Palm Springs Drive Church of Christ

Series: 1 Peter

Service: Praise and Preaching Service

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Dwayne Gandy

Almost everyone has had one. The boss who takes credit for your work. The manager who gives impossible deadlines and zero grace. The supervisor who plays favorites, talks down to the team, and makes every Monday feel like a sentence. At some point in most working lives, the question becomes less about finding a good job and more about surviving a bad boss.

It's a practical, daily, grinding problem — and the Bible addresses it directly.

First Peter 2:18-25 is not a comfortable passage. It doesn't tell workers to unionize, to quietly underperform, or to soothe themselves with the idea that karma will handle everything. It asks something more demanding. And at the center of it is a principle that cuts against the natural human impulse to match difficult treatment with difficult behavior: the way you work is not ultimately about your boss. It's about God.

The starting point is the ideal. In any working relationship — and the New Testament uses the language of masters and servants, which maps closely onto employers and employees — God's design is straightforward. Bosses should be fair. Employees should work hard. The relationship functions best when both parties fulfill their responsibilities with integrity.

The Old Testament takes this seriously enough that it built protections for workers directly into the law. When a Hebrew found himself in debt and had to sell his labor to pay it off, the law put a clock on it — six years maximum, and then freedom. More than that, when the six years were up, the employer wasn't simply allowed to show the worker the door empty-handed. He was required to send him off with resources: grain, animals, wine. Enough to rebuild. The point was not just freedom from servitude but the ability to avoid falling back into it.

The law also protected workers from physical abuse and gave them recourse if they were permanently injured. God built guardrails around the use of power because He understood something about human nature: people with authority over others have a consistent tendency to use that authority in self-serving ways. The regulations were an acknowledgment of that tendency and an attempt to restrain it.

The story of Abraham's servant in Genesis 24 shows what the relationship looks like at its best. The servant — likely Eleazar — had been entrusted with one of the most important tasks of Abraham's life: finding a wife for Isaac. And his prayer at the well is striking. He doesn't pray for his own success. He prays for his master's. The loyalty flows from the treatment. Abraham had treated his servants well, and they loved him for it. That's the design.

But the design and the reality are often two very different things.

First Peter doesn't pretend otherwise. Verse 18 is addressed specifically to servants working for masters who are "harsh" — not just imperfect or occasionally difficult, but genuinely unkind. Verse 19 acknowledges that people can suffer "wrongfully," meaning the mistreatment isn't earned. And the letter was written to real people in real circumstances, not to an imagined audience with ideal working conditions.

Joseph is one of the clearest biblical illustrations of what unjust treatment at work actually looks like. He was a slave in Potiphar's house who had done nothing wrong — in fact, he had done everything right, refusing an advance from Potiphar's wife and honoring both his master and his God. The reward for that integrity was a false accusation and prison. He was punished because someone in power lied about him, and the person with authority believed the lie.

That scenario is not unique to the ancient world. A customer complains dishonestly. A colleague takes credit and shifts blame. A supervisor makes a decision based on incomplete or fabricated information. The employee who did their job well ends up on the receiving end of consequences they didn't earn. It happens, and Scriptures doesn't gloss over it.

Exodus describes the labor conditions of the Israelites in Egypt in terms that feel almost modern in their bleakness: taskmasters set over them, burdens increased the harder they worked, lives made bitter through relentless demands. People in authority using that authority to extract maximum output with minimum consideration for the human beings doing the work. The Bible doesn't dress this up. Power has been abused since there was power to abuse.

Here is where the passage becomes most useful and most practical, because 1 Peter 2 is not fatalistic. It doesn't simply say "endure and be quiet." It holds together two things that can feel contradictory: a call to submit and work with integrity, and an honest recognition that people have options.

Prepare before you're desperate. The most practical wisdom for anyone not yet in a bad situation is to avoid the conditions that make a bad situation impossible to leave. Living within your means — or better, below them — creates margin. Eliminating debt creates options. Saving money creates leverage. The person who has three months of expenses in the bank and a boss who treats them badly is in a fundamentally different position than the person who is living paycheck to paycheck under the same boss. The first person can leave. The second person feels trapped. Both are working the same bad job, but only one of them has the freedom to act.

This is not incidental financial advice — it's what Proverbs and the general wisdom tradition of Scripture point toward consistently. Planning and provision are acts of stewardship that protect your freedom.

Develop skills that give you mobility. No one owes anyone a job. But competence, training, education, and expertise give a person options that dependence and stagnation don't. The more specifically valuable you are — whether through a degree, a certification, a technical skill, or deep expertise in a particular area — the less vulnerable you are to any single employer's decisions. If you can be replaced easily, you have less ground to stand on. If you bring something that is genuinely hard to find, you have more.

Use the options you have. Unlike servants in the first century who had no legal right to leave their masters, most workers in the contemporary world are free to quit. That freedom is significant and worth using wisely. Finding another job before leaving the current one is wisdom, not weakness. Giving proper notice — even to a boss who doesn't deserve the courtesy — honors God and closes the door cleanly. Talking to a boss directly about how you're being treated is a biblical step that often goes skipped in favor of complaints to coworkers or HR escalation. Start with the conversation.

None of these options were available to the original recipients of Peter's letter. They're available now, and using them is not a failure of faith. It's stewardship of the circumstances God has placed you in.

But options or no options, there are times when leaving isn't possible right away. The bills are real. The timing is wrong. The alternative hasn't materialized yet. And for those seasons, 1 Peter 2 is direct about what faithfulness looks like in the meantime.

Work hard. Not selectively. Not when someone is watching. The passage in Colossians 3:22-24 uses a phrase that captures the problem precisely — "not with eye service, as men-pleasers." Eye service is the performance of effort when the boss might be looking and the disappearance of that effort when they're not. It's the human default. And it's specifically what Scripture calls out as incompatible with the character of a person who works for God rather than for a paycheck. Whatever the job, whatever the boss, whatever the circumstances — "do it heartily, as to the Lord."

Endure what is undeserved without retaliation. This is the hard part. When something unfair happens — a false accusation, an unwarranted consequence, a decision that goes against you for reasons that have nothing to do with your performance — the instinct is to fight back, to match the injustice with a response that feels proportionate. Peter says to take it patiently. Not because the unfairness doesn't matter, but because something larger is at stake than any particular grievance.

Don't sin. This sounds obvious until you're in the situation. When you're working for someone who is genuinely difficult, the rationalizations come easily. They don't deserve my best effort. Everyone here knows the boss is terrible — why shouldn't we talk about it? They've done worse to me than I could ever do to them. But the standard for Christian behavior at work doesn't come from what the boss deserves. It comes from what God calls His people to be. That means no stealing, no lying, no slacking, no reviling — not behind closed doors, not in the break room, not in any of the places where it feels private and harmless. Jesus, who was treated worse than any of us will be treated in any workplace, did not revile in return. That's the example Peter holds up.

Don't make threats. In cultures with strong legal protections, the temptation when mistreated is to reach for legal leverage. And legal recourse may genuinely be appropriate in certain situations. But using the threat of legal action as a weapon in ordinary workplace conflict is not the disposition of someone who trusts God with the outcome.

The frame that holds all of this together is a shift in perspective that changes everything: you are not, ultimately, working for your boss.

Colossians 3:23-24 says it plainly — "whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ." The inheritance isn't a paycheck. It's not a promotion or a performance review. It's the reward of a life lived in faithful service to God, regardless of who signed the checks.

This matters because it removes the fundamental dependency on your boss's character that would otherwise make the whole thing impossible. If you're working to please your boss, a bad boss makes good work pointless. But if you're working because God sees and God rewards, the boss's character becomes, in a real sense, beside the point. You're not doing this for them. You're doing it because this is who you are and whose you are.

2 Corinthians 4:17 calls present difficulty "light and momentary" compared to the eternal weight of glory it is producing. That's not a dismissal of how hard things can be. It's a recalibration of the time scale. Forty years of working life, including difficult bosses and unfair seasons, is a fraction of a fraction of forever. The person who endures with integrity isn't losing — they're investing.

To anyone who holds authority over others — whether in a business, an organization, a team, or any other context — Ephesians 6:9 is direct: treat the people under your authority the same way you want your own master in heaven to treat you. Because there is no partiality with God. The boss who lords power over employees, who takes credit and distributes blame, who exploits the desperation of people who need their jobs — that boss also has a boss. And that account will be settled.

The golden rule translates directly: how do you want to be treated by someone who has authority over you? That's your template for how to treat the people who work for you.

The workplace is not a neutral space. It's one of the primary places where character is formed, revealed, and either honored or dishonored before God and the people who are watching. And people are always watching — not for dramatic moments of virtue, but for the ordinary, day-in-day-out evidence of whether your faith changes anything about how you actually live.

It does. Or it should. And on the days when the boss is difficult and the situation is unfair and the temptation is to match the environment you're in — that's precisely when the difference becomes visible.

Work hard. Stay clean. Trust God. Those three things don't solve every workplace problem. But they settle something more important: who you are when it's hard.

Series: N/A

Service: Lord’s Supper Service

Type: Lord's Supper Talk

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Mark 8:22-26 [I think this is one of the most fascinating miracles Jesus ever performed] - Now, in our modern germaphobic world, spitting on this man’s eyes sounds disgusting.  Why in the world would Jesus do that?  I mean He can heal people any way He wants!  He could have just snapped His fingers and the man would be healed!

Well, in the ancient world people believed saliva had healing properties, and they were KIND of right about that, it can help soothe wounds, but of course it wouldn’t have the power to make a blind man see.  But this wouldn’t have been considered gross or disrespectful like it would be for us; it made this miracle more personal and intimate; it’s why he also laid his hands on him.  This man can’t see, so Jesus is doing very tactile things to show that He is there and He cares.

Well, the reason this miracle fascinates me is because it’s the only miracle Jesus performed in 2 stages.  Normally when Jesus heals someone, it works immediately, yet for this man, it seems like his healing was only partial at first.  He was blind and couldn’t see anything at all before, but now he can see, it’s just he’s not really sure what he’s seeing.  He says, “I see men around me,” which makes sense because he’s surrounded by Jesus and his disciples, but he says the men look like trees.

Now, my guess is that this man was born blind and had never actually seen a human being before.  If you grow up blind, people have to describe what humans look like to you.  But how would you do that?  How would you describe what a person looks like to someone who has never actually seen a person?  Well, you might say, “A human being stands vertically up and down, there’s a top called the head, a middle called a torso, and a base which are the legs.  If you ran your hands over a human, you’d feel like a central trunk with arms and legs branching off from the trunk, some humans are thinner, some are thicker, some have bushier hair, some hair is flatter,” so can you see if someone described a human being to you as a blind person, it MIGHT actually sound kind of similar to a description of a tree?  Trees have a central trunk with limbs branching off of them, some are thinner, some are thicker, and they’re bushy on top.

