The Lord is a Warrior

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I invite you to open up your Bibles to Hebrews chapter 11 and make your way to verse 29.
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We are continuing this morning in our study of the 11th chapter of Hebrews.
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We've been in the book of Hebrews now for a couple of years, studying through the book verse by verse, starting at the beginning and now having made almost all the way through the 11th chapter.
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As most of us know who have been here, the 11th chapter gives us an account of those men and women of the Old Testament who were considered to be demonstrations of faithfulness.
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We've looked at various Old Testament people from Enoch to Abraham, and for the last couple of weeks we've looked at the person of Moses.
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We saw how his parents exercised faith in keeping him alive when the king had commanded the death of all of the sons of the people of Israel.
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We noted how though he was raised with all of the benefits of Egypt, he did not succumb to the temptation of Egypt, but instead he decided he chose to pursue God rather than the fleeting pleasures of sin.
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And then last week we saw Moses and his role as the great leader of Israel in the establishment of the Passover, an event which was instrumental in prefiguring the then future work of the Lord Jesus Christ and his atonement.
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Now this week we move past the person of Moses as an individual, and we begin to examine the faith which was demonstrated not just by Moses, but by the entire nation of Israel which he served as leader.
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And we're going to look at their faith, we're going to look at what their faith consisted of, and most importantly we're going to look at the object of their faith, the object of their faith obviously being the living God.
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And we're going to understand the parts about their faith that we would do well to emulate.
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So again I ask that you stand as we hear the word of the Lord.
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This is the beginning of our sermon.
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We're going to read verses 29 through 31, and this will be the verses that we give exposition of this morning.
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Verse 29 says, "...By faith the people crossed the Red Sea as on dry land, but the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned.
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By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days.
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By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient." Because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies.
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Father in heaven, as we seek to understand your word today, I pray that you would keep me from error as I preach.
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I pray that your Holy Spirit would speak through me and that Lord you would keep me as I know I am a fallible man capable of preaching error.
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I pray that you would protect me from that and protect the congregation, Lord, and open their hearts to the truth that the message that is preached will help us to understand you better, understand our responsibility as believers better, and help us to understand our theology better, Lord, that we might draw closer to you in this study.
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And Lord, if there are those here who do not know you, who do not know your son Jesus Christ, we pray, O Lord, that you would use this time to open their hearts to the gospel in accordance with your will.
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In all these things we pray, in Jesus' name and for his sake, Amen.
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Most of us who grew up in church, and I realize there are some of us who didn't, but most folks who grew up in church become very familiar with certain stories from the Bible.
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There are a few Bible stories which are so familiar that the very mention of the Bible often is associated with those stories.
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This week, my daughter and I have been watching a show.
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Well, the family's been watching it, but she's been the one most pushing us to watch it.
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And we've been watching the show.
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And it was in the story of the show, there was a missing Bible.
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It's one of these mystery type shows.
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And there was a missing Bible.
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And the very first thing the guys said, they immediately started talking about the parting of the Red Sea.
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It just seemed like that story is so associated with Scripture that as soon as you mention the Bible stories of things like parting of the Red Sea or the burning bush or the cross, these are all things that just come to your mind, even secular minds, when the Bible is mentioned because they've been so ingrained in our understanding of the fact that those are biblical stories.
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And there's good reason for that.
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The reason is that these stories exemplify what the Bible is.
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The Bible is a book that not only records history, many books record history.
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There are history books from every culture.
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There are history books that tell us all about the history of all different kinds of people.
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But the Bible records for us a very special kind of history.
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The Bible records what we call redemptive history.
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It records for us the parts of history which many other history books do not record.
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Many other history books don't even want to go near because the Bible tells us about the God who created the world and the very reason for why history even exists.
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The Bible, for instance, tells us in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
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You know what? You know what the history books tell you in school? They don't even deal with what the beginning was.
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They just go back to the earliest sociological societies and they begin to break that down.
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They don't want to deal with the beginning.
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The beginning has now been moved to the science classroom.
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And what does science try to do? Science tries to say, well, it's evolution that created the earth.
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Evolution is the beginning.
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But even then, if you press an evolutionist hard enough and say, yes, OK, and you want to argue about evolution, well, what started the process? Even they don't want to deal with it.
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Richard Dawkins in the movie that was put out by Ben Stein called Expelled.
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Richard Dawkins is one of these men who is an atheist and he and he preaches about atheism.
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He's one of the most zealous atheistic evangelists I've ever seen.
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He's going around preaching the good news of atheism, whatever that is.
