Psalm 51:4
All sin is sin against God
every sin is an act of defiance or rebellion against God
2 Samuel 15.1-23, 30
David is the anointed king of God
he is the Messiah and is an image of Christ
Absalom rebelled against his own father who was the king and Messiah
every time we sin
it is an act of rebellion against God the King
and Christ the King
we are rejecting his will
and doing what we will
taking control of our own lives and rejecting his control over us
openly rejecting his desires and following after our own desires
we are not acting like those people in this account that remained faithful to David
this is why sin is so serious
it is rebellion against God
16.5-14
Shimei rebels against his king
this is a picture of our own sin
rebelling against God and Christ
David’s patience with his enemies
prefigures Christ’s patience before his enemies
David suffers if it is God’s will as Christ did
18.1-17
Absalom is killed on the tree
this is the punishment for rebellion against the king and God
this is why we need Christ
he suffered our punishment to liberate us from punishment
David’s willingness to forgive Absalom
prefigures Christ’s willingness to die in place of sinners
19.8-23
Shimei is forgiven despite his rebellion and defiance
this is what every one of us must seek
this must be our daily prayer: Ps 51:1-9
we must ask forgiveness daily
to live in reconciliation with him
and because we are his children he stands ready to forgive us
he doesn’t want us to ignore our sin
but confess our sin to him and ask for forgiveness
ask, seek, knock
you will receive, you will find, the door will be opened to you
last week
1. read the Bible as one big story headed toward the final historical salvation
2. read each small story in light of the big story of the whole Bible
3. remember commands are not necessarily spoken to you directly
4. there are not moral principles or principles for living in every passage
5. each small account or passage does not have a separate and distinct moral or message
I don’t have five or three points today
but just one point:
every passage of the Old Testament points to Jesus Christ
Luke 24:27, 32, 44-45
27And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
32They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
44He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.
the Old Testament is about Christ
“micro” context
the intent of the human author speaking to his original audience in a particular historical setting
“macro” context
God’s larger intent connecting with the entire story of the Bible which is pointing toward the revelation of Christ
this is the way the NT writers interpret the OT
saying texts are about Christ which were not about Christ originally, not what the human author had in mind
some interpreters will only find Christ if a NT author has made it clear that Christ is symbolized
even when no NT author tells us
every OT passage points to Christ
Type
a person or theme in the text of symbolic significance that points to Christ (original author unaware)
Bible is a series of historical periods, not a collection of timeless life principles
in each of these periods
there is a progressive revealing of Christ
more and more is revealed about Christ
David/Goliath
What is the message?
Not “little guys can do big things too”
not “we can defeat the Giants in our lives if we trust in God”
Learn what the original story was all about to the original author
but then look for Jesus in the passage
David, the Lord’s anointed, points to Jesus Christ
Jesus has been small and weak
and defeated our enemies of sin and death
notice the people of God
are cowering and have lost heart
and are facing destruction and slavery
David is the Messiah God sends.
God’s champion.
The deliverer who rescues those who can do nothing from their enemies.
David fights as the legal representative of the whole army.
David won the victory for his people while they did not have to lift a single spear or sword.
As Jesus fought and won the victory for us.
The story of David is not teaching
“If you have faith in God you will conquer all the giants in your life and God will not let bad things happen to you.”
It is teaching us look to Christ
you need someone to rescue you from your enemies
look to Christ
he will deliver you
Genesis 45
NOT life principles about how to be a Godly man–
Not a promise that if you are noble like Joseph God will turn bad things around to your good
Not Biblical principles you can apply to rise to success as Joseph did
How does this passage point to Christ?
You must read the whole Joseph story to get the big point of the whole narrative.
Joseph though he goes through great suffering
is in the end exalted
Joseph is sent by God to deliver his people from destruction
and not only Israel but also all people
the joy of the story
is to move us with joy in Christ at our deliverance
In preparation for war, on July 26, 1941, General Douglas MacArthur brought the 12,000 strong Philippine Scouts under his command with the 16,000 American soldiers stationed in the Philippines. Even these combined forces were poorly trained and equipped for an adequate defence of the islands against a Japanese invasion. The attack on the Philippines started on December 8, 1941 ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. As at Pearl Harbour, the American aircraft were entirely destroyed on the ground. Japanese troops landed on the Philippines on December 22, 1941.
MacArthur concentrated his troops on the Bataan peninsula to await the relief of reinforcements from the United States that, after the destruction at Pearl Harbour, could never come. General MacArthur escaped on the night of March 11, 1942 in PT-41 bound for Australia; 4,000 km away through Japanese controlled waters.
