Palm Springs Drive Church of Christ

Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Wed Bible Study

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Tonight we’re talking about one of the most basic, yet profound doctrines of Christianity, and that’s salvation by grace through faith.  Discussing the covenants was a great primer for this subject because the fact that the new covenant is a one-way covenant means we’re not saved by our own performance, by our own works of law-keeping, but rather by putting our faith in the gracious promises of God.  Paul puts it this way…

Ephesians 2:8-9 - Question:  What’s a good way to define grace?

- Unearned, undeserved kindness to the unworthy.  It’s why Paul calls it a gift, If someone gives you a gift, that’s not something you earned and it would be really weird to go around boasting as if you did something great to deserve it.  And I think it’s helpful to differentiate between a gift and a wage.  If your employer gives you a paycheck, you earned that for the hours you worked, and you should be paid because that’s what you’re owed.  So when your employer gives you a paycheck, you don’t say, “Oh wow, I don’t know what to say, this is so thoughtful of you.” Now, IF your boss gave you your paycheck, but then also gave you another check as a bonus to show you how much they appreciate you, THEN that’s a gift, or an act of grace, and you would be blown away by their thoughtfulness.

But let me press this a little further to more fully picture the radical nature of God’s grace.  Because when we give gifts, it’s usually still only to people who, though they didn’t technically earn it, we still think they deserve it in some way for the kind of person they are or for what they’ve done for us.  But let’s say as an employee you made several massive mistakes and cost your company millions of dollars over the course of a year.  At this point, you’re just waiting for the shoe to drop and you know it’s only a matter of time before you get fired.  Now imagine your boss comes in and says, “I know you’ve made some horrendous mistakes and you’ve cost me millions, but I want to write you this bonus check for 100,000 to show you how much I still care about you and want you to stay.”  That would seem INSANE on the boss’ part, because not only was this check unearned and undeserved, you were completely unworthy of it!  What you deserved and are worthy of is to be fired!  THAT is more analogous to God’s grace for us!  Or consider an even more radical example:  what if someone killed your family and went to prison for it, and every month you sent that murderer money so he could buy food and supplies in prison as he awaits the electric chair.  That is RADICAL, CRAZY grace!

Illustration:  For a few months I tried something I called the Grace Experiment, where I would walk up to people and say, “Hey I know we don’t know each other and this may seem weird, but I want to give you $10.”  Usually they would ask why, and I’d say, “I’m just trying to share the grace of God with people.”  And I’d have the $10 in a paperclip attached to a card with a Bible verse about how we’re saved by grace as a gift.  And do you know when it was the hardest?  It’s when I purposely gave it to people who proved themselves unworthy.  Like if I had a terrible server at a restaurant, or maybe a contractor who came to my house gave me an attitude; it was INCREDIBLY painful to give them that money, because it felt like I was rewarding them for bad behavior and what they really deserved was NOTHING, and maybe even to be reported or fired for bad service.  And it was such a vivid reminder of the radical grace of God who gave ME the gift of salvation, which didn’t cost $10, or even $100,000 dollars, but it cost Him the blood of His Son!  And that gift wasn’t just undeserved or unearned, I was completely unworthy of it.  What I, and what we all, deserved and earned and were worthy of was eternity in Hell, yet by God’s grace He saved us as a gift!

Romans 6:23 - Wages and gifts are COMPLETELY different!  The wages we earned was death, yet God gave us by His unearned, undeserved kindness to the unworthy the gift of eternal life!

Romans 3:23-24

Questions/Comments?

In order to help us appreciate why this subject is so important in Scripture…

Question:  God expects us to be righteous like Him.  What are the only two ways to attain that righteousness?

1) To keep God’s laws perfectly and never sin.  This is what the New Testament refers to as righteousness by works.  2) To be considered and treated AS IF WE ARE righteous by God even though we’re not.  This is what the New Testament refers to as righteousness by grace through faith.

As we discussed in our class on the problem of sin, the issue with trying to be righteous by works is that none of us have kept God’s laws perfectly and never sinned.

James 2:10 - All it takes is to break one of God’s laws to be considered a law breaker who is, by definition, unrighteous, and of course we’ve broken WAY more than one.

Romans 3:10 - This doesn’t mean there is no one who has ever done righteous things.  It means no one fits the true definition of righteous which is to be perfectly right with God by never saying, doing, or even THINKING anything unrighteous.

Which means if salvation were based on our works, we’d all be hopelessly lost because the wages, what we earn by the works of God’s law, is death and eternal separation from Him!

That only leaves one other path to righteousness, and that’s God considering us righteous and treating us as if we ARE righteous people even though we’re not!  And the only way that’s possible is by His grace because it’s completely unearned and undeserved and we’re completely unworthy of such a gift!

And someone might say, “Brian this is REALLY hard to believe!  How in the world COULD God do that and why in the world WOULD God do that?”  And that’s exactly why it requires faith!

Romans 4:4-5 - Paul says if we’re working for our righteousness like we work for a paycheck, then when we get it, it’s not like God is showing us grace or doing us a favor, He’s just paying us what He owes us as a wage.  But if we seek righteousness by putting our faith in God to justify us, or to legally consider us righteous even though we’re ungodly, then God considers our faith all the righteousness we need!

The word “credited” is an accounting term, so by our own works we made ourselves morally bankrupt, and our own works could never get us out of the mess we made and make us whole again.  Yet when we put faith in God, He credits our account and deposits money into it as a gift to make us financially whole again!  He credits our account with righteousness even though we were completely unrighteous.  He gives us credit for being Godly people even though we’re not Godly at all!  And it takes faith on our part to trust that God is actually going to look at me, a sinner, and consider and treat me like a righteous person!  He’s going to treat me, someone completely undeserving of Heaven, as if I DO deserve Heaven!  And faith in His promise to do that is the basis of our salvation, not our performance of the works of law!

Now, what requires even more faith is that in order for God to credit our faith as righteousness, His Son had to take what God actually owed us based on our performance!  Based on our performance of works under the law, we were all sinners and the wages of sin is death.

2 Corinthians 5:21 - The only way it’s possible for us to be considered righteous by God is by Jesus taking the consequences of our unrighteousness upon Himself on the cross.  In other words, Jesus was considered and treated by God as a sinner so that we could be considered and treated by God as righteous!  And again, that is NOT easy to believe because how in the world could God give such a generous gift to such ungodly people?  How could He love us so much as to give up His Son?  It truly is mind-boggling, but the good news is, we don’t have to understand it perfectly, in fact we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to understand it — we just have to believe it’s true and put all our faith in Jesus’ sacrifice to save us and God will consider us righteous and welcome us into His heavenly kingdom.  Now, we’ll talk later about how that faith also requires repentance, confession, and baptism, but it’s all rooted in faith, not our works.

Now that you all are experts on the Big Picture of the Bible, I think it’s so helpful to understand that salvation has ALWAYS been by grace through faith.

Question:  Even though the Mosaic covenants as more two-way than the Abrahamic covenant, do you believe God expected perfect performance the law for them to be saved?

No, in fact the entire reason for the Levitical priests and animal sacrifices was because God knew His people would NOT keep His laws perfectly.  He built in a system of grace and forgiveness within the Law itself.  Even IF someone were to perfectly offer every animal sacrifice for every sin, that’s still being saved by grace because they deserve death, yet God is graciously allowing the animal to die in their place!  And it’s by faith because they have to trust God will forgive them if they offer this animal!

The question is, “Why has salvation always been by grace through faith, even under the Old Covenant?”  It’s because God knew 1,500 years later that Jesus was coming to die for the sins of the world, INCLUDING the sins of those under the Old Covenant Law of Moses system!

Hebrews 9:15 - Jesus’ death didn’t just atone for the sins of those in His generation and after, but for all those in previous generations, including the Israelites under the Law of Moses system!  The reason God was willing to forgive them by grace if they offered Him animal sacrifices in faith wasn’t because the animals could take away sins, but because God knew one day the ultimate sacrifice would!

And this was true going all the way back to Adam and Eve’s sin too!

Genesis 3:21 - Their sin exposed the shame of their nakedness, and what they deserved was to be killed immediately, yet as an act of grace, God used the skin of an animal who died in their place to cover or atone for their shame.  How could God do that?  Because He knew thousands of years later Jesus was coming to sacrifice His skin and die for Adam and Eve’s sin.

Key:  In the New Testament times, if the Jews said, “We don’t need to put our faith in Jesus’ sacrifice, we’ll just continue keeping the Law of Moses and we’ll still be saved,” do you see the problem with that?  If they reject Jesus, they are rejecting the basis upon which God can consider them righteous, and now the only method they’re left with to be righteous is perfect law keeping!  Most Jews in the first century didn’t understand this concept.  None of them would say they had to keep the law of Moses perfectly, the Jews would all admit they’re saved by faith in God, not their perfect law keeping.  BUT they didn’t understand salvation by faith is only possible because of Jesus, so if you reject Him, all your left with is a system of works for your righteousness which means you’re hopelessly lost!  This is one of THE major issues Paul was combating in his letters.

And one of the reasons the Jews rejected faith in Jesus is that if our faith in Him is all we need to be saved, that means we don’t have to keep the Law of Moses anymore and that will lead to a lawless life!  If we’re saved by grace in more of a one-way covenant apart from the Law of Moses, then that’ll lead people to just live however they want!

Romans 3:8 - They slandered Paul and said he was telling people to go ahead and live evil lives and forget God’s laws and it’ll all be okay and God will forgive you because of Jesus.  Like we talked about Sunday, that’s our concern too when we hear we’re saved by grace through faith, not by our own works, but ironically grace is a MUCH greater engine for obedience than law, and we’ll talk about that next…

Questions/Comments

Question:  Why is salvation by grace a MUCH better motivator for keeping God’s laws than salvation by law-keeping?

1) Salvation by grace gives you much more confidence in your salvation!  Since it’s not rooted in my performance or lack thereof, I have way more hope and joy!  If it’s based on law-keeping, I never know where I stand with God.  Some days I’ll feel like I’m Heaven bound, other days Hell-bound.  So I’m constantly bouncing in and out of God’s favor, and there’s no peace or joy in that.  2) If it’s based on my own law-keeping, I know I’m going to fail, so why even try?  If I already know I’m not going to be good enough to make it to Heaven, what motivation do I have to obey God?  If it’s based on grace, I know I’m not good enough to make it to Heaven, yet I know God’s going to let me in anyway and I’m so blown away by His love and generosity that all I want to do is live for Him!  3) If it’s based on my own law-keeping, I’ll start looking at how well I’m keeping God’s laws compared to others.  If I’m doing worse than some, it makes me feel hopeless and I think, “What’s the point?  I’ll never be as good as so and so.”  If I’m doing better than some, it makes me feel prideful and I think, “Thank you God that I’m not as bad as all those sinners out there.”  But if it’s based on grace, I’ll see those who are better than me as motivation, not condemnation.  Those people will be examples that inspire me to strive for more maturity in Christ and I’ll think, “Wow I can’t wait for Jesus to give me a heart like theirs.”  And if we’re doing better than others, instead of looking down on them with a holier than thou attitude, we’ll try to encourage them in the faith.  4) If it’s salvation by works, then when things go wrong in our lives, we’ll be angry at God because we’ll think He owes us a good life for our good behavior.  If it’s by grace, we’ll realize God doesn’t owe us anything; we owe it all to Him and like Job said, “God gives and God takes away,” and we trust Him no matter how life goes for us.  5) If it’s salvation by works, obedience feels like a burden, kind of like a child trying to please a father who can never be pleased no matter what they do.  But if we’re saved by grace and know we’re loved by our father, it’ll bring us joy to make Him proud and to hear Him say, “Well done.”

