at all? A king who rules over the whole world as God’s representative? Doesn’t that sound like Adam? And doesn’t it remind us of the promises made to Abraham and then to Israel?

And the picture gets even clearer when we remember that David, Israel’s king, was also a prophet (2 Samuel 23:2). And then think about how Psalm 110:4 speaks about David’s son as being a Priest in the Order of Melchizidek. 

And so you put those pieces together and you have the idea of prophet, priest and king, ruling over the whole world as God’s representative.

And then we remember this really important word “offspring” that God used with David, and how that connects us up to the offspring He promised to Abraham who would be the one to bless the whole world, and how that is the same person as the offspring God promised would come from Eve and crush the serpent.

And so it sounds like the Son of David that God is promising is the one we’ve been waiting for.

And this gets confirmed for us when we go back to Psalm 72, which I just read from. Because describing the son of David ruling over the whole world, it says this in verse 17: “May his name endure forever, his fame continue as long as the sun! May people be blessed in him, all nations call him blessed!” (Psalm 72:17). 

That is a direct reference to God’s promises to Abraham: “and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 22:18). 

And if we put this all together, we see how the whole storyline of the Bible has now converged and come together in this one person. And all of God’s previous covenants—with Adam and Noah and Abraham and Israel—all come to a focal point and narrow down to this one person, this offspring of David, who is also the offspring of Abraham and the offspring of Eve, a king and priest and prophet, who will bring blessing to all nations as he rules the world as God’s representative.

What this means is that the son of David is the main character of the whole story of the Bible. He is the one we’ve been waiting for all along.

Who Is This Son?

So… who is this offspring of David? Well if we are reading the story for the first time, and kept reading through the rest of 2 Samuel and into the book of kings, we’d probably think that all of this was talking about David’s son Solomon. Because God did establish Solomon’s kingdom. Solomon finally expanded the Israelite empire out to the area that God had originally promised to Abraham (1 Kings 4:20-21). 

And Solomon did build the temple, in fulfillment of these promises (1 Kings 5:5), and God’s glory fills the temple just like the tabernacle in Moses’ day. And we read about the Queen of Sheba coming to Solomon and his reach expanding further and further and the incredible Eden-like peace and prosperity that Israel enjoyed under his reign.

And if you were reading all of this for the first time, you’d be tempted to think that Solomon is the promised one we’ve been looking for.

But then we’d get the kick in the gut. Because 1 Kings 11 tells us how Solomon turned aside from the Lord and began to worship other gods. And the covenant curses start to come into effect as enemies start rising up against him.

And then we step back and realize that Solomon, even at the peak of his power, was not king of the whole world. And after he died God took away most of the kingdom from his son, and the house of David never recovered again.

So Solomon failed us, just like Adam did, just like Noah did, just like Israel did. He gave us a taste of the kind of king we’re looking for, but nothing more than that. And then his dynasty came to an end. The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, and David’s throne sat empty. And the people longed for the promised Son of David to finally come and rule the world like God had promised.

And that’s really where we’re going to pick up next week when we talk about the exile and hear how the prophets spoke about these things during that time.

Conclusion

And so in some ways we end this morning with a big “to be continued.” But in terms of what we can take home this week, without giving away the whole rest of the series, I want us to see ourselves in this story, and realize how much we need a king.

See, so much of the time when we hear the story of David, it’s all about how we can be David. We can kill our giants by God’s help. And some of that may be true.

But it’s more accurate to recognize that our place in the story is just the people of Israel. We need a king. Left to ourselves, we will do whatever seems right in our own eyes, and it won’t be pretty. We need someone to lead us and to help us follow the Lord and to rescue us from enemies that are too big for us.

We need a king. We need the Son of David.

And I don’t want to give away the rest of the series here, but I don’t think it will be too big of a surprise to you when I say that we know who the real son of David is, and it’s Jesus. And He is the king. He is reigning right now, and He will reign one day on this earth from the New Jerusalem, and all of God’s promises are and will be fulfilled in Him. 

Now we’re going to come back to this truth on December 16 and go at it in depth, but I want to ask you this morning—have you bowed your knee to the son of David? Is Jesus your king? Are you submitting your whole life to His word, or are you still living by whatever seems right in your own eyes? 

We’re going to end by singing “Jesus Shall Reign.” The Son of David will be recognized as king over this whole world just like God promised.

But this is only good news if you’ve bowed your knee to Him and asked Him to forgive your sins and make you His child. And you can do that today if you’ve never done this before.