So in the first stage of this miracle, the blind man can see, but he lacks discernment.  He cannot yet tell the difference between humans and trees.  And so in Stage 2, Jesus fixes his discernment problem so now he actually understands what he’s looking at.  Now, I suppose a skeptic might accuse Jesus of failing the first time.  He tried to heal his blindness, but then realized it didn’t work and said, “Oops, sorry about that, let me fix my mistake.”  But of course Jesus healed people on the first try all the time, so why would He all the sudden make a mistake this time?  No, Jesus never did anything by accident.  There was always a reason behind what He did, and I believe once you appreciate what happened leading up to this event, you’ll realize Jesus did this to teach His disciples a valuable and timeless lesson:  there’s a difference between seeing and understanding.  Jesus wants His disciples to know just because you see something with your eyes doesn’t mean you have the discernment to know what you’re looking at, and if they truly want to understand who HE is, they need to not just see Him, but to understand who He is and what it means that He is with them.  It all started a few days before in…

Mark 8:1-4 - Now this miracle may sound familiar because earlier in Mark 6 Jesus fed 5,000 men along with their wives and children!  Well, this miracle is almost identical because He’s about to feed 4,000 men along with their wives and children, but there’s a fundamental difference between this miracle and the previous one.  In the previous feeding, Jesus provided bread for a Jewish crowd.  Here He provides bread for Gentiles, which is just astounding.  A Jewish Rabbi has compassion even for Gentiles, people the Jews had great disdain for.  There may be some symbolism to the fact that when He fed the Jews, they had so much left over they collected 12 baskets full of bread, 12 representing the 12 tribes of Israel.  But here, when He feeds the Gentiles, they had so much left over they collected 7 baskets full, 7 being the number of completion and the fullness of Jesus’ salvation in the world.  Hidden within these miracles is the fact that Jesus did not just come to save the Jews, but the Gentile nations too, which should remind us of the promise to Abraham back in Genesis 12 that through his seed ALL the families of the earth would be blessed.

With these two miracles, Jesus has proven Himself the provider and sustainer and Savior of the world, yet the Pharisees come to Him and listen to what they say…

Mark 8:11-13 - The Pharisees wanted a sign from Heaven proving that He really was from God, but the problem is they had already seen and heard about so many signs of Jesus.  He had been healing the sick, casting out demons, cleansing lepers, and providing bread for tens of thousands of people!  But those signs weren’t proof enough for them because they wanted a specific KIND of sign, maybe something on a more cosmic level.  And Jesus refuses to be a circus monkey for them and perform miracles on command, because He knows no matter what He does, they still won’t believe.  And that’s because they have a problem:  they see with their eyes, but they don’t understand what they’re seeing.  They’ve already seen signs by Jesus, but they lack the discernment to know what they’re looking at and what it means about who He really is.  And the Pharisees aren’t the only one with that problem…

Mark 8:14-16 - When they got back in the boat to cross the Sea of Galilee, the disciples realized they forgot to bring enough bread for the journey, so when Jesus said, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod,” they think He’s rebuking them for not bringing enough bread.  They think He’s saying, “Listen since you all don’t have enough bread, make sure you don’t take any bread from the Pharisees or from Herod.”  But Jesus wasn’t talking about literal leaven in bread, He was talking about their evil influence which can spread like leaven, but the disciples were worried about not having enough bread and thought Jesus was rebuking for them it.  Now think about how unbelievable it is that they had just seen Jesus feed bread to 20,000 people, and now they’re worried there won’t be enough bread for the 12 of them!  Honestly sometimes the misunderstanding of the disciples is harder to believe than Jesus’ miracles!  And that’s true of us as His disciples today sometimes too.  So look at what Jesus says to them…

Mark 8:17-21 - The disciples see, but they don’t understand.  They have eyes, they saw Jesus provide for both the Jews and the Gentiles, thousands of people and with plenty of bread left to spare, yet for some reason after seeing all that, they don’t have the discernment to understand Jesus will take care of them and they don’t have to ever worry about not having enough bread again!  In the Lord’s Prayer back in Matthew 6, one of the things Jesus instructed us to ask the Father for is our daily bread.  The disciples are worried and anxious that they won’t have enough daily bread, when the provider of bread for the whole world is right there in the boat with them!

Do you see why Jesus performed this miracle in 2 stages for the blind man?  He was trying to teach His disciples that it’s not enough just to SEE, you need to understand!

And I think this principle can help us so much as we partake every week of the Lord’s Supper, because all of us can see with our eyes what we’re doing.  We see the bread, we see the fruit of the vine, we see ourselves eating and drinking it, but the most important question is not, “Do we see it” but “Do we really understand what it means?”  And that’s the purpose of these short lessons before we partake each week, is to help us deepen our understanding of this memorial and the sacrifice of Jesus it represents.

For this morning, I want us to make sure we don’t have the same problem the disciples did here in Mark 8.  I know that times are tight financially, everything is so much more expensive, and maybe we’ve been filled with worry and anxiety lately about not having enough daily bread.  And while I have compassion for that struggle, I do want us to consider how odd it is to be partaking of the Lord’s Supper, eating the bread of Jesus’ body which He gave for the salvation of the whole world while also worrying about not having enough daily bread.  Paul said in Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?”  In other words, if Jesus gave us His body as the bread from Heaven, why wouldn’t He give us daily bread from earth?  This memorial is a communion with Jesus Himself and He is right here in our midst.  Like the disciples, Jesus is here with us in the boat, so we have no reason to worry about not having enough daily bread to eat.  May the weekly bread of the Lord’s Supper be an antidote to worry about our daily bread.  Jesus said about about worry in Matthew 6, “Do not worry then, saying “what will we eat?” Or “What will we drink?” Or “What will we wear for clothing?”  For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; but your Heavenly Father knows you need all these things.  But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Matthew 6:33)

This morning, as we seek His kingdom and His righteousness first by taking the weekly bread of the Lord’s Supper, may God grant us the eyes, not just to see, but to understand that He’ll take care of our daily bread too.

Series: N/A

Service: Wednesday Night

Type: Invitation

Speaker: Luke Hinely

Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Wed Bible Study

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

John 5:39-40 - Jesus was talking to Jews who wanted to kill Him because they thought He was violating the Scriptures, and Jesus tries to get them to see that the Scriptures they’re putting all your hope for eternal life in are all about ME!

Think about what an incredibly bold statement that is!  Imagine if you were reading your Bible at a coffee shop and I came up to you and said, “Hey that’s a great book isn’t it?”  And you said, “Oh it’s the best,” and I said, “Did you know that whole book is about me?”  You’d think I was a CRAZY person at best and an arrogant blasphemer at worst!  Yet Jesus is claiming that the entirety of the Old Testament, from start to finish, is about HIM!  And of course we’ll learn later that the entire New Testament will be about Him too!

Illustration:  I’m sure you all have seen those Magic Eye posters, also called stereograms, and a lot of people really struggle with them because you have to look at them a certain way in order to see the hidden image.  You can’t just focus on the surface of the picture and expect it to work, you have to relax your eyes and look BEYOND the surface to find the hidden image.  The Jews were only looking at the surface of the Old Testament Scriptures and they were missing the hidden image of Jesus concealed within.  I was actually able to find a Magic Eye picture of Jesus.  To the Jews, this is all they could see when they read the Old Testament.  They could see all the individual colors and verses and it was actually quite beautiful and powerful because it was the word of God.  But what they couldn’t see was how all the colors formed distinct patterns and themes woven into the background which all worked together to form an image of Jesus and the incredible work He came to do on the cross to bring us eternal life.

That’s why when the writers of the 4 gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were describing Jesus’ life, they so often spoke of His words and actions as a fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures.

Matthew 2:15

Matthew 5:17

Luke 24:27

Luke 24:44 - And of course, the rest of the New Testament writings will quote from the Old Testament, continuing to show how Christ fulfills the Scriptures.  Usually those quotations are marked in your Bibles in all capital letters, or are offset in some way from the rest of the text so you know it’s a quotation.  The point is, during Jesus’ ministry, He was trying to show the Jews the image of Himself that had been hidden for centuries in the writings of their prophets.  And just like one of those Magic Eye pictures; once you see it, you can’t unsee it!  It changes the way you look at Old Testament passages forever!

Now, the hidden images of Jesus in the Old Testament are usually referred to as Messianic Prophecies because the word “Messiah” in the Hebrew means “Anointed One,” or King.  Kings in ancient Israel were typically anointed with oil at their coronation to symbolize being chosen by God and that His Spirit was with them.  In the New Testament, which was written in Greek, the equivalent to Messiah is Christ.  Both mean “Anointed One.”

And even though they’re typically called Messianic prophecies, often they include foreshadowings too.  Prophecy is a veiled statement about what the Messiah is coming to do.  Foreshadowings are much more subtle.  It’s when you read about a person, event, or object that seems to resemble the later work the King is coming to do.  Prophecies are built on words, foreshadowings are built on patterns and themes.  Like for instance, on Sunday when we talked about the problem of sin and how God set up a system of animal sacrifices to die in their place, that whole system was a foreshadowing of Jesus.  The death of an animal in the place of the sinner resembled the work Jesus would later come to do as the ultimate Lamb of God who came to die in our place and take away the sins of the world.  A life given for sin established a pattern in Scripture that pointed to Jesus the ultimate life given for sin.

Hebrew 10:1a - Jesus is the very form of things, the hidden image behind the shadows of the Old Testament.  So tonight we’ll talk about both prophecy and foreshadowings to see if we can get the hidden image of Jesus to really pop off the page.  And while there are hundreds of prophecies and foreshadowings of Jesus, I chose 7 that are the most basic and fundamental to know.  So we’ll start by going over these 7, and then I'll invite you all to mention more of them to bring the hidden image of Jesus into even sharper clarity.

Comments/Questions?

1.  Genesis 3:15

• After Satan tempted Adam and Eve to sin, God immediately cursed Satan to be destroyed.
  • Genesis 3:14-15 - God describes Satan as a serpent here, not because he was a literal snake, but because he acted like a snake with his double-tongue and his sneaky, slithery, cold nature, so God used language about snakes as a curse.  Snakes have no legs and are forced to crawl on their bellies eating dust so to speak, and God says the same fate awaits Satan.  To have no hands or feet is to be powerless, and to eat the dust of the ground is to be humiliated, and God says He’s going to set the seed of Eve in hostility against Satan all the days of His life.
    • Note:  Sometimes once we see the Magic Eye image of Jesus, we can’t unsee it and we lose sight of what this meant in the original context.  We jump straight to Jesus and ironically, by doing so we miss the richness of the original language.  So when God sets the seed of the woman against the seed of Satan, the seed of the woman refers to all the faithful followers of God like Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua and Caleb, etc.  The seed of Satan refers to all the evil doers opposed to God like Cain, the sons of Korah, Ahab and Jezebel, etc.  So when Jesus tells the Pharisees in John 8 that the devil is their father, He’s going all the way back to Genesis 3:15 because He’s saying they are the seed of Satan.  So if the Pharisees are the seed of Satan and they are completely hostile against Jesus, should that really be surprising?  Jesus is one of the seeds of the woman, so of course they’re at enmity with Him!
      • Now, Jesus isn’t just ANY seed of woman, He’s the ultimate seed of woman through whom this prophecy will be fulfilled.  The word “bruise” in Hebrew isn’t just some surface level injury that turns purple and goes away.  It’s much more serious like a strike that causes fatal internal bleeding.  That’s why some translations render it “crush.”  Well, Jesus is coming to crush the Serpent’s head, BUT He’s going to get crushed in the process, just not as bad!  It’s like if you step on a snake’s head to kill it, but one of its fangs gets you in the heal in the process.  It hurts a lot, and that venom may cause you serious problems, but the snake got the worst of that exchange.  The snake is dead, and even though it caused you great pain in the process, you lived and came out victorious.
        • Well, Jesus came to crush Satan’s head by taking care of the problem of sin, but in the process Satan had Him crucified for it.  Yet gratefully, even though He died it was only a minor heal injury in comparison to what He did to Satan because He was resurrected from the grave!   For Satan though, it was a deathblow to the head because once Jesus dealt with the problem of sin, it was like Satan lost his power over us to keep us enslaved and condemned.  And now Paul could say this…
          • Romans 16:20 - Ultimately as Christians, we become part of the seed of the woman too, and we too live in victory over the serpent, though as we stomp on his head, the serpent still bites us and can even kill us, but in the end because of Jesus, we’ll be victorious.
            • And it’s so awesome to see that by God’s grace, He uses Eve, the same woman who brought death into the world through her sin, to bring life into the world through her seed.

