From the Pastor's Study
Image by Людмила Аненко
You know what made the holidays so special as a kid? The fact that everything was taken care of by someone else! You could sit back and enjoy watching dad cut down the tree (or struggle to figure out which branches went in which order on the artificial tree), you could smell the food your mother was cooking, and best of all looking under the tree on Christmas morning to see the presents that were bought for you! Those memories are wonderful, but some can look at those days as joys long gone by. Oh, those were the days when someone else took care of you, but now that responsibility is all on you and with it the nagging fear that perhaps you won’t be able to pull it off, that disaster is just around the corner. Now the eggnog makes sense. But perhaps that wasn’t your experience of the holidays. Perhaps what makes them painful to remember was the fact that there weren’t people caring for you when there should have been. The responsibilities of life were thrust on you very early, and now life is viewed through the lens of “I got myself this far, so I think I’ll make it the rest of the way.” This sense of self-sufficiency if it isn’t bravado, is simply the lack of realizing how delicate life can be. Psalm 146 has something to say to the both of us. Quite simply the Psalmist is telling us not to trust in people but to trust in God. What made the holidays so carefree when we were children is that we trusted the powerful people in our lives, and when those people were no longer in power, that simple trust has vanished. And in my short time in ministry, I’ve met a few self-sufficient people who suddenly were reminded how delicate they really are and thus lost that confidence. This Psalm, I trust, will help you regain that sense of childlike joy of this season, not because you are trusting in a new person (even if that person is yourself) but because you’ve got your eyes on Jesus. v 1 The Psalmist is emphasizing the theme of this Psalm which is obviously praise. He uses the covenant name of God, Yahweh showing that this praise is being offered up from the perspective of deep, abiding relationship. We can rejoice when a player we don't even know crosses the touchdown line. We go absolutely crazy! But now let's imagine that it is our own son or daughter making the game-winning play. We go absolutely insane! The action of praising is the same in kind, but it is vastly different in quality. This might be what is wrong with our praise today. We praise "God" like we would say, "Long live the King," but it is very different when the king also happens to be a great father. Do you praise God from the heart that knows, is assured, of God's favor to you? Do you worship Him as someone that you have a covenant with? The Psalmist does. You can as well. v 2 This relationship that we have with God is a love between essentially different beings. The Psalmist, while still praising God, looks to himself and declares that he will praise God for as long as he lives. This idea is repeated, emphasizing the finiteness of the Psalmist. The declaration isn't, like it is in marriage, "as long as we both shall live," because God isn't going to die. The Psalmist will, and so will everyone else that the Psalmist knows. Yet, there is a positive dimension to this as well. Ross points out that the Psalmist is going to praise God his whole life which means this commitment to praise goes beyond just happy emotions in the present (923). v 3-4 Here, the Psalmist points out that trusting in any other being is foolish. There is no salvation in a man. Even if that man is a powerful person, a prince, he can't provide salvation. I think this is something that we need reminding about now more than ever. In the Psalmist's day, powerful men had armies and access to food. That's not nothing, but compared to what is the case today, we have singular men that control nearly all aspects of our lives as we know them today. In our own country, we've seen the power of the executive order, one man making a decision that impacts literally hundreds of millions of people. Up in Canada, protestors found themselves without access to their banks. Speaking of banks, this power extends to the private sector, too. Do you know the names Ryan McInerney and Michael Miebach? They are the CEOs of Visa and Mastercard respectively. Their companies handle about 80% of all transactions of credit and debit cards. How about Tim Cook and Satya Nadella? They are the CEOs of Apple and Microsoft, basically the two major computer companies that control the software that runs 90% of the world's computers. My point here isn't to take a position on whether that's good or not, but the world that we live in depends on the networks that are built and maintained by a few. It is easier than ever to give praise and fear to tech geniuses like Musk or Jobs, because we see how their world impacts our lives. Mark Zuckerburg is making it possible for you to see me right now if you are watching on Facebook. If you are listening to me via podcast, you can thank Steve Jobs, because I am recording on my iPhone that he envisioned. Yet. Yet, when their breath departs, they all will return to the earth, and on that very day their plans will perish. Companies will go in different directions or implode entirely, new figures will be elected into office if that office is still there to occupy, pastors and preachers will die, and with them their plans. Apple is very different without Jobs at the helm. America can feel very different from president to president. So don't put your trust in them. We can be grateful for the good these people do, criticize the evil that the do, talk about safeguards to not let them run their sinful hearts wild with power, but please, don't put your trust in them. What does that look like? Well, don't let what they do change how you sleep at night. Don't let them rule your conversation, your thought life, your podcast listening, or your news watching. They won't last. vs 5-6 Who will? God will last. The God who was the hope of Jacob thousands of years ago is your hope today. That is you if you are trusting in the Lord you are blessed. Who is the Lord? Oh, He is the one who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever. You know, the one Who made all this possible. Every bit of technology is just rearranging the creation that God gave us. Computer chips don't just come out of thin air. In most basic terms, they come from the dust of the ground. God is so powerful, He can create something that grows crops and also can calculate space rocket trajectories when combined