The Jesus Lens/jl16

So let's go back and take a look at how it all got started. The Scripts of Stories we're probably very familiar with. There's two stories that really take us into the beginning of this thing. One, obviously, is Genesis that gets us started. The other one, interestingly enough, is Job. Now, Job doesn't appear much later in the Scriptures, and it might have been written much later, but it's written about a timeframe that seems to happen before the patriarchs. So it's before Abraham, there's this Job critter. And we don't know much about Job. We don't know where. I mean, we're given places and a little bit about him. But we don't really know the details of when he lived, when that story was. Some people even said, we don't even know if it's a true story. It's written like a play. Could it be a fictional story? And the answer is, it could be. Job's referred to as historical. I accept Job as historical. But even if it's a fictional story, you know, people always ask, you know, is the shack true or was it fiction? Or so you don't want to cherish anymore? Well, it's fiction. But just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's not true. And I think we've got a pretty disoriented view of that. Job is a story God wants us to know. It's written as a play. I'm sure if it happened, it didn't quite happen where you had these three counselors come and take their turns giving their speeches. And then I'm sure there was a much more aggressive conversation than that if it was true. But it's written as a play. It's written as a dramatization of a man's story and a man's crisis. And it's an important story. As we'll see, it's an counterpoint to most of what is in the Old Testament to begin with. But let's start with Job. I mean, start with Genesis because that's where it begins. It begins in God creating. It begins in a garden that he's put us in. He's creating man and woman. I'm not going through all the details of that. I think they're familiar. But that's where the story begins. We've got God creating the first two people and then wanting to enjoy a relationship with them. And he comes down in the cool of the day and somehow in some manifestation that's not clear to us, he goes on a walk with them or they have some time together and he kind of told them his heart. He's kind of given them things to do. I love this early on. I think we missed this. He gives Adam the freedom to name the animals whatever he wants. And it's not God saying name the animals, but I really have a secret will. I hope you call that a giraffe. And if you don't call that a giraffe, you're going to get it wrong. And Adam was free to call him whatever he wanted. And God was going to call them whatever Adam called them. And I think it begins to show from the very beginning God was wanting this partnership. God was wanting this dance together of the creative God, the all-powerful God who's created us out of dirt and then breathed the breath of life into that dust. God wanted to share a relationship with us. And for some season of time we get that. And there's two trees in the garden that we know about. There's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. And he tells them the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the wrong way to go. And the day you eat from that, you're going to die. But the tree of life is a tree that, if they eat of it, I guess they would live forever. That seems to be the inference, so it's not exactly stated that way. And they're in the garden for how long we don't know, and then the tragedy happens early on. Chapter 2, the first book of the Bible. Adam and Eve get close to the tree. Satan beguiles them into giving it a try. And Satan beguiles them by separating them from the God they know. Now what we often leave out of this story, again, it's not in the story because the people writing the book of Genesis, it may be Moses, that's the thought that Moses might have written these first few books. Obviously Moses didn't observe this if he wrote them. It's God making it known to him by some kind of revelation, some kind of tradition that was passed down. So he's writing this story. And in this, we don't have the sense that God's right there when Adam and Eve sin. We now know God's omnipresent. We know God cannot be not present in his creation. So he's there. He's there when they're making this mistake. It's not like he was busy somewhere else and this got away from him. And there's a part of me that can't but wonder, God, if you just could have parted the heavens and kind of stepped through at that moment and said, really, guys, bad idea to eat that thing. I'm not really serious about that. It's going to destroy you. He doesn't. They do the thing. And as soon as they eat from this fruit, their eyes are open to see good and evil. Before they weren't. See, Adam and Eve weren't created perfect. They were just created innocent. And they didn't know good and evil. And they were just knowing God in a garden and all was good. And they only had one thing not to do. And they did it. And as soon as they did it, their eyes were open to see good and evil. How did they perceive themselves? As evil. We've done the thing. The lie from the enemy is a cute little lie because on the one hand it's built on the truth. The truth is God knows the day you eat of it you'll be like him knowing good and evil. That part's true. You are going to be like him in that you will know good and evil. But the other side of that is the lie he leaves them with, you won't surely die. So the inference is God's holding out on you. This God can't be trusted. And Adam and Eve decide it's better to find what knowledge we need apart from a relationship than find it inside a relationship. So they choose knowledge without the Father. They choose knowledge without God. And in choosing that knowledge, God's not being caught unaware here. This is part of an unfolding process. It's one that I fully don't appreciate. I'll be honest with you. I can't sit here and say, oh, I get this. I get why we needed 2,500 years of sinful brokenness and then 1,500 years of law before we finally get to the cross. I can't tell you that I understand the whys of all that. I do know God well enough to know there's something profound going on in the unfolding of this story that defies my imagination. I can't imagine why this was important. But somehow God knew our first step to know him would be a step away from him. That's the parable of the prodigal again. The first step to that son coming home