John 19:16-17 (Jesus, the Serpent Crushing, Giant Killing, Warrior)

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the

Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you.

War is the culmination of many battles. When you're fighting in a war, generally speaking, you don't win after a lucky pop shot.

It's one battle after another, after another, that eventually culminate in the winning of a war.

You think about World War II as an example. There was combat that was happening on multiple different continents.

There was hundreds, if not thousands, of identifiable individual battles that all collectively contributed to the allied powers winning over the

Axis powers. It was a lot of battles. There's only one war.

Now, in some ways that this analogy is very similar to what we see going on in the Bible. There are lots of individual skirmishes between God and Satan that describe a total war that is going on in the

Bible where God is at war with the serpent, where the serpent is at war with God and God's people, and there's a victory that we see also in that war.

And today we're going to see exactly where that victory is rooted, and it's rooted at the cross of Christ.

The war was launched in the garden. That was the original shot heard round the world when the enemy swooped in, came in, and tricked both

Adam and Eve to falling for his beguilements and then enslaving the human race.

That's where the coup d 'etat of world leadership first occurred. Adam was installed as the vice -regent to rule over the world, to sit on the throne.

If Adam had not sinned and Adam would have continued along, we would have a king named

Adam. Adam was installed in that leadership position, and Adam failed.

And it began a multi -millennium war in the Scriptures between God and the serpent, between God's people and the people of the serpent.

And there's several key battles in that fight that we're going to talk about today. There's Eden, there's the flood, there's the conquest narratives, there's

David and Goliath, and there's Golgotha. These battles add up to the total victory of God over the devil.

And that's what we're going to be looking at today. We're going to be in John 19. We're only going to be in two verses today, and yet we're going to be in the whole

Bible today as well, as you can see. Just as a reminder of where we've been two weeks ago,

John 19 really has this curse motif that's laying underneath the surface. Two weeks ago, we talked about how

Jesus himself is going to take our curse, the curse that we deserved. When we rebelled against God in our forefather

Adam, we deserved the curses of the covenant to be poured out on us. And yet Jesus, in the violence, in the ugliness and brutality of the cross, took upon himself the covenant curses that we deserved.

Deuteronomy 28, Leviticus 16, as we talked about two weeks ago, was poured out on him.

But then last week we saw the Jews, who were an example of everyone who rejects

Christ and who defects from his leadership. They're the ones who turned on him and received the curses on them.

No one is safe unless they're in Christ. There is no neutrality in the kingdom of God.

You will either be hidden in Christ and he will take your punishment or you will face the executioner without a mediator.

And that's what the Jews did. They allowed or Jesus allowed himself to be captured and taken behind enemy lines.

He entered into our Auschwitz, as it were, and he set us free by allowing them to kill him, by allowing him to be the one who was put into the gas chamber where our curses were poured out on him.

Again, last week we saw how Israel defected and took the curses for themselves. When they said that we have no king but Caesar, it would have been infinitely worse than a

Holocaust survivor saying, I have no Führer but Hitler. It would have been worse than that.

They looked right at their covenant God and they said, we hate you, we reject you, give us hell.

That's what they were saying. And that is exactly what they received. Jesus brought the war to this earth for us, to rescue us, and Jesus brought the war against them and all those who rebel against him.

The war works itself out in two ways. Now this week we're going to look at how

Jesus captured the enemy commander, how Jesus fired the pivotal and accurate laser sniper round shot that crushed the serpent's head.

And he did that from Golgotha. But in order to understand the significance of what happened at Golgotha, we need to look back on some relevant battles that happened in the past in the

Old Testament. And then once we've done that, we will see how Jesus has totally and finally ended the war.

And when you see how Jesus has ended the war, my prayer is that you would be greatly encouraged and greatly strengthened in your faith.

So with that, will you turn with me to John 19 as we look at this scene and all the underlying layers that come with it.

John 19, and we're going to be in verses 16 through 17 this morning.

This is what the text says. So he Pilate then handed him over to be crucified, and they took

Jesus, therefore, and he went out, that's he went out of the city, bearing his own cross to the place called the place of the skull, which is called in Hebrew Golgotha.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you for John the gospel writer.

Lord, thank you for the Holy Spirit who authored all the texts of Scripture and has woven into the

Scripture a unity and a coherence. Lord, thank you that, like sonar, there are different layers that we can look at these things.

There's truths to be discovered on the surface, and yet there's truths that even the most powerful depth finders can't find.

Lord, thank you that that your word integrates reality, and Lord, I pray today as we study about the final moments of Jesus that I pray that we would see an under -appreciated, under -noticed, and maybe even never heard before in this room theme that's going through the

Scriptures that Christ is having dominion and victory over. Lord, I pray that in Jesus' name.