Questions/Comments?

2.  Genesis 12:3

• There are technically 7 promises made to Abraham in this section, though we typically narrow it down to 3 to make it easier to memorize.  God promises Abraham a great land, nation, and seed.
• Genesis 12:3 - The seed promise is here in v. 3, and I should have also included the repetition of this promise because it actually uses the word “seed.”
  • Genesis 22:18 - This connects the promise to Abraham directly to the promise to Eve in Genesis 3:15.  We’re seeing that the specific seed of Eve coming to crush Satan’s head will come through the line of Abraham, and when He crushes Satan’s head, it’ll be a blessing to the whole world!
    • Now sometimes we’re left to guess about whether something is a prophecy of Jesus, but a lot of times the New Testament will just tell us flat out.
      • Galatians 3:16 - The Jews, as a nation, thought they were the seeds of Abraham that were going to bless the world by making the whole world Jewish like them.  But Paul says the promise wasn’t through many different seeds, but through one seed in particular!  And that’s Jesus!  The Jewish nation, in a roundabout way, DID bless the whole world by providing the lineage through whom Jesus would come!  But salvation and eternal life are found by coming to Christ, not by joining the Jewish nation.

3.  Genesis 49:10

• In context, Israel is on his deathbed, and he makes prophecies concerning the future of his 12 sons.  One of those sons is Judah, and he says this about him…
  • Genesis 49:10 - Israel tells his son Judah that the scepter will never depart from His house.  He will always have a King on the throne until Shiloh comes.  The word “Shiloh” means “whose it is.”  You may have a footnote in your Bible that says, “Until he to whom it belongs comes.”  This means that the tribe of Judah will be the royal tribe in Israel who will have kings until the time comes when the ultimate one comes to whom the kingdom belongs.  There will be kings in Judah, but it’s like they’re just placeholders until the true king arrives.
    • Now, the first king of Israel was King Saul, and he was NOT from the tribe of Judah.  He was from the tribe of Benjamin, and his kingship was a disaster.  But remember God, after rejecting Saul as king, appointed a new king, this time a man after His own heart named David.  And guess what tribe he was from?  Judah.  Well, the problem is, after David there were many more kings of Judah after him, and some of them were good, but many of them were evil, to the point where God ripped the last King of Judah out of the land and sent him into captivity.  His name was Zedekiah, and when he was dethroned, it seemed like the Kingship had come to an end completely in Judah.  Yet God said this…
      • Ezekiel 21:26-27 - This prophecy was made over a thousand years later and it sounds exactly like the Shiloh promise to Judah.  There is one coming to whom the Kingdom truly belongs, and until He comes the kingdom would lie in ruins.  This was written 600 years before Christ, or Shiloh, came.

4.  2 Samuel 7:12-13

• King David realized it wasn’t right that he lived in this beautiful palace while God was living in a tent, so he asked God if he could build him a more permanent house or temple.  God was honored by the request, but told David He wanted to wait until there was peace in the land first before His temple was built.  David had too much blood on his hands, there were too many battles going on, but that David’s son Solomon would build him the house.  Yet because God was honored by David’s heart, God made a promise to build HIM a permanent house instead.
  • 2 Samuel 7:12-13 - With each one of these promises, there is a narrowing of God’s intention for the Messiah.  First we learn the Messiah will be a seed of the woman which could refer to any faithful person, then a seed of Abraham which is a faithful person from his lineage, then from the tribe of Judah, and now from within the tribe of Judah it’s specifically someone from David’s lineage who will sit on the throne forever.  This is why Jesus in the New Testament is so often called the Son of David.  It’s a connection back to this passage in 2 Samuel 7.  David’s house, or dynasty, will be eternal because the King who comes from his line will reign forever.

5.  Isaiah 7:14

• God asks King Ahaz of Judah to ask for a sign so God can prove to them that He’ll protect His people from the brutal Assyrians.  But Ahaz pretends to be righteous and says, “I don’t want to test the Lord,” but the real reason he doesn’t want this sign is because he’s already made up his mind God can’t be trusted.  So God says, “I’ll give you a sign anyway just so that you’ll KNOW I’m your Savior!”
  • Isaiah 7:14 - The word for “virgin” in Hebrew can mean someone who’s never had sex before, but it can also just mean a young married woman who’s not a virgin.  I believe in the original context of the verse, he’s talking about Isaiah’s wife here, and her son will be given the name Immanuel as a sign that means “God is with us.”  Now, this may be considered more of a foreshadowing of Jesus than a direct prophecy because the birth of Isaiah’s child resembles the later birth of Jesus, but Jesus’ birth is an even GREATER fulfillment of a sign birth proving God is with us.
    • Matthew 1:21-23 - Whenever people or events foreshadow Jesus, it’s always in a dimmer, more shadowy way, but when Jesus comes He fulfills it far more gloriously!  Isaiah’s son was born of a young married maiden, but Jesus was born of a literal virgin who had never had sex before, which made His birth truly miraculous!  Isaiah’s son was only a sign that God was with them.  Jesus’ birth literally meant God was with them because Jesus was God in the flesh!
      • So Isaiah 7 narrows the seed down even further as being born of a virgin, and helps us appreciate the nature of this seed; that He won’t just be a man, but God!

6.  Isaiah 53:4-7

• We won’t spend long here, another reason we know the animal sacrifice system was a foreshadowing of Jesus is because when Isaiah prophesies about the work Jesus is coming to do, he describes him like one of those animals slaughtered for our sins.
  • Isaiah 53:4-7 - The Jews didn’t understand who this was talking about which is why they struggled so much to think their Messiah was coming to suffer and die.  They thought of the coming Messiah mainly as a conquering King, not as a suffering sacrifice for sins.

7.  Daniel 2:44

• King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had a dream of a statue with 4 parts, and each part represented a successive kingdom.  There was Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, but then in the days of that 4th kingdom, Rome, God promised to set up His kingdom which would last forever and destroy all other kingdoms!
  • Daniel 2:44 - This prophecy now gave them a timeline for when the Messiah was coming; during the reign of the Roman Empire.  Which is why when we get to the New Testament during Rome’s reign it says…
    • Luke 3:15 - People knew the time was almost near for the Messiah, and in the first century, the Jews were ready for the son of Abraham, the Son of David, eternal King from Judah to set up His eternal kingdom for the Jews and crush Satan and all evil in the world.
      • And they were right about Jesus being a conquering King and setting up His kingdom; but they were wrong about what this King and kingdom would actually look like.  We’ll talk more about that in future classes.

1. Name a prophecy or foreshadowing that depicts Jesus as a suffering Savior.

• Isaiah 53.
• Also any passages about King David suffering since he foreshadowed Christ.

2.  Name a prophecy or foreshadowing that depicts Jesus as a conquering Savior.

- Psalm 2; Psalm 110

3.  Name a figure or event from the Old Testament that foreshadows the work Jesus was coming to do.

- Passover, Moses, etc.

Series: N/A

Service: Praise and Preaching Service

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Romans 5:12 - In 1961, a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz was running a weather simulation on a computer to make a forecast, and once he ran the numbers, out of curiosity he decided to re-run the numbers, this time rounding them ever so slightly.  So for instance, instead of typing in .506, he typed in .5.  He figured it was such a minuscule difference, it wouldn’t matter much to the final model, but what he found was shocking!  The weather patterns in the new simulation were RADICALLY different from those in the first!

It showed him that future conditions are highly sensitive to even the smallest changes in the initial conditions, and he gave a talk in 1972 in which he argued that a butterfly could flap its wings in Brazil and set off a tornado in Texas!  Now, he wasn’t being literal, he wasn’t saying that the gust of air from the wings would turn into a bigger and bigger gust of air until it literally turned into a tornado.  No, but he used it as a vivid illustration to suggest that something so small and seemingly insignificant can influence the future in unimaginable ways.  This concept was later coined, “The Butterfly Effect.”

And as with all truth, the Butterfly Effect is something God built into the fabric of the Universe He created, and we not only see the Butterfly Effect at work in weather patterns, we see it at work in the way our moral choices affect the future too.  Think about Adam and Eve in the Garden.  They were given the freedom to make so many choices, to enjoy good fruit from any tree they wanted, yet God said, “There’s only one choice I don’t want you to make, because if you do, you’ll die.”  Well, Satan came and tempted them to make that choice anyway and when they ate of that forbidden fruit, there is no way they could have ever imaged the future consequences of their choices.  Their sin set off a chain reaction of destruction, their choice in that one moment set a future in motion plagued by the curse of sin and where all of humanity was sentenced to death.  One choice caused a cascade of suffering in a world where women now face extreme pain in childbirth, where we face disease, natural disasters, and where we’re not at peace with the animals so when we come across lions, tigers, and bears, we say “Oh my!” and we run for our lives!  Now, we can’t blame everything on Adam and Eve because we’ve all sinned like they did and we perpetuate the curse of sin in the world, but Paul uses Adam here as the representative head of all humanity, and as our representative, his one choice reverberated throughout all generations to this day.  Like a butterfly, Adam flapped his wings one time and it was enough to send a tornado of death and destruction into the world that continues to wreak havoc today.

I learned that the world record for the most dominos toppled in a single chain reaction was 4.5 million dominos.  That record was set almost 20 years ago and still hasn’t been beaten.  And I just have to tell you, it was a tremendous distraction to my sermon prep because of course I had to go watch the video on Youtube.  Now, I only watched bits and pieces of it because it took over an hour for them to fall, but it was absolutely mind-boggling, and it wasn’t just one linear chain of dominoes; there were points where it widened out and hundreds of dominos were falling at once, and they had them arranged to form pictures honoring different cultures and depicting various landscapes.  And the most amazing thing is, it all started with the push of a single domino.

And that’s how our choices are too.  One choice we might think is so small and insignificant can cause a chain reaction, a ripple in time, that reverberates through the ages in ways we never imagined.  Because our influence, like those dominos, isn’t just a single linear chain.  No it widens out much broader than that because God created us as social beings in community.  So if I come across 1,000 people in my lifetime, each one of those thousand people will come across 1,000 people in their lifetime, so the way we treat each person has an effect, not just on them, but on the 1,000 people they come in contact with, and each of the thousand they come in contact with also meet a thousand people so you can see how one choice we might think is so small can become far more significant than we ever thought possible.

