An Unusual Promise

I love the Christmas season.

Although it doesn’t exactly feel the same as it did when we were kids, this season is one of the few times when life feels familiar.

It is easy to become obsessed with the newest technology, the latest trends, or the hottest new bands.

During the month of December, though, we do some things the way we have done them for years. We have traditional get-togethers or decorations that we always put in that one particular spot.

It is easy to allow the nostalgia and familiar to cause us to lose sight of the wonder of what Christmas is all about.

That’s why, for the next four weeks, we want to take a look at An Unusual King.

These are familiar passages and stories that you may have heard for years. However, in the grand scheme of history, the way God worked to bring his Son into the world was, to put it mildly, unusual.

God made unusual promises, sent him to earth in an unusual way, brought unusual celebrations for him, and will one day send him back to earth in an unusual return.

So, I invite you to spend the next four Sundays with us as we look at different aspects of our Unusual King.

This week, we are going to look back at some of the promises God made that set the stage for the unusual king.

We are going to do something a little different today and actually look at three different passages to help us see that our lives should be marked by an unusual peace.

Let’s start by looking at where everything went wrong.

Flip over to Genesis 3.

In the pain in this passage, we also find the first promise that God would send an unusual king.

However, it is a very....

1) An unusual picture.

Let’s talk about the problem before we get to the picture God uses.

When God made the world, he created a beautiful garden and put Adam and Eve in the middle of it.

Their job was to take care of it, and they could eat anything they wanted except for one tree—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Scripture doesn’t tell us much about the tree, other than that the fruit looked good and we weren’t supposed to eat it.

Some have suggested God created this tree as a reminder that, even though Adam and Eve had been given the task to care for and lead the rest of creation, they were doing so under God’s authority. The tree symbolized the fact that ultimate authority belongs to God alone, and we were never supposed to take that on.

However, you know the story. The serpent deceived Eve, and she disobeyed God and ate the fruit. Adam was there with her, and she gave him some to eat as well.

Suddenly, everything was wrong. Sin came into the world, and they had participated in it. Adam and Eve hid from God instead of running to him, and creation has been damaged ever since.

As God is going through the list of consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin, we find this verse that sounds really confusing at first.

God is speaking directly to the serpent, and he says this:

Genesis 3:15 CSB

I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.

It appears from statements such as Revelation 20:2 that the serpent here is Satan.

Satan, or the devil, was created as one of the most powerful angels, and yet he rebelled against God and has been fighting God’s plan in the world ever since.

He tricked Eve, and as a consequence, there would always be conflict between the children of Eve and demonic forces, along with those who do not follow God, which Jesus says makes the devil their father.

However, the last part of the statement is the first promise God made about the unusual king he was going to send: “He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

What is God getting at here?

This moves us from a general statement about the battle between Satan and Eve’s children into a specific conflict between one of Eve’s children and Satan himself.

He uses the term “strike” here in two different ways: Satan would strike the descendent of Eve on the heel, but the descendent would strike the serpent on the head.

How many of you have ever injured your heel? It hurts, doesn’t it?

However, an injury to the foot is not enough to kill someone on its own, is it?

What about a blow to the head? Strike someone the wrong way in the head, and you can mortally injure them.

The unusual picture here is that a Son of Eve would be injured by Satan, but that Son would also be the one to defeat Satan.

You know what is incredible about this promise? How soon was it made after the first sin entered the world?

The very same day—within hours of our wrecking ourselves and all of creation, we discover that God already knew we would do it, and he already had a plan in motion to solve it.

In fact, we aren’t going to read it this morning, but Revelation 13:8 indicates that God set the plan in motion before the world was even created.

The plan was that he would one day send an unusual king—Jesus—who would live a life on earth. Eventually, he would be put to death—his heel would be bruised—but he wouldn’t stay dead.

Our King rose from the dead, dealing a mighty blow to the serpent and breaking the power of sin and death itself.

Satan did strike at his heel, but it wasn’t enough to kill our unusual King.