Amen. Today's passage is going to be kind of like naval warfare.

I know I'm I was in the Army. We've got some Air Force guys, Space Force guys here. I don't know that we have anyone from the

Navy, but I always was told you're supposed to make fun of the Navy. So it's a, that's what

I was told. But today, today the sermon will be sort of like a naval battle.

I was thinking about this this week. The Navy really have a hard job because they're the butt of everyone's joke first and foremost.

But also think about how they have to fight a war. I was in the artillery, so I would sit behind my little radar on the ground and I would track things that happen either on the land or in the sky, the little mortar rounds that went up.

The Navy has to has to fight wars on three different fronts, the sky, the surface of the water, and under the water where no one can see.

It's not enough if you're in the Navy to know how many cruisers, how many destroyers, how many aircraft carriers that the enemy has.

It's not enough to know how many how many planes that they have in the theater of operations that you're in. You also have to have the technology to be able to see down into the murky depths of the ocean to find out what's lurking down below.

Because if you don't, you'll miss something that's actually absolutely important to your safety, to your survival, and all these things.

Well today, there's things that are happening on the surface of this text that are probably quite familiar to you.

Jesus is being scourged where he was in last week's passage. He has now been rejected by his people and he's being led off to the mountain of Calvary to be crucified for our sins.

That is the centerpiece of the Christian faith and and that is absolutely what we boast in every single week.

But the gospel is like a diamond. It's not like a flat surface.

When you turn it, it has different aspects of it that the light of the gospel shines and you're like, oh,

I've never seen that before. The gospel, as I said earlier, integrates all of reality. So there's things in this text that you need biblical exegesis, i .e.

biblical sonar technology, to be able to look at and to be able to notice because there are depths underneath this passage we need to explore.

Now I will warn you, just like in the deepest parts of the ocean, have you ever watched those

YouTube videos where it talks about the kinds of creatures that you find at the bottom of the ocean? They are weird. They are strange things that are lurking down at the bottom of the ocean.

The deeper you go in the scripture, you'll find things you don't know what to do with. You'll find things that you don't quite understand.

Today we're going to be talking about things that are very, very deep, very confusing, very complicated.

And my hope is that by the end of it, you will see a unity and a theme which all point to Jesus.

So that's where we're going to begin today. Golgotha. John tells us that it's called the place of the skull.

Why does John do that? John said that these things have been written so that you will know that Christ is

Lord and that you have life in his name. John doesn't waste words. Though as expensive as writing books were in the

Old Testament, you did not waste a single letter. We've said this before, but the book of Romans in the first century, if you were to try to go to your local church and copy it out, would have cost you nearly $10 ,000 in supplies and vellum and ink and everything else just to produce it.

So, I mean, John is not wasting words. He is not saying superfluous things. Everything that John utters is important.

So why does he say that this hill where Jesus died is called the place of the skull?

It's a very strange thing to say about a particular hill. And if you look it up online, you'll see that Golgotha where Jesus died, or at least the location where they think that it happened, it has this sort of appearance of a skull.

You look at the side of the mountain, it looks like there's two parts that are sunken in for the eyes. It kind of looks skull -like.

But what else is going on in that? Theologically, why is he reminding us? I don't think John was telling us that this hill just looks like a skull and that's how it got its name.

I think there's more to it than that, that he's pointing to. This is not a rando hill that just happens to exist as the high point of the city of Jerusalem.

This is a very intentional hill. And because Jesus does everything intentionally, I think he chose to die on this spot.

The Romans thought that they were choosing the death spot. And in the sovereignty of God, he chose the hour of his death and he chose the exact piece of geography of his death.

So in that, the place of the skull is highly, highly intentional.

But now to understand what that means, we're going to have to pull the thread a little bit. And that thread's going to take us back to Goliath.

And if we pull that thread a little further, you know how when you pull the thread, the sweater eventually comes undone? The thread's going to take us back to the conquest of Canaan.

That thread's going to take us back to this group of people called the Nephilim in Genesis.

And that thread's going to take us back ultimately to the Garden of Eden. And by the end of it, we're going to have a whole pile of thread that points to Christ.

So let's begin in Eden. Hold on to the fact that we're coming back to Golgotha eventually.

We're going to work our way there. The war began in Eden. The serpent first brought the war to the garden where Christ had to cover his people in their nakedness and their shame.

Now, Satan brought the war first in heaven. Jesus kicked him out of heaven. Adam, as Jesus's emissary, was supposed to imitate

Jesus and kick Satan out of the garden, and he didn't. Man failed. And instead of bringing war upon the head of the serpent, he brought war upon his own soul through the fall of God crashing down on him.

