The Promised Land

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Genesis 12:1-20

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this theme and introduced this theme of the promised land. Seeing as that is so central to God's promise to Abram in Genesis 12, 1 -3, and as we'll see, it's very significant again in chapter 15, 17, 22.
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Throughout the patriarchal narrative indeed, throughout the narrative of Israel and the fulfillment of God's promises and even unto
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Christ who is the apex, the center and basis for it all. And so this theme of the promised land connects us from Genesis to Revelation and it explains some of the themes that we've already seen in Genesis 1 -11.
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So we want to stick with our approach here of taking the 10 ,000 foot view at certain occasions.
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We wanna look at the forest more than the trees. And also we want to keep in mind that there's a poor tendency among Christians when they read the
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Old Testament, especially Old Testament narrative, that they read it as a Sunday school lesson for toddlers on how to be good little girls and good little boys.
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In other words, we've been trained to read the Old Testament narratives moralistically instead of theologically.
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We wanna make sure that we don't fall in to that temptation, that snare. It's certainly good to derive morals both positively and negatively from the examples in the
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Old Testament, but that's not their primary purpose. That's not their primary function. We wanna make sure that we're finding, as David Murray says in his wonderful book, we wanna make sure we find
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Christ on every page. And so we're looking at the outflow this morning of God's promise in Genesis 12, one through three.
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You remember from last week and even the week before what Stephen said in his speech in Acts 7.
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Brethren, fathers, listen. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia.
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Before he dwelt in Haran and said to him, get out of your country and from your relatives and come to a land that I will show you.
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And he came out of the land of the Chaldeans and dwelt in Haran. And from there, when his father was dead, he moved him to this land in which you now dwell.
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God, as we've seen so far in Genesis 12, has called Abram and now led
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Abram into this dawning realization of his promise. Not all of that promise has been fulfilled where we are, and yet God has guided
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Abram to the beginning of it. He's guided him into Canaan, the promised land. Every time
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Abram reached a hilltop or a vista, some boundless vision of the plateaus or plains or mountain ranges of this land, he would have been awestruck that God was giving this land over to him.
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Not just a place, but a promise that he would have a fulfillment, a posterity, an inheritance within it that he would fill this land and that through his seed,
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God would fulfill his promises. And so we find God encouraging
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Abram to tour the land. We find the seed of the woman that God promised in Genesis 3 .15.
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Entering into this land under the shadow of the serpent, building altars and laying claim to God's kingdom.
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And this morning, we want to look at the land in perhaps a thematic way.
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How should we understand the land? What dots do we connect from where we've been at the beginning of Genesis and carry that forward to Christ and the
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New Covenant? It's hard to convey how important the land is in Scripture as a theme, as a paradigm, a theological theme.
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On the one hand, we can hardly get back into that ancient mindset, especially that ancient
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Israelite mindset, which had its theology coupled with its territory.
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It had this view of the land and the promise and the physicality of the territory.
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It was bound to their identity, bound to their worship, bound to the covenants of promise.
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It's very hard for us to get back into that mindset and see just how vital and how foundational, how identity -forming the land was to God's people of old.
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On the other hand, we can hardly escape the influence of much modern treatment of the promised land.
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And here I have in mind mostly dispensational treatments of the promised land. Now, this might be something that you'll hear in a few moments more about throughout this morning.
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Let me just say, if this is just something you can't quite grasp, don't check out now, please.
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Don't go, what did he say? Dispo what? Oh, I'm checked out. Time to daydream for the next 45 minutes.
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No, no, no, no. I grew up in church. I know what it's like to be exposed to things that you have no idea.
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What are they talking about? What was that name? What was that label? The beauty of it is week by week, month by month, season by season, you start to understand how these things fit together, where they click, certain things that you understand as principles.
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And you begin to discern maybe how this fits into other views, other interpretations.
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And so don't check out, even if some of this seems new or maybe a little beyond of where you are this morning.
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Pay attention, glean what you can, write down things that maybe you want to explore a little bit more, and then go seek out
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Marty and Tony and not me, no, just kidding. But this is the point, we have to grow in these things.
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These things are hard. Even Peter had to admit, Paul writes some hard stuff. And I'm an apostle, and I was actually with Jesus for three years.