When is the first time you heard the story of Moses? Some of you might not remember, because you were so young. You grew up with the story. Like me, some of your earliest memories may have been burned in through the power of cinema. I still remember the first time I watched Charleton Heston play Moses in “The Ten Commandments.” I also remember, just a few years after that, the first time I saw “The Prince of Egypt” in theatres. More recently some of you may have seen Christian Bale’s version of Moses.

These are just a few examples of the fact that most of us are really familiar with the story of Moses. And yet, I need to ask—as I’ve asked several times throughout this series—if there’s a chance that this familiarity might actually hold us back from really understanding this story as it’s meant to be understood.

What I want to suggest to us this morning is that the key to properly understanding the story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Ten Commandments is to see it as a part of the big unfolding story of the Bible. We have to understand how it fits into and develops that big story if we’re going to understand it at all. So that’s what we’re going to try to do today.

Keeping the Promises to Abraham

So to begin, let’s remember where we are in that big story. Last week we considered God’s covenant with Abraham, and how this covenant represented a huge turning point in the history of redemption. God promised to bless Abraham and make him a blessing to the nations. God promised to make him into a great nation and give him a land for that offspring to live. And most importantly, we saw how God promised that through one specific offspring of Abraham, blessing would come to all the nations of the world.

There was a lot there last week, so if you weren’t there—or even if you were—you can go back and listen to or read the message on our website.

One of the key passages we read last week was Genesis 15, where God first makes a formal covenant with Abraham. And what you might have noticed is that as we read from that chapter, there’s a section of verses what we skipped. It was verses 13-16 of chapter 15, and they say this:

“Then the Lord said to Abram, ‘know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.’” 

This was God’s promise to Abraham. Hundreds of years before Moses was born, before the ten plagues against Egypt, before the Exodus—the whole thing had been planned out and promised.

So imagine you’re reading Genesis for the first time. And you’ve got these promises in the back of your head. And you’re waiting to see how they get fulfilled. And so we read that Abraham died, and God confirmed His covenant with Isaac, and then with his son Jacob, whose name he changed to Israel. And then we see how some of Israel’s sons sold their brother Joseph into slavery, and he ended up in Egypt, and you’d probably be thinking: “Bingo. This is how it happens.”

And then we’d read how God elevated Joseph into position of incredible power, and how he saved Egypt during their seven years of famine, and you’d hopefully notice the significance of a royal son of Abraham is bringing blessing to the nations. 

And then you’d read that because of the famine, Joseph’s eleven brothers are forced to immigrate to Egypt and make it their home, and everything seems great, but we know what’s going on. We remember God’s promise God’s promise to Abraham, we know that hard times are ahead for the sons of Israel.

And sure enough, as the book of Genesis draws to a close and Exodus begins, we read how a new king arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph (Exodus 1:8), and how he began to fear them and afflict them with slavery (Exodus 1:9)—just like God had promised Abraham.

But we know the rest of what God promised—that He’s going to bring them out. And so we’re not surprised when we hear at the end of Exodus 2 that “God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Exodus 2:24). God made a promise, and God keeps His promises.

And so I’m assuming that most of us are familiar with how the story goes. Moses is raised up by the Lord as the leader who will set his people free. And God displays His glory by sending ten plagues that demonstrate His supremacy over the gods of Egypt. And finally, Pharaoh relents, and the people leave Egypt with great possessions, just like God promised. They walk through the Red Sea and finally arrive at Mt. Sinai.

The Purpose of the Exodus

Now when I was a child, I used to think that this is where the interesting stuff ended. For years, I didn’t understand that what happened when they arrived at Mt. Sinai was really what the whole thing had been about all along.

See, when the Lord said things to Pharaoh like “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness” (Exodus 7:16), I thought that was just an excuse or an alibi. I didn’t understand that when God said “let my people go that they might serve me,” he was being very clear. The whole purpose of the Exodus was so that He could bring Israel to Himself and enter into a covenant relationship with them, taking them to be His people and becoming their God (Exodus 6:7).

And we see that so clearly when they arrive at Mt. Sinai, and through Moses, God speaks these words to them, which are found in your bulletin:

“On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain, while Moses went up to God. The Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, ‘Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel’” (Exodus 19:1–6). 

Did you notice those words in verse 4? “I bore you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself.” God did not just set His people free from Egypt. He set them free so that He could bring them to Himself, and so that they could enter into this covenant with Him. The covenant that God made with them at Sinai was the whole purpose of the Exodus.

