Intruder in the Dust

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church.

Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota.

We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg.

The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew chapter 4 verses 1 to 11.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

After fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry.

And the tempter came and said to him, If you are the Son of God, command these stones

to become loaves of bread.

And he answered, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by

every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Then the devil took him to the holy city, set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, If you are the Son of

God, throw yourself down.

For it is written, He will command his angels concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a

stone.

Jesus said to him again, It is written, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.

Again the devil took him to a very high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

And he said to him, All of these I will give to you if you will fall down and worship me.

Then Jesus said to him, Be gone, Satan!

For it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve.

Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.".

This is the Gospel of the Lord.

In the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Alright.

Every earthly military battle has its aftermath and its grisly

mathematics.

Now, keep that in mind.

When I was growing up, I had family from Tennessee and from Georgia.

And our family would visit them fairly regularly.

And although I grew up in Southern California, I was never considered by them to be from the South.

It's weird how that works.

I mean, technically I was part of their South, and never mind.

You get the point.

So, my Southern relatives, when we would visit, whenever the American Civil War was invoked, they would

always correct me and say, It's not the Civil War, that's the War of Northern Aggression.

Hmm.

Okay.

I don't know if you've noticed, the Southerners are a little touchy about this even to this day.

It's as if the loss of the Civil War has left, well, a pretty serious mark on

the psyche of the people in the South that lingers to this day.

And that's relevant for our text.

So, regardless of what you call it, whether it's the War of Northern Aggression or the Civil War, the South

effectively lost that war in early July of 1863 at

the Battle of Gettysburg, which took place in the North in the state of Pennsylvania.

That battle lasted three days, July 1st, July 2nd, and July 3rd, and it was the

ultimate collision of the two armies.

The South nearly won the battle on day two, but had just come up literally inches short.

It's almost miraculous when you consider the battle tactics that were involved in maintaining the military

positions on the little round tops, but I digress.

General Longstreet of the Confederate Army noted that General Lee's blood was up.

He was really incensed that they did not actually defeat the Union forces on the second day, and so he was

determined to fight and defeat the Union army who was in front of him.

The solution that he came up with will forever go down in history as one of the most costly decisions ever

made in the annals of armed military conflict.

It is known as Pickett's Charge.

And on July 3rd, 1863, at 2 p .m .—that's when it

started—12 ,500 Confederate soldiers marched

across an open field in full view of Union artillery batteries and riflemen with the

objective of taking Cemetery Ridge.

Only half the men who marched onto that field that day survived the ordeal.

In fact, it was such a sound defeat that William Faulkner, years later in his work

titled Intruder in the Dust, notes that this day, July 3rd,

1863, 2 p .m., is burned into the hearts of young men from the

South.

Here's what he wrote, for every Southern boy 14 years old, not once,

but whenever he wants, there is the instant when it's still not yet 2 o

'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.

The brigades are in position behind the rail fence.

The guns are laid and ready in the woods, and the furled flags are already loosened to break out.

And Pickett himself, with his long, oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand, probably, and

his sword in the other, looking up the hill, waiting for Longstreet to give the word.

And it's all in the balance.

It hasn't happened yet.

It hasn't even begun yet.

It not only hasn't begun yet, but there is still time for it not to begin

against that position and those circumstances.

But see, Pickett's charge did happen.

Pickett did give the order to send his men across that field.

And his division was annihilated.

And the Confederate army did lose the Battle of Gettysburg.

In fact, there's no way to undo that defeat.

And living in an alternate reality where you can imagine what it was like before they lost

is really nothing but wishful thinking and a way of not actually having to deal with the painful reality

and the brutal truth of defeat.

And in losing the Battle of Gettysburg, the South had effectively lost the war that day.

The outcome was inevitable.

It was a couple years later when Antietam, not Antietam, but the

courthouse, I forget the name of it happened.

But anyway, you get what I'm saying.

I'm getting old.

So here's the idea then.

This battle, the losses on both sides were catastrophic.

Consider this.

The Union army in the Battle of Gettysburg lost 23 ,000 men

who were either killed, wounded, or went missing.

Literally, their bodies just ceased to exist after they were blown up.

Confederate army, 28 ,000 men were either killed, wounded, or missing.

Total, 61 ,000 men in three days.

The cost of this battle is staggering to calculate and to contemplate

as far as the repercussions that it had on human lives.

But I want you to consider this.

