God's Plan A (2)

Introduction

So since I was hired here at Fredericton Christian Church this is actually my first sermon where the subject isn’t determined by the date on the calendar. My First series of Sermons was based on Christmas and last week I preached on New Years Resolutions.

As soon as it became clear to me that it was a real possibility that the church would hire me I began thinking about what I would preach on first. There were a lot of different directions I could go. I could start out just picking a book of the Bible and start preaching through it, a method I love to do. I could do something more topical appropriate to beginning a new church, like Christian essentials, or a series on Ecclesiology (aka the theology of the church.)

In the end I decided that the best place to start was with the beginning, the Old Testament. In my experience the Old Testament can be a bit of a neglected part of Scripture. Maybe this is because of all the very specific laws and long genealogies in there. Maybe it’s because we as Christians are living in the New Covenant and we want to take every opportunity to speak about Jesus and the gospel when we gather, as we rightly should.

Well what if I told you that studying the Old Testament was actually a great way to talk about Jesus and the gospel? This is because while the Bible was written by the hand of human authors it’s ultimate author is God Himself, and while the Gospel was new to us when Jesus came, God new the ending from the start. So you can see in retrospect now that we’re on the other side of the unfolding of God’s gospel that He had planted the seeds all along.

Jesus said in John 5:46

John 5:46 ESV

For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.

So even the first five books of Bible, or the Torah or the books of the Law are about Jesus. In Luke 24:27 Jesus appeared to some of the disciples in disguise and when they showed their lack of understanding he did this:

Luke 24:27 ESV

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

Here is a sweeping statement that all of what we call the Old Testament was a witness to Jesus. And in 2 Timothy 3:16

2 Timothy 3:16 ESV

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,

This statement isn’t about the New Testament which hadn’t yet been compiled, although the statement certainly applies to the Old Testament. No, Paul was telling Timothy about the value of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is what I prefer to call the Old Testament.

So we’re going to go through the Hebrew Bible to find Jesus. In this series of sermons we’re going to find Jesus in the Old Testament in three ways, through Prophecy, Types, and Christophanies.

So first we have our Prophecies. This is the category you’re probably already familiar with. The word Prophecy in Christianity has two main meanings, first to speak the word of God to others. This was actually the main job of the prophets. They spoke the words of God to Israel about how they were missing the mark and what God’s will to them. Less often but just importantly there’s also prophecy in the sense of foretelling future events, which is probably more commonly what you think of when you hear the word prophecy. So what we’ll be discussing when we talk about prophecy is this sense, and specifically about Jesus. So some of the sermons in this series, including this one, will focus on Prophecies about Jesus, or in other words predictions about the Messiah coming. Some of these are straightforward and more or less obvious, others take a little more digging to see how they predict Jesus.

The second category of how we’ll explore Jesus in the Old Testament are Types. This is a slightly more obscure thing than prophecies, but when we talk about a Type of Jesus what we’re talking about is a person place or thing that in some way represents or pictures Jesus before His first coming in the first century. The word Type here comes from the Greek word τύπος which basically means image or pattern. This is where the english word type comes from, because of the “typewriter” which used metal keys in the shape of letters pressed against ink ribbons to create a “type” or image of the letter you pressed. So again, when we talk about a Type of Jesus we talk about someone or something from the Old Testament that functions as an image of Jesus. The first type we will talk about for example is Adam, who we will talk about next week. He’s a great example because he’s one type that is identified in the actual New Testament text and Paul called him a “τυπος” of Christ in Romans 5:14 “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.”

Finally we will talk about Christophanies. This category is perhaps the least Biblically supported of the three, but many Biblical scholars believe there are a number of times that Jesus appeared on earth in his immaterial form, or in other words without a physical human body before the incarnation. Perhaps the most famous of these is the fourth man in the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fiery furnace found in Daniel Chapter 3. In the story the three men are thrown into the furnace for refusing to bow down to an idol made by king Nebuchadnezzar, and we read in Daniel 3:24-25

Daniel 3:24–25 ESV

Then King Nebuchadnezzar was astonished and rose up in haste. He declared to his counselors, “Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?” They answered and said to the king, “True, O king.” He answered and said, “But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.”

There are other appearances like this that many believe are appearances of the pre-incarnate Jesus. On the 29th we will look at the Angel of the Lord who visits Hagar as the possible first Christophany of the Hebrew Scriptures.

So after that lengthy introduction today we will start the series with the first two Prophecies of the Messiah found in Genesis 3:15 and Genesis 5. They are short but beautiful passages that show that God was already planning for our salvation from the moment that mankind first sinned.

