He Who Makes Promises

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; Genesis 8:20-9:17 He Who Makes Promises

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Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service.
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This is a message from the series Beginning with God, Walking Through the Book of Genesis by Pastor of Teaching and Vision, Don Filsek.
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If you'd like to learn more about Recast or access our sermon archive, please visit us at recastchurch .com.
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Here's Pastor Don. But one of the exciting things is that we get to reflect this morning on a
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God who makes promises to humanity. That's really the point of the text that we're looking at in Genesis. The reality is
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God doesn't promise us, he doesn't promise to give us enough money to build a building. He doesn't promise that we will always be healthy and wealthy or that all of our plans will succeed.
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Is that reality in your life? I mean, have you experienced that, that God's promises don't extend to you always being extremely rich?
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Is that right? Or that every plan that you set forward is going to succeed? Is that what he promises to us in Scripture?
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No. But what God does promise is very significant. He promises to us that he is good and will remain good.
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That he actually is for us and not against us, for his people and not against his people. He promised to Eve after the eating of that fruit that was forbidden, he promised to her that he would send one of her offspring to fix the mess that humanity has made.
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That he would repair the rebellion that we have brought against him. And in our text we're going to see that we serve a
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God who promises to never blot out humanity again like he did in the flood that we saw last week. We will see that he's well acquainted with our sinful hearts.
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He knows us inside and out. How many of you, maybe you don't want to raise your hand, but you acknowledge that you have a sinful heart?
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Some of you are even willing to raise your hands on that one. We do. Our hearts are sinful and he knows us.
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He knows us inside and out and he's a God who knows we're sinful and he still makes promises to be patient with us.
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How many of you are grateful for the patience of God? I've lived 40 years under the patience of God.
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Every breath that I take is a demonstration of his patience and endurance with me and I'm grateful for that.
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So I want you to open your Bibles please to Genesis chapter 8. We're going to start in Genesis 8 .20
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and go all the way through 9 chapter 17. If you open the Bible in the seat back in front of you, you can turn to page 6 and boom it's right there.
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If you don't own a Bible or don't own an English Standard Version of the Bible, which is the one that I just prefer to preach from, you can take that one home with you.
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We want everybody to have a copy of the Word of God. Follow along as I read Genesis 8 .20 through chapter 9 verse 17.
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Read it in its entirety. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
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And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man.
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For the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth, neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.
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While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.
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And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea.
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Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants,
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I give you everything, but you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.
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And for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning from every beast. I will require it and from man, from his fellow man,
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I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.
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For God made man in his own image. And you be fruitful and multiply, team on the earth and multiply in it.
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Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you.
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And with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark, it is for every beast of the earth.
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I will establish my covenant with you that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.
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And God said, this is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for all future generations.
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I have set my bow in the cloud and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds,
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I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh and the water shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.
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When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.
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God said to Noah, this is the sign of the covenant that I've established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.
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Let's pray. Father, I rejoice in the opportunity that we have to come together and hear from your word.
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A chance as the band comes to lead us in singing to lift our voices and our songs before you.
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I ask that you would accept these songs as an offering up to you, Father, that it would be pleasing to you, that it would be like a pleasing aroma before your throne, that it would be our hearts that are genuinely engaged in who you are.
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Father, you are a God who makes promises, who has demonstrated patience and long suffering and endurance as a father who loves his creation and is working to bring about restoration and reconciliation and wholeness and completeness.
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Father, I look forward to just even the chance to dig into this text once again and talk through the implications of covenant and sacrifice and how those
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Old Testament forms couldn't accomplish for us what has now been accomplished for us in Jesus Christ, your son.
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And so, Father, I pray that we would lift our voices up as a people who are saved because of the work of Jesus Christ on the cross.
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And I ask this in his name. Amen. I always count it a privilege to get a chance to get up and preach right after that song because that's exactly what we're about to do is to hear from God, from his word, and give room for his spirit in our lives.
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And so that's my prayer every Sunday morning is that God would meet us where we're at. Now, you've had all different kinds of things going on in your week and all different kinds of things and hassles and frustrations.
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Some of you had a great week, some of you had a really down week. But the reality is the spirit of God can come and meet us right here, right now, each of us as individuals and transform us and change us by the hearing of his word.
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And so that's what's encouraging to me. And I do want you to have your Bibles open. I think that that's beneficial for you, that you can actually walk through the text with me because that's what
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I'm going to do this morning. So if you would make sure that you're open to Genesis chapter 8.
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Remember that anytime, I know we just took a break, but if you need to get up and get more coffee or juice, you can feel free to do that.
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Restrooms are back here if you need those at any time. But let me kind of summarize kind of where we've been so far in the book of Genesis.
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We're marching through this book. I'm taking it a week at a time and a section at a time. And so we've seen
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God create in the first couple of chapters. And then we saw Adam and Eve sin and rebel against God.
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The world was plunged into corruption over the course of several generations, several long generations that we saw.
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God looked down on the intensity of the corruption. And we saw a couple of weeks ago that he actually said this, that he saw that every intention of the thoughts of the heart of mankind were only evil continually.
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Pretty strong statement, right? Continually, everything in our hearts, the intentions of our heart, the intentions of the thoughts of our heart, wicked only ever continually.
