Selected Scriptures

July 9, 2017

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

Download the bulletin.

Download the Kids’ Korner.

The sermon starts at 18:20 in the audio file.

Or, An Introduction to a Commingled Worldview

On the very first resurrection Sunday two Jews walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus and talked with each other about all the things that had happened over the previous days. While they conversed, the risen Jesus joined them and started asking them questions. They didn’t know it was Jesus, and were surprised that this stranger seemed not to know about all the events concerning “Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people.” They went on for a while explaining to Jesus about His death and reports of His tomb being empty. But they themselves hadn’t come to any conclusions.

At some point “[Jesus] said to them, ‘O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” All these things were in the Bible.

They got to Emmaus and Jesus sat down to dinner with them. “When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed it and broke it and give it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight.” We imagine them saying, “Wait! Now we have more questions!” They hadn’t had a problem with their physical sight, but now they could finally see.

Not only could they see who they had been talking with, they could see how what He had said made sense. “They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’” Jesus had been clearing brush away from the signs and then showing how all the signs pointed in one direction.

Both because the Bible is a more-than-human book, and because sin is a blinding force, not seeing what is right in front of us, especially on the pages of Scripture, is a typical problem. We can be obtuse on a sentence level, we can be oblivious on the story level. But we are about to embark on a a new series, a sign-clearing effort to see a way of explaining God’s plan, from beginning to end, that has been in the Bible all along but for whatever reason we haven’t recognized.

This is a Bible reading project, “beginning with Moses” and including “all the Prophets,” as well as the Gospels and the epistles of Christ’s apostles. This is a project to read and believe that “‘everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’” This is a project to describe the things that make our hearts burn within us.

Where It All Started

This series has been brewing for quite a while but the coffee hasn’t turned into sludge, not yet at least. There have been a few stages, starting with a gnawing discontent with epistolary exclusivity. I’ll have more to say about the eye-opening effect of Ecclesiastes, Genesis, and the Psalms in the next couple of weeks, but there is more to the Old Testament than just historical background to or illustrations for the New Testament. The New Testament is great, inspired even (!), but the whole thing was written in one long generation. Sometimes in the Old Testament, you can skip a couple hundred years between chapter breaks. The revelation in the first 39 books of the Bible has a breadth to it, and a breath in it, as it points to Israel’s Messiah, Jesus, the Savior of the Nations. I started longing to answer some questions I didn’t even know I needed to ask.

Then I got asked a question for which there was no good answer. I was meeting with Mitch Rothenberger for coffee one Saturday morning, probably about a year after TEC started. He asked me what book he could read that would explain what TEC was all about. I think I laughed, and I would stil[...]