Episode 1. The Point of Grace
This program is the first in a new Series called Coming to Grips with Grace. It can be tough sometimes – really getting our minds and our hearts around God’s Grace. So if you want to draw closer …
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but Grace is one of those words that doesn’t quite fit into our vocabulary anymore. We live in a fast world that moves quickly and we’re very transactional with each other. Often we don’t build relationships anymore with the people that we live around or the people that we work with. The whole concept of grace can be hard to get your mind around.
What is Grace? What exactly does that word mean? We know the hymn Amazing Grace, but in my life and your life what is Grace.
Exactly what does it mean? Today on Christianity Works we’re starting a new series called: “Coming to Grips With Grace.”
Maybe you’re someone who’s heard the message of Jesus over and over again Sunday after Sunday and you think you’ve heard all that before but what does it really mean in my heart.
Maybe you’re someone who’s never heard that message before. Maybe you’re somewhere in between. Wherever we sit, whoever we are, wherever we are in our walk in life, I honestly believe that the message of Grace is one that we need to hear time and time again. To bring our hearts to life as to who God, who Jesus really is.
Now, if I were to ask the average Christian on a Sunday morning as they walked in, to write down on a sheet of paper in 25
words or less why did Jesus die on the cross most people would write down something along these lines. The reason Jesus died on the cross is to pay for my sins so I can have forgiveness. That’s a reasonable answer, in fact, that’s the right answer theologically.
But now, let me ask another question. If the reason that Jesus died on the cross is to pay for my sin, all my weaknesses,
all the things that I’ve done wrong and everything that I’m going to do wrong. If the reason is that He should pay the price for
that, so I could be forgiven by God, there’s another question.
“Why do I need to be forgiven?”
The answer is, so you can have eternal life, so you can live forever with God. Well, that’s the correct answer. But now, let me ask you another question. If I’m going to have eternal life, what’s the point of all that? Why have eternal life?
John wrote in His Gospel in the New Testament that when God created the universe everything was created by Jesus and through Jesus. What was that like?
There was a time when there was nothing. There was a time when there was just God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then one day God decided to create the universe. Was it just a rainy Sunday afternoon and Jesus was playing with a cosmic play dough and He decided to slap a universe together? Was it a despotic act or was there a purpose?
If Jesus created the universe, then died for you and me so that we could be forgiven, so that we can eternal life, what’s the point to all of that? What’s the point of God being God, creating the universe and the stars? You go out and look at the stars, you look at the stats of how far everything is apart and how big the universe is. You see the wonder, the might and the beauty. You look at the fragility of the universe. You think, wow, that is some serious creation, a really serious creation. That’s what I’d like to look at today. We’re going to look at answering that question, what was the point of all that? And God putting you and I in that with a free choice—– either to follow Him or turn away from Him. God knew full well that you and I would blow it and would turn away from Him and that God would send Jesus to die on the cross in our place so we would be forgiven, so that we could have eternal life.
What’s the point? I’d like to look at that today. Beginning in Genesis. We’re going to go right through from Genesis to Revelation, all 66 books. We’re not going to stop at each one.
I’d like to look at this broad picture of how God has engaged with humanity. One of the basic tenants of Christianity is that God is a God who reveals Himself to us. When we look at the Bible, when we look at the sixty-six books from Genesis—-the very first book written by Moses— right through to Revelation we see that the way that God has revealed Himself or shown Himself to individuals and groups of people, has changed dramatically from the beginning to the end. As we look at the big story that spans 2000 years we will see in that story the whole point of creation.
Let’s start right at the beginning. If you’ve got a Bible, go and grab it. In chapter 17 of Genesis God has chosen Abraham. He makes a covenant, a promise that He will never break with Abraham. God says: “I will give to you Abraham and your offspring after you a land where you are now aliens. All the land of Canaan for a perpetual holding and I will be their God.” Here is the promise that God makes to humanity. He makes it to the father of His chosen people, the nation of Israel. It’s a wonderful promise given at a time when Abraham was struggling with a whole bunch of things: why has God called me, surely I’ll never have a son, I’m one hundred years old……….
But see how God reveals Himself to just one man. Abraham is a very important character in the Bible but he was just a man, like me.