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And so he raised up a preacher to proclaim righteousness and repentance. And ultimately he told that preacher, Noah, that judgment was coming.
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And he gave it, he said, 120 years, I'm going to be patient with people. And then comes a judgment. So build a boat.
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Noah obeyed and built the boat. And God, we saw out of grief, not out of anger, not out of wrath, not out of spite, not out of vindictiveness, but out of grief in his heart.
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We saw last week that God blotted out humanity from the face of the planet with a global flood.
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Only eight people who had trusted him, Noah and his family, passed through that calamity along with some animals in the ark.
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And last week we ended with Noah and family and animals all stepping out onto dry ground.
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Put yourself in their shoes. Sometimes I think it's very helpful for us to have a bit of an imagination when we think through these things.
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But what would be the first thing that you would do? What would be your first act after spending a year seasick in a manure strewn floating barn?
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Get to step out of that barn. What would be your first act? How many of you maybe kiss the ground would be up on the high end of the list of things that you might do.
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Worship God. Give thanks. Now, did any of you a few weeks ago follow the news story of that cruise ship down in the
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Caribbean that was, you know, out of power? Have any of you in here ever been on a cruise before?
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Pretty opulent, pretty nice, pretty extravagant. Some of you maybe are saving money to go on a cruise. It's kind of a neat thing.
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Can you imagine the turnaround on that? The bathrooms aren't working. The ovens aren't working. No lights, nothing.
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That would turn into a pretty bad cruise pretty quick. And they were only without power down in that boat for a few days, right?
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Was it five, four or five days? Can you imagine what those people were like when they finally tugged them into Mobile, Alabama and they actually got off that boat on the dock?
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I bet there was a lot of rejoicing. We're free. We're safe. We're back home. Well, what we see here, the first act of Noah is to build an altar and offer some sacrifices.
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What that demonstrates to us is that the knowledge of sacrifice was pretty well developed by Noah's time.
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We saw Cain and Abel actually already make sacrifices centuries before this account. So that there was already a concept, a mindset of sacrifice to God that was developing is very clear.
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Now how that developed, we don't get from the book of Genesis. It doesn't tell us how they understood the sacrificial system.
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We see mentioned that he offers some of the clean animals and some of every clean bird.
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Obviously God had somehow delineated those things out to them that you don't sacrifice geckos on the altar, you sacrifice lambs on the altar.
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They were clean and unclean animals. And so that's what's going on here. I want to point out that there's a multitude of different reasons given in the
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Old Testament for sacrifice, aren't there? Any of you reading through the Bible in a year? Maybe a couple of you.
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Have you gotten to Leviticus yet? You get through Leviticus and bravo for those of you who got through Leviticus.
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Kudos to you. That's awesome. If you want a little bit of light reading this next week, go ahead and take off the chunk of the first nine -ish chapters of the book of Leviticus where it spells out all of the sacrifices in depth.
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That's light reading for you. That was meant to be funny, but apparently you guys don't see this.
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What? No, it's not super light reading, but that's where you find all of these sacrifices that are mentioned in the book.
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There's all different kinds of reasons given there. The word that's used in the text here is a whole burnt offering, which has some notion of atonement to it, has some notion of the offerer recognizing their sin before God and saying
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I want my sin washed away, I want it cleansed. So there's some of that notion in here, but I think there's probably three distinct reasons why
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Noah might offer a sacrifice in this situation. One would be to give thanks. Would you agree with me on that?
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There's a sacrifice of thanks, an offering saying thank you for deliverance, thank you for carrying us through this calamity, thank you for saving us.
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The second is atonement for sins, as I already mentioned, and the last would be, there would be an element of consecration.
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That's not probably a word you used this last week, right, consecration? Consecration being a setting apart of you for the further service of God in your life, and I think that there was a sense of that for the future of saying this is a fresh start for us as a race, and we are going to start it on the right foot with gratitude to God, with thankfulness, and with a moving forward in the grace of God.
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Now nobody here brought an animal this morning, right? You didn't bring an animal to sacrifice? I just want to make sure that what I say next is accurate.
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I'm grateful that you didn't bring an animal to sacrifice this morning.
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I'm glad that I'm a pastor and not a priest under the old covenant. Now that the entire sacrificial system ultimately has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, we find that our gratitude and thankfulness, like that element that was in Noah's sacrifice, we find that our gratitude and thankfulness is now focused on the cross, right?
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It's no longer on bringing a lamb to slaughter, no longer bringing oxen, no longer bringing birds to sacrifice.
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We find that that gratitude is focused on the cross. Our atonement, that is the covering of sins, flows out of the cross, and our consecration, that is setting us aside for the work of God for the future, is brought about by the cross of Jesus Christ, and in the
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Old Testament, sacrifices were an act of worship. To bring a sacrifice was to worship
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God, but now in the new covenant, there is one sacrifice that is the source of all worship.
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There's one sacrifice now, and I think if we reflect on the Old Covenant, we reflect on the
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Old Testament, and we are encountering really here sacrifices for the second time, because we talked about it just briefly with Cain and Abel, but then it's going to be well -formed throughout
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Leviticus. How many of you have read the Old Testament and have to know that there's a little bit about sacrifices in there? A lot of sacrifices mentioned in the
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Old Testament, and what I fear might be our tendency is looking backwards on the sacrifices that we see in the
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Old Testament. We encounter one, and we go, the logical conclusion to that, what many preachers might be tempted to say, what
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I could even be tempted to say now, is okay, now folks, recast, what are you sacrificing for God?