to the Father he doesn't know is go ahead and do what's in your heart to do. Go ahead and spend sin to its end. Then you're going to begin to discover in the pit of that despair who this Father is that you didn't know you had when you were home. And maybe that opens the door for you to come back and discover. So they plunge into this and then God comes into the garden. And this again, an indication that God's not this offended, angry deity. He comes to the garden still in the cool of the day looking for them. He's not hiding from them. They are hiding from him. Am I right? They're from him. And he said, where are you guys? Abraham who hides as well as my granddaughter Lindsay hides is laughing behind the curtain so loud that you know right where they are. And he goes, well, we're naked. He said, how do you know you were naked? Well, we ate from the tree. So it all comes out. Is God picking up new information here? He's not, is he? And then God takes mercy on them. They've clothed themselves in fig leaves. You ever work in a fig orchard? Fig leaves are itchy. And these guys are not sitting there talking to God about all this. They're like, oh God, I'm sorry. They're like this. And God takes mercy on that and says, you know what? Here's some, take some leather skins and close them in that. He begins to close them. Yes, he doesn't ask them. He tells them to leave the garden. And he stations angels there and it looks like, well, here's the mean old God punishing us. No, not really. Because what's in that garden still? A tree of life. They've not eaten of that tree. Interesting, the tree they could eat from, they haven't eaten from. Because if they had of, they would have become immortal. We were not created immortal. A tree of life brings immortality. We didn't eat of that tree. And so when we ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and plunged ourselves into darkness, then what God knew was, I can't let them eat from the tree of life unless they live forever. That's what Genesis is pointing to. So their expulsion from the garden isn't, okay, you've ruined it. So now get out of here. It's you can't be here anymore because if you eat from this, you will be eternally sinful. And if you are eternally sinful, how do I rescue you? So as we talked about from John, eternal life. This is the wonderful to me, the consistency of the story. God preserves eternity as that which is still pure, undefiled by our sin. So that God has a safe harbor to rescue us into. So he asks them to leave the garden. Now we know the soul that sin shall die. Some have called the first curse. Isn't the first curse at all? The soul that sin shall die is the first step of redemption. When this dies, I can be resurrected in Christ. This mortal can take on immortality now in him. This is God's gift to us, but when you're living all that story and now God's become scary to you and this is Adam and Eve. God comes to the garden again. Now they're hiding. And I think there's a process here. Probably day two. If we could even wonder what day two was like, does God stop coming to them or does He still come? And are they now so far retreating into the darkness because they feel so unworthy to be near this God. They are scared of Him because of their own intuitive sense of evil and the shame that comes with it. So now they don't want to be near Him. It's not that He doesn't want to be near them. They're withdrawing into the darkness. Trying to them is painful to them. It causes great fear and so then God, whatever God's coming, God now cloaks Himself more not because He doesn't love them but because He does. It's Sarah trying to win a stray into our household. If you can walk up to that stray dog and it's ready to love you, then all good. If you walk up to it and it runs away because it's been abused by humanity and it just doesn't get that you're there to love it, then you've got to somehow take some distance from that dog and win it into your life with food and with moving close slowly and I think that's what we're seeing now. This is the great rescue. We're the estranged animals. We're the estranged people. God's not estranged from us. We're estranged from Him. We've backed away into the darkness and God sets Himself to redeem and there's lots of stories here of Noah which I said is the great rescue. If God has got to have a civilization some 4,000 years later and already in the generation of Noah what's clear in Scripture is civilization is not going to make it one more step before everybody's obliterated by sin. Sin has become so all-consuming in the culture that God has to reset human history. Noah is the only one that can find grace in the eyes of the Lord. No one else could find it and Noah's family. Not a particularly holy bunch, are they? These are not the holy people who earned it. There's nobody destroyed in the days of Noah that God did not love. But sin had become so rampant God had to push a reset button and He does. And He starts over again with Noah. Could those be the captives Jesus talks to between His death and His resurrection? We don't know. Scripture doesn't clearly say. But those are not people God didn't love. Those are people God loved deeply. Now He starts over with Noah and then we get to Abraham this. The first of now a generation of people that God has. Joe probably already did. We don't have the details of his story. There's a guy named Mechizedek who's a priest of the Most High God. He knows God. So there's other ways God's made himself known to other people. But the story of our narrative picks up with the children of Israel and begins with the father of that nation and begins with Abraham, a man who God reveals himself to Abraham as the one true God. And then he comes into Canaan and there's all kinds of false gods there and human sacrifices to those false gods. And Abraham comes into that and there really is just well there's lots of gods. And then the God of Abraham begins to make himself known as the one true God. And Abraham begins to see that and then this is a God that wants to rescue Abraham, not a God that wants to destroy him. And then he's even asked to sacrifice. He's a child of promise. He's promised a child 25 years before he has it. And the wonderful thing Scripture talks about in the New Testament a lot is how much that promise purifies Abraham even in his disappointments. They didn't happen when they thought it could and then Abraham's womb dies. So they're not even thinking she can even have kids again. And God's just through this promise