The Bible in 16 Verses: 12 Fulfillment: Mk 1:14-15

So, as you know, we've gone through, the time is coming.

We've gone through creation, Adam and Eve, the fall, redemption promised, Abraham, Judah the king, the

Passover lamb, the exodus, King David, the suffering servant, the resurrection promised, and the promise of a new creation.

Well, you made it. The time has now come. We have now bridged the gap from the

Old Testament to the New Testament. And we're going to talk about the fulfillment of everything that we learned over the past 11 weeks, and then get to the cross, the resurrection, justification, and glory.

So, this morning, we're going to talk about the fulfillment of what's happened up until this point. So, last week, we learned through Isaiah that God promised that there will be a new creation.

He's going to renew the heavens and the earth. And God disciplined each one of the patriarchs and the nation of Israel all along the way, because they continually broke

His covenant, which really should be a reminder to us that we continually break God's covenant.

And He is more faithful to us than we are to Him, which is what I pray every Sunday morning, that we would be as faithful to Him as He is to us.

But remember this also, you, as a human being, an image bearer of God, you were created to be dependent on God for everything, including your salvation.

So, God knows, it's part of His plan that we would fall into sin, but that we would continually grab onto Jesus Christ as the sin bearer for our sin.

So, it's an exercise of faith. So, quickly, let's go through where we are in the story so far.

God created a very good kingdom of which He is the King. He created human beings, His children, to represent

Him in that kingdom, and they were responsible to expand it. Through their sin, Adam and Eve rejected

God's commission and rebelled against their father and creator. Yet God proved His covenant love toward them despite their unfaithfulness.

Very good did not turn into very bad. It just proved the character of who was always very good.

That's God. There will be ongoing enmity between the offspring from now on, but God promised a

Redeemer who will crush the head of the enemy and secure God's victory. With this promise, very bad turned into very hopeful.

Next, God chose Abraham, an idolater, to bring the seed through whom the covenant blessings would come to all of the families of the earth, not just Israel.

Despite the sinful lineage of Abraham's family and specifically Judah's royal seed through David, God is still faithful to bring the covenant blessings to the world which would be ruled by a faithful king.

Because all people were guilty and deserve death, the blood sacrifices of the Mosaic law revealed more clearly their guilt and ongoing need for a substitute, the one suffering servant of Isaiah 53.

Through the servant and the work of the Spirit, God would establish a new covenant and give everlasting life to His people.

Through the servant and the work of the Spirit, God would establish a new covenant and give everlasting life to the people in the new heavens and the new earth.

Okay, which brings us to today. And our scripture verse for today is

Mark 1, verses 14 and 15. Now after John was arrested,

Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel. So when it says the gospel is at hand, when does that mean?

Right now, when Jesus said it. Not sometime in the future, not sometime in the past.

When He says the kingdom of God is at hand, He meant right then and there. Okay, He's inaugurating the new kingdom.

Our quote for this week is, pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

So all the Old Testament promises, there was an anticipation. Now when we see them, especially us on this side of the cross, look back at them and remember the things that God has done.

So as the last Old Testament prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, completed their ministries, the people of God could look back through the ages and see how

God had slowly revealed His plan for the promised sea to reverse the effects of the curse. Based on the unfolding covenant promises, they were looking for a new king, a new

King David, God's anointed one. In Hebrew, this anointed one is called

Mashiach, which is transliterated into English as Messiah, and it's translated into Greek as Christos or Christ.

So every time you see the word Christ in the New Testament, understand that's pointing to the anointed one or the

Messiah. This messianic hope was a right and proper expectation.

Unfortunately, they were expecting a conquering king, someone who would lead the charge against Rome or whatever physical enemies the kingdom of Israel had.

They thought that this was an earthly kingdom, that God would usher in a general, so to speak, to come in and lead the armies of Israel into victory over the surrounding nations.

That's obviously not what it was. And as you can see, God's plan continually unfolding.

We were getting more and more information as the Old Testament moved on, as history moved forward to the coming of the

Christ. Now we're going to see all those unfolding prophecies come to light in Christ.

