Making Us Thankful: The Story of Salvation
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Today is thanksgiving Sunday! Many of us in the next 48 hours are going to be eating some big meals, spending time with family, and celebrating the many blessings that God has given us.
Thanksgiving itself was just that: a holiday set up as a specific time to thank God for the blessings He’s given. Simultaneously, we enjoy those blessings as we sit with family, eat good food, and spend time thinking about how God has provided and taken care of us in the year past.
Today I wanted really badly to talk about how we can thank God. Different ways that we express thanksgiving to God for everything He has done. But I think God had a different plan.
So today, I’d like to spend our time focusing on the reason for our thanksgiving. We’re going to do this by looking at how God purposes to save us right from the beginning of creation, and how the whole Bible is about Jesus.
By the time we finish today, my prayer is that you will understand that
True thankfulness comes as a response to God’s mercy and grace.
We have much to be thankful for, but the #1 reason, the one that I believe God wants to firmly impress anew into our hearts this morning, is the life-changing truth that Jesus died and rose again so you can be set free from sin and death, and be made right with God.
The Old Testament:
The Old Testament:
The Bible starts in Genesis, where we read the following:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Pretty simple. Two whole chapters are devoted to how God created the earth. Finally, at the peak of creation - the finishing point - God created man. First Adam, then Eve, who together are charged with the responsibility of caring for the earth under God’s authority, and procreation so that more people might serve God and enjoy life in the garden.
The scene is beautiful, right up until Genesis 3… many of us know this part well. Eve and Adam eat the fruit, they become sinful through their wilful breaking of God’s law, and they hide from God. When God finds them, He makes atonement for their sin, gives them clothes, and sends them out of the garden. Within three chapters, humanity has messed it up. Now here we sit, sinful and stuck, and in need of a hope we can provide. Now what?
At this juncture we need to realize two things:
The whole Bible is about Jesus
Nothing takes God by surprise
With those in mind, let me pose this question: Was God’s redemption plan formed at Genesis 3, or Genesis 1. Here’s God going , “oh dang, I wondered if they would do this and here we go! Guess we’d better tell them to start slaughtering animals for eternity to make up for their sin.” Is that how it worked?
We fall into that kind of trap. Like somehow we have enough power to mess up God’s plan and take Him by surprise with sin. So He decides to develop the sacrificial system (which we’ll discuss in a minute). Then after 3000-4000 years of sacrificing animals, God realizes that it’s not cutting it so He goes “Ok, guess we’d better up it a notch.” So then Jesus is sent. But is this really the case? Certainly not!
Read Genesis 3:15 with me:
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.”
Here God curses the serpent, who temped Adam and Eve to disobey God. But within this curse already is found a promise. That the offspring of the woman would triumph over the offspring of the serpent. Well, what does that mean?
The seed of the woman is anyone who comes after her, who has her nature. This is humanity. This humanity would one day triumph over the seed of serpent. These are not baby snakes that are pictured, but rather evil and those who choose to embrace it. So somehow, God is going to send someone - someone fully human - who will triumph over evil and restore what Adam and Eve broke.
God had this plan in mind from the beginning. Sin didn’t take God by surprise. To be fair, humanity chose to walk away from God. We didn’t have to, but we chose to. Yet God also knew this would happen, and had in mind a plan of redemption and restoration from the moment He started creating.
So now we sit here; we are now sinful, and we are now stuck. Death has entered the world, and as we chart history through Genesis we see that murder, sinfulness of all kinds, and hatred of God permeate the moral landscape. The depravity on earth gets to bad that we get to Genesis 6:13 and read:
And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
Just 4 chapters and a few hundred years later, humanity is so corrupt that God chooses the only people who still love Him and starts again. And that’s what happens. Noah and his family are placed in the ark, and as punishment for their sin many lives are lost in the flood. God then extends the same blessing to Noah as Adam and Eve.
What happens after this? Sinful humanity keeps going. We read stories of how people kill others, how marriage is perverted and people steal, destroy, cheat, etc. The world, now governed by Satan, is a mess. Humanity is broken, and deeply lost in sin.
Yet through it all the promise remains. God calls Abram. He calls Him to leave His homeland - leave everything behind, and set out for an unknown country that God will show Him. Now, here’s where the promise comes in:
And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
God promises that if Abram will follow God, He will bless Him and prosper His family, so that they will be a great nation - God’s nation, who will follow after Him. Did you notice the last line: “In you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” What does this mean? This is another iteration of the promise that a Redeemer, a Messiah is coming. Abram - if he will follow God - will be part of the lineage of the Messiah.
Do you see how God has orchestrated the story of salvation? He had a plan in mind from the very beginning. He chose to use Noah and Abram, because they were faithful to Him. Throughout the first 12 chapters of the Bible, we can already see how God is moving and working, preparing the way for promised hope to come and save us from slavery to sin.
As we travel throughout the rest of the OT, we see that God does grow Abram’s family into a nation. Not just those of that particular bloodline. Rather, God grafts in anyone who will choose to follow Him and live according to His law. We meet Rehab, Ruth, Melchizedek, and others whom God adopts into the family of Abraham. God makes a covenant with this family, and in doing so gives them the sacrificial system. Not so that he could trial it to see if it would do the trick for 3000-4000 years, but rather to demonstrate and foreshadow that One was coming - fully human - would could pay the price once for all, and free us through His sacrifice. Yet we must understand, as the writer of Hebrews says,
Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. Yet the blood of animals cannot take away the guilt of human sin. It had to be one from humanity, who had never sinned and was therefore never guilty. This One, and only this One, could take on the guilt and sin of the entire world, and shed their blood, and die an eternal death, so that we might be saved from eternal punishment. But the question becomes, who can do such a thing? Anyone born of human decent is sinful, by nature. As Romans 3:23 says:
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
So, what do we do?
The New Testament
The New Testament
Would you read Galatians 4:4 with me?
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law,