inviting Abraham to know him better. It's frustrating. But it's in holding on to the promise in the face of adversity that God teaches us to trust him so much so that now God takes Abraham and says sacrifice your son to man. This is the story of the cross. The story of the cross really begins right here. Abraham lives in a culture in which false gods demand human sacrifices every day. 12 year old son, first born male sons, first born virgins are offered to these false gods in Canaan. Abraham saw that. And so when his God asks him to give me your son, your only son. This is not a shock to Abraham. Every God he knows demands human sacrifice. But Abraham, even though he's the son of promise, decides I've got to do what God's asking me to do and takes him. And as he's taking him to Mount Moriah to sacrifice him. Mount Moriah is the dome of the rock. The mosque over that rock at Temple Mount in Jerusalem where Abraham was going to sacrifice his son. That is Mount Moriah. And so you can go to that rock. You can go into that mosque. You can sit in front of that rock and say Abraham was here with Isaac. And on the way to that, Isaac is saying Dad, we've got fire. We've got wood. Where's the sacrifice? And Abraham not wanting to say it's you son says something like God will be his own. God will provide his own. It's often translated for us literally in Hebrew. But with Mount Moriah, he intrudes, God intrudes and takes care of business there and provides his own sacrifice. And Abraham names that place the God who will be his own. What he said to Isaac a few days before he now knows the truth of. And here's how God's different from all the faults. This God is not requiring our sacrifice. He's not even requiring a human sacrifice. And that begins to then give us a different construct. Most of our construct of the cross is nothing more for what I grew up in and what many Christians believe. It's no different than what Malek wanted or what Ash Tarroth wanted or what Pele wanted in. You guys have offended me. I need a sacrifice to satiate my offense and then I can be nice to you. So sacrifices were to appease the gods. Many people see the sacrifice of Christ in the same way. God needed the most perfect, innocent human being on the planet to be slaughtered brutally on a cross so that he could love us. God's already showing us in Abraham and the story will continue to unfold. That's not what's going on. God didn't need a cross to be satisfied with you. We needed a cross to break the bondage of sin and shame in our life so we could be near and be with the God who loves us. So that story continues. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob this person God works with becomes a family and there's lots of great stories of God working. The story of Joseph is a great story of how God works. That Jacob is the most arrogant blasted little boasting kid that finally brothers can't take it anymore out of that story and him sold into slavery. God does great stuff. So he can come at the end of it and say what you intended for evil God did for great good. That's encouragement I need through a lot of circumstances in my life because sometimes people do things so God's able to get past it and use it for great good. So that takes us up to Jacob and then as he goes into slavery in Israel he becomes a leader in Israel. He can invite the children of Israel there to be preserved in a time of famine and it's at that point then as they come to Egypt and they begin to procreate and grow that Egypt then has to turn them into slaves and that sets us up for the next side of that. Let's just stop a minute and talk about Job. Somewhere in this story there's this story of Job a wealthy, blessed man, a righteous man by most of what we can observe externally and yet the enemy desires to sift him. This is one of the few instances we have the enemy in the Old Testament. One of the things we're going to look at in the Old Testament that seems to be a flawed perspective is that God's responsible for everything. So if Saul has an evil spirit it's an evil spirit sent from God. That's what this text will say. But we know from the New Testament God doesn't send out evil spirits. Every good gift, every perfect gift. So one of the things we're going to misunderstand about God in the Old Testament is God's responsible for everything. So God kills people, destroys people, sends pestilence and influence, sends all those things. God's the author of everything in the Old Testament in terms of the perspective of the writers. We find out in Job that there's another presence in the earth. This presence wants to destroy what God loves. And the stories told of Job who has all this stuff and the enemy takes it all away destroys him. And there's this long conversation between Job and his advisors and here's the counterpoint. What we will get from Deuteronomy, what the understanding will continue to unfold in the Old Covenant is you get what you deserve. Job is the counterpoint to that. Job didn't get what he deserved. Suffering was just part of the world he was in and the work of the enemy sought to destroy him. So Job turns on God and blames him. And his advisors are saying, Job, hey, you must be sinful. This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't been evil. But I haven't been evil. I've been a God fearing God, I've been following God, walking with God. Oh, you see, that's your arrogance. That's the problem God had to get in. It goes on on. And then Eli who comes in, the last of the advisors, the fourth, and he's the one who says, you all are out of your minds. You misunderstand who God is. And what begins to unpack in Job, if you haven't read it, is a New Testament understanding of the living God in his creation to redeem us and how lost we are in the darkness that we see the things God does as being against us and seeking to be hurtful to us so that Job could say in the end, when he gets no answer for how did I lose my family, my possessions, everything? How did I lose all of that? He gets nothing about the devil did it. What he gets is, in spite of all that, this God is too wonderful for me to comprehend. This God who made the heavens and the earth, this God who put through the wild flowers across the field, this God is too wonderful. I have missed him in the midst of my pain. And he's a counterpoint to some of the things early on that we're going to believe about God that need to shift. And we'll see that happen as we get to Exodus and some of the books that involve the life of Moses.