That wouldn’t happen for thousands of years, but that’s the promise God made in the garden the very first day we sinned.

What does that tell us today? As we find out more about the unusual promise God made to send an unusual king, we can have an unusual peace.

Nothing that can happen has ever caught God off guard. In fact, as some have said, “Has it ever occurred to you that nothing has ever occurred to God?”

Our sin didn’t catch God off guard; he promised from the first day we sinned that he would make it right.

If an event as jarring and upsetting as us damaging the beautiful world God created didn’t catch God off guard, then what could possibly catch him unawares?

God is fully aware and still fully able to control what is going on.

That means that you and I can have an unusual peace that isn’t based on some Pollyanna-like positive vibes that we think things might get better someday.

Instead, we can look at this unusual promise God made and see that he is fully in charge.

There is just a hint in this passage of the promise of what was to come, but it is a start.

Using an unusual picture, God tells us that he is going to send this unusual king. He isn’t caught off guard or thrown off in the least; he knows just what he is doing.

That isn’t the only unusual promise God made about this unusual king, though.

If we fast-forward to Isaiah, we see that God promised to send this king in...

2) An unusual way.

Turn over to Isaiah 7:14...

A lot has happened since that day in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3.

God set a specific group of people apart for himself, and he promised that the unusual king would come from the nation that started from that family.

The nation, Israel, has had lots of kings—some good, and lots bad—but none of them have been the one to crush Satan’s head.

By the time Isaiah is writing this, a portion of that nation has been taken away captive, and it looks like the rest of the nation will fall as well.

The people had turned their back on God and weren’t serving him, and he was allowing them to carry the consequences of rejecting him.

As the remaining part of Israel watched in fear, God spoke to Isaiah and gave him a prophecy about what was coming.

Here’s what he says:

Isaiah 7:14 CSB

Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: See, the virgin will conceive, have a son, and name him Immanuel.

God is doing something unique with this promise.

First, the word “virgin” here could also be translated “young maiden,” which doesn’t necessarily have to be a virgin.

So, to the people of Isaiah’s day, he is giving a prophecy about a child who will be born that will herald judgment coming on the people of Judah.

However, what we find when we get to the New Testament was that God was doing something more than just promising a sign to King Ahaz in Isaiah’s day.

When the New Testament translates this verse from Hebrew to Greek, they use the term “virgin,” instead of calling her a young woman.

Why? Because God is making another promise about the unusual king he is going to send.

That king who is going to defeat Satan is going to have to be free from the stain of sin, and from what the Bible indicates in places like Romans 5:12-21 that the stain of sin on our souls is passed down through Adam, which implies that it is passed down through our dads.

If the unusual king was not going to be stained with sin, then he would need to not have an earthly dad.

How is that possible? Well, a virgin would have to miraculously conceive a child.

How could that happen? Even if fertility treatments existed then, if it involved any biological material from a male, then that child would be tainted by sin.

A virgin can’t conceive on her own—that is something that only God could do!

God would have to create a life in a virgin’s womb without any human intervention at all for this child to be born sinless, which would allow him to crush the head of the serpent.

God fulfilled this promise in the life of a young woman named Mary.

She was engaged, but she was still a virgin, and an angel came to tell her that she would have a son.

She responded,

Luke 1:34–37 CSB

Mary asked the angel, “How can this be, since I have not had sexual relations with a man?” The angel replied to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. And consider your relative Elizabeth—even she has conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called childless. For nothing will be impossible with God.”

God was keeping his word through Isaiah in a greater way than we could have imagined.

A virgin was going to have a child, and that child would be the Son of God.

Can we agree that this is an incredibly unusual way for God to bring a king into the world? It had never happened before, and it has never happened since God brought our unusual king, which is what we celebrate at Christmas.

This also should give us an unusual peace this morning. God doesn’t usually suspend the laws of nature and do the miraculous, but he is able to if he needs to!

We can have peace right now, at this very moment, no matter what our circumstances are, because we know that the God we are trusting in is able to work in unusual ways, even if that means overriding the very laws of nature.