For context let me set the scene: God had just loving created the whole world and declared it to be “very good.” He put Adam and Eve into a beautiful lucious garden and gave them dominion over all the other living creatures in the world. Finally he gives them only one instruction; they can eat the fruit of every tree in the garden except for one, they were not allowed to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. So the serpent who is described as more cunning or crafty than every other creature approaches the woman Eve and convinces her to doubt God’s commandment and she takes a bite of the forbidden fruit. She offers this fruit to her husband Adam and thus seal the fate of mankind by bringing sin into the world. God comes to the garden and Adam confesses to his crime, but not without passing the blame on to Eve, who then blames the serpent. So in reverse order God pronounces curses on the serpent, women and men.

As an interesting aside there are some who argue that God “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” is actually the first Christophany. I won’t be preaching on that one in this series but it’s one you can look into on your own that’s very interesting.

Anyway, our particular passage for the day is found in verse 15 and is found in God’s curse that He pronounces on the serpent, whom we now know from further revelation is likely satan. Genesis 3:15

Genesis 3:15 (ESV)

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

From this text and from Genesis 5 which we will get into later we draw the one and only point of this sermon:

1. Jesus was Always God’s Plan A

So remember, God had just finished creating a beautiful world and gifting it to Adam and Eve. Everything was as it should be and mankind royally messed this up. Just imagine the depths of the feeling of betrayal that God must have felt at this moment. Even when we are betrayed we know that we are messed up people just like the people who messed us up, but imagine how hurt God must be knowing that He is Perfect and Holy. God would have been right to just strike Adam and Eve off the face of the earth and start from scratch. They deserved nothing but the wrath of God, as do all who sin against Him.

Yet that’s not how God reacts. He reacts immediately with grace. Now to be sure there are certainly punishments for sin here. Later in the passage God declares that woman’s pain will increase in birth and man will suffer and toil to get food. Yet before these curses even we get in the context of God’s curse on the serpent the first hint of God’s redemption plan for mankind.

Genesis 3:15 (ESV)

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

Now this is a mysterious statement. On the non-mysterious side we all know that there’s enmity between literal serpents and mankind. There are some people out there who like snakes but for the most part we understandably don’t get along. There’s also clear animosity between satan and mankind. 1 Peter 5:8

1 Peter 5:8 ESV

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

That’s a vivid picture of the way that the devil works against mankind even to this day. But in this picture of animosity and strife is this mysterious hope. “He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.”

So the devil will injure man but ultimately we can see that the injury man gives to the serpent is ultimately the fatal one. The offspring of Eve will triumph over the offspring of the devil.

Even more interesting the word offspring is plural but in the final part of this verse instead of saying “they shall bruise your head,” God says “he shall bruise your head.” In other words a single male offspring of Eve will defeat the serpent, the devil.

This is exciting, but still very general. All we know about the one that God will send to save mankind from this short verse is that he will be a human male, because everyone is a descendent of Eve according to the Bible. So the bar is not set high yet for someone to prove that He is the Messiah, and we don’t yet know anything about how He will defeat sin and death and the devil. The most important thing that we learn is the fact that He is coming at all. The fact that God, though He is under no obligation to do so, has chosen to set in motion a plan to save fallen human beings.

Jumping down to Gen 3:21 we have another beautiful picture of God’s grace. “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” They were naked and ashamed. God wanted them naked and unashamed, but knowing that their new lives of living in sin would prevent them from living the way that God intended He compromised and provided a covering for them. Not only that but He provided a covering made of animal skins. In other words it’s pretty safe to assume that God killed an animal to make them clothing.

Now if you know your scriptures this is the part where you perk up in excitement. God killed an animal to provide clothing for them. God sacrificed an animal for them. This would preview the way that the Hebrew people worshipped the Lord as we read further on in the Torah. So God was the first one to sacrifice, and as we know from the other side of the cross He would give the final and ultimate sacrifice to save us from our sins.

So there we have the first prophecy of the coming Messiah in the beginning of Genesis. Well what if I told you that there’s another prophecy about Messiah that predates the flood of Noah? This one is a lot less well known and it’s found in Genesis Chapter 5. If you turn there you are likely to be confused at this point. Let me summarize it for you. Adam had a son named Seth, who had a son named Enosh, who had a son named Kenan, who had a son named Mahalalel, who had a son named Jared, who had a son named Enoch, who had a son named Methusaleh, who had a son named Lamech, who had a son named Noah.

And there we have a beautiful prediction about the one who would come and save us from our sins. To see it we have to do a little bit of digging into what those names mean. Now today we think of names differently than they did back then. In our modern society most of our names are based on old established names that come from other languages, so their meanings aren’t very obvious when you first hear them. Joshua for example comes from the Greek Iesous, which comes from the Hebrew Yeshua which means “God Saves.” But in ancient societies their names came mostly from their own languages, so you would name your son something like, “honor” or “God provides” or something that sounds like those words. In our English Bibles they give a “transliteration” of these names, in other words they don’t translate the meaning they just rewrite the word with english letters. So all of those names in the genealogy have a dictionary definition like any other word would.