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So we can hardly escape the influence of some modern treatments of the land. We've been influenced by modern treatments, positively and negatively.
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I think positively, we've been able to understand in more detail, with more clarity and scope,
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God's promises and how they relate to Christ and the church. There's also a danger that we always swing the pendulum a little too far, and I think there's been some valid criticisms of some reformed positions on the land, and we'll talk about that.
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But I hope that having been through Genesis from the beginning, we have some real foundation to be able to understand the land promise better.
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And that really begins with our understanding of God as creator and king of what he's made.
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And the fact that his intention from the very beginning was to appoint his image bearers to reign with him, to exercise dominion as his image on the face of the earth, on what he had made.
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So there's a creational kingdom that from the very beginning was part of God's purpose for the world.
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And of course, we know that purpose was undermined and tragically brought into ruin by man's fall into sin.
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And yet we're going to see this dynamic now, this dynamic of God's creational kingdom, and that's gonna bring us from Genesis all the way to Revelation.
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The relationship between God and humanity made in his image and the earth, or the land, is important from the very beginning to the very end.
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In fact, it is the end, this relationship, this interconnection between God, his people, his image bearers, and the earth, or the land.
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One reason we miss this deep connection is because our concepts of these things have been shaped by translation.
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And so when I say the word land to you, you have a certain concept that's very different from earth. In fact, because we live in the days of satellite -given maps, when we think earth, we conceive of an earth in a way that no one 200 years ago and before that could conceive of earth.
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We have some general idea where the continents are, and good understanding of the proportionality and the scope.
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We just really don't understand how massively different the idea of land or earth is because of our translations.
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And I bring this up because in Hebrew, most often the word land or the word earth is the same word, it's arets.
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And so God is the creator of the heavens and the land, and he also gives the land to Abram.
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God is the creator of the heavens and the earth, and he gives the earth to the children of Abram.
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There's this way that we cannot quite see the connection that is automatically there.
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There is a deeper connection between the creation and the fall and the land than we often assume for this reason.
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The land as Oren Martin, O -R -E -N Martin. If you're looking for some good books on the land,
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I'd recommend, there's I think a two by a man named Gary Burge, B -U -R -G -E.
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He has one that's thinner and it's at a more popular level, and then he has one that's a little more technical. If you're able to understand or you have a desire to understand things at a higher level,
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I'd highly recommend a book by Oren Martin called Bound for the Promised Land.
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It's not very expensive, it's a little technical, it's in a series edited by D .A. Carson.
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Some of you men have read D .A. Carson, it's probably on par with what we read. At Basics for Believers, which was his study of Philippians and anything by D .A.
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Carson's not really that basic, but it will give you a good flavor of what you might expect. Well, Oren Martin, who's down at Southern Seminary in Louisville, he wrote,
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I think, one of the best studies of the land and the land promise and how it fits in with the rest of scripture.
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And he says, the land serves as the place where God's image bearers know him and they live under his lordship and where he fulfills his redemptive purpose from creation to new creation.
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So this is the significance of the land. When we think of the Bible's teaching on the land, we might make the mistake of beginning at Genesis 12.
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Oh, now we're gonna talk about this land, Canaan. And that's not the place you wanna start, right? Because what about the previous 11 chapters?
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They have to have something to say about God's promise and why he would promise this to Abram. We don't begin with this promise of the land that God is going to show
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Abram, that he's going to give over to his offspring, this land of Canaan and the descendants that will fill it.
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The importance of the land does not begin with Abram, the patriarchs in Israel. It actually goes back to the very beginning.
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It's the land in which God dwells with Adam and Eve. So we have to begin at the foundation of the place where God is present with his people as their
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God and maker, as their king, and the purpose for which they are in the land of Eden, in that land which is meant to expand the glory of God over the face of the earth.
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So we begin the land promise, not in Genesis 12, but in Genesis 2. And we remember what happens in Genesis 3, that Adam and Eve are expelled from the land where God dwells, the land that was their inheritance, the land in which
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God was present and in which they as His image bearers would begin to exercise
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His dominion from Eden over the rest of the world.
