The Anti Venom to Darkness

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Date: 4th Sunday in Lent Text: John 3:14-21 www.kongsvingerchurch.org

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Welcome to the Teaching Ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern
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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.
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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to Saint John, the third chapter.
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As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.
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For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.
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For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.
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Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only
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Son of God. And this is the judgment. Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil.
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For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.
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But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been carried out in God.
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This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. All right, here the judgment of Christ.
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This is judgment. Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.
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I think another way you can put it, the reason why pagans do what they do is well because pagans peg, that's what they do.
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And you're going to note that each and every one of us, according to our epistle text, we were born dead.
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You ever have somebody ask the question, why do you think that God allows bad things to happen to good people?
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And you should scratch your head and say, what are you talking about? Not a single one of us is good.
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And the only one who was good, we murdered him. You see, that's kind of the point.
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So in our text today, we're going to weave them all together because I think you can do that with these texts and walk through some of the major themes here.
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And you're going to note that Christ is the light of the world. He's come into the world and well, people love darkness.
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And don't think this doesn't apply to you, even though at one point you were dead in trespasses and sins, each and every one of us baptized into Christ still have our old sinful nature until we either die or Christ returns.
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And I don't know if you've noticed this about your sinful nature. Your sinful nature really likes sin, really enjoys it, and quite naturally can steer right into the weeds.
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And so you'll note we've got to pay attention to the fact that each and every one of us still has that proclivity to love darkness.
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And so in that context, I always like to return to the scene of the crime with a text like this. Let's review again the fall of man, shall we, in Genesis chapter three, because you're going to note that Adam and Eve's behavior post -fall goes perfectly with what
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Christ says about men loving the darkness and not coming to the light. So the serpent, it says in Genesis three, was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the
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Lord God has made. Always and again I always crack up when atheists think they've really got us over a barrel because you believe in talking snakes?
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Well, actually, snakes on their belly as we know them were actually post -fall.
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This you'll note goes in conjunction with Revelation 13 where the term dragon and serpent are used interchangeably.
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In fact, we know from Isaiah chapter six that there are seraphim in the very presence of God and these seraphim, well, they're serpentine, if you would.
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They're kind of like dragons. That's really what that's all about. So he said to the woman, and here it comes, and by the way,
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Christ has let us know what's going on here. In the Gospel of John, Jesus makes it clear that the devil was a liar and a murderer from the beginning and he is the father of lies.
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He's the inventor of lying. And being a fact that he's a murderer from the beginning, we now know from Jesus' words what the whole scheme was about.
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There's the devil. He's seen that God has created mankind in his own image and he's spoken a word to man and basically said, you can eat of any of these trees except for that one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you eat of it, you will surely die.
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And the devil knows a thing or two about God and that is that when God says something's gonna happen, it happens.
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God's word never returns to him void. God's word accomplishes the thing for which he sent it.
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So Adam and Eve, the way the devil's thinking, ah, I'm going to murder them because they look just like the
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God that I hate and I'm gonna make God the murder weapon. You know, in all of the annals of evil, this is like the ultimate, right?
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This is the ultimate villain setting out to murder humanity. And so he begins with these words, a question, and he says, did
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God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? Did God ever say you can't eat of anything?
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Let me give you Roseborough's paraphrase of the devil's word. Is it true? Oh, he's just a terrible, awful deity.
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Is it true he's not letting you eat? I knew he was wicked, but this is just beyond the pale. That's Roseborough's paraphrase.
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But it kind of gets you in the ballpark because you're gonna know what is the devil doing here, slandering God. And I love how our epistle text today is gonna take the slanders of the devil and just turn them on their head because anybody who thinks that God has it out for them doesn't understand who he is and what he's done for us.
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So Eve, kind of thrown on her back heel, says, well, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that's in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die.
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And I gotta give her just a little bit of space here, because people note that she's added to God's words, and she has.
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It's true that God said that if you eat of the tree that's in the midst of the garden, you will die, but he didn't say you shouldn't touch it.
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So this is what I would call just not quite memorizing your catechism lesson yet.
