Sermon Tone Analysis

Reading

Introduction

Quiz about what these things are used to remember:

rainbow: pride day, no global flood, no global drought

roast lamb: Passover, Australia day, birthday

sending a goat into the desert: 40 years in the desert, shepherds, payment for sins

a pile of 12 stones: best BBQ spot, God’s presence here, boundary marker

God has done many great things for his people, and it is important that we never forget them.

In fact, he tells us to teach them to our children:

As Christians, we too have mighty works of God that we should remember.

What is the symbol of what Jesus did for us?

[The cross]

Kid’s church

Who dies?

Now that the kids have left, here is another, more morbid quiz.

I should mention that, during the first part of this message I’m going to be talking about death.

If anything hits you a bit hard, please don’t feel embarrassed if you need to go out for a time—no-one will think any the less of you.

But I assure you, we will end on an upbeat note.

So, I’m going to tell you about three people I knew growing up in wild North Queensland:

the first was a rodeo clown—he was the guy who distracted the crazed horse or cow from the fallen rodeo rider; it’s famed as the most dangerous job in a dangerous activity;

the hoon—he was the guy who fixed up an old car and then went “rallying” in it, drifting, jumping, crashing, and generally taking every vehicular risk you can imagine;

the student—this guy studied hard, he played a bit of basketball and cricket with us, but he just wanted to get a decent job.

Which of these three won’t die?

[discussion]

Yes, the point is that, no matter what our lifestyle, we all die eventually.

(For the curious, the rodeo clown died while we were still in school, and the other two have families and jobs still.)

Our problem with death

Death is something that we still rail against.

Death touches all of us throughout our lives.

For example, I consider myself relatively untouched by death, so far in my life.

And yet I have seen grandparents die from old age, I have seen friends around my age die from cancer, and Mable and I have had miscarriages—our own barely-started children dying.

Death is so omnipresent that we often don’t even notice it.

In traditional societies death was much more visible in people’s lives.

Even today in Hong Kong, when you go to the market to buy chicken, you are confronted with a live chicken which is executed in front of you.

You buy a live fish and then club it to death at home.

But in traditional, extended families, the children would be present when grand or great-grandparents died, and they would see their bodies.

I grew up on a farm, so animal death was simple a part of my reality, but human death, thanks to the segregation of Australian society, was something I rarely saw.

I think the first dead human body I saw was in Hong Kong, at a funeral home.

But no matter how we try to hide death, to lock it away in hospitals and funeral homes, it stalks us all.

And, eventually, it will claim us all.

So why then do we see death of animals, of people, as so bad?

Why do we rail against something that is an integral part of the reality that we live in.

Isn’t trying to resist reality a sign of lunacy?

No, because the story of the Bible tells us that we were made without death.

And so death is an intruder, an enemy.

How did that happen?

Remember that we’re working through the Bible in a year.

So let’s recap the story so far:

Story so far

In the very beginning, Adam and Eve were created in a beautiful, peaceful garden, and placed in charge.

There was no death, only growth and life.

But they decided that they knew better than their creator, and chose to make their own decisions.

The result, as God had warned, was that they brought competition and death and destruction into the world.

Their children killed one another, and the long line of descendants from Adam to Noah ends each line with “and he died.”

(Except for Enoch, of course.)

By Noah’s time, people were so destructive and wicked that God decided that death for all was the only solution.

He offered Noah a refuge, the opportunity to build a boat that God would protect through the great flood with which he would wipe out the wicked world.

But, of course, Noah and his family brought death and destruction through the flood with them, and the line from Noah down to Abram was also punctuated by death at each step.

God called this guy Abram out of his land to a new one, and there he gave him a new name, Abraham, and a miraculous son in his old age, Isaac.

And then he asked Abraham to kill his own son, as a sacrifice.

Unlike Adam and Eve, Abraham trusted God’s life-giving power so much that he was prepared to sacrifice Isaac, but at the last second, God provided a substitute, a ram that was killed in Isaac’s place.

Now that’s where we got up to last week, and Graham shared with us about Abraham’s incredible faith.

But the story doesn’t end there, of course.

Isaac himself had children: Esau and Jacob.

God chose Jacob, and gave him a new name, too: Israel.

Jacob had twelve sons, the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.

One of those sons, Joseph, was sold into slavery in Egypt by his own brothers, but God used their evil and Joseph’s faithfulness to create a refuge for the family of Israel when a great famine spread through the Middle East.

The family of Israel, now itself called Israel, remained in Egypt even after the famine, and over the centuries grew from a large family of 70 into a small nation of perhaps two million people.

The vigor of the Israelites terrified their hosts, the Egyptians, and they reacted by forcing the Israelites into hard labour, and eventually trying to slow their population growth by killing their baby boys.

But one of those baby boys escaped death (many of them did, actually) but this one, named Moses, found his way into the palace of the Pharoah, and grew up as a prince of Egypt.

When Moses was 40, he discovered his Hebrew, or Israelite, heritage, and in a fit of tribalism, murdered a cruel, Egyptian overseer.

He fled into the wilderness, where he sheltered as a shepherd for forty years.

But then the the all-powerful God of Israel, Yahweh, called him back to Egypt to confront Pharoah with God’s power, and to demand that Israel be released.

The Pharaoh, and all Egypt with him, refused to listen to Yahweh’s request, and so Yahweh visited a series of progressively worse plagues on them.

Moses kept offering Pharaoh the opportunity to obey God, but Pharaoh kept refusing.

And so, plague by plague Yahweh crushed Egypt and its gods.

He turned the waters to blood, brought swarms of frogs, gnats, and flies, destroyed their livestock, inflicted the people and animals with boils, crushed them with hail, stripped the fields with locusts, and hid the sun from the land.

The gods of Egypt were supposed to protect its people and land, but they were crushed by Yahweh’s constant triumphs over them.

Still Pharaoh and the people resisted, and Yahweh promised a tenth plague, a plague where he would kill every firstborn, except for those of Israel.

But why would God kill all the firstborn?

Why death of the firstborn?

The first thing that we need to remember when we’re talking about the idea of God killing people is this: God gave all of us life, our lives rightly belong to him, and he is well within his rights to take them away at any moment.

One of the consequences of Adam and Eve’s rebellion, which happened right at the beginning of the story, is that we have inherited their upside-down view of the world, where we think we are in charge, that we are the bosses.

But no matter how firmly we believe lies, they don’t become true.

I can believe I am Albert Einstein as firmly as I wish, but it doesn’t make me him.

It just makes me crazy.

The same is true for the idea that God somehow owes us life—life is a gift from God, not an entitlement.

God in his mercy sustains us in life until, in his mercy, he chooses the moment of our death—for all of us, remember, whether we are hoons, rodeo clowns, or have our heads stuck in books.

The idea of only taking the firstborn is an example of God’s mercy.

In Old Testament law, God in his mercy asks only that we give the first-fruits, and that includes our first-born children.

Of course we don’t need to sacrifice our children, but rather “consecrate” (dedicate) them to God.

Immediately after explaining the passover to the people we find in Exodus 13:

But since even firstborn children belong to God, some form of substitute must be presented, and God tells Moses that he will take the priestly tribe of Levites as a substitute for the firstborn of the rest of Israel in

Now it’s interesting that, as Christians, God treats us more strictly in a way!

We can no longer get away with just dedicating the first-fruits to God.

Rather, God expects everything.

Remember, Jesus said,

We no longer merely dedicate our first-fruits to God, but rather what he deserves, what he owns: everything.

I’ll talk about how that works a bit later, but lets get back to the Israelites and Egyptians.

As we saw, Egypt had rejected God, constantly and completely.