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And so we begin here and we understand then why God calls Abram and brings him into a land in which he will dwell as a
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God with a people and a purpose to exercise dominion over the face of the world, over the nations.
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Long before Israel had ever lost the land in exile, remember
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Israel is the Adam of God, right? Israel is the Adam of God and they're expelled from the land, they're dragged out in exile.
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All of this connects us back to Genesis 1 through 3. Long before Israel ever lost the land in exile due to their sin, we're reminded that our first parents were cast out from Eden due to their sin.
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And yet God continues His plan and purpose of redemption. The fall will not be the final note on God's creation.
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So He calls Abram by His grace and brings him out of a strange land into a land of promise.
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And then the redemptive promise of the seed is given to him. This will continue. This plan of redemption will be fulfilled through the seed of Abram.
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And through Abram, then all of the nations, all of the families of the earth will be blessed.
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And so Paul says explicitly in Galatians 3. 13 and 14, Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us so that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the
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Gentile. So, if we disconnect Eden from this land promise and from everything else that follows, then we take the land among all these other things and we read them apart from Christ.
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And Paul doesn't do that. And we should not do that. The blessing of Abraham is the blessing of Christ Jesus.
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If we read the land promise apart from its fulfillment in Christ, then we'll read the biblical storyline.
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Apart from the fulfillment of Christ. And we'll have a hard time getting from paradise lost to paradise restored.
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So here's the big picture. Here's the big picture and then we'll take a step into the details. Abraham is promised this land and he's promised a seed, though his wife is barren, an offspring which
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Paul will go on to clarify that he's referring to a singular seed that is Christ.
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Though there's a immediate direct fulfillment to his offspring as Isaac, we recognize
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Isaac is in fact a type of Christ who is the fulfillment, the promised one.
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And then he also promises that Abraham will, for this very reason, be a universal blessing to all the families of the earth, to all of the nations.
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And so all of these promises begin to reverse the curse of Genesis 3.
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And remember that that curse has been escalating from Genesis 3 onward. In fact, its climax came when
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God had to wipe His creation clean of everything except Noah and his family. So Adam and Eve are expelled from the land.
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Their sin prevents them from dwelling with God in the midst. And then of course, the whole world is cut off through the judgment of God upon the earth.
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And when Abraham arrives on the scene, he's given this promise. He's going to be brought into a land which he will call his own.
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It will be his inheritance for him and his seed. And this is going to be a place of blessing. And he's going to, again, reverse this curse.
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He's going to exercise dominion. And through his seed, he's going to be fruitful. And he's going to multiply.
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He's continuing this purpose of God for his image bearers. And this land in time will become a new dwelling place for God with God's people.
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And then this promised land will not stop until the offspring of promise comes,
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Christ in the fullness of time. And ultimately then it brings us even beyond to that city that has foundations whose builder and maker is
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God. This is the promised land. Now I've mentioned that this way of looking at these things is contested.
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It's debated. There is a school of thought, an approach to reading the
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Old Testament that says we should not spiritualize. We should not try to find types.
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We shouldn't read things symbolically. We should read things literally. Of course, the problem is when you read something literally, it's not the wooden meaning of its words, but the intention of the author.
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And so if you were to read the Song of Solomon literally, that would be a horror show of a beloved whose eyes are fish ponds and whose back is like the herds on the hill.
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It'd be like, yikes, what is going on here? We don't read something literally, meaning the wooden meaning of the text, the rawest definition of the words.
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We read it literally when we're reading it according to its genre, to its authorial intention.
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And so therefore the door is opened to read things as they're meant to be read. And we understand the apostles themselves approached the
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Old Testament scriptures and prophecies in this way. And so it's sort of a slight to say we spiritualize the
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Old Testament. We put some untrue, vague, mystical meaning on it. That's no, no, we're reading it according to its substance.
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Notice the difference. We're saying the old covenant contained many shadows.
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Christ and his fulfillment, the new covenant, is the substance. They're saying that, oh, you're just bringing shadows onto these concrete, substantial promises and prophecies.
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Saying, no, no, actually, these are the shadows. These are the shadows. The concrete substance is on the side of fulfillment, on the new covenant.
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So two very different approaches to the same texts and the same contexts.