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What are you giving to Him? What are you sacrificing? As if that's the reason that the
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Old Testament model of sacrifice was set up, so that we might be moved to sacrifice, and that's the end of it.
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And that misses the understanding of why the sacrificial system exists in the
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Old Testament. It is not that you should walk away here feeling guilty, that I ought to give more to God, that boy, what
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God demands of me is a sacrifice. No, the point of the Old Testament system is that sacrifices never accomplish the redemption, the fixing of the problem of the human heart.
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There's sacrifice after sacrifice after sacrifice, and it never accomplishes what it set out to do with intention, it's purposeful, are you getting what
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I'm saying? So if you walk away from this service and you go, well, what, you know, we talk about sacrifices,
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I ought to give something to God, well, I mean, we'll get there here in a minute, but ultimately, it comes down to recognition that God has now provided the perfect sacrifice for you and me.
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He has done it. Not what can you do to get closer to God, He has brought you near through His Son, through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, done,
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He did it for you and me. That the logical conclusion of this is not, what are you going to sacrifice for God?
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He has done it, He has solved the problem of the human heart. What that Old Covenant, and that's gonna be the theme of this message, is the way that these
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Old Covenant promises are band -aids, they are definitely God -ordained and they are good things, but in the end, they do not accomplish what
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Jesus Christ, everything in the Old Testament, pointing forward to a Messiah, a Savior who would come to deliver us from our sins.
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All this Old Testament stuff that couldn't accomplish our heart issue, could not fix our heart issue.
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We see that the Old Testament sacrifices, however, did have an impact on God and I think in order for them to illustrate the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, they did need to have an impact on Him in some way.
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So, the implication in this text is that God saw the offering of Noah, the pleasing aroma, it says in verse 21, and the
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Lord said in His heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man. So there's a movement in God because of this.
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And I mean, we have to ask ourselves some questions then. How do we know that God accepts sacrifice at all? Because in the Old Testament, He does.
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And that's the way that we make sense of the brutal death of the cross. Here in the text, we see that sacrifice does move
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God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ was the ultimate sacrifice that moved Him. I don't think it's the death of the animal that He delights in.
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I don't think it's the shedding of the blood that makes Him excited. That's a pagan notion. A real pagan thought is that God needs,
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I mean, ultimately at the most crass level, sacrifice is God's hungry and He needs some food, right?
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Isn't that the ultimate pagan notion of sacrifice? If you get into ancient history and things like that, certainly tribes and people who have thought that way down through the ages, we're going to give
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God some food. He's hungry, but God doesn't have nostrils to smell. And I believe that the smell of a barbecue in this text is a metaphor.
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It's an image. We're going to see that all throughout Scripture that there's this image or this notion. So that when it says, and when the
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Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, what is the aroma that He's smelling? Now, do any of you ever smell something and it just keys you into something in the history of the past?
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I love the seasons in the state of Michigan. Any of you really enjoy that first time you smell burning leaves in the fall?
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It just takes you places and it's cool and it's like, okay, fall is here, the leaves are changing. Aren't there certain smells that you expect as a passage of time?
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I'm really looking forward to it. I know that this is probably going to happen just in the next few weeks. There's going to be a warm day.
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I'm going to get in my car right out here. I'm going to pull out and I'm going to drive just right over there, just behind here.
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And on the way, I'm going to have the window rolled down and you know what I'm going to smell? Somebody is barbecuing.
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And it's like the sign of spring, right? Like spring is happening. Okay, somebody actually fired up the grill and the barbecue is going.
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It'll probably be Pete. And it's my neighbor. But somebody's going to be barbecuing and I love those smells, right?
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I mean, isn't there something like, I mean, even, even, I'm from Michigan. I grew up here. I love this place. But even that sense like when it's a single digit, middle of the winter, and you step out and like your nostrils freeze.
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You know what I'm talking about? None of you like that. This time of the year may not be the best time to use that as an illustration.
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We're ready for the barbecue smells, right? But I want to point out that I think that the smell of barbecue is a metaphor we can relate to, right?
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It's something that's like a pleasing thing. It's a good thing. But I don't think that's the, that's the main point. Many acts of service throughout scripture result in the metaphor of a sweet aroma rising to God that had nothing to do with burning meat.
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Think about this. The prayers of Christians in the book of Revelation are pictured as a delightful incense rising up to our
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God. Does he have nostrils? Is he smelling our prayers? You get what I'm saying? It's a picture.
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It's a word picture of what's going on here. It's not like he's smelling your breath when you pray or something like that. Might not be such a sweet aroma after all.
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Our praises are said. Like when we just sang, if our hearts are engaged with God and we're thinking about him accurately and we're praising him, then those are pictured in the
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Psalms again as a aroma, a sweet savor that rises up to God before his throne.
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And he was there listening to us sing, going, I delight in this. I rejoice in this. I'm excited.
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They trust me. They believe me. They really do understand me and they're getting me. They're learning and they're committed and they're here.