Our Old Testament and Epistle text today, in them we see the aftermath of

our failed conflict with the enemy of God, who's the devil.

And this encounter was truly a cosmically cataclysmic

defeat, and the cost of this defeat makes Gettysburg look like a picnic or a walk in the

park.

In fact, if you really think about it, going back and imagining what life was like

before this happened, you know, Genesis 2, when Adam and Eve live in

paradise, walking around naked without shame, we have no way of even contemplating

that.

None of us have even experienced anything like it.

And so with that, let's return, and I want to look at the aftermath of the effects in Genesis 3.

We'll start at verse 16.

There's a few things I want to pick up before we get into our Epistle text and then ultimately into our Gospel.

Genesis 3, 16, God is speaking punishment now to Adam and Eve

for their disobedience.

To the woman He said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing.

In pain you shall bring forth children.

Not many women in this room do not know what this is talking about.

We thank God for epidurals and things like that, but still.

And your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.

If you remember back in the early part of Genesis 3, it talks about how Eve desired

the fruit, that she sought and it was desirous.

That same word, desire, there is here, and basically the way the Hebrew works and what it's saying

is that because of the fall, your desire will be to be

above your husband.

To rule over him, but he will rule over you.

In other words, those of us who are married who understand that there always seems to be a constant power conflict within our

marriages.

This is a result of the fall.

Don't elbow your spouse, please.

Adam, he said, because you've listened to the voice of your wife and you've eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat

of it.

Note, God here tells you who you should be listening to.

You listen to me, not to other people, even your own wife, if your wife is telling you to do something contrary to the will of God.

Because you've done this and listened to her voice, not mine, cursed is the ground because of you.

In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.

Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field by the sweat of your

face.

You shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust,

and to dust you shall return.

Calculate the math here.

So each and every one of us, from the time we're born, already have one foot in the grave.

Each and every one of us, in order to survive, depend upon toil and the sweat of our brows to pay our

bills.

And each of the farmers here understand that when they plant their crop in the spring, there's no guarantee that it'll yield a

harvest when it comes time for the fall.

We have to battle bugs and thorns and thistles and hailstorms and all this kind of stuff,

all the while while keeping a careful eye on our bank accounts, praying that we have enough pennies at the end to pay the

bills.

All of this is because when we went toe -to -toe with the devil, we listened to

him rather than listen to God.

We were in battle and didn't recognize it for what it was, and we lost.

And so every single one of us who has family members in that graveyard, every single one of

us who have recently lost somebody that we love, or lost somebody we loved long ago, or

each and every one of us who suffers with languishing debilitating pain in our

bodies as we head towards the grave, all of this is the grisly

mathematics caused by our failed encounter with the devil.

We were thrust under the dominion of darkness, put in bondage to sin,

death, and the devil.

And who's going to rescue us from that?

The text then continues, the man called his wife Hawah, that's the Hebrew, because she was the

mother of all the living.

And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins, and he clothed them.

A hint at the gospel itself.

Some poor animal, maybe even a lamb or two, had to lose their lives

in order for Adam and Eve to be clothed.

Important to note.

Verse 22, which is not in our pericope, I think is important.

Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us.

This is the Trinity speaking amongst itself.

I don't know if that's the right way the pronouns work when talking about the Trinity, but I think it's a good

way of looking at it.

So the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are discussing among themselves, man's become like one of us,

knowing good and evil.

Now lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever.

If you notice that that sentence doesn't seem like it's complete.

In the ESV, in your pew Bible, after the word forever there's a dash.

The reason for that dash is simple.

It's because this is not a complete sentence in Hebrew.

It's as if God, the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, contemplating the magnitude and the

depth of the defeat that we have suffered, contemplates and thinks the

only thing worse than this would be if man reached out his hand and ate of the tree of

life and lived forever in a sinful, fallen, corrupt

state in bondage to sin and the devil.

And the thought is so unthinkable he can't even finish his sentence.

Lest he reach out his hand and eat of the tree of life and live forever.

What a thought.

This is defeat of the highest magnitude.

So what is the result of this defeat in theological terms?

A little bit of a note here.

You'll notice Genesis 3 is historical narrative.

Our epistle text, Romans 5, technically is a type of passage known as a didactic

text.

It is a teaching text.

It gives us the theology so that we know what the theological implications are of

Genesis 3.

And here's what Romans 5 12 says.