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So you haven't quite got the catechism, but you're in the ballpark. She's in the ballpark. And now it comes, and listen to what the devil says.
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He says, you will not surely die. Let me say this another way.
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God lied to you. He said you would die, but he's lying. You're not gonna die. It's gonna be okay, dear.
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You just go right ahead. And the reason why he lied to you is because he knows that when you eat of this tree, your eyes are gonna be opened, and you're gonna be like God, knowing good and evil.
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And God, he's small -minded. He's jealous. He's capricious. He's threatened by you.
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He doesn't want you to achieve your full potential. He wants to keep you from experiencing your purpose.
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And so because of this, you can't listen to him. I'm your friend. I'm here to tell you the truth.
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I'm here to set you free from that tyrant, God, the one who made you.
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So now the woman goes full Pentecostal. Eve goes full Pentecostal.
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She looks for the answer inside of herself. It's God within Ism. And so feeling the spirit moving within her, she saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.
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Never go inside to find God's word. It always comes to you from outside.
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So then she took of its fruit, and she ate it, and then she also gave some to her husband who was with her.
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Yeah, he was standing there the whole time, and he ate also. And then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
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Yeah, when their eyes were opened, they didn't sit there and go, mwahaha, I now have ultimate power.
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I am a deity. No, it just resulted in complete disaster and shame and, as God said, death.
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And they're sitting there going, well, they're still breathing. The physical death will catch up, but at this point, they are spiritually dead.
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They are spiritual corpses at this point. How do I know? Well, remember what our epistle text said.
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And you, you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work, and the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and we were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
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Dead, objects of God's wrath. They, for sure, died that day. So who was lying,
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God or the devil? And you'll note that in our epistle text, we are warned that being a child of the devil, being one of the sons of disobedience, means carrying out the desires and the passions of our own sinful flesh.
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I already warned you that what your sinful flesh desires are contrary, the things contrary to what
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God would have you do or not do. And so you think of the fellow who says, but, you know,
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I, I'm a victim of oppression, so I have a right to steal. Uh -huh, right.
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We always try to justify what we do wrong, but, but she's my soulmate, man. I can commit adultery on my wife because I, I was meant to be with her.
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You're just following the passions of your sinful flesh. Well, I didn't feel like taking out the trash, and I don't like it when my parents tell me what to do.
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Uh -huh. Been there, done that, too. That's your sinful flesh. Being lazy, not wanting to do what your parents told you to do, which is a breaking of the fourth commandment and is a sin.
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And I could go on, I mean, citing example after example, but you get the point. So now
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God, at this point, shows up. They heard the sound of Yahweh Elohim walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife, what did they do?
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Rather than run to God and be excited to see Him, oh, so good to see you again,
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God, they hid from Him. They hid from the presence of Yahweh Elohim among the trees of the garden.
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Well, that's going to be effective, right? And we already know that they had decided to cover their nakedness with fig leaves, like a lot of good that's going to do.
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But Yahweh Elohim called to the man and said to him, where are you? He said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.
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Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?
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And now comes the proverbial blame game. Rather than taking responsibility, confessing his sin, repenting,
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Adam blames God. The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate.
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It's your fault, God, you gave me that woman. So then Yahweh Elohim said to the woman, what is this you've done?
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And the woman said, well, the serpent deceived me and I ate. At least she gives an honest answer. So now the
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Lord God says to the serpent, because you've done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field and on your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.
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And then comes the first gospel, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He, Christ, that's who he's referring to here, shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.
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But there's Adam and Eve, God comes and they flee, hide from the presence of God.
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Light comes into the world but thou, they are dwellers in sinfulness, a darkness.
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That's what's going on here. And over and again, I think it's important to note there's different ways in which you can describe what has happened to humanity.
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We describe it as the fall. The effect is called original sin.
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The Calvinists, they call it total depravity and they're not wrong in calling it that, we just don't generally use that term.
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But the idea here is the fall is total, it's catastrophic, it's devastating.
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This is the reason why we experience the suffering and the misery that we have. This is why there is evil in the world.