The Purpose of the Covenant

So, let’s go a step further than that. If the purpose of the Exodus was the covenant at Sinai, then what was the purpose of the covenant at Sinai? Why did God want to enter into a covenant with Israel? What’s really going on here?

We see the answer to those questions in verses 5-6 of the passage we just read. “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5–6). 

There are three phrases in these verses that describe God’s goal or purpose for entering into covenant with Israel.

1) Treasured Possession

The first is that they would be His “treasured possession among all peoples.” In the ancient world, it was typical for kings to have a storehouse of treasure.  The closest thing in our world today might be the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, which I believe are the most valuable treasures the queen has. And she has them, and puts them on display, to demonstrate her royalty to the whole world.

So if Israel was to be God’s treasured possession among all peoples, and if He’s going to put them on display by having them live at the crossroads of the ancient world, then what that means is he wants Israel to represent Him to the world. Like the Crown Jewels, they will be a living proof of the glory of God to the watching nations.

2) Kingdom of Priests

The second phrase describing Israel’s role is a “kingdom of priests.”  The phrase doesn’t just mean that they are going to be priests who live in a kingdom. The idea is that they are to be a group of priests who are also kings. The idea is that they will be a “royal priesthood,” like 1 Peter 2:9 says.

God’s covenant with Israel would make them royalty. They would rule and exercise authority. And at the same time they would be priests, which means they would represent God to the world and mediate His presence here on earth. 

Now just think, who else have we met in the story of the Bible who was a royal priest, both a king and a priest? Adam. And then Noah. And last week, we talked about how Abraham also filled both of these roles.

And now Israel is inheriting this job. As a whole nation, they are inheriting the mission that God gave to Adam, of being a royal priest who represents God to the world.

3) Holy Nation

The third and final phrase in verse 6 is that they will be a “holy nation.” I don’t know if you remember, but just over a full year ago we talked about this word “holy,” and how it means “devoted to God.” And so Israel was to be a holy nation— a nation completely devoted to God and His purposes for the world.

So this is the purpose of God’s covenant with Israel. Making Israel into a nation of royal priests for the sake of the nations. And I hope you see how this covenant with Israel is really just a fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham, whom He had promised to make into a great nation and through him to bring blessing to all of the nations of the earth.

The Obligations of the Covenant

So that’s the purpose of the covenant. Now what we’re going to do for a few minutes is think about the covenant itself. This covenant that God was going to make with Israel through Moses, which we often call the Mosaic covenant—what was it like? What did God expect of His people in this covenant? What were their obligations? What would it have actually been like to be a part of that covenant?

The answer to those questions can really be summed up by the word obedience. We saw that in verse 5. “If you will indeed obey my voice.”  And following this chapter, in Exodus chapter 20, God began to give His people His instruction, beginning with the Ten Commandments. And then the principles of those commandments are unpacked and applied in detail to every aspect of their lives over the next several chapters and books of the Bible.

And that’s one thing you immediately notice as you read through these first books of the Bible: God gave Israel a lot of commands to obey. At the same time, even though there’s a lot there, it’s not hard to sum it up. All of this instruction simply was simply showing Israel, at that particular setting in history, how to love God and love each other.

That’s how Jesus summed it all up. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And then He said, “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37–40). 

So in the covenant, Israel was expected to obey God’s good instruction on how to best love God and love each other. And as they did that, they would be showing the world what God was like, and how we are to have a just society and best care for each other and the world God has given us to live in.

The Tabernacle

Now if you’ve read through the book of Exodus and then into Leviticus, you’ve probably noticed that a major part of God’s instruction to Israel had to do with worship. What this tells us is that if they were going to be in a close relationship with God, they needed to know how to approach Him and worship Him appropriately.

And so that’s why right after the Ten Commandments, the first thing God gives Moses instruction about how to build altars. And then, just a few chapters later, God begins to give Moses instruction on how to build a tabernacle where they would worship Him. And if you turn over to the book of Leviticus, almost the whole book is about how they were to worship God at that tabernacle.

If you’re not familiar with it, the tabernacle was a really fancy tent, and it was like a portable temple. They set it up in the middle of their camp, and God’s presence was manifested there. It was though the tabernacle that God was really with His people.

A few weeks ago we touched on how the word that’s used to describes God’s presence with His people in the tabernacle is the very same word that’s used in Genesis uses to describe God coming to walk with Adam in Eden (Gen. 3:8, Lev. 26:12; Deut. 23:14, 2 Sam. 7:6–7).