We may not often see God work miraculously, but that is because he can usually accomplish his purposes without it.

However, we can settle down knowing that God is able to do the miraculous if he needs to!

He brought our unusual king into the world in an incredibly unusual way, through a virgin so he could be born without sin.

Let’s look at one more unusual part of the promise God made about this unusual king.

Not only did God bring him in an unusual way, he brought him to the earth in a very...

3) An unusual place.

Let’s jump over to Micah 5:2 to see one last part of the unusual promise God made when he sent this unusual king.

You might need the table of contents for this one. Micah is in between Jonah and Nahum, if that helps as you are thumbing through.

As you are finding that passage, let’s think for a second.

If you were going to bring a king into the world to save it and to rule over all of the nations on the earth, where would you have him be born?

Maybe you would choose London, Washington D.C., or a big city like New York City.

In the days when Jesus is born, where would you have him born?

Rome seems like the most logical choice, but possibly Athens or even Alexandria in Egypt.

You would choose somewhere he could get the best education, have access to the greatest amount of resources, and have the best chance of getting face-time with the powerful and elite rulers since the throne would be his one day.

Would you ever pick for that king to be born in Christiansburg?

It was a great place for me to grow up, and it has been a good place to raise a family, but it isn’t exactly a global metropolis, is it?

In fact, most people in the world have no idea where Christiansburg is.

You try to describe it to folks, and the best you can get is “It’s south of Roanoke on 81 and next to Virginia Tech.” They still have no idea where it is, but they have at least heard of Tech, right?

What is the likelihood that someone from here would end up as the king of the world? Basically none, right?

So, then, in God’s plan to send this unusual king to save the world, wouldn’t you expect him to send him somewhere massive and well-known?

An influential town or some kind?

No; with the place where this child would be born, God again chose to do something incredibly unusual:

Micah 5:2 CSB

Bethlehem Ephrathah, you are small among the clans of Judah; one will come from you to be ruler over Israel for me. His origin is from antiquity, from ancient times.

God promised that this unusual king would be born in a very unusual place - a little town called Bethlehem.

This town was about five miles outside Jerusalem, and was tiny in comparison, even to our relatively small region.

To give you a sense of scale, we know that Jesus and his parents were still living in Bethlehem when the Wise Men came to visit him.

If you remember the story, Herod had all the baby boys age 2 and under murdered to make sure they killed this king who would become a competitor to his throne.

Scholars tell us that, given the population at the time, it would likely have been around 20 children slaughtered needlessly by the paranoid king.

According to a midwife in our church, there are around 15-20 babies born a week at just one of our our two hospitals, and there were only around that many baby boys who had been born in Bethlehem in two years!

This is a tiny town that the world would completely forget if God hadn’t chosen to send his son, our unusual king, to the earth at that place.

We will look more at that next week, but God fulfilled this unusual promise as well!

How does that help us have unusual peace today? Because God can work in unusual ways in places the world overlooks. Throughout the Bible, we see example after example of God working through people who were weak and unknown and doing extraordinary things in and through them.

You and I can have peace that God knows exactly what is going on in the world, in the nation, in the state, and in our own town. He can even do work here in this town that can change lives for eternity, and possibly even shape the world!

You can have an unusual peace because God can work, even here!

God made some unusual promises about this unusual king.

Not only did he give us these promises, he also kept them!

He gave a picture to describe what the king would do, and he sent him to earth through a virgin birth in a largely unknown town.

Now, that same king invites you to trust him with your life; to serve him and honor him and, as we have said multiple times this morning, to find your peace in him.

Would you say your life is characterized by unusual peace?

If not, why?

Have you ever trusted him as your Savior and Lord, the one who defeated death and sin on your behalf and now calls you to himself?

Drop the nostalgia around Christmas for a moment. Reflect on how unusual it is that God would send his son to die for us, knowing it was the only way for us to be saved.

Think about God’s power to work in impossible ways in obscure places, and ask God to allow that to give you peace.