Sermon Tone Analysis

Foundations of the Church - Let God Out of the Box

Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV)

 

Isaiah 55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

When it comes to doing things as we humans would do them, God is not normal!

Have you ever stopped and looked at the way God does things on earth?

It’s not normal!

It’s not the way we think things should or would be done!

God was not normal with…

 

1.

Abraham

One of the earliest examples of this in scripture is found in Genesis when God tells \\ Abram to leave Ur of the Chaldees and not to take any of his extended family with Him.

\\ Apparently not happy with Abram’s disobedience, (he took his nephew Lot with Him) \\ God doesn’t speak to Him again until he separates Himself from his nephew.

Even \\ so, God still sends angels to save Lot from the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Place yourself in the position of Sarah Abram’s wife.

Her husband says to her one day that God has told Him that they are to leave and leave everything and everybody they know behind them.

Quite naturally she might ask, “and where are we to go?” Abram then says, “I don’t know, He didn’t say!

He said He’ll tell me.”

She must have thought I need to put some wet towels on his head and tell Him to lie down in the shade!

That would be my first thoughts.

Does Sarah do that?

No!!!, she packs up the old SUV-camel and without even touching up her make-up jumps on the camel and is ready to go.

Later she allows Him to lie to a king and the king’s men about her relationship to \\ Abram which almost makes her the newest concubine of the king.

Then she allows \\ Him to take their only child, (that they had waited 20 years for) and to offer Him as a sacrifice to this “unknown” God!

 

2.

Noah

Next God saves the world, by having Noah build a huge ark on dry land \\ warning Him of a flood that will be caused by excessive rainfall when previously there \\ had never been rain!

Then God chooses a man who when the flood is over gets \\ drunk and naked.

3.

Moses

A little later He appears in a bush, setting it ablaze and yet not consuming it?

He then speaks to a man through the noise of the burning bush and tells Him to take off his \\ shoes!

Now He wants this man to tell Pharaoh, the King of the most powerful nation of \\ the world and the lowest of all the Gods of this world, to give away the most useful \\ thing he possesses; his slaves, all because some burning bush God named “I Am” \\ says so! Exodus 3:13-15 This God is not normal!

He’s just not normal!

He’s just not natural and comprehensible!

What?

You still don’t think He’s not normal?

4.

Jonah

How about the story of Jonah?

You know Jonah from the Old Testament.

Jonah is the “great fish” story where the fish tries to convince his friends about “the one that got away!”

Jonah is the first of all the writings of the prophets.

Very little is known about Him.

On the other hand, Ninevah, the place where GOD wants Jonah to go to is very well known.

As far as a Jew is concerned, it is Hell on earth!

The Ninevites were the sworn enemies of the Jews.

They were known to have boiled Jews alive and to have skinned them alive and then dragged them behind a horse or chariot through the streets of Ninevah or to have staked them over an anthill.

With this knowledge what would be your response to a God that tells you, a Jew, that He wants you to go to warn the Ninevites that the God of the Jews is going to wipe \\ them out if they don’t repent?

I’d be thinking, Go God, wipe them out!

You’ve got to see how not normal this all looks?

So you’ll admit this looks not normal but there’s just not enough of a history to qualify God as being not normal?

 

5.

Gideon

Gideon has 32,000 men to fight with.

God says he has “too many.”

Too Many?

How can you have too many to fight a ground battle?

That is how you win!

You simply overwhelm your enemy by shear numbers.

God has him cut his ranks to 300 men to fight all of the Midianites and Amalekites in Judges 6.

 

6.

Elijah

What do you think of someone who would feed one of His greatest servants by the use of ravens?

Is that not normal enough?

No! What about someone who then sends you to meet a widow woman elsewhere whom He says He has commanded to feed you.

You go \\ and ask the woman to fetch you some water.

As she’s going you also ask her to \\ prepare you a “morsel of bread”.

She then says she has only “a handful of meal in a \\ barrel, and a little oil in a jar... for me and my son, that we may eat it, and die.”

This \\ is whom He has commanded to feed you?

She is a widow woman with no means of \\ support and a son who is in herself preparing to die?

I Kings 17.

This is a not normal God!

 

7.

Jesus

Generally today, we accept that the reason the Jews never accepted Jesus as the \\ Messiah, was because He didn’t come to them the way they expected the Messiah to come.

By using scriptures like Psalm 45 and 68 as well as Isaiah 9:5-6 they had imagined a Messiah who would be a great conquering hero who would establish a new world order with them as the elite ruling class.

They believed that as this elite class, that all the rest of the world would then suffer under them as they had under the rule of the world.

They had established through the teachings of the priest an elitism that was built on scripture.

That was built and then established walls of “tradition”.

This was a tradition that bound them from seeing the other side of the Messiah.

They had used scripture to   put God in a box!

They had, by the use of scripture, established traditions that constructed a spiritual Jericho.

They had used scripture to build such great walls to keep the people from ever transgressing “the Law” as well as to keep the people and God separated.

In Mark 7:13 we read, Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.

And you do many things like that.”

Tradition is another name for the spiritual walls!

In chapter 7 we see how these walls are constructed.

The Pharisees and certain scribes saw that the disciples of Jesus ate without washing their hands and as they noted that this is a violation of Jewish tradition.

Jesus then constructs a gate through the middle of those walls, when in v. 6 He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

When we are “religious” people, we do the same thing.

We concern ourselves so much with what a person is like, that we fail to see their heart!

We fail to see that it is not the “law” and the keeping of the law that saves people but rather that it is the establishment of a personal relationship with Jesus through what He did on the cross that gives you eternal life.

Keeping the law or legalism does not bring life, it kills it.

After being confronted by Satan in the wilderness Jesus went to Nazareth and to the synagogue.

He basically went to His home church!

There the book of Isaiah was handed to Him to read from.

He quoted Isaiah 61:1 in Luke 4:18-19 and said, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Generally the Jews were looking for a Messiah that would establish a ruling king that would place them as His special, chosen people.

That He would come and subdue all the peoples of the earth and place them (the Jews) in positions of aristocracy, in positions of authority.

They were so steeped in this tradition that they were unable to fathom the possibility of any of the prophecies that said He would come any other way.

Modern Pharisees do the same things they box God in just as the Jews had done.

In many ways we all approach life as a “product of our environment”.

We have \\ established a bias based on a group of beliefs.

When Philip found Nathaniel to tell Him about Jesus, Nathaniel replied, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?”(John

1:46) Jesus teaches us how we need to look at God when in Mark 10:14-15 He uses children to illustrate the point when He says, “… Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.