And we also heard that Levites were charged to work and keep the tabernacle (Numbers 3:7–8, 8:26; 18:5–6), which are the exact same two Hebrew words used to describe Adam’s charge to work and keep the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15).

All of this suggests that in the tabernacle, God was bringing His people a step closer to his original intention to dwell with us, to be in relationship with Him. Just like He walked with Adam and Eve in the garden, so now He walked among Israel through His presence in the tabernacle.

So Israel was a step closer to Eden. But they weren’t all the way. Because in some ways, the tabernacle was a reminder of just how far the people still were from God. When Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, its entrance was guarded by cherubim—mysterious angelic creatures. And there’s no mistaking the connection that the tabernacle’s curtains were woven with cherubim (Exodus 26:1) and that the ark of the covenant in the most holy place was guarded by two golden cherubim (Exodus 25:18, 22).

And just like Eden, the cherubim kept them out. Common Israelites weren’t allowed in the tabernacle—only the priests. And only one person, the high priest, was allowed into God’s presence in the Most Holy Place, and only once per year, to offer a special sacrifice for the people’s sins (Leviticus 16).

So the tabernacle brought God’s presence close, but in many ways it was a reminder of just how far away He still was. And we see this even more clearly when we think about the kind of worship that happened at the tabernacle. Because the people didn’t just show up and sing and pray and go home. No, most of their worship at the tabernacle consisted of animal sacrifice. 

If you read through the book of Leviticus, the first several chapters are all about the different kinds of sacrifices that the people needed to bring at all different times to the tabernacle, where they would be killed and burnt on the altar.

And the sacrifices never ended. They were a constant reminder that because of their sin and lack of holiness, God’s people could not just approach Him however they wanted. If they did that, they would die. The only way they could stay alive and stay in relationship with God was by having an animal take their place and die instead of them.

And so the priests in the tabernacle were essentially butchers. Some people speculate that the reason they burnt incense was to help cover up the smell of all of the blood.

God had brought them close to Himself, but only so close. Their sinful hearts had still not been dealt with. And the animal sacrifices could only do so much. Atonement for their sins was not complete and needed to be made over and over again.

The Promises of the Covenant

Now so far we’ve talked about Israel’s obligations in the covenant—to obey God’s instruction and worship Him in an acceptable way. But what about God’s end of the covenant? We’ve seen that God made very specific promises in His covenants with Noah and Abraham. So what were the covenant promises to Israel?

The clearest place where we can see these covenant promises is Deuteronomy 28. There’s two sections from that chapter there in your bulletin, which we read already.

And you probably noticed as we read those passages that there is big difference between these promises, and, for example, the covenant promises God made to Noah. God’s promises to Noah were all one-sided. God said that He would do certain things, regardless of what anybody else did. They were unconditional.

But the promises to Israel are not like that.What God will do depends on what they do. These are conditional promises.

So we see in verse one that if they “faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today” (Deuteronomy 28:1), God promised them incredible blessing.

I really encourage you to read the whole chapter when you go home this afternoon, and you’ll see that it goes all the way up to verse 14 with incredible promises of blessing. God promised to bless them in virtually every single area of their life, including the fruit of their ground.

Now that’s a big deal in the storyline of the Bible, isn’t it? What did God to do the ground after Adam sinned? He cursed it. But what God is promising here is that if Israel will obey Him, they will find blessing as they work the ground. It almost sounds like a return to Eden. And this picture grows as God promises them prosperity and fruitfulness and success in everything they do.

If they obey Him.

But what if they don’t? Well if they don’t obey God, if they break the covenant, they won’t just miss out on the blessings. Instead, God promised that He will curse them. 

Verse 15: “But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out” (Deuteronomy 28:15–19). 

And on and on it goes for the rest of the chapter, almost 50 more verses of heaviness and darkness. It is literally the stuff of nightmares.

So it’s pretty black and white, isn’t it? If Israel obeyed God and kept His covenant, they would be blessed beyond their wildest dreams. Life would be amazing in every possible way.

And if they disobeyed God and broke His covenant, they would be cursed beyond their worse nightmares. Life would be horrific in every possible way.

Could God have given them any stronger motivation to obey Him and keep His covenant?

Conclusion

So let me ask you, as we wrap up for this morning: if you were a member of the Mosaic covenant, and you had those options laid out before you, how would you do? How consistently and carefully would you obey God?