But in the shadow of these prophecies, there was also a strong expectation that when God defeated sin and death, he would also wipe out the geopolitical enemies of Israel.

The people had expected freedom on the other side of their exile in Babylon. But after they returned home, a series of foreign armies ruled over the

Israelites or the Jews, Judah, as they came to be known. Rome came in. First, Alexander the

Great conquered the nation, followed by a series of Greek and Egyptian rulers who kept the nation from regaining its independence.

It was a short period of freedom under the Maccabees in the 2nd century BC. But then the Romans seized control of the region.

The great victory of God and his Messiah still seemed a long way off to them. Again, there's hope, disappointment, hope, disappointment, hope, disappointment.

At some point in time, the Israelites are like, when is this going to happen? So they had this anticipation, and then despair, and then hopelessness.

And what comes in after hopelessness? Doubt. Is God really going to do this?

But then another prophet came on the scene. He was not exactly the clean -cut type. You know him as John the

Baptist. John was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey.

That's why we know John the Baptist is not Italian. Locusts and wild honey. But his strange clothes and diet weren't the most amazing things about him.

That was his message. He called the Jews to repent and told them that he was preparing the way for a greater prophet.

A prophet who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. He says, I will baptize you with the

Holy Spirit. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. Mark chapter 1, 7 and 8, and he preached saying, after me,

John the Baptist, comes he who is mightier than I. The strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.

I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. Now many, many, many times people who read the

New Testament say, see, baptism saves you, and they point to water baptism. John is pointing to baptism in the

Holy Spirit, not water baptism. Water baptism happens after you're baptized in the

Holy Spirit to signify that you have been baptized into the Holy Spirit. And when I say baptized into the

Holy Spirit, I don't mean charismatic baptized into the Holy Spirit, evidenced by speaking in tongues and flopping around on the floor.

I mean baptized in the Holy Spirit in the sense that your heart has been circumcised.

You now have a hunger and a desire to follow God and reject sinfulness. You're going to turn, you're going to repent from those things and turn toward Christ and cling to him and remain faithful to him throughout the rest of your life.

Now think back to what we saw in the Old Testament. The prophets foretold that when the Holy Spirit would come, he would bring with him the life and resurrection of the new covenant.

Before that, the suffering servant would have had to take on the sins of God's people as their representative. Remember Isaiah, the suffering servant?

He was the one to whom all of these promises would point. The promises to David, the

Mosaic law, the promise to Judah, the covenant with Abraham, and the promise that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent would all point to Jesus, to him.

But we don't have to do all of that detective work. We can just keep reading Mark chapter 1 to see this.

In verse 9, Mark tells us that Jesus of Nazareth came on the scene. If you've read the

Gospels, you know that he was no ordinary man. He was born to Mary when she was still a virgin. From his earliest days, he knew that God was his father in a very special way.

In fact, we learn in John 1 that this man was none other than God incarnate, and this should begin to make sense to us.

Who else could keep both sides of the covenants and pay the infinite debt that sin had brought?

One human being cannot pay an infinite debt. You would need to be truly

God, truly man. How else could God finally fulfill the promises except by becoming a man?

So I just want to let you know this is secondary. All four Gospels, John 1, 1, Matthew 1, 23,

Mark 1, 1 -3, and Luke 14 -17, all point to Jesus as deity. This is in the first chapter of every

Gospel. So when someone comes to you and says, who says Jesus is God? Every one of the

Gospel writers at the opening of their Gospel, John 1, 1, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the

Word was God. He was in the beginning with God, and all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.

He came to his own. His own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word, God, became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory as of the only

Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. That's John 1, Matthew 1, 22.

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name

Immanuel, which means God with us. John says

Jesus is God. Matthew says Jesus is God. Mark 1, verses 1 through 3, the beginning of the

Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet, Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the

Lord, make his path straight. Mark is talking about John the Baptist, who says what? He's going to prepare the way of the

Lord. The term Lord is in all capitals. It's Yahweh, Jehovah. Who did

John the Baptist prepare the way for? Jesus. It's the easy Sunday School answer. You got that one, right?