Our choices today have the power to change tomorrow in ways we cannot comprehend.  The truth is, all of us today are living downstream of someone else’s choices, and some day others will be living downstream of ours, and while that’s terrifying to consider because sometimes we make really bad choices; it’s also comforting because it’s not just our evil choices that set the future in motion; our good ones do too.  All of this means…

1.  Evil Choices Matter Way More than You Realize

• This morning in Bible class, we mentioned the most often repeated description of God’s character in Scripture.
  • Exodus 34:6-7 - While it’s true God is merciful and loving and forgiving, sometimes the sins of fathers can affect their children, their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s children, all the way down the line of their family tree in ways they never imagined!
  • For instance, when King David went out on a roof and saw a woman bathing, he made a choice in that moment to send for her and to sleep with her, and when he did that, there is no way he could have anticipated the chain reaction of death and devastation that followed.  For one, when he slept with her, he had no idea she was going to get pregnant.  He probably figured, “This is no big deal, this will just be a one night stand, and I can move on with my life,” but when he found out she was pregnant, he was in a bind because she was married and her husband was away at battle so people would know it wasn’t him, so he made arrangements to have him killed!  David had no idea his choice today to commit adultery would lead to another choice tomorrow to commit murder!  And when he committed murder, he had no idea that choice would lead to the death of the child he had with Bathsheba!  And it got even worse because listen to what God told him would continue to happen in the future!
    • 2 Samuel 12:10-11 - David had no idea when he made that one choice to sleep with Bathsheba it would lead him to commit murder, it would lead to the death of the baby born by Bathsheba, and then there was constant hostility in David’s household from that point forward.  One of his sons named Amnon committed incest with his sister, then David’s son Absalom killed Amnon for it, so David lost another child.  Then Absalom rebelled against David and removed him from the throne, forcing him to leave his kingdom behind, and then he took David’s wives for himself just like God said would happen, so David’s wives were humiliated too.  What’s more, David’s most trusted advisor, Ahithophel, betrayed him and helped David’s son accomplish his coup, and guess who Ahithophel was?  Bathsheba’s grandfather.  This was his chance to get revenge on David for defiling his granddaughter and costing him a great-grandchild. Then later Absalom gets killed in the rebellion and David loses yet ANOTHER son!  Then when David’s son Solomon rises to power after him while David is old and on his deathbed, another one of David’s sons, Adonijah, tries to revolt against Solomon’s kingship and is executed for it, and David loses yet another son.
      • I’m certain if David could have seen the tornado he created by flapping his wings with Bathsheba, he would have averted his eyes and just gone back in the house.
• This is why our evil choices matter far more than we think.  It’s so easy in the moment to minimize sin, to justify it and think things like, “What harm could it really do?” Or “No one’s going to find out,” or “It’s just this one time,” or “This only affects me, not anyone else.”  Can you imagine someone saying that about pushing the very first domino in a chain of 4.5 million?  Can you imagine them saying, “Look, all I’m going to do is push one little domino, I mean what is that going to do?”
  • Lying on a test, cheating on our taxes, starting a rumor, doing sexual things before marriage, getting drunk at a party, stealing supplies from the office, watching pornography, or fill in the blank with any other sin, Satan loves to get us to think these things are no big deal, and really what he’s convincing us to do is push that first domino over, or to flap our wings so he can bring the tornado in.  Satan knows evil choices matter way more than we realize, and if we’re going to say “no” to those choices, we need to know that too.
  • And as scary as that is, the good news is…

2.  Good Choices Matter Way More than You Realize

• Genesis 12:1-4 - Abram came from a family of idolators who did not worship the one true God, yet his one choice in that moment to obey God by leaving his home and moving to Canaan changed everything, not just for him, but for the entire future of humanity.  His good choice led to the establishment of the nation of Israel through whom Jesus would come to bless the whole world by saving us from our sins.
• Exodus 2:5-6 - Remember at this time Pharaoh ordered that all the Hebrew children be killed, yet Pharaoh’s daughter made a different choice in that moment, a choice to show compassion on this child and adopt him as her own.  And with that one good choice in the moment, it set off a chain reaction of blessings from God for future generations she could have never imagined possible.  The name of the child she found that day in the River was Moses who grew up and rescued the entire nation of Israel from slavery in Egypt, who gave them a Law from God, who interceded and saved the nation of Israel from destruction for their sin on several occasions, who wrote the first 5 books of the Bible, and who helped create and preserve the nation that descended from Abraham through whom Jesus would come to bless the whole world.
  • John 6:8-13 [When Jesus asked His disciples where they could buy bread to feed a crowd of thousands…] - Question:  Do you think this lad’s Mom imagined anything like this could have happened with the lunch she packed for him that day?  I mean if you sent your kid to school with a PB&J and some pudding, would you ever imagine that it would feed the entire school AND all the kids from dozens of other schools too?  Yet here’s a Mom just making a good choice in the moment to provide for her child, one that doesn’t seem all that significant in the moment, but it changes the future for her child and for 10-15,000 people that day, because not only did that boy’s bread and fish feed them all that day, it became an opportunity for a miracle those people would never forget and would lead many of them in the future, possibly even that young lad himself, to come to Jesus for salvation!
    • There was a preacher named Robert Smith who was working in Seychelles with his wife Andrea about 30 years ago.  And he walked into a small convenience store and saw a young man in shorts and flip flops walking down one of the aisles looking for snacks.  Now, Robert could have just bought his supplies and left, but instead he made the choice to start a conversation with this young man and said, “Hi how are you?”  And they got to talking and he started a Bible study with that young man.  That young man became a Christian and by God’s providence was able to attend school at Florida College where he learned more about the Bible, met incredible mentors like Marty Pickup who got him into preaching, and he became the first person to ever go through the summer preacher training program right here at Palm Springs Drive.  His name of course was Jimmy Petrousse, and Jimmy went on to mentor and inspire another young man named Brian Messerli who he put in touch with Palm Springs Drive and who has been preaching there for over 15 years and who has hopefully inspired others on their spiritual journey as well.  Then Jimmy returned home to Seychelles where he continues to preach, while also running his own mental health counseling practice, where he has appeared on national TV there and has a chance to reach the whole island with the gospel.  And of course he got married and had 2 beautiful children who have also been taught the gospel and who will hopefully pass it down to their kids and grandkids too.  I’ve asked Jimmy before about his journey, and he has said to me many times how amazing it is that all of this started because of that one day when Robert Smith decided to say, “Hi.”
      • One flap of the wings created a tornado, but this time a tornado for good in the world that goes out to destroy Satan’s work.  One touch of a domino in that convenience store 30 years ago has touched and will continue to touch hundreds of thousands of lives for the better.
        • So next time you’re thinking, “I don’t know if I should even bother greeting this person,” or if you’re a Mom thinking, “It seems like all I’m doing is packing lunches and running around like a chauffeur for my kids’ activities,” remember your good choices matter way more than you think.  So hold that door open, greet people with a smile, speak kind words to build people up and encourage them, forgive people when they wrong you, choose integrity and tell the truth even when it hurts, invite someone to worship or to study the Bible with you.  Your good choices today may seem so small or mundane in the moment, but they can change the future in ways you cannot comprehend!

Now, I need to make one final point because as encouraging as it is to know my good choices can reverberate through generations, it’s kind of terrifying to think our evil choices can reverberate too.  I mean, are you saying Brian if I’ve made evil choices in my life, it’s too late to reverse the damage because the dominos are already falling and the tornado is already out there?  Gratefully, that’s not the case at all because…

By God’s Grace, He Can Reverse the Damage Tomorrow Caused by our Evil Choices Today

• Some of you know I’m a big fan of Dave Ramsey, I’ve listened to his show for years and his financial advice has been transformative in my life, and of course his advice is rooted in the Bible which is why it’s so effective.  But there’s an expression Dave uses that I’ve always thought was really powerful.  He encourages people to “change their family tree.”  His point is, you may have had parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who were TERRIBLE with money, who were constantly in debt and didn’t know how to save and were always stressed out, and their bad choices may have influenced you and put you on the same destructive path, but the good news is you can make a different choice and change your family tree so that instead of handing down bad choices like your parents did for you, you can hand down GOOD choices down to your kids, and they can hand those down to their kids and their kids’ kids so that now your family tree looks totally different from that point forward!
  • That’s what Abraham did!  He changed his family tree by putting his faith in God, and created an ETERNAL legacy of faithful children and grandchildren after him.  I say eternal because the New Testament says if you’re a Christian, you’re a part of Abraham’s continued family tree of children making good choices to put our faith in God like he did!
  • Galatians 3:7 - With just one choice in the moment to give his life to God, Abraham reversed the damage of his parents and grandparents in his life and created a new family tree that continues to grow even today!  And that’s all made possible by the grace of God!
    • God has the ability, if we’ll put our trust in Him, to stop the tornado in our lives and in the lives of those to come and to put His hand right in the middle of dominos to stop them from falling.  In fact, we started with Adam and how his one sinful choice plagued the world with the curse of sin and sentenced all of humanity to death.  Well, notice what God did to reverse that by His grace.
      • Romans 5:15, 18-19 - Adam, as the representative head of humanity, made a choice that condemned us all because our connection to him.  But God, in His grace, said, “I’m going to give humanity a new representative, Jesus the Christ, and if you’ll make the choice to connect to Him by faith, He will reverse the damage caused by Adam so you’re not longer under the sentence of death.”
        • I’ll just tell you, I think the butterfly effect is tremendous motivation to avoid evil and make good choices and I hope we all take that with us this morning.  But if all the pressure is on us to make good choices every single time, and if we make one evil choice it sets generations on fire in irreversible ways, that’s too overwhelming and disheartening!  Because if that’s the way it is, then we’ve ALL irreparably destroyed our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren!
          • Yet by the mercy and grace of God, Jesus says, “There is still hope for tomorrow even after your evil choices today.”  Now, that’s not license to make evil choices, we should never take God’s grace for granted and say, “Sweet I can do evil and God will fix it!”  That’s not how this works.
            • But if you feel like your evil choices have set your future on an irreversible course of destruction and the dominos are already in motion and cannot be stopped, that’s just not true!  God can stop and reverse ANY future damage caused by our sin if we’ll put our faith and trust in Him!  And even if it there is something that can’t be reversed because the damage has already been done, God can re-purpose it.  Like with Joseph and his brothers.  The damage they did to Joseph and all those years they lost with him could not be reversed, but God re-purposed it and used it for good!
              • On a more personal level, if you feel like you’ve messed yourself up for life by your evil choices, that’s not true either; you can come to Jesus and He can heal you and change your family tree.

In the movie Gladiator, when Maximus was leading his men into battle, he said to them:  “What we do in life — echoes in eternity.”  He was talking about the butterfly effect, but applying it beyond just this earthly life.  He was saying the consequences of the choices we make in life even outlive our time on this earth.

And the Bible teaches the same thing, that the consequences for our choices, whether good or evil, don’t just affect future generations on the earth after we’re gone, it directly affects our own future in eternity, a future spent either with or without God.  Either blessed in Heaven or cursed in Hell.