A good way to summarize this is that the law is what I do for God and grace is what God does for me.  I do things for God and keep His laws because of what He did for me by grace.  I don’t do things for God and keep His laws SO THAT He’ll give me grace.

That’s why if you picture our Christian life as a train, grace is the engine that drives the train down the tracks, but the law is more like the tracks.  The law tells us where to go, grace tells us why to go.  No one would ever say that the tracks are what give the train power, yet like we said Sunday sometimes Christians treat the law like that’s our source of power.  We treat Christianity as a two-way covenant and if I can just do my part well enough and stay on the tracks without veering off, then I’ll be good enough to make it to Heaven.  But just like a train trying to use tracks as its power source, we won’t make it anywhere.  We need grace as the engine to empower and propel us; the tracks just give us direction.

Salvation isn’t based on works, but Faith without Works is Dead

• While we’re saved by grace through faith, faith in the Bible is never just mental ascent.  If I say, “I have faith in this chair,” I don’t just mean I believe it exists; I mean I trust it enough to sit on it and put my whole weight on it because I’m confident it’ll hold me!  If I say I have faith in the chair, but refuse to actually sit in it, that’s not real faith at all.
  • Faith is absolute trust in God that leads us to rely on His power, seek His guidance, be secure in His love, and obey Him.
    • Mark 16:16
    • Acts 2:38
    • Romans 10:9 - When we combine these verses, it sounds like faith isn’t enough, we also have to repent, confess Jesus as Lord, and be baptized to be saved!  But we’ve already established we’re saved by faith, not works, so isn’t that a contradiction?
      • Well, it’s important to keep the faith vs. works controversy in context.  In the New Testament, people were not asking, “Do we need to do ANYTHING else at all except put our faith in Jesus to be saved?”  That’s our modern question and debate.  Their debate was, “Do we need to put faith in Jesus at all, or can we just do the works of the Law of Moses?”
        • The faith vs. works debate in the New Testament was about whether faith in Jesus’ sacrifice was even necessary.  And the point was, “Yes, we absolutely DO need to put our faith in Jesus’ sacrifice, otherwise we’re left with a system of salvation by works, which doesn’t work.”
          • But once it someone believed they needed Jesus’ sacrifice, it didn’t mean they were saved in that instant.  It meant they were ready to obey the apostles’ instructions about what to do to access Jesus’ sacrifice!  Faith was part of it, but so was repentance, confession, and baptism!  It didn’t mean they earned their salvation or were worthy of it for doing those things, it just means they obeyed God by faith!  It’s like if someone hands you a gift by grace, but you have to unwrap it.  It doesn’t mean you earned or deserved it, you just did what you needed to do to access the gift.  That’s how faith has always been in Scripture!
            • Hebrews 11:7 - Did Noah earn His salvation by building the ark?  That’s WAY harder than repentance and baptism but no, he was saved by God’s grace who gave Him the means of salvation through the ark!  Likewise, God gave us the means of salvation through Christ’s sacrifice, but we still have to put our faith in Him, confess Him as Lord, repent, and be baptized!  Otherwise, if we say we have faith in Jesus but aren’t willing to do those things, that faith isn’t real at all.  It’s dead.
              • James 2:26

Bonus:

When I said the Old Covenant was a two-way covenant, I didn’t mean it was a system of salvation by works.  If that were the case, every person under the Old Covenant, including men like Moses and David, would be lost.  But it was more two-way because God set up a more 1:1 correlation between obedience and blessings, and disobedience and curses.  Obey me and the land will be given rain, disobey me and there will be drought.  It didn’t mean people were saved eternally on the basis of their performance of the law, but the welfare of the nation was more tied to their performance.

Series: 2026 - Q2 - 1&2 Kings - 2 Chron

Service: Adult Class B-Classroom

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Dwayne Gandy

Series: N/A

Service: Praise and Preaching Service

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Dwayne Gandy

Mother's Day tends to reach for the familiar — the Proverbs 31 woman, Mary at the manger, gentle portraits of sacrifice and strength. All of those are worthy. But tucked into one of the darker corners of the Old Testament is a mother whose story is far less celebrated, and perhaps far more honest about what love actually costs. Her name is Rizpah. She appears in only two verses that describe her actions. And yet what she did in those verses is one of the most striking displays of devotion in all of Scripture.

Her story doesn't begin with her. It begins with a famine.

By the time we meet Rizpah in 2 Samuel 21, David's kingdom is well-established. The early battles are behind him, the unified nation is functioning — and yet for three years, the land has produced nothing. Three years of famine is not an inconvenience. It is a catastrophe. Even for a king with resources, a three-year drought represents a slow-motion crisis with no end in sight.

When David finally seeks God about the famine, the answer that comes back is sobering. The land is under judgment because of something Saul did — he had violated an ancient covenant with the Gibeonites, a people who had been promised protection going all the way back to the time of Joshua. Saul had broken that promise, and now, years later, the consequences were being felt across the entire nation.

To make it right, the Gibeonites ask for something David could never have wanted to give: seven of Saul's descendants, to be executed in Gibeah — Saul's own city — as restitution for the families Saul had destroyed.

David honors his personal covenant with Jonathan and spares Mephibosheth. But he identifies seven others. Five are grandsons of Saul through his daughter Merab. Two are sons of Rizpah, a woman who had been Saul's concubine. Her sons' names were Armoni and Mephibosheth — not the same Mephibosheth as Jonathan's son, but sharing the same name.

And so they were handed over. And they were killed. And they were left hanging in Gibeah, exposed.

This is where Rizpah's story begins.

What Rizpah does next is simple, fierce, and almost incomprehensible in its devotion.

She takes a piece of sackcloth — the garment of mourning — and spreads it on a rock near where her sons' bodies hang. And she stays there.

In the daytime, when birds of prey circled and descended, she drove them away. At night, when the predators came — and in that region, that meant wolves, lions, bears — she kept watch and kept them back. She did this not for a day. Not for a week. The text tells us she stayed from the beginning of the barley harvest until the late rains came. That is four to six months.

Four to six months on a rock, in the open, in the heat and eventually the rain, protecting the bodies of her sons from being desecrated. She couldn't bring them back. She couldn't undo what had been done. She couldn't change the king's decision or reverse the Gibeonites' sentence. All she could do was this. And so she did this, completely and without stopping, for as long as it took.

There is a question worth sitting with: Why didn't someone intervene sooner? David had authorized the execution, so the men of Gibeah likely felt they had no authority to move the bodies. The Gibeonites wanted them there — it was the point. David himself may not have even known she was there. And so she kept her vigil, alone, with no audience and no rescue coming, doing the only thing left to her.

A mother who no longer had any power — no husband, no status, no certainty of provision — found one thing still within her reach. She could stay. And so she stayed.

What Rizpah's story captures, at its core, is the enduring nature of a mother's love. It does not calculate the cost before deciding whether to continue. It does not set conditions on its presence. It does not leave when the situation becomes too painful or too hopeless or too prolonged.

Her sons were already gone. They could not know she was there. There was no audience to applaud her faithfulness, no recognition coming, no reward on the horizon. She was not staying because it was working. She was staying because they were hers.

That kind of love is not unique to Rizpah. The mothers of Scripture share it across wildly different circumstances.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, was warned from the very beginning that her son's life would pierce her like a sword. She watched him minister and was sometimes kept at a distance. She watched crowds turn on him. She watched him arrested, tried on false charges, beaten, and nailed to a cross. And John 19 places her there at the foot of that cross — not because anyone told her to be there, but because she was his mother and she would not leave.

Rebecca, when she learned that Esau intended to kill Jacob after the stolen blessing, did not simply mourn the situation. She acted. She sent Jacob away to protect him, knowing full well — though perhaps not fully reckoning with it in the moment — that her "few days" plan would stretch to twenty years. She never saw Jacob again. Sometimes a mother's protection costs more than she imagined when she offered it.

The mother of James and John, who came to Jesus asking that her sons be given the highest places in the kingdom, is often read as pushy or misguided. But there is something else visible in that moment: a mother who believed so fully in her sons that she went to the most important person she knew and asked for the best thing he had to give. She came boldly, on their behalf, because that is what mothers do.

Mary, at the wedding in Cana, saw a need and saw her son and quietly connected those two things — even when Jesus indicated the timing wasn't right. She believed in what was in him before the world knew. She drew it out. And how many people can say, honestly, that their mother saw something in them worth drawing out — something no one else saw, something that became foundational to who they are?

There is a detail in Rizpah's story that is easy to pass over but worth pausing on.

Before all of this happened, Rizpah was a concubine of the king. She had some measure of provision, some form of status in Saul's household. By the time we reach 2 Samuel 21, that is all gone. Saul is dead. The men who might have provided for her are gone. Her two sons, who may well have been her primary means of support, are now the ones taken from her.

She arrived at that rock with nothing. No comfort. No security. No future clearly visible. And she spread her sackcloth on the stone and stayed anyway.

She sacrificed her comfort — sitting exposed on a rock for months. She sacrificed her sleep — keeping watch through the night against wild animals. She sacrificed her appearance, her health, her safety. She did it not because it was sustainable or sensible, but because the alternative — walking away — was unthinkable to her.

That quality of sacrificial love is not foreign to anyone who has been raised by a devoted mother. It shows up in forms both dramatic and mundane: the career deferred, the sleep lost, the meal eaten cold after everyone else was served, the worry carried quietly so the child wouldn't have to carry it. Sacrifice is rarely one grand gesture. It is mostly the accumulation of ten thousand small choices to put someone else first.

Rizpah made those choices on a rock in a field for half a year. The scale was extreme. But the impulse — the refusal to stop showing up for the people she loved — is one that mothers recognize in their own bones.

Here is the part of Rizpah's story that is easy to miss: she changed things.

She didn't set out to end a national famine. She wasn't lobbying for policy change or writing letters to the king. She was just a woman on a rock, protecting her sons' bodies, doing the only thing available to her. But someone saw her. Someone watched long enough to be moved. And that person went to David and told him what Rizpah had been doing.

And David was undone by it.

He went and retrieved the bones of Saul and Jonathan from Jabesh-Gilead. He gathered the bones of the seven who had been hanged. He gave them all a proper burial — including Rizpah's two sons — in the tomb of Kish. And then the text says something remarkable: after that, God heeded the prayers for the land.

The famine did not end when the seven were handed over to the Gibeonites. It did not end when they were executed. It ended after David responded to the grief of one woman who refused to abandon her sons.

She didn't know any of that was coming. She wasn't strategizing for influence. She was just being faithful to the people she loved in the only way still open to her. And it mattered more than she knew.

This is worth holding onto for anyone who has ever felt that their quiet faithfulness is invisible — that the daily, unglamorous, unwitnessed acts of love don't add up to anything. Rizpah would have had no idea that her vigil would reach a king. She was just staying. And people were watching. And it moved someone who moved someone who moved someone — and the curse on an entire nation ended.

Jesus said that people don't light a lamp and put it under a basket. He said we do good works so that people see them and glorify our Father in heaven. The goal isn't personal recognition. The goal is that faithfulness becomes visible, and visible faithfulness points people somewhere better than themselves.

Rizpah's story surfaces three things that are worth carrying beyond Mother's Day.