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I do not think it's the death of animals that he is excited about. It is that God delights in the heart of the one offering the sacrifice.
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Noah is thankful. Noah is penitent. Noah is trusting in God and therefore the aroma is not the cooking of meat.
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The aroma is a heart devoted to him. That is what
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God delights in. So it's not the skill of the singer. It's not the quantity of offering.
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It's not the eloquence of the prayer, but it is the heart given to God that is the aroma before him.
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Does that make sense? And that is what's going on in this text here as Noah makes a sacrifice.
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And therefore God declares, looking down, he sees the heart of Noah and this whole sacrifice that's happened and this is post -flood and they've just stepped out on dry land and he's built an altar.
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His first act is to worship. And God declares to himself, it says in himself, he's speaking to himself and he says he would not further curse the ground again.
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Ultimately God is kind of like I love these people. I love them. He doesn't repeal the current curse, but he says he is not going to ever strike down all living creatures on the earth again.
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In verse 22 he promises to keep the seasonal cycles running. He promises that planting and harvest, cold and heat, summer, winter, day and night.
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He is the one sustaining the cycles of this planet. Do you realize that? He's keeping this thing rolling.
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And as long as there is an earth, these things will continue, the text says. And I want to point something out about the phrase in verse 22, while the earth remains.
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I lean towards the belief that the earth will remain. There is going to be a coming final spiritual judgment of this place, but I believe that this pledge is a solid promise that God is not going to destroy life from this world again in this way.
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Like he snuffed out everything except for the ape. I believe that the new earth we live on one day will be this very earth, this place, purged and cleansed of sin, washed of the effects of the fall.
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So when God says here he will not do this again, I believe him. I take it at face value. I think he genuinely will not destroy this world again.
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And although some have limited this merely to another flood, and we're going to go on here in a second to chapter 9, and in chapter 9 there's indication that certainly he's not going to flood it again.
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I think the promise rings kind of hollow if it's something like this. God says, you know what, I promise I'll never destroy the world again, but you know, you got the whole apocalyptic fire from heaven, you've got all different kinds of ways that God could destroy the world, but don't worry folks, it won't be water.
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Does that give you assurance? Does that give you some kind of sense of God's care and concern and it won't flood you again?
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But it might be a meteor strike, it might be nuclear holocaust, it might be, you know, we don't know, but it's not going to be water.
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Do you see how that kind of rings empty if that's the case? I'm actually making a case that I believe that this world will exist and will be the new earth that we live on into the future.
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It will receive some pretty heavy renovations. As a matter of fact, the book of Revelation talks about some pretty significant remodeling that's going to happen.
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But even in that devastation, he will never again wipe out all living things from the face of the planet. He's going to keep it going.
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And that demonstrates his commitment and his love for us. But notice the phrase in the middle of verse 21, and this is kind of key.
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And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because a man for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth.
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The word youth there can be translated infancy, or it can also be translated as a figure of speech from the beginning.
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In essence, he's saying, I've known that you are wicked all the way from childhood up. Anybody kind of believe that that's true?
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Like, do I need to convince you of that, or is that reality in your own heart? Have you faced that in yourself to actually see that there is that reality about you?
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I mean, have you made that personal and recognized your own sinfulness? So I think that's the first step to healing, is recognizing that there is something significantly wrong in my heart, not just in my behavior, but it's a root in here that keeps cropping out in various avenues and various ways.
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But there's a wickedness in my heart, right? There's a problem in here that keeps showing up in my behavior out here.
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And it's not just this that's the problem, but it's this that is the problem. And so he recognizes and identifies.
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God takes it straight on, an honest assessment. Ultimately, that the flood has not taken care of the part of the human problem.
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What did God say was true of the human heart prior to the flood? Everything, every thought and intention of their heart, wicked, only ever, continually?
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And now what's he saying after the flood? Has the flood solved the problem? Okay, now they're okay?
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Now these eight people, I've saved humanity by bringing about a blameless man,
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Noah, he's righteous, he's all good, and everything's all good, and hunky -dory, it's all taken care of, is that what he says? It's still the case.
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Has the flood solved the problem? I think the flood has served to slow us in our progress towards sin.
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It's kind of been like a hurdle in the way of our sinful behavior, because now there's only eight people sinning on the face of the planet.
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It's a little bit slower, but they'll get back up to speed, so don't worry about that. They'll get it going again. But it slowed the progress, and I think it does also demonstrate how evil and wicked that must have been during that age and that generation for him to have to just hit the reset button.
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The flood reset things, but it does not solve the human condition. Nothing in the old covenant could quite solve the problem.
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Not the flood, not the sacrifices of sheep and goats, not the building of a temple, not the establishment of a code of conduct through the law of Moses.
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None of those things could solve the problem. As a matter of fact, one could say the Old Testament is like one long story of the things that don't work in trying to fix the human heart.
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It's a big case study for us. I love the Old Testament because I dig in there and I see a lot of my own behaviors and a lot of myself in there, but equally
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I also see a lot of the attempts that I have made to try to bridge the gap between me and God. It's in there.
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Sacrifice? I've tried it. Give up things for God and He'll love you more. Can you see yourself in the kinds of things that they did?