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And Richard Dawkins was asked, well, you know, you're so ardently believing in evolution.
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What started it all? And he said, well, I don't know.
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It could have been aliens.
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So he's satisfied that something may have created the earth, but he just doesn't know what.
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And he certainly knows it's not God.
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You see, but the Bible doesn't shirk from telling us God created the world.
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It tells us that God has given us commands by which we are to live.
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He has told us what is righteous and what is not.
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What is sin and what is holiness? And most importantly, the Bible tells us that this God chose to call a people to himself, a particular people, a peculiar people.
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The people of Israel, and it records for us the miraculous acts which he did in the midst of those people.
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The entire Old Testament revolves around God's work within the nation of Israel, the people God chose to call his own.
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In the book of Joel, or excuse me, Amos, it says that when God looked down at Israel, it says, you and you alone have I known of all the nations of the world.
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And the word known there is a synonym for the word love.
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You of all the nations I have loved of all the nations of the world.
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God had an affection for these people, Israel.
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He had a love for them.
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And when we read the Bible, we're not just reading the history of Israel.
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We're reading the history of God's love for Israel and then through Israel, bringing Jesus Christ and how God's love went out into the world through the work of the ministry of the church because of the work of Jesus Christ.
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So it's not just history, it's redemptive history.
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And when we arrive at Hebrews 11 and we get to verse 29, the author begins to talk rather than about just individual faith, because up until this point, he's talked about individual faith.
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He's talked about the individual faith of Enoch.
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He's talked about the faith of Noah.
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He's talked about the faith of Moses and Abraham and Isaac and Sarah.
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He's given us individuals to look at and said these people demonstrated what faith looks like in different ways.
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All of them had a different expression of their faith, but it was all the faith in the same God.
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Now he's going to move to the faith of a nation.
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He's gone from talking about individuals to talking about the nation.
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But there's something to something important that we need to understand.
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The entire nation of Israel never in history has had a complete and 100 percent demonstration of what we would call genuine saving faith.
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Let me say that again, never in history has the entire nation of Israel and I'm talking 100 percent had a demonstration of what we would call saving faith.
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There have always been people within Israel who have shown themselves to be unbelievers from the followers of Korah during the time of Moses to the followers of Baal during the time of Ezekiel and Elijah, from the followers of the Pharisees during the time of Jesus.
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There have always been people among the Jews who demonstrated themselves to be unbelievers.
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There have always been in Israel some who had faith and some whose faith was not genuine.
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And because of this, when we come to verses 29 and we read down, when we read about the faith of Israel as a nation, we need to understand that what the writer is focusing on here is the object of the faith of Israel as a nation, not everyone's individual faith.
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It's not talking about the individual faith of every Israelite because as we've noted, the individual faith of every Israelite could have been very shaky.
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There are some who didn't even have it.
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But what they all had was one God who created the heavens and the earth that they all look to as the only God of the universe.
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So the object of verses 29 through 31, though we are going to talk about Rahab a little, but the object is not individual faith.
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The object of the passage is the one whom the faith was in, namely God himself.
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Not all Israel was faithful to God, but God was faithful to all Israel.
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That's the point.
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Not all Israel was faithful to God, but God was faithful to them.
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That's why we call the message this morning, Faith and the Faithfulness of God.
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So the focus of Hebrews 11, 29 through 31 is more on the faithfulness of God than on the faith of the individuals.
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Israel as a nation has had a unique revelation from God and as such, they had a uniquely proper view of God.
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Israel saw God in ways that other nations could not and did not see the Lord because God revealed himself to them in ways that he did not reveal himself to other nations.
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Would you agree? And I imagine you would.
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Would you agree that God revealed himself to Moses in a different way than he revealed himself to Pharaoh? You would have to agree that God's revelation to Moses was one of love and and and guidance.
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But God's revelation to Pharaoh was one of justice and wrath.
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This is why Romans chapter nine tells us he raised Pharaoh up for what reason? So that his power could be demonstrated in him.
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He raised Pharaoh up for one purpose so that his wrath and justice could be demonstrated in him.
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So we see God has had this special revelation that he has given to Israel.
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He's given this special revelation to them in the word that has been passed down to us so that now we can know this God the same way that they did.
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And the question is, how did they know this God? How did Israel see God? Well, that's the question of the morning.
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That's because that's what I want to focus on.
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I want us.
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As believers in Jesus Christ, as Christians, I want us to see God.
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In the same way that Israel saw God, because Israel saw God in three ways and they understood God in three ways, and then we see it in this passage, they understood God as savior.
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They understood God as warrior.
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They understood God as provider.