Luke 1, 14 through 17, And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the

Lord. He must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb.

And he will turn many of the, and that's about John the Baptist, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the

Lord their God. And he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just to make ready for the

Lord a people prepared. Again, Luke is quoting this about John the

Baptist, who would point people to who? Jesus. He is the

Lord incarnate. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. All four

Gospels, in the beginning, opening chapters, proclaim Jesus as God in the flesh.

So this man, now grown, came to the Jordan River to be baptized. Then the Spirit of God, taking the form of a dove, descended on him, and the

Father himself spoke from heaven to testify that Jesus was indeed his beloved Son. The three persons of the triune

God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, were all present to confirm what Jesus was about to do. Mark says it like this.

In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the

Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven saying,

You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased. Now let me ask you something.

What had Jesus done up until that point, ministry -wise? Nothing. God was pleased with Jesus because it was his

Son. The same way he is pleased with you, not because of what you've done, but because he chose you and circumcised your heart and adopted you into his family.

The other thing is this. God said, You are my beloved Son. The next time

Jesus would hear those words, he would be hanging on a cross. If you're the Son of God, get yourself down from here.

We always got to go back to our conversion and say, God called me his Son. I don't care who questioned me.

If you're a Christian, if you're the... God called me. He circumcised my heart. Yes, I've sinned, but there's repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

There's forgiveness in him. Both Joshua's and Jesus's names are variations on the

Hebrew name Yeshua, which means God saves. When Jesus began his public ministry, he crosses over to the eastern side of the

Jordan River where John the Baptist is baptizing. So he crossed over the river the same way

Joshua crossed the Jordan. This Jesus, the new Joshua and ultimate only savior, enters the

Jordan on the east side, is baptized and then crosses the Jordan into the promised land of Israel to begin his public ministry.

Jesus's death and resurrection will open the doors to the new promised land of heaven and he will pour forth his spirit on his followers so that they may conquer the seven deadly sins just as Joshua battles the seven nations of Canaan.

So where Joshua brought them into the promised land but could not conquer the enemies,

Jesus is going to bring us into the promised land and conquer his enemies. So Joshua was pointing forward to a greater

Joshua, Jesus. So let me ask you this. Why do you think

Jesus had to be baptized? What does Jesus's baptism signify?

To fulfill all righteousness, yes. What does that mean? If Jesus didn't get baptized, he wouldn't be righteous?

There's a lot of different competing answers to this question. Hopefully we're gonna get some more clarity as to what it's pointing towards.

All right, let's move on. Hopefully we'll be able to answer this. Okay, so second, Luke tells us that immediately after his baptism, he began his ministry, ministry being about 30 years of age.

Priests likewise in the old covenant began ministry at the age of 30, following their ordination, which included a ritual bath.

You see where this is starting to point? Jesus, as the spirit hovered over the waters at the original creation, right?

God created heavens and the earth and the spirit hovered over the waters. So the spirit hovers over and rests on Jesus.

He is the new Adam. And this will be the beginning of the new creation.

The cloud, right, that led the Israelites out of the wilderness is the spirit that will also lead

Jesus into the wilderness where he survives the test. Israel failed the test. Jesus, the new

Adam, will pass the test. Finally, immediately after recording the baptism,

Luke gives the genealogy of Jesus. Once we see that Jesus' baptism is the inauguration of his priestly ministry, he is now being ordained as a priest.

The spirit of God resides on him. He takes the ritual bath, which is baptism. His priesthood, nothing could be more appropriate than a genealogy.

Priests of the Old Testament had to prove descent from Aaron or they were not permitted to serve.

If you were not of the line of Aaron, you were not allowed to be a priest. Throughout the Old Testament, Old Testament priests are consistently identified as a son of some previous priest, a sign that the priesthood was tied to a physical descent.

So Luke, having recorded Jesus' baptism into priestly ministry, must show that Jesus had the right to this ministry.