He, Adam, provoked the fury of God. And the sinfulness that was then multiplied throughout the face of the earth also provoked the fury of God.

But if you notice in the passage, the fury of God is most pronounced against the serpent.

God promises in that moment that you are going to be crushed, that there's going to be a seed of the woman who's going to come.

Genesis 3 .15. It's the first mention of the gospel in the Bible that she's going to have an offspring one day who is going to crush your head.

So the serpent, by going after God's people, by firing the first shot, provoked the fury of God.

It's kind of like when the Japanese soldiers flew over Pearl Harbor and the newspapers at the time said that they awoke a sleeping giant because we were not involved in World War II at that point.

The serpent awakened the wrath of Almighty God. He kamikazed himself into the

Garden of Eden, and he would be destroyed for that action eventually.

The war is going to happen on two fronts. It's going to happen in the spiritual world, it's going to happen in the physical world, and we're going to see how it happens in the physical world for just a moment.

Outside of Eden, the serpent doesn't give up. He doesn't throw the white flag. He attacks Adam and Eve, and then immediately, as soon as you get out of the garden, he's attacking

Cain and Abel. The serpent is tempting Cain so that Cain does the first murder, and Cain receives a curse.

And then you keep reading, and you see that there's this man named Lamech who has the first person in the

Bible who has two wives, and it's not a good thing. It's not a blessing. He is a monster of a man.

He says that he would have the curse poured out on him even harder than it was poured out on Cain.

Very soon after that, you see a world that is filled with people who are under the curse.

The world is not filled with righteous people. The world is filled with people who hate God, who rebel against his standards, and who are worshiping basically the serpent.

The serpent has taken control of the world, and all of the humans on earth are serving him. But things get much worse than that.

Because not only is the world filled with good old -fashioned regular sinners, the world is going to be filled with a different kind of breed of monster that is strange to our ears that we don't think much about in the modern world.

Let me give you an example. In the Lord of the Rings, great book,

Saruman was not content to fight his war against Middle Earth with regular old orcs.

Instead of that, he designed an abominable race, a new race of super orcs called the

Uruk -hai. In that, he was taking the design of Morgoth, his predecessor, and he was making it more evil.

This is a very similar thing to what's happening as the serpent is continuing to fight against the race of man to destroy them.

Why is the serpent fighting against the race of men? Because God promised that the serpent would be destroyed from the seed of woman.

And if he can kill men, then he can kill the promise. So what does the serpent do?

The serpent and his fallen angels come down to earth, it says in Genesis chapter 6, and they pollute the earth with their treachery.

They teach men evil things and they intermarry with the daughters of men and produce this polluted race known as the

Nephilim. Nephilim comes from the Hebrew word naphal, which means to fall. So it means the fallen ones, and these are fallen people who are the byproduct of the intermarrying between angelic beings and women.

Now, there's a lot of people who disagree with that. They'll say, no, no, no, the sons of God in this passage don't mean fallen angels.

It means like us. We are sons and daughters of God. And it's just the good people were marrying the bad people.

The good men found the bad girls a little bit more attractive. That's what they say. That could not be further from the truth.

The word here, sons of God, is Elohim. It means divine beings.

These are divine beings who left their station, rebelled against Yahweh, and came down and produced these

Uruk -hai -like humans called the Nephilim. Now, there's lots of ancient sources that ascribe to this.

You and I just happen to live in an anti -supernaturalist age that doesn't believe in giants and doesn't believe that men can grow to be 30 feet tall and all of those things, whereas every ancient culture on earth has those things written.

The Babylonians and the Assyrians talk about this in the Anaki. The book of Enoch talks about this as the

Watchers. The hieroglyphs of Egypt talk about this. The Hebrew Bible talks about this.

Genesis 6, 1 through 4 says, Now, it came about when men began to multiply on the face of the land.

Now, that's good, right? They're supposed to be fruitful. They're supposed to multiply. They're supposed to do all it.

But it's more sinister than that. Satan is perverting their multiplication into something abominable.

And it says daughters were born to them. That the sons of God, the word again is

Elohim, the angelic beings, saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they took wives for themselves whomever they chose.

And then the Lord said, my spirit shall not strive with man forever because he is also flesh.

Nevertheless, his days shall be 120. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them.

These are the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

This word mighty men is used of giants also in the Bible and in the Greek Old Testament.

I'm throwing a lot of data at you. It's gigantes, which means giants. Again, sons of God here is not the sons of Seth.

The race of Adam that was pure because there was no one pure at this time. The whole world was filled with sin.