And gratefully, even though all of us have sinned and committed evil worthy of echoing in Hell, God sent Jesus to reverse the eternal damage to our souls and to our relationship with Him, so we can be with Him forever in Heavenly bliss.  Will you come to Him this morning?  Your choice to do that today has the power to change tomorrow for you and for so many others in ways you cannot comprehend.

Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Sun Bible Study

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

In our first class on the nature of God, remember we said there is one main descriptor of God in the Bible under which all other descriptors fall.  It is His holiness.  The fact that He is holy means He is completely unique, set apart from all others in a far superior way.  There is no one like Him.  Remember Isaiah’s vision of God on His throne with angelic beings called seraphim praising Him!

Isaiah 6:3 - In our first class we mentioned this verse, but we didn’t talk about Isaiah’s response to being in God’s presence.

Isaiah 6:5 - When Isaiah sees the perfect majesty and purity of God, he is immediately made aware that he does not deserve to be there.  The perfect sinlessness of God exposes the sinfulness of Isaiah.  It’s astounding to see someone as righteous as Isaiah saying this!  Compared to the evil Israelites in his day, Isaiah was a saint!  But when he saw God, even just in a vision, it was too overwhelming for him and it exposed all of his sins.

Illustration:  We typically can’t see all the junk we breath in all day.  The air is mostly invisible so we don’t even think about it, but have you ever opened a window when the sun was shining through and all the sudden you could see millions of little dust particles floating in the air?  It’s kind of horrifying, and that’s what it was like for Isaiah.  Compared to the rest of the nation, Isaiah’s sins were invisible, but once he stood in the presence of the brightness of God’s glory, it exposed the uncleanness of Isaiah’s soul, and he realized he had no business being in the Lord’s presence.

Something similar happened to Peter when, after fishing all night and catching nothing, Jesus told him to cast his net over the side of the boat, and Peter basically said, “Lord that’s not going to work, but okay,” and they hauled in such a massive catch that the nets started to break!

Luke 5:8 - Peter understood he was in the holy presence of God and, just like Isaiah, he knew he was too sinful to be there with Jesus and for Jesus to be there with him.

Psalm 5:4 - Question:  What is the most fundamental problem with evil and sin?

It makes us unfit to live with God.  We cannot live with a holy God because our sin makes us ashamed in His presence, and God cannot live with unholy people because our sin makes Him judicially angry in our presence because we’ve fallen under His judgment.  But it goes beyond just the emotions or feelings of shame or anger, it’s that God cannot be in unified relationship with sin.  It is against His nature, just like water and oil can’t be unified, and light and darkness can’t be unified.

This is why when Adam and Eve committed the first sin, they were removed from the presence of God in the garden of Eden.  And this is why Hell is described in Scripture as eternal separation from His presence.

2 Thessalonians 1:9 - Some may think of Hell as an act of cruelty, and why can’t God just let everyone into Heaven?  But again, to choose to let evil dwell in His midst is a direct contradiction of His nature.  It’s like asking, “Why do human beings choose to walk instead of flapping their arms and flying?”  It’s not that we’re choosing NOT to fly, it’s that we can’t fly because that’s not our nature.  Likewise, God’s nature and character are morally perfect.  And a perfectly good God simply cannot be in unified relationship with evil people.  So if someone ends up in Hell for their sin, it’s not because God wanted them to be there, but because they can’t live with Him in sin and He can’t live with them either, and if you’re not in God’s presence, it means you’re in a place where there is no goodness, no beauty, no hope, no comfort in suffering, and that’s Hell, where sin ultimately leads.

This is the fundamental problem of sin, and it’s a MAJOR problem!  Because we’ve already established in the first class that God created us for relationship with Him, yet now we’re finding out that our sin makes that relationship impossible!  That’s why the Bible, though not fictional, is a story with characters, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution. Just within the first 3 chapters of the Bible we’re presented with the characters, setting, plot, and conflict, and the rest of the Bible is about the resolution!  How in the world is God going to resolve the problem of our sin so we actually CAN live with Him forever?  And as the Bible’s story unfolds, we find that there is hope because God LOVES us, WANTS to live with us forever and is willing to do whatever it takes for us to live forever in relationship with Him, and He has a plan to resolve the problem of sin.  We catch a glimpse of that after Isaiah’s response to God’s holiness…

Isaiah 6:6-7 - This is just symbolic, God’s not planning to burn our lips with hot coals, but the point is we serve a God with the power to cleanse and purge us from the impurity of our sin so we can dwell in His presence.  Now let’s talk more about the problem of sin so we can appreciate the solution to the problem that much more.

What is sin?

• The Bible uses many different words for sin, each one with its own meaning, but within the same family of meaning.
  • Sin = missing the target.
    • Leviticus 11:44 - This is repeated in the New Testament for Christians, so our target is to live like God because we’re made in His image and are meant to reflect His goodness in the world, but when we sin, we’re way off target and aren’t living like God at all.
  • Transgression = rebellion, stepping over a line
  • Iniquity = corruption, perversion
  • Lawlessness = breaking God’s laws as if they don’t matter
  • Trespass = going somewhere you shouldn’t.  Even today there are signs on people’s property that say, “No trespassing,” and it means, “You have no right to be here,” and if you say, “I don’t care, I’m jumping that fence anyway,” you can be arrested for that!
  • Unrighteousness = not living right according to God’s will
  • Wickedness/Evil = deep moral corruption, rotten to the core
    • Definition:  Sin is basically any violation of God’s will, whether in thought or action.  When most people think about sin, they only think about the action part, they don’t consider that we can actually have sinful THOUGHTS too!  If you lust after someone in your heart, or covet your neighbor’s spouse, or fantasize about beating someone up in anger, that’s all sin too!  And you might think, “That’s an incredibly high standard!” And you’d be right!  God doesn’t just call us to be decent people or to be better than the people around us.  No, He calls us to be holy as HE is holy, to be morally perfect reflections of His character in the world!  There is no higher moral standard than that, which is why NONE of has lived up to it!
      • Ecclesiastes 7:20
      • Romans 3:9-10, 23 - To be truly “good” or “righteous” in Scripture is to be sinless like God, and none of us have brought the proper glory to God by the way we’ve lived!  Which is why this conflict between God’s holiness and our sin is SO serious.

Question:  How does Satan use sin to seduce us? (Why is it that all of us, even the most righteous among us, have sinned?  What makes sin so seductive?)

1) It’s easy, looks good, and feels good in the moment.  2) He convinces us it’s for our good.  God tells us to take the way of escape and run from sin, but Satan convinces us sin IS the way of escape.  It’ll help us escape all our problems and make us feel so much better about everything.  3) He makes us think sin is more efficient, it’s like a shortcut to our goals.  God’s way takes SO long, but Satan offers us quick fixes.  4) He likes to normalize sin by getting the culture to go along with it, which puts pressure on us to conform so as not to seem weird.  5) He tries to convince us God is holding us back and keeping us from living life to the fullest.

But as Jesus said in John 8:44, “Satan is the father of lies and there is no truth in him,” and in John 10:10 that Jesus has come to give us the abundant life, whereas Satan comes only to steal and to kill.  Satan makes big promises about sin, but he never shows us the fine print.  There have been horror movies made about some mysterious figure who promises to grant you any wish, and it sounds so amazing, but there are dreadful strings attached.  Like someone may wish for 1 million dollars, but it’s not handed to them in cash.  Instead their spouse dies, and they get a million dollars from the life insurance policy.  It’s truly horrific because now they not only have the sadness of losing their spouse, but the guilt of making the wish in the first place, so that 1 million dollars actually destroyed their life and means nothing to them now.  That’s what Satan does.  He makes it sound so rewarding, but hides the true cost.

So let’s talk more about the cost of sin.  It’s clear from the very first pages of the Bible that God’s desire is for peace and unity, yet by chapter 3 of the Bible, we see that sin separates.  It causes hostility and division.

Question: What things, united as one, does sin separate?

1) Separates man from God.  As mentioned, this is THE fundamental problem with sin.

Genesis 3:8 - Just like Isaiah and Peter, once they sin, they know they cannot be in God’s presence.  It’s too terrifying, they are too guilty, and they don’t belong.

Isaiah 59:2

2) Separates man from man.  Genesis 3:12 - “The woman you gave to be with me, SHE gave me from the tree, and I ate.”  Adam throws his wife under the bus.  Once he’s guilty of sin, all he cares about is himself and he’s willing to give up his wife in sacrifice to God if it means saving his own skin.  Sin causes us to dehumanize each other, and what’s the very first thing that happens after sin enters the world in Genesis 3?  In Genesis 4, Cain murders his own brother, and that pattern of violence and hostility continues until the world becomes so evil God regrets that He created man and destroys the world with a flood.  After the flood, it’s not long before people are violently attacking and kidnapping each other.  And it’s the same problem today between countries, within marriages, within friendships, and sadly even within some churches.  Wherever there is sin, there is separation and the absence of peace.

3) Separates our soul from our body.  Genesis 3:19; Ecclesiastes 12:7.  This is physical death.  Our separation from God is spiritual death because our souls have been corrupted and we’ve been cut off from relationship with God the source of life.  But physical death is when our soul or spirit is separated from our body.  In the Garden of Eden, this was never meant to happen.  But once Adam and Eve sinned, they were cut off, not just from God, which was spiritual death, but from the tree of life, which meant one day Adam and Eve would die and their souls would leave their bodies.  This is one of the major plot conflicts in the Bible caused by sin.  How in the world can God possibly bring our souls and bodies back together again?  How can He save us from both spiritual death AND physical death?

4) Now this last one, I understand some hold a different view on so I won’t push this too hard, but I also believe Heaven and Earth were separated by sin.  In the Bible, Heaven is the dwelling place of God, and Earth is the dwelling place of man (Psalm 115:16), and in the Garden, those two dwelling places overlapped as one.  God was dwelling with man on earth and the Garden was like a Heaven on earth Paradise.  Yet after sin, not only was mankind cursed, the earth itself was cursed, and now it yielded thorns and thistles and became a place of great pain and suffering, which means it was no longer a fit place for God to dwell permanently with man like it was in the Garden.  So after sin, God and man weren’t dwelling together on earth anymore, except in very specific locations God would later provide like the tabernacle and temple.  These were like miniature Edens where Heaven and Earth overlapped, and I believe this is yet another major plot conflict in the Bible.  How can God unify Heaven and Earth again so that the dwelling place of God is with man on earth once again and we can live forever in a Garden of Eden-like paradise?  I realize some disagree and believe the earth won’t play any role in God’s final plans, but that we’ll be taken away from the earth to Heaven.  That’s okay, we can still be brothers and sisters in Christ.  Maybe in Quarter 4 I can more fully convince you of my view on this because I’ll be teaching on this in one of the smaller classrooms that quarter.

Question:  What does sin spoil/ruin?

• I realize now this question was a little redundant after what we’ve already discussed, but basically sin spoils everything.

Question:  How does sin snare and entrap us to make us slaves?