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They understood their God in many other ways, but those three ways specifically, and that's what we see in these verses.
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So let's go and look at these verses individually and see what I'm talking about.
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Number one, Israel saw God as their savior.
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Verse 29, it says, By faith, the people crossed the Red Sea as on dry land.
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But the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned.
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Now, I thought long and hard, should I do an entire series on the on the crossing of the Red Sea? Should I do an entire message? Should I spend a lot of time on the parting of the Red Sea? And beloved, I could have done that I preached on in the past, but I got to thinking as I was preparing this message, I was looking at these passages.
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Most of us, again, like I said earlier, there are some certain Bible verses that are so familiar.
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They're so ingrained in us.
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Most of us are very familiar with what happened at the Red Sea.
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And you know what? The people of Israel were familiar with what happened at the Red Sea.
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That story is foundation to the people's understanding of God because it was illustrative of how God is their savior and how the Lord brought salvation unto them.
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There they stood.
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They have just left Egypt.
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They are many folds standing there in the wilderness.
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They are standing there with a sea in front of them and an army behind.
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They are literally without a place to go.
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They can't retreat to the left.
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They can't retreat to the right and they can't swim for it.
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All they have is the possibility of surrender.
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We can give up and maybe Pharaoh will have mercy.
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Maybe he won't, though.
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Maybe after the death of his son and the death of so many sons in Egypt, maybe their anger is kindled so that they are going to bring the very end of our lives.
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What do we do? And God opened the waters in an unparalleled demonstration of grace.
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I can't think of another demonstration in Scripture outside of the work of Jesus Christ where God so visibly brought a salvation to a people.
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God opened the waters and allowed the people to pass.
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And the writer of Hebrews makes the point first that they walked on dry land, which tells us that this was a miracle.
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This wasn't just something this wasn't just I've heard I heard some scientists one time sort of chatting about this.
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And they said, well, maybe what happened was a meteor hit near the water and it pushed the water out just long enough to get the people through.
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And it caused the receding of the water.
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And it looked like a miracle, but all it was was a natural phenomenon.
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That's not what the Bible says.
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The Bible says the water stood as heap on both sides.
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And there's one thing water doesn't do.
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Water doesn't heap.
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I'll give you a dollar if you can cause water to heap up.
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You can't do it.
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You pour water out, water goes everywhere, but water doesn't stack.
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You've got to have something to put water in to cause it to stack.
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And even then it's not stacking, it's filling.
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Water is the greatest conformer in the world or will conform to any point.
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If you want to know you have a leak in something, put water in it.
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The leak will be demonstrated by the water because water is going to find the fastest way to escape.
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Water doesn't stack.
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But yet the Bible says the water stood, it stacked, it heaped upon itself on both sides to allow the people of Israel to walk through.
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And the writer of Hebrews makes the point that it took faith to walk through.
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If you look, it says by faith, the people crossed the Red Sea as on dry land.
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It did take faith, because if I was standing at the at the precipice of the sea, if I was standing on the shore of a sea and the sea opened up, I would not walk through it.
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Just just naturally, because there's not anything telling me that at any moment it's not going to go back to the way it was.
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And there's one place I don't want to be is in the middle of it when it goes back.
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If the water is standing as a mountain on either side, it takes faith to step through it.
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You might say, well, wait a minute, Pharaoh went through and he didn't have any faith and he didn't make it either.
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But that's not the point.
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The point about Pharaoh is Pharaoh didn't see the water.
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All Pharaoh saw was revenge.
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Pharaoh wasn't worried about the water, Pharaoh wasn't worried about what was going on with God's miracle.
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You would think you would think that seeing that miracle would have stopped him in his tracks, but it didn't because he was seeing red over the death of his son.
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The people of Egypt were so focused on Israel, they were missing the very miracle in which they were going through.
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And of course, they didn't make it.
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And again, this is a true salvation experience.
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Had this not occurred, it would have either been back to slavery or to the grave for the people of Israel.
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Mass return to Egypt or mass slaughter.
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But in this moment, God brought salvation.
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And from that point forward, the people of Israel would look back to that moment and say, here is a picture of God as our Savior.
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In fact, even in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul connects baptism to the crossing of the Red Sea.
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First Corinthians chapter 10 and verse 1 says this, For I want you to know, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea.
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They saw the crossing of the Red Sea and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.
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You see, Paul is connecting baptism to the crossing of the Red Sea.
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Why? Because when you become a Christian, when you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the very first thing that you do as an act of a demonstration of faith, it is not what saves you.
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And let me make sure that that is clear.
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Baptism does not save us.