Be careful how you answer. Because what we’ve hinted at this morning, and will see so clearly in a couple of weeks from now, is that all of the motivation in the world, all of the promises in the world, can’t change a sinful human heart. And for all of it’s glory, the covenant with Israel did not do anything to change the human heart.

And in fact, it really served to highlight the problem with the human heart. Because even with all of the displays of God’s power, even with these mind-blowing promises of blessing, as we keep reading the story, we find Israel continually disobeying God’s instruction. They kept turning away from Yahweh to the gods of the nations around them. They kept breaking His covenant over and over again.

And so what would happen is that they would suffer the covenant curses. We read about this in book of Judges. They’d break the covenant and start worshipping other gods, and foreign nations would come oppress them, and all the terrible things God promised would happen. And then, they would cry out to God for deliverance. And just like He promised in Deuteronomy 30, He would forgive them and rescue them.

And so they would begin to keep God’s covenant and experience His blessings…for a time. But before long they’d be turning aside again, and the cycle of cursing would repeat.

And so the covenant with Israel, for all of it’s goodness and glory, shows us that we need more than just promises and threats and temporary sacrifices. We need a real saviour. We need someone to deal with sin once and for all. And we need someone not just to motivate us from the outside, but to change us on the inside.

And so, like we’ve seen with all of the other covenants, the real purpose of the covenant with Israel was to set the stage for Jesus. And one of the main ways it did that was by showing us what kind of a saviour we really need.

And I’m going to leave you hanging there, because we have two more stops to make in this series before we finally get to Jesus and get to spend two months just talking about Him and how He fulfills each of these covenants.

But I can’t just leave us there. And so we’re going to end this morning with a sneak peak. We’re going to end by singing a song that celebrates that Jesus is the saviour that the Mosaic convent pointed towards. Jesus is the great high priest that we really need. And more than this, He is the sacrifice who has paid for our sins once and for all. He is the one who has sent His Holy Spirit who has caused us to be born again and written His instruction on our hearts. And He is the one through whom we have access to our Father.

So this week, when Satan tempts you to despair and reminds you of your guilt, praise God that you don’t need to take a trip to the temple and have a priest kill an animal for you. Praise God that we can simply look up to the one who has made an end to all of our sin, and fulfilled all of God’s promises to us.

Whatever’s ahead of you this week, His grace is enough for you.

Welcome to this morning, everyone. I know that many of you were away last week, so it’s good to see you here again.

As I hope you know, we’re working through a series where we are exploring that the Bible is one story, and that Jesus Christ is the main character of this story, and that we are still a part of this story today.

And so in this first part of the series, which is going to take us up to the beginning of November, we’re going back through the Old Testament and are tracing out the story by following the series of covenants that God made with His people. And so last week we considered the story of Noah. We saw that after Adam and Eve’s sin, people descended into so much violence and sin that God destroyed all of them in a flood. But Noah was righteous and found favour in God’s eyes, and so God spared Noah and made him to be the new father of humanity.

So Noah was really a second Adam, and through Him, God was giving the world a fresh start. But then we saw how Noah majorly let us down. After the flood Noah fell into embarrassing sin, and things just went downhill from there. And what we saw was how important this was in the big story of the Bible, because it showed us that the problem with the world is not out there, but in here. We’re the problem. And the fresh start of the flood did nothing to fix the sinful condition of our hearts—in fact, it only served to highlight it.

And so, after the story of Noah, if we keep reading Genesis, we’ll see a big genealogy which shows how all of the nations of the world descended from Noah and his sons. And then the very next story is the Tower of Babel, where we see humans gathering together to commit the sin of Adam and Eve all over again: disobeying God’s command for them to fill the earth, and challenging God’s place in the universe by trying to reach into the heavens and make a name for themselves. And God responds with another act of judgement, confusing their languages and causing them to spread out and fill the earth.

And at this point in the story, things don’t look good at all. And the only thing giving us hope is the promises of God. God has covenanted with Noah that He will continue to uphold the earth in spite of human sin. So we know that he’s not giving up on us. And God’s promise to Eve is still on the books. We’re still waiting, looking, for that promised offspring to be born and crush the head of the serpent.

And so, with this in mind, if you were reading the book of Genesis, the next thing you’d find after the Tower of Babel episode is another genealogy—a list of who was born from whom—that begins with Noah’s son Shem. But here’s what’s interesting. We’ve already read a general overview of the descendants of Shem and his brothers back in chapter 10. This genealogy is singling out Shem and zooming in on him and recording his offspring in detail. Do you think there is a reason for this? Do you think we’re being told something?

