Jesus in the Old Testament - Jesus in the Law - November 11, 2018
Today we’re continuing part 2 of a 4-week series on Jesus in the Old Testament. Last week we looked at Jesus Christ in Creation, and today we’re looking at Jesus in the Law.
Put up your hand if you want the world to live in peace? For people to live in peace; to act with love and justice?
For people of good will, this is a common hope. That the world would know peace. That people wouldn’t need to live in fear.
That things like Hitler and Stalin and ISIS and Colombian drug Lords and corrupt politicians and corrupt police would be a thing of the past. Wouldn’t that be great?
That WOULD be great. But instead, if we take a sober look at the world, it seems like there’s something inside people that makes us not behave in the way of peace, but pretty much constantly wreak havoc and destruction.
We would like to think that the Hitlers of this world are buried in the 20th century, but we know that bigotry and hate and greed still exists in this century.
We’ve seen a resurgence of race-based hatred in the past few years, as recently as a week and a bit ago when a bigot stormed a synagogue in Pittsburg and killed 11? People, shouting: “All Jews must die!”
Anti-semites and racists of all kinds are out there, hoping and waiting for things like this to happen.
Evil takes all kinds of forms. And evil always thinks it’s right. And won’t be persuaded otherwise.
There’s something inside of humans that makes us say and do terrible things, wreaking havoc and destruction.
From the Bible's point of view, evil ruins things in at least two ways.
There's a direct effect of our evil like when someone steals from another person, they've done something wrong, they’ve created an injustice and therefore they owe something to make it right.
They have to pay it back and/or suffer personally for what they’ve done by going to jail or paying a fine. That’s one effect of evil.
But there's another indirect effect of evil. The person who has stolen has also damaged trust and ruined the environment of the relationship creating a lack of trust.
There's emotional damage. It's like vandalism and they need to make that right too, they need to pay a price for their actions.
You’ve felt this when there’s been a shooting in Regent Park, or on the Danforth this past summer, or the mass murder in North York last April when a guy used a rented van to kill 10 people and he marred the lives of dozens more.
By extension, thousands of people who knew or were related to the victims were negatively impacted.
The entire city ‘felt’ unsafe after these terrible events in our own backyard. Evil ruins the environment for everyone.
When evil completely runs amuck, unchecked, you get a Hitler or a Mao Tse Tung or a Pol Pot or ISIS who create chaos and war and death and suffering on a scale no person could wrap their mind around. (Pause)
And we might think, hey, why doesn’t God just fix everything. Why doesn’t He just destroy all the evil in the world? If He’s good, wouldn’t He do that?
Some believe that because God doesn’t destroy the evil in the world, that means He’s not good,
or He doesn’t exist. You hear that sometimes.
But if we get really honest with ourselves, if we think about it: the evil I see everywhere else, everywhere out there, that’s the same evil that’s in me. Inside of me.
We’ve all done wrong. And if you’re young and you can’t think of anything, wait for it. We’ve all contributed to the problem of evil and we keep doing it.
So this puts us in a bind if we want God to rid the world of evil, he’ll have to GET RID OF US. And that’s not a great solution.
If fact, the story of the flood in Genesis chapters 6-7 is the story of God ridding the world of evil by destroying the world through a massive flood, but allowing a small remnant – Noah’s family – to survive.
And then Noah, after the flood, built an altar and worshipped God. The text continues:
“The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood... “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”” ??Genesis? ?8:21-22???
This idea of destroying evil was tried, and failed. The solution didn’t work. Because the people continued to do evil. Kinda proves the point. But God would find another way.
So we need to rethink things, we need a better understanding of ourselves, if we’re going to wrap our heads around the problem of evil.
This is remembrance day. What are we remembering?
The people who fought bravely against tyranny and evil, many of whom gave their lives in service to the country.
But we are also remembering the horror of war, the nightmare of rampant evil manifesting itself in horrific and brutal battles between nations that cost the lives of soldiers, yes; and a GREAT MANY more innocent civilians.