with other elements of God's creation. He is still in charge of those things! God holds together the blood cells of all of those powerful men I just mentioned. He actively maintains their heart beats, and will one day cause them to stop just like He will mine someday. We don’t need to fear or trust in them for salvation, for as Ross asks, “How could a man save anyone if he could die at any moment…” (923). v 7-9 That kind of power centralized in one person would normally scare us and did scare people who believed in a pagan system with many gods subject to the same flaws that we have, but God doesn't have those flaws! God executes justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, sets prisoners free, opens the eyes of the blind, and lifts up those who are bowed down. Do we not see this visually in Jesus' ministry, when God walked on the earth among and as one of us? When He cleared the temple, driving out the animals, He was clearing the way for the Gentiles, the sojourners to be able to worship. He fed the 5,000, freed the woman caught in adultery from stoning, opened the eyes of the blind, and raised the widow's son. He didn't just do these things physically, but does these things spiritually as well. And He does it still today, even though He doesn’t have to. God isn’t gracious because He can’t help Himself, but because He has in the past and promises to do so again, we can trust Him (Ross, 925). For example, in the late sixties, there was a proposal in a book called The Population Bomb to put sterilization drugs in the water to prevent populations from outpacing the food growth rate! Right about that time, we had an agricultural revolution that allowed for food to be grown to the point that now we are facing a crisis of people having TOO MUCH food. We live today in an era of God providing for us in way that would have been difficult for even my grandfather to imagine. And as far as bringing the wicked to ruin, God has been at work there, too. This is true of evil empires. The Assyrians once were carting off Israel and many other nations into its fold. Where are they now? How about the Babylonians? The Persians? The Romans? The Ottomans? The Nazis? The Soviets? All these wicked men who tried to burn the world down are now themselves on fire. "But why did it take so long?" you may ask. It’s a question that needs answering, because it deals with the reality that God doesn’t always present grace in the way that we want Him to, which usually means no suffering on our part and other wicked people quickly being stopped. So let’s give two answers to that: 1) God doesn't owe you a solution at all much less a quick one and 2) if God were to strike down evil people quickly, I would be dead before I finished this sermon. God gave even Hitler time to repent. God is more gracious than you or I am. If I were the almighty creator of the universe with my petty personality, it wouldn't have made it past the flood. But God keeps His promise to be gracious, and usually chooses to be gracious through us, His servants (Ross, 925). v 10 And that God, that God is the one who will reign forever. The Hebrew here could be translated in the present tense, meaning that God reigns now and forever into the future (Ross, 926-7). The best days of our experience with God's administration are ahead of us! They will be for our children and our grandchildren. I often hear this from my parents and from many of you who say something similar to, "Well, I'm old, so I won't see the decline of the world, but I worry about my children and grandchildren." Allow me to remind you of Who is the God of your children and grand children! Look at verse 10 again, "The Lord will reign forever, YOUR God, to ALL generations." The same God who has watched and reigned over your life will reign in your children's and grandchildren's lives. So don't despair! The God of Mrs. Clyde brought her through the Great Depression, World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, The Cold War, September 11th, the 2008 financial crisis, her widowhood, and most recently, the 2020 Pandemic, and He's still in charge to be Augie's God, too in all that he will face (and it has already been a lot, hasn't it?)! I could point to so many of you who have walked through personal crises that would crush people without the grace of God. So many of you who have lost spouses and children. Yet even those lost to us and not lost to God, which means they aren't even lost to us permanently. God is a God of the living (Matt. 22:32), the One who kills also makes alive, and the one who wounds, heals (Deuteronomy 32:39)! For those who are in Christ, even death cannot separate them from God's love and rule (Rom. 8:38-39)! God can make it so that the worst thing that we could ever imagine is just the thin doorway to eternity with God! So what should be our response? Praise. Worship in the midst of hardship, because the God Who keeps covenants is watching over you. Hardships will come, but they are temporary. And the day is coming when they will be no more. So what do we do now? In light of all that we have just said, is there any reason to fear how an election will turn out? No. Now, do elections have consequences, even consequences that can bring a lot of pain? Yes, of course, I'm not minimizing that, but I am wanting you to maximize your view of God's control over those. We act responsibly as citizens because that is one of our God-given duties to the world. We do our duty and then sleep well at night. God controls governments, and your own health. So trust in Him. Feel the sweetness of a child-like trust in their good father. Do you remember the days when your folks did all the worry and care? Or if you didn't, did you long for that? Well, you both can have it, either again or for the first time. And then, be that person for someone else. To borrow one last time from Ross, “The righteous…should demonstrate their love for [God] by emulating his faithfulness to the covenant, championing justice, feeding the hungry, bringing relief to those in bondage, and taking care of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. It remains true in the New Testament that God most often meets these needs through the ministry of his servants.” (927) God has done a lot to make that happen. In fact, that is what we are about to display in the Lord’s Supper here. That supper shows, as Ross put it, that “God is able and willing to meet all our needs.” (927). Willing! Even at the cost of His own Son. Have you put your trust in that God? And if you do, maybe you will see why the Psalmist is so eager to Praise the Lord.