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Follow more laws, obey more rules, do more good, do more of this, do more of that, because then God will like you.
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That's what the Old Testament is all about. It's just one huge demonstration of a human attempt, humans working to try to please
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God when all He's saying is all of this stuff points to your inability, I'm sending a Savior.
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I'm going to send one to take care of it because you can't remedy the problem yourself. You see in reality when
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I read the Old Testament, I read it from a different lens and I understand it that ultimately every single story whispers the name of Jesus.
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You ever thought about that? Every story gives a sense of there's a Messiah coming, there's one who is going to take care of this mess.
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Even the promise, the very first promise of God to Eve, an offspring of the woman,
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He will crush the head of the serpent. Promise. You hear the whisper of Jesus in that promise?
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And I fear that sometimes in understanding or studying, some of us are scared of the Old Testament because we don't quite know what to do with it.
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We don't quite know how it fits into the big picture or we primarily teach it as moral lessons to our children.
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It's good, kids need to get that whole David and Goliath thing. We need to get
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David and Goliath. And David and Goliath, by the way, just an illustration of how we get that one wrong.
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David and Goliath isn't about you going out and slaying your giants, it's about God doing it for you.
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How many stones did David pick out of that river? What did he know was going to happen?
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He's just trying to be faithful, trying to do what God... Who slayed the giant? God did.
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You hear how we get that wrong? It's like, oh, the illustration of David and Goliath. What's your giant you need to slay this week?
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God has slayed the giant for you. He is working on your behalf to bring about your salvation.
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It's a glorious thing. Grace is amazing. So undeserved, but so real.
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Jesus Christ is the solution to the issue of our corrupt hearts. Not sacrifices, not the flood.
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It amazes me here that God in verse 21 knows the nature of our hearts, knows what we're made of, knows that we're sinful and wicked from our youth up, and He still promises to never do this again.
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He's gracious, He's compassionate, He loves us even in our brokenness. And He loves us so much that He's been working for centuries to bring about His ultimate plan of redemption.
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And that plan of redemption is not another flood. It is punishment. But it's not another flood. It is the cross.
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And punishment meted out on His Son on our behalf. That is where He takes out the punishment that you and I deserve.
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He takes it on Himself. In chapter 9, God restarts with Noah and He issues the same command
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He gave to Adam and Eve. He says there's only 8 people left on the face of the planet. Get busy, be fruitful, and multiply.
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Go at it. But things have changed after the flood and God switches up a couple of things. So things are not quite the same that they were before the flood, which calls into question, what were things really like before the flood?
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Because we're going to see a difference in the shift of the relationship between animals and humanity here that's kind of intriguing.
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In verses 2 -4, humans are for the first time given permission to eat meat. So we know that the society prior to the flood was a vegetarian society.
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But the clear implication of verse 2 is that prior to the flood, animals did not have a healthy fear of humanity.
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Is that kind of intriguing to you? Like, what was life like on a planet where animals really didn't fear humanity that much?
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How many of you know that if you eat animals, they're probably going to fear you? Right?
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How many of you have ever noticed we went down on vacation, we did a huge trip out west, we came back through Mammoth Cave.
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Have any of you ever been to Mammoth Cave? Mammoth Cave sits on huge park grounds with roads running through it and stuff.
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You have to be really careful driving there because deer will walk right up to your car. And I mean, they'll poke their head in your door trying to get food from you.
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Is that normal behavior for deer during hunting season around here? There's a pretty healthy fear that deer have of humanity during hunting season.
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But even in Michigan, there are places where the deer know that they're pretty well protected and they're kind of more tame than other places, right?
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Because they're not as fearful of hunting. I think that that's part of what's going on here is that when you eat delicious critters, they're afraid of you.
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That's reality. And at this point in the text, there are no kosher laws.
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So that's coming later. That's coming later in the book of Exodus where God brings down His law on Mount Sinai and the people of Israel are told not to eat certain foods and things like that.
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And so really what we have here is, I mean you can see it in the text, all food is available to Noah and family.
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They're eating shellfish, they're eating are you ready for this? I think we should take a moment of silence because you know what's going on here.
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Bacon is going on here. We are seeing in our text the origin of bacon.
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Now I shouldn't be talking about that during my message because some of you are just going to zone out and you're hungry now and that's like the end, I lost you at the word bacon.
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But wow, okay, bacon starts here in this text. But also something else starts in the text and it's for the first time we actually see the significance of blood.
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Now how many of you know that blood is a pretty significant theme throughout Scripture all the way up to the sacrifice, the beautiful amazing sacrifice of the blood of Christ.
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We're going to take communion later. We reflect on blood every week. I've actually heard people say that one person was inviting somebody else to our church and they actually had a conversation back and forth and the lady said to this man, but you're not one of those blood churches are you?
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And he's like what do you mean? He's like one of those churches that always talks about blood all the time because I just can't stand that.
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I've been to a couple churches where they're just all about blood and it's like I can't stand that. It's so gross and I just want it to go away.
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Something significant about blood in the Christian faith that it is without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
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That's the nature of the way that it's designed and so there is something about blood and yes,
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I guess maybe we are one of those blood churches. I don't know. How does that hit you? We're going to talk about blood when the text talks about blood.