The total number of deaths? 40 million. World War 2? 60 million. People. Every person with a name. Every person with a family.
There’s not only good in us. Not everything is right inside of us.
Again, God has chosen to not rid the world of evil, because, it would mean ridding the world of us who find, when we look inside, that there is a conflict.
The Apostle Paul, himself a man who turned from persecuting the church to the death to being a chief leader, in the first century, still found in himself this conflict, this chaos:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it”. Romans 7:17-20
And here’s the rub. Far from excusing himself for his actions and sinful leanings, Paul identifies that there is something weird going on inside of him.
Some odd rebellion, he calls this evil, that is out of line with his desires.
And though he speaks of himself, he is really talking about the human condition.
This is one reason why the Bible, the story or narrative of the Bible, is so awesome. So remarkable.
The Bible tells us, in a nutshell, that God is so good that he is not only going to rid the world of evil - He’s going to find a way now to do that WITHOUT destroying us.
How? How in the world is God going to remove the stain of evil, the actions and consequences of evil, the pollution, the damaged trust and ruined environment, the vandalism, as it were, of sin?
How is he going to do that? Well early in the story of the Bible we're introduced to the practice of animal sacrifice.
To us, If we are not familiar with this practice, it can seem very strange.
But for the Israelites it was a very powerful ritual symbol of God's justice and of His grace. Why His grace?
Remember, strictly speaking, I'm a contributor to the evil that's in the world and I should be removed.
Humanity as a whole is a contributor to the evil in the world. We should be removed.
But God is allowing an animal's life to be a substitute. It symbolically dying in my place.
And the biblical word for this is atonement, which means to "make restitution for or to cover over."
It means something you do to show you are sorry for your actions, and that you understand how by your actions you have, hurt, offended,
and vandalized a relationship, ruining the environment of the relationship.
It was necessary to do something that costs you dearly to demonstrate that you understand the cost of your evil actions to others in pain, distress, and even the destabilization your actions cause. So the sacrifice on the animal, which was costly, accomplished this.
Tony Clement, the Canadian federal politician and Member of Parliament for Parry Sound—Muskoka in Ontario.
He was caught this week having behaved inappropriately, having done some pretty awful things sexually which betrayed his marriage covenant.
He resigned from caucus and this weekend is sorting through things with his family.
He is going to have to do many things - get treatment for his behaviours, demonstrate over time a genuine sorrow for his actions and a determination to never again repeat his harmful actions.
All those things he will have to do to atone for his actions. And it’s not for sure that his wife will forgive him, though hopefully she will.
Very often that kind of betrayal of a covenant relationship leads to divorce, the end of trust and hope for that relationship to be restored. This is serious stuff.
So in the Bible, God created this way, this ritual of animal sacrifice, for people to demonstrate that they understood the seriousness of sin, the impact of selfish actions,
and that they understood that there was a very real cost associated with restoring peace, restoring things to the way they should be in terms of the relationship with God.
But there's a second part to this ritual. Remember that evil also causes this relational vandalism.
And in the Bible this idea is described as polluting or defiling the land and making it unclean, so the priest would symbolically wash away the vandalism by sprinkling the animal's blood in different parts of the temple.
So does the animal's blood clean things? Well, remember this is a symbol and it's a symbol that we're not used to.
The blood represents life and the sprinkling of the blood by the priest is this representation of how God is cleaning away these indirect result, consequences, of evil in their community.
In the Bible this process is called purification, and so the temple and the land now become a clean space where God and His people can live together in peace.
So this ritual makes things right between Israel and God. And more than that!
The Israelites experience God's love and His grace through these symbols.
By being forgiven, receiving this forgiveness from God, ideally you’d think this would motivate the people to become people of love and grace. You would think that, wouldn’t you?
That should’ve happened, that's the ideal but it wasn't always happening.
So the prophet Isaiah says that the continual sacrifices of the Israelites had become meaningless because they were also at the same time allowing great evil in their midst.
They were ignoring the poor and the oppressed even the Israelite kings were distorting justice.