1) It snares us and traps us in hidden costs we didn’t consider, like we talked about earlier.  And those traps include emotional ones too like shame and guilt and sadness.  2) It traps us under the sentence of death.  Once we’ve sinned against God, we experience spiritual death and one day physical death for our sin.  It means we’re on a path to Hell from which we cannot escape.  3) Once we start sinning, it can be hard to stop.  It can hijack the pleasure chemicals in our brains and get us to chase those highs and chase even higher highs the next time.  Plus, the longer we sin, the more it deadens our consciences and the less guilty we feel which also makes it harder to stop.  It has been said, “Sin takes you farther than you wanted to go, keeps you longer than you wanted to stay, and costs you far more than you wanted to pay.”

Romans 6:20-21

Now, remember when we described the character of God in our first class, we mentioned…

Exodus 34:6-7 - This is the most often repeated description of God’s character in the Bible, and notice it seems like it contradicts itself.  One the one hand, it says God forgives sin in love, but on the other it says God won’t leave sin unpunished!  But if the penalty for sin is death, how in the world can He both punish sinners and forgive sinners?  How can He forgive us AND kill us?

Well, in the Law of Moses, God created a system of animal sacrifices, where He basically said, “Instead of YOU dying for your sin, you can sacrifice the life of an innocent animal in your place.”

Leviticus 19:22 - The word “atonement” means “covering.”  In God’s mercy, He allowed animal sacrifices to cover, or pay the debt for, their sin.  The people who sinned owed God death, but God agreed to continue having a relationship with them, which means they had spiritual life, as long as these animals took their place.  For the word “atonement,” think, “At-one-ment.”  They could be at one with God, unified in relationship with Him, through these sacrifices.  Now, it wasn’t fair at all because these animals didn’t deserve death, but it was a very visual way for God to show them the cost of their sin is death, yet in His mercy they didn’t have to pay it themselves.  Which, if you had the right heart, would make you tremendously sad on the one hand that this poor animal had to die because of you, but tremendously grateful on the other that you got to live.

And of course the truth is, it wasn’t a fair trade at all.  An animal’s life simply isn’t worth as much as a human life, so it’s not really a fit payment for sin.  It would be like if you owed me $10,000, and as an act of mercy because I know you can’t afford it, I say to you, “I’ll accept 10,000 in monopoly money.”  Well, once you pay me that monopoly money, you might be grateful that I considered it covered out of the kindness of my heart, but you would know it wasn’t REALLY covered.  The only way to truly pay the debt is with REAL money.

The same thing was true for the problem of sin.  The only way to truly cover the payment for sin is with human blood, not animal blood.  But the problem is, if we all paid with our own human blood, sin would be paid for but we’d all be dead!  Yet God, because He is so loving and merciful and forgiving, made a way for our debt to be covered, yet without requiring us to die!

John 1:29 - Jesus, the Son of God, came in the flesh as the true sacrifice for sin, accomplishing what animals never could, which is the full human-blood payment of death.  He was sinless and innocent like an animal, yet unlike an animal, He was human and He made the conscious decision to voluntarily climb up on the altar of the cross and give His life as the ultimate atonement for sins.   

Now, He was sinless so He didn’t experience spiritual death in the same way we do.  Jesus’ soul wasn’t corrupt in any way or cut off from relationship with God, but He was separated from the presence of His Father in Heaven to come here, which was a kind of exile like Adam and Eve being removed from God’s presence, and He allowed Himself to be treated by His Father as if He WERE a sinner.  By putting on flesh, He came to experience physical death so that when He died on the cross and breathed His last, He committed His soul or spirit to God, and for 3 days His soul was separated from his body.  Yet on the 3rd day, His soul and body were reunited, and He was raised from the dead, conquering spiritual death for us by paying for our sins, and conquering physical death for us by overcoming the grave.

And because it was the greatest act of love in history, it moves our hearts to WANT to give up our sin and serve Him.  As pleasurable and seductive as sin is, the love of Christ creates a far greater desire in us for Him than for sin so that we now live to please Him instead of ourselves.  Will we be perfect?  No, but Jesus has covered us by His sacrifice and…

Romans 8:1

It is through Jesus that all the conflicts caused by sin are resolved.  It is through Jesus that our relationship is restored with God and we’re not longer spiritually dead, our relationship is restored with our neighbor, one day our souls will be reunited with our bodies in a literal resurrection from the dead like His because physical death loses its power, and the curse of sin will be purged by fire from this earth and we’ll live forever with God in what the Bible class the new heavens and new earth.

This is what the Bible calls, “The restoration of all things.”

Acts 3:21 - God’s ultimate plan is to remove the problem of sin from the picture entirely, to reverse all the damage caused by sin, and restore all things back to His original intention in the Garden.  And Jesus is the key to it all, which is why our next class will cover the Old Testament prophecies about Him because once sin enters the world in Genesis 3, the rest of the Old Testament points to the hope of the Messiah coming to solve the Problem of sin once and for all.

Series: N/A

Service: Lord’s Supper Service

Type: Lord's Supper Talk

Speaker: Ryan Crozier

Series: N/A

Service: Wednesday Night

Type: Invitation

Speaker: Connor McClenny

Series: Basic Bible Doctrine

Service: Wed Bible Study

Type: Bible Class

Speaker: Brian Messerli

On Sunday, we talked about who God is and one of the descriptors of God in the Bible is Father, which means it only makes sense for Him to want to communicate with His children.  It wouldn’t make any sense for God to go through the trouble of creating us and putting us here on this earth, only to leave us completely in the dark about who He is and what He wants from us.

So gratefully, since the dawn of time we serve a God who does not hide from us, but makes Himself known and makes His will known to us so we can answer the most basic questions of life:

Where did I come from?

Who am I?

Why am I here?

How should I live?

Where am I going?

2 Timothy 3:16-17 - The word “Scripture” means writings and here refers to the holy writings of God Himself.  The word “inspired,” means God-breathed.  Now it sounds redundant in our English Bibles to say Scripture is “God-breathed by God.”  But the English translators added “by God” for clarity’s sake because sometimes when we say a work of art is “inspired” we just mean it was a great idea or that it was moving in some way.  But Scriptures weren’t some great idea by man, they were God’s great ideas breathed out through His Spirit.  Remember from Sunday’s sermon that there’s a connection in Scripture between God’s Word and God’s breath, because when we speak words, we’re moving breath to do it.  If you hold your hand in front of your face when you talk, you’re going to feel your palm getting pelted by little bursts of breath.  Well, the word “breath” and “spirit” are also the same, so Paul is saying the writings of God are breathed out by God’s Spirit.  Peter puts it this way.

2 Peter 1:20-21 - Peter’s not saying we don’t have to interpret Scripture when we read it.  He’s saying Scripture did not originate with human interpretation.  It wasn’t like humans said to themselves, “In my opinion, I think THIS is what God is like and this these are my interpretations of what He would want from us.”  No, the Holy Spirit or breath of God spoke through them; they were simply the mouthpieces of God.  In fact, that’s what a prophet was.  We tend to think of prophets as those who tell the future, and certainly God’s prophets did that at times, but more fundamentally they were spokesmen for God.  That’s why before prophets delivered a message, they would always preface it in the Bible with, “Thus says the LORD.”  When Paul talked about how the mysteries of God were revealed to them, he said…

1 Corinthians 2:10-11 - This is why the Scriptures could never be the product of human interpretation because no one knows the mind of God except God’s Spirit.  Just like no one can read our thoughts and the only way someone can know what we’re thinking is if we tell it to them, the same thing is true with God.  Only the Spirit knows God’s mind, and the Spirit has revealed the depths of God’s mind and hidden wisdom to us in the Scriptures!

And if we think back to the 2 Timothy passage, Paul says God gives us everything we need to be complete, mature followers of God and so that we can teach others to become mature followers of God too!  God’s Word answers all 5 of those basic questions of life and SO much more!  Does it answer every question for us?  No, but it answers every question that NEEDS to be answered.

Deuteronomy 29:29

Question:  Why is it so bold and risky for the Bible to claim to be God’s Word?

1) It’s bold because for humans to claim divine origin for their writings, it makes them sound arrogant,  insane, or like deceptive con men.  To claim their writings are from God would raise everyone’s suspicions and most people would think they either have WAY too high an opinion of their writings, they’re deluded and actually think the Creator of the Universe is speaking and writing through them, or they’re making all this up and it’s just a big hoax.  2) It creates an impossibly high standard for those teachings to live up to!  A) They better be the most brilliant teachings the world has ever heard!  Of course it better not sound like a 5th grader wrote it, but honestly if you’re claiming it’s from God it better not even sound like the smartest person in the world wrote this!  It should be far more brilliant and practical than what even the smartest humans on the planet can produce!  B) It better not have any errors or contradictions in it because all you would need is to find ONE error, and the whole Bible would fall apart.

And I realize this isn’t an apologetics class so we can’t go into detail on this, but it’s so encouraging to know that people have tried for thousands of years to disprove the Bible, claiming to have found errors and contradictions, yet every attempt has failed.  Not only that, but it remains the greatest piece of literature ever written and continues to be the #1 best selling book, not just of all time, but every single year to this day because it IS far more brilliant than anything of human origin and it is absolutely inerrant because it contains thoughts from the wonderful mind of God.

Romans 11:33

Now of course, God understood what a bold and risky claim it was for His messengers to tell people they were speaking words from God’s Holy Spirit, so He would equip His messengers with the ability to perform miracles to confirm that they indeed were sent by God.  The first time we see this in Scripture is when God sends Moses to Pharaoh to tell Him God said to let His people go!

Exodus 4:1-3 - Moses understands how ridiculous he’s going to look when he waltzes in and says to the most powerful man in the world, “The one True God sent me to order you to let his people go.”  Why would Pharaoh have any reason to believe him, and why would the Israelites believe him either?  Well, God gave him the miraculous power to turn his staff into a snake and back again to prove that God was with him!  And this is God’s pattern all throughout Scripture, even with Jesus and His apostles.

John 3:2 - Jesus performed signs of power over the body through healing, power over nature by turning water to wine and calming storms, power over death by raising the dead, and power over time by predicting the future.  And while His disciples certainly weren’t as powerful as He was, He did give them the ability to perform signs and wonders too so people would believe they were legitimate messengers of God.

Mark 16:20 - Note:  Most of the prophets in the Old Testament did not perform signs and wonders because they were sent to God’s people who should have recognized His Word without the need for proof.  Most Old Testament prophets were appealing to God’s people based on His previously revealed word in the Law of Moses, which was already proven legitimate by Moses’ signs and wonders.  But whenever God was starting a new phase of revelation or whenever He knew there was going to be strong skepticism about His prophets, He would arm them with miracles to help convince people they were legitimate.

Question:  What is one of your favorite miracles performed by a prophet or apostle in the Bible?  What is one of your favorite fulfilled prophecies?

A) I like Acts 5:15 when people brought their sick out into the streets, and as Peter walked down the street, if even his shadow touched them, they were healed.  B) The prophecy against Tyre in Ezekiel 26:4-5 - In 701 BC, the city of Tyre will be attacked by the Assyrians, and they fled to a fortress out on an island about a 1/4 mile off the coast of Phoenicia.  Well, in 332 BC, Alexander the Great came and scraped all the debris from the city of Tyre off into the water, forming a land bridge in which he and his armies to cross over and destroy the island fortress of Tyre too.  What was once this great global empire of trade with great ships had from then on become a humble town in which fishermen dry their nets out along the coast.