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This is why pagans peg. Another way you could talk about it is you can say, well, on that day, the serpent envenomated them with, well, the lies that led to our fall.
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And we still have the venom of the serpent running around in our veins today.
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It's been passed on from generation to generation to generation. I didn't have to teach my kids how to disobey.
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It was a chore, it was a difficulty teaching them how to obey. So those of you thinking about having kids anytime in the near future, just keep in mind, it's quite the task, okay?
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Because they come out broken and you try to fix them. And there's only so much you can do with glue and paper mache.
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But you get the idea, right? So it's with that in mind that we consider, then, our
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Old Testament text as a foundation for our gospel text. In our
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Old Testament text, in the types and shadows, we see here one of those big picture types and shadows that points us to Jesus himself.
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And Jesus makes it very clear that what we're gonna see here is a type and shadow of himself. And so here we hear about the children of Israel.
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They are just setting out from Mount Sinai and heading by way to the
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Red Sea to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way. And listen how much these people sound exactly like the serpent.
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So they spoke against God and against Moses. Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?
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What a terrible question. What an awful question. Because the question assumes something that is absolutely slanderous about God.
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Isn't that exactly what the devil did? And so you can see here the children of Israel know well the ways of Satan and that venom is still running through their veins.
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Because they have attributed to God that his intent all along was to kill them in the wilderness.
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How could somebody honestly say that about God? Especially after what they've been through.
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They had been in slavery for hundreds of years, oppressed under Pharaoh, forced to kill all their male children.
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And God sends a deliverer and you got the whole ten plagues of Egypt. Then you have them crossing the
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Red Sea as on dry ground. And then God destroying the army of Pharaoh, feeding them miraculous bread from heaven.
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And what are they saying about God? God, you brought us out here to kill us. Men love darkness.
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Then they complained about the food and saying that the manna was worthless. So then Yahweh sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people so that many of the people of Israel died.
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Now, a little bit of a note here. The Nechashim Seraphim, that's how you say fiery serpent in Hebrew.
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The Nechashim Seraphim, they're not called fiery serpents because they have a really cool flame paint job on their bodies.
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In fact, they're just kind of like a bronze colored snake. The reason I call them fiery serpents is because if you are unfortunate enough to be envenomated by one of them, it feels like you've caught fire on the inside of you.
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And that's your experience and the pain that you experienced prior to dying from being envenomated by them.
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It's not a good way to go. And so you'll note here we've got Seraphim showing up, and that's kind of the point.
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So the people of Israel realized, maybe we should repent here. That's not a bad thing to do here.
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So the people came to Moses and said, all right, we've sinned. We've spoken against Yahweh and against you.
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Yeah, they have. So please pray to Yahweh so that he may take away the serpents from us.
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So Moses prayed for the people. And Yahweh said to Moses, make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole.
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And everyone who is bitten when he sees it shall live. And this is where we understand something very important, that God doesn't take away the curse.
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Instead, he gives them a way to live through the curse. And this fiery, this bronze serpent that Moses makes is one of the instances of what we call a sacrament.
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Sitting there going, a sacrament? Yes, the term sacrament means mystery.
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And so what is a biblical concept of a sacrament? It's where God takes his word and he attaches it to something that we can see, smell, taste, or touch.
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And the idea here is that by combining it with earthly material, that then
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God mysteriously works through that thing. Cuz we know that bronze serpents in and of themselves have no medicinal properties for healing people bitten by snakes.
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In fact, when I was growing up, I used to hike in the foothills of Southern California.
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I lived in Monrovia and Arcadia and that area. And I used to carry with me a snake bite kit, all right?
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And so if you're ever bitten by a snake, do not follow the methods taught to you by the old spaghetti westerns, okay?
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You'll end up dead if you do that. Cuz how do the spaghetti westerns work? Somebody's bitten by a snake and somebody says, here, let me suck the venom out.
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You're gonna die if you do that, okay? But snake bite kits do have a way for you to extract the venom.
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And so the way it works is kind of gross. So you're supposed to break this thing open and you've got a really nice sharp scalpel.