0 Comments
Image by Albrecht Fietz
Have you ever kept a letter from someone that you love, even if that person is still with you? Or maybe you’ve saved voicemails or text message threads of the same. It is an strange thing that we would keep these messages when we still have a relationship with the real person, but then it isn’t. These messages that we have are moments where the other person has revealed something about themselves, and that act is what is special. I still have the first messages that Abby and I exchanged when we were dating because those messages revealed that budding love between the two of us. It was a witness to the relationship we already had that gave the place for those messages to be exchanged. Keeping that in mind will help you understand why Presbyterians get so excited about covenants in the Bible. We’re big on this! We name our churches, colleges, even children after this concept because a covenant is like a letter from God. A covenant reveals Who God is, what He is like, and most critically, how He works. Covenants are the first messages that God sends to His people, and in fact, covenants are how God gathers His people (Myers, 2). We are starting into the Christmas season, and that means the Hallmark movies begin at my house. While every Hallmark movie is basically the same—well, is the same— the favorite flavor of Hallmark Christmas movies in my house is the Royal Christmas genre. You’ve seen it. A handsome prince is supposed to marry the surprisingly indifferent princess, when the “plain” Christmas decorator from the small town with no royal blood comes to the castle, teaches the prince the vaguely “true” meaning of a winter holiday (usually the word “family” is involved), the prince falls in love, but they can’t marry because she isn’t royal until blah blah the prince finds a legal way to marry her, usually in the last three minutes of the film after she has gotten in the taxi to fly home. By the prince marrying her, he bridges the legal gap to make a relationship possible and makes her royal. Now, given that this is a popular film genre, we understand the idea of a relationship between people of unequal status. It should give us pause as to how we have a relationship with God. We know that we can’t just walk into a castle and demand to be married to one of the royal members of the house. The royals have to condescend as it were to us. And it is infinitely more so with God. God not only has to bridge the gap between, you know, Creator and creature, but also holy and sinner (Myers, 9-11). The way God bridges that gap is by making a promise to us. Those promises gather God’s people and reveal who He is at the same time. Today, we are going to look at one of those covenants. Today we are going to pick up where we left off last time in our two points: God provides parameters for people and God provides promises for people. As we pick up from verse 8, we begin to see the promises that God has actually already made to Noah and His family. Hang with me as we do a little mining here! God says that He is going to “establish” His covenant with Noah and his family, and that word is important. To establish a covenant means that there is already a covenant in existence, but now it is going to be confirmed. This is different than “cutting” or making a covenant (Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament). By God saying “establish” means that God has made a promise to Noah before, and that can be found back in chapter 6:18. There, God is establishing the Covenant with Noah that He will be saved from this flood. So, does this mean that Noah was undergoing some sort of trial period? In other words, did God decide that Noah was a good candidate for a covenant but needed to see how Noah would perform first? Does God make promises and then only after seeing some good response does He then confirm that covenant? In other words, how do God’s covenants work? These are important questions to think through. If God needs to see some proof of works, then Noah wouldn’t have been saved by grace. He would have gotten the covenant because he built a boat! Scarier still, if Noah got in by works, then he would be able to work (or sin) his way out of God’s promises. As we will see in the future, Noah doesn’t behave very well after the flood. The man gets drunk and acts lewdly. Believe it or not, the question affects more than Noah. If Noah can blow this covenant, then you and I are at risk. Look at verse 12. This covenant is for all future generations. When Adam broke his covenant, we all now are subject to death. If Noah breaks this covenant, are we all subject to flood forever? Thankfully, the answer is no. This is because Noah got into this covenant by grace. If we go back to chapter 6, we find that word “established” again. That means that there is a covenant promise made prior to chapter six that the Lord is going to confirm. Well, anywhere else in chapter six you look, we don’t see another covenant made with Noah. The only other covenant that God has made was all the way back in chapter 3, the Covenant of Grace (Myers, 131). Adam and Eve broke the Covenant of Works. God promised that if they wouldn’t eat of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they would live forever. That covenant had a condition on it, which they broke. Because of that, they were now subject to death, and since they represented us, we are all now subject to death. After that in chapter 3, God sets up a new covenant, one where everything is going to be set right. God promises to do that by ultimately preserving a line of people who would love God and oppose the line of the snake, culminating in Jesus, and for our purposes today, is found in Noah (Myers, 128-9). Noah found favor in the eyes of God because God was keeping His covenant to Adam and Eve and the rest of us. God was “establishing,” confirming that He was keeping the covenant of grace. Here stays the line opposed to the snake and it is running through Noah. Sounds good so far, but what is God promising through Noah? Is there anything essentially unique with this