He drew attention to what happened on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Our shame and our guilt are addressed because he dies in our place. (Genesis 1:26–2:3). What do you expect Jesus to be? Maybe he can come out of the tomb. Remember that this nation is your people.” (Exodus 33:12–13). He covers them with something more durable but at the price of an animal that sheds it blood and is slain. For if indeed your dear Son, the God-man, rose from the dead, then everything is changed. Does he really think that Jesus is seriously suggesting that you have to crawl back into your mummy’s tummy physically and start all over again? In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”, When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from observing the law. He’s also the God who does not leave the guilty unpunished. He was not going to have an easy faith, just believing somebody else’s account. This is not an easy topic, but they have to be said. Suddenly it dawned on me about November that he had never read the Christian Bible. (Romans 3:27). How shall we think of the relationship between God and human beings? But the ancient Israelites were not like that. How can God offer a sacrifice that propitiates himself? Help us to see that the terrors of the world, the threats and torments offered often enough across history by the world, are nothing compared to the wrath of the Lamb. He’s going to do the job himself. But Matthew knows that he could get down. Jesus on that cross by his death provided the means by which we have new birth. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. “Created”? You’re following either one of these ladies or the other. There was an otherness right within God himself. So while the opening chapters insist that human beings, male and female, were equally made in the image of God, they also insist that the woman was made as a helper. But that doesn’t mean that you deny the existence and power of wind. He begins with a question: “Did God really say that? Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the components that have God’s image stamped on them. In the seventeenth century, the great thinker Pascal wrote, “What sort of freak then is man? It is what God has ordained through his Son, this lion-lamb, to pay the price of sin, to take on the effects of the curse, to release his people, to gather and transform men and women from every tongue and tribe and tongue and nation. He didn’t stop and ask me questions. About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). Now God is telling him to go to what would eventually become the land of Israel. (Genesis 17:23). There is no hint of any of this. We meet not in some garden of wax fruit and painted leaves that lies east of Eden but after the fall, after many, many deaths, now you understand the plotline of the whole Bible. I will proclaim my name, the Lord (Yahweh) in your presence. What’s going on? Open our eyes, Lord God, that we may see your sovereign independence, your glory, your patience with us so that we are not destroyed, the way you took time across countless generations to show what a gracious sovereign God you are until in the fullness of time you sent your own Son to be the lamb of God who really does take away our sin. Even those who were atheists were, shall I say, Christian atheists. Do you think there are going to be little signs posted here or there saying, “You shall not murder” or “You shall not commit adultery”? It becomes a kind of master-concept that is filled in as you go along. You get in a hospital, and I go and visit you two days from now. I will obey you.” For all the failures in Abraham’s life and in your life and mine, God provides the sacrificial lamb. But now you can nail them down: different colors, different senses of humor, different languages, different ethnicities. Moses discerns what it is: “It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear” (Exodus 32:18). Somebody else should go. . For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. But although the word faith is used in a variety of ways in the Bible, not once is it ever used that way. Certainly the Bible has all kinds of pretty condemning things to say about horizontal evils, that is, evils among ourselves. “I’m going to build a house for you. But that’s not the way it is with God. He is the temple of the living God. That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. He’s the eternal subject. We’re not convinced that this God is so transcendent an other; we would like some image that portrays him. We have all received a grace in place of a grace already given. It’s the book. (Revelation 22:4–5). God is the kind of God who pursues us and therefore we close with Christ. And that’s how you find them if you have not become familiar with handling the Bible in the past. In a few moments we are going to look at Romans 3:21–26. That is, he has no cause; he just is. On top of this box in the Most Holy Place something takes place once a year. She comes to know it by experience. But, of course, if you hold that view, then you’re holding that that perspective is true. Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people. They have this child named Isaac. He is there with God in the beginning. There’s a moral dimension to it all. No one has seen God at any time, but we have seen Jesus. “Jesus is saying something deep again, very enigmatic.” But then John comments, “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. This is another way of saying that the exercise of his sovereignty covers absolutely every domain. The disciples saw that it was saying something about who Jesus was; they saw his glory. Granted the tension that sweeps right through the whole Bible, this is what we need: In other words the Bible’s prospect is not just that we make a decision for Jesus and lives happy lives. There’s only one other possible way. Unless you love the brother and sisters, you just aren’t a Christian. And now what does Nicodemus see? That is to say, the God they disbelieved in was the God of the Bible. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. This does not mean the kind of cringing fear that a whipped cur has when you pick up a newspaper, knowing that you’re an arbitrary and cruel master who gets some sort of cheap glee out of scaring the poor little thing to death. He must be coming along to offer his Son to expiate, to cancel, sin. It includes them both. The passage to which Jesus is referring, which of course Nicodemus would have picked up like that because he knew his Old Testament, is found in the fourth book of the Bible: Numbers. The sacred meeting-place. We divide the passage in to. If justice is to be done, you must find me innocent. Instead of fostering freedom, they merely engender constraint. By his magnificence the clouds run hither and thither. And he also comes to his own covenant people with judgment. It is excluded. The light gives us light and life. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Psalm 51:3–4). One of the best brief responses to it I have seen is by John Piper, who says. There’s a wonderful poem by Francis Thompson that talks about God as if he were the hound of heaven, chasing him down. This is so out of line with contemporary self-perception that when you read some of what Paul says without developing a feel for the whole storyline to this point it just seems over-the-top. Provided you’re good enough, you’ll get married happily. Is that the message we are to learn? In that sense we are already under God’s judgment. It is a personal, subjective, religious choice. It’s not as if God gets to Thursday afternoon and starts saying, “Oh boy, I can hardly wait until Sunday when they crack out those guitars again. The man had just gone to meet his Maker, and his last words for us at the funeral were scoring points on people who didn’t like him, still thinking on a horizontal level. That is why in the next two sections we will focus on “The God Who Loves” and then “The God Who Dies—and Lives.”, TNIV: “And I will put my Spirit in you” (Ezekiel 36:27a). God transcends it all. Sometimes when stories are told they get grist of the thing out there, but they may be sufficiently symbol-laden that you have to work your way through things. It is so hard to imagine. Now he wanted the Jews’ forgiveness. He was twice as old as I was. The task is going to be assigned to David’s son King Solomon, but God will take the initiative (2 Samuel 7:8–11). The question is “What is this eternal gospel?” There are two views: (A) One group says that “the eternal gospel” in verse 6 is given its content in verse 7. People are saying, “Hush, hush, hush, the master is preaching. They are listed for us in the next verses. Some see this as a literary device: creation week is a creation week alright, but it is symbol-laden and full of other things rather than describing a literal week. That’s not just bad timing. But you’ll catch the thrust of it in any case: Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people. God takes the initiative in Genesis 22 to provide a lamb. Now light has some sort of overtone of revelation or truth—light that is revealed. But then as the years go by and the moral tide swings up and down, it is horrendous to see how much damage and destruction are done, and God still is forbearing because he promises to keep his covenant. Hallelujah, what a Savior!” It is appropriate to speak of the God who dies. (Ephesians 5:5). So here is a psalm of huge intensity as a believer looks at how God has helped him and looks to the way he’s going to need God’s help in the future. You’ve won. On the other hand, he is said to be the God who does not leave the guilty unpunished. . It’s still in a metaphor of this tree, which prospers even when there’s heat and blight and the like because it’s well-watered; it is always evergreen. And that’s the way it is once you and I become a disciple of Jesus, that is, it changes us from within so that our moral categories change. Because of Jesus’ death, because of his willingness to stay there, in the very next verse, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51), the veil of the temple that set off the very presence of God from the rest of the people. Some did receive him; they believed in his name. We can pick up only a small part of them, but they are wonderful. It’s a bloody mess. Another century-and-a-half and the Davidic dynasty itself is so corroded and corrupted despite times of revival and renewal that at the beginning of the sixth century (about 587 BC), it shut down. Name change? “God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind” (Genesis 1:21). How shall we understand this chapter? It’s a plain, flat-out miraculous solution as the story unfolds. The most offended parties of the Holocaust are dead. When we’re told, “I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and hers,” this does not mean that all women will hate snakes. Carson. In other words the source comes from the parents. We sometimes call it the Mosaic Covenant. (Psalm 40:1–3). And they really have different weight. Recently, of course, the media have focused on the fresh literary adventures of people like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others. “I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes and that when I looked at the enemy officers and guards who had starved and beaten my companions and me so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity.” He survived, and dedicated his life to missionary work in Japan. In due course he shows what good law should be, how there needs to be sacrifice for sin. Hail, King Jesus. Pretty soon they will be offering their children to Moloch, the god that we described last night. Yet he has the cheek to say, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” At the deepest level it is exactly the truth. There are a lot of psychologists who use the love of God in exactly that way. It is a symbol for the spirit of godlessness