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And this divides us from much of evangelicalism today, unfortunately. This is
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R .L. Thomas. R .L. Thomas, who's written many wonderful things, Robert L. Thomas. This would be his defense of a dispensational reading.
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Dispensationalism interprets the words as God intended them, as Abram understood them. No typology.
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No spiritualizing. No symbolism. No pre -understanding of how words must fit into a system of theology.
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No reading back into words of later special revelation. To take the words in any other sense than what
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God intended, he's assuming he understands what God is intending, and what Abram understood is a distortion.
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Abram understood God correctly. Israel became a nation chosen by God in possession of a particular plot of land on the present
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Earth's surface. So the idea is, whatever promises are attached to this physical land have yet to be fulfilled and must be fulfilled at some point in the future, beyond the present fulfillment of Christ.
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Now, I would say, no, this is a misreading. This is a misreading.
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We, as Christians, as members of the body of Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female,
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Scythian or Greek, we are the real heirs to the land promises, but not only in their fulfilled character, because what was given to Abraham was always a physical shadow seeking fulfillment of its substance.
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This is why we don't begin with Genesis 12, we go back to the very beginning, a land with God's purpose to dwell with his people eternally.
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And then, of course, how did Abraham understand? We're saying we must take it as Abraham understood it.
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This was a physical possession. This was given to him and his descendants. And this is all that was ever meant, and so that must be fulfilled.
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Well, how did Abraham understand it? Hebrews 11, 13 and following. These all died in faith, right?
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Abraham, Sarah, Noah, this whole gallery of the faithful, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, they were assured of them, embraced them, confessed.
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They were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland, and truly, if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return.
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He's not going back to Haran. But now they desire a better, that is a heavenly country, heavenly country.
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What is, what's the heavenly country in Pauline language? It's the Jerusalem above, which must descend upon the earth as a new heavens, a new earth.
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But now they desire a better, that is a heavenly country. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
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Earlier, we read this writer of Hebrews explaining Abraham dwelt in the land as if a foreigner, as if a stranger in the land.
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What does Stephen say in Acts 7, 5? God gave him no inheritance in it, not even enough to set his foot on.
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Wait a minute, Stephen, slow down. Doesn't he buy the field of Machpelah? Isn't Sarah buried? Doesn't even the exiles, as they return in Ezra and Nehemiah, they return back to these promises, these places.
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What does Stephen say? Abram had no inheritance in this land.
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What gets him stoned? I mean, that's pretty provocative. What? And God doesn't dwell in a temple made by hands.
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That's enough to get the first martyr of the church killed. Abram believed that the fulfillment of God's promise of the land was going to be a future hope.
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He sought a better country, that is, something heavenly. He saw from God's promise, back in Genesis 3, 15 and following, he saw the fulfillment.
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Therefore, he knew that this promised land was not the promised land. This was not Eden. There was an
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Eden yet to come. He knew that God had not ultimately dealt with his sins or the sins of the land or the people that would dwell within it.
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Abram was looking for a better country. He was looking for a fulfillment. Now, according to a dispensationalist, we're spiritualizing this reading.
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We're spiritualizing the land. What I'm trying to point out is Abram approached the land promise in this way.
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He was looking for the paradise -like glory of Eden to be returned for him and his people.
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And therefore, he lived by faith and not by sight. He lived as a stranger without an inheritance.
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He lived in a tent and did not build a city. He was looking for a city whose builder and maker was
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God. Now, no one disputes, of course, no one disputes that God gave a temporal, earthly promise of a land to His people,
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Israel. No one disputes that. Physical dimensions of the land.
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So much of the Old Testament history of Israel is bound to the land and its dimensions and its purpose, of course.
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But God, we're saying, God never envisioned a literal fulfillment of these shadows in the way that a dispensationalist might understand a literal fulfillment.
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We begin to understand it through Christ as the last Adam bringing His people back into an
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Eden, a new heavens, and a new earth as the seed of Abram, which means all of the nations, all of the
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Gentiles freely come into His midst. So then the fulfillment of the land promises must be viewed as arising from the fulfillment they await, a new heavens and a new earth which descends from above, which descends from God.