covenant? The first thing we notice is that this is a covenant with all people and animals. Everyone from Noah, his sons, and all future generations! That includes you! The promises and blessings made to Noah are being upheld for you! God is still giving the earth babies. New children are still being born everyday, and as we saw last week, is a sure sign of God’s blessing. This is a blessing that He gives even to people outside the Church! That also tells us that the responsibilities that we saw last week apply to them as well. This covenant draws the whole world into a community, a community that experiences blessings and responsibilities from God. Now, those blessings are very specific. This covenant doesn’t mean that the whole world is Christian, but it does mean that the world is spared from a very particular form of judgment: the flood. God is sparing the world from ever having that cataclysmic flood happen again. This is something that He would need to promise as I can imagine that every time the storm clouds gathered, humanity would wonder if they were about to be destroyed again. Beyond just saying that He wasn’t going to do that anymore, God gives us a sign. Think about that. It would be enough for God to simply say, “I said it, and I’ll stick with it.” He’s God, but He gives the world the picture of the rainbow in the sky. God doesn’t set it there so that He will remember (God doesn’t forget) but He is setting it there so that we don’t forget that God remembers. As one commentator notes: "A 'sign' points to something beyond itself and therefore requires interpretation, which we find here. Its importance lies in what it communicates and evokes, not the wonder itself" (Matthews, 411). The way we do this today is with wedding bands. On March 10th, 2018, I made promises, a covenant, before God and witnesses that I would be dedicated to Abby. As a visible sign of that covenant, I presented her with a ring, and she did the same thing. She made promises, entered into a covenant with me, and she gave me a wedding band. These are symbols and not the covenant itself, but they display the promise that we have made to each other. This communicates to the rest of the world that I intend to keep my promise, and everytime I look at it, I am reminded of the covenant that I am in. If my band were ever stolen, that wouldn’t mean that the covenant is broken or that my promises are void, but I would want to replace it as quickly as possible in order that I might be kind to my wife in declaring to the rest of the world and to her that I want to be reminded of this covenant I have made. We should feel the same way with God. When God has made a promise, that is enough, but God is kind enough to provide the sign. That’s not the only one that He has given to us either. God has also provided for us the Lord’s Supper, which we will have next week. It is enough that we have the Bible to tell us that Jesus died for our sins. But God has given to us a picture of that reality that we remind ourselves of every month. We hold the bread and juice in our hands to remind us that Jesus broke His body, spilled His blood for us. We eat it individually as a reminder that this promise applies directly to us, yet we eat it together because we are all a part of a family! We have similar workings in Baptism which show that sin is washed away. These sacraments are like looking at our wedding bands. Every time we do that, we are reminded that we have a relationship with our God and reminded what God did to make that relationship possible. When we break the bread and pour the juice, we see a picture of Jesus’ body and blood being poured out for us, and are by faith spiritually nourished by that. Let’s return now to our text in Genesis to take a closer look at this sign that God has given to the world. What does the rainbow do for us? It is a sign given to the entire world that God is holding back His judgment every time there is a reminder of what He did that first time the storm clouds gathered. I was talking to a pastoral colleague at Presbytery this week who was teaching through Genesis, and he had a very interesting point. He noticed the timing of the rainbow, it comes out after the storm is over as if to say, “I could have kept this rain coming. Judgment could have flooded out until the mountains were twenty-two feet deep in water, but I didn’t. Why? Because I’ve made a promise to you all, and here is your reminder of that.” There is more that God is doing with that. One commentator put it this way: "Each day that passes without God bringing history to close does not declare that God is unable to judge the wicked; it declares that God intends to do more than judge the wicked. He intends also to gather His people and give them new hearts" (Myers, 139-140). In other words, the rainbow says that there is still time to turn to Jesus, still time to be forgiven by God. But, time isn’t going to go on forever. As we see, God promises in Genesis 8:22, that as long as Earth shall last. The world is not going to last forever. Judgment will come! One scholar put it this way: "In Peter's reasoning, those who use the regularity of time as a reason to doubt God's final, covenantal judgment have forgotten the flood" (Myers, 145). Yet at the same time, those who are in Christ have something after that final judgment. As one of my seminary professors put it: "Believers attempt to live obedient to their covenant God, reminded every time they see a rainbow that divine wrath will give way to peace, for judgment is God's strange work (Isa. 28:21)" (Ross, 207). We can have confidence that God does not take His Son’s sacrifice lightly. When we come to the table, we are reminded that God has sworn on His Son’s blood to save us. He will deliver us. So what does that mean in the meantime? Well, if you are going through something difficult and feel that God has abandoned you or the world for that matter, look at the sign that God has given to you. God made a promise to the whole world, and He doesn’t take promises lightly. Yes, hard times come, but so does deliverance (Ross, 206). 