This is a race of rogue angels who intermarried with women to produce monstrous people called

Nephilim. And God was so angry at this sin that he decided to destroy the world. God was not angry because the good men found the bad girls a little bit more attractive.

Yes, he's angry at that. Yes, he says don't intermarry like that, of course. But he destroys the world because it was polluted with strange flesh.

Now the book of Enoch talks about this and you're like, well, that's not in the Bible. I agree it's not in the Bible, but the

Bible quotes the book of Enoch. It's the only pseudepigraphal book.

Pseudepigraphal means it was written as a pseudonym. Some person wrote it as if he were Enoch. Enoch didn't write it.

It was another person who wrote it as if he were Enoch, pseudepigraphal. It's the only book in that genre that's quoted by the

Bible. And it's quoted by Jude and it's quoted by 2 Peter. And it's what the book of Enoch says the

Bible substantiates. So let me read you from the book of Enoch and tell you what it says. If nothing else, you'll know what

Jewish opinion on this topic was. They didn't believe that it was from the line of Seth. They thought it was something much more sinister.

This is what the book of Enoch says. And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives and each chose for himself one.

And they, that's the fallen angelic beings, began to go into them and to defile themselves with them.

And they taught them charms and enchantments and the cutting of roots and made them acquainted with plants.

And they, the women, became pregnant and they bear great giants whose height was three thousand

L's. I don't know how tall that is, but it sounds tall. Who consumed all the acquisitions of men.

And when men could no longer sustain them by their produce, the giants turned and devoured them.

Now, in the same way that the Satan came into the garden and taught Adam additional knowledge, and that additional knowledge led to greater evil.

These angelic beings come in and teach the race of men extra knowledge. They teach them industry, which is exactly what

Saruman was doing in the Lord of the Rings, by the way. It's almost as if J .R .R. Tolkien had a base text that he was working with called the

Bible. They taught them secret knowledge. They taught them how to go to war.

They taught them medicinal properties. They taught them those things. And they also reproduced with these women.

Now, Enoch tells us that the giants were feasting off of the produce of the land.

All of the human beings at that particular time were their slaves and their servants. And they had to produce, produce, produce, produce to keep the giants happy.

And when they were no longer satisfied with that, the giants turned on them and ate them. Now, if you think that's strange, every society has a story of man -eating giants.

Every society. And we didn't always live in the information age when every society could talk to one another.

So every society, the most ancient ones, in fact, have stories of man -eating giants.

Is that a surprise? Or is it possible that it's all pointing back to a event that happened on earth that was passed down from one people to the next, to the next, to the next, until it got down to the societies of men?

Now, we can speculate on that. But the purpose of the Nephilim, at least in the Bible, was that Satan was building an army to go to war with God.

That's Satan's MO, to fight with God. And he's building this army to pollute the race of men so that men cannot have godly offspring.

So that he could cancel the line of the Messiah. Because if he could cancel the line of the

Messiah, if he could make sure that that seed of Eve was never born, then Satan would not be crushed.

That was his thought. That was his MO. And Satan provoked the absolute fury of God.

It says that this is the very reason why God flooded the earth. This is why he killed everything that moved upon the land, which is a theme we'll see again.

And he saved only one family. Why did he save that family? Noah and his offspring?

It wasn't because they were perfectly righteous. We find that out pretty quickly as soon as they get off the ark.

He saved them because he would bring Christ through the line of Noah.

And that Christ would crush this very serpent who was trying to destroy the race of men. That's the battle that we see being waged here.

This is why the flood can't be local. Because sin was multiplied across the face of the earth.

You'll hear many people today, especially Christians who are trying to have their evolution and eat it too.

They'll say, oh, the flood was local and the earth is old and all. You can read the text and you can see that it's a worldwide flood.

You're either gonna believe it or you're not. God brought the entire world under the curse because of this cursed thing that was happening on earth.

Now Jude, again, quotes the book of Enoch when it says this. I didn't understand these things when we were in the book of Jude.

So if you go back and listen to the sermon on Jude, you won't hear this because these are things that I've learned since then. It's one of those

Monday morning quarterback things that I've seen now. Here it is, Jude chapter one, verse six through seven.

And the angels who did not keep their own domain but abandoned their proper abode, he has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of that great day.

Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh and exhibited as an example of undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.

So what Jude is telling us is that when this event happened, God did two things. He destroyed the world with a flood and then he took these fallen angels who produced this cursed line called the

Nephilim and he buried them under the earth in prison. He prisoned them under the earth in gloomy darkness.

And we know that this was not just the sons of God because Jude compares them to Sodom who was having wicked sexual sin in their city.