Deuteronomy 18:22 - One of the greatest evidences that the Bible is God’s word is that it contains hundreds of fulfilled prophecies that have all come true, though some are still waiting to be fulfilled.  But if some religious group claims to have writings from God or claims to follow a prophet of God, and what their prophets say will come to pass doesn’t, it’s clear they’re not from God.  And that’s another risky claim from the prophets in the Bible; they claim to know the future which makes them falsifiable given enough time.  Yet over and over again, God’s prophets are vindicated because their prophecies always come true, giving us even more confidence that the Bible is indeed God’s Word!

Question:  Why would it be incredibly odd/absurd for human beings to make up/fabricate the Bible’s teachings?  

1) We’ve already mentioned how incredibly risky it is to make up a religion and claim it’s legitimate.  That opens you up to all manner of scrutiny and skepticism.  People have done it of course, but those are usually one-off religious figures, not 40 different people over a period of 1600 years all claiming that the same religion is true and that their writings should be considered part of the same collection of teachings from the same God.  It would be incredibly odd for 40 people, many of whom never even knew each other, to get in on fabricating the same religion.  2) The Bible over and over again presents human beings as sinful and dumb.  If you’re going to make up a religion, typically it would make you and your nation look good, yet the Bible continuously records the failures of Israel, and even the failures of its own prophets!  Look at Jonah!  The guys runs away from God, gets thrown overboard a ship and almost dies, then even after God saves him and people listen to his message, he throws a pity party.  Look at Peter, the one who is supposed to be one of the leading apostles, yet he denies he even knows the Lord 3 times and runs away crying in shame.  Plus, whenever nations record the histories of their battles, they almost never record their losses.  Yet there are so many accounts of God’s people getting destroyed in battle because of their sin.  That’s especially problematic because in the ancient world, they viewed battles as between the gods, so if your nation lost a battle, it meant your God was weak.  So why would the Israelites make up a God who allows His people to be defeated so often?  No one would make that up.  And of course, the Bible is clear they were defeated not because God is weak, but because His people are terrible, and again why would you make that up?  3) The God of the Bible does things that run completely counter to human thought.  For instance, when God’s people were taken captive in Babylon, it says the way God rescued them was to use a pagan foreign King named Cyrus.  That’s another amazing prophecy in Scripture; God names King Cyrus of Persia before he’s ever born and says He’s going to use Cyrus as a shepherd to rescue His people from Babylonian captivity.  If you’re the Israelites and you’re trying to create a false God that’s the best of all the gods and makes your people sound like the best and most powerful nation, why would you write that your God initially lost to the Babylonian gods and couldn’t keep His people out of captivity, and then when He did finally save his people, He did so by a foreigner who didn’t even worship your God?  No human Israelite would make that up, it’s absurd.  It would be like me as an American creating a fictional account about American history to show how great we are, but I make up a story about how all the Americans were rescued in battle by the French.  Now, the French actually DID help us in the Revolutionary War and without their help we may not have won our independence, but that’s in the history books because it actually happened.  But no American would have made that story up.  When we get to the New Testament, crucifixion was a death reserved for the worst of criminals and the lowest of slaves, so why on earth would the apostles make up a God who said a crucified criminal was our Savior?

1 Corinthians 1:21-23 - God specifically chose to reveal Himself in ways that were absolutely foolish to mankind so that no one could boast that any of this was their idea.  No one could say, “I found a way in my own human wisdom to be saved!”  No, everyone would have to admit, “This is wisdom from another world entirely because it’s from the mind of God.”

And because it’s from the Lord and His Spirit, and not from human beings, it makes sense why the Bible is so different from and far more powerful than any other book.

Hebrews 4:12 - Since it was breathed out by His Spirit, when we read it with humble hearts, it’s like God performs spiritual CPR on us, breathing His life into us through the Spirit to revive and sustain us!  The reformer Martin Luther once said, “The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.”

1 Thessalonians 2:13 - It actually performs work in us, it’s not some dry history book or doctrinal treatise, Jesus said His word is like a seed planted in the soil of our hearts and and by God’s power, it becomes a beautiful tree that bears good fruit.

Now, Jesus preserves some of the mystery of how all that works by saying when we put a seed in the ground, it grows, but we don’t know how because it’s God doing His work in the soil of people’s hearts, but some of the ways it changes us 1) it tells us the truth, and Jesus says the truth will set you free!  It gives us true answers to the most basic questions of life, including the truth about our own sin, our broken relationship with our Father in Heaven, and the good news that we can be made right with Him.  2) It fills us with goodness and purity 3) it inspires us with amazing examples of faith.  4) It helps us understand the problem of pain and how God has a purpose for all things.  5) It gives us hope and reminds us this world is only temporary.  6) It reminds us despite God’s wrath for our sin, we are loved beyond imagination, and it touches and moves us to want to live for the Author of this word.  7) It reminds us of our identity.

There is no book that has changed more lives or been more influential for good in the world than the Bible, because it wasn’t of human origin, but divine origin.  It is the revealed mind and will of God.

And because it’s so transformative, those who ignore it or disobey it do so at their own peril.  We’ll talk more about why sin is so bad on Sunday, but suffice it to say God is VERY serious about us making sure to obey His Word because He’s trying to keep us from destroying ourselves and others around us.

Deuteronomy 13:3-5 - God was so serious about obedience to His word in the Old Testament that misleading people into disobedience led to the death penalty!  The truth is, there is a warning against false teaching that goes against God’s word in almost every book of the Bible, including the New Testament!  The New Testament writers don’t say, “Now that Jesus has come, it’s no big deal if you listen to false teachers and live however you want.”

Galatians 1:8

Revelation 22:18-19 - This is why our point from Sunday about God being our King is so important.  It means He calls the shots, He is the one in authority over us.  Same with God being our Father.  He’s not on a power trip, He just knows His teachings are for our good, and when we veer away from His guidance and start living by our own authority and rules, it’s a disaster for us, not just in this life, but for all eternity in Hell.

This means we need to be SO careful how we handle God’s word.

2 Timothy 2:15

Question:  What are some ways to make sure we’re using God’s word to determine His will for us accurately?

1) Approach with humility.  Don’t use the Bible as a proof text for beliefs you already hold, read it to discover truth.  2) Approach with prayer.  Ask God to help open the eyes of your heart and give you understanding, ask Him to give you a deeper knowledge of Him as the Author.   3) Context is key.  The Bible was written for us, but not written TO us.  It was written to a particular audience in a particular historical setting facing particular problems.  Before we ask, “What does this mean to me, we have to ask, “What was meant by the original author and how would it have been understood by the original audience?”  4) Identify commands.  Sometimes God just explicitly tells us His will on something, like “Thou shall not murder.”  Or “Thou SHALL love thy neighbor as thyself.”  5) Identify good and bad examples.  Other times we may not have a direct command like, “Take the Lord’s Supper every first day of the week,” but when we look at the examples of early Christians under direction of the apostles, that’s what they did, so we should do that too.  6) Use sound judgment.  Sometimes there’s no command or example, and we have to use sound judgment based on the big picture of what we know of God’s character, and based on the commands and examples He HAS given us.  Gratefully we serve a God of mercy and grace, so there may be times when our judgment isn’t the best.  7) Be willing to reevaluate.  It’s SO tempting to assume we already have everything figured out and there’s nothing new to learn, but that’s pride and it can hinder our spiritual growth and can put us in a position of teaching the traditions of men as if they were God’s word.  And Jesus condemns that big time.

I’ll finish with a quote by AW Tozer:  “Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian. The Word of God, when received into the heart, produces life, and that life grows by feeding upon the same Word. The Bible is not merely a textbook about God—it is God speaking, God breathing, God revealing Himself to His people. Where it is neglected, faith weakens; where it is treasured, faith flourishes.”

Series: N/A

Service: Praise and Preaching Service

Type: Sermon

Speaker: Brian Messerli

Ezekiel 37 - It’s been said a picture is worth a thousand words; well, Ezekiel was the prophet of pictures.  Not only did he use props as visual aids to add power to his message, but God gave him a series of visions.  For instance, back in chapter 8 God shows Ezekiel a vision of the temple complex and he tells him to dig through the wall so he can see what’s happening inside, and when he looks through the hole, he sees that God’s people have set up an idol to a false god right at the entrance to the temple.  They are brazenly worshiping false gods right in the house of the one true God!

Illustration:  Imagine if, as a kid, you brought a strange man and woman home to your parent’s house and gave them a room to stay in and when your parents asked, “Who are they?”  You say, “Oh these are my real parents, I love them more than I love you.”  Not only would that be insane because they are NOT your parents, it would be a slap in the face to your real parents and it would break their heart to see you giving credit to strangers for raising you, providing for you, and loving you all these years!  That’s what the Israelites did to God, their real father, with these false gods.

And over the years, God tried so many different ways to reach them and get them to change, but they continued to reject Him to the point where in Ezekiel 10 he saw another shocking vision.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find a good picture of this, but he saw a vision of God leaving the temple.  Basically, God was packing his bags because they had moved these other false parents in and kept them around so long it was clear God was no longer welcome in His own home, and so He left.  And now that God was gone, so was His protection, and so were His blessings, and there was nothing left but judgment.  In fact, since God had to pack his bags, He told Ezekiel to tell the people it was time to pack theirs because they were about to exiled from their homes too and sure enough, starting in 605 BC the Babylonians attacked, besieged, killed, and hauled off many of the Israelites into captivity.  And now they have no land, no temple, no king, no God because they pushed Him away, and no hope.  For all intents and purposes, as a nation they are completely dead with no future, and it was all their fault for their sin.  So now God shows Ezekiel another vision, this one the most shocking of all.

The Valley of Bones

Ezekiel 37:1-2 - God transports Ezekiel in a vision to a valley full of dry bones.  And he doesn’t just show it to him, he makes Ezekiel walk through the midst of this horrifying upside down cemetery where the bones are on top of the ground instead of below.  The fact that these bones were never buried means they died disgraceful deaths.  Normally as a sign of honor, when someone died they were buried to protect them from scavenging animals, yet these people died in dishonor, and their flesh was left to jackals and birds.  The fact that they’re dry means they’ve been dead a long time; there’s no blood, no tissue left, they’ve been picked clean and baked in the sun so that there is absolutely no trace of life left in them.  And all of this is exactly what God warned His people would happen almost a thousand years earlier.  He told them all He wanted to do was bless them and give them life, but if they rebelled and sinned against Him long enough…

Deuteronomy 28:25-26 - This is what sin does; it cuts us off from God, who is the source of our life and all good blessings, and it kills us spiritually and leaves us for dead.  And we get an interpretive clue a little farther down in the passage about what these bones represent…

Ezekiel 37:11 - It is a tragedy of epic proportions because these are the bones of God’s chosen people.  They were chosen to be blessed above all others, they were given the Law of Moses, the temple where God could dwell in their midst, a beautiful land flowing with milk and honey, a righteous King David to rule over them, and great promises that one day a Savior would come from their lineage to bless the entire world!  Yet now, because of their continued rebellion over hundreds of years, they are no longer a nation, they have no land, no king, no temple, God has packed His bags and left, and they’re living as captives in a foreign land.  All of their hopes, dreams, promises, and even their own souls, are dead.   