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Maybe you're here. I didn't even think about that. I hope I didn't offend anybody. Come and talk with me if I offended you.
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I probably won't be able to make it right, but I'll try. Who could argue that blood is a good illustration as an excellent symbol for life?
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Is blood a really good image? You don't have blood in you, you die. In one sense, it's very accurate to say that the life is in the blood and without blood, you're not living.
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I want to point out that there is a difficult phrase in verse 4 to translate. But ultimately, look at this carefully.
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You shall not eat flesh with its what? What does it say?
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With its life that is its blood. To eat meat, anytime you eat meat, you're eating some blood.
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Did you know that? I don't want to creep anybody out, but that's reality. You never get all of the blood out of that. So what's going on here?
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Is this a prohibition on eating any blood at all? You'd have to press that thing. I don't know how you could do it.
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You might have to be able to vacuum suck it out. I don't know. Maybe there's a process you can do that.
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I don't know. But we don't do that, do we? So are we breaking this? Are we going against this?
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Well, I think that there's something significant in this. I think this is an illustration of prohibition against savagery.
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If you think about it, Noah and family have never eaten meat before. And they're being told,
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I mean, what is their observation of meat eating up to this point? Lions eating gazelles?
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No, you don't eat like the animals eat. You don't go and attack something and eat it with your teeth. You kill it.
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And there's a proper way to do this. And I think that's what's going on here, is a respect for life and that kind of thing.
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We lived in England, and I thought about this passage every time we were offered blood sausage. Any of you ever eat blood sausage?
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Do you know what I'm talking about? This is a real dish, real food, in a real part of the world. Congealed blood packed into a sausage.
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Eat it for breakfast. Mmm. No. Nasty. I never ate it. It was always nice to be able to say, you know,
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I'm always kind of confused about this whole Genesis thing. For religious reasons, I'm going to abstain from blood sausage.
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Not honestly, but I never did end up eating it. Linda, did you ever try it? But I do want to point this out.
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If your burger literally moves at you, you're doing it wrong. Okay? That's not right.
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Raw, I don't think this is a prohibition against those of you who like medium to raw burgers.
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That's not what we're talking about here, so rest easy. But eating meat is a concession, I believe, to the relationship between the animal kingdom and humanity.
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There is a war that's waging between humanity and the animals where we were given to be caretakers and they didn't have a fear of us prior to the fall and then all of these, you know, on down through the ages and the ramifications of the flood and all of this.
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And the words, the terminology in Hebrew is one of battle. And I don't think that that's that far off in the case of thinking about down through the ages, an ongoing battle between humanity and animals.
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Another way to state this battle is that sharks want to taste us and we like to taste them. Have any of you ever had shark fin soup?
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It's actually pretty good. But they wouldn't mind taking a bite of you or me either.
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And I don't see this in the original plan of God. I don't think that's the way he originally designed it to be. You can kind of extrapolate out what that implies for the future and on a new earth and all
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I can say is enjoy bacon. I don't know that it's going to be here on the new earth. So maybe he'll have a nice bacon substitute that still sizzles and is actually pretty crispy.
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I don't know. I don't know how that's going to work out. But a further concession is made. So there's a concession made between animals and people, but also
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God sees that in the future some of the very same violence and murder that happened in the pre -flood that actually caused the flood is going to occur again.
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Murder is not done with after the flood. And he's actually going to make a case for what to do when murder occurs.
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The flood slowed the process of sin, but it didn't solve it. So he sets forth what is in Latin called the lex talionis, the law of retribution.
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Talion meaning retribution, lex meaning law. It's this ancient concept of law that's an eye for an eye.
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Have you heard this one before? Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life. How many of you are just being just flat out honest that sounds like a barbaric law to you?
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Just being honest. Anybody? Am I the only one that when I first encounter that I'm like you punch me in the face I get to punch you back?
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Does that sound, some of you are like yeah that sounds pretty just right. That's pretty good. Well I mean if you put it in perspective, those of you who raised your hands and those of you who are kind of thinking how is this fair?
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Think about this from the perspective of what we have seen in regards to retribution and law up till this point prior to this in the book of Genesis.
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We encountered a man named Lamech, for example, in the line of Cain. What was his sense of retribution?
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Seventy fold it says in the text. He says you kill one of my family I'm killing 70 of yours.
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You see how things kind of escalate? Can you see how the human heart does that? You kill one of mine
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I'm going to kill five of yours you're going to kill 20 of mine and eventually we're just wiping each other out right and we're right back to where we were pre -flood.
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So God is saying here I'm going to set up some laws, I'm going to put some things in place to kind of get to work to get human society civil towards one another and move in that direction.
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Does that make sense? Maybe a better way to make sense of it is those of you who are in college did you ever have the prank wars get escalated out of hand?
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You know what I'm talking about and eventually the police are involved and it's like I don't know how things got out of hand. That never happened to me but I can imagine how that could happen where that kind of thing might happen.
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So this escalation, capital punishment in this sense is a reasoned response to avoid the escalation of violence in a society.
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Ironically I think that it kind of strikes us a little bit different but even retribution or reckoning is applied to animals in verse 5 that if an animal takes the life of a human that the law of retribution applies to them too.
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But if you think about it don't we do that? Don't we do that in our society? A dog kills a person or attacks a human what happens to the dog?
