3-17-24 Kasey Campbell: A Thousand Generations
Notes
Transcript
Morning! We’re back in the book of Romans today. If you missed it, last
week, we talked about not being ashamed of the gospel (or the good news of Jesus)
because there is power in it. Paul comes to Rome, where honor and shame are a big
deal, and preaches Jesus crucified on the cross (a criminal’s death) and preaches
faith in His Name and in His resurrection.
In that society, It was shameful to be weak; it was shameful to be poor, and it
was shameful to be sick. It was very status-oriented. Rome sees any teaching that
doesn’t make you richer, stronger, smarter, better, or more powerful as shameful.
Weakness is bad. If you don’t have it all together, if you have problems, if you
need a Savior, then that’s shameful.
Paul is not ashamed of that message of humility, weakness, and
acknowledgment of our need for Jesus. He is it as true strength, true life, true
power, cloaked in humility, love and service to others. That’s why he writes to the
Corinthians 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 NKJV For the message of the cross is
foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the
power of God. 19 For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, And
bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” 20 Where is the wise?
Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish
the wisdom of this world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through
wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message
preached to save those who believe. 22 For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek
after wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block
and to the Greeks foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and
Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of
God is stronger than men. 26 For you see your calling, brethren, that not many
wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. 27 But
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God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God
has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are
mighty; 28 and the base things of the world and the things which are despised
God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that
are, 29 that no flesh should glory in His presence. 30 But of Him you are in
Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God—and righteousness and
sanctification and redemption— 31 that, as it is written, “He who glories, let him
glory in the Lord.”
The ancient Greek world was renowned for its philosophers. It was a culture
that loved reasoning about the nature of things, so it was normal for people to
re-examine Christianity logically. The problem was that the more they thought
about it, the more the gospel Paul had brought them seemed silly. That God would
decide that the Savior of the world, the Messiah, to be brutally beaten and crucified
and then be brought back to life after three days in a grave became a message that
was embarrassing to tell others about.
In some cases, they even re-interpreted or glossed over certain elements until
they either made more sense or sounded more appealing. But here Paul Paul says
that when the truth of the gospel is clearly stated, it produces two opposing
responses. To people who are spiritually rebellious toward Cod, it sounds to their
ears like something invented by a mentally, logically, or intellectually incompetent
person.
To people who are seeking God in the integrity of their hearts, it is a
message that reveals how powerful God is and how much He loves us. The true
gospel message has the power to expose a person's deepest attitudes toward Cod.
Jesus made the same point. When He said he was the Light of the world (John 3),
He explained that people's reaction to Him reveals their hearts.
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When people see Jesus, they also see, by contrast, and conviction of the
Holy Spirit, their own moral condition and are faced with their need to repent and
their need for a Savior to be in a relationship with God. Also, when the resurrection
of Christ is preached, people's fundamental belief or unbelief in God and His
power to do miracles is exposed.
So, Paul is not ashamed of the good news of Jesus Christ. It exposes our
hearts and leads to salvation. Now, he will go on to say something else in verse 16
of Romans, which we’ll look at today. And what he is saying might slip by us as
Bible readers in 2024, but Paul is making a very profound statement about how
God keeps His promises and how much God loves you and me. God is trustworthy,
and He has a plan for your life.
God loves you and He invites you and me to join His family, which He
wants to be ever-growing. God will keep His promises to you because He is a
faithful God. And God wants you to be a carrier of His presence. He wants to fill
you with His Holy Spirit so you can help bring God’s love to people, too.
But these points can be very easily missed in the next part because it’s very
short. So short, in fact, that we tend to fly right past it! Let’s take a look: Romans
1:16 NKJV For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of
God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the
Greek.
He says that the Gospel is for the Jewish person first and then for us Greeks
or Gentiles. Gentiles are basically ‘other nations’ that aren’t Jewish. What’s going
on here? Is God racist? Does He love people more because they’re Jewish? Do you
ever feel like God loves you, but based on your reading of the Bible, He just loves
you a little less than He would a Jewish person?
God is not racist, He’s not sexist, He’s not ageist. The Bible says that God is
love. Later Paul writes Romans 2:11 NLT For God does not show favoritism.
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Or, there’s no partiality with God. So what’s the deal? Why is the gospel to
the Jew first? It’s because God keeps His promises to people. It’s because He keeps
His promises to His family, to His kids, and to those who choose to follow Him.
Deuteronomy 7:8-9 NKJV “Therefore know that the Lord your God, He is God,
the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with
those who love Him and keep His commandments;
You see, when God makes a covenant or a promise where a person believes
Him by faith, He never forgets it, and He always keeps His end of the bargain,
forever and ever. ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will not pass
away,” Jesus said. Paul says in 2 Timothy that even if we fail, fall, and break our
promise to God, He won’t ever break His to us. He says, 2 Timothy 2:13 NKJV If
we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.