Image by Anja
When I was growing up, I remember seeing a brand that was outdoors related that had little stickers that said, “Life is good.” It depicted little stick figures relaxing in hammocks or driving little Jeeps. We’ve often used the phrase ourselves after a great meal, or sitting on the back porch watching our kids play in the yard. There’s nothing wrong with that at all; life is good. But when the hammock isn’t out, or when life is hard, another common phrase in our fallen world, the statement “Life is good” can feel glib or in really dark places, can feel like a lie. That’s where this passage comes in to help us. This passage tells us that not only is life good and worthy of preservation, life is precious because it is made in the image of God. Life is good, and because it is, it has real demands, actual, personal responsibilities on how we treat it. Questions 135-136 of the Larger Catechism go into great detail that the command “you shall not murder” goes way beyond just not killing people, but goes into preserving life as well. In fact, in 136, it sees that the sins this commandment forbids goes all the way down to “desire of revenge; all excessive passions, distracting cares; immoderate use of meat, drink, labor, and recreations; provoking words, oppression, quarreling, striking, wounding, and whatsoever else tends to the destruction of the life of any.” This passage has a lot to say to us today! God provides parameters for people Our passage begins with a blessing from God. This blessing is going to be the fact that they will be able to be fruitful and multiply on the face of the earth. Seeing children as a divine blessing is something that one scholar highlights in this way: "Children are the universal evidence of the Lord's creation 'blessing,' who are not to be disparaged nor exploited but celebrated by responsible parenting and societal protection" (Matthews, 399). In other words, we need to see children the way God sees them, the way Jesus sees them in the New Testament as people who were worth His time. As we go on in our verses, we will see that God is going to lay down a lot of parameters for the protection and respect to all life, human and otherwise. God goes on to tell us that all animal life is given to humanity for food, hence the fact that all the animals now run away from us! We’ve gone from protectors and providers in the garden to predators in the post-flood world. Though the post-flood world was allowed to eat meat, God still puts a parameter around it. We can’t eat it in any old way that we want to. God tells them that they are not able to eat the meat with the blood still in it, blood being a symbol of life, something that comes from God. Everytime human beings are to eat meat, they have to pour out the blood in recognition that life is special and belongs to God. Side note: Does this mean we can’t eat medium rare steak? Meat-eaters, rejoice! The answer is no. In short, the red stuff you see coming out of a properly prepared steak actually isn’t blood. It is a protein called myoglobin in animals that turns red when exposed to air. The blood is drained in modern butchering techniques, so go ahead and make your steak medium rare. Be good Presbyterians! Now, since even animal life is precious, one could only imagine what is in place to honor human life, and indeed, that is what we find in verses 5-6. Here, we see God institute capital punishment for murder. If you kill someone (or even if an animal does so as we see in Exodus 21:28), God will require all of your blood as the penalty. Now, this is not meant to be a license for personal vengeance, as we see in Romans 13, that it is the government’s job to do. We don’t get to kill people back ourselves. They are going to have to go through the justice system as established by our government. Now, it is worth spelling out what the government is doing by taking on this responsibility. All told, the government is “…executing God's vengeance." (Matthews, 405). They are meant to be carrying out what God would do in light of these verses. That is an enormous responsibility, and one that cannot be entered into lightly. And just because we here in this building aren’t sitting on the bench, doesn’t mean we don’t have responsibilities, indeed, in our country, direct responsibilities. Our most basic duty is to pray for those in our justice system. Our second duty is to be informed and elect our rulers well. Our government (at least as originally envisioned) is for the people, by the people. In other words, as one podcast I listened to this week put it, the government is us. We elect representatives to act on our behalf. So we must choose wisely whom we are going to have representing us as they execute the vengeance of God and pray for them regularly. It is also worth noting why human life is getting this kind of treatment. Only human life is made in the image of God, so as one scholar noted, “"First and foremost, the taking of human life is offense against God;" (Matthews, 403). The image of God is what makes taking human life different from animal life. Life in all its forms is precious because it is from God, but human life is made in God’s image. There is a special stamp put on by God on human life. That is why the intentional killing of it demands the ultimate response. Why is this important for us to realize and reflect on? One doesn’t have to murder someone to have this verse apply. Anytime we hurt, belittle, or reduce someone we sin against the image of God. I have seen myself do this in traffic. Instead of seeing the person in front of me who forgot to use their blinker as someone who bears God’s image, I reduce them down to an inconvenience to me. Instead of seeing them the way that God sees them, I filter all people down to how they relate to me, how I see them. Often I act as if I am the only one made in the image of God with everyone else around me as either advantages or disadvantages to me. Do you not do the same? Perfectly natural for a sinful human being, but this is not the way that God calls us to act. We are called to something far more profound.This isn’t just how we aren’t supposed to act, but governs how we are supposed to act. One scholar pulls this out of the Hebrew, "Obscured by the modern rendering 'fellow man'...is the Hebrew idiom, 'His brother,' [at the end of verse 5] which possesses a double entendre. Here it echos the first human murder, the fratricide of Cain and Abel, 'his brother' (4:2,8). 