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We put it down. A bear that mauls a human is hunted down. The entire movie of Jaws is premised on this notion that we hunt down a shark that's a man eater right?
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Some of you just had that whole movie just flash through your mind didn't you? Just like swimming in a swimming pool late at night.
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Have you ever done that in the dark? You know that there's a big shark in there with you. That's not in my notes.
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But this is ultimately, it says in the text the reason for this law of retribution, the reason for capital punishment that's spelled out in this text is because man is made in the image of God and therefore
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God requires the life of anyone who knowingly snuffs out one of his crowns.
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Humanity being the crowning achievement of God being the point, if you read Genesis 1 through 2 you see that everything culminates in the creation of humanity, male and female, made in the image of God.
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They who are his vice regents if you will, his representatives here on Earth to take care of this place and that therefore ascribes significant value to every single human on the face of this planet.
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Everyone has inherent worth because they are made in the image of God.
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Does that make sense? And so therefore that ought to flavor our interactions with one another.
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The way that we view that person who cut us off in traffic that makes us so angry we could just run them off the road.
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But wait a minute how does the image of God in others inform the way that we treat one another?
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I'm not talking about the fact that you're redeemed and bought by the blood of Christ, I'm talking about that because you were created in the image of God you have value.
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Just that alone requires respect from us. But regardless of your personal political leanings regarding capital punishment, verse 6 makes it hard to say these two things in tandem.
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My view is biblical and I oppose capital punishment. You really have to wrestle with this text in order to get there.
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Now I want to point out that the details of capital punishment are spelled out more clearly in the Mosaic Law. The concept is carried over into the
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New Covenant through Romans chapter 13. Paul actually identified the state's right to kill those who are guilty against the state.
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For those who desire to accurately live and believe according to scripture, really the room for us to debate really comes down to due process of law and significant work to protect people from false accusations.
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I really feel like that's probably the biggest hang up for most people regarding capital punishment is generally the fear that somebody who is being falsely accused, would you agree with me on that?
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The primary hang up is that somebody who's falsely accused. So we ought to do everything that's within our strength and power to make sure that we have good laws in our land that protect the innocent and help take care of them.
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Help take care of us. But now in verse 8 through 17 God gathers
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Noah and his sons and proclaims his promise to them. He openly declares that he is offering to them or giving to them a promise of protection that is to cover all of humanity for future generations and all the animals and even the earth.
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In verse 11 God specifically promises no more floods like that one. And once again I want to point out that if this was just a localized, a case of localized flooding then
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God has broken this promise many many many many many times. Do you hear what I'm saying?
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If he promises here I'll never flood the world like that again and this was just a localized flood, how could he be being honest right here?
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I just want to point out are you guys getting the impression that I believe this was a global flood in these last few weeks? Are you kind of getting that notion?
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I do. I think that the text just makes it hard, very very extremely, nearly impossible to interpret that this is anything other than a global flood.
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But another word on the nature of covenant, so God is making a promise here to never flood the world again like that. Usually covenants include if clauses.
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If you do this then I won't flood the world. Something like that. But the nature of this covenant with God is just like so many with him, it's heavily one -sided.
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He pledges protection with no strings attached. He even says I know your heart is wicked and he still makes this promise.
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He says I'm unilaterally declaring that I will not hit the reset button again. And just like most covenants there's a sign given as a reminder.
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We see that according to the Abrahamic covenant circumcision was given as a sign to the Jews. We have for us today the sign of baptism, the sign of communion for the covenant of grace.
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A symbol, a sign, a way of remembering it and God here uses the rainbow for his covenant of protection.
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Now I'm going to geek out scientifically for you just for about 30 seconds here and explain what a rainbow is.
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A rainbow occurs when direct light strikes airborne water vapor at an angle of 42 degrees to the observer, to the eye.
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So you have to be a certain angle from the direct sunlight in order for a rainbow to occur. How many of you knew that?
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A few of you. 42 degrees to the observer. A rainbow is not a tangible physical thing.
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It is a phenomenon of light so it is something that is observable to the eye and therefore if I'm standing here and I see the light striking 42 degrees through water vapor over there to my perception somebody might be standing under it but to their perception they don't look up to see a rainbow, they just look further off.
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It's not above them. It looks like it's above them but it's not. There's always the potential for another rainbow further on.
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You're not going to catch up to it. So the question, the reason I even bring that up is the question, did God create physical laws here to create the first rainbow or was it possible that prior to this event there could have been rainbows?
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I want to point out that it's just like God to repurpose something for his honor or for his glory or to have had an intention for it and then basically tell us what it was.
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So I'm not confident and the text doesn't require that this is the first rainbow that ever occurred.
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There may have been rainbows prior to this one but he says now when I see it I will remember. An illustration of this is marriage.
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Is marriage an illustration of something? Is it a sign of something? It is a sign of Christ and his church, right?
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When did marriage first occur? Clear back in Genesis 2. So for centuries marriage was going on before we fully grasped as a humanity what is meant by marriage.
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And I would say to you that I believe that marriage was created as an image of Christ and his church, not just something that was kind of like an afterthought.
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Do you get what I'm saying? And I think rainbows were created as an image of what God is doing here, his promise to us.