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But it is the first act of demonstration of faith is that we are washed in the waters of baptism to demonstrate that we have died to sin and we are alive in Christ.
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So Paul takes that picture of salvation and he links it to this picture of the history of Israel.
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And he says, see, their salvation, the thing that they remember about salvation was that crossing of the Red Sea and it reminded them that their God is their Savior.
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I want to move on.
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There's a lot more that I could say and I want to move on to the second point, because Israel not only saw God as a savior in the parting of the Red Sea.
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Israel saw God as a warrior at Jericho.
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Look at verse 30.
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It says, by faith, the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days.
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Now, if you're taking notes, we've already said God is a Hebrew, Israel saw God as their Savior.
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Now we're saying Israel saw God as their warrior.
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And I realize that of the many words that we use to describe the Lord, the one that I don't think I hear often used today is the word warrior.
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Many people see God so benevolent, so loving, so gracious that they refuse to see Him as the God who battles for His people.
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But yet this is what we see throughout the Old Testament.
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Time and time again, God is defeating the enemies of His people.
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And one of the greatest examples is the story of the falling of Jericho.
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I mentioned earlier about the people who try to explain away the Red Sea.
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Well, there are also people who try to explain away the events at Jericho.
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Sometimes I wish they would just say, I don't believe it happened rather than trying to explain it away.
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It'd be better just to admit your unbelief than to try to come up with some of the silliness that is often brought up by a lot of these guys.
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We're aware of what happened at Jericho, that the people were commanded to march around the city walls.
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And at the end of seven days, they shouted.
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And at the shout, the walls fell.
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And extra biblical literature, old Jewish literature from the Talmud and other places in referring to this particular event say that the walls didn't just fall, but that the earth swallowed them up.
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That there was just this massive taking down so that Israel could go in and could claim what was rightfully theirs had been given to them by God.
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But again, there are all these folks who try to bring this.
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Well, what maybe it was this.
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And once on the History Channel, I remember discussing this in the fellowship hall about probably about seven years ago with a guy here at our church.
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And he had seen something on the Discovery Channel or the History Channel or something.
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And he wanted to tell me about it because he said, this is the neatest thing I've ever heard.
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You know, what really happened was that they marched around for seven days and their marching just happened to resonate with the proper frequency that it caused the whole building to begin to resonate.
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And begin to shake.
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And when they shout, it just happened to be at the right frequency that they're shouting, caught that resonant frequency and it shook itself to the ground.
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See, it's all scientific, Keith.
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It's not a miracle.
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It's just science.
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I said, first of all, the Bible is very clear that God is the one who is fighting this battle.
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That what the people of Israel are doing is simply acting in obedience.
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I said, but even if that was the means to which God used to bring about this end, that is still a miracle because there have been millions and millions and millions of people that have been walking through New York for the last how many years? And they shout all the time.
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And yet this entire state building is still there.
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So if that is how it happened, which I don't concede that it was, it's still in itself is a miracle.
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But people don't want to believe that God performs miracles.
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They don't want to believe that God would perform a miracle that would bring the destruction of a city.
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But you see, God did, because God is fighting that battle for Israel.
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God is a warrior.
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He battles for his people.
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When Israel went to battle without the Lord, they lost every time that tells you something.
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They weren't the most skilled of fighters.
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It was the Lord who was fighting the battle.
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When the Lord was with them, they won.
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And when the Lord withdrew his grace from them, they were defeated every time.
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It was the Lord who was the warrior.
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It was the Lord who was mighty in battle.
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Psalm 24, 8 says, Who is this king of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty.
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The Lord, mighty in battle.
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You know, this is why we're told not to seek vengeance.
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The Bible tells us, Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.
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For it is written, Vengeance is mine.
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I will repay, says the Lord.
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We are commanded not to seek out vengeance.
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We are commanded to stand and let God be our vindicator.
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Let God be the one who fights our battles and is our warrior.
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God stands up and battles for his people.
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He is their warrior.
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He is their champion.
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And Jericho is the illustration of this fact.
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Well, finally, we've seen God as warrior and we've seen God as savior.
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Finally, I just want to show in verse 31 that God, Israel also saw God as provider.
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Look at verse 31, it says, By faith, Rahab, the prostitute, did not perish with those who were disobedient because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies.
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Now, I am going to spend more time on Rahab as an individual.
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In fact, after Dr.
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Sarfati has come and gone in a couple of weeks, I'm going to I'm going to take an aside and deal just with the subject of lying, because oftentimes when people talk about Rahab, that's the question is, you know, she told a lie.