This genealogy tells us that Shem fathered Arpachshad, who fathered Shelah, who fathered Eber, which is where the word Hebrew comes from. And Eber fathered Peleg, who fathered Reu, who fathered Serug, who fathered Nahor, who fathered Terah, who fathered three sons—Abram, Nahor, and Haran (Genesis 11:26).

And then it stops right there. And if we were reading this for the first time, with God’s promises ringing in our heads, then this moment in the genealogy is brimming with drama and anticipation. Because why did it stop there? What’s so special about these people? What’s about to happen? Is the promised one about to arrive?

A New Creation

And so we keep reading, in Genesis 11:27 and following, and we find the words “now these are the generations of,” which show that a new section in Genesis is beginning: “Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered Lot.” And then we get a bit of an introduction to these three brothers and who they married. And that’s about it. There are some details here that are important, but nothing really prepares us for what we read just a few verses down in chapter 12 verse 1:

“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”” (Genesis 12:1–3). 

Where did that come from? What just happened? Who is Abram, and why did God pick him to make these promises to, and what is going on here?

Doesn’t this seem like it just comes out of the clear blue sky? God’s actions here as sudden and unexpected and unexplained… just like His act of creation in Genesis 1:1. Out of the chaos of the dark waters, with no introduction or explanation, God said, “let there be light.” And all of a sudden things are happening.

And the calling of Abraham is not that much different. Out of the chaos of the post-Tower-of-Babel world, with no introduction, God steps in, and using only His word He begins a new work of creation. He tells Abram, “I will make of you a great nation” (Genesis 12:2). That’s the same word that’s used repeatedly in Genesis 1 to describe God’s work of creation.

And so that’s why we’re told almost nothing about Abram up until the point that God called him and makes these promises to him. Because this isn’t about Abram and how he was so special and did great things to cause God to look his way. This is about God, choosing to step in and make something out of nothing. This is about God demonstrating His power by creating a great nation and blessing the whole world using only a nondescript 75-year-old and his childless wife.

A New Adam

So if God is beginning a new work of creation, then this suggests that Abram is kind of like a new Adam. And in fact, that’s exactly what the story suggests to us. We see it in the way that God says to Abram in verse 2, “I will bless you.” When’s the last time we’ve heard that? Noah. And the time before that? Adam and Eve. God is talking to Abram in an Adam-and-Noah kind of a way.

This connection gets even stronger if we look at Genesis 17, which is when God changes his name to Abraham and confirms His promises to him. And in verse 2 (which is in your bulletin), He promises Abraham that He will “multiply you greatly.” And in verse 6 he says, “I will make you exceedingly fruitful.” Do you hear those words, “fruitful” and “multiply”? It’s the exact same language as what God used with Adam and then Noah.

And there’s more, especially as the story moves on, and we see Abram functioning in the roles of prophet, and priest, and king. There are so many pointers in the text that invite us to see Abraham as a new Adam standing at the beginning of a new act of creation. God is beginning another fresh start.

Blessing to the Nations

But this fresh start is going to be different than the fresh start with Noah. Because with Noah, God destroyed everybody else and started right from scratch again. And we know, from His promise to Noah, that He is not going to do that again. We know that God is not going to make Abraham into a great nation so that He can destroy all the other nations. The opposite is true. God is making Abraham into a great nation so that He can bless all of the other nations.

We see that when we read verse 2 and 3 of chapter 12 again. “And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2–3).

God is planning to bring blessing to the whole earth through Abraham. 

And I hope you see that this is a massive turning point in the storyline of the Bible. Because hasn’t the whole sad story up until now been a story of cursing? God’s curse on the earth, the curse on Cain, the curse of the flood, the curse on Ham and Canaan, the judgement on Babel—it’s all been a downhill spiral.

But now God picks a man and says, I will bless you, and through you, the whole earth.

In the biggest story ever told, this is the moment where the tide turns. This is the moment when the curse begins to be pushed back. This is the moment when God  begins His work of reconciling the world to Himself and repairing the damage caused by our sin.

The Land

Let’s keep going, because God’s promises to Abraham aren’t finished yet. God has promised him many offspring, and He’s promised to bless Him. And there’s a further component in God’s promise to Abraham, which is is the promise of land.