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Now we're reminded of Israel entering into the promised land under Joshua. And that really is given in the text as Israel reentering
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Eden, the garden of God. It holds out this promise of entering into an
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Eden -like bliss. But just as the initial creation was declared to be very good, the promised land of Canaan, as we read it in Judges 18, we have seen the land, indeed it is very good.
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And so the land is held out again, going back to Eden, going back to this original purpose of a land and a people.
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In Deuteronomy, we have descriptions of Israel and the land as parallel to God's mandate for Adam and Eve.
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They're to multiply and subdue the land, exercise their influence beyond it.
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That's right back to Genesis 2. Israel dwells in the land as man and woman would have dwelt in Eden with God dwelling in the midst of them.
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Remember we said Eden was the prototypical temple of God. God would dwell and manifest
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His life, giving presence to His people. And they would enjoy Him as they worshiped Him, living in and upon and from the land of God.
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Under Joshua, He leads His people, and that's very significant in Stephen's speech.
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Under Yeshua, the people are brought into the land of promise. Under Joshua's leadership, the
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Israelites conquer the land, receiving in one sense this paradise that God had promised, but it's pretty obvious that God's purpose of redemption has not been completed.
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For there's Canaanites in the land, and there's compromises that are made, and there's intermarriage, and there's idolatry, and there's sin in the people and from the other peoples.
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Because of Israel's sin, throughout the monarchy periods, they're devastated by the
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Assyrians, and finally the Babylonians, and the indwelling glory of God in Solomon's temple departs, and the people are ripped away.
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They're banished in exile, which is, as it were, a death. To be cut off from the land is to be cut off, in a sense, from God Himself.
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And yet God, through the prophets, is speaking of these prophecies that Christ is going to come fulfill.
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They're in this place where this group was called my people.
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They'll be called not my people. And all these who were not my people, they will be called sons of the living
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God. According to the prophets, this once fruitful land, flowing with milk and honey, now appeared as a desolation, a desert, a dwelling place of jackals and owls and scorpions, paradise.
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Even in this shadow was taken out from them. And so the restoration after that Babylonian captivity, remember when we were working through Ezra and Nehemiah, that was not a paradise.
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The people were brought back and the temple was refounded, and those that could remember Solomon's temple wept. So far from it was this restoration.
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They knew the purpose had not yet been completed. And the glory of that tiny rebuilt temple as Haggai prophesied would someday be greater than the glory of Solomon's temple.
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It meant that God had something better for them than a temporal land, a material temple built by hands, as Stephen would say.
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The promise of the land would be nothing less than a restored paradise on a cosmic scale.
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And so Verne Poythress, who wrote another really wonderful book, very thick, so you know, unless you need some summer reading, maybe just go to Burge or Martin, The Shadow of Christ and the
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Law of Moses. And Poythress says dispensationalists want to find particular religious significance in one special land, the land of Palestine, as distinct from other lands.
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Canaan undeniably had such significance in the Old Testament, undeniably. But that's because, he argues, it typified, it presented the inheritance of the world in Christ.
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So we have, because of the influence of dispensationalism, what could be called Christian Zionism, the idea that God must fulfill
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His promises in this place for this ethnic people. Now, just to put cards on the table for those who have ears to hear,
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I think depending on how you understand the millennium, there is certainly a purpose in place for the
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Israelites, for ethnic Israel in the redemptive plan of God. It's hard to read Romans 9 through 11 otherwise.
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But that does not mean, that does not mean that there must be a return to that land and that system and that way of worship.
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This is to go back to the shadows, to say that God has providentially kept this people distinct.
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Of course, we see that in the past 100 years in profound ways. Certainly has something to do with His plan as He taught it in Romans 11, and we won't have time to look at that.
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Okay, but that does not mean that they must be ushered back and the priesthood must be reestablished and the temple must be rebuilt.
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That does not mean that. That is to go back to the shadow. Paul says this in Colossians.
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We don't interpret the old covenant and then go to the new covenant and assume, well, this is this nice little break for the
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Gentiles and eventually we're gonna get back to the fulfillment of the old. No, that's not the way we approach the old covenant.
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The old covenant is fulfilled and understood in light of the new covenant as Paul teaches in Colossians 2, 16 and 17.