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And how is it that God blessed in the event of something that we would know as a command, I shall not bear false witness.
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We're going to deal with that.
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We're going to deal with the ethics of lying.
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So that's a that's that's a preview of what's coming later.
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But today, I just want to talk about something in regard to how this fits with the verses before it.
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We've seen God as savior.
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Verse 29, in the event of the Red Sea, we've seen God as warrior.
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Verse 30, in the events of Jericho and God is provider here.
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Because what this is showing is that where Israel sent these spies in could have easily could have easily been caught and destroyed and there would have been a worse battle to fight.
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But God provided a believer in the midst of a pagan city.
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I want you to hear this.
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This is this this is what is said about it's in Joshua, chapter two, verses eight through eleven.
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I want you to hear what is said about her faith.
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This is and remember, this is before the walls fall.
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This is before that event happens.
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Listen, it says.
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Before the men laid down, she came up to them on the roof and said to the men, I know that the Lord has given you the land.
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Remember, this is before Israel's even gotten there.
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They've sent spies.
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She said, I know that the Lord has given you the land and that the fear of you has fallen upon us and that all of the inhabitants of the land melt away before you.
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For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you.
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See, they heard that God was their savior.
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Jericho already heard the story when you came up out of Egypt and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan to Sihon and Og, whom you devoted to destruction.
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And as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted and there was no spirit left in any man because of you.
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For the Lord, your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.
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Now, who do you think it was who opened up her heart to believe? Others among her people heard the same stories, others among her people had heard about this Hebrew God who opened the Red Sea and who protected Israel in battle.
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But they only feared, they did not believe.
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Rahab believed.
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Who opened Rahab's heart to believe? The only one who can open up a heart is God.
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Many people fear God, but it takes an act of grace for that fear to become faith.
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Even Rahab's part in the history of Israel is a demonstration of the faithfulness of God.
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God provided Rahab for the men to protect them from danger.
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This is why he is called Yahweh Yirav, the Lord who provides.
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It is important to realize that though the stories of faith contained in Hebrews 11 are diverse, they all have one common denominator.
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All the way from back to Enoch, all the way down to the people of Israel.
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All of the stories of faith in Hebrews 11 have this common denominator.
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All of them exercised faith in a God who was faithful to them.
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God himself, the true God who created the world, was the object of their faith.
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All of the people of Hebrews 11 believed in the one true God and in his faithfulness to his people.
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They all understood him as Savior.
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They all understood him as warrior.
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They all understood him as provider.
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Which leads me to the question of the morning.
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If Israel saw God rightly as Savior and warrior and provider, how then today do we see God? In our modern world, there are many ways people see God, many of which are not biblical.
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Some see God as a tyrant who sits upon his throne making demands and having no mercy.
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Others see him as a universal policeman looking for ways to stifle their joy and imposing upon them his laws.
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And even among Christians, particularly those of the newly established emergent movement, there is an unbiblical view of God.
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Some see God as being unable to truly influence world events, saying that he's more of a spectator than a supreme being.
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Open theists believe that God doesn't even know what happens in the future.
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He doesn't have any idea about the future.
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He's in flux, just like we are.
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He's in transition.
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And even more sadly, many Christians see God as a sort of impotent Santa Claus.
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Someone who patiently sits waiting for us to come and bring him our wishes, but is ultimately powerless to influence the course of our lives without our approval.
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But beloved, the biblical God is not like any of these.
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The Bible shows us that God is merciful.
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God is powerful and God is gracious.
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He is merciful as our Savior.
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He is powerful as our warrior.
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He is gracious as our provider.
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And beloved, it is my prayer that this is how we would all see God today, not as a harsh deity that the world often sees filled only with laws and wrath, devoid of grace and not as the impotent deity of the newfangled religion, which sees God as simply being unable to truly influence history.
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But rather, I pray that we would understand the Lord as the powerful God of the universe described first in the Old Testament and shown in his fullness in the new.
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The God who has been merciful to us, who has fought for us and who continues to sustain us and provide for us by his grace.
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We need to see God as that for that is as God is to him the glory forever.
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Amen.
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Father, we thank you for having this opportunity today to examine your word and to study it together.
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We pray that you would use this message, O Lord, to encourage hearts that those who trust in you would be edified and moved towards a closer walk with you.
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And Lord, if there are those here who do not know you, that they would hear of your work as savior, provider and warrior, and Lord, that they would understand themselves as sinners who need redemption and saving saving.
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Lord, we pray that you'll use this time now to move hearts and Lord, we thank you for all that you are doing and you're going to do in Jesus name.
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Amen.