He was just a person, like you, but God chose to reveal Himself and speak directly to Abraham. We know that Abraham had a son, Isaac, and Isaac had a son Jacob, and Jacob was the one who had twelve sons and those twelve sons became the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel.
Through a sequence of events Israel found herself exiled in Egypt as slaves. They were somewhere between several hundred thousand and a couple of million Israelites in slavery in Egypt. Most of us will remember the story: how Moses came along and God called him out of the desert to lead his people out of slavery. He dealt with Pharaoh and Israel was fleeing from the mighty Egyptian army. They went southeast down toward the Red Sea and of course, the Red Sea was impassable. Old men, old women, little kids, all sorts of people who just couldn’t swim across the Red Sea.
Here is a beautiful picture where we have the God of Israel who appears again to His people. But now in a very public way. With Abraham it was very private and personal. Now here with Israel it becomes very public. We’ll pick up the story in Exodus 14 where the Israelites are fleeing from the Egyptian army. The Egyptian army which is the real world force going on. (It’s like the American army is today). The Egyptian army is the real world force that was there and it’s going to kill the Israelites. We see how God appears to them as a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. In Exodus 14 we see God was a pillar of cloud by day and He led His people where He wanted them to go. All of a sudden the Egyptian army caught up with them. God went from being in front of His people to putting Himself between His people, the Israelites and the Egyptian army.
Let’s read in Exodus 14:19: “The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them and it came between the army of Egypt and the people of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness and it lit up the night and one did not come near the other all night.”
Here, very publicly, God protected His people. Theologians call it a theophany. This was an appearance of God and everybody saw God’s power and God’s might. Then Moses lifted his staff, the Red Sea parted, the people went through, the Egyptian army followed them, and the water came and swallowed up the Egyptian army. Israel was saved. The Egyptian aggressors were killed. It’s quite a story.
It’s an appearance of God’s power and God’s might and God’s love and God’s compassion. Over the next forty years we see how this pillar of cloud by day and fire by night leads and guides the people.
We pick up the narrative at the end of Exodus in the last few verses. (You see, about half the book of Exodus is about the tent of the meeting or the tabernacle that Moses was instructed to build. This was the place where God’s presence lived and dwelt.)
“The cloud covered the tent of the meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses wasn’t able to enter the tent of the meeting because the cloud settled upon it and the Glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. Whenever the cloud was taken up from the Tabernacle the Israelites would set out each stage of their journey but if the cloud was not taken up they did not set out until the day it was taken up. The cloud of the Lord was on the Tabernacle by day and fire was in the cloud by night before the eyes of all the house of Israel at each stage of their journey.”
Now this was really significant because all of the other gods that all of the other nations worshipped were static gods. They were gods that were in temples on hills and the people went to worship their gods there, whatever their gods were, Baal and all the other gods that they worshipped. But, here the God of Israel is a God that travels on the journey of life, the journey in the desert with His people. It’s a beautiful picture and then we see how Moses goes up to Mt. Sinai and gets the Ten Commandments and comes down. Again, God has spoken through one person to all the other people. It’s quite different than the way God works these days.
And God asks Moses to build this Tabernacle, this Tent of the Meeting Place. (As I said, half of the book of Exodus is about how the Tabernacle or the Tent should be set out.)
Here’s how it worked. The tent was right in the middle of all of the people. There were three tribes that traveled to the north, three tribes that to the south, three tribes to the east and three tribes to the west. So God has gone from occasionally appearing to someone like Abraham and Moses to being a permanent God in the midst of His people. They had the ark of the covenant and God was mobile and He was committed to their journey.
Then, as the Hebrew Law is being given to God’s people, God says in Leviticus 26:11-14: “I will make my dwelling in your midst and I will walk among you and I will be your God and you shall be my people. The Lord your God brought you out of the land of Egypt to be their slaves no more. I have broken the bars of your yoke and I have made you walk upright.” That’s beautiful. Let’s hold that thought that as God is laying down His Law to His people says: “What is really in my heart is that I will walk among you, I will dwell among you, I will live in your midst and I will be your God and you will be my people.”
We’re starting to get a hint here what creation is all about. It’s not fully revealed yet but we’re starting to get a hint.
