Blessings, History and Family

Welcome

Thank you all for being here! I am excited to jump into this sermon with you all and continue learning and growing together!

Let’s pray for God to open our ears, hearts and minds to receive what He wants us to receive

RECAP

Every week is going to build off of one another so we will do a recap for those who were not hear and to remind us of where we are in the topic:

So last week we discussed 2 major points:

God is Immutable meaning that He is unchanging.

Since God is unchanging He is always trustworthy because He will never just randomly or wantonly change His mind concerning us.

So when He says He loves us, or that He is committed to us that is not going to change.

Similarly the promises God gives to us He will not just randomly revoke, no matter how old those promises may be (which is going to be important for our discussion today!)

Our Generous Father is a Generous Blesser

We discussed what a blessing actually is

We discussed that a blessing in a tangible thing, it is something that someone has and the blessing itself can have various effects based on what the specific blessing is.

We explored the blessing given at creation, Be fruitful and multiply fill the earth subdue and rule it.

We explored that for God to give that blessing and for Him to make it effective, He also has to provide for that blessing, so He has to provide for all the things that would lead to the ability to be fruitful and multiply, which means that He will provide food, water, shelter, clothes, land, everything that is needed.

So when Jesus teaches in the sermon on the mount that we do not need to worry or have anxiety about food water clothing shelter etc and Jesus says that we are to focus on His kingdom and righteousness because He is already providing for our needs which forms a strong foundation for us to live generously and abundantly because we are not trying to figure out our own provision, but instead we are trusting God to provide for us so that we can be obedient to Him.

So today we are going to dive deeper into Blessing, specifically what blessing is there, who has it and does it apply to us today?

History and God’s Steadfastness

So, As we talk about many themes in the Bible we will spend a lot of time in the book of Genesis because by far and large this is where almost all biblical themes start and then they get developed through the Scriptures usually finding their climax in Jesus and it’s application in the teachings of the Apostles.

This theme of Generosity is no different.

So we are going to look at the Story of Abram who later became known as Abraham.

We need to look at the story so far!

So Genesis 1-11 is like the opening in this story and it follows a bit of a pattern and the pattern goes like this.

God creates or recreates human/community

That human or community begins to rebel against God which usually takes the form of wickedness bloodshed and sexual immorality

That rebellion accelerates and spreads

Someone/Something cries out to God/God sees what is going on

God rescues/saves a righteous portion/remnant by bringing judgement onto the oppressive usually by turning their own evil back on them or accelerating end.

I can appreciate that this maybe the first time anyone has pointed out this pattern to you, but this pattern is the drumbeat of the whole Old Testament and is what Jesus sees Himself as part of. We will in the future explore this more in detail but for the purpose of this sermon it is enough to know that it exists.

By the time we get to Abram we have seen two full cycles of this pattern

God makes Adam and Eve

Adam and Eve rebel, spiritual beings rebel

The next generation begins to murder

Cain builds a whole city of violence and bloodshed that fills the whole land, spiritual beings start intermingling with humans

The spilled blood cries out to God, God sees the mass violence

God saves Noah, His family and the animals in the Ark and judges those who were destroying and ruining creation by letting creation fall in on itself, meaning God stopped holding back the primordial waters..

We are meant to see the Flood as de-creation, meaning God stopped holding it all together, so when the Ark is sitting there we are meant to see the pre-creation state

God recreates humanity in Noah and His family and He blesses them but now it is bigger:

God begins with a promise:

Genesis 8:20–22 NRSVue

20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humans, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. 22 As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.”

This is a promise built into creation

God continues:

Genesis 9:1–17 NRSVue

1 God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. 3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you, and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. 4 Only, you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 5 For your own lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning: from every animal I will require it and from human beings, each one for the blood of another, I will require a reckoning for human life. 6 Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed, for in his own image God made humans. 7 “And you, be fruitful and multiply, abound on the earth and have dominion over it.” 8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12 God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

See how in this God expands the blessing to include a reminder of what has happened and now God sets physical reminders of this blessing and the promise (covenant) that God has made.

This is also the origin of the rainbow and as Jesus said we are meant to see it and reflect on what God has done.

So the cycle continues again…

God remakes humanity in Noah and his sons

Noah and his sons rebel this time in wickedness, disobedience, and sexual perversion

This spreads and instead of people spreading out and filling the earth and subduing it, they gather, they reject God and want to build a name for themselves, they use technology (bricks) to try and usurp God and become God by creating Babylon (Babel) and trying to set themselves in the center of the Cosmos

God sees what they are doing and comes down

God judges the situation as not good and scatters the people by confusing their languages and giving them over to the other spiritual beings that are in rebellion.

Deuteronomy 32:8–9 NRSVue

8 When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods; 9 the Lord’s own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.

The people wanted to be their own Gods and worship these other spiritual beings so God lets them, however God chooses Abram from out among them, not because of anything Abram did or had done, but because God chose.

God is still committed to the humans even though now already there have been 2 full cycles of rebellion, God continues to bless and continues on as Generous even though we humans continue to mess everything up.

I just want to pause here for a moment and appreciate that as far as reliable partners go, us humans have not proven to be reliable or good at all and still God continues to work with us. He is committed and He does not change.

