A Preposterous Promise

Intro

Hey Good morning church family. My name is Ben Hein and I am one of the pastors at Redeemer. I serve as the Church Planting Resident. I’m here this morning with my family, my wife Neva, and two sons Felix and Kaius. We’re still relatively new here to Indianapolis as we just moved here in June with the hope of planting a new congregation in the city in about 2 years. So at some point in the near future we are going to join the crazy club of church planting with you all and follow in your footsteps. Which is exciting for us, but many of you are probably quietly laughing at how much we couldn’t possibly know about what we’re getting into and you’re probably right. Please don’t burst our bubble until after the Advent season though.

Well we are kicking off a short Advent series this morning that will focus on Jesus - which is good for an Advent series. See - you’ve already taught me my first lesson in planting. Specifically, I understand that you all will be looking at Jesus as the ultimate prophet, priest, and king of God’s people. So do me a favor and turn to or turn on Genesis 3. While you’re turning there let’s pray together.

Prayer

Christians believe some pretty outlandish stuff, you know? I mean we literally just read a story about a talking snake. Some might even say that Christian beliefs are preposterous. A couple of weeks ago my friend sent me this meme that said this:

“Christianity: The popular belief that a celestial Jewish baby, born from a virgin mother, died for three days so that he could ascend to heaven on a cloud and then make you live forever only if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically tell him you accept him as your Lord and master so he can remove an evil force from your spiritual being that is present in all humanity because an immoral woman made from a man’s rib was hoodwinked by a talking reptile possessed by a malicious angel to secretly eat forbidden fruit from a magical tree.

Yeah, that sounds perfectly plausible.”

And of course he sent this to me thinking, Aha, slamdunk on Christianity. But as I’m reading it I’m thinking, “No, that sounds about right. I mean, I might change the way some of that worded but no, that sounds about right.”

This book, frankly, says some pretty wild things. Talking snakes and donkeys, world wide floods, sea’s parting, strange looking heavenly creatures, the dead coming back to life. And I haven’t even touched Revelation in that list.

I know as a pastor you might think I’m supposed to be convincing you that all of this is perfectly plausible and believable and rational. But the moment we start to think we can explain and rationalize the miraculous and incredible is the moment our faith becomes devoid of awe and wonder.

Actually, I think it’s really easy for us to walk through the Advent season absent of the joy and wonder it brings. Maybe Advent has just become so familiar for you, and it’s hard to still feel any new sense of joy with all these familiar songs, stories, and sermons every year. Maybe the last year or two has just been so overwhelmingly sad that you’re just tired of feeling feelings; the thought of new joy just sounds exhausting. I get it. But for most of us, maybe all of us, I think we lose our awe and wonder through this season in part because we’re just trying to get by. The advertisements, the shopping, the parties, the events, the year end tasks at work, vacations with family. It’s all just so much and with our attention elsewhere, we lose the sense of wonder, and with it the joy that the message of Advent brings.

Christian or not, I think we all struggle with joy during Advent. So that’s what I want to call us back to this morning. Wonder and joy at the good news of Advent. As preposterous as it may sound, the long-expected promise of a Savior who would redeem God’s people is true. And God’s people really can have joy, even in an incredibly busy season, even in a heavily commercialized environment, even after 2 really hard years of a pandemic, because Jesus is the Savior we so desperately want and need.

Ok, 3 points this morning: Preposterous Sin, A Preposterous Promise, and Certain Joy.

Preposterous Sin

If you have Genesis 3 open, I want you to look at verses 1-6 with me. Now, so much could be said about this dialogue between the serpent and Eve. A quick footnote on the serpent - while nothing here in this passage directly groups the serpent and Satan together, Jesus in John 8 and John in Revelation 12 clearly tie the serpent to Satan. And the serpent’s character is perfectly in line with the character of Satan as a liar, deceiver, and accuser as Scripture continues to unfold. So it is fitting for us to see Satan at work here, even if that was likely not clear to Eve, or even to Moses when he wrote these things down for us.

The serpent twists what God actually said to Eve, and Eve conveniently leaves out some key parts of what God said in her response. We could rightly look at this opening exchange in more detail and see the importance of holding fast to God’s Word. That’s certainly one piece of this.