'Am I my brother's keeper?' argues Cain...Our passage answers explicitly 'yes.'" (Matthews, 404). Do you hear what he is saying? When someone is murdered by a human being, they are murdered by their brother, and we, as fellow brothers and sisters, need to take care of that. We gotta get involved because the image of God has been insulted. The blood on the ground cries out for justice, and this needs to be dealt with carefully, like we are acting on behalf of God because we are. We are called to care because those are our brothers and sisters. This is why Christians have gotten so involved in the abortion tragedy that is in our country, and I’m going to tell you that the fight is going to extend to adults as well. As I said before, it isn’t just the murder of the image of God, like what we see in abortion, that demands our attention. Things that mar the image of God need our focus as well, and that is found in the trans movement. In the trans movement that we see in our country, there is an assault on the image of God. The trans movement, which is part of a much larger movement called transhumanism, is basically saying that our bodies don’t matter. In this passage, God says that they do. We were made in the image of God, and that includes our bodies. We are not souls zipped up into an “earth suit” that we will one day take off and be free of forever. Paul talks about in Romans 8:23 longing and waiting for the redemption of our bodies. In 2 Corinthians 5:1-5, we see the same hope that our bodies will be renewed and made immortal. Paul is being explicit that the hope is not to be unclothed, but to be further clothed. The goal is not to be rid of the body but to have our bodies redeemed, made immortal, to have and to hold forever! This shows us that God is very concerned about our embodiedness as it really does make us who we are, not just what we have. One secular writer, Mary Harrington, talks about how the trans movement sees our bodies, in a phrase that I desperately wish that I thought of, Meat Lego. We are not meat legos! We are not made of a bunch of different pieces that we can take off and replace. We are a unified whole, body and soul, in the image of God. We care for our bodies. Mary also looked at how we view medicine as going from repairing what was broken to breaking what was perfectly fine (you can listen to the whole podcast here). Hear me when I say that repairing that which is physically or mentally broken is fine. Jesus did that. Having a hip replacement to repair the hip that God gave you that wore out due to our fallen world is a blessing to rejoice in. Again, Jesus restored limbs to their proper function (Mark 3:1-6) backs to their proper function (Luke 13:10-17), wombs to their proper function (1 Sam. 1:1-20; Luke 8:43-48). Restoring that which is lost or repairing that which didn’t form correctly is one thing. But it is quite another to try to fix a mental issue like gender dysphoria with the breaking of a perfectly functional body. In the last 50 years, our culture has lied to us in both directions of what it meant to be in the image of God as body and soul. The abortion movement told us that it was just a body, with no soul, and the trans movement has told us that you are just a soul with no importance to your body. Might as well not have one. This passage tells us, no, soul and blood (i.e. body) are precious and are not to be spilled. To do so is to neglect our brothers and sisters and cause offense against God. So what do we do? One, we need to know what passages like this say to teach the next generations. Even as late as my generation grew up to have somewhat instinctually known that our body is important, but we haven’t really had to know why. We do now. My generation is going to be carrying on this fight that is coming for our kids. Our youth group is dealing with this right now. Those kids in the nursery right now are going to be the ones dealing with the aftermath of this. All of them are looking to us to guide them. It’s time to get serious about knowing what God says. 60 million have died since 1973 because our culture lost sight of God’s view of the soul. Now, around 10,000 people a year are changing their bodies permanently (source) because we’ve lost sight of God’s view of the body. And, yes, it’s happening to young people, too. Knowing John 3:16 and the Lord’s prayer doesn’t cut it. It never really did. God gave us the whole book for a reason, and we’ve got to know it. So that’s the first thing, we’ve got to know what God says. We’ve got to prepare our minds. The second thing we need to prepare is our hearts. I’m going to say that we are going to have a crisis on our hands in about ten years. A crisis of people who have made permanent changes to their body and now feel like nothing. It is already happening in Europe, and some individual stories here and there are popping up in this country. Once the culture has swallowed up people’s money and spat out the person, we have the opportunity to say to them, as Rosarria Butterfield put it, “God doesn’t throw people away. The culture did that to you, but we won’t. Yes, you bear the marks of the sin of envy on your body, but one day Jesus is going to take those away.” We can tell them that Jesus cares about their bodies and will raise them up and be restored. All reference to sin will be erased in the new world, even those that we have put on ourselves. God came to earth in a body. Lived in a body. Died in a body. Raised in a body. And most importantly, ascended into heaven with a body, where even now He sits at the right hand of God overseeing the redemption of your body and soul. That’s the hope that we hold out. And do you know what we can look to in order to remind ourselves of that? The rainbow. We’ll cover this more next time, but the rainbow is a sign to us that God keeps His promises. He is giving us time and mercy. One day all will be restored. One day, all of God’s enemies will be destroyed. And we will have peace. So what do we take from this? God cares about life, and so should we. God gave us bodies that we need to respect and take care of because they, together with our soul, make us who we are. Yes, they break down. Yes, even some of our children and grandchildren break them on purpose, but even then they are not beyond the redemption of God. Approach this issue with that in mind. Tell people the truth. Don’t live by lies. But don’t throw anyone away, because God doesn’t. 