First: identity is not found in outcomes. Rizpah had no control over what happened to her sons. She had no power to prevent their deaths, no ability to change the king's decision, no influence over the circumstances that put her in that position. What she could control was that she did not give up on them. Our identity — as mothers, as fathers, as people — is not determined by whether everything turns out the way we hoped. It is determined by who we belong to and whether we keep showing up.

Second: sometimes the most powerful thing is presence. Job's friends, at their best, simply sat with him. Rizpah could not fix what had been done to her sons. She could only be there. There are moments in every life where the most loving thing available is not a solution — it is not leaving. People need presence more than they need answers. Staying is not a lesser form of love. Sometimes it is the truest form.

Third: faithfulness is rarely private for long. Rizpah did not have an audience. She wasn't performing. But someone noticed. Someone always notices. The quiet, consistent, costly love that a person pours into their family and their life does not disappear into the void. It takes root. It ripples. It moves people in ways that can't always be traced or predicted.

She would not leave. And because she wouldn't leave, things changed.

That is the kind of love that endures. That is the kind of love that sacrifices. And in ways we may never fully see, that is the kind of love that influences everything it touches.

Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Adult Class

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

This morning we’re covering part 2 of our discussion of the Old and New Covenants.  Another word for Covenant is Testament, so the fact that our Bibles are divided into two major sections, the Old and New Testaments, means this is an incredibly important subject!  And just to review what we covered Wednesday night.

Definition of a Covenant:

• A binding relationship of peace and blessings based on promises of faithfulness by one or both parties.  God’s covenants are a way to restore the peace and blessings we had with Him in the Garden of Eden.

7 Elements of a Covenant:

• 1) Promises between parties.  2) Terms and Conditions; these are the responsibilities of each party.  3) Consequences for Violating the terms and conditions.  4) Animal Sacrifice as a way to say, “I’m staking my life on this covenant, and if I violate it, may I be killed like this animal.”  5) Covenant Meal, as a way to make the covenant official by showing, “We’re at peace now.”  6) A Sign of the Covenant, which was a memorial set up to remind the parties of their covenant.  7) Witnesses to hold both parties accountable and to testify against them if they violate it.

One-Way vs. Two-Way Covenants

• • In a one-way covenant, the promises and blessings are only coming from one party!  And the only term or condition put on the other party is to live in trust and gratitude for the one who made the promises.
    • This was the way the Abrahamic covenant was structured.  When God promised Abraham to give His descendants a great land, make them a great nation, and use them to bring the Messiah to save the world, it was a one-way covenant where Abraham’s primary role was to live by faith in God’s promises.
      • Key:  One-way covenants are crucial in Scripture because the only way we can ever truly experience the blessings of God and live at peace with Him is if those blessings are rooted in His promises and not on our performance.
  • A two-way covenant is more evenly weighted, where both parties have more equal responsibilities to the covenant.
    • This is how it was with the Mosaic covenant.  God said He would do His part and bless the physical nation of Israel, who were descendants of Abraham, but ONLY as long as they did their part and kept the Law of Moses, and if they didn’t, they’d be cursed.  And they failed, so they lost their land, their status as a great nation, and they lost their king through whom the Messiah would come — or so it seemed.
      • Despite their failure to keep God’s two-way Mosaic covenant, God still planned to keep His one-way covenant with Abraham to bless His descendants with a great land, which will be Heaven, to make them a great nation, the church, and it would all be accomplished through one of Abraham’s descendants, the Messiah, aka Jesus.  And God promised one day to make a new covenant with His people through the Messiah.

The Promised New Covenant

• Jeremiah 31:31-34 - Question:  How would things be different under the new covenant?
  • 1) They’ll actually keep this one.  2) God’s law will be internalized, written on their hearts.  It won’t just be some external obligation imposed on them from the outside, God’s laws will be something they actually WANT to keep.  3) No one will have to teach his neighbor who God is because everyone in this covenant will know who He is.  4) Their sins will be forgiven.  Now, it’s true their sins were forgiven under the Old Covenant through animal sacrifices, but they’ll have an even fuller appreciation for their forgiveness under the new covenant when they realize their forgiveness really came from Jesus’ sacrifice, not those animals.

What Went Wrong Under the Old Covenant?

• Why did Israel break God’s covenant and why wasn’t it written on their hearts like Jeremiah said it would be under the new covenant?
  • 1) It was established based on genetics rather than genuine faith.  This was not like the Abrahamic covenant where Abraham proved himself to be a man of faith before God made the covenant with him.  No, God didn’t make this covenant with the physical, ethnic nation of Israel because they had Abraham’s faith, but because they had Abraham’s genes!  God promised to bless Abraham’s physical descendants, and that’s the Israelites!  Now of course God WANTED them to have faith, and some of them did, but Israel’s history was largely characterized by unbelief and a complete rejection of faith in God!
    • Deuteronomy 9:5-6
  • 2) You could be involuntarily born into this covenant.  Since it based on genetics, if you were born an Israelite, you were automatically considered a part of this covenant with God.  If you were a male, the sign of being in covenant with God was circumcision, and that happened on the 8th day of your life, which means you didn’t choose to join this covenant.  That choice was made for you and you could be in covenant with God without even knowing who God was!  You were told from your youth you were in covenant with Him, and here’s all these laws you’re supposed to keep from Moses as part of the terms and conditions of the covenant you never even signed up for.  So essentially, God’s laws were just external conditions imposed on you by your parents and larger community, but they didn’t mean anything to you because God didn’t mean anything to you.  You follow God because that’s just what we do in our family.  It was kind of an outside-in approach, where outside teaching and influence was meant to reach into your heart, and for some that worked, but for most it did not.
    • Isaiah 29:13 - Rote is just mechanical repetition without any depth of meaning.
  • 3) The rules became empty rituals.  Since a deep, abiding love for God was so rare with people in this covenant, the Israelites often just went through the motions, keeping the laws but with no real love or faith behind it.  Because it was a two-way covenant, their relationship with God became very transactional.  “Okay God, I did this for you, now you need to keep your end and bless me.”  Which almost led to a sense of entitlement to God’s blessings; like God owes us because of all the laws we keep for Him.
    • Jeremiah 7:9-10 - They went to God’s house at the temple and offered sacrifices, but it was all empty ritual because then they’d go out and steal, murder, and cheat on their spouses!  And yet it was like they felt entitled to God’s protection because, “Hey, we did our part and offered sacrifices, so it’s on you to do your part God and save us!”  This sense of entitlement also led to…
  • 4) National arrogance.  Because this covenant was based more on genetics than genuine faith, Israel came to believe they were morally superior to the Gentile, non-Israelite nations around them.  The fact that they had the Law of Moses from the One true God and the other nations didn’t meant that God chose them as the superior race and only the Israelites could receive the full blessings of God.  Now, Gentiles could receive some acts of mercy from judgment, kind of like the Ninevites after Jonah’s preaching, but the only way they could become true beneficiaries of the covenant promises was by submitting to the Law of Moses.  They believed when God promised to Abraham, “Through your seed, or descendants, all the nations of the world would be blessed,” that it meant the world would be blessed by coming to join the nation of Israel!  But for those who didn’t, they were looked down upon as morally inferior and cursed by God.
    • Isaiah 65:5 - God was so angry at their arrogance it was like He was breathing fire.  And this is another problem with two-way covenants.  If we keep them better than others do, it leads us to think we’re better than they are and that God owes us salvation!  So Israel, as a nation, failed to keep the Old Covenant…
      • But the good news is, despite the failure of Israel on a national level, there was always a small number of people God referred to as a faithful remnant, a small group from Israel who actually DID have the faith of Abraham, and it is through them that God would fulfill His promises to Abraham.
        • Isaiah 10:22 - God never promised to bless the entire nation of Israel simply because of their genetics; He has always been looking to bless people of genuine faith and to bless the world through them as well, which is why God used this faithful lineage of Israel to bring the Messiah into the world.

Questions/Comments?

Jesus and the New Covenant

• When Jesus was born, Matthew said this…
  • Matthew 1:1 - Matthew calls Jesus the son of Abraham to show us He is the fulfillment of God’s one-way covenant promise to Abraham that through his seed all the families of the earth would be blessed.  We didn’t mention this covenant Wednesday, but He’s called the Son of David because He’s the fulfillment of another one-way covenant promise to David that one of His descendants would reign as King forever.  Then right before Jesus’ was born, John the Baptizer’s father Zacharias said this about it…
    • Luke 1:72-73 - Jesus was the descendant of Abraham through whom the world would be blessed, through whom Abraham’s descendants would become a great nation as the church, and given a great land in Heaven.
    • And on the night before Jesus died for the sins of the world on the cross, He instituted the Lord’s Supper and said this…
      • Matthew 26:26-28 - Luke’s gospel specifies that this is the blood of the new covenant.  Based on the elements of a covenant we’ve covered, notice…
        • 1) He’s establishing a covenant meal, which was going to be a sign, a weekly memorial to remind us of the peace between us and God in this new covenant relationship.  2) Instead of an animal sacrifice, which is what normally accompanied the cutting of a covenant, Jesus Himself is the sacrifice to be cut.  Usually the two parties in the covenant would kill an animal as a way of staking their lives on the covenant and saying, “If I don’t keep this covenant, may my blood be shed and may I lose my life like this animal.”  Yet Jesus died as if He HAD broken the covenant.  He took the position of a covenant breaker on the cross deserving of death on the cross!  Why?  Because He was taking OUR place, the place of the true covenant breakers!  And now that this new covenant is founded on His sacrifice for our sins, it fulfills Jeremiah’s vision for how this covenant would be different and so much better than the Old Covenant!
• 1) This covenant is based on genuine faith, not genetics.  Being a physical descendant of Abraham is NOT what brings you into covenant relationship with God.  It’s putting our faith in Jesus and what He did for us on the cross.
  • Matthew 3:8-9 - The Jewish religious leaders arrogantly assumed they were morally superior and were right with God simply because they were genetic descendants of Abraham.  But Jesus is saying, “God can raise up a genetic son or daughter to Abraham from that stone over there, but that’s not what really matters.  What matters is repentance driven by faith!”
    • Galatians 3:7-9 - Do you see what Paul is doing?  He’s saying the true sons of Abraham are not those who share his genes, but those who share his faith.  And in fact, this was God’s plan all along, which is why it says God actually preached the gospel to Abraham that one day the Messiah would come from His descendants and bless the world, and God’s plan was for the world to be blessed by their Abrahamic like-faith in the Messiah.  Just like Abraham lived by faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, so too do Christians in the new covenant!  That means Jew AND Gentile, anyone regardless of genetic descent, can become beneficiaries of God’s covenant blessings.  We don’t have to join ourselves to Israel to be saved like the Jews thought; we have to join ourselves to Jesus!
• 2) No one can be born into the new covenant; you can only be born again into it.  Which means it’s not against our will or without our knowledge.  It’s impossible to join this covenant without knowing God.  No, we join this covenant in response to the amazing act of grace and mercy Jesus showed to us on the cross!  Which means we don’t need to teach other people inside this covenant who God is, because the only people who join this covenant already know who He is and what He’s done for us!  So instead of being an outside-in covenant, it’s an inside-out covenant!  Instead of God’s laws being externally imposed on us from the outside with the hope that maybe the laws will help us love God on the inside, we fall in love with God in our hearts first because of what Christ did for us, and now we WANT to keep His laws.  The laws are not imposed on us, they’re written on our hearts because we love God and want to please Him!
• 3) Our service to God isn’t about rules, but relationship.  We’re not going through the motions with empty rituals because that’s just what we’re supposed to do; no we’ve been transformed by God’s love and we’ve been given His Holy Spirit!
• 4) There’s no room for arrogance at all because we know we’re only in this covenant because Jesus died for my sins!  There’s no place for feelings of moral superiority because the cross puts us all on equal footing, all sinners in need of God’s grace.
  • Galatians 6:14