Okay, so yes, most people say when Jesus is baptized, he is identifying with his people and that is true, but this is also identifying

Jesus as a high priest. Okay, he's fulfilling the Old Testament regulations, the

Old Testament requirements, thank you, requirements to be a priest.

Peter Leinhart says it like this, if we see Jesus' own baptism by John as an inauguration to priesthood, some light can be shed on a few of the details of that event, especially as recorded in Luke's account.

First, the question of why Jesus was baptized at all, especially with a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins, has frequently been answered by saying that Jesus himself was identifying with his people.

He submitted to baptism as a part of his work as the sin -bearing substitute, right?

So we talked about the suffering servant who's going to take the place of his people. He now enters into the body with them.

He enters into a union with them to become their substitute. This explanation fits very snugly with the view that Jesus was baptized into priestly ministry.

The high priest of Israel, after all, was a sin -bearer. Throughout the year, the sins of Israel accumulated on the high priest until they were confessed over, the scapegoat, and sent out of the camp on the

Day of Atonement. The Aaronic priests were ordained to bear the sins of Israel, baptized into substitutionary ministry.

You see how this now lends clarity to why Jesus was baptized? He's now the high priest.

He's going to be their sin -bearer. He identifies with his people, and now he's going to take on the sins of the people.

Immediately after his baptism, like the nation of Israel, after the Exodus, what did he do? He went out into the wilderness.

Since the Messiah was going to be the representative for his people, it shouldn't surprise us to see that he faced the temptations that they themselves faced.

The devil tempted him three times, right? And every time, Jesus answered what? It is written.

It is written. It is written. He went right back to the Scriptures. But unlike the first Adam and Israel of old,

Jesus did not succumb to temptation in the wilderness. He came out on the other side victorious.

He is the last Adam and true Israel. Israel was in the wilderness for 40 years.

Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days. This is a recapitulation of Israel, and we're going to get more into that later.

Recapitulation just means a retelling of the story or what the Old Testament was pointing towards.

So what exactly does that mean for us? First, that Jesus is the son of Abraham, thus making him true

Israel. God's covenant promises given with respect to Abraham's seed were really given to Christ.

It was to Abraham and his seed, singular. In the unfolding of redemptive history, the seed of Abraham in typical form was the nation of Israel.

But as the Apostle Paul says in Galatians 3 .16, it was about Jesus. It was about Christ, the true spiritual seed.

Matthew 1 .1 reads, The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Adam.

Right? Abraham, I'm sorry. So this, again, is pointing to the fact that the seed is going to be from Abraham and future.

Jesus fulfills that. He is the seed. In other words, the prophesied one who would crush the head of the serpent is here.

He is the seed of the woman. He's the offspring that was promised to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 .15.

Next, we also see that Jesus is the son of David, thus fulfilling

God's promise to keep one of David's sons on the throne to rule and reign. At the beginning of the genealogy,

Matthew mentions three major epochs in Israel's history, 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 generations from David to the exile, and 14 from the deportation exile to Jesus.

The reference to the period from Abraham to David and from David to the exile marks the totality of Israel's history as they waited for the promise from the father.

So again, Jesus is fulfilling each one of these offices as he is the son of David, as he is the seed of Abraham, as he is the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent.

The genealogy of Jesus is more than a mere record of lineage. It introduces the idea of Christ being the fulfillment of the entirety of Israel's promises and prepares the reader for the idea of Christ as the one who recapitulates

Israel's history in order to fulfill those promises. So this is astounding. If you see all of the unfolding of the whole

Old Testament and all of these prophecies, how they all land on one man who fulfills them in totality completely.

After he was born, Jesus goes down into Egypt. Out of Egypt, I called my son.

Through the waters, through the Red Sea, into the wilderness like Jesus did.

The Israelites went into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil where he overcomes by using the scripture that God gave to Israel in the wilderness.

Up on the mountain, Moses went up the mountain. Down from the mountain to feed people with the bread like God fed

Israel with the manna in the wilderness. Jesus would be the bread, the manna from heaven that God gives to his people.