And he's saying these angels were doing wicked sexual sin with the line of men. So God has punished them.

God has put them under the earth and they are awaiting the great day of judgment, these fallen angels.

So now the world is safe, right? Well, Genesis 6 -4 tells us that the

Nephilim continued even on after that. We'll get to that in a moment. 2 Peter 2 -4 tells us the same thing.

For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned but cast them into hell and committed them to the pits of darkness reserved for judgment.

So if God didn't save these angels when they sinned, Peter's telling you, you should be careful not to live in sin and think that God is gonna spare you.

That's the point. Again, the book of Enoch says in chapter 10, 12 -14, he confirms what

Jude and Peter is saying. And when their sons, the fallen angels, children, the

Nephilim had slain one another and they seen the destruction of their beloved ones through the flood,

God commanded to bind them fast for 70 generations under the earth till the day of their judgment and of their consummation till the judgment that is forever and ever is consummated.

In those days, they should be led off into the abyss of fire and the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined forever.

That's the book of Enoch. So to sum up, the serpent made war with the race of man.

The serpent sent his fallen angels to intermarry with the race of man and make this polluted race called the

Nephilim. And God destroyed the world and God buried those rebels underneath the earth in eternal torment until the final judgment when they will go into the lake of fire.

So that's the war so far. That's the first battle between Satan and God. One point for God.

Now it's not the end. Genesis 6 -4 tells us that the serpent at that point did not give up. He did not stop fighting.

He goes on to have a second battle and it's the same sort of thing.

Genesis 6 -4 says this. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days. That's the days of the flood.

We know that. We already proved that. The Nephilim were on the earth then. But then Moses says, and also afterwards.

What? So all these angels were utterly destroyed for this sin.

So how does this happen a second time? Well, there's several different theories on this.

The ones who were under the earth certainly didn't do it because they're in eternal chains. They're not coming out.

So some people say that this was a second occurrence of fallen angels coming down upon the earth and doing the exact same sin again.

Except this time, not on the global stage, on the local stage. Because Satan was defeated globally.

Now he picks one place, Canaan, and he does his war there.

So that's one theory. Another theory is that this came in through the curse of Shem.

If you remember, right after they got off the ark, Shem uncovers the nakedness of his father,

Noah, and his son, Canaan, is cursed. Some people say that this polluted line lingered on through the race of Shem.

Some people say that this came in through the incestuous sex that happened between Lot and his daughters.

You remember Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed? They were homeschool girls. They didn't know that the rest of the world had people in it.

They were really sheltered and they said, well, if we're gonna continue the line of men, then we have to go into our father.

Awful, awful, awful scene in the Bible. And you'll find out that the two sons that they have from this, one is called

Moab and one is called Ammon. Moab and Ammon are where the giants are from.

So some people say that this sin, which happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, which was already notorious for wanting to have sexual relations with angels, you can read about it.

It wasn't a hospitality sin, as some of our brothers will say. Some will say that that's how it came in.

I don't actually know how it continued. I think it could be one of those or all of those. I don't know.

But I do know that it says that the Nephilim were on the earth after the flood and I see it in the conquest narratives that the

Nephilim were there. So somehow this cursed race continued. Somehow Satan is continuing his war against God and God's people.

And we will see again in stage two, in battle two, that God will triumph over the devil and his minions.

Moses tells us about these giants in Deuteronomy chapter two, verses 10 through 11.

The Emim lived there formerly, a people as great, numerous and tall as the

Anakim. Like the Anakim, they also are regarded as Rephaim, but the

Moabites call them Emim. This is why this is so hard because you're like,

Rephaim, Anakim, Emim. Okay. In verse 20, it goes on to say, it is also regarded as the land, the

Rephaim, for the Rephaim formerly lived in it, but the Ammonites call them Zanzumim.

All these ancient cultures had an idea of what these giants were. A people as great and as numerous and as tall as the

Anakim, but the Lord destroyed them and dispossessed them and settled them or settled us in their place.

So that's the second stage of the battle. These giants somehow ended up in the land of Canaan and God tells the people of Israel to utterly destroy them.

This is not a superfluous command. You'll have many people today who will look at the passage of the conquest narratives and they'll say,

God is being over the top here. He's bringing violence on the poor Canaanites.

What did they ever do to anybody? They're just good old people just on their little Canaanite porch swing.

They didn't bother anybody and here these big, bad Israelites came and destroyed them all. That is not what's going on.

They were sacrificing their children to goat devils and they had giants who were the byproduct of a half -breed relationship between women and demons.

The same fury that God poured out on the world in the flood, he's pouring out on Canaan in the conquest.

