Hope (Week before Christmas)

Last week we got learn from Jesus as He taught the parable of the Sower. We saw in His parable how the Sower is sowing seeds, or God’s word, across the hearts of people and these hearts are reflected by the different types of ground that Jesus spoke of. Some hearts are hardened and completely opposed to God. Some hearts are still full of rocks, which is like the hardness is starting to break but there are still too many things blocking the way. Some hearts are full of weeds, or full of the things of the world, of money, of materialism, or just full of so many other things that there’s no room or time to grow with Jesus. And finally, some hearts are good ground, ready to be planted, and grow, and produce fruit. But then there’s a cycle to this and that good ground grows up to be another Sower who is sowing God’s word into the hearts of other people looking for more good ground and growing the Kingdom of God.

 

If our heart is anything besides that good ground, I trust that God can break up the ground and take out the rocks and pull all the weeds to get us to that place where we can grow in Him. Because we should absolutely want that.

 

But that’s where we were at last week and starting this week, we are going to take a little break from our path straight through the Gospel of Matthew. At least for this week, next week, and possibly a third week, but we’ll see.

 

So instead of continuing on in Matthew 13 I wanted to use today as kind of a lead into next week’s Christmas service. Today I want to take a step back and see a little bit of the big picture of Bible history that led to the moment that Jesus physically arrived on this Earth. The moment that we celebrate as Christmas.

 

So, for this big picture, where do we start? Where is the first real mention of the coming of Jesus?

 

It’s actually all the way back in Genesis chapter 3. I want to head over there together, and we’ll read from it in just a minute.

 

But Genesis one and two contain the story of God’s creation of everything. And after everything is made, God says that it is good, and then God rests. But we get to see the first people that God made, and those people were Adam and Eve. God put Adam and Eve into this incredible garden, the garden of Eden. It had everything that they could ever need, and God gave them the task to help take care of His garden. But as they are getting started with that, God tells them that they can have anything in the garden, anything at all, except for the fruit of one tree. There is a tree called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and God told them that if they eat from this tree that they are going to die. It’s the one rule that God gave them, and it has really harsh consequences.

 

Read Genesis 3:1-13

 

So, here in Genesis 3, Satan comes on the scene in the form of a serpent. And Satan starts engaging with Eve and tells her that she’s not going to die if she eats the fruit. That God knows if you eat of the fruit then you are just going to become like Him. You’re going to know the things that He knows. And man, that fruit sure looks good doesn’t it, you know you want it!

 

And so, with just a little smooth talk and a little temptation, we see a complete rebellion and disobedience against God’s one rule. Eve grabbed the fruit and took a bite. And then she gave some to Adam and had him eat it too.

 

 

The perfection of God’s creation was now spoiled by this rebellion, this disobedience, and what we know of now as sin. And after this point, God came walking into the garden and looking for Adam and Eve, but what had once been a perfect relationship between man and God was now broken by sin. So Adam and Eve were now hiding from God in the garden. And then the truth comes out, though of course God already knew, and man tries to blame it woman, and woman tries to blame it on Satan. But then God brings consequences down upon everyone for what happened here.

 

And we could be like … but they just ate a fruit? But the fruit isn’t the specific issue here, just like with every sin, the sin itself is a problem and it’s terrible, every single one of them, but the bigger issue with sin is always the aspect of it, that is our disobedience and rebellion against an awesome, perfect, and holy God. They had one rule and they rebelled, and they broke up the wonderful relationship that they had with God.

 

And you may be wondering, where does this talk about Jesus?

 

Well, it’s coming next as God brings consequences down on Satan. Let’s read the next verses.

 

Read Genesis 3:14-15

 

Notice in verse 15, that the woman’s Seed is capitalized, and it when it talks about “His heel” that it’s capitalized as well. God tells Satan that you are going to have a problem coming your way that is going to be born of a woman. God tells Satan that He is going for your head, and you are going to just get a piece of His heel.

 

This is it. This statement is the very first time in scripture where it says that One is coming to deal with the sin issues, and to deal with Satan, that He’s coming for Satan’s head. This is the moment, and it’s crazy that it’s being spoken towards Satan, but these words come right in the wake of the disaster of sin, and even right in that wake, we find hope is spoken of for the first time in the person of Jesus Christ.

 

Essentially, you started this problem Satan, and someone is coming to take care of you!

 

This may have been the first time that He was spoken of, but it definitely wasn’t the last. The Old Testament is full of prophecies about Jesus and also these different things that are called a “type of Christ”. Which are basically like different people or situations that happened that are like a living picture on a small scale of what Jesus was coming to do on a big scale. A good example of this would be Moses, where God sent Moses as His representative to free His people Israel from slavery in Egypt. Moses’ story is a “type” of Christ. It’s a small-scale picture in Moses’ story with the people of Israel that gives us a glimpse of the bigger story of Jesus coming to rescue all of His people. But like I said the Old Testament is full of these prophecies and these “types”.