After Israel wandered in the desert for forty years, Moses died. Joshua led this great nation of Israel into a land that they had to fight for to occupy. Their leadership, their system of government was what is called a Theocracy. God was the head of state and there were a number of judges appointed by God to administer God’s Law. Some time went on and the people decided they wanted a king. It wasn’t really God’s plan, but God gave them a king. The first king was Saul and he was quite a disaster. The next king
was David. Often remembered as the greatest king that ever reigned over Israel.
David had a plan in his heart, you can read about it beginning in II Samuel 7:1. God had helped David win yet another battle and David came home one day and said: “Lord, you’ve done so many good things for me. I’ve got a house to live in. The people have houses to live in. We have food. We’d like to build you a house. At the moment you live in a tent. The ark of the covenant is still in a tent. I’d love to build you a house. I’d love to build you a Temple.”
While God never let David build the temple he did all the planning. His son King Solomon was the one who built the Temple. There was a day (you can read about in I Kings 8:4), when they had the dedication of the Temple. (It took a number of decades to build this massive building). They brought up the ark of the Lord to the Tent of the Meeting and all the holy vessels that were in the Tent for the dedication.
“And the priests and Levites brought them up. King Solomon and all the congregation of Israel who assembled before Him were there before the ark, sacrificing sheep and oxen that couldn’t be counted or numbered and the priests brought the ark of the covenant of the Lord to its place in the inner sanctuary of the house, the most holy place under the wings of the cherubim. (The Holy of Holies it was called). For the cherubim spread their wings over the place of the ark so the cherubim made a covering above the ark and its poles. And the poles were so long that the ends of the poles were seen from the Holy Place in front of the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies.
Here we have God going from being a God who traveled in the desert with His people to now making His home in the midst of Jerusalem. The capital that David had chosen for Israel was Jerusalem. In the middle of Jerusalem was the temple and in the middle of His temple in the Holy of Holies was God.
God has gone from appearing to a man to appearing to all the people walking through the desert with Him for forty years and now to dwelling in their home.
God’s getting closer, ever closer. For the next several hundred years God spoke to His people through the kings. Through His prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Obadiah, Ezekiel, etc. He spoke a great many things and did many great and mighty deeds. All of that time Israel struggled with God. They deserted God and God called them back and they did it again and God punished them by allowing the Temple in Jerusalem to be destroyed and sending them into exile in Babylon. After seventy years He brought them back again.
The whole of the Old Testament is about how God’s chosen people Israel, struggled with their God. In fact, the word Israel literally means to struggle with God.
But then God does something amazing. God sends His Son Jesus. John tells us about it in John 1:1-3: “In the beginning was the Word (Jesus) and the Word was God and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him and without Him not one thing came into being.” Later in John 1:14 he says: “The Word became flesh and lived among us. We have seen His Glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son full of grace and truth.”
The Word became flesh, became man. What a huge step toward you and me. God has gone from being a Spirit, a God who reveals Himself through clouds and people. God has gone a huge step over the divide from the spiritual realm into the physical realm to become a man.
The Word became flesh and lived among us. Literally, the Word that John uses there is ‘tabernacled’ among us. He’s pointing right back to the Tabernacle, the tent that Moses built out there on that journey. He is saying God has taken another step closer to us. He’s become a person, a human being. He’s gone from being a cloud, to being in the Tabernacle, to being in the Temple, to speaking through the prophets, to being in our midst. That great crossing, across the Red Sea, which was the great act of salvation in the Old Testament was really only a shadow, a pre-cursor for the great act of salvation in the New Testament when Jesus would die to pay for our sins.
There is now thirty odd years when Jesus grew up from being a little boy to a man. He had his three to three-and-a-half year public ministry. It wasn’t just a holy bus ride to the cross. The cross is central, it’s so important, but along those years, Jesus showed us what God is like.
The apostle Paul writes later that Jesus is the very image of God Himself. The exact replica of God Himself we see in the face of Jesus Christ. This Jesus who hung around with the prostitutes and the lepers and stood up for the down-trodden and healed the sick
and loved the poor. Who preached the good news, who gave His very life for you and me.