Now as a disclaimer, not all of the meanings of these names are obvious or agreed on by all scholars. That being said every name meaning I’m about to give you IS a valid option for what the root word the name is derived from could have meant. So let’s look at these names and see what the root words they come from meant.

First we have Adam. Adam’s name is literally just the word for man. In fact since there were no capital letters in the original copies of the Old Testament in Hebrew there’s actually debate over some places where the word is used whether it should be translated as the name Adam or the word man.

Next we have Adam’s son Seth, whose name Eve explains in Gen 4:25 “And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth, for she said, “God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel, for Cain killed him.”” So his name means “appointed.”

Next we have Seth’s son whose name is Enosh. Strangely enough Seth’s son is named after a root word which means “mortal” and comes from the idea of a wound or injury. A little bit of a strange thing to name your kid but I guess I won’t judge. They were probably still mourning the loss of paradise and maybe that shows with how they named their kids.

Enosh like his father also gave his son a depressing name. He named his son Kenan, which comes from the word for “Sorrow,” derived from the idea of a dirge or funeral song.

Kenan decided to buck this trend and give his son a much better name. Mahalalel, which is difficult to say ten times fast, means “the blessed God.” I like that name, but somehow I feel like it would be a bit of a strange name to give your kid today. I don’t know, maybe we’ll consider it for baby number three.

Mahalalel names his son Jared, which means “shall come down.” A bit random but alright. Then Jared names his son Enoch which means “teaching” or “discipling.” For this reason there was actually a lot of Jewish scholars who wondered if Enoch was the first teacher and speculated that he might have invented writing. Enoch is also one of the few men in scripture who never died. We read in Genesis 5:22-24

Genesis 5:22–24 ESV

Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.

So that’s interesting. It seems that Enoch had a good relationship with God, which may be why he named his son Methuselah. Methuselah means “his death shall bring,” and is most likely a prophecy about the coming flood. This is because if you line up the timeline the death of Methuselah comes just before the flood. This is amazing to because it shows how God’s mercy is extended to mankind, because Methuselah has the longest life of any other man in the Bible. So God tells Enoch that his sons death will bring the judgment of mankind and then his son goes on to live for 969 years.

Methuselah’s son is named Lamech. The meaning of Lamech actually comes down all the way to English in the form of the word “Lament,” and originally meant despair or despairing. Maybe Methuselah had the coming judgment in mind when he named his son.

Finally we have Noah, whose name is explained right in Scripture. In Gen 5:29 “and called his name Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.”” So his name means relief or rest.

So have any of you put this together as I’ve been going yet and already have your socks blown off? If you take their name meanings and put them together you get

Man appointed mortal sorrow the blessed God shall come down teaching his death shall bring despairing rest

Commonly in translation we supply English words to make better sense of sentences, so if we do that with this sentence we get:

Man is appointed mortal sorrow but the blessed God shall come down teaching and his death shall bring the despairing rest.

I don’t know about you guys but that gives me a serious case of the goosebumps. That’s the gospel! God Himself came down and taught us, and died to give us rest and relief. Paired with the prophecy of Genesis 3:15 we get the mystery of the incarnation. The Messiah will be born of woman, but He will also be the Blessed God Himself.

Conclusion

It’s easy when we read the Bible in order from the beginning to the end to think of it as though God is adapting to the situation as it develops. Oh, mankind sinned we better kick them out of the garden so that they won’t live forever in a sinful state. Oh, now they’re doing evil all the time, let’s pick one righteous family to save and kill the rest. Oh, they’re still doing tons of evil? Let’s pick a special family to bless and give a special law. Oh they aren’t keeping the law? Let’s give them a king to rule over them. Oh they still aren’t keeping a law? I guess I’ll have to come down there.

Yet when we see prophecies like this one we realize that just isn’t the case at all. All along, at least from the moment mankind fell, God had a plan to save us from our own sin, and that plan was for God the Son to be born as a man, to teach us what is right and to die for our sins.

So long before any of us messed up in that way you’re thinking of, before any of us were as broken as we are, before any of us were lost and hopeless, God was making all things right and giving us a way to come back to Him, a way to be made righteous and to be born again to a new and eternal life.

So because of this plan we can now all come boldly to God in the blood of Jesus, and if we confess our sins they will be forgiven, and if in the words of Romans 6:4 “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

So just as this sermon only had one point but it’s a big one, it also has only one real application and it’s a big one: come to Jesus. Embrace God’s saving plan for your life. If you’ve already come to Christ than praise Him in thankfulness of the amazing gift that you’ve been given. Let us never forget to be thankful for all that God has done in our lives, but especially for this.

Let us pray.