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Don't let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink or with regard to a religious festival, a new moon celebration or a
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Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come. The reality, however, is found in Christ.
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Christ is the reality. These things, in shorthand, the whole typological system is the shadow.
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So the question is not whether the promises of the covenant are to be understood literally or if they're going to be spiritualized.
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It's a question of whether they've been fulfilled in Christ. That is the question. He is the substance.
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He is the reality. He is the yes and amen of all that God has promised.
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And so even in Hebrews 12, when Christians assemble for worship, they're meeting, as it were, in the presence of the angels in the true
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Jerusalem. Jerusalem itself was a shadow of the real.
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You have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living
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God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly. Do you know that that's true this morning?
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Doesn't feel like we're at Mount Zion, does it? Wouldn't we rather take a two -week tour to Israel? This is
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Mount Zion. This is Mount Zion, just like the disciples when they get to Jerusalem.
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Have you ever seen any? It never gets old. See, in this building, isn't it? Oh, isn't it amazing? And Jesus is trying to deflate them.
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Not one stone is going to be left upon another. We think that if we could go back to what seems so real to us, if we could just touch the marble blocks, if we could just imagine the scene of sacrifice, oh, here we are at Mount Zion.
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And yet, huddled into basements and underground churches in Beijing this morning, or gathered here in the sort of dim, cloudy weather of Bari, we have come to Mount Zion.
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Because Christ is the reality of these things. We have the land.
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We are being brought into it through Christ. We have a Joshua that is greater.
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We have a high priest who's greater and an altar who's greater and a sacrifice who's greater. We enter into the holy place.
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We enter into the reality of the tabernacle, the reality of the temple. We have come to Mount Zion and we're receiving a kingdom.
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According to Hebrews, the only thing that we do not have is an earthly territorial city where all these things are awaiting to be fulfilled.
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Hebrews 13, 14, here we do not have an enduring city. We are looking for a city that is to come.
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And that city, according to Revelation, is the city of God, the new Jerusalem, the city which is a temple and the land as its light.
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Once this consummation has been achieved, the New Testament refuses to go back to the shadows. It refuses to go back to the paradigms.
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God's children have become temples, in fact, in which the glory of the Spirit dwells to suggest that the presence of God's glory must then be taken out of us as the temple and brought back to a physical building and brought back to a physical building is to go from the reality that those physical things were always pointing toward and to go back to the shadow, to go back to the type.
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It's to pour the new wine of the New Covenant into old wineskins that are already perishing.
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It's to take the new cloth of God bringing fulfillment and to sew it back on this garment so that it might be torn.
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To pull the now presently reigning King off of His throne to diminish
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His finished work of atonement, His present reign, and the fact that the consummation is being inaugurated now in His people throughout the world this very day.
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So when Jesus comes in the Gospels, He does not talk about a return to the land, which is why the early dispensationalists had to say the church age was parenthetical.
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Apparently this was plan B because we read the Old Testament and the people have to be in the land.
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This has to be their dominion that knows no end and Jesus doesn't really talk about it much. It must have been because the
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Jews rejected Him. So the church is kind of plan B. And when He comes back,
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He'll then fulfill everything. Maybe that's what's going on. No, no. He doesn't talk about the land in this way because He understood what the land was meant to be.
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It's bringing us back to Genesis 3. He understands that He's the seed of the promise.
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He understands that God is going to give Him a people and a place as a possession forever.
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And so He doesn't use the word land hardly at all. He uses the word world because the world, the earth is given to Him as His inheritance.
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And so He understands His relationship to the land in terms of the kingdom of God. He often speaks of Himself as the
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Son of Man from Daniel's vision, coming to the ancient of days to receive His kingly authority.
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And so it's deliberate. It's deliberate that Jesus has very little to say about the land because the fulfillment is this inheritance.
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It's going back to the very beginning, the purpose of Adam to exercise dominion over the earth.
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And now Christ is the second Adam. We, in His image, conformed to His image, reigning with Him, co -heirs of that inheritance.
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Do you not know that you will judge angels, Paul says? The meek inherit the earth.
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In the progress of redemptive history, there's this dramatic movement from type to reality, from shadow to substance.
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The land that once was so specific that you could pick up its dirt in your hands and watch its sand flow between your fingers was in fact just the shadow.