This Jesus is the huge stepping stone in this process of God revealing Himself to you and me. Then Jesus talked to His disciples, to the twelve. He said: “Look, I’m going away, I’m going to be killed, I’m going somewhere where you can’t come. But it’s actually good for you. It’s to your advantage that I go away, John 16:7 says: “For if I do not go away, the Advocate, the Comforter, will not come. But if I go, I’ll send the Comforter to you.”
Just think about this for a minute. These disciples have been following Jesus around for all this time. He’s saying it’s good for you that I go away. In other words, something better is coming, some better expression of God’s love and comfort. Something closer, something more intimate. That’s why God sent His Holy Spirit. Jesus died, Jesus rose again. He’s sitting on the Father’s right Hand. Then we read in the first few chapters of Acts how God poured His Holy Spirit out on each person who believed. Jesus Himself said: “If you love me, if you keep my Word, my Father and I will love you. We will come and make our home in you, in each one of you who believes in me.
That is really radical. That is such a long distance from appearing in a cloud or speaking through prophets or living in the Holy of Holies in the Temple. All of a sudden Jesus is God in the flesh, close and intimate. And Jesus said: “There’s something better, there’s something much better. There’s the ability to have God in you, the presence of God in you. So we see how God falls on the believers. The truth is that each person today who believes in Jesus Christ has the Holy Spirit dwelling in them. They have the ability and the potential to have a close, intimate, loving relationship with God.
The God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament. The God of power and mighty deeds and acts of the Old Testament. The God of humility. The God of suffering in the New Testament. That God wants to dwell in each one of us, right here, right now.
But there’s a final chapter. Flip to Revelation 21. John is gripped by the Holy Spirit. He sees a slice of heaven. That’s what Revelation is about. He sees what’s coming. See, we know how the story of humanity is going to end. Jesus is coming back. There is an eternity and people Jesus won on the cross will be there.
But listen and you’ll hear the echo of what God says. In Revelation 21: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had all passed away and the sea was no more. And I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a Bride, adorned for her husband and I heard a loud voice saying: See, the home of God is now among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God and they will be His people and God Himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more. For these first things have passed away.”
Remember earlier on we read in Leviticus where God was making a covenant or contract of promise with His people, the Israelites.
He said: “I will be their God and they will be my people. I will dwell among them. Over the whole history from Abraham through to Revelation when Jesus comes again what we see is this. And this is the crux, this is the purpose, this is the point of Christ. We see God taking steps, closer and closer to you and me.
From the pillar of fire and cloud, to the Tabernacle, to the Tent of the Meeting where God traveled on this journey through the desert for forty years with His people. To the prophets, to the Temple where God lived in the middle of Jerusalem, in the Holy of Holies. Then, to the person of Jesus as He walked among us, humble yet powerful, the Son of God, the Son of Man who died on the cross for you and me and rose again and now sits at the right hand of the Father. He now sits at the right hand of the Father to send His Holy Spirit to dwell in each person who believes in Jesus Christ.
It doesn’t get any more intimate and closer than this.
But there’s one last step. When Jesus comes again, to call the living and the dead. To call the people who believe in Him to spend eternity with Him.
And at the end of creation, the whole purpose has been for God to make His home among mortals. “I wil dwell with you as your God and you will be my people.” I will be with you for all eternity.
What’s the point of God creating this universe?
What’s the point of God creating us?
What’s the point of God sending Jesus to die for you and me?
What’s the point of forgiveness?
What’s the point of eternal life?
The point is this. God wants to be our God. He wants us to be His people. He wants a close, loving, intimate, wonderful relationship with each one of us forever and ever beginning right now. That’s the point. If you would like to have that sort of relationship pray this with me.
“Father, I’ve heard your Word today. I’ve heard this beautiful story, how you created the universe, how you came and over thousands of years revealed your love for us in the person of Jesus. In His face I see you. On the cross I see your love. In the resurrection I see your power, your hope and your joy. Father, I want your Holy Spirit in me now. I want my eternal life to begin now Father. I give my life to you afresh today. Fill me with your Holy Spirit. Baptize me with your Holy Spirit afresh, so Father I can experience the whole point of grace and your presence, your love and your tenderness. I want to hear your voice, see your face and behold your glory.
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