As we get into the next part, I want us to see that God could have given up on us, He could have stopped working with us, but He doesn’t, God isn’t giving up on us collectively and individually.

So if you are or if someone you know is going through something and we are tempted to think that we are failures and aren’t worth it, I think God’s actions say differently, by God’s actions He shows us time and time again, that we are worth the effort, we are worth the trouble. We are worth loving.

Abram, Blessing, and Paul

So continuing on God continues being overly generous to people and here is what He says to Abram:

Genesis 12:1–3 NRSVue

1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 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. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Remember that God has given over all the other families on the earth to other spiritual beings because that is what they wanted, so God picks a man to become the fountain of blessing not just for himself but for the whole world. Abram was 75 when all this started and fun fact Sarai his wife was barren.

So for God to see this blessing through, He is going to have to make a way because He just said He will make Abram (who has no children) into a great nation (from his offspring) and this is where we get the insight that blessing is not just meant for us, but we are blessed to be a blessing.

From the very start, our blessings have always been intended to be vehicles for us to bless others.

So we can see from this blessing, that all those other families that God has just given over to the rebellious spiritual beings, God has them firmly in view when He gives this special blessing to Abram and His family, we are chosen and elected to be vehicles of blessing for others.

This is so crucial I can not harp on it enough, this gives us the best understanding for blessing, even though blessings are given to families/individuals and the recipient is going to be significantly better off because of the blessing, it was never ever intended to remain with that family/individual alone, it has always been others focused.

Blessings are always others focused

So the blessings given to Abram have always intended to rescue those other families. This by the way is the biggest upset by the time we get to the NT because the jews hoarded the blessing of their God and intentionally built walls to keep themselves separated from the Gentiles. So the biggest shock revelation in the NT is that Gentiles could be God’s people too through Jesus.

I often think we do not see this as monumental as it was, remember for over a thousand years, only the Jews had a relationship with Yahweh.

Jesus came to restore all those families who exiled themselves in the tower of Babel back into the fold of God’s people. This refolding of the Gentiles back into God’s people is what most of the NT writings are focused on. See the jews thought that Abram offspring was by birth and heredity and so they were exclusionary but listen to what the New Testament authors have to say:

1 Corinthians 10:1–4 NRSVue

1 I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.

So it is incredibly possible to miss this, remember this is Paul writing to the Greeks in Corinth…the Greeks, not the Jews, the Greeks..

He says OUR ancestors, He is talking about the Exodus generation a few down the line from Abram, Paul a Jew, is saying to Greeks, our ancestors, in Paul’s mind we as Christians, share a common ancestry with the Jews, that their story is our story. When we are baptised into Jesus Christ, His story becomes our Story, His blessings (inherited from Abram) become our blessings, we are adopted into this family of faith that has it’s origin all the way back through Abram through Noah to Seth. We are the family of faith.

Now you may say…Shawn…dude…you are making all this up…it seems far fetched.

I will again turn to Paul:

Galatians 3:6–9 NRSVue

6 Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” 7 so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. 8 And the scripture, foreseeing that God would reckon as righteous the gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the gentiles shall be blessed in you.” 9 For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.

Remember the word for faith and believe is the same work in Greek Pistis.

Galatians 3:14 NRSVue

14 in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

So what we have gone over is actually the fundamental understanding of the Apostles, Paul will later reproves the Galatians

Galatians 4:8–11 NRSVue

8 Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. 9 Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental principles? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? 10 You are observing special days and months and seasons and years. 11 I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted.

See Paul here is saying that you have been adopted into a great heritage a family of faith, with all the trappings of blessings that are associated with it via the Holy Spirit.

So why in the world would you want to be enslaved again by those other spiritual beings that you swore allegiance to at the tower of Babel? They were doing this by observing other religious practices and festivals being g enslaved to those same spiritual beings who want to do nothing but ruin us and destroy us.

The Choice: Blessing or Ruin

So we have a choice.

As Christians we can live in and under the blessings that we have inherited from our Common Ancestor Abraham and the whole family of the faithful.

Mark 3:33–35 NRSVue

33 And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

Jesus re-defines His family as the obedient faithful

in typical blessing/curse format Jesus teaches this:

Luke 6:46–49 NRSVue

46 “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you? 47 I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them. 48 That one is like a man building a house who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it because it had been well built. 49 But the one who hears and does not act is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, it quickly collapsed, and great was the ruin of that house.”

This is just one example of blessing and ruin.

It is in fact the choice present to all who hear Jesus’ words.

How Generous is our God that He would make this blessing available to everyone?

This is like winning the lottery just because you played, this is guaranteed for us. Remember God does not change, these blessings and promises do not change, they are as true for Noah, for Abram, for Jesus, for the Galatians and for us.

This is our great foundation, this is the wonderful foundation that we all have to stand on.

These blessings are Signed, Sealed and Delivered in Jesus Christ to us by Faith

So the question is do you want it and what do I do with it.

Next Week- Be Holy as I am Holy

Next week we are going to explore, what do we do with this blessing, now that we have it, what do we do with it.

Communion

As a family of faith, I want to take communion together as one.

We are one family in Christ