You remember when the spies got sent out. The spies were sent out to sort of begin the strategy and the battle for how to fight these monsters.

Numbers 13, 32 through 33 talks about it. So they, the 12 spies, gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of which the land, which they were spying out saying, the land through which we have gone and spying it out is a land that devours its inhabitants and all the people whom we saw are in it men of great size.

They also, we saw, there also we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak and part of the

Nephilim and we became like grasshoppers in their sight and so we are in their sight.

I don't think that this passage is being metaphorical. I think that they saw men as tall as trees and I think they actually looked like grasshoppers in their sight.

And when it says that the land devoured them, I think they were talking about man -eating giants because it's the same thing that happened in Genesis 6.

And just in case we're tempted to think that we would have done any better, we would have stood there with them and wet our pants too.

If we saw men 30 feet tall, we would have given a bad report as well.

But God punished them for their cowardice because even in the midst of 30 foot tall men,

God is still the God who brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand. He's still the God who crushed

Pharaoh. He's still the God who brought Egypt to its knees. He's the God who divided a massive body of water called the

Red Sea in two so that they could come in. What is a 30 foot little giant compared to the power and might of Almighty God?

So he punished them for their cowardice and he allowed that entire generation to die in the wilderness because they didn't trust him.

Moses now in Deuteronomy is talking to the new generation and he says to them, and you grumbled in your tents and said, because the

Lord hates us, he has brought us out of the land of Egypt. Now, why would they say something so strong?

I've always thought that maybe they were unemotional people and that they were a little prima donna and they overreacted.

But now, knowing that there's 30 foot tall giants who eat people in the land, I can understand this prayer a little better.

Like, God, why did you do this to us? It makes sense. To deliver us into the hand of the

Amorites to destroy us. Where can we go up? Our brethren have made our hearts melt.

The people are bigger and taller than we. The cities are large and fortified to heaven.

And besides, we saw the sons of the Anakim there. So the Israelites are saying, how could we possibly go to war with these people?

They're going to kill us. And God calls them to annihilate them just like he did to the people on earth during the age of the flood.

And God signals out a particular man called Og of Bashan.

Og of Bashan is said to be 14 feet tall. His bed was 14 feet long and like nine feet wide.

That's what the Bible tells us about him. And that they're to start with him. They're to start with one of the smaller ones.

This is what God says in Deuteronomy 3, 8 through 11. Thus, we took the land at that time from the hand of the two kings of the

Amorites who were beyond the Jordan from the valley of Ammon to Mount Hermon. By the way, in the book of Enoch, Mount Hermon is where the fallen angels descend and start their treachery.

So it's interesting that Deuteronomy mentions Mount Hermon. The Sidonians call

Hermon Sirion and the Amorites call it Sinir. All the cities of the Plateau and all of Gilead and all of Bashan as far as Selka and Adriae, cities of the kingdom of Og and Bashan.

For only Og, king of Bashan, was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold, his bedstead was an iron bedstead.

It is in Rabbah, the sons of Ammon, and its length was nine cubits. Cubits, 18 inches.

From the tip of the finger to the bend of the arm, unless you're a giant, and then it's probably like 48 inches, but I think it's a standard cubit.

And it's four cubits by ordinary cubit. There you go. So nine times 18, nine feet times 18 inches, 14 feet roughly.

Now, the people obviously were terrified, but they eventually obeyed the

Lord. They went into the land of Canaan and they brought the war that God called them to, and they put down these giants one by one by one.

In the cities, you'll wonder why some cities are told that you're supposed to destroy everything, every creeping thing.

You're supposed to not keep anything. Well, those are the cities where the giants are, where the

Nephilim are. There's some cities that didn't have them where they're allowed to keep the goats. The men were allowed to keep some of the spoils of war, and there were some cities where they weren't allowed to keep anything, because everything in that city was polluted by this thing.

So those cities were the ones that they had to destroy them completely. Now, Joshua tells us that the battle was almost finished at the end of his life, and he challenges them, this day, who are you going to serve?

As for me and my house, we're going to serve the Lord. He's saying, as for me and my house, we're going to continue doing what God has told us to do.

We're going to cast out the Canaanites from the land and we're going to end this unholy race of giants once and for all.

That's the subtext that's going on there. And yet it didn't get wiped out completely.

Joshua 11, 22 says, there were no Anakim left in the land of the sons of Israel, starting off great.

Only they were left in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod, some of them remained.

Now that's where we pull the thread. Who is from Gath in the Bible? Goliath of Gath, a giant.

So he's not just an ordinary giant. He's not a guy who's struggling with giantism or whatever that's called.