In the Psalms, this is called ‘lovingkindness.’ the Hebrew word is hesed,
meaning ‘promised love.’ Psalm 103:2-4 NKJV Bless the Lord, O my soul, And
forget not all His benefits: 3 Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your
diseases, 4 Who redeems your life from destruction, Who crowns you with
lovingkindness and tender mercies,
So when you and I choose to put our faith in Jesus and His work on the
cross, we enter into a blood covenant, so to speak, where God has now promised
His love to you. He has promised faithfulness to you and to your children. He has
promised His grace, mercy, kindness, and favor because that is His character
toward those who call upon His Name.
Look at one of the promises God makes here to Abraham. Now I want you
to understand something. Abraham is called the father of faith. Yes, of course, I
understand that his line became the Jewish people. But you need to understand that
the reason God sent the Gospel to the Jew first is because He is keeping a promise
to a man who followed Him by faith!
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And God does not show favoritism - God also keeps His promises to us as
we follow Him in faith. Let’s look at this promise: Genesis 17 1:9 NLT When
Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, “I am
El-Shaddai—‘God Almighty.’ Serve me faithfully and live a blameless life. 2 I
will make a covenant with you, by which I will guarantee to give you countless
descendants.” 3 At this, Abram fell face down on the ground. Then God said to
him, 4 “This is my covenant with you: I will make you the father of a multitude
of nations! 5 What’s more, I am changing your name. It will no longer be
Abram. Instead, you will be called Abraham, for you will be the father of many
nations.
6 I will make you extremely fruitful. Your descendants will become many
nations, and kings will be among them! 7 “I will confirm my covenant with you
and your descendants after you, from generation to generation. This is the
everlasting covenant: I will always be your God and the God of your descendants
after you. 8 And I will give the entire land of Canaan, where you now live as a
foreigner, to you and your descendants. It will be their possession forever, and I
will be their God.” 9 Then God said to Abraham, “Your responsibility is to obey
the terms of the covenant. You and all your descendants have this continual
responsibility.
In this covenant or promise of faith, we have the responsibility of repentance
and walking blamelessly (or walking by the holy spirit so we can reflect the
character of God), we have belief in God that is manifested by faith in God, and we
have Abram receiving the Holy Spirit (his name is changed - breath, or ‘ha’ is
added), and we have Abram receiving blessings on him and his descendants by
faith.
And this chronological order of the gospel going ‘to the jew first and then
the Greek,’ isn’t racism; it’s promised love and faithfulness!
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It’s a promise of God to parents for their children. It’s also a plan to reach
the most people possible with the good news of Jesus. In different times and
seasons of history, God has used different ways to reach people with the message
of grace by faith.
Strategy #1 was ‘Don’t eat the apple.’ Genesis 2:15-17 ESV The Lord God
took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And
the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of
the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,
for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Did Adam and Eve die when they ate the apple? Physically, no, but
spiritually they did. They were separated from God. God had mercy on them and
made their clothes out of animal skins and did not abandon them. But they weren’t
walking with God every day anymore. It was different. They now had to call on
Him in a different way that took more faith.
Genesis 4:25-26 AMP Adam knew [Eve as] his wife again; and she gave
birth to a son, and named him Seth, for [she said], “God has granted another
child for me in place of Abel, because Cain killed him.” 26 To Seth, also, a son
was born, whom he named Enosh (mortal man, mankind). At that [same] time
men began to call on the name of the Lord [in worship through prayer, praise,
and thanksgiving].
And we still have this problem of sin in the world. One family, Adam and
Eve, they sin; they choose to do wrong. And just one generation away, we have the
first murder (Cain and Able). We can’t seem to escape this sin problem. So the next
plan (strategy #2), instead of simply telling people not to eat the apple or ‘not to do
bad stuff,’ is a bit more extreme. The plan is to get rid of all the bad apples. That’s
the flood.
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Genesis 6:5-8 NKJV Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was
great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and
He was grieved in His heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I
have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and
birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found grace
in the eyes of the Lord.
Noah found lovingkindness from the Lord. Even though his generation was
evil and wicked to the point where it made the heart of God sad - God had grace on
Noah. There was one person who had faith in the Lord and so God showed His
lovingkindness. But sparing Noah was also fulfilling a promise. Do you remember
what it was? It was the promise of hope even in the midst of the curse of sin falling
over the earth. Genesis 3:15 NKJV And I will put enmity Between you and the
woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And
you shall bruise His heel.”
