First Light Series

The Divine Advent(ure)

First Light

Genesis 3:14—4:1

This morning, we kick off for the Christmas season, believe it or not, a Christmas series, since Jesus Christ is what the Christmas season is all about. I’m calling it The Divine Advent(ure). We’ll have six messages to consider the Greatest Story Ever Told, the fact that God became a man and revealed Himself beginning with His virgin birth in Bethlehem now a couple thousand years ago.

Now I’m calling this first message “First Light.” We are literally going to look at the very first light with regard to the Incarnation—the first clue found anywhere in the Bible about this incredible event, the coming of God as a Man. And believe it or not, it’s found in the very first book of the Bible, the book of beginnings the Book of Genesis.

Now it has always struck me as interesting that this time of great light, or great revelation comes at what, at least in the Northern Hemisphere is the darkest time of the year. As I was working on my message last night, the last vestiges of the daytime, the last rays of light were descending beyond the western Sierras at about 5 p.m. Daylight is in awfully short supply at this time of year, and so it’s a dark time when we begin to talk about the great light that has ever dawned upon mankind in the person of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

It also so happens that this is an illustration of the actual spiritual condition of our world. As we begin to celebrate the Christmas season, we find our world immersed in spiritual darkness. As we consider what brings great joy and hope to this time of year, we are often confused and overwhelmed by the fact that there is so much spiritual darkness, so much that does not make spiritual or moral sense going on in the world. Yesterday I read of the literal slaughter of Christians still going on in Iraq and Syria as ISIS militants behead and burn Christians, children and adults by the thousands, a genocide that continues to go on largely unnoticed. Last week we again heard of yet another mass shooting, this time in a Chicago hospital. In such innocent places, like the very schools which educate our most precious possessions, is where most of these mass shootings have taken place recently in the U.S. I had a brush just this past Tuesday with the great anxiety that now exists in our society as a result of these nearly weekly events now—I came over to this school, Sepulveda Elementary School on Tuesday afternoon to attempt to discuss the last of heat we experience on Sunday mornings so often about this time of year here only to find I could not get into the school—at the main entrance, the two side entrances, anywhere whatsoever, even though classes were obviously in session and cars were parked all around. After trying the main entrance for the second time a couple police cars rolled up with lights flashing and told the school was on lockdown and they officer suggested we get into cars. It was only a couple hours later before I discovered that one of the patients at the urgent care center across the street had been making threats, so police were called, and the school was completely locked down due to the threat of any kind of violence whatsoever.

And it is because of this sort of thing, repeatedly, in our time that one my many doctors, a young female doctor, confessed she was trying to figure out what was going on in the world—what prompts such moral and spiritual insanity. And this morning, we found out in the course of one cryptic but incredibly prophetic verse in the Book of Genesis which forecasts the great moral and spiritual battle which would characterize human history, which also in its few lines, also, amazingly also predicts the coming of the Savior, the Messiah, Jesus Christ, 1500 years before he showed up, and more than that tells us who wins in this great spiritual battle.

It’s all found in Genesis 3:15, the precursor to John 3:16 when it comes to our salvation and the hope of eternity. It reads like this: “The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life; 15 And I will put enmity

Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

What we learn from this is this: God gives hope even as the darkness descends on the human race—we need to take that hope & live.