We could also pay special attention to what the serpent suggests about God. Look at his appeal in verses 4-5. “You will not surely die. For God knows that what will really happen is you’ll become like him.” The serpent undermines God’s goodness. He’s forcing Eve to ask questions she never would’ve thought to consider before: “Is God really good? Is he really enough? Or is he holding out on me?”

But what I really want us to focus on is just the offer itself. What is the serpent really offering to Eve? What does he really have to offer that she doesn’t already have? Nothing. It’s an offer of nothing.

If an internet retailer jacks up the price of their product in October only to give you a “Black Friday” offer that is just the original price of the product from September, are they really giving you a deal? No. That’s an empty deal built on a charade.

And so is this offer the serpent makes with Eve. The fact of the matter is, they were already like God. Like us, Adam and Eve were made in God’s image, that’s Genesis 1:26. And to be made in God’s image means that they were filled with the qualities of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. So everything the serpent offers here is what they already had. But twisting the truth, he convinces Eve to believe a lie about herself and her God.

Isn’t this how sin and Satan always operate? We so quickly believe lies about ourselves and about God, empty offers that fool us into thinking we will find fulfillment apart from God.

So here stands Eve. The Word of God is twisted, doubts about God and herself enter her mind, and as a result her heart becomes corrupted. Believing this empty offer, Together with Adam, they take and eat from the tree - and sin enters the cosmos. The Apostle Paul will later say in Romans that sin and death entered the world through one man, and then spread to all.

I get it. This does sound a bit crazy - preposterous even. One small act of disobedience - eating from a simple tree - is the cause of all the sin, pain, disfunction, violence, hurt, and death we see all around us? How could that be? Stay with me. Maybe this story isn’t as crazy as you might think.

God returns to the garden. This incredibly sad and tragic moment - one he knew was coming - has now arrived. And so with a pained voice he calls out, “Adam, where are you?”

He’s hiding in the bushes behind his fig-leave undergarments. Whereas Adam and Eve had once been naked and unashamed, they are now poorly clothed and filled with shame. Sin, having taken control of their hearts, has now grown to full-on shame; a shame that drives Adam and Even from the joy of life with God to one of fear and shame apart from God.

If you’re at all familiar with the work of Brene Brown, then you know she has a paradigm for understanding the difference between guilt and shame, and its a paradigm that I find incredibly helpful. Of course she’s not coming from any explicitly Christian framework, but nevertheless, very helpful. She says the difference between guilt and shame is the difference between “I’ve done something bad,” and “I am bad.” It’s the difference between something saying, “I’ve stolen something” and “I’m a thief.” Guilt is the sense of remorse over individual actions of wrong doing; shame is when our identity becomes shaped by negative perceptions of the self.

Notice how quickly Adam and Eve’s guilt is turned into shame. No sooner do they disobey God then their eyes are opened, they become ashamed of themselves in front of one another, and more significantly, they are ashamed of who they are before God. So they hide from one another and from God.

You see, this is how total our sin is. Sin is not merely individual acts of disobedience; According to the Bible, and we see this here in our passage, sin is totalizing in how it affects our inner being, and how it ruptures our relationships with God and with one another.

It’s in this rupturing that shame enters in, infects, and debilitates us.

Why do we exhaust ourselves trying to have the picture-perfect holiday season with our family? Why do we run ourselves ragged comparing ourselves to others while trying to keep up appearances on social media? Why do we turn to addictions of all kinds for quick hits of dopamine and relief?

Do you know what these things are? They’re fig leaves. Fig leaves we create because we’ve believed the empty offers that convince us God cannot satisfy; that tell us lasting happiness, meaning, purpose, value, that any of these things can be found apart from God. They’re the way we hide ourselves and try to deal with the sense that we feel deep down, this sense of shame that says “There’s something wrong with me.”

The Bible says that feeling, and our response, that’s a result of sin fracturing our relationship with life with God. Now, I recognize that the idea of a talking snake is still pretty wild. But I’d also offer this thought: maybe this story of our fall into sin isn’t as crazy as it first appears.