Key:  The New Testament, or new covenant, is a one-way like the Abrahamic covenant, not two-way like the Mosaic covenant.  It was the ultimate fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant, and Abraham was the ultimate model for how covenant partners should live.  It means our primary role is to live by faith in what God promises to accomplish on our behalf!  There’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, it’s fully the provision of God on the cross.  It’s not like we can contribute equally to our salvation, anymore than Abraham could contribute equally to having a child when his wife was barren.  No, the blessings of this covenant can only be experienced by God’s power and gracious promises, so our role in this covenant, like Abraham, is to live by faith in those promises.  This covenant is based on God’s promises, not our performance.  Now if someone says, “Yea but Brian doesn’t God expect us to grow and to meet the terms and conditions of this covenant laid out in the New Testament writings?”  Yes, but keep in mind, 1) even our own spiritual growth as Christians is described as the fruit of God’s Spirit working within us.  Any of our performance is really the result of God’s performance within us as He changes our hearts.  2) The teachings in the New Testament are not presented as, “Make sure to perform all these things well or you won’t be saved.”  No, it’s presented as, “You’ve already BEEN saved by your faith in the Messiah, now this is what a saved person’s life looks like who lives by faith daily!” 3) Remember when God made the covenant with Abraham, it was God who walked through the pieces of the animal sacrifice, not Abraham.  Which means God was staking His life and willing to die if He didn’t keep His promise, yet by God’s grace, Abraham’s death was not required if he didn’t keep the covenant perfectly.  The same thing is true for our covenant with Jesus.  We won’t keep His covenant perfectly, yet instead of requiring our death, Jesus dies for us instead, which sets us free from the penalty of death and now instead of trying to earn our way to Heaven in a two-way covenant, we can live by faith in His promises.

What was the Purpose of the Old Covenant?

• It’s important to understand, the Jews in Jesus’ day thought the way the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant would be fulfilled was THROUGH the Mosaic covenant.  They thought, “If you want to be right with God and be blessed, you have to join the Jews and get circumcised and keep the Law of Moses!”  Which makes sense and it’s hard to blame them because that’s basically the way it was presented in the Law of Moses, but they didn’t realize that was never God’s ultimate plan!  The two-way Mosaic covenant based on performance by law was never meant to replace the one-way Abrahamic covenant based on faith in His promises.
  • Galatians 3:17-18 - Paul’s saying God established a one-way covenant with Abraham based on promise 430 years before he established the Law of Moses covenant based on performance, and it’s not like the Mosaic covenant canceled out the Abrahamic covenant God made previously.  If that were the case, Paul says, our inheritance of the blessings through the Messiah would be based on our performance of the law, rather than our faith in God’s promises through the Messiah, and we’d all be lost!
    • Galatians 3:19, 24 - The Law of Moses covenant was added to rein in people’s sins, or transgressions, and keep them from living like the sinful nations around them, and to show them how bad their sin really is, how unholy they were compared to God, to help them learn more about who God was and how holy He is, and to teach them like a tutor about their need for a Savior!  It was to teach them that a system of salvation by law in a two-way covenant can never save us because we’ll only end up cursed for breaking it.  It was to teach us our only path to salvation is through faith in God’s promises in Christ.
      • • Application:  Sometimes we treat Christianity like a two-way covenant, and we walk around feeling hopeless because we know we haven’t been good enough for Heaven.  We need to flip that mindset and realize our faith is not in our performance or lack thereof, but in God’s promises and in His performance on our behalf through the cross of Christ!  And I know that makes people nervous because some might take advantage and think it means we can live however we want.  Well, it’s true some will, people took advantage of it in Paul’s day too.  But for those with good and honest hearts, once you realize how incredible it is that our salvation is rooted in God’s promises, not our performance, it will only improve our performance for Him because we’ll want nothing more than to please Him and live for Him and not for ourselves!
          • That’s how it was for Abraham!  It wasn’t, “Oh I better straighten up my life or God won’t bless my descendants.” It was, “Are you kidding me?  God is miraculously blessing me with a child?  And He’s promising to bless my descendants long after I’m gone?  THIS is a God worth serving and giving my life to in faith!”  That’s the way it should be with us as Christians!

Series: N/A

Service: Lord’s Supper Service

Type: Lord's Supper Talk

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Hebrews 10 - This morning in Bible class, we’ll be talking about how the new covenant is better than the Old Covenant.  Since we won’t touch on this in class, I’d like us to consider before the Lord’s Supper that one of the reasons for that is because Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was so much better than the animal sacrifices under the Mosaic covenant.  And I’d like to break down the first 10 verses in Hebrews 10 to explain why:

But first, let’s set animal sacrifices in their proper context.

- In Genesis 2, when God gave Adam and Eve His law about the one tree they couldn’t eat from, he said “For in the day you eat of it you will surely die.” - So we learn right from the start that the penalty for sin is death, not just physical death, but spiritual death where we’re separated relationally from our Creator.  Well, because of God’s mercy, love and kindness, under the Old Covenant He allowed people to offer up animals to die in their place.  Instead of their own death which they owed God for their sin, that animal’s death would cover or atone for them so that they could live.

• v. 1-4 - Here he gives 3 reasons why animal sacrifices were insufficient to truly cover for people’s sins.
• 1) If they were truly effective, they wouldn’t have needed to be offered over and over again.
  • Illustration:  Maybe some of you have been in the horrible situation where you have go back to a mechanic over and over again to fix your vehicle.  Every time you go to get it fixed, something else breaks and you have to take it back again.  That’s a good sign that you probably just need to get a different vehicle because this one just isn’t effective.  If it was a good, effective car, it wouldn’t need to constantly be fixed.  Despite the mechanic’s best efforts, there’s nothing he can really do to solve the problem.
    • Likewise, people would come offer animal sacrifices to repair their souls that had become defective because of sin, but those sacrifices ultimately could not solve the problem.  If offering animal sacrifices really fixed things and took care of the sin problem, they wouldn’t have to keep going back to the priests, or the spiritual mechanics, over and over again.
• 2) Those animal sacrifices were not really removing their sins, they were reminding them of their sins.  And what a disturbing reminder it would be.
  • Leviticus 4:4 - “He shall bring the bull to the doorway of the tent of meeting before the LORD, and he shall lay his hand on the head of the bull and slay the bull before the LORD.”  Let’s try to put ourselves in the shoes of one of the Israelites under that covenant.  You take a calf and bring him to the priest and you have take your hand and set it on the head of this animal, indicating that your sins are the cause of this poor animal’s death.  This animal is taking the consequences of your sins upon itself, and then YOU have to be the one to slit the animal’s throat and watch the blood drain out.
    • Could there be any more vivid and disturbing reminder of sin than to kill innocent animals on a regular basis in your place?  It’s why the Day of Atonement when animals were sacrificed on behalf of the whole nation of Israel wasn’t a happy, joyful time.  It was accompanied by fasting and humility because it gave them all a conscious awareness of how sinful they were.
      • Illustration:  If your car needs repairs all the time, when you bring your car in to the mechanic it’s not really a hopeful situation.  It’s just a constant reminder that your car is ineffective and it’s costing you a fortune.
• 3) It’s impossible for the blood of animals to take away sins.
  • While it’s true God accepted animal blood as payment for their sins, if you think about it, how does the death of an animal serve as an adequate substitute for the death of a human being?  As humans, we are of far greater value than the animals because we are made in the image of God, so it’s not an equal 1:1 trade.  Plus, those animals are innocent, and we are not.  So it’s not fair to the innocent animal to have the take the place of human beings who willingly choose to sin against God.  Which is why even though God said they could be forgiven by those sacrifices, perceptive Jews knew those weren’t enough, as we’ll see when we get to the next section of verses.   
    • Illustration: Let’s say your mechanic has been fixing your car for you, and it’s drained your bank account and you can’t afford any more repairs, nor can you afford a new vehicle.  And because you don’t have the money, your mechanic, out of the kindness of his heart, says, “Look, I’ll make you a deal.  I know you don’t have any money, but I love Chipotle burritos.  So every time you bring your car in, just bring me a Chipotle burrito and I’ll fix it for you.”
      • Well, you’re amazed by his generosity and so grateful he’s willing to do that for you, but you know in your heart that’s not a fair deal.  A burrito is not worth hundreds of dollars in repairs.
        • Likewise, God accepted those animal sacrifices by His grace and mercy, but an animal sacrifice is not worth the real payment we owe God for our sins, which is our own death.  Those sacrifices didn’t really pay the price for sin.  They were just burritos.   

Well now the Hebrew writer quotes from the Old Testament, from Psalm 40 written by King David and uses it as if Jesus, the ultimate King, were the one saying it to God.   

• v. 5-7 - So even verses from the Old Covenant say God never really wanted animal sacrifices from His people.  Yes He commanded them to make those sacrifices, but it wasn’t because they were sufficient to remove their sins and make things right with God.  No, it’s because God wanted the repentance and love of the person offering those sacrifices.  What God has always wanted was for us to use our bodies to live in obedience to Him in love.  “A body you have prepared for me.”  This is consistent with other passages in the Old Testament too.
  • 1 Samuel 15:22 - “Has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord?  Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams.”
  • Hosea 6:6 - “For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice.”
  • Micah 6:6-8 - “With what shall I come to the Lord and bow myself before God on high?  Shall I come to him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves?  Does the LORD take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil?…He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
    • Think now about Jesus.  Jesus is the only one who ever gave God what He really wanted.  He gave God His body in total devotion and obedience to Him from the heart.   
    • v. 7 - The scroll of the book is the Law of Moses which described a person who obeys the Lord and does His will.  Jesus is saying in Psalm 40, “I didn’t come just to give you animal sacrifices; I came to be the person who actually does your will and obeys you like the Law says, even to the point of giving you my entire life and body on the cross.”  When He did that, He did two things:
      • 1) He finally took care of the sin problem.  When He died, the real substitute, human blood for human blood, was made.  The real price for sin, which is the death of a human, was paid.  And because He was also God, His sacrifice had the power to atone for the sins of not just one human, but for all of humanity.  Illustration:  In our mechanic example, if we were paying in burritos for a while, we’d be feeling guilty and self conscious about that because we know how much we really owe.  So even though the mechanic SAYS we’re square, we don’t really feel that way.  Now imagine someone comes up to the mechanic and says, “I want to pay this person’s debt in cash.  They won’t have to pay you in burritos anymore, and in fact I’m going to buy this person a brand new car so they never have to come back to get it fixed again.”
        • That’s what Jesus did for us.  He used real money, real blood, to pay the debt we owed, so we don’t have to pay God in animal sacrifices, that never really solved the problem anyways, ever again.
          • v. 10 - The problem with our souls has been fixed once and for all by one sacrifice that never has to be repeated again.   
      • 2) He showed us the kind of person God is looking for.
        • • v. 9 - He took away that first system to establish the second.  That not only means we don’t have to offer animal sacrifices anymore.  It means He established a superior system whereby our hearts are forgiven and transformed, and now in gratitude for His sacrifice we can give God what He’s always wanted from the start.  We can give Him OUR bodies in total devotion from the heart.  We can live like the person in Psalm 40.  We can live like Jesus.
            • Romans 12:1 - “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.”
              • While we gather around this table, let’s remember the body Jesus gave for us that finally takes aways our sins, and let’s strive daily for the kind of devotion Jesus had.  To say with the Psalmist, “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God.”