He's not like Andre the Giant, where he's like, anybody want a peanut? And he's this good natured beast that nobody likes.

That's not what's going on. He is from the unholy line of the serpent.

He is the one who acts like the serpent, who stands up in front of the people of God and accuses them day and night.

That's what it says that he does. He accuses them. He mocks them. He blasphemes God. And the people are standing there like the first generation of Israelites, weeping and whimpering and shuddering and quivering because of the machinations of this satanic half man,

Goliath. He was nine feet tall. So the giants are getting a little smaller.

He was six cubits and a span, roughly nine feet. Again, he mocked

God like Satan. He had arrogance like Satan. And he has this spirit of the Nephilim in him, just like all the rest.

And God is commanding his people to utterly destroy him. God does not waste violence.

God uses violence in a calculated way to destroy things that are unholy. God is not superfluous in his wrath.

He is holy in his wrath. So you've seen a consistency here. Every time this sort of pollution happened on Earth, God says totally obliterate it.

That's how wicked it is. That's how unholy it is. That's how disgusting it is. And he says the same thing about Goliath.

Now, Saul was kind of like the former generation who believed the bad report. He was too cowardly to do anything about it.

Saul also was a head taller than all the rest of the people, which is interesting to me. Now, David responds, unlike Saul, he's this short little shepherd boy, but he responds with holy violence against the things that threaten

God. And with a single sling and a stone, he cast that rock, the single rock and knocks down the giant.

Now, there's several things I want to mention here because you don't have to take me on this. I'm telling you that this right here could be a little bit speculation, but we're already in a sermon that's focused on the deep weird in the

Old Testament. So if you'll bear with me just for a moment. There's a language at the time of Hebrew, a cognate language called

Akkadian. It's a language that's very similar to Hebrew. And in that language, forehead comes on the armor that exists on the arms and the legs of the soldier.

Now, in the ancient world, I'm going to tie these thoughts together. If you've ever seen one of these boys in the

Middle East with the sling, they fling those stones. They're about this big. They're like the size of tennis balls.

And they fling them 100 to 150 miles an hour once they release.

So if Goliath was hit in the forehead, there would be no head left. Right? Okay, that's the first thing because it says

David chopped his head off. He wouldn't have to do that. It would be gone. Second thing, it says that he fell forward.

If you got hit by 150 mile an hour fastball, you would not fall forward.

You would fall backward. Okay, so the Hebrew word here could mean the armor on the shins.

In the Akkadian language, the shins, the forehead of the shins was the armor that you wore on your legs.

That would have caused the giant to fall forward. That would have caused him to be immobilized.

And that would have caused David to come, grab Goliath's sword, and chop his head off and carry it around as a trophy.

You don't have to base your faith on that. You're not going to become a better Christian by believing this ancient evidence that I've described to you.

I'm just saying that we need to have a head for David to cut off. Because if there's no head to cut off, then that part of the

Bible is not true. So David goes up to the giant, who's laying there in agony.

And David chops off his head, which is a symbol of the curse of God coming on a person.

And David grabs him. He grabs him by the hair and carries him around, which

I think is fascinating. First Samuel says this, then David took the Philistine's head and brought it to Jerusalem, but he put the weapons in his own tent.

So David stopped at his house, basically, and took Goliath's weapons and put them in his tent, still carrying the head.

And then says, I think a good place for this head to go is Jerusalem. And then later, when he stands in front of King Saul, King Saul is obviously unnerved because this little shepherd boy has just killed a giant and he's standing there holding the head.

Saul's like, how'd it go out there? David's like, can't you tell?

And it says that David took the head and placed it in Jerusalem. Now, what

I find fascinating about this is that Jerusalem is a hilltop city and David would have displayed this severed head at the most prominent point in the city.

The most prominent point in the city is also, not by coincidence, the very hill where Jesus is killed.

So when Goliath, do you see where I'm going? When Goliath is called the place of the skull, what do you think it's talking about?

Where David put on display the skull of Goliath, that's where Jesus died.

Now, what's fascinating about that, there's so many different things that we could talk about, but Jesus is making war with the serpent.

He chose his death spot intentionally to show that I am the better David. I'm the one who fights a better giant, a bigger giant, a greater giant.

The whole story of the Old Testament is human beings fighting against the seed of the serpent and they kill a couple of giants.

Big whoop. Aggravation. Okay, Joshua and a few

Israelites killed him. Great. We could do that today. We've got missiles and scuds and AKs and we could kill a giant.

Okay, big deal. That's not that impressive. The bigger giant, the greater giant, the one that actually is the power underneath all of those giants is the one that Jesus was going after.

Jesus was born as the seed of the woman bringing victory to where Satan polluted.

