Genesis Church - Sermons

Do you know what title Jesus used for Himself most often? You might think He called Himself the Son of God, or Messiah, or even Lord. While Jesus refers to Himself in all these ways, the most common self- reference is as the Son of Man.

Interesting? At first glance it might seem as if in calling Himself the Son of Man, Jesus might be identifying Himself as one of us, a human being living among us. But a deeper study of this title actually reveals a completely different image—one coming from a crazy vision given to the Prophet Daniel around 560 years earlier.

Daniel lived as a Jewish exile, in a time when Israel and Israel’s God seemed small and defeated. In the midst of this, Daniel received a bizarre vision of four crazy beasts arising from the sea; beasts representing the most powerful kingdoms on our planet. The vision ends with the Son of Man coming to God Himself and receiving dominion, glory, and a Kingdom which will never pass away. This prophecy is the promise of a Divine Man coming on the clouds who will rule over all human kingdoms and crushing all enemies.

This morning we will see the meaning of the snake-crushing Son of Man as an invitation to lift our eyes to see the glory of Jesus, which gives us great hope.

“It’s a David beats Goliath story!” As a sports fan, I have heard this phrase used countless times when referring to major upsets. Whether it’s the 1983 North Carolina State upset of Houston in the NCAA Tournament, or the victory of the USA Hockey Team over the Soviets in the Olympics, David and Goliath is used when the underdog and little guy defeats the giant, the overwhelming favorite.

In church life, the story of David and Goliath is often used as motivation for fighting your giants, and standing strong even when you look defeated. You are David, it has been said, and with God on your side, your giants will fall. But maybe, that is not the real point of this story. Maybe we aren’t David, but we are supposed to identify with Israel. And maybe David isn’t the true hero of the story, but gives us a picture of how God raises a rescuer who fights the battle for His people, and then gives them the victory and the benefits.

More than any other person in the Bible with the exception of Moses, David’s story is full of pointers that lead us to Jesus, who is the True and Better David. So, we will look at how this 9 foot giant fell, and see how it actual pictures the way God always rescues and saves His people.

In our continuing sermon series “The Serpent Must Die”, we come to a very important story that involves Moses wanting to see more of God’s glory. God knows that if Moses sees all of His glory, Moses will evaporate into a messy pile of atoms - but God shows mercy and grace to him and allows Him to see some of His glory - just the back side for just a moment.

Is God destined to be distant from us forever, to hide His glory from us, or will He allow us to see HIs glory? The answer, of course, is Jesus - the full revelation of the Glory of God. The Serpent wants us to focus on our own glory, our own importance; but today, we’ll see that Jesus came to crush the Serpent and reveal the full Glory of God to us!

Moses is a figure of tremendous importance and we’ll spend a couple of weeks with him. Today, we’ll see two immensely significant sections of his story where, when the people of God grumble against Him, God sends fiery snakes among them. Then as Moses intercedes for God’s people, God makes a way of escape through a serpent on a pole (not THE Serpent, but one who represented the punishment of treason against our God); in the same way, in another story, amongst the complaints of the Hebrew people, God provides a rock where, when Moses struck it, it gushed water for the people of God to drink.

Jesus is the better Moses and is the One who, when He was lifted up, saves us and gives us everlasting water. The Serpent would have us believe our God isn’t for us, that He has left us in the wilderness to die without Him. Jesus crushes the head of the Serpent by reminding us that He is always with us, is always for us, and will provide for His people in their time of need.

We saw last week that God would provide Someone to come and crush the head of the serpent. That Someone was to come through a man named Abraham. God promised that He would make Abraham a great nation, that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him, and that blessing would come through a child born to Abraham and his wife, Sarah.

The child arrives. It’s everything they could have ever wished for. So how is that promise going to come to fruition when God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son as a burnt offering? How is the head of the serpent to be crushed if there is no line from which the seed can come?

Today we start a summer sermon series where we will see Jesus’ promised victory over our enemy, giving up His life for us and securing our salvation, and fulfilling Genesis 3—The Serpent Must Die!

The Bible is full of promises of the coming Messiah – some are so easy to see that even secular scholars can’t deny that these promises are talking about a future Messiah. Others are a little more complicated and require a close eye to the details.

But in all of them, starting in Genesis 3, we see that Jesus has a plan from the moment of humanity’s fall into sinful rebellion – crush the head of the one who tempted them to sin in the first place.

Just 50 days after the Cross…at Pentecost…the early church numbering about 120, huddled in an upper room in Jerusalem, received the empowering Holy Spirit, for the purpose of proclaiming Christ to the lost world around them. But, the world hates the gospel and reacts to muffle the voice of the believer— and still does so today. However, there is something so much bigger, so much more powerful, happening in the grand story!

The early Jerusalem believers understood it and drew strength from it. And, they often found it in a moment of gathered prayer…the Prayer Meeting!

The Sovereign Authority of God…His Word…His Plan…His Power…available to the early church, remains for us today: for the empowering of our ministries, mission, and witness…and can be found in our own Prayer Meetings!

Just 50 days after the Cross…at Pentecost…the early church numbering about 120, huddled in an upper room in Jerusalem, received the empowering Holy Spirit, for the purpose of proclaiming Christ to the lost world around them. But, the world hates the gospel and reacts to muffle the voice of the believer—and still does so today. However, there is something so much bigger, so much more powerful, happening in the grand story!

The early Jerusalem believers understood it and drew strength from it. And, they often found it in a moment of gathered prayer…the Prayer Meeting!

The Sovereign Authority of God…His Word…His Plan…His Power…available to the early church, remains for us today: for the empowering of our ministries, mission, and witness…and can be found in our own Prayer Meetings!

We end our journey in the book of Judges with a story that is about as awful as you can find. The story focuses on a man and his concubine seeking a place to stay the night on the way to visit the Tabernacle. Believing he has found a place of hospitality, the story quickly turns ugly as the men from the city first try to take and rape the man, but instead tale his concubine, abuse and rape her to the point of death. The man’s insane response leads to a civil war filled with violence against the tribe of Benjamin. The story just gets more violent and depraved from there, and at the center is the horrible treatment and abuse of women. This story and the book of Judges concludes with the theme statement, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Israel was supposed to be different because they had a different God. Sadly, their story just mimics those told by the unbelieving nations around them.

We live in a world filled with abuse, violence, power grabs, and greed. Judges actually ends where human history keeps landing, leaving us with the question, “Is there any hope for a better story?” Thankfully, the story does not end here, as Judges prepares us for the coming of a king and God’s Kingdom, with the promise that one day the True King will rescue His people and make everything sad untrue.

The book of Judges ends with two horrible stories that reveal the distance Israel had fallen. The people rescued from slavery and brought into relationship with Yahweh became people so entrenched in their sin and idolatry that they didn’t even realize they were worshiping different gods.

The story of Micah, his idols, the personal priest, and the Danites is just bizarre. More important, it is the anti-Exodus and Joshua. In those stories, God rescues Israel from slavery, forms them as a people, gives them priests and leaders, and then gives them the Promised Land. This crazy story is laden with so many images from Israel’s redemption story, but every image is upside down and opposite God’s rescue story.

This is always what happens to people who reject Jesus as King and do right in their own eyes. False worship and spirituality will lead people to believe they are spiritual and right while actually abandoning everything Christ represents. So, we must let our worship be defined by the true character of God and the means of grace He has given us to truly worship Him in Spirit and in truth.