Series: 2026 - Q2 - 1&2 Kings - 2 Chron

Service: Adult Class B-Classroom

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Dwayne Gandy

Series: N/A

Service: Wednesday Night

Type: Invitation

Speaker: Aaron McKibben

Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Adult Class

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Tonight we’re talking about the Old and New Covenants in the Bible, and I’ve decided to expand this out to two classes because it’s such an important and somewhat complex subject.  There are new syllabi in the back to account for this change and some other things I needed to move around.  Did you know, another word for Covenant is Testament?  So the fact that our Bibles are divided into two major sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament, means this is a pretty important subject.

I also think it’s helpful to realize there were many different covenants in Scripture.  Even though the Old and New Covenants get most of the press, other covenants were made between God and people and between people and people.  The example I had you all read first, because I think it helps us understand what a covenant is, was the one between Isaac and Abimelech in Genesis 26.

Isaac was digging a bunch of wells in Canaan, but Abimelech and his herdsmen were filling them in back in with dirt.  They weren’t happy with Isaac’s family taking water from the ground that could have been theirs, so to eliminate the competition they’d just fill up the wells, and they fought over those for a while, but eventually Isaac just moved to a different part of the land and let Abimelech have his own territory, and eventually Abimelech came to make peace with him.

Genesis 26:28-31 - Now, based on this passage and what you may already know about covenants in other passages…

Question:  What is a covenant?  I realize the Bible doesn’t give us an exact definition, so you might word it differently.

Definition of a Covenant:

• A binding relationship of peace and blessings based on promises of faithfulness by one or both parties.    
  • Sometimes covenants were made between people like Isaac and Abimelech, but we more importantly we’ll see covenants made between God and people, the Old and New covenants being the most major of those agreements.  And knowing what you know about the Big Picture Story of the Bible, doesn’t it makes sense why covenants would be such a central part of God’s dealings with humanity?  From the very start in the Garden of Eden God has always wanted to live in peace with us and for us to live in peace with Him and experience His blessings!
    • Since our sin messed all that up, God put covenants in place as a way to restore what we had with Him in the Garden.

7 Elements of a Covenant:

- We don’t see every one of these elements in every covenant account in Scripture, but if you put all the accounts together, this is what you find…
1)  Promises between parties

- One or both parties in the agreement commit to fulfill certain promises or obligations to the other in order to bless the other party and foster peace.  Notice Isaac and Abimelech made oaths to one another.  Covenants weren’t haphazard or flippant; the parties bound themselves to each other by oath.

2) Terms and Conditions

- These are the specific commitments and obligations of the parties in the covenant.  In this relationship, I’ll do this for you and you’ll do this for me.  When Jacob and Abimelech made a covenant, they agreed to do each other no harm.  If one of them violates those terms, the covenant has been breached and there’s no longer peace.

3) Consequences for Violating the Terms and Conditions

- We don’t really see these laid out between Isaac and Abimelech, but later when God makes a covenant with the nation of Israel, He has several chapters devoted to the consequences of violation.

- Deuteronomy 28:15 - Then God gets very specific with the kinds of curses they’d experience like plagues on their flocks, bodily illness, locusts destroying their crops, famine, drought, and exile.

4) Animal Sacrifice

- The animal sacrifice symbolized how the parties were staking their lives on this covenant.  The idea was, “If I don’t fulfill this covenant, may I be killed like this animal.”  The animal served as a substitute for the people in the agreement.  It’s a way to seal the covenant with their own blood, they’re just using the animal’s blood as a symbol of their own.  Each party was putting his life on the line in this agreement, so that if it’s violated, their life could be taken from them!  Sometimes they would cut the animal in half and walk between the pieces as part of the ritual.  In fact, our English Bible translations use the phrase “make a covenant,” but more literally in the original Hebrew, it was “cut a covenant” because of the cutting of the animals, either in half, or cutting their necks.  In Jeremiah’s day, some of God’s people made a covenant with Him to release their fellow Hebrew slaves, but they failed to keep that covenant, so listen to God’s response…

- Jeremiah 34:18, 20 - Covenants were so serious, if you didn’t keep them, you forfeited your life.

5) Covenant Meal

- Even though we don’t see Isaac and Abimelech mention an animal sacrifice, it does say they ate a meal together, and guess where that meal usually came from?  They ate part of the animal they sacrificed.  And the point of the meal was to ratify the covenant, to officially show, “You and I are at peace now.”  Eating meals together in the ancient world was a sign of peace, loyalty, relationship, and mutual commitment to each other.

6) A Sign of the Covenant

- Sometimes the covenant meal itself could serve as a sign of the covenant, but other times there would also be emblems or memorials set up as reminders so that both parties would remember the agreement they made with each other.  Later when Jacob makes a covenant with Laban, it says this…

- Genesis 31:44-46 - So they eat together as a covenant meal, and sets up a pillar of stones as a sign to remind them of their agreement.

7) Witnesses

- We just saw Jacob calling the pillar of stones a witness of the covenant between him and Laban.  When God makes a covenant with Israel, He’ll call heaven and earth as witnesses to it.  Sometimes God is called as witness, but the idea is we’re accountable to more than just ourselves to keep this covenant, and if we violate it, we won’t be able to say, “Ah no one knew about it, so it’s not a big deal.”  No, we’re accepting public accountability for our actions.

Genesis 31:52-54 - We see pretty much all 7 elements of a covenant in this one between Jacob and Laban.

Questions/Comments?

One-Way vs. Two-Way Covenants

• Genesis 9:9-13 [This is a covenant God made very early on with all of creation] - Question:  What’s the difference between a one-way covenant like this and a two-way covenant like the one between Isaac and Abimelech?
  • In a one-way covenant, the promises and blessings are only coming from one party!  And there aren’t any terms and conditions placed on the other party for keeping their end of the agreement.  In this case, God is the one making the promise not to destroy the world again by water and that promise is unconditional.  He doesn’t say, “However, if the world disobeys me again, I won’t keep this covenant and I’ll destroy the world by water anyway.”  No, God is going to be faithful to this covenant no matter how His creation responds, and He put the rainbow in the sky as a sign and constant reminder to humanity of this covenant.
    • Key:  One way, unconditional covenants from God are absolutely crucial in Scripture because if all of our covenant relationships with Him were conditioned on our performance, we’d all be dead!  This original covenant proves that!  Think about it, if God said, “Okay, I’ll make a covenant with humanity; if you all obey Me, I won’t destroy the world with a flood, but if you disobey me, I WILL destroy the world with a flood,” wouldn’t He have to destroy the world with a flood constantly, over and over again in every generation?
      • Genesis 8:21 - God knew He couldn’t make this a two-way conditional covenant because mankind is evil and He’d have to keep destroying us.  So He makes a covenant to give us all life and more time based on His promise, not our performance!  And what we’ll find in Scripture is that this is the only way we can ever truly experience the blessings of God and live at peace with Him is if those blessings are rooted more His promises than on our performance.

The Abrahamic Covenant

• We’ve talked in previous classes about God’s 3 major promises to Abraham.  He says, “I’ll give you and your descendants a great land, I’ll make your descendants a great nation, and through those descendants the whole world will be blessed.”  Well, let’s notice the covenant ceremony between God and Abraham.
  • Genesis 15:9-10, 12, 17-18 - So here we have the cutting of the covenant, where animals were cut in half, but the shocking thing about this ceremony is that God is the only one who walks between the pieces!  Now, in the ancient world, one way covenants where one party walked between the pieces wasn’t that uncommon, especially if it was a covenant or a treaty between a King and his vassal servants.  In those cases, it’s the servants who walk through the pieces and the king does not, because the servants are the ones making promises to obey and to bless and honor the King, but the King wouldn’t normally be making promises to bless his vassals.  But this passage is shocking because God takes the position of a servant and walks through the pieces on Abraham’s behalf!  And basically God is taking His own life into His hands saying, “May I die if I don’t keep this covenant” but Abraham isn’t required to do that.
    • Which means this is more of a one way covenant where the weight of responsibility to bless Abraham is fully on God, not on Abraham.  Abraham’s role is to put His faith in God’s promises and live like he believes them.  But it’s more of a one-way, unilateral covenant for a couple of reasons:
      • 1) None of these blessings are possible by anything Abraham could accomplish because they’re completely dependent on him having a child, and his wife is barren.  In other words, there’s nothing Abraham can do by his own performance to ensure these promises come true!  God was fulfilling this promise through the miraculous birth of a barren woman, so all Abraham could do was have faith in God’s promise because it was fully dependent on Him!
      • 2) God never gives Abraham an ultimatum and says, “Listen, if you don’t hold up your end of this covenant, then I’m not holding up my end.”  It doesn’t mean Abraham was free to live however he wanted, but God does not seem to make this covenant dependent on Abraham’s faithfulness.  If in some hypothetical world Abraham was unfaithful, God still would have found a way to keep these promises to Abraham’s descendants.  But I think God knew Abraham was the perfect person to make this one way covenant with because He knew Abraham would live a life of faith in Him.
        • Genesis 17:1, 10-11 - So God did put expectations on Abraham for how he should live, but it was more like, “Since I’ve promised to bless you in this one way covenant, here’s how you should live.”  It wasn’t presented as, “If you don’t live this way, I won’t keep My promises to bless your descendants or the world.”
• And this covenant is SO important because these 3 promises point to the ultimate plans of God through the Messiah.  The great land is Heaven, the great nation is the church, the seed through whom the whole world would be saved was Jesus!  So praise God He made that a one way covenant not dependent on our performance, otherwise the Messiah would have never come to save us and we’d all be lost!  Instead, God is saying, “I’m going to keep these promises no matter what, and the recipients of these blessings are those who put their faith in my promises like Abraham did!”  We’ll talk more about that Sunday, Lord willing.

Questions/Comments?