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And you're supposed to actually make the wound bigger by opening things up with the scalpel.
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And then you have the syringe -y kind of thing that you're supposed to throw onto the bite.
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And then you take the plunger and you go, to get the, yeah, it's really kind of gross, if you think about it, okay?
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It's kind of involved, and I would note that most people die anyway. So all of that being said, being snake bit's not something that you want.
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But I can tell you this, that in my snake bite kit, they did not have a bronze serpent.
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So that I can take a look at the person who's been bit, here, quick, look at this, and then, yeah, it doesn't work that way.
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And the reason why is because there was only one bronze serpent that had
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God's word attached to it, only one, and that was this one. And so you'll note then that God gives them this sacrament so that they can get through the curse.
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So Moses made a bronze serpent, set it on a pole, and if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and he would live.
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So here we've got an anti -venom sacrament, if you would. Types and shadows, pay attention to that stuff.
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Well, all that being said then, consider what we hear then from Christ in our gospel text.
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Jesus, in his Nicodemus at night passage, he's talking to Nicodemus at night, that's why I call it that, it's his
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Nicodemus at night passage. He's discussing with Nicodemus the importance of, in fact,
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I would say how vital it is, imminent, that somebody be born anothen, born from above.
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And then he, in his discourse with Nicodemus, says these words. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the
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Son of Man be lifted up so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
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So the right way then to understand that bronze serpent is that it's a picture of Christ.
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And this is where we struggle a little bit here, because it seems sacrilegious to ascribe to Jesus the symbol of the serpent, which is the thing that brought us into misery in the first place.
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But this is where we have to recognize something very important about the work that Christ has done.
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And that is that he has extracted all of Satan's venom from us, from all of us, and taking it into himself.
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As the scripture says, God has laid on him the iniquity of us all. But Corinthians says it a little stronger than this, where it says that God made
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Jesus to be sin so that we might be the righteousness of God.
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And there it is. So that bronze serpent foreshadows
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Christ, and it foreshadows Christ in him taking all of the venom of the serpent into himself so that we can be pardoned, forgiven, so that rather than die, we would live.
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And then we hear these very comforting words that every one of us knows, even from when we attended
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Sunday school as kids, because this is always a verse that you got to memorize as a kid. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
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This stands in stark contradiction to the words of the serpent. Is it true that he's not letting you eat?
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Oh, he doesn't want you to eat of that tree. He's lying to you because he knows that you'll be like God. And then you got the children of Israel.
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You brought us out into the wilderness in order to kill us. You don't know anything about God. You're lying about him.
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You're speaking against him. The text says that God so loved the world. And by the way, that includes you.
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It includes me. And this great love that God has, he has this, and it's demonstrated by the sacrifice that he's willing to make in order to save humanity.
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Now, people in the NAR and in the purpose -driven churches, they'll say things like this, that you were so worth it that God laid down his life for you.
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Oh, God looks at you and he sees what a beautiful future you have, and he recognizes that you are so valuable.
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Scripture says in Romans 3 that because of our rebellion against God, we have become worthless.
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That's how Scripture describes us in the fall. It is not because we are so amazing that God sent his son.
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Instead, the reason why God sent his son is because God's love is that amazing. And you can see the depth of his love because the thing that is sacrificed is his only begotten son.
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Imagine if God had said, you know, I like you guys, and I feel bad that you were deceived, so I'm going to send an angel, you know, maybe send
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Clarence, you know, an angel in training from It's a Wonderful Life. Would you believe that God really loved you if he sent
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Clarence? No. You see, God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were yet sinners,
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Christ, the son of God, the only begotten son of God, dies in our place.
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Think of it this way, from our epistle text. Even though we were dead in trespasses and sins, it says of God in verse four that God is rich in mercy.
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And use that word there for a second because it's a wonderful modifier because I don't know what it's like to be rich, but could you imagine like having like all the money you ever need and a whole lot more, that it would be impossible for you to run out of money?