We saw a hint of this in 12:1 when God told Abraham to go to the “land” that He would show him. And later on in that chapter, when Abraham arrived in the land, God spoke to him again and said, “To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 12:7). And this promise gets repeated and confirmed multiple times to Abraham.

Did you ever wonder where the phrase “Promised Land” came from? It comes from this. God promised Abraham that his descendants would inherit the land of Canaan.

It’s very significant that God gave that piece of land to Abraham and his descendants. At that point in world history, the land of Canaan was like a bottleneck where all the trade and communication between the superpowers of Egypt in the West and Mesopotamia in the East had to pass through. It was the hub of the world. So it’s an ideal place for Abraham to fulfill the promise of being a blessing to the nations.

Now we can’t get into it fully this morning, but there are clues throughout God’s communication with Abraham and then throughout the rest of Scripture that the promise of land was not limited to the land of Canaan. In other words, God was not saying to Abraham, “your descendants will inhabit this specific piece of land, and nothing more.”

No, the picture we get as we read through the rest of the Bible was that this piece of land was like the Garden of Eden. It was a starting place. But it was not the ending place.

We see that idea develop throughout the Old Testament and especially in the later prophets, who foretold that the Messiah, the offspring of Abraham, would rule over all of the gentile nations—in other words, the whole world.

One of the clearest places we see this in Scripture is Romans 4:13, where the Apostle Paul talks about “the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be”—and listen to this phrase he uses here—“heir of the world” (Romans 4:13). Did you catch that? Paul understood that in the scope of the big story of the Bible, Abraham’s offspring would rule not just over that land, but over the whole world.

This is also what was going on when we read about a young rabbi standing on a mountainside in Galilee looking out over a group of people and saying, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit”—what?—“the earth” (Matthew 5:5).

The Covenant

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s come back to Abraham and the promise from God of blessing and offspring and land. And with what we’ve seen so far in the unfolding story of the Bible, it should not surprise us to see God confirming all of these promises to Abraham in the form of a covenant.

God’s covenant to Abraham came in two distinct stages, and this morning we’re only going to be able to focus on the first stage, the very first time that God made a formal covenant with Abraham, which is in Genesis 15. This isn’t in your bulletin, so I’ll read this for us, beginning in verse 7.

“And he said to him, ‘I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.’ But he said, ‘O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?’ He said to him, ‘Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.’ And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half” (Genesis 15:7-10).

And then in verse 17:  “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates’” (Genesis 15:17–17). 

The scenes in this chapter might seem bizarre to us, but they would have made more sense to the original readers. This is a somewhat familiar covenant-making ceremony. When the parties making the covenant take animals and cut them in half and walk between them, they are essentially saying, “may this happen to me if I break this covenant.”

And so typically, in this kind of a covenant, both parties would walk together between the animal pieces, each signifying that they will uphold their end of the covenant, and if they don’t, they’ll accept the penalty of death.

So it’s really important that Abraham does not walk between the pieces. The only thing that does is a smoking fire pot and a blazing torch, which is a very clear picture of God’s presence—just think of the cloud and fire that lead Israel through the desert. 

God alone passed between the animal pieces. And what this means is that God alone took the responsibility upon Himself for upholding this covenant. God is promising to die if He is not perfectly faithful to the covenant. And God is promising to die if Abraham is not perfectly faithful to the covenant.

Now it’s not until Genesis chapter 17 where God specifically informs Abraham of his obligations in this covenant. And we see this in verse 1 & 2 of this chapter, which are in your bulletin, that those obligations are steep. “When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly’” (Genesis 17:1–2).

When we look throughout the rest of the Hebrew Scripture, we’ll see that this phrase “walk before me” has the sense of walking before someone as their representative or ambassador.  God is telling Abraham, “represent me to the world.”

So just a side note, this is another connection between Abraham and Adam, who was created to represent God on earth, just like we learned a few weeks ago.

And this is Abraham’s obligations in this covenant. Represent God to the world and be blameless.

Did Abraham do that, perfectly? Abraham was an amazing man of faith. But if we look at his story honestly, we’d realize that he did not represent God well at every point. He was not blameless. He did not uphold his end of the covenant perfectly.

But don’t miss that God did not tell Abraham about his obligations until He had already promised to take the penalty of death upon Himself should Abraham fail to uphold them.

This is amazing. But how is that even possible? How can God die? 

I’m not going to tell you the answer this morning. We’re going to get there in a few weeks. But I think you already know. This ends up at the cross of Calvary.