The Mosaic Covenant (Old Covenant)

• The covenant with the nation of Israel through Moses is basically an extension of the Abrahamic covenant, which is why those under the Mosaic covenant still practiced circumcision, the sign of the Abrahamic covenant, because the nation of Israel were the descendants of Abraham through whom God would fulfill His Abrahamic covenant to give them a great land, make them a great nation, and use them to bless the whole world through the Messiah.    
  • So the Abrahamic covenant established God’s promises, but now the Mosaic covenant is about shaping the character of the people through whom those promises will unfold.  And this covenant is presented as much more of a two-way, bilateral covenant.  We see that in a couple ways:
    • 1) The covenant ceremony.
      • Exodus 24:3, 5-7 - In this case, they didn’t walk between the animals, but they did kill the animals and sprinkle half the blood on the altar representing God’s part and half the blood on the people representing their part.  So this covenant is much more of a two-way street.  God keeps His end and the people keep theirs, which is why the people say, “All that you say, we will do!”  They’re telling God, “If we don’t keep our end of the covenant, may we be killed like this animal!”
    • 2) The covenant conditions.
      • They were given a long list of laws as conditions of this covenant called the Law of Moses.  So sometimes the Old Covenant is called the Mosaic covenant because it’s rooted in the Law Moses gave to the people from God.  And God tells them, “If you faithfully keep the conditions of the covenant, you’ll be blessed, but if you abandoned my laws, I’ll take the blessings away from you.”   
        • Deuteronomy 28:1-2 - Then He gives a long list of very specific blessings, but basically it’s the blessings of being a great nation, living in a great land, being the lineage through whom the Messiah comes to bless the world, and most importantly living in peaceful relationship with God.
          • Leviticus 26:12 - He also warns them…
        • Deuteronomy 28:15 - Then He gives a long list of very specific curses in which they’ll lose their land, they won’t be a great nation anymore, God won’t use them to bring the Messiah into the world, and God won’t live with them in peace anymore.
          • God really didn’t go over these kinds of things in the covenant He made with Abraham because it was more one way.  That’s because again God’s promises to Abraham looked far beyond the blessings on physical, ethnic nation of Israel.
            • But the covenant with the physical, ethnic nation of Israel was more about their prosperity as a physical, ethnic nation in the specific land of Canaan, and once they abandoned their covenant with God, they lost the right to share in the blessings of that covenant, so they lost their land and their status as a great nation.
              • 2 Kings 17:15 - But despite the failings of Israel on a national scale to keep His covenant, God still planned to honor His covenant with Abraham to bless the world through the Messiah, but that would only be possible with the establishment of a new and better covenant.  And on Sunday, we’ll talk about why the new covenant was so much better than this one.

Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Sun Bible Study

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

This morning we’ll be talking about Christ’s resurrection, which the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15 is a matter of first importance.  After Jesus’ died and was buried in a tomb, 3 days later Jesus’ mother Mary along with Mary Magdelene and a few other women, came to the tomb bringing spices to show honor and love for him and partly to keep his body from smelling too bad as it decomposed, but when they came to the tomb, they found the stone rolled away from the entrance, and there were two angelic beings with the appearance of men in dazzling clothing, and they asked the women a powerful question…

Luke 24:5b-6a - Then later when these women told the 11 disciples about it, they thought they were crazy!  It says their words appeared to them as nonsense and they refused to believe it.  Well, later Jesus appeared in His resurrected body directly to His disciples, and they still had a hard time believing their eyes!

Luke 24:37-39 - Then He asked them if they had anything to eat, and He shared a meal with them!

Jesus’ Resurrection Really Happened!

Now, I made the point in our last class that Jesus is the only religious figure in history who’s existence actually matters to us today because He didn’t just come to set a good example and give us good teachings, He came to change our legal standing with God!  All other religious figures could have been purely fictional and we could still benefit from their example and teachings, but Jesus actually came to DO things for us and in addition to changing our legal standing, He actually changed death’s power over us forever through the resurrection!  So if Jesus never actually came to do that, we’d have no hope to defeat death!  We’ll talk more about that later, but for now…

Question:  What are some reasons to believe Christ’s resurrection was a real event in history?

1) This was very chauvinistic, but in the first century world the testimony of women was not admissible in court.  Men believed women could not be trusted to give accurate testimony, so if the Bible wanted to fabricate the resurrection, there’s no way the writers would have made women the first witnesses to the empty tomb!  God knows the testimony of women can be trusted, so He has no problem using them as the first eyewitnesses, but if the Gospel writers wanted to get away with a lie, they’d never use women to do it.  The only explanation for why they would use women as the first eyewitnesses is that that’s how it actually happened!  2) Jesus was in His resurrected body for 40 days before ascending to Heaven!  It’s not like He only appeared to a few people, He appeared to hundreds of people, and in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says He appeared to a crowd of 500 people at once, many of whom were still alive at the time Paul wrote that letter and he was inviting anyone who doubted it to go ask the eyewitnesses!  3) Some try to argue that it was just a hallucination, but hallucinations don’t manifest themselves the same way to hundreds of people.  Hallucinations are very individualized, so for crowds of people to all see the same one is not the way hallucinations work.  4) There were enemies who denied the resurrection and all they had to do to disprove it was produce the body.  All they had to do is say, “Uh, what are you talking about?  His body is right here.”  His enemies knew exactly where He was buried.  5) If the apostles made it up, it means they died for something they knew was a lie.  People don’t allow themselves to be tortured and killed for something they know is a lie.  They might die for a lie they believe is actually true, but not for something they know is a lie, and all the apostles, with the exception of John, were tortured and killed for their faith in the resurrection.  6) Christianity would have never gotten off the ground.  Remember, if you claim to be God and die, that’s the end of your movement because if you die, that means you were lying about being God, since gods don’t die.  Yet Christianity exploded because Jesus died, but didn’t stay dead and everyone knew it!

Romans 1:4

Acts 26:26 - Jesus’ resurrection appearances were not done in a dark corner somewhere, but out in the open for 40 days for so many to see.

The Resurrection on the Last Day

• In John 11, Mary and Martha’s brother Lazarus has died.  They send for Jesus to try to heal him before He dies, but Jesus purposely delays and lets it happen.
  • John 11:4 - Now, after delaying on purpose, Jesus finds out that Lazarus dies, and says something really shocking…
    • John 11:14-15 - Jesus says, “I’m glad I wasn’t there to prevent him from dying.”  Not because death is a good thing or because Jesus wanted to see Mary and Martha in pain, but so He could raise Him from the dead and everyone would believe in His resurrection power.  Well, when He gets there, Lazarus has already been dead 4 days, and here’s the exchange between Jesus and Martha.
      • John 11:23-27 - Now, I want to point out something that’s really eye opening.  Nowhere in this chapter does anyone take comfort in the fact that Lazarus’ soul is with God.  There’s no one saying, “It’s all okay because Lazarus is in a better place now.”  Now, we’ll talk in a few minutes about how it’s absolutely true Lazarus’ soul WAS with God and he WAS in a better place.  However, they all recognize something is terribly wrong with this situation and it won’t be fixed until the resurrection on the last day.  The ultimate hope in the Bible is NOT that our souls get to be with God.  The ultimate hope is that our bodies are raised to be with God.

Question:  What are some Old Testament passages that would have given Martha belief in a future resurrection of her brother’s body?

- Daniel 12:2

- Job 19:26

- Isaiah 26:19

- Psalm 16:10

- There are many other examples, but these verses led the Jews to believe in a bodily resurrection in the last day, and Jesus and the apostles, being Jews themselves, had the same view!  But what made Jesus’ teachings and resurrection so shocking and revolutionary is that He showed the Jews they could have a foretaste of that final resurrection’s power right now in this life!  Here was the common Jewish understanding  in Jesus’ day.

Chart.  A) This present age is full of corruption and evil, but B) when the Messiah comes He’s going bring an end to the present age and God will pour out judgment on all the wicked, He’ll resurrect all the righteous from the dead and usher in C) The age to come, the glorious restored kingdom of God described by the prophets, the restoration of all things, or the new heavens and new earth.

So the Jews thought the Messiah’s arrival signaled that the last day was upon them and the bodily resurrection would happen soon!  Yet when Jesus came, it wasn’t the end of the present age.  It’s 2,000 years later and the bodily resurrection still hasn’t happened yet!  We’re still living in this present age, and the age to come hasn’t started.  However, Jesus entered into history and HIS body was raised from the grave thousands of years before the final bodily resurrection in the end!  The Jews NEVER expected that.  They never even expected the Messiah to die, let alone to be resurrected.  And yet by Jesus resurrecting from the dead now, He’s showing us that the resurrection power of the age to come now overlaps with the present age so we can experience that power in our lives right now and don’t have to wait until the final day to have new life!

That’s why Jesus tells Martha, “I AM the resurrection and the life and if you believe in Me, you can be resurrected to new life right now and even when you die, that won’t be the end for you.”  That’s one of the major purposes of baptism; that we’re joining ourselves to the power of Christ’s resurrection!

Romans 6:4 - When we come up out of the waters of baptism, it’s like we’ve already experienced the final resurrection of our bodies on the last day; it’s like we’re already living with God in Heaven in our resurrected bodies which means our life looks totally different now because we’re no longer driven by our fleshly impulses.  Instead we’re empowered by God’s Spirit and we no longer have to live in fear of death!

Questions/Comments?

3 Main Views of the Resurrection — Only One is Right

• If you were to take a survey and ask Christians how they view the final resurrection in the end, you would likely get one of 3 answers.
  • Answer #1:  God gave us bodies, but we corrupted them by our sin, so the goal of the resurrection is for our souls to finally be set free from our bodies.
  • Answer #2:  God gave us bodies, but He’ll only resurrect our souls in the end because He values our souls far more than our bodies.
  • Answer #3:  God gave us bodies, we corrupted them by our sin, so the goal of the resurrection is to redeem and re-unite our bodies and souls and live with God in glorified bodies forever.
    • Now, I’m not sure which answer you chose in your mind as I was reading them to you, but answers #1 and #2 must be completely rejected.  And this is NOT something we are free to disagree on.  There are some things it’s okay to hold different views on, but not this. I had you all read all of 1 Corinthians 15 because Paul makes clear in that chapter that it is of first importance that we accept answer #3 and he rebukes the Corinthians because they got this answer wrong.

The Intermediate State of our Souls before the Bodily Resurrection

• The Bible does say once the righteous die, our souls go to be with God without our bodies.  Our bodies stay in the grave, but our spirits return to the Lord.
  • Philippians 1:21-24 - Paul is in prison and he’s not sure whether he’s going to be executed or if he’ll get to live.  And he says he’s not sure which one to choose because if he dies he’ll get to go be with Christ.  Now, he’s not talking about his body going to be with Christ, but his soul.  His body will still be in the grave.  But he does admit that his soul going to be with Jesus is far better than continuing to live here apart from the presence of Jesus, but there’s still great value in living because it means he can continue to be a blessing to his Philippian brethren.
    • But even though Paul says it would be great for his soul to be with Jesus, that is NOT his ultimate hope.
      • Philippians 3:10-11 - Paul wants to know the power of the resurrection right now!  Remember, Jesus came to bring the resurrection power of the final day right into the middle of history so we could experience that power in our life today, and Paul wants to experience that power more deeply in his life!  But Paul’s ultimate hope he longs to attain to is the resurrection of his body from the dead!
        • Philippians 3:20-21 - While it’s certainly some comfort for our souls to go to a better place and be with God after death, the Bible never presents that as our ultimate hope!  The ultimate hope is the resurrection of our bodies in the new heavens and new earth.  And that will only happen when Jesus returns in judgment.

Question:  Why do you think the Bible puts so much emphasis on bodily resurrection?  Why wouldn’t it be enough for our souls to be with God without our bodies?

1) It was God’s original intention that human beings have bodies and souls.  The definition of life in Scripture for humans is body and soul together.  God created our material bodies from the dust, then breathed an immaterial spirit into us, and called it good.  So for humans, life is the union between the material and immaterial, the flesh and spirit and that has always been God’s plan for humanity.   2) A bodily resurrection is a reversal of the curse of sin!  Remember in our class on the Problem of Sin, one of the consequences of sin is a separation of the body and soul, also known as death.  If life is body and soul together, death is body and soul separated.  It’s why James says the body without the spirit is dead, and death was never a part of God’s original intention for us.  So for God to keep our souls and leave our bodies in the grave, He’s not only changing his original intention, He’s conceding defeat to Satan!  He’s saying, “Well I originally intended for them to have bodies and souls, but Satan ruined that plan, so I guess I’ll just take their souls and let Satan have their bodies.”  No, God’s plan is to reverse sin’s curse and redeem and restore our bodies from sin’s corruption!  Remember when I said doctrines aren’t just rules and regulations, they are reflections of God’s character and plans in the overall story of Scripture?  When you understand the Big Picture of the Bible, it’s about the total defeat of Satan and sin, and if God lets Satan corrupt our bodies and keep us in the grave, then Satan, sin, and death win!  Yet the Bible presents the final bodily resurrection as the defeat of Satan, sin and death!