He's the true and new garden of Eden. Jesus. Have you noticed in the gospels that when

Jesus shows up, the devil start doing crazy things and it's like every page there's devils.

There's one demon shrieking over here. There's another one possessing someone over here.

There's a whole herd of them going into the pigs and running off the cliffs. And you're like every page, it's like there's a battle between Jesus and the devils because there is.

Because Jesus is going back and undoing all of the curse of his forefathers and all of the curse of the

Old Testament. In the same way that the whole world was filled with devils in the flood, Jesus brings the flood of God's wrath against the devils on earth.

That's why his ministry is about warring with them, as it were. You'll remember the conquest narratives,

Joshua, which is Yeshua, which is Jesus's name. He's supposed to drive the devils, the devil's people out of the land.

What is Jesus doing in his ministry? The first thing he does is after he's baptized, he goes and fights the devil in the wilderness.

He makes war with him there. And then after that, he starts sending his disciples out to make war with the devils.

And the disciples come back and they're like, I can't believe it. Even the devils obey us. And Jesus said, don't brag about that.

Brag that your name's been written in the book of life. But don't negate the fact that they were making war with the devils.

They were conquesting, just like Joshua. And unlike Joshua, who didn't finish the job,

Jesus did. And then you get to the final battle, where Jesus walks intentionally up to the hill called the

Place of the Skull, where the last giant was slaughtered. And Jesus is admitting to us that now the battle is finally over.

Because you killed some physical giants in the Old Testament, I'm killing the power underneath them. I'm crushing that one's head.

And as Jesus died upon the cross at the Place of the Skull, the place where Goliath's last resting place was, he was crushing the giant that you and I could never crush.

And he was setting us free from a power that we could never free ourselves from. You and I could gather together and kill a couple man -eating giants, but we couldn't kill this.

And Jesus went and did our battle for us. And he won. It says that he bound the strong man.

That's Satan. It says that he disarmed the powers. That's the demons.

And it says that there is therefore now nothing that can separate you from the love of God.

Neither height, nor depth, nor powers, nor principalities, nor anything in heaven and earth can separate you from the love of God.

Why? Because Christ brought the war. And thank God that he did. And now you and I, we're a part of the mop -up project.

We're a part of the cleanup project. I'll tell you a story and then we'll end. When I was in Iraq, my unit was the one that found

Saddam. I wasn't there when it happened. I was in a radar booth of Bolivia's. But nonetheless, 15 miles north of me, they found him in a little hole.

They pulled him out of that hole and he looked disheveled. He did not look like the man who relieved himself on golden toilets, which that's rumors in his palace,

I think that he had golden toilets. He had roughly a million dollars cash with him, but they removed him from that hole and he looked disheveled and he looked a broken shell of the man that he once was.

And then they arrested him and eventually they hung him. Now, I, from my perspective, thought that the war in Iraq became much easier once Saddam had given up.

The people who were firing mortar rounds at us stopped firing mortar rounds at us. What was the point?

The war's over, effectively. There were still a few pop shots here and there. There were still a few little ups and downs that we had to go in and clean up.

But overall, the war was over. The commander had been taken out. That is the era that you and I live in.

Christ himself took out the commander. There's a few pop shots that we need to deal with along the way, but the war is basically over.

And he's called you and I to join in his victory, to spread his victory to the ends of the earth, to clean up the little pockets of rebellion that still exist so that when

Christ returns, the whole world will be in alignment with his vision and he'll hand it over to the

Father and give God great glory. Amen? So as Christians, be secure in who you are.

Know that no power of hell and no scheme of man can ever pluck you from his hand. And as we sing right now that that old devil, that old liar, we don't tremble for him anymore.

We rest in the victory of Christ. And that is very, very good news.

Let's pray. Lord, underneath Golgotha is a whole history of war.

Skulls piled upon skulls of all sorts of warfare where the serpent was making war with you and your people.

And yet standing atop that hill is not death. It's the life of Christ, the one who won the war, the one who brought us into his kingdom and the one who defeated the final giant.

And Lord, I pray that us today would have great confidence in your gospel victory.

Lord, I pray that the problems that we face in this life would not even be worthy of comparing to the glory that's been revealed to us in the gospel.

Lord, I pray that these light and momentary afflictions would not take from us the joy that is ours as people on the side of Jesus's triumph.

And Lord, I pray that we would not act like the cowering Israelites who cowered before Goliath, who cowered before Og of Bashan, and as the people of the world cowered before the

Nephilim. Lord, I pray that we would see that old salamander as a defeated foe and that we would have great boldness to serve our king in everything we do and in everywhere we go.