Then Jesus recapitulates the kingdom period telling the religious leaders of Israel that he was one greater than David.

He was one greater than Solomon. He was one greater than Jonah. And he is greater than the temple which

Solomon built. This one who is greater has arrived as the king of Israel.

He is the anointed. He is the Mashiach. Jesus explains that he and his disciples were the antitype of David and his mighty men.

When he walked through the grain fields on the Sabbath doing something similar to what David did when he took the showbread of his mighty men.

Recapitulation, just to let you know what this means, refers to the process of summarizing or condensing a large amount of information into a concise and meaningful form.

So now everything that happened to Israel over that long period of time is going to happen to Jesus in a condensed, shortened period of time.

So watch the parallel here with Moses. Pharaoh was worried that Moses and his people were going to take over.

With Jesus, King Herod was worried about Jesus taking over. He wanted all the babies executed.

Pharaoh ordered all the newborn babies slaughtered. Herod ordered the newborn babies slaughtered.

Moses was saved from death. They put him in the little ark, in the little basket, sent him across the river.

Jesus was saved from death by his parents. They took him out of the area.

Moses fled to Egypt. Jesus and Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt. Moses was a slave who ended up going into Pharaoh's palace to become royalty.

Jesus was royalty who became a slave. It's the opposite. Both were shepherds.

Moses led the enslaved Hebrews to freedom from the Egyptians and death. Jesus led the enslaved humans, spiritual

Israel, to freedom and eternal life from death. Moses was a non -slave, a

Hebrew. Jesus was a non -sinner, human, divine. Moses led them to freedom through the waters of the

Red Sea. Jesus leads humans to freedom through the waters of baptism. And when I say the waters of baptism,

I'm talking about spirit baptism followed by baptism in the water. Any questions at this point?

Good? Okay. Moses went up the mountain to pray. Jesus went up the mountain to pray.

God gave the people God's law, God's word. Jesus fulfills

God's law, gives us a deeper law and is the word of God. Remember, Jesus puts a heightened emphasis on law.

He says, the law says thou shall not murder. But I tell you, if you've ever had a hateful thought or called someone a fool, you've committed murder in your heart.

He takes it from the external and brings it internally. Moses led Israel to the promised land.

Jesus leads us into the eternal promised land or heaven. Do you see how all this is being fulfilled?

How when you see Jesus and all the New Testament writers writing about him, how this is so prefigured in the

Old Testament? It's just amazing that this all comes true like this. After Jesus' temptation,

John the Baptist was arrested and executed. But anticipation still was building. John's followers were waiting to hear from Jesus.

For those who had eyes to see, everything was pointing in one direction. But would

John's prophecies and Jesus' actions just lead to more disappointment and waiting? Remember, up until this point, they've been waiting and being disappointed, waiting, being disappointing, being disobedient, being taken captive, being deported.

It's been a constant up and down thing for them. They're thinking, he looks like he might be the right one, but who knows?

Finally, centuries after the promises to the last prophets, a millennium and more after the promises to David, Judah, and Abraham and Adam, it happened.

In our first stop in the New Testament, we see that Jesus came proclaiming the gospel or the good news from God. Now after John was arrested,

Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, the time is fulfilled.

The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel. He announced who he was.

He announced that all of these prophecies that they were waiting on have been fulfilled.

The time is now. That's what at hand means. His announcement of this news had three basic components.

First, he said the time is fulfilled. Could you imagine the thrill of those who are waiting to see the fulfillment of all that God had promised?

Imagine that you're one of them. Imagine from as far back as you can remember, your grandfather has told you about the promises of God that he's been waiting for his whole life.

He heard them from his grandfather and his grandfather from his grandfather and so on and so on and so on for hundreds of years.

They were waiting, anticipating, they were waiting for this Messiah to come. But here was

Jesus, standing in the wilderness in Galilee in the northern part of the promised land, announcing that the time had finally come.