The Offspring

There’s so much else in the story of Abraham that we could spend time on this morning. We’ve barely mentioned Abraham’s journey of faith, and how he was tested over and over again. We haven’t touched on what is probably one of the most important verses in the Bible, Genesis 15:6, which says that Abraham “believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” There’s so much here we could spend time on.

But we’re just going to make one more stop this morning, by jumping ahead to Genesis 22. The events of this chapter takes place almost 40 years after Abraham left Haran. And it’s here that we read about Abraham’s ultimate test of faith, when God asked him to offer up Isaac. And God stopped him at the last minute, having proved that Abraham would trust and obey the Lord even if it meant giving up the most precious thing to him on earth.

And it’s only after these things that God says these words to Abraham, which are in your bulletin: “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice”” (Genesis 22:16–18).

Did you catch that word there? Offspring. God has used that word many times throughout His communication with Abraham to speak in plural—that He will give him many offspring.

But there’s something different here. Starting at the end of verse 17, we read that “your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies.” Not their enemies. His enemies. There’s a shift in the grammar there,  and the word “offspring” is no longer referring to a big group of offspring, but to one particular offspring. One person.

And it is this one person, this one offspring, who is being referred to when verse 18 says that “in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” The promise of blessing to the nations is going to be fully realized not through every offspring of Abraham but through one single offspring of Abraham’s.

This is exactly the point that the Apostle Paul makes in Galatians 3:16, when he says, “Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but referring to one, ‘And to your offspring’…”

One offspring.

If we’re tracking with the story, this language should bring us right back to Genesis 3:15, and God’s promise to Eve: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he [singular!] shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

We’ve seen that ever since that promise, all of the hope of humanity has been hanging on the hope that this person, this offspring, will come and crush the serpent’s head.

And we’ve seen through the genealogies how the line of promise has been drawn from Adam to Seth to Noah to Shem and finally to Abraham. And now God promises to Abraham that a singular offspring will come from him and will turn back the curse and bring blessing to all the nations of the earth.

It’s not hard to put 2 and 2 together. The offspring that God is promising to Abraham is one and the same as the offspring promised to Eve. The serpent-crusher will be the bringer-of-blessing to all the nations.

And so this is the major way that Abraham’s story links up with the big, unfolding story of Scripture. The promised offspring is going to come though Abraham and fulfill all of God’s promises.

Conclusion

So let’s sum up what we’ve seen this morning. Genesis chapter 12 shows us that out of the blue, out of the wreckage of the Tower of Babel, God stepped in to begin a work of new creation, by choosing a man and turning Him into a great nation. God promised him descendants and a strategic piece of land for those descendants to live.

And then God confirmed all of these promises to Abraham in a covenant, in which God promised to take upon Himself the punishment for Abraham’s failure.

And then we saw how God’s promises to Abraham narrow down to one specific individual, the long-promised offspring, the one that we’ve been waiting for ever since God’s words to Adam and Eve in the garden.

So I hope you see how big the promise with Abraham is. It is the turning point in the story where blessing begins to dominate the storyline and turn back the curse. Every act of redemption and salvation form this moment on will happen in fulfillment of these promises. This is so huge.

And I hope you’re also beginning to see the big picture, and how this whole big story really does have a main character and really is all pointing to someone.

And as we end today, I think it’s okay to give just a little sneak peak at the rest of the story and everything that’s still coming. Because we know who that main character, that offspring is—it’s Christ. And the incredible truth is that if you know Christ and have been saved by Him, then you are an heir of these promises to Abraham.

Galatians 3:14 says that “in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham” have “come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.” And verse 29 says, “If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.”

We sang that song as children, “Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had father Abraham. I am one of them, and so are you.” I don’t know who got the idea to start shaking our arms and legs around after that, and it kind of wrecks things, but the first part is true. If you know Christ, you are one of the offspring that God promised to Abraham.

And this means that you are a part of something so big. You are a part of a covenant almost 4,000 years old. And the promises that God made 4,000 years ago He is still keeping today.

This perspective is really important as we prepare to head out from here and in to the rough and tumble of our daily life. Whatever’s ahead of you this week, whatever struggle or frustration or temptation or sorrow, remember this truth.  Remember how big this promise is. Remember that you are a part of a covenant that has stood for thousands of years. And if God has been faithful to keep His covenant promises for all of those thousands of years, He’s not about to give up on you today.

So we can trust Him and we stand on His promises today. And that’s where we’re going to end this morning. Let’s pray and then sing.