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That'd be kind of cool, right? I have no idea what that's like. But all of that being said, you'll note that when it comes to mercy,
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God isn't cheap. God isn't on a budget. He doesn't have to sit there and go, you know,
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I don't know. I don't know if I have enough mercy to go around this month. So we might have to just pull it back just a little bit.
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We need to put you on a mercy diet, okay? God doesn't act like this. It says that he's rich in mercy.
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God being rich in mercy because of the great love, not small love, great love with which he loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses,
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God has made us alive together with Christ. It is by grace you have been saved.
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It's not something you've done. And he raised us up with him and listen to God's intent. God raised us up with him and seated us with Christ in the heavenly places so that in the coming ages,
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God might show the immeasurable riches of his grace.
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This sounds nothing like the words of the serpent. Immeasurable riches of God's grace.
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Now, I need to assure you of something here. Your sin and my sin is measurable.
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It is not immeasurable. It is not infinite. It is very finite.
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In fact, in the books that are opened on the last day, people's sins are recorded in the section known as the
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Record of Debt. It's the world's most satanic spreadsheet. But all of that being said, there is a limit to your sin.
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But scripture here says of God that his grace is immeasurable. And when you take your very measurable sin and you weigh it against the immeasurable grace of God, do you think for a second that God could say, you know,
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Christ died for you, but it wasn't enough to cover that? No, not at all.
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And so you'll note here, scripture paints a completely different picture of who God is.
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He is loving, he's rich in mercy, his grace is immeasurable, and his intent in the new world, the world that is coming, is to demonstrate in the ages to come and show us his immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us.
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It's really easy for us to believe the lies of the darkness. When pagans peg, what they often do is they slander
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God. One of the things they say about God is, oh, he's cruel. God is guilty of genocide.
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Look at all the people he had murdered in the Old Testament. He is evil, he's wicked, he doesn't care anything, he's not deserving of your love.
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Oh, and worse than that, the SJWs assure us that God is evil because he allowed slavery.
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You see, he doesn't care anything about social justice, so you shouldn't believe in Jesus at all.
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Those are the lies of the devil, and people who speak those lies, they sound just like the serpent, they sound just like the children of Israel in the desert, in the wilderness, and they're slandering
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God. But we do it too when we believe that our sin is too big for Christ to forgive.
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We do it too when we believe that God turns a blind eye to sin because he doesn't. There's all different ways in which we love the darkness and we slander
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God. Well, the God I believe in would never, and then fill in the blank.
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Well, the God you believe in isn't God then. So note this, God is kind.
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He is rich in mercy. His grace is immeasurable, and his kindness towards us and his love for us is staggering.
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I noted on Wednesday that when Christ was inaugurated as the King of Israel, proclaimed to be the
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King of the Jews, unlike human heads of state who wait until their last act in office to pardon people, because pardoning people is usually kind of scandalous, because always and again there's people that make the list of people who got pardoned, and the opposite side says,
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I can't believe you pardoned that guy. But Jesus begins his reign as King by pardoning all of his enemies, you and me included.
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Is it any wonder then that we hear these amazing words, God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him, and that's right, you don't have to earn that salvation, and if you're trying to earn it, you'll never earn it.
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You'll be damned for trying. Whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life.
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You see, God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
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And whoever believes in him is not condemned. Whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only son of God.
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So brothers and sisters, note then, God truly is loving.
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He is kind, he's merciful, and he does not will your destruction. He does not will that you perish.
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And anybody who perishes, it is such a tragic thing, because they perish aside from the love, and the mercy, and the will of God.
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So be assured today, brothers and sisters, that Christ has taken your sin upon himself. God made him to be sin, so that we could become the righteousness of God, so that we can be forgiven, and pardoned, and not perish.
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And all of this is a gift. It is not your own doing. It is from God, and it is so that we can be saved.
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So take comfort in these assuring, wonderful, gospel -filled words, because they reveal the true nature and heart of God.
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He is kind, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, pardoning iniquity, even yours and mine.
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In the name of Jesus, amen. If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th
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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota. 567 -44. And again, that address is
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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th
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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota. 567 -44. We thank you for your support.
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