Imagine what was going through some of their minds and hearts. Some great joy and for the

Pharisees, great hatred. The time is fulfilled meant that the hopes of Adam and Eve, Abraham and the patriarchs,

David and his son, all of the prophets, and all of those faithful Old Testament believers were finally being fulfilled.

Second, Jesus says the kingdom of God is at hand. The rule of God would finally be established or inaugurated here on earth because the promised king who would perfectly keep

God's law and perfectly reign over the people was finally present among them. Do you remember what the characteristics of the kingdom of God were?

Anybody remember? Okay. God's people in God's place under God's rule and enjoying

God's blessing. That's what the kingdom is defined by. God's people in God's place under God's rule enjoying

God's blessing. Right now, the church on earth is that people.

Now, we're not done. We still have a lot of work to do. We have to take dominion over the whole world. We have to extend

God's kingdom and the church worldwide because Jesus is ruling and reigning until when?

He makes his enemies a footstool for his feet. And he does that through the church. Jesus, as the anointed king, the

Messiah, would succeed where Adam failed. Even though Adam was the image of God, he did not rule

God's kingdom as he should have. Neither did any of the kings in Israel or Judah.

So the moment that Satan started speaking to Eve, what should Adam have done? Get out of here!

You don't belong here. You don't talk to my wife. I talk to my wife and I get my orders from God.

But he didn't do that. So now Jesus comes. He's the word made flesh. He now comes to earth.

What is one of the first things he does? He starts casting out demons. You don't belong here.

Get out! The same way Adam should have cast Satan out of the garden. You don't belong here.

You're a fallen angel. You're a demon. Get out! That's why Jesus comes to earth and starts casting demons out because in the new creation,

God's people are to get rid of the fallen angels. They have no place here.

Finally, here was the one who would do what no other king could do. He would act as God's representative ruler, the true king.

But in order to establish his perfect reign, he would have to be the representative servant of God, which would mean he would have to suffer on behalf of God's people.

Finally, Jesus announced, repent and believe in the gospel. Who knows what the word gospel means?

Good news, right? So what was that good news, that word gospel?

What did that word gospel mean before Jesus came on the scene? Right. They used that word before Jesus.

And that word was when somebody became king. The good news, Caesar is

Lord. He conquered all the enemies. We now have him as our Lord. He's king.

The gospel is that Jesus is Lord. Caesar's not your Lord anymore. He rules and reigns over Caesar or any other earthly king.

So the good news is that God is our king. Remember in Old Testament Israel, they wanted

Saul to be king, right? And God's like, you know what he's going to do?

He's going to fleece you guys. He's going to put you in the army. You're going to be fighting battles you shouldn't be fighting. They're like, no, no, no, no, we want a king.

And then God gave them what they wanted, what they deserved. Now God is giving us what we don't deserve, him as our king, him as our savior, him as our father.

This was a call, the gospel, for the people to trust that God would fulfill his covenant, that the way to finally be and do what he had called the human race to do and be would not come through their work, but instead through rest in him.

Jesus, the representative of God's people, would do what they could not do for themselves, and he called them to believe that that was finally happening.

The time that they had been waiting for had finally come. All that time waiting through all the

Old Testament promises, waiting to see what the fulfillment of all of those would be finally culminated in Jesus.

Remember our scripture, not our scripture, our quote for the day? Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

Gustave Flaubert. When we, thankfully, we have the New Testament and we have the

Old Testament, we were talking about this this morning, do not unhitch yourself from the Old Testament.

The New Testament won't make any sense. Who is this one they prophesied about if you've unhitched yourself from the

Old Testament? The Old Testament is God's word, and Deuteronomy 8 .3 says, man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word out of the mouth of God.

If you unhitch the Old Testament and throw it to the side, you're throwing away God's word.

It's something he wants you to feast on, or to meditate on the law. The law is not just the

Ten Commandments. The law is a word that means instruction. It means the Old Testament as well as the New Testament.

So do not throw that away. Now, us living on this side of the cross, we can see the fulfillment in the church.