 

And sometimes I think we may forget the scale of the big picture that leads to Jesus. Adam and Eve walked on this Earth thousands of years before Jesus. It was thousands of years between the time when God told Satan that Jesus was coming, to the time when we He actually got here. And think about that, through all of that time, the relationship between people and God was broken. God created kind of a band aid fix with animals being sacrificed to cover over people’s sin, but the problem wasn’t dealt with, and it would never be dealt with until Jesus came.

 

And so, when we step back for this big picture, we see thousands of years of people and families sharing the hope forward that eventually a Savior would be coming. It started with this conversation in the garden. It’s almost seen visually in the form of the Ark as the Ark carries Noah and his family through the devastation of the flood to salvation and life afterwards. It’s promised by God to Abraham that one would be coming through His family line that would eventually bless every single family on earth.

 

We see the picture again in Abraham’s son Isaac as God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son. We then see Isaac carry the wood for his own sacrifice up that hill just like Jesus carried His own cross and then God intervenes and provides another sacrifice in an animal to takes Isaac’s place. Just like Jesus takes our place. Again, we see the picture of Moses being used by God to save Israel just like Jesus is going to do for everyone. We see during that in the time in Egypt when all of the first born are going to die and that God has His people sacrifice lambs and spread their blood on the door posts. The lamb’s blood saves them from death, again just like Jesus saves us from death in sin.

 

We see the picture in Jonah as he is three days inside of the great fish and released at Nineveh to preach God’s message of salvation there. Just like Jesus was three days dead, before rising again for our salvation. We hear of the continued promise to King David that the savior was coming through His family line as well.

 

And there are so many more prophecies and promises and types. The biggest issue of all of mankind is our sin issue, and the problem that it creates between us and God. People throughout all of human history have understood this. Because it’s a big deal and it absolutely effects our life here on Earth, and even greater than that, effects our existence for all of eternity. Through all of these hundreds and thousands of years and generations and generations of people there has been a consistent thread of hope that goes all the way back to the garden of Eden. That someone was coming to take care of these problems. To take care of our sin. And that someone is Jesus and He’s why we celebrate Christmas.

 

There’s this moment in Deuteronomy 6 where God talks to His people and talks about teaching His truth diligently to their children. He says to talk to them while we’re sitting in the house, when we’re out walking somewhere, when we’re lying down, and when we rise up. Basically, be teaching the things of the Lord at all times. And I can only imagine that through all of these generations of parents teaching children the things of the Lord, probably sitting at their bedside and everywhere else, that the teaching had to be in many ways … that this is how things are now … but some day there is One coming Who is going to change everything! Thousands of years of this conversation happening and then God speaks through a man named Isaiah and I want to go together to Isaiah 53.

 

Read Isaiah 53

 

As we have been going through Matthew, Matthew has quoted from the prophet Isaiah several times. God used Isaiah to prophecy about the coming of Jesus and Isaiah 53 is one of the clearest moments of this. This passage clearly describes Jesus. It says, “He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant”, and Jesus will grow up, because He is coming as baby, not as a man. It describes Jesus as not being particularly beautiful or attractive. He didn’t even give Himself that benefit or the advantage of good looks. It says He will be despised and rejected by men, and haven’t we been seeing that every single week lately, as these guys are literally plotting to kill Him?

 

Isaiah says that He will be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. It says that He will bear our griefs and carry our sorrows and be smitten or struck down by God. This is what happens on the cross because of our sin. Which is why verse 5 says that He was wounded for our transgressions, or for our sin, and bruised for our iniquities. That our punishment or chastisement was put on Him instead and by His stripes we are healed. Stripes, because He was whipped and beaten even before being put on that cross.

 

 

But notice this, that thousands of years of hope for the One Who is coming has led to this prophecy that is so clearly Jesus by the prophet Isaiah. But this is still about 700 years out from when Jesus is going to get here.

 

Imagine being in the year 1322 right now. Because that’s how far back this is. That’s still a very long time. It’s almost hard to comprehend time at that scale with our mere 30-40-50-60 years to compare it to, but it’s an extremely long time.

 

Isaiah was 700 years before Christ and then the last Prophet and the last book of the Old Testament is Malachi, and he speaks of Jesus’ coming and he even prophecies about John the Baptist coming to prepare the way for Jesus. He’s the last recorded prophecy that we have and yet that was still about 400 years before Jesus got here.

 

For a time, reference for us, from where we are now, this is about the same amount of time back to when the mayflower and the first pilgrims landed in North America, which happened in 1620. Again, that’s a really long time ago and as far as we know, the prophecies went quiet for those next 400 years. 400 years without an update, 400 years of still waiting. I’m really glad that we were not born into the waiting period, because I think it would have been way more difficult to have faith then, instead of where we are now after Jesus came. We’re not waiting anymore.

 

As we look forward to Christmas this next week. Let us not miss the gravity of the literal thousands of years of generation after generations of people that were eagerly waiting for the One Who was coming to finally deal with this massive sin problem plaguing humanity. Sometimes I think we just come listen to the Christmas story again, but fail to feel the weight, the importance, the gravity, of what we now have in Jesus, that thousands of years of people were anxiously waiting for.