After all, doesn’t it explain the ruptured relationships that we are all painfully aware of? Does it not explain so much of the sense of shame that chases us through life? Maybe this story gets us more than we want to admit.

Maybe the truly preposterous lesson from this story so far is that we still continue to sin by willfully choosing life apart from God as a better alternative, knowing that it only leads to more and more shame. Adam and Eve had it all and still thought they could have it better by living apart from God. We think we can be more clever than they were, but regularly find ourselves back in the same place: clothed in fig leaves and hiding from God.

A Preposterous Promise

So what is God’s response to Adam and Eve in this moment? Does he kick them while they’re down with judgment or condemnation? Does he pat them on the back and say “Do better next time?” Does he fill them with false assurance? Maybe any combination of these responses would make sense to us. Let’s consider the preposterous promise God makes instead.

Look at verse 15. This is where things get good. Speaking to the serpent, that is Satan, God says “I will put conflict between you, serpent, and this woman; between your descendant and her descendant.” Jesus told us who the descendants of Satan are in John 8:44, when, speaking to the Pharisees he said:

John 8:44 ESV

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

It’s a matter of the heart and will. In contrast, the descendants of Eve are all those who by faith love and know God as their Father who is in heaven.

If God had stopped there, we’d have no good news in this passage. We would be forced to conclude that we are destined for eternal conflict with Satan not unlike other world religions that posture reality as some duality between a force of good and a force of evil. And perhaps we’d expect the dialogue to stop here. Many people today think of God as nothing more than the dispenser of karma or a divine arbiter of quid pro quo. Many of us function as if God operates tit for tat: you obey, I will bless; you disobey, I will curse.

Let us thank God that such notions are completely foreign to his character. Even in our sin and misery, he still draws close to us and relates to us not by Karma, not by contract, but by grace. He relates to us by promise.

The Hebrew here in verse 15 for offspring or descendant literally means seed. The promise if we read through to the end of the verse is that a child of Eve will some day rise up and put an end to the conflict by striking the head of the serpent, vanquishing him once and for all. A redeemer will be given who will crush the head of the serpent. Even though this redeemer will be struck himself in the process, the conflict between Sin and Satan and humanity will finally be put to an end.

The promise is of redemption, that even in our sin God will still be gracious and kind to us, and will free us from our misery. The way God’s people relate to Him has always been by grace. They have always entered into fellowship with him by way of believing in his gracious promises.

We, then, are to be a people of promise. The way we relate to one another is informed by the way God relates to us - by gracious promise. The way we talk about God ought to convey that this is who God is: A God who is gracious, filled with loving kindness, who enters into all of our sin and shamefulness and promises himself to us anyway. The very thought that God could be gracious and forgiving to us, as ashamed as we feel, is preposterous to many. And yet this is precisely who God is.

In 1958 Dr. King gave a powerful sermon titled “A Knock at Midnight.” Some of you may be familiar with it. I’d encourage you to find the manuscript as it is remarkably relevant. I’m going to paraphrase like, 3 or 4 big paragraphs now. He talked about how so many people, especially young people, are stuck in the dark midnight hour of life, stuck in sin, confused about what purpose their life may have, stuck without any hope. He said then that the greatest challenge facing the church is to continue to be a Friend to those who are lost at midnight. The church must, he said, proclaim Jesus as the hope of the world and the answer to all of life’s most complex problems. Many will come knocking on the door of the church, he said, confused by life’s uncertainties, their disappointments, and hopelessness. The church will often fail such persons, and yet they continue to knock. We must, he said, imbue people with the conviction that God is still at work in this sinful world and that Christ is where true and lasting forgiveness is found.

Are we a friend to those who are lost at midnight? Are we proclaiming a God who makes promises to those who feel hopelessly trapped in their sin and shamefulness? Maybe before we can talk about being a friend to those lost at midnight, we need a fresh experience of God’s promises ourselves this Advent season. Maybe we need a fresh experience of God’s redemption breaking into our lives and putting an end to our own continued cycles of sin and shame.

What we need then is joy, certain joy that can only be found in Jesus.