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It was just the projection. What seems to us so ethereal is in fact the reality.
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The exalted Christ rules out of heavenly Jerusalem, demonstrating His sovereignty over the entire world.
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And when He comes back, He will bring from that place a new heavens and a new earth. In the
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Old Testament, God created a place. Remember what we saw in Genesis? He planted His people in it.
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He created a place and He put man and woman in Eden. It doesn't say He made them there, it says
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He put them there. He created Canaan, He called Abram and He put them there. He raised up Joshua out of Egypt and He put
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His people there. You see, He creates a place and He puts His people there. In the New Covenant, here we are,
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Christ has called us and He's creating a place for us. He's creating a place to put us.
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He makes us new creatures in Him and He's going to bring us to a place appointed. Now as we come to a close, we want to remember that the way we're reading this is according to Christ's fulfillment.
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You must do this, you must do this. Christ must be the yes and amen,
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Christ must be the fulfillment. He is the substance, Paul says in Colossians 2.
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Which means we cannot understand any of the promises of God, including the promised land or anything else in the Old Testament, if we don't view it through that yes and amen of Christ.
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This is what, and this is a throwback, but this is what Hermann Bavink says. The great Dutch reformed theologian,
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Hermann Bavink. Jesus is the truth, the substance, in whom all the promises and shadows have been realized.
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In Him, all things have been fulfilled. Nothing of the Old Testament is lost in the new.
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Everything is fulfilled, matured, it's reached its full growth. And now, off of that temporary husk, produces the eternal core.
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It is not the case that in Israel, there was a true temple, a true sacrifice, a true priesthood and so on.
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And that all these have now vanished. It's the opposite, it's the converse. Of all this,
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Israel only ever possessed a shadow. Now the substance has emerged. The things that they were seeing were temporal, but now the invisible things are eternal.
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And so Paul says that all who belong to Christ are the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the promise.
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Galatians 3, 29. We are heirs of the promise given to Abraham. What promise?
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The land. The land and all that comes with it. The promise made to Abraham is our promise by faith in Christ.
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Romans 4, those who have the faith of Abraham are Abraham's seed, Abraham's offspring.
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Jesus Himself as the promised seed, singular of Abraham, according to Matthew 1, 1 and Galatians 3, 16, declared this in John 8, 56.
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Abraham rejoiced to see my day. He saw it and was glad. What does that say?
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How does that change our reading of the Abrahamic narrative? Abraham saw the
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Messiah. He saw the Genesis 3, 15 promise from afar, but he saw it and he was glad.
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And so he said, yes, I will live in a tent. I will not found a city. I recognize that there is one coming and He will undo the curse.
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He will deliver me and my seed from their sin and He won't just give us this border of Canaan.
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He'll give us the earth as the Eden in which God's glory dwells. And so though I see it so far away,
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I rejoice, I see Him and I'm glad. The promised land stretches from Eden to a new heavens and a new earth.
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It stretches because of God's promise that through the seed of Abram and through the line of David, there would be an anointed one, a king anointed by the very spirit of God who would bring forth a new covenant, unlike the old covenant, a new covenant that in fact will be made in His blood.
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And when you come to read the Gospels in this way, if I could just summarize what I was reading from Lauren Martin's book.
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When you come to Matthew, for instance, or the other Gospels, you begin to realize just how much
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Christ is the substance of all of these things. Christ comes and He preaches the gospel of the kingdom, of this creational kingdom, of this land -based kingdom, so to speak.
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And He inaugurates it, though He in many ways talks about its need to be fulfilled, its need to be consummated.
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So there's a sense in which the kingdom is here and the kingdom is not yet. Things that are true now and things that will become true.
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And yet all of these things filter down to Jesus in some ways through the land and they're fulfilled in light of Him and in relationship to Him.
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And so He is, as it were, leading His people out of an exodus, out of their sin, out of their exile, and He's bringing them to a place of God's presence and God's blessing.
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Think of how the land would have functioned for these people. Are they thirsty? Christ is drink.
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Are they hungry as they're wearily traveling toward the promised land? Christ is bread. Are they vulnerable?
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Christ is a bulwark, a refuge. And so He gives them rest.