1 Corinthians 15:54-56 - Our resurrection is a taunt against Satan’s attempts to ruin God’s plans by introducing sin and death into God’s good world.  In the resurrection of our bodies God has the last laugh.  So when Jesus offers us eternal life, He means eternal life with our bodies and souls reunited.

Question:  Why do you think we, as modern Christians, struggle to accept the idea of a bodily resurrection?

1) We’re still heavily influenced by Greek philosophy.  This was the problem in Corinth too.  Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato had a dualistic concept where they valued the soul over the body and that our bodies were kind of like prisons for our souls.  Then later the gnostics took that even further and said the body is evil and the soul is good, and the Christians in Corinth were influenced by early seeds of this idea and some of the early church fathers were too, and this kind of thinking has trickled down even to our modern day, but it’s simply not Biblical.  2) We have a hard time envisioning what our bodies will be like.  We have all kinds of questions like, “If I had an injury in this life, will I still be walking around with that injury in my resurrected body?  If a baby dies and is resurrected, will they be a baby forever?  Are we going to look like zombies?”  The Corinthians had this problem too.  In 1 Corinthians 15:35 they were asking, “How exactly are the dead raised?  With what kind of body do they come?”  And sometimes because we don’t have all the answers to our questions, we assume it must not be true.  3) I think the songs in our songbooks give us an incomplete picture.  It is incredibly rare for any of our songs to mention the bodily resurrection.  Most of the songs we sing are about the intermediate state of our souls going to be with God, but they’re written as if the intermediate state is our ultimate hope.  Songs like, “Where the Soul of Man Never Dies,” and “I’ll Fly Away,” make it sound like our souls being with God is all that matters, but that’s just not true.  Now, I’m not saying it’s sinful or wrong to sing these songs, because our souls DO go to be with God and it’s true our souls never die, but these songs are incomplete because our souls will be reunited with our bodies and our bodies will never die either, and that’s our ultimate hope in Scripture!

4) We misunderstand the word “spiritual” in the Bible.

Spiritual Bodies

1 Corinthians 15:42-44 - To our modern ears, we think the word “spiritual” means the opposite of physical or material.  We think spiritual means immaterial, not made of matter at all, like ghosts or spirits.  But that’s not what spiritual means anywhere in the Bible.  Spiritual refers to the power source.  A spiritual body is empowered and given life by the Holy Spirit, not from any earthly source.  Whereas “natural bodies” are empowered and given life by earthly processes like the sexual union between a man and a woman, and we’re kept alive by our mothers and then when we’re born we’re empowered by lungs pumping, blood circulating, and hearts beating.  But because of the curse of sin, God did not allow those earthly physical processes to keep us alive forever and eventually we die.  But in our spiritual bodies, our life source will be God’s Spirit which means our physical, material bodies can live forever!

Romans 8:11 - Jesus’ resurrected body flesh and bones, it could be physically touched, and could even eat food with the disciples, but it was no longer powered by any earthly source, but by God’s Spirit, and that’s important because…

Christ Resurrection is the Model for Ours!

• The reason Paul rebukes the Corinthians for not believing they’ll be raised from the dead bodily is because He says if you deny that, then you’re also denying that JESUS raised bodily from the dead!  Paul saw Jesus’ resurrection and OUR resurrection as inseparable.  If Jesus’ body was raised, ours will be raised with a body like His!
  • • 1 Corinthians 15:20, 23 - Just like the first fruits of a harvest is the sign of more of those same crops to come, so too was Jesus’ resurrection the first fruits of more resurrections just like His to come in the end!  But again, the good news is, we don’t have to wait until the end to experience Christ’s resurrection power!  We can be resurrected to new life now, to live as if we’re already in our imperishable bodies, which should give us even MORE hope and confidence of our future resurrection because it’s like it’s already happened for us in Christ!

Questions/Comments?

Note:  When he says in v. 50 that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, he’s talking about natural bodies empowered by earthly processes.  Our earthly flesh and blood bodies are mortal and perishable, and it’s impossible for them to live eternally with God on their own.  These flesh and blood bodies must be empowered by God’s Spirit in order to be made imperishable.

That’s how it was in the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve’s flesh and blood bodies were never meant to live eternally on their own apart from the empowerment of God, which is why they had to eat from the tree of life to live eternally.  But once they were removed from the tree, their flesh and blood bodies could no longer live forever.

This means we’ll still have flesh (though possibly no blood since that’s an earthly life source), just like Jesus was raised in the flesh, but we’ll be empowered by God’s Spirit, not earthly processes.

Series: N/A

Service: Praise and Preaching Service

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Matthew 4:18-19 - This quarter I’m teaching a class on Basic Bible Doctrines, and while that material is incredibly important, I’ve tried to emphasize that we must never get the impression that Christianity is just about rules and regulations.  Christianity is an invitation by God into a grand story and adventure and the rules and regulations are there to guide us along the way.

When Jesus said to His very first disciples, “Follow Me,” He wasn’t saying, “Follow Me, because there are a ton of new rules I need you to keep.”  He wasn’t saying, “Follow Me, because you all haven’t been as well behaved as you should be and I need you to straighten up.”  He wasn’t saying, “Follow Me, and I’ll teach you how to hunker down and stay safe until God comes and takes you to Heaven.”  He wasn’t saying, “Follow Me, because I need you all to go to church services a couple times a week.”

Yet sadly, many Christians believe that’s all Christianity is and if that’s our view of the Christian life, it’s going to be exhausting, aimless, deflating, and we’ll either quit and go back to the world or we’ll settle for being completely bored and unfulfilled the rest of our lives.  No, when Jesus said, “Follow Me,” He was calling His disciples to join Him in a grand adventure and this morning I want us to explore the anatomy of an adventure and how the Christian life the grandest adventure of all.  And while I won’t make this the focal point of the sermon, I do want to use the adventure of Frodo from Tolkien’s story The Lord of the Rings to help us see the parallels to our adventure in Christ.  And here’s the foundational point of the sermon…

The Christian adventure is about joining our King’s mission to rescue the world from the power of darkness and expand His kingdom of light.   

And as with every adventure, it starts with…

1.  A Wake Up Call

• We have found among one of the Dead Sea Scrolls a Jewish writing from before the time of Jesus called, “The War Scroll” for short, but the longer name is called, “The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.”  When Jesus came, the Jews believed they were the sons of light.  They were the people of truth, holiness, and faithfulness, but the Gentiles who opposed God were sons of darkness.  The Jews thought they were in good shape spiritually because they were descendants of Abraham and they had God’s law.  Yet when Jesus arrived…
  • Matthew 4:16-17 - Jesus came to expose the fact that those who THOUGHT they were sons of light had actually been overtaken by the power of darkness themselves, and they needed repent and allow the true light of His kingdom to shine forth like the dawn upon them!
    • Ephesians 6:12 - The Jews thought their battle was against the Romans, but Jesus came to show them their real battle was against Satan and his demons, the powers and forces of darkness in the world.  And Jesus came to save us from the darkness of sin, suffering, and death.
      • John 12:46 - The Lord of the Rings starts with Frodo living a peaceful, happy life in the Shire.  He doesn’t know much about life outside the Shire, so he naively assumes all is well in the world.  Yet when he finds his uncle’s ring, he learns from his wise friend Gandalf that there’s something sinister behind it.  He learns that evil and darkness is spreading because Sauron, “The Dark Lord,” is expanding his power and kingdom and plans to come find this ring and when he does, all of middle-earth would fall under tyranny and darkness, and he would enslave or kill all of his enemies, and even Frodo’s home is in danger.  And now that he knows the truth; he can’t stay neutral.  He has to pick a side; either stay and be destroyed, or go and try to save his home and the world from the power of darkness.
        • In Matthew 4, this isn’t the first time the disciples have met Jesus; we know from Luke and John’s gospel that they’ve spent time with him already and they know things aren’t right in the world and they can’t stay neutral.  Jesus interrupts their lives with a wake up call that the world needs saving and they’re forced to choose a side; either they stay in their boats and allow the darkness to overtake them, or go and follow Jesus.
• This is how the Christian adventure started for all of us!  We were all just living our lives, doing our thing, and then we came to a crisis point where we learned the truth that there is darkness and evil in this world that has even reached my heart.  And that this life isn’t all about me; there’s a battle for souls going on in the world, and if I don’t join the fight, many will lose their souls and I’ll lose my own in the process!

2.  Leaving an Old Life for a New Mission

• Matthew 4:19b - Jesus says if they’ll follow Him, He’ll give them a whole new mission in life.  They won’t be pulling fish out of darkness, they’ll be pulling people out of the darkness!  Later Paul will describe his mission this way…
  • Acts 26:18 - And listen to the way Paul describes what happened for us as Christians!
    • Colossians 1:12b-14 - When Jesus came, it was a battle between His kingdom of light and Satan’s kingdom of darkness!  In fact, later when the Pharisees accuse Jesus of casing out demons by the power of Satan, Jesus explains why that makes no sense!
      • Matthew 12:26, 28 - Jesus’ point is that Satan would never cast out his own demonic forces of darkness because that would only hurt his kingdom!  Satan is trying to expand the borders of his kingdom of darkness in the world and yet when Jesus casts out demons it was a sign that God’s kingdom of light was bursting forth into history to break Satan’s hold on people and crush his kingdom from within!
        • • THIS is the adventure Jesus is inviting His disciples into when He says, “Follow Me!”  He’s asking them to join His mission to rescue the world from the power of darkness and expand His kingdom of light!
            • But as exciting as adventures can be, the truth is it always costs us something.  Frodo had to leave his old life in the Shire behind, the comfort, the parties and feast, and it was especially hard for Hobbits like Frodo because they were homebodies who never ventured far and didn’t care to.  And as he left, it says, “He stood for a moment looking at the door he had shut for the last time.”
              • Matthew 4:20 - These disciples left their familiar lives behind for the great unknown.  They knew Jesus was King, but they no idea where He was leading them or what was in store for them.  All they understood is that the life they knew was over and they had to shut the door on it for the last time.
• Now, I realize when we become Christians, we may not have to quit our jobs like they did, but it’s about leaving our old selfish life behind and living for Him and others.  We can’t stay in the boat, or in the Shire, any longer; there’s a world being overtaken by darkness and they need the light of Christ and His kingdom!