Image by Public Co
Our world is under the judgment of God today. It is not just that the world is doing things that will bring judgment, the things that they are doing ARE the judgment. I don’t have to describe to you what you see on the nightly news about the sexual revolution and transgenderism. I don’t have to rehearse the images that you’ve seen coming out of the various wars around the world. You all see these things plainly every day. And while there will come a day when there will be a great judgment over the whole planet, as we will see in a minute, we already have the seeds of that right in front of us. In Romans 1, we see God hand over people to their sin as part of their judgment. Essentially, God would be saying, “Do you want to bend nature and rebel against God’s rule for marriage and intimacy? Ok, let’s see you do that. Let’s see how far that can take you.” We are seeing this play out in hatred leading to war. We are seeing this play out in apathy to the Bible and faithful living. We are seeing the consequences of God handing our world over to what it wants. Now admittedly, that seems a little scary, doesn’t it? I mean, we have to go along for the ride! Yes, we will be spared ultimate judgment, but boy, it doesn’t look like things are going to be all that smooth leading up to that either. What do we do? How do we react to seeing the world handed over to the sin that it wants and us having to suffer the consequences of that? Well, this passage is going to tell us how to do that. Noah had to literally go along for the ride of judgment on the Earth. Noah didn’t like anything that was going on in the world, yet a planetary flood was coming to the planet Noah lived on. This was going to make an impact on his life. How did Noah react to being in the midst of God’s judgment? Well, he hoped only in God and responded in worship. Coincidentally, those are the main points for today: God is your only hope in the midst of judgment and The proper response to judgment is worship. God is your only hope in the midst of judgment We begin with a final reminder of Noah’s character. The grace that God has given to Noah has been very evident in Noah’s obedience to God (Belcher, 95). It is very similar to Abraham being obedient to God as an expression of his faith in Him (Romans 4). Noah has finished construction, so now his family and the animals are all getting on the boat. Here, there is an expansion of the number of animals that are getting on the boat. We’ve all heard that it was two by two, because that was what was in chapter 6. Here we are given an additional detail that God also wants Noah to bring in seven pairs of clean animals and just one pair of unclean animals. To the original audience, Jews freshly freed from Egypt and who have just been given a list of animals that they can safely eat and offer as sacrifices, I’ll bet this came as a relief. God is providing for there to be more animals that can be eaten and sacrificed for sin. There are also seven pairs of birds that are to be brought in, especially kind given that the dove was the offering of the poor person in the Old Testament (Matthews, 388). God was looking out for the least of these all the way back in the flood. God is always the hope. Even when, as that great philosophical school, REM, said, it's the end of the world as we know it, yet we truly can feel fine because God is setting things up to be ready for future sacrifices for sin, the ability to repair the relationship with God in future centuries, even amongst the poor. We get this message twice as it repeats to us that God has all the animals needed and Noah and his family safely put into the ark. Remember how I said that Genesis slows down when it wants to show us something. People can think that ancient writers were too dumb to notice that they already wrote something down and so this addition is some sort of other writer, wrongly detailing things. That is just a surface reading of the text. If this were a movie, we would be seeing the same scene from two different angles because the Director wants us to really notice what is going on here. They are getting into the boat; they are going to be safe. They have been called into the boat, as Matthew Henry says, "...like that of a tender father to his children to come in-doors when he sees night or a storm coming." And then it culminates in the Lord, the covenant name of God, shutting the door. In the end, it all comes down to God’s gracious mercy. God shuts the door and keeps it closed during what is about to happen. He honors the covenant He sets which He still does. This is why we keep our eyes on Him during times of judgment like we are experiencing now. When Noah turns 600, in fact, the second month of the year, and in fact the 17th day of that month, the flood comes. "Unlike the Mesopotamian flood stories, the Biblical account sets the event in a historical framework. For the author of Genesis the flood event is as real as the birth of Abraham" (Matthews, 376). And what a flood it is. There is water coming from above and below across the whole earth. The fountains of the deep “break forth” a term that calls to mind a very violent event (Belcher, 95), and water is coming down like never before. But in the midst of that, the ark is lifted up. Again, from Matthew Henry, "When the flood thus increased, Noah’s ark was lifted up, and the waters which broke down every thing else, bore up the ark. That which to unbelievers betokens death unto death, to the faithful betokens life unto life." In other words, God is doing a lot of things in the midst of trying times. That which crushes God’s enemies, in due time, will deliver the righteous. But God’s enemies are, indeed, crushed. The waters spread all over the earth, covering even the highest mountain by twenty feet or so. That’s total destruction just as God said there would be. We do well to meditate on this. God always comes through on His promises, and ultimately that includes promises of judgment. Judgment is often delayed, but it is never denied, as I believe R.C. Sproul said. Sin is going to have consequences, and they don’t have to be planetary for them to be destructive to us. Even one sin can be destructive to us. Thomas Watson meditates on that for us, tolerating one sin in our lives is like missing just one piece of armor, or having just one gap in the safety fence, or hiding one rebel to the crown in your house, or just having one drop of poison in the cup. We need to believe God that these sins will hurt us. Can even sin separate one who is truly united to Christ? No, but it can sure hurt one’s effectiveness for