God doesn’t want us to go through the motions of religious observance, of just going to church,
pretending to be holy, looking good on the outside, while on the inside we remain unchanged and still inclined to do evil.
Something about doing evil turns the human heart to stone, and God wants our hearts instead to be hearts of flesh.
24 “‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Ezekiel 36:24-27
This is what God wants. People who live in loving relationship with Him, who have the Spirit of God in us moving us to live lives of blessing and faithfulness to God.
And so Isaiah looked ahead to a time when a new king from the line of David would come and deal
with evil. But this would happen in a surprising way. (Pause)
The King would come as a servant. And not just a servant, but He would also suffer and die for the evil committed by his own people and his life would be offered as a sacrifice.
A life offered as a sacrifice. Atonement.
In fact, Jesus himself used Isaiah's words when he said that he came to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.
Matthew 20:28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
And that word ransom refers to the sacrifice of atonement.
And all over the New Testament we hear about how Jesus' death was an atoning sacrifice for us.
It covered the debt that humans owe God for contributing to all of the evil and death in His world.
But the new testament writers also talk about Jesus death as providing purification and so we hear about Jesus' blood as having this ability to wash away the vandalism that evil has caused in and around us so we can now live at peace with God.
So that's the meaning behind Jesus' death but there's more to the story.
The Bible says that Jesus's death was not final. That He ROSE from the dead, and so HE'S THE SACRIFICE WHO BROKE THE POWER OF DEATH AND EVIL which means that He lives on to offer his life to anyone who will accept it.
He is the perfect sacrifice to it which all the previous sacrifices were pointing all along.
Scapegoat
Leviticus 16 gives instructions to the Levites to set aside 2 goats on the Day of Atonement. The first goat was meant as a sacrifice for the sins of the people.
The 2nd goat was to be sent into the wilderness to remove the sins from Israel.
The priests were to lay hands on the scapegoat and “confess over it all the iniquities (or sins) of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins and he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness (Leviticus 16:21).
Verse 22 says “The goat shall HEAR all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness”.
This was a foreshadowing of Jesus who was like a sheep led to the slaughter to “take on Himself the iniquity of us all” as Isaiah prophesied in chapter 53:6.
In a few weeks we will look in more depth at the prophesies in the OT about Jesus Christ, and we will see how all along, God knew that He Himself would provide the solution to the problem of evil;
that all along God planned to send His only Son into the world to save us from our sins, to bring healing and joy into our lives that can only come through a restored relationship with God through Jesus.
Before the foundation of the world, God planned to send His Son to this earth to bring about our peace with God through His sacrifice, through His blood.
1 Peter 1:18-20 For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. 20 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. (NIV)
Before the foundation of the world, God planned to send His Son.
But God was patient. So very patient. Patient enough to allow His plan of salvation to unfold over a great many centuries of human disobedience and evil.
Patient enough to establish the system of animal sacrifice through which people would grasp the lengths that had to be gone to atone for sin, the high cost of the forgiveness of sin.
Patient enough to wait for His Son to come to earth as an infant, grow, teach us about the ways of God, and suffer and die for our sins.
And He was patient enough in our lives today, to wait for us to come to Him in faith.
To come to Jesus, trusting in His love, trusting in His sacrifice for our sins as the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.
And He’s still patient today, waiting for each of us to make those small steps toward fulfilling our destinies as children of the most high God. (Pause)
May we experience that fulfillment as we yield our lives to Him, as we increasingly grow as true worshippers of God,
learning to live in the Way of Jesus, learning to trust Him and understanding that we were created for the purpose of being a blessing to the nations,
that we are sent by God to bless others and invite them to follow Jesus, our whole lives being given over to the King of kings.
And may we look forward, with eager anticipation, on the basis of His grace alone, to joining our voices to the chorus of heaven. With whom we will sing:
You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation…“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!” Revelation 5:9-12
Amen.
With thanks to the Bible Project for their video: Atonement, which was the inspiration and a source for this sermon.
Here is the video (link active in November of 2018): https://youtu.be/G_OlRWGLdnw
