The Mystery of God - Romans 11:25-36

How many of you are sports fans? How many of you have taped a game so you could watch it later and tried to avoid any information about what happened in the game because you wanted to be surprised? Or maybe a new movie is coming out and you can’t see it for a few days, and you just know to stay off parts of the internet so you can avoid any spoilers. Maybe you have a favorite show that comes out once a week, and if you don’t watch it by the end of the weekend, Monday at work will be a minefield of people talking about it that you’re going to have to navigate. Can anyone relate to that?

I’m the opposite. It started when I was a teenager. In high school I loved to read. I read all the time. I don’t know when it started, but I got into the habit of reading the last page of a book first. I had no context for who any of these characters were, or where they were flying off to, or the emotions that they had, but we didn’t have the internet back then, so reading the last page was what was available to me.

A few years ago I found this website themoviespoiler.com Generally, within a day or two of a movie coming out, sometimes the same day, it will have a complete summary of the entire plot. It drives Amanda crazy, but if there is a movie that looks interesting to me, especially if I don’t know if I’ll actually watch it, I go and read the summary. It’s because I don’t like surprises. There are some movies I won’t go read the summary for, but that number has shrunk over the years.

I especially don’t like horror movies, but sometimes the plot looks interesting and I’ll go read what happens. There was a particular movie that came out a few years ago called IT. Now, I don’t know if it’s because I saw part of the original mini series that came out for it when I was young and it permanently scarred me, but when this new version came out, I had a desire to go see it. Because YouTube exists, before I went and saw it I was able to go and find a video of every scene that Penny Wise the clown is in. I watched them out of context, on a tiny screen, in the daytime. So later, when I went to see the movie I knew every scary part before it happened.

This is kind of what reading the Bible is like. We read these stories of people who are going through something and we sometimes judge their reaction to what is happening. How many of us have read the story of Jesus asleep in the boat, then calming the waters and thought, how could they doubt what was happening when they literally had Jesus in the boat with them? What did the disciples say right after this happened though? Who is this person that even the waves obey him? They didn’t have a copy of the new testament. If they had any bible knowledge, which at the time consisted of the scrolls generally kept in the synagog, they knew that a messiah was coming. The problem was most of the talk about him took place in poetry and imagery. Many Jews thought the messiah would come, overthrow the Roman empire, restore Jerusalem and set up his kingdom here on earth.

This brings us to the letter that we know as the book of Romans. It was a letter written to a group of house churches in the city of Rome. The local synagog likely had a copy of the Tanakh, which is what they called their old testament scriptures at the time, and they may have had a few copies of letters that circulated amongst the early Christians. The Messiah had come, but not in the way anyone had predicted. Many people refer to it as Jesus’ upside down kingdom. The Jews are wrestling with their place in this, weren’t they God’s chosen people? Had he abandoned them? Rejected them? To the horror of the Jews, the Gentiles had largely thrown out every tradition they had and many themselves thought God had rejected the jews and they were now God’s new chosen people.

In Romans 11:25-36 “I don’t want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you will not be conceited” - Paul tells them, don’t miss what God is trying to do.

We can look back and see clearly what God was doing, but they were in the thick of it. I have slightly more sympathy for them because as I went over this text, it largely came into focus for me how over the last year I myself had been wrestling with what God was trying to do in my own life. I’m talking sleepless nights, anxiety, worry, prayer, and most of that year completely missing what God was trying to do. There are probably some here currently in their own wrestling with a decision or direction.

This morning I want to give you three main reasons, or maybe categories of reasons for why we miss what God is trying to do in our lives.

It’s nothing new. Talk to the person next to you, who was the first person or group in the Bible to miss what God was trying to do?

Adam and Even. Turn to Genesis 3:1-6 “Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’ ” “No! You will certainly not die,” the serpent said to the woman. “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”