3.  A Guide to Lead the Way

• It’s foolish to go on an adventure without a guide.  You’re entering completely uncharted territory, this is a totally new life and mission way outside your comfort zone and without a guide, at best you’ll wander around aimlessly and at worst, you might get killed!  I mean, the disciples had never been fishing for men before, and if they tried to go out by themselves, they might be casting hooks into crowds, snagging people’s clothes and lips and end up killed by an angry mob or school!
  • No, they needed someone to not only explain to them how to fish for people and rescue them from the darkness, but to show them what it looks like!
    • Matthew 4:23-24 - Through the curse of sin, Satan plagued the world with all kinds of disease, both spiritual and physical, and Jesus came to defeat the power of darkness with the light of truth and healing and restoration!  And the disciples got front row seats to watch Him do it, so they could learn how to crush Satan’s kingdom too!
      • For Frodo, Gandalf was his guide.  Gandalf knew far more about the dark Lord Sauron, far more about the world beyond the Shire, and he seemed to have a plan and to be able to handle things Frodo couldn’t.  Later when Frodo volunteers to take the ring and destroy it in the fires of Mordor, he said, “I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.”  And Gandalf comforts him and says, “I will help you bear this burden, Frodo Baggins, as long as it is yours to bear.”
        • The disciples had the courage to leave their boats, but they did not know the way.  And Jesus was there to comfort and guide them as they bore this burden of rescuing the world from darkness.
          • John 12:35-36 - Jesus is redefining who the sons of light really are; it’s not all the Jews like they thought; it’s only those who follow Jesus as their guide.  When Jesus said He’s the light of the world, they would have pictured their ancestors being led through the darkness of the wilderness as God manifested His presence as a pillar of fire lighting and guiding the way.
• When we first become Christians, especially if we didn’t grow up in a Christian home, we have no idea what we’re doing or how we’re supposed to live out our new mission, yet Jesus has left us His word in Scripture so He can still say, “Follow Me,” and we can know exactly what that means.  And that means reading our Bibles shouldn’t just feel like homework or like boring busy work.  It’s a map from our Guide on how to defeat the power of darkness in the world and expand His kingdom of light!  It shows us how to walk with our King so we’re never lost in the dark again.

4.  Danger

• Matthew 10:1 - Here Jesus gives His disciples the power to fight against the kingdom of darkness and overcome it with light!  And I realize we don’t have these same miraculous powers of healing today, but Jesus still lives within us through His Spirit and works through us to teach people the gospel, to live righteously, to love and trust our King, and to show people the power of sacrificial love and the goodness of God.
• Ephesians 5:8-11 - The problem is, when the light from our life exposes the darkness in the lives of others, some will hate us for it.
  • John 3:19-20
    • Matthew 10:16-18, 22 - In the Christian adventure, there are 4 kinds of danger.  1) Internal spiritual 2) Internal physical 3) External physical 4) External spiritual.  Internal spiritual dangers are our own doubts about God and about our own ability to endure to the end.  It may also be things like sadness, anxiety, discouragement, and fear, things that weigh our hearts down.  2) Internal physical dangers are things like sickness, chronic pain, fatigue, and chemical imbalances that make the journey harder.  3) External spiritual dangers are temptations that entice us to abandon our mission and pull us back to the kingdom of darkness.  It could also be mental and social persecution from people trying to tear us down for our faith.  And while every adventure needs a guide, sometimes there are false guides claiming to know the way, but they lead us right into a trap.  4) Gratefully these are very rare in our country, but external physical dangers are things like bodily persecution where you get physically assaulted for your faith and end up injured, or maybe if you go on a mission trip to a foreign country there may be hazards on that journey you never anticipated, like encounters with robbers or wild animals.  I remember Wayne Welsh saying how hard it is to baptize people in India because the rivers are filled with water moccasins, and they have to time their baptisms just right so they don’t die.   
      • 2 Corinthians 11:26-28 - And all these dangers can make us question if we’re really on the right path or not.  In moments of weakness, they can cause us to want to turn around and go back to our old life.  Frodo faced every danger on that matrix.  He faced Nazgul and Orcs trying to kill him, constant temptation to put on the ring and take power for himself, pressure from friends like Boromir to make his life easier by giving them the ring instead, self doubt, false guides like Gollum who led him right into a Spider’s lair, and it was exhausting for him to the point where he told Gandalf, “I wish the ring had never come to me.  I wish none of this had happened.” And Gandalf replied, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.  All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
• There will be times in our lives where we wish we weren’t in spiritual battle and that we didn’t have to fight against the kingdom of darkness all the time.  The fight can be scary and exhausting and discouraging at times, but we don’t get to opt out and pretend Satan’s kingdom doesn’t exist; we have to actively stay in the arena, keep trusting in Jesus our King and Guide, and do our part until the end to help the light win in people’s lives!
  • When bad things happen to us, it doesn’t mean God is picking on us or being unfair, it’s because Satan is trying whatever he can to snuff out our light!  He’s threatened by us and when we suffer, that’s the darkness desperately clawing to fight a losing battle against the light!

5.  Companions to Give us Courage

• Mark’s gospel says when Jesus sent the disciples out, He sent them out in pairs.  He does the same thing later in Luke 10 when He sends 70 disciples out, and that’s because this adventure is far too dangerous to go it alone.  It’s not enough just to have a guide; we need companions for the road too!
  • Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 - Notice that last point!  In the Christian adventure, we’re trying to overpower Satan and his kingdom of darkness in the world, and if we try to take him on 1 on 1, we’re going to be in trouble.  We need companions with the same mission on the same journey with us to pick us up when we fall and to help us overcome the darkness!
    • Luke 10:17-18 - When the disciples came back after working in pairs of companions against Satan’s kingdom, Jesus said He was watching as Satan fell from heaven like lightning!  In other words, these companions were doing great damage to Satan’s kingdom of darkness as they thwarted his power and expanded the influence of Jesus’ kingdom of light.
      • For Frodo’s adventure, he not only had Gandalf as his guide, he had the fellowship of a larger group to support him on his journey, but most importantly he had his best friend Sam.  And when he was in the throes of despair, ready to give up, he said, “I can’t do this Sam.”  And Sam spoke a word of hope to him and said, “I know.  It’s all wrong.  By rights we shouldn’t even be here.  But we are.  It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo.  The ones that really mattered.  Full of darkness and danger they were.  And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end.  Because how could the end be happy?  How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?  But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow.  Even darkness must pass.  A new day will come.  And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.  Those were the stories that stayed with you.  That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.  But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand.  I know now.  Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t.  They kept going because they were holding on to something.”  Frodo asked, “What are we holding on to Sam?”  “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo.  And it’s worth fighting for.”
• Let’s never view the church as just some people we meet with a couple times a week.  We are companions for the road who carry each when we are at our weakest, who encourage us and speak words of hope to us when we forget what we’re holding on to, and who will work with us when the whole world is working against us.

6.  Transformed Character

• Matthew 10:25a - Jesus’ goal was for His disciples to become like their Guide.  He knew the dangers of this adventure would bring out the worst in some of them, but His goal was to use it all to change and bring out the best in them.   The adventure exposed James and John’s desire for power as they asked Jesus for a seat at his left and right hand in His kingdom.  It exposed Peter’s impetuousness like when He rebuked Jesus for saying He was going to be killed, or when he boldly asserted he would never deny Jesus even if all the other disciples did, or when he took out his sword in the garden and tried to chop someone’s head off.  It also exposed Peter’s fear when he went back on his word and denied 3 times that he ever knew Jesus.  The adventure exposed Judas’ greed and his love for this world.
  • Sir Edmund Hillary was the first person to ever climb Mt. Everest.  And he said something true of all adventures; “It is not the mountain we conquer; but ourselves.”  You see, as part of our mission to defeat the power of darkness in the world, Jesus’ plan is to use all the dangers and failures along the way to re-shape our character and defeat the darkness within ourselves and our own hearts.  With the exception of Judas, that’s what happened for Jesus’ disciples.  By the end of their time with Jesus, they were completely different people.  They changed from cowards to courageous warriors in His kingdom.  They changed from naive to wise, from impetuous to patient, from fixated on an earthly kingdom to fixated on the Heavenly kingdom to come.
    • So too Frodo had grown in wisdom, compassion, and humility by the end of his journey.  But in order to grow, he had to confront the darkest corners of his heart along the way.
      • While Satan wants to use dangers and failures to snuff out our light, Jesus uses them to sharpen our character make our lights shine all the brighter.
        • Romans 5:3-4a - In this adventure, the more dangers we overcome, the more dangerous we become to the enemy and his kingdom of darkness!

7.  Sacrifice

• Matthew 16:24-25 - The disciples had no idea that when Jesus first said, “Follow Me,” He meant to follow Him to the cross.  They didn’t know they would have to give up their own lives in the fight against the powers of darkness.  But as our Guide, Jesus showed us exactly what that level of sacrifice looked like.  And while we may not have to literally die in the mission to rescue the world from darkness, we will have to set aside our comfort, our convenience, and our risk-free lives to have conversations with people about the gospel, to raise kids who love the Lord, to be radically generous with our time and money, to forgive the unforgivable to show the world God’s grace, to choose gratitude over grumbling, to put the needs of others before my wants, and yes, in extreme cases if we ever face bodily persecution for our faith, to give our lives like Jesus did in our fight against the kingdom of darkness.
  • John 21:15, 18-19 - Peter’s character has already changed so much at this point.  Jesus asked if he loved him more than the other disciples because before that’s basically what Peter claimed.  When he said, “Even if all the other disciples deny you, I never will!” He was essentially saying, “I love you more than they do.”  Well now, when Jesus asks him if he still thinks that, Peter doesn’t say yes.  He simply says, “I love you” without any comparison to the others.  And then Jesus tells him one day his love will be put to the ultimate test because he’ll have to die for his love for Jesus, and at the end of it, Jesus offers the same invitation He did at the start, except this time it takes on a whole new meaning for Peter.  Now Peter knows when Jesus says, “Follow Me,” he means follow me even into the darkness of death so that the light of God’s glory will shine all the brighter through him.
    • As Frodo approached the volcanic Mt. Doom to destroy the ring, he had prepared himself for the reality that this was going to be a one way trip.  He was willing to sacrifice his own life to save the world from the dark Lord, and selfless sacrifice was the ultimate deathblow to Sauron’s kingdom.
      • Revelation 12:10-11 - There is no light that shines brighter than the light of loving sacrifice; it’s a light the darkness simply cannot handle, and when we give our lives in service to others, it is the ultimate path to breaking the power of darkness in our own hearts and in the hearts of others.  Which ultimately leads to…

8.  Victory

• Revelation 11:15; 21:3-4; 22:5 - Jesus asked us to pray that God’s kingdom would come, and He described that kingdom as the place where God’s will on earth is done as it is in Heaven, and that’s the ultimate victory.  That the kingdom of darkness becomes the kingdom of light as those who refused to do God’s will have been rescued from the darkness and returned home to Him.  And in that glorious eternal kingdom, there is no more suffering or death, and no more darkness or night, because the light of God will illumine the world and we’ll bask in the light of His glory for all eternity.
  • When Sauron’s kingdom was shattered, Tolkien described it this way: “The shadow departed, and the sun was unveiled, and light leaped forth; and the waters of Anduin shone like silver, and in all the houses of the city men sang for the joy that welled up in their hearts, though from what source they could not tell.  And before the sun had fallen far from the noon out of the East there came a great Eagle flying, and he bore tidings beyond hope from the Lords of the West, crying: Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor, for the realm of Sauron is ended forever, and the Dark Tower is thrown down.  Sing and be glad, for your King shall come again, and he shall dwell among you all the days of your life.”

Tolkien considered himself a Christian, and it’s pretty clear he used the Christian adventure as his template.  Truthfully, it’s the template for every grand adventure and every great story because it is the story of all stories, except Christ’s story is real!  Christianity is not about rule keeping or hunkering down until heaven; it’s about joining our King’s mission in rescuing the world from darkness and expanding His kingdom of light, and it’s an adventure that leads to victory if we’ll take Him up on His invitation when He says, “Follow Me.”