Christ. But now, we turn to chapter 8, and we read the most comforting words, “God remembered.” The word “remembered” here doesn’t mean that God forgot about Noah and then suddenly recalled him to His mind. No, this is covenant language (Matthews, 382). When you see “God remembered” it means that God is about to act on a previous agreement. God knows that He has made a covenant, and He is about to come through on His terms. God begins the process of drying out the earth, and does so actively. He sends a wind to move the waters. Does this sound familiar? It turns out that the word for wind is the same for Spirit. Now the wind, the Spirit, the Ruah, is hovering over the waters again, separating the dry land from the water (Belcher, 96). The world is being recreated. But it is a process. The water goes down slowly but surely allowing the ark to rest on the mountains of Arat. Quick side note here: Every few years, news stories go around wondering if we have found the ark itself or at least found this very location. I might not have brought this up, but, as providence would have it, there was a fresh round of stories this week about this again. This wasn’t Answers in Genesis, but Popular Mechanics writing about possible discoveries of human activity, marine materials and seafood in this region. People have made claims like this as far back as the early 1900s, and the results are always inconclusive. Would it be cool to know precisely where the ark landed? Of course! Is it necessary for us to find this ark for us to believe that the Bible is true? No. One day the scientists will climb up the mountain of truth to find the theologians already there. Anyway, the ark comes to rest on the mountain, slowly the waters recede, and the animals are let out to repopulate the earth. The original command of God is set out to cover the earth with life. One scholar comments, “...catastrophe does not interrupt God's desire to bless the world" (Ross, 195). Even God’s own punishment does not take out His desire to bring goodness. Never think that because God is taking you through something hard means that He is out to get you, that you have somehow used up all of God’s goodness, and now all He has is hardship for you. No, as Matthew Henry so eloquently put it, "The same hand that brings the desolation, must bring the deliverance; to that hand, therefore, we must ever look." When the diagnosis is given, when the family member dies, I mean the real hard stuff in life comes, look to Christ. Deliverance is coming, my flock. Say with the Psalmist, “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” Your help comes from the One who also recreated the Earth. The one who flooded also dried. He can do that for you, too. It might take a while. God does things gradually for us so that we stay grateful for the small things (Matthew Henry). And there is one thing that we can always do in response to even cataclysmic judgment: worship. The proper response to judgment is worship. When the floodwaters come down, the first thing that Noah does is build an altar, and puts those clean animals to their use. He offers a burnt offering to God. What does this mean? Ross explains, "The whole burnt offering represented the worshiper's total surrender and dedication to the Lord, and the expression of the Lord smelling the sweet fragrance represented God's acceptance." (197) Nothing is being held back from either party. Noah isn’t getting to eat of that sacrifice, it is totally given to God, and God in His graciousness, accepts that offering. Listen to what God says about that. He is never going to flood or curse the earth again. The word “curse” is a different word than what we saw in chapter 3. So God isn’t lifting Adam’s curse on the ground (after all, Paul mentions it in Romans 8:22), but He isn’t going to lay on anything else to it like the flood. But God goes on to say that man is still sinful "...meaning that despite warrant for another judgment God will exercise clemency." (Matthew, 395). We have deserved a planet-wide flood, but God doesn’t require that again in flood form. He will judge the Earth again in the last day, and this is hinted at in the last verse, “as long as the earth remains.” As Matthews comments, “This shows a permanency for the world, but it also infers that the present heavens and earth will someday cease" (397). But I don’t think that this is the most impressive thing that we see in the Bible here. It is not that God spares the world, but I think our main takeaway as New Testament Christians, is Who does the Lord crush? He doesn’t destroy the world, because He is going to offer up His own Son in its place. For you! He hasn’t crushed our world, our planet, because the Father made an agreement with His Son to satisfy the calls of God’s justice. The Son sacrificed, the Father sacrificed to make your salvation possible. A worldwide flood brings justice, but it doesn’t bring justification. Here the Son of God, Jesus Christ volunteers to take all the wrath that was to be poured out onto a still sinful world on to Himself. And do you know what He was doing during all of that? I heard this from a preacher named Neil Stewart probably a decade ago now and have never forgotten, Jesus is singing Psalm 22. Get this, in the midst of judgment, Jesus was WORSHIPING the Father. That’s your Savior! A Savior who in the midst of pain, suffering, and death that belonged to OTHERS, belonged to you and me, worships God. Can we not do the same? Yes, the world is terrifying. God’s judgment tends to be like that. But the hand that crushes is the hand that cures. The God who is allowing the world to spin seemingly out of control is the same God who will give up His Son to one day make it right. So if you are not taking God up on His offer of salvation, what is holding you back? Come to ark. Flee the judgment. Leave your sins behind you and embrace a God who loves you so much that He made a way at great cost to Himself to rescue you. And if you are in Christ and enduring a world that is in crisis, remember your Jesus. Remember your Jesus who worships in the midst of pain, and worship Him. One day deliverance is coming and is in progress even now. No matter what you are facing, God can turn it for good. The flood waters make take a long time to go down. It may take your whole life. But God will dry out your world. Keep praying. Stay close to God. And one day, God is going to call you out of that ark, and into a new world where there will be no more pain or judgment. |
AuthorThis is where our Pastor posts weekly sermon manuscripts and other writings. Archives
July 2024
Categories |
RSS Feed