The 76,000 starving and sick American and Filipino defenders in Bataan surrendered to the Japanese on April 9, 1942. The Japanese led their captives on a cruel and criminal Death March on which 7-10,000 died or were murdered before arriving at the internment camps ten days later. For over three years and right to the day of Japan’s surrender, the Philippines were to suffer grievously under the depredations of military occupation.
General MacArthur discharged his promise to return to the Philippines on October 20, 1944. The landings were accomplished with an amphibious force of 700 vessels and 174,000 army and navy servicemen. On January 9, 1945 the Americans landed and closed on Manila. The Japanese fought desperately, street by street, to hold the city. From February 3 to 23, its liberation took almost a month. The liberation of the Philippines was costly. In the Philippines alone, the Americans lost 60,628 men and the Japanese an estimated 300,000. Filipino casualties are estimated at over a million.
Christmas is the celebration of the coming of our king who will destroy all our enemies
and liberate us and rescue us from the “present evil age”
(as Paul calls it in Galatians 1:5)
remember the words of Zechariah
Jesus was born to bring
“deliverance from our enemies”
Westminster Shorter Catechism
Question 26: How does Christ execute the office of a king?
Answer: Christ executes the office of a king, in subduing us to himself, in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering all his and our enemies.
1 Corinthians 15:20-26
He will destroy all the enemies that hold us in bondage.
We read the account of the shepherds this morning:
the shepherds rejoiced BECAUSE they were miserable
They lived in extreme poverty,
outcasts of society,
under the rule of the evil King Herod.
They needed a deliverer
It is important to understand that they were not rescued that day
They were not rescued in their lifetimes
They rejoiced that the king who would one day rescue them had been born.
Christmas brings joy to those who recognize their miserable state and their need of deliverance. To those who see in Jesus the king who will deliver them.
Our enemies are the spiritual powers and authorities that hold us in bondage,
Three ways they bind us
1. under the bondage of evil human leaders and the threats of evil men
2. under the bondage of sickness, aging and death
3. under the bondage of our own sinful desires which wreck our lives and others
We are in bondage and cannot liberate ourselves.
one cannot grasp the joy of Christmas and the promise of liberation
until one feels the darkness of the present evil age
three snapshots of our bondage
In Zimbabwe the people are in bondage to poverty, death and evil leaders
Mugabe is the president of Zimbabwe and he has destroyed the country
he has also stolen the foreign aid that comes to his country
there is astronomical inflation so that money is worth nothing,
little medical care,
improper sanitation systems and water treatment
and right now an epidemic of Cholera is sweeping Zimbabwe
and children are dying from drinking contaminated water and being unable to receive healthcare
and so they are dying of an easily preventable and treatable illness
“Cholera swept through the five youngest children in the Chigudu family with cruel and bewildering haste… the children had chased one another through streets that flow with raw sewage, and chattered happily as they bedded down for the night. The diarrhea and vomiting began around midnight. Relatives frantically prepared solutions of water, sugar and salt for the youngsters, aged 20 months to 12 years, to drink. But by morning, they were limp and hollow-eyed. The disease was draining their bodies of fluid. Prisca was first, second Sammy, then Shantel, Clopas and Aisha, the littlest one, last. Cholera stole the five Chigudu children in just two days, on Nov. 17 and 18, and the grandmother and aunt who helped care for them died just days later. Their father returned home just hours after the last of his children died.”
There was a man who was married with three children and a prosperous career and a nice house and nice cars
from an outsider’s perspective he had passed up most of his peers
but he was dominated by his own evil impulse to anger
anger controls him and masters him
at the slightest provocation
he lashes out at his children and his wife
he rages about mistakes they have made and rants about things that irritate him
and he hates himself for doing it
he tells his friends “I am hurting my children and they are growing to resent me
and my wife is bitter about what I am doing to our kids and I swear I am going to stop
but then I get so angry”
and he feels that he is powerless to do anything to stop
a man in bondage to his own evil impulses
third snapshot
“When Abraham Lincoln came to the stage of the 1860 state Republican convention in Decatur, Illinois, the crowd roared in approval. Men threw hats and canes into the air, shaking the hall so much that the awning over the stage collapsed; according to an early account, “the roof was literally cheered off the building.” Fifty-one years old, Lincoln was at the peak of his political career, with momentum that would soon sweep him to the nomination of the national party and then to the White House.