Now, this might not sound like a promise at first, but it’s the promise of a
Savior, born as a human (seed of a woman) who will overthrow Satan and the
enemy of death. It’s a prophetic declaration that One Man would come from a
woman and carry out the overthrow of evil and darkness. And He did. Jesus, born
of a woman, conceived by the Holy Spirit - fully God and fully man, has triumphed
over all of the works of darkness and fulfilled the promises of ages that a Savior
would come to make a way for the human race to be reconnected to the loving God
who made them.
Sparing Noah in the midst of wiping out evil was one way God fulfilled His
promise. There had to be a seed of mankind still alive, or else this prophecy, this
promise, wouldn’t be true. And we know what happened. God flooded the earth,
and only one family was left. Unfortunately, we still have a sin problem.
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No more bad apples, and within a generation, evil is back. The first
manifestation of the spirit of the antichrist even arises. There’s a guy named
Nimrod who rises up and gets everyone to build a tower to the sky in pride and in
worship of how great humans are. That’s Genesis chapters 10 and 11.
But God isn’t done being faithful to humanity. His lovingkindness has not
failed, and His mercy has run out, even though His heart is saddened and grieved.
So new plan. This is where Abraham comes in. Strategy #3: Let’s plant an apple
tree that’s resistant to rot. The apples might not go bad as quickly. God starts a
family of faith. I hope you see it that way from now on. God starts a family of
faith; he’s not being racist; He’s looking for a person and a people who will choose
to follow Him.
Love isn’t love unless it’s a choice. Abraham was a rich man’s son living in
Ur of the Chaldeans. He stood to inherit all of the wealth and estate his family had.
He could have very easily chosen worldly riches and status and respect that His
family had built, but instead, he responded to God’s call to become a follower of
the Lord. Genesis 12:1-3 NKJV Now the Lord had said to Abram: “Get out of
your country, From your family And from your father’s house, To a land that I
will show you. 2 I will make you a great nation; I will bless you And make your
name great; And you shall be a blessing.3 I will bless those who bless you, And I
will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed.”
This final statement promises Abram that "in you, all the families of the
earth shall be blessed." It points beyond his own family to the entire human
population. If Abram will walk with God in faith he will become part of God's
redemptive plan. God is beginning a new chapter in His history of salvation and is
inviting Abram and Sarai to be the first parents of a new believing nation.
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From them would arise a nation that would support faith in God rather than
erode it, and through them and into this new nation would flow the promise of the
"seed of the woman.”
With Abraham, God decides to stop trying to halt the widespread moral
decay and evil and instead focuses on the family. He nurtures a family descended
from people of faith. Rather than wipe out the human race every time it gets bad
enough, He lets ungodly nations and ungodly people follow their own downward
course (within boundaries) and raise up a believing nation where He could
incarnate His Son. He chose this course because it would allow Him to forgive all
people who repent and accept His mercy by faith.
Because of the righteousness of faith, Abraham’s family had the Holy Spirit
to help them resist evil and pass their faith on to subsequent generations. From
Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Jesus Christ, over 2,000 years, faith in the One True
God was passed down, even if not all of the kids in the family or all of the
generations were really following Him. The passing down of the seed, the mustard
seed faith of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, could be made manifest in Jesus, who
came and brought Strategy #4 - bring a dead apple back to life.
In Jesus Christ, who is incarnated into the Jewish family of faith, all who
have faith in His Name can be raised to new life in God now and be raised from the
dead on the last day. Romans 8:29-30 MSG God knew what he was doing from
the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who
love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the
line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives
there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like,
he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set
them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he
stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.
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In God’s glorious gospel plan, He has shown His grace, mercy, and kindness.
He’s shown the power of a kept promise; He’s shown that He does not ever fail to
perform what He says He will do. He’s shown that though evil may be rampant,
darkness may fall, and the enemy may steal, kill, and destroy, His promised love
never departs from those who follow Him in faith. So as we read Paul’s words,
Romans 1:16 NKJV For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the
power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also
for the Greek.
We can know that God is trustworthy and faithful. God keeps His promises
to you, to me, and to all those who choose Him, and He will do it for over a
thousand generations, even when we fail and fail. God loves you so much that He
made a way for you to be in His family of faith. And it came through the Jew first,
but not it’s offered to us gentiles, not because God loves one person more than
another, but because He keeps His promises always and forever.
2 Corinthians 1:19-22 NLT For Jesus Christ, the Son of God, does not
waver between “Yes” and “No.” He is the one whom Silas, Timothy, and I
preached to you, and as God’s ultimate “Yes,” he always does what he says. 20
For all of God’s promises have been fulfilled in Christ with a resounding “Yes!”
And through Christ, our “Amen” (which means “Yes”) ascends to God for his
glory. 21 It is God who enables us, along with you, to stand firm for Christ. He
has commissioned us, 22 and he has identified us as his own by placing the Holy
Spirit in our hearts as the first installment that guarantees everything he has
promised us.
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