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He is the rest. He is the vine. He is the vineyard. He is the resurrection.
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Still to this day, Jews must be buried in Jerusalem to have this hope of the resurrection. The rabbis taught that if you were to be buried elsewhere in the earth, you would tunnel back toward Jerusalem if you belonged to the covenant of promise.
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Christ is the land. Christ is the vineyard. Christ is the honey and the milk.
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Christ is the blessing of God. His people come to Him and receive that blessing and they live from Him and they live upon Him and they live through Him.
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Their life is sustained by them. He is the promised land. Because of what
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He's done upon the cross, His people are now indwelt by His spirit and they're awaiting that future inheritance to be fully realized.
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They've entered into God's rest and yet they recognize that rest has not been consummated. There yet remains a rest for the people of God.
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Christ is leading His people to a better country, to a better inheritance. Believers in the
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Old Testament looked afar to that great promise. They looked forward to that city whose builder and maker was God.
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And they looked forward to what we look back upon. We see Christ and we know Him and His work.
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We now in this new covenant await the heavenly Jerusalem to be consummated and to be the new heavens and the new earth, a kingdom that will know no end.
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This covenantal relationship that brings us all the way back to Genesis 2 because God had always intended for His people to dwell with Him in a place of blessing.
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And so then the last question is, brothers and sisters, as we both conquer and sojourn, as we both wander in our pilgrimage and take dominion, as we hold these two paradigms together, knowing that the consummation is yet to come, knowing there is a new heavens and a new earth in which we will dwell with our triune
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God bodily manifested in the person of Christ Jesus, where we will live with Him in the blessings of the promised land yet unknown, where He is our
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God and we are His people forever. How are we now to live in light of that?
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And since we've been in Hebrews, I'll just close with the exhortation of Hebrews. And keep in mind this exhortation is given to believers that are feeling discouraged and oppressed.
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Sounds a little too pie in the sky, this heavenly Jerusalem talk. What about the real things?
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What about the real illness, the real loss, the real need? What about my physical life?
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And you're just saying, oh, just positive thinking, pie in the sky, heavenly country is coming, don't you know you're gonna be heir of everything?
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No wonder we have Hebrews 11 given to us. Discouraged and oppressed believers are exhorted in this way.
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We desire that each one of you show the same diligence, the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end, that you do not become sluggish, but rather imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
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In Christ, we inherit the promised land. Let's pray.
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Father, we thank you for your word. Lord, we've been considering deep things, deep truths today, and in many ways could not touch on so many of the details that are part of that.
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Lord, help us all just to be awestruck at your word. Your plan and purpose, which has been united from the very beginning, it has been singular from the very beginning,
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Lord. And even this day, you're still carrying out your purpose for creation in our very midst,
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Lord. In the complexity of life in the nations throughout the world,
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Lord, as people are being called to know you, love you, and serve you, you are bringing them toward a better country, a heavenly city that will descend,
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Lord. Help us not to, as it is said, spiritualize these promises as though they're vague or mystical.
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Let us realize just how concrete they are. Let us not be sluggish then. Let us live as heirs, co -heirs with Christ, as the true seed of Abram, as the true offspring and the true
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Israel under the second Adam. Help us, Lord, to recognize how firm and unwavering your promise is, even as it seems so distant from us.
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It's only as distant as it seemed to Abram when his wife was barren and he was dwelling in an uninhabited land that you had promised would be full of his posterity.
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Help us to live with his faith and imitate his patience, Lord. Help us to remember your promises on this side of your fulfillment.
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How much greater should our faith be? And where there is discouragement, Lord, or doubt, you've given us your spirit to dwell within us,
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Lord. You've made us temples and living stones within the assembly. May your spirit,
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Lord, produce this full assurance. May he convict us, Lord, of what we believe and what we confess.
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Help us to live, as it were, in the dawning of the fulfillment of the promised land as we see
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Christ bringing us to a place that we might receive the blessing and as we approach him as we would this great promised land,
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Lord, knowing him, dwelling in him, taking refuge under him, eating of him, and being nourished by him,
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Lord, having our lives sustained by him. May we find him to be the yes and amen of all of your promises to us, your weak and needy people.