Yet to the convention audience Lincoln didn’t seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. On the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the convention floor, “I then thought him one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw.”
The next day the convention closed. The crowds dispersed, leaving behind cigar stubs and handbills and the smells of sweat and whiskey. Later the lieutenant governor of Illinois, William J. Bross, walked the floor. He saw Lincoln sitting alone at the end of the hall, his head bowed, his gangly arms bent at the elbows, his hands pressed to his face. As Bross approached, Lincoln noticed him and said, “I’m not very well.”
Lincoln’s look at that moment—the classic image of gloom—was familiar to everyone who knew him well. Such spells were just one thread in a curious fabric of behavior and thought that his friends called his “melancholy.” As a young man he talked more than once of suicide, and as he grew older he said he saw the world as hard and grim, full of misery… “No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character,” declared his colleague Henry Whitney, “was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy.” His law partner William Herndon said, “His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”
Lincoln wrote to his law partner in Washington: “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”
A man in bondage to enemies, spritual powers hold a sickness in his own mind
Jesus has come as a king to liberate us.
Jesus became a man and came under these powers:
death, evil men, and sin
he entered into our bondage
and through his resurrection won the victory
two Biblical snapshots of liberation
these are pictures of the final liberation
1 Samuel 30:1-19
Mark 1:21-28
so my word to you today is rejoice!
rejoice in our Messiah
who will one day destroy all our enemies
and liberate us from the present evil age
*
In the present while we wait for future liberation
we must avoid two extremes.
1. We should not act as if God has promised deliverance in our lives now
Many of you seem to expect some kind of ecstatic existence in Jesus and you complain that there must be something more, something more
There is something more but it will only come when Jesus returns.
our joy is the joy of knowing the love of God and of hope and faith in what we do not yet see
2. On the other side we should not simply do nothing and wait for God’s future deliverance
Many of you seem to think that because we can’t deliver the world, we should do nothing but just get through this time.
But Jesus and the Apostles told us not to do that, but instead to work to alleviate the sufferings and misery of this present evil age even though it cannot be healed until he returns.
The Holy Spirit can work through us in the present evil age
to bring snapshots of liberation
every time we work liberation in the present, it is not the final liberation but it is a foretaste of that final liberation
This story of David is not the only the story of God’s love for David it is the story of God’s love for his people in raising up David to deliver them
no matter what came against David the future of David could not be stopped because God was working through him for the salvation of his people
This morning I want to point out three important differences between the David story and the story of Jesus
1. David saved God’s people through violence
Jesus saved through love undergoing violence
John 18:36-37 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.” “You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You are right in saying I am a king.”
Jesus did not establish an earthly kingdom of power and violence. He does not save through violence
2. David saved the nation of Israel/the Jewish race from its national/ethnic enemies
Jesus is saving all nations and all races His kingdom is transnational, transcultural, transracial.
3. David robbed his enemies of their possessions and wealth and gave them to his people.
But Jesus is a king whose people do not plunder but give willingly to others who are in need
We see this also in David’s insistence that the strong and the weak, the haves and have-nots share together David even sends gifts to people in other places there is a redistribution of wealth just like in Jesus’ church where poor and rich were members of the same church the poor shared in the wealth of the whole church
We have two dozen Burundians who are part of our church they are Hutus
The demographics of Burundi through the 1960s and 1970s was roughly 80 percent Hutu, dominated by a small Tutsi minority.
On April 29th, 1972 a Hutu rebellion erupted killing about 2,000 Tutsis.
On April 30th the Tutsi government struck back with the mass killing of Hutus. By the end of June (just 2 months later), conservative estimates are 80,000-100,000 Hutu deaths.
Protestant churches lost as many as 60% of their pastors.
About 150,000 others, mostly Hutu, left Burundi for refuge in Rwanda, Zaire and Tanzania.
