God Is Coming Series

There are a lot of funny things to be said this time of the year.

Christmas does things to you. You can either laugh about it or get run over by it. It makes you act like a kid and age faster at the same time. Speaking of being a kid…

You’ve heard of the 3 stages of man:

He believes in Santa Claus.

He doesn't believe in Santa Claus.

He is Santa Claus.

Seems that Santa’s helpers have been issued elevator shoes, especially for the very shortest ones. The poor little guys! The constant jokes about how short they are is giving them low elf-esteem.

Last week, I cleaned out my chimney. You can never be too ready, just in case. You know, the opening of that thing is actually pretty small – makes me worry. Then, I ran across some timely advice: What do you do if Santa gets stuck in your chimney? Pour Santa flush on him.

Not that I want to cast doubt on the old guy, but the weight of Santa's sleigh loaded with one Beanie Baby for every kid on earth: 333,333 tons. A sleigh of that weight would require 214,206 reindeer and one Rudolph to pull it. They’d have to travel about 3000X the speed of light and make about 822.6 visits per second.

There’s a paramedic named Rick in Miami. A few years ago he answered a call about a man who had a head injury sustained when some teenagers were throwing eggs at cars. The egg had come through the open window of the man's car as he was driving at about 45 mph. He had a large swelling on his forehead. So, in the official report, Rick described the incident as an "egg-noggin".

Speaking of what we call things at Christmastime, we need to rethink what we call people at this time of year – I mean, the “wise men.” Everyone knows that the wise men are from the “East,” wherever that is. Here they are living in the East. They said, “We have seen His star in the East, and we have come…” So, they “look-ed up and saw a great star, shining in the East beyond them far.” What direction do they travel? And we call these guys “wise men”! We should probably just stick with “magi,” even if it gets mispronounced.

You think that one through. Actually, the wise men were wise. What were they doing? – looking for Jesus so they could worship Him. That’s wise. They showed up in Jerusalem and asked, “Where is He? Where is He?” This is #2 of 3 messages trying to answer that question.

September 11th, and a lot of people were openly asking, “Where is God?” Last week we were looking at reasons to believe that God is there. Well, that’s nice. So are income taxes. But if God is just there and that’s it, what is that to us? There are plenty of people whose concept of God stops right there. God is there. That’s it. He wound up everything and let it go.

If that’s your understanding of God, you need to listen carefully this morning, because the Bible paints quite a different image of God. In fact, just the very fact that we have the Bible is one way we know that God is more than just “there.” From the very beginning, God has interacted with His creation constantly, and the Bible records a lot of that for us.

Someone has said the message of the whole Bible can be summarized in 3 sentences:

Someone's coming

Someone's here (That's next week's message)

Someone's coming again

Today I want us to look at the biblical message that Someone is coming. That’s prophetic. It’s a promise of something that’s down the road.

A good part of the OT prophets are about the future – and this morning we have an interesting advantage as we look at them. We’re already “down the road.” We see these things from the fulfillment end. We get to consider what they mean after the fact. Hind sight is 20/20 and all that.

That’s us – 20/20 vision when it comes to the OT.

But, when it comes to what the OT has to say about God coming to us, I find these prophecies basically do the same thing for people that first heard them and for us today – It’s all God reaching out for the sake of having a relationship with mankind. Bear that in mind: the point of anything we look at in the Bible, OT or New, is for us to have a relationship with our Creator.

So, we’re just going to look at that message this morning: God is coming! If you’re looking over a beautiful diamond, you might take up and turn it around. We’re going to turn this message that God is coming and look at it real closely, and finally we’re going to take some time to see how it applies to us today.