Is There a Valley of Dry Bones in Your Own Life?

Maybe as a Christian, you used to be on fire for God, alive and vibrant in your faith, but because you’ve allowed yourself to get distracted, discouraged, or seduced by the sins of the world, you just feel dead inside, spiritually numb and you come to services but it just feels empty and it seems like you’re too far gone for there to be any hope of revival.

Or maybe you’ve never become a Christian because you think there’s no way God could save someone like you.  You may have done so many horrible things in your life and maybe you’re here because it’s Easter and your family invited you, but you don’t really think it’s going to do you much good because you’re too far dead and gone.  One of my family members, every time I invite him to church, says, “I would, but if I came the building would burn down.”  He believes he’s too evil and that there’s no hope to ever be right with the Lord.

Maybe there’s a relationship that seems irreparably destroyed, and where there was once a vibrant friendship or parent-child relationship or sibling relationship or marriage, it’s nothing but dead dry bones now and it seems impossible to ever be restored.

Maybe you’ve given up on evangelism because it seems like the world around us is too dead spiritually to ever change.  You see so much hatred, so much perversion, so much false religion, so much indifference and apathy, it seems like there’s no hope for anyone to come to Christ ever again.

Maybe you’ve been stuck in a dead end job for so long your career feels like a valley of dry bones and it’s sucked all the life out of you and you don’t think there’s any way out.

And one of the saddest valleys of all, maybe you have lost a loved one and all that’s left of them in this world are their bones in the ground or their ashes in an urn.

All of us face things in this sin-cursed world that seem too far gone to have any hope to change.  Yet as Ezekiel’s vision continues, we are reminded that nothing is impossible for God.

Can These Bones Live?

• Ezekiel 37:3-4 - God calls Ezekiel “son of man” throughout this book to remind him of his humanity.  He’s receiving all these divine visions, yet God reminds him he’s not divine, he’s just a man.  And He asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” and I love Ezekiel’s answer because I don’t think he can honestly say “Yes” because that seems impossible and too hard to believe!  But he can’t say, “No” because that would show a lack of faith in God.  So he gives a middle ground answer and says, “Lord, only you know.”
  • And God tells him to do something that would have sounded crazy!  “Go and preach to these bones!”  That sounds crazy because bones can’t hear, so what good would preaching do for them?
  • Illustration:  True story: one time I was asked to be a guest speaker at the church of Christ in Clermont and I’m not kidding, my GPS led me to a cemetery.  I’m still not sure how that happened, but eventually I found the right place and when I stood up to preach, I told the congregation what happened and that I was really worried about them at first because they didn’t seem like a very lively bunch.  I think I got a few chuckles, but here’s my point:  Imagine if I got out of the car at the cemetery and preached my sermon there instead!  People would think I was insane!  If someone saw me, they’d say, “What are you doing?  These people are dead!  They can’t hear you or respond to anything you’re saying!”
    • Yet God is going to tell Ezekiel, “My word is so powerful it can even reach and raise the dead!”
      • Ezekiel 37:5-6, 12-14 - It’s important to know that the word “breath” and “Spirit” are the same in Scripture.  So when God says He’ll put His breath in them, that’s synonymous with putting His Spirit in them!  And we learn from all the way back in Genesis that God’s Holy Spirit, or Holy breath, is the animating force of our life!
        • Genesis 2:7 - Human beings were formed from the dust, and it was the Spirit or breath of God that originally gave us life, yet here in Ezekiel because of their sin against God, they have basically returned to the dust and become dry, dusty bones, yet the same God with the power to create humanity in the first place has the power to RE-CREATE us and raise us from the dead spiritually!
          • And the primary way He does that is through the preaching of His word, which makes sense because in Scripture God’s word is also connected to His breath, because when we speak, we’re moving air and breath to do it.
            • Psalm 33:6 - So the way God is going to bring these bones to life is by telling them something!  He’s going to speak a life-giving message to them, and we don’t know what that is yet, but look what happens when Ezekiel speaks God’s word to the bones!

These Bones Live by God’s Word and Spirit!

• v. 7-11 - Ezekiel sees exactly what God said would happen and the bones come to life; at first they shake and rattle, then they start to assemble together in connection, then connective tissue between the bones is formed, then skin begins to cover them, and finally God’s breath gives them life!  And interestingly in v. 9 Ezekiel doesn’t just speak God’s word to the bones; He speaks God’s word to the breath of God, almost as if the breath of God, or Spirit of God, were a person.  The Holy Spirit of God is not just an impersonal force like in Star Wars, He is personal, He is part of the Triune Godhead like we discussed in class this morning, and Ezekiel addresses him directly and says, “O breath,” or “O Spirit,” and tells the Spirit by God’s authority to come from all directions and enter these bones to give them life, and now they don’t just come to life, they become an army for God with a new purpose to fight evil and to stand for what is right!
  • v. 24-28 - By God’s grace and mercy, not only will His people be brought to life again, but all the blessings and promises they thought were dead and hopeless are ALSO alive and well.  They will not only be a nation again, they will have a righteous king like David over them, they will return to their land, and notice God says He’ll set His sanctuary or temple in their midst once again.  Instead of packing His bags to leave like He did before, God is packing His bags to move back in with His people, and He’ll make an everlasting covenant of peace with them for all eternity.

How Do We Know this will Happen?

• How could anyone believe something so far fetched?  Ezekiel’s vision may have sounded like a pipe dream to them, yet 600 years later, God sent His Son Jesus into the world about whom grand claims were made and who made incredibly grand claims about Himself.
  • John 1:14 - Jesus was the word, or breath, of God incarnate.  He was the living embodiment of the life-giving message of God!
  • John 1:33-34 - Jesus, the Son of God, was the one who was coming to baptize, or immerse people in God’s life-giving Spirit!
    • • John 20:22 - Now, we know that Jesus hadn’t actually breathed the Holy Spirit into them yet, because John makes clear in an earlier chapter that something else had happen first, but here He is acting it out in preparation for the real thing later.
        • And before He could actually send the Holy Spirit to bring life to our dead bones, He had to bear our sins in His body on the cross and die a disgraced death on our behalf.  Even though He was perfectly sinless, He willingly died the death of the worst of sinners, the death of a criminal by public execution, bearing the shame of humiliation, the pain of extreme torture, and the burial of His body and bones in a tomb.  And yet 3 days later, Jesus bones could not be held by death’s power and God the Father sent His Holy Spirit to breathe new life into Jesus’ dead body and bones and raise Him from the grave as proof that these bones can live and that He can raise US from the dead too!  And when the disciples saw Him after His resurrection, they thought He was a ghost or a spirit, but Jesus said this to them!
          • Luke 24:39 - Because Jesus’ bones came to life again, it was proof from God that Ezekiel’s vision was possible!  And when Jesus ascended to Heaven, He sent the apostles out to declare the good message, to breathe on everyone the word of God that Jesus had died for our sins, was buried and raised again on the third day so we can be forgiven and resurrected like He was to new life!
            • Ephesians 2:1, 4-5 - Here He’s talking about a spiritual resurrection where all our sins which led to our death are washed away, and we are no longer cut off from God or hopeless, but now by the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf we can be made right with our Father again and there is now no condemnation for us in Christ.  But the blessings of Christ’s resurrection are even MORE amazing because not only can we experience a spiritual resurrection right now, we can experience a literal resurrection so that even though one day we’ll all die and our bones will be buried, on the final day of judgment, the same Spirit that raised Jesus’ body and bones will raise ours and we will literally come out of the grave by the power of Jesus’ breath and Spirit and live with God forever!
              • John 5:28-29
              • Romans 8:11

Applications:

1. Let Christ’s Resurrection give You Hope that Dead Things Can live Again!

• I love how God doesn’t just expect us to take His word for it that dead bones can live; He literally showed it to us in Jesus, and not only that, He provided us with more evidence for Jesus’ resurrection than for any other event in history by far.  God knew it would be hard to believe that Jesus raised from the dead, so He gave us a MOUNTAIN of evidence so we could know with certainty that it happened and that our bones can live too!  There’s a scholar named Gary Habermas who is almost finished with a 4 volume series on the Resurrection of Jesus.  The first volume came out in 2024 and it’s dedicated to laying out all of the evidences for Christ’s resurrection, and it is over 1,000 pages long.  That’s how much evidence God has given us, and I wrote an article this morning in the bulletin about one evidence of the resurrection you may not have ever considered about Jesus’ unvenerated tomb, and I encourage you to read that.
  • But because of the absolute historical certainty of the resurrection of Christ, it means every valley of dry bones in our lives can live again!  It means if our souls feel dead inside, God can revive them again by His Spirit, it means if we think we’re too far dead and gone for God to save us, that’s not true because the same God who created you can re-create you in Christ, it means if there’s a relationship that’s dead, a career that’s dead, a loved one who is dead, or even if one day we ourselves are dead, since Jesus’ bones lived again, these dead bones can be made alive again too.
    • A woman named Jan Richardson wrote a poem and said this about our hope in Christ, it is a “hope not made of wishes, but of substance, hope made of sinew and muscle and bone, hope that has breath and a beating heart, hope that raises us from the dead, not someday but this day, every day, again and again and again.”

2.  Let’s God’s Spirit Bring You to Life in the Waters of Baptism!

• In Acts 2 when Peter preached the first sermon after Christ ascended to Heaven, the Holy Spirit was speaking through Him and using the good word or message of the gospel to bring the dead dry bones of lost souls to life!  But beyond the Spirit’s work through the word, Peter also believed the Holy Spirit was something to be received in the waters of baptism!
• Acts 2:38 - When we are baptized in water by faith in Jesus’ sacrifice, we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and God breathes new life into us spiritually, and the Holy Spirit then becomes the animating force of our lives as Christians!  This makes sense because Paul says baptism is the moment at which we join ourselves to Christ’s resurrection, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit, so too are we in that moment!
  • Romans 6:4-5 - If you’re dead spiritually because you’ve never put your faith in Christ, you can come to life this morning by the power of His resurrection in the waters of baptism, and go from being dead, to alive and filled with new purpose in the army of the Lord in spiritual battle against Satan and his demonic forces!  And when you do that, you become a part of the restored spiritual nation of Israel which is the church of Jesus Christ and you’ll get to join in being part of the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s grand vision 2600 hundred years ago!

3.  Let God’s Spirit Continue to Give you Life!

• The prophet Ezekiel mentions the Holy Spirit more than any other prophet by far, and just from his one vision in chapter 37 I hope you’ll appreciate that the Holy Spirit is absolutely crucial for our life and continued growth as Christians.  The Holy Spirit gives us wisdom and enlightenment though God’s Word, which the Bible calls the sword of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, empowers us to bear fruit and live out our purpose, intercedes for us in prayer, reminds us of God’s teaching in moments of crisis and temptation and need, He helps us hone our gifts and talents, and gives us courage and boldness.
  • So let’s continue reading God’s Word every day, not to mark off some Bible reading checklist, but to get God breath and Spirit in us more and more, and let’s pray what Paul prayed for the Ephesians when he said this…
    • Ephesians 3:16