We can see the fulfillment as the gospel goes forward and people's lives get radically changed by coming into an encounter with Jesus, repenting and trusting

Christ for their sins. People's lives have been changed for the better worldwide. And we can also point to the saints of old in the

Old Testament who were waiting for this to happen. Thankfully, we get to see it from this side of the cross, not the other side.

Think of how blessed you are to have all that information and have the completion of God's word in the

New Testament. All right, so what did we learn this week? We understand that the kingdom of God is at hand.

It started, it was inaugurated when Jesus came to earth. All right, he's the second

Adam, and where the first Adam failed, he will not. He started casting out demons, he started healing people, he started sharing the good news that Jesus is

Lord. We see all of the fulfillment of all the prophecies that were about Jesus.

There are more to be fulfilled when he comes back at the end of history, okay? But the ones that we went through in the

Old Covenant have been fulfilled by Jesus. So here's our summary up until this point.

God created a very good kingdom of which he is the king. He created human beings, his children, to represent him in that kingdom, and they were responsible to expand it.

Through their sin, Adam and Eve rejected God's commission and rebelled against their father and creator. Yet God proved his covenant love towards them despite their unfaithfulness.

Very good did not turn into very bad. It just proved the character of who was always very good, and we'll see why he's very good in a greater way with the fulfillment of Jesus.

He sends his son to die in the place of rebel sinners, right?

You need to repent and place your faith and trust in him if you don't have a payment for your sin, or you will be the payment for your sin.

There will be ongoing enmity between the offspring from now on, but God promised a redeemer who will crush the head of the enemy and secure

God's victory. With this promise, very bad turned into very hopeful, and very hopeful turned into very true in the arrival of Jesus.

Next, God chose Abraham, an idolater, to bring the seed through whom the covenant blessings would come to all of the families of the world.

Despite the sinful lineage of Abraham's family and specifically Judah's royal seed through David, God is still faithful to bring the covenant blessings to the world, which would be ruled by a faithful king.

Because all people were guilty and deserved death, the blood sacrifices of the Mosaic law revealed more clearly their guilt and ongoing need for a substitute, the one suffering servant of Isaiah 53.

Though the servant and the work, through the servant and the work of the spirit, God would establish a new covenant and give lasting life to his people.

Through the servant and the work of the spirit, God would establish a new covenant and give lasting life to the people in the new heavens and the new earth.

Jesus is the promised one, the anointed one, the seed of the woman who will crush the head of the serpent.

He is true Israel, and he is our high priest through whom all of these promises find their fulfillment.

Questions? You guys got this? Hold that. Help. Help me.

So do you see how God's unfolding plan finds its fulfillment in Christ? And don't you see how lucky

God got? Lot of coincidences. I mean, it's like hitting the lotto four times in a row.

You see God's sovereign hand bringing all these things to pass. For the people who deny

God's sovereignty and his meticulous control over all things, how on earth do you think we got to this point with Jesus being the fulfillment of all these things had he not providentially brought history to this point?

It's impossible. He is sovereign over all. Like R .C.

Sproul says, there is no maverick molecule. There's no molecule that's going to fly off that's going to destroy

God's plan. Everything is within his control, and he's guiding, providentially, everything that he decreed to happen.

So I should say this. When we talk about God's sovereignty, that's his rule over everything.

We talk about his decree, which is his eternal plan for everything. How does he carry out the decree?

Through providence, which is a subset of his sovereignty. He providentially moves history forward the exact way he wants to to bring the fulfillment of things that he's promised in the past.

Make sense? All right, let's pray. Father in heaven, we do thank you,

Lord, that you are a covenant -keeping God, that everything that you promised in the Old Covenant has found its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

And Lord, we thank you for all the blessings that we have in Jesus. We thank you for the forgiveness of sins. We thank you for the gift of everlasting life.

We thank you for our union with him and our union with you that we can now come into your presence as there is fullness of joy with you.

Father, we pray that you would bless anyone who's listening to this recording, that you would grant them eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to believe.

We also ask your blessing upon our worship service that's upcoming. May we worship you in spirit and in truth and bring you the worship that you are worthy of.