that in every age lives in those who worship anything but the Creator. That was their light. The Lord, whose name is jealous. In fact, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus can use that fact to say, “If God can send his Son and his rain upon the just and the unjust, then you shouldn’t make all these fine, fine, fine distinctions about who’s your friend and who’s your enemy and only love your friends and hate your enemies.” So there is a sense in which God’s love can extend so generously to friend and foe alike. He did not want to be duped. This is God graciously, sovereignly promising something. The Bible doesn’t run along those lines. In the next chapter, we’ll be introduced to this chap Abraham, who is told to introduce circumcision to the men in his family and clan. How do such people get restored to God? So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. Even the comics pick it up and picture her saying, “We are not amused.” It could be conceivably a royal reference, a king of royal editorial “we.” But it is striking that it’s introduced here when human beings are made and that it goes on not only to speak of the first person plural when God says “Let us” but “in our image, in our likeness.” You can’t build too much on that yet. We must have God. As for manipulating you, it is manipulating you only if it is not true. We went here and there, and eventually we went to one of our parliament buildings. . If he went with him anymore, there sin in proximity to his transcendence and holiness would simply mean that he would end up destroying them. He has the legal right to the throne. The stories are told in many different ways. I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut off all your enemies from before you. Adam and Eve knew this kind of intimate connection with God their maker in unsurpassed joy and the most intimate communion, and they delighted in it. From the Bible’s point of view, meaning in life is bound up with the fact that we were made by God and for God in his image with an eternal destiny. Then the Most Holy Place, where only the high priest could enter once a year, is exposed. What love does Jesus show? (Prices may vary for AK and HI.). Indeed, “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Here is the big ploy, the total temptation: the heart of the vicious deceitfulness in what the serpent promises is partly true and totally false. People don’t want to be exposed to that kind of light. I can’t imagine heaven without you.” Is that what he’s saying? Indeed, John the Baptist bore witness to him (John 1:15). But instead . Then he was genuinely converted, and his life changed. Saving in Matthew’s Gospel means saving from sin: from its guilt, consequences, eternal effects, effects and power in this life. Yet this is not simply a truth in the public arena of history to be absorbed quickly and then passed by one side. There was an anticipation that eventually great David’s greater son would come and introduce the kingdom alright. (3) The last thing to understand from this passage: “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:16). Jesus says to one of his own followers, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? But, thanks to being introduced to Francis Schaeffer's work from a pulpit - I was fortunate. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. That’s where you go. (Romans 3:29–30). (Psalm 19:1–6). And if the judge starts talking that way, he will be thrown off the bench. In that old pagan way of looking at things, I the worshipper offer a propitiating sacrifice to the gods. Be pleased to save me, Lord; come quickly, Lord, to help me. I make your name great. Then John adds, “Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given” (John 1:16). . He’s sovereign over the whole lot. We’re back in the Bible’s storyline. We’ll discover here in a moment, “God so loved the world.”, Sometimes God’s love is elective. The twelve months remind us of the twelve tribes (one more time) and of the twelve apostles: all the people of God. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. Instead of reading the section right through, I’ll read it section by section as we go along. In fact, it is going to be built in the next generation. Jesus was a kind of itinerant teacher from the boonies in Galilee with a funny accent and all that, whereas here was Nicodemus himself, the Regius Professor of Divinity. If you want to see the full measure of God’s love, watch Jesus. Right toward the beginning of the book is a proverb that recurs in a variety of ways: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Proverbs 1:7). In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. In the eighteenth century there was a very famous preacher (probably the most famous preacher in the Western world at the time) named George Whitefield. That’s why Barna’s interpretation is so abysmally off-base: “somebody’s made a commitment to Jesus.” La-dee-dah. But the fact that he puts these human beings, this man and this woman, in charge over the rest of the created order—not to rape it or merely to exploit it or to become economically selfish but to be God’s own stewards over the good world that God has made—really makes us (I don’t know really what else to call it) vice-regents. There were a lot of fat cats on that boat: John Jacob Astor was there, the Bill Gates of 1912, the richest man. One writer has entitled his book The Selfish Gene, in which he argues that because of the way we have developed along evolutionary lines, we have genes that protect us. “I am who I am. (McGill had a very fine Islamic institute at the time.) We weren’t getting anywhere. He’s already favorable. In other words, Paul is not concerned to have us legally acquitted alone. We’re not God. Them away be evil ” ( Matthew 22:37, 39 ) you provide solution. Theme of rest again: rest from their seed will come from you more debate going on for century-and-a-half... 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