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Regardless of how all this went down though, whether he created the first rainbow and he could have, right? I mean he's in charge of physics.
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He could have been the first one. I don't really know but I'm thinking it's like God to take that and have meant it all along.
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Who remembers when the rainbow happens? Look at the text. What does it say? Who is it to remind?
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God. Wait a minute. What's God's memory like? Is it like God was up in heaven just before we saw a rainbow and he was like, you know,
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I'm just kind of thinking about flooding the world again. Just about to do it and then all of a sudden a rainbow occurred and he's like, oh,
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I remembered. Oh my goodness, I made a promise. I'm sorry. It's just about to pull the trigger but I remembered. It's not that God is forgetful.
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He doesn't struggle with his memory. So what I think is going on here is that the rainbow is meant to be an assurance to us but it's a little bit convoluted in the way that I'm going to word it but I think it's specific.
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It's what the text is telling us. When you and I see a rainbow, we should remember that God remembers his covenant.
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Do you hear that? We should remember that God is a God who remembers that covenant.
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The rainbow should reflect something. We should be thinking about something about God's character when we see the rainbow.
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Oh, he's a God who remembers this. Right now in heaven God is sustaining and keeping his promise.
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He's a promise keeping God. We should reflect on his grace that he knows our hearts.
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He knows our sin and he's been patient with us and he's working within this broken system to restore humanity through Jesus Christ.
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Now the message for the last few weeks have not been that different and it's apparent that God wants us to get him right because he keeps harping on it week after week here in the text.
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He shows himself to be engaged in his creation as a gentle father.
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He is patient with his children but just like any loving father he eventually is deeply grieved to his heart over their self -destructive behavior.
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He gives them 120 years to repent but in the end he washes the earth clean with a global flood.
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But not giving up on humanity mercifully he saves some in the animal kingdom through the ark of his salvation.
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And here in our text we see that although the problem of our corrupted heart is not fixed by this promise he covenants with humanity to never do this type of reset again.
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And I believe that this covenant this promise is just a part of a whole complex of promises in the
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Old Testament that point to a future covenant of grace. And God spoke about this future covenant in the book of Ezekiel.
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What is our problem? What did we talk about the problem? Was it behavior? The way we act? What was the problem?
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Our heart. And so in Ezekiel 36, 25 through 27 he's promising to Ezekiel under the old covenant a new promise that he is going to make.
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And he says this, this is what's going to happen Ezekiel. This is what's going to happen in the future. Now we get a chance to look back at it but listen he says
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I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness and from all your idols I will cleanse you.
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Who's doing the cleansing? God. And further and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit
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I will put within you and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and I will give you a heart of flesh and I will put my spirit within you.
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Capital S. And cause you to walk in my statutes and to be careful to obey my rules.
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I love that passage. How are you going to be able to obey?
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How are you going to be able to walk in God's commands? Because he's going to give you a new heart.
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He's going to change you from the inside out. Does the text say under this new covenant I'm going to make a bunch of rules and you're going to follow them and if I like you and I think you're doing a good enough job then
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I'll accept you? He says I will wash you. I will take out your heart, your unresponsive heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh that's able to beat for me.
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Saving. Not us saving us. Oh God forbid that we would leave here and think that we have anything to offer to him in this equation other than faith, trust.
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God I believe in you. I trust you and I need you to solve this problem in my heart.
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And without a new heart I have no hope. But I need your washing.
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I need your cleansing. I need a new heart. I need a new spirit in me. And those of you that are in Christ rejoice.
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He has done this for you and he is carrying it forward to its completion.
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One day you will walk with him with a completely renovated heart. He's in that process right now.
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I think all of you are just like me you're being changed day by day right? You're a work in progress.
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One day he will come and he will set it all straight. We are beneficiaries of this covenant that works to remedy the problem.
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The flood didn't resolve it. The giving of the law didn't resolve it. The formation of the nation of Israel didn't solve the corruption of the human heart.
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But in the fullness of time God sent forth his son to live a sinless life.
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To shed his life blood as the ultimate sacrifice for us. All of those sacrifices in the
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Old Testament a mere shadow of that one sacrifice to come. And we take communion this morning as a sign of the covenant of a new heart.
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If you are in Christ and you're here. You believe he died for you and you've asked him to save you.
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Then I encourage you to please come and please take communion as it's passed this morning. As a remembrance that Jesus has taken the punishment that we deserve.
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So that we can be declared righteous before our God. That we can have new hearts that beat for him.
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Let's pray. Father I rejoice in the way that you have worked through the covenants.
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Even just understanding the flood and the righteous your righteousness, your holiness, your justice. And equally recognizing that you came up with a plan a way for our punishment to be poured out on Jesus.
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That we couldn't pay it ourselves and you provided a way. Thank you so much for grace and for a fresh start.
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That Father you extend that out to any here. There may be some that are sitting here who have not had that experience of a new heart and new life.
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And Father for those of us that are in you I ask that you would cause us to walk in your ways. That you would be working in us by faith to take on more of you this week.
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Father that none here would walk out of here and only hear sacrifice and obedience and do, do, do.
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But we would rejoice and even as we get an opportunity to take the cracker and the juice that our hearts would burst forth with just joy because it has been finished for us and you completed it on the cross.