Sermon Tone Analysis

INTRODUCTION

​Matthew 1:23 AMP23 Behold, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a Son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel—which, when translated, means, God with us.

Emmanual, sometimes rendered Immanuel, both are taken from the same Hebrew word “Ἐμμανουήλ (Emmanouēl)”, taken from the root word “עָמַס (ʿā·mǎs)”; meaning to take a burden too heavy for one to carry, and place it upon another who could.

We would not need “God with us”, lest we were without God.

Did God leave us, or did we leave God?

To answer this question, we need to take a quick look back to the beginning.

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God created the earth after his standards.

God created humanity after His standards and image.

These standards, laws if you will, are the foundation of the universe.

All things subsist because of these things.

God’s laws, moral or physical exist above and before creation.

There is no difference in the eyes of God between the laws of morality and gravity.

God is the moral standard of the universe.

Man, as created by God was “good”, because God could not create anything that was not good.

But to be made in His image, also meant to be a free moral agent, a self-aware, self-determining entity, with the power of choice.

If we could not say no to God, our yes meant nothing.

And Adam made a bad decision.

A decision not to trust.

There were 2 trees in the garden, the tree of Life and the tree of knowledge.

Adam chose knowledge over life, self direction over faith and relationship.

Anyone who had children has experienced this.

“WHY!”

Man became disintegrated from God, sin entered creation.

​A Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Greek Testament and The Hebrew Bible 264.

ἁμαρτάνω264.

ἁμαρτάνω hamartanō, ham-ar-tan´-o; perh.

from 1 (as a neg.

particle) and the base of 3313; prop.

to miss the mark (and so not share in the prize),

To violate the standard of the universe.

There had to be a morality for fallen humanity.

We now have God’s dilemma; How to Be Just and Yet Justify Sinful Man?

There could be no mercy lest there was judgement.

And further, as humanity, in it’s sin-damaged, soul disintegrated state, though pardoned, would continue to sin.

The answer?

Someone must pay the price for sin; the death penalty.

Someone must stand in the gap between God’s righteousness and humanity’s sinfulness.

This will justify God’s rebirth of the second Adam described in Romans 5:12-14.

​Romans 5:12–14 TPT12 When Adam sinned, the entire world was affected.

Sin entered human experience, and death was the result.

And so death followed this sin, casting its shadow over all humanity, because all have sinned.

13 Sin was in the world before Moses gave the written law, but it was not charged against them where no law existed.

14 Yet death reigned as king from Adam to Moses even though they hadn’t broken a command the way Adam had.

The first man, Adam, was a picture of the Messiah, who was to come.

God gave us the law to show us that we could never be good enough to return to the standard or the universe without a union with Himself; and that we could never experience that union with Him apart from accepting the work of Jesus Christ on the cross.

​Acts 7:48–50