the Burundians, the older ones are the survivors of terrible violence and ethnic warfare violence like most of us have never seen or could even imagine
they have been living in refugee camps for decades in Tanzania in a kind of poverty like we have never known the younger ones were born there
from the world they have known violence and racial hatred they have known extreme poverty and lived as unwanted aliens in Tanzania
But the Burundians are a picture of the gospel the Lord Jesus has saved them saved them from ethnic hatred saved them from violence saved them from extreme poverty
they have found welcome and love from members of another ethnic group they have found peace and safety from the threat of violence they have found provision and possessions given to them freely by brothers and sisters in the Lord
This is a picture of the gospel
This is not charity work They are not charity cases They are family brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children
today we will eat the Lord’s Supper with our brothers and sisters in the Lord don’t close your eyes and retreat into your inner spirit and inner space look around you at your brothers and sisters Rejoice in the Lord’s salvation to them
he has saved them from violence he has saved them from poverty he has saved them from being refugees and he will one day save them when the kingdom of God comes and all violence and hatred and poverty is no more
a group 1) loyal to the one anointed by God above all else and 2) persecuted by the authorities
This is what the church was in the first few centuries
They were a community loyal to Jesus Christ and the Roman authorities despised them and executed them in large numbers
The Roman accusations against Christians: 1. They would not worship Caesar but claimed that Jesus was their Lord, not Caesar. 2. They did not worship the gods. They had abandoned all the acceptable forms of religion. They had no temples, priests, altars, images, rituals. They were corrupting many people who were also abandoning religion. They were going to bring down the wrath of the gods on the Empire.
3. Their God was a despicable God. He was invisible and pried into everything. He examined all acts, words and secret thoughts. This idea was corrupting all the people.
4. Their leader was a man who died as a criminal. All his followers must also have been criminals and deserve the same death.
5. They met in secret before sunrise and after sundown. They did not congregate openly. Such meetings were politically subversive and no doubt concealed evil practices.
6. They threatened conflagration on the Roman Empire and the whole world. They claimed there will be an end of all things.
7. They did not fear present death or torment, but they feared what may come after death and filled others with such fears.
8. They had a perverse superstition that their bodies would rise from the dead. They spread this teaching everywhere and corrupt the people.
9. Their God was either unable or unwilling to help them in the present life because many of them lived miserable lives. They deceived the ignorant with these lies.
10. They are uneducated and uncultured people and they tried to teach people more learned than them but they only deceived other gullible and ignorant people.
In the Roman eyes Christianity was not a religion, but a perverse superstition corrupting and infecting the people and it was damaging to the empire.
It was a group of people loyal to Jesus as Lord who had no ultimate allegiance to Caesar or the Roman empire.
Listen to this letter from Pliny, a Roman governor, to Trajan the Caesar in 111
“with Christians I have observed the following procedure: I interrogated these as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogate a second and third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed.
Those who denied that they were or had been Christians, when they prayed to the gods, offered prayers to the image of Caesar, and cursed Christ– none of which those who are really Christians can be forced to do– these I thought should be discharged. They all worshiped Caesar and the statues of the gods, and cursed Christ.
The disease of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms. But it seems possible to check and cure it. The temples which had almost been deserted, are being visited again, and the religious rites which had been neglected are being resumed again… a multitude of people can be reformed if an opportunity for repentance is afforded.”
he knows three things about Christians: they will not worship gods, they will not worship Caesar and they will not curse Christ
He is trying to convert them back to the Roman empire and Caesar.
the fate of one who confessed he was a Christian and would not repent was death
1 Corinthians 12:3
“Therefore I tell you that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, ‘Jesus be cursed,’ and no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”
you have two options to stand up before the Empire and say “Jesus be cursed” and convert back to empire or to stand up before the empire and say “Jesus is Lord” which means Caesar is not
the Spirit alone can make a man say “Jesus is Lord” when he is being threatened by Rome and being demanded to curse Christ
one who would “curse Christ” has no Spirit in him
Let me give you another example from history some of you saw the movie Amazing Grace celebrating the 200th anniversary of the passing of the Slave Trade Act in England
William Wilberforce is the hero he was a member of parliament who became a Christian in 1785 and took up the cause of battling the slave trade in 1787 the struggle took 20 years as the Slave Trade Act was not passed until 1807 and the Abolition Act not until 1833
what I want you to understand is that it was not the first job of the church to change the government It was good and proper for Wilberforce to use his political resources to try to do so but that was not the church’s first duty
the first job of the church was to obey Jesus to live and speak against the British Empire and its slave trade this is exactly what many in the church including Wilberforce did
many during that time mocked the church and called them “the saints” and “saints” is exactly what they were filled with the Spirit, loyal to Jesus above the empire
the church is not always able to change the government the government and the people of a nation will often be on the side of evil and then it is the church’s job to stand on the side of the right and good to live and speak for Jesus
these are the questions I want you to go from here with:
As citizens of the USA How is America trying to convert us to America and away from Jesus?
How is America demanding that we curse Christ?
How do we stand up before the authorities and say “Jesus is Lord” in the American Empire?
