Sermon Tone Analysis
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Introduction
About 10 years after the apostle John died, a baby was born by the name of Marcion.
Marcion would go on to develop a false-teaching which basically said, that the God of the Old Testament was evil and the God of the New Testament was good.
Thus the God of the Jews was bad and the God of Christians, the true God, was good.
The God of the Old Testament was about righteousness and justice.
The God of the New Testament was about mercy and love.
And it isn’t difficult to understand where he was coming from, though he was absolutely wrong.
We see moments when God brings fire against Nadab and Abihu or Uzzah or the Canaanites at large.
And many wonder why?
Is he capricious?
Is he just mean?
Is he hateful?
And the answer is God is severe.
He deals severely with sin.
He deals severely with unbelief.
Sin is a major issue with God.
Not so much to people because we’re immersed in it.
We’re like fish in the water.
But sin is outside of God and he sees it for what it is and he deals with it as it needs to be dealt with.
At the same time, God is kind and gracious.
We read in Ephesians 2:8-9
And that is what we see in today’s passage.
By grace we have been saved through faith so that we do not boast.
And we see Paul explaining this grace to us in its many forms.
We see four of those forms this morning, and keep in mind that these all work in tandem.
In this passage, we see:
Gospel Grace
Grafting Grace
Guarding Grace
Generous Grace
Gospel Grace
The first form of grace that we see in these verses is what I would call gospel grace.
And the reason I call it gospel grace is because, it is grace that reconciles a lost and dying people to God.
That is the good news.
The good news is that we do not need to remain in our sin, but that we can be reconciled to God through the blood of Jesus Christ.
It was the gospel that compelled Paul to go and preach the good news.
He was unashamed of the gospel as it was the power of God to salvation to everyone who believed; to the Jew first and also to the Greek, the Gentile.
But the Jews rejected it and so Paul began focusing more on the Gentile people, becoming effectively the apostle to the Gentiles.
And by presenting the Jewish Messiah as the Gentile’s Christ—their king too—Paul was hoping to stir up some emotions in his fellow Jew.
It’s interesting here that in the original, Paul used the words, “my own flesh,” rather than “my fellow Jews.”
Paul so identified with his fellow Jews, he called them his flesh.
When Treye was probably 2 or so, Katie and I stayed at a hotel that had a gas fireplace.
It had a clear, glass shield over it and we didn’t think much of it.
We turned on the fire place and went about our business.
Because of the shield, we didn’t think anything of Treye getting near it until he touched the shield and we heard the searing of his fingers and then the screaming of his voice.
He immediately pulled away from the fire.
It was instinctive.
His flesh was burning.
I can imagine that’s how Paul felt about his fellow Jews.
They were his flesh and he was compelled to do whatever was necessary to keep his flesh from burning.
If that meant provoking them to jealousy, he was not above that.
Yet in provoking his flesh, he was benefiting the rest of the world.
Rather than Christianity being just another sect of Judaism, the world was being transferred from the domain of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son.
And how much greater then will our blessings be when we are joined in faith by the Jews!?
It will be thrilling!
It will be like watching a resurrection of an entire people.
And so, all I would say, to us as a church and to each of us as individual believers: don’t put the gospel in a box.
There is not one set way of evangelizing.
There are many strategies and methods that God uses, sometimes direct one on one, sometimes in a group setting, sometimes even by shaking the dust from our feet and going elsewhere so as to make those who have heard jealous.
But however we evangelize, let us do it as if our own flesh were on the line.
As Jude wrote,
Grafting Grace
So the first form of grace we saw in verses 13-15 was gospel grace.
The second form we see is grafting grace.
It’s easy to miss the flow of what Paul is saying here.
He just emphasized that at the moment the Jews have been rejected, but that is not going to always be the case.
In fact, there will be a time when the Jews move from death to life—they’ll be resurrected.
How does he come to that conclusion?
The principles and revelation of the Old Testament.
Paul used two metaphors to get the point across.
The first was about the firstfruits and a lump of dough.
Which is probably loosely based on Numbers 15.
If you think about sourdough for instance, whenever they made a starter, a portion of that new dough would be offered to God.
In doing so, they had sanctified the entire dough for the season.
Does that mean that every loaf of bread will come out perfectly golden brown and fluffy?
No.
The same with the second metaphor.
If the root is good, then the tree will be good.
That doesn’t mean that every piece of fruit will be worm-free and that black spots won’t form on the leaves ever?
No. What it does mean is that Israel, the Jews as a whole, came from “good stock.”
The little dough offering most likely represents the patriarchs.
The root represents Abraham, whom Paul always goes back to to prove a point about faith and righteousness.
The remnants throughout Israel’s history had these people as their fathers, their sacred lump and remaining branches.
And so, there have been loaves of bread, or we could say branches that have followed in their holiness.
And God, in his grace, has grafted us into that same root—that same holiness.
We have been grafted into this righteous root.
This was not our own doing.
This was God’s doing.
When you go outside, one thing you will never see a branch, on its own accord, break off its tree, scoot across the yard, climb onto another tree, and attach itself.
It will not happen.
Someone outside of that tree must cut the branch and transfer it.
So God has done for us all.
He has taken us out of this wild tree and grafted us to the cultivated tree of Israel.
Or as Paul said in Colossians, he has transferred us from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of his beloved Son.
What God did in his grafting grace was make one tree out of many.
E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one.
This is not Replacement Theology that says the Church has replaced Israel.
This is Engrafting Theolgy that all believers are engrafted onto the tree of righteousness.
And the grafting is not yet over.
There are more to be grafted on of both the Jews and the Gentiles.
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