Certain Joy

If you still have a Bible or app open I want you to flip open to Luke 2 starting in verse 10 with this familiar scene between the angels and the shepherds. Hear the proclamation of the angels afresh this morning:

Luke 2:10–14 ESV

And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

The promise for a redeemer has finally been fulfilled in the person of Jesus. The long awaited offspring who himself would be struck in his death, but whose victory over death would crush the serpent, would defeat Satan and the power of sin, who would end all conflict and finally bring peace between God and man - that person is named Jesus.

It’s only in Jesus where the rupture between us and God can be healed, where our sin that only leads to shame can be defeated, where we can find lasting joy that will light our way through the darkest midnight hours.

What does this mean for us? 2 things and I’m done.

First, the message of Advent is the only lasting remedy for shame. If shame is the wicked cancer that says, “You are broken, defective, worthless”; the certain joy we find in Jesus says, “You are loved, treasured, of immeasurable value.” The sin that ruptured our relationship with God, Jesus came, died, and rose again so that relationship could be healed. Our joy is full when we come to Jesus and cast all our burdens, cares, sin, and shame on him.

Second, this good news brings peace among all men who believe. As the good news works in each of us individually it also works in us collectively. Jesus is committed to radically reshaping and reorienting our relationships and love for one another. He does this through the power of his gospel working in and among his people.

Some of you may know the name Greg Johnson. He is a pastor in our denomination who has been vocal about his own same-sex orientation and how the church must better care and minister to sexual minorities. In his new book Still TIme To Care, he speaks to how important it is for churches to be shaped by this good news. Greg says this:

If there is one thing that is essential to the church becoming a safe haven, it is this. The church must be permeated by gospel culture. It is the only thing that can speak to our shame. Because we don’t need to become lovable. We need to be loved. That’s so much better than making ourselves lovable.

Do you see what he’s saying? We don’t need to radically strive to make ourselves lovable to others or to God. We need to hear and learn and know that we are loved. And the good news of Advent is that our God, out of his great love for us, he has kept his promise and sent Jesus into the world to be our Savior and Redeemer. When our churches become a place that loves those who do not feel lovable; well, people might really start to believe the preposterous idea that our God really does love them too.

I recently met a woman who has been faithfully attending church every week, and she’s been coming from an addiction recovery center. Every week she comes with someone new. When I first met her, she told me some of her story and history with various addictions. But as she was stuck in her shame, she said God entered in and has set her free. She has experienced God’s promises and redemption for herself. Now she says, since God has been so kind and loving to her, she’s going to keep inviting whoever she can every week so more and more people can see how good he is.

How did this happen? She met Jesus. She experienced the good news of Advent. Through Jesus she learned that our God is a God of promise, forgiveness, and love, and that through Jesus she can now have certain joy.

What about you? May Jesus set our hearts free from shame by filling us with certain joy this Advent season. Let’s pray.

As we come to this table now we remember another preposterous thought: Jesus always has us and our needs in mind. Even as he looked ahead to his own death, he prepared a meal that would strengthen the hearts of his people for centuries and millennia to come. At this table we partake of a meal that Jesus has promised to use to spiritually strengthen and nourish his people.

This meal is not for perfect people. It is for the sinful and hungry, the ashamed and needy, those who trust that Jesus really does bring certain joy amidst all of our sin and shame. So if you’re here this morning and you have trusted Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, this meal is for you this morning. In just a minute you’ll come forward to grab the bread and the cup and you can take it back to your seat and hold onto it until we all partake together. The tinted cups are wine and the clear cups are juice. Let me encourage you to use the time you have to pray and ask the Lord to fill you with a new sense of the good news that can bring great joy to you, even today.

If you’re here today and you have not trusted in Christ in this way, then let me say this morning on behalf of Fountain Square that we are all really glad you’re here. As we are coming to this table this morning however, I would ask you not to partake of the bread and the cup. And I don’t say that to be exclusive or elitist - far from it. I say this only because apart from faith, the bread and the cup really mean nothing to you. Instead I’d invite you to consider this crazy thought: that there is a God in heaven who loves you. And there is a Savior whose name is Jesus who wants to take all of your sin and shame and fill you instead with joy. There are some guided prayers in the bulletin if you’d like to use those during this time.