Therefore just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin and so death spread to

all men because all sinned.

This is not painting a pretty picture.

The person who really thinks that life is nothing but My Little Pony and rainbows and that people are

basically good does not understand the reality of the situation.

Man is not basically good because of what Adam and Eve did.

Sin has come into the world and it has impacted every single one of us.

For sin was indeed in the world before the law was given yet sin is not counted where there is no law.

Yet death reigned.

What reigned?

Death did.

Death reigned from Adam to Moses even over those who sinning was not like the transgression of Adam

who was a type who was a one to come.

And here in our epistle text we begin to see the turn.

In the face of such cataclysmic defeat of which the consequences are so

ginormous that we can't even begin to calculate.

In the midst of all of this we begin to hear the hints of a second Adam.

Not the first Adam but a second Adam.

The first Adam pointing to Him.

The second Adam being Christ.

And here's what it says but the free gift.

The free gift?

There's a free gift?

Tell me about that free gift because I think we need something like that.

The free gift is not like the trespass for if the many died through the one man's trespass and

that's all of us how much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man

Jesus Christ abounded for many.

And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin for judgment following

one trespass brought condemnation.

Notice no second chances.

Adam and Eve they broke one command judgment follows and that brought

condemnation not just to them but to every one of us.

But the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.

Important word.

It's a legal term.

When you go to court and the judge slaps the gavel down and says either guilty or not guilty

justification is when the judge declares you not guilty or innocent.

So the free gift brings not guilty?

For if because of the one man's trespass death reigned through that one man how much

more will those who receive the abundance of grace and watch what the free gift is and the

free gift of righteousness.

Scripture says that the free gift is righteousness.

That's Christ's righteousness given to you and to me.

Remember how God clothed Adam and Eve.

He now God is clothing us in the righteousness of Christ and he's doing this not by a

wage.

You don't earn it.

He's doing this as a gift.

So the free gift.

The abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus

Christ.

Therefore as one trespass led to condemnation for all men.

One of them did.

One led to condemnation for all men.

So one act of righteousness this is Christ's death on the cross for you and for me leads to

justification and life for all men.

For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners.

This is the reason why in our confession of sin we confess these words.

I confess that I am by nature sinful and unclean

because according to Adam's sin we were all made to be sinners.

So though by the one man's obedience the many that's us will be made righteous

and all of this is a gift from God.

Well how can this be?

How can this be?

Well our gospel text and I want you to consider this is truly amazing and it

should cause all of us to stand up and to take note and as a result of it

begin to dare to hope in our deliverance and our redemption.

Our gospel text recalls the hand to hand combat of Jesus who is one of our own.

He's a man.

A descendant of Adam and Eve but he's also God in human flesh.

And his battle against the same foe who defeated our first parents doesn't end up in the same

tragic result.

Rather than defeat it results in victory.

In fact consider this.

Return with me now to our gospel text in Matthew chapter 4.

Here's what it says.

Jesus was led up by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

And every one of us in hearing that sentence should shudder because up to this

point the devil is the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world.

There is nobody who's gone toe to toe with this foe and won.

And after fasting for 40 days and 40 nights he was hungry.

Two notes on this sentence.

You'll see that 40 days 40 nights children of Israel were 40 years in the wilderness.

All of this is showing that Jesus is Israel squished into one human being.

But this does not sound like the way you prepare for mortal battle.

I want you to consider the Rocky movies if you would.

Remember the original Rocky movie?

And Mick?

When Rocky was training to go against Apollo Creed was he fasting?

No.

What was he doing?

He was training.

He was chasing chickens while Mick was yelling at him.

Catch the chicken Rock.

Catch the chicken.

And don't stay away from your wife because women they weaken legs.

You know this is the way Rock talks.

Mick talks.

And so what does he do?

He's training.

He's running.

He's lifting weights.

He's drinking raw eggs.

He's boxing pieces of meat.

He's getting ready to go against Apollo Creed.

Because this is how you defeat an enemy.

But what's Jesus doing?

Eating nothing.

Now I don't know if you've noticed.

It may not be the same for you.

But I have a difficult time making it from lunch to dinner.

Okay?

As we get close to the 5 o 'clock hour.

I don't know if I can make it.

And by the time 6 o 'clock rolls around when dinner is in our house I'm crawling down the stairs.

I don't think I can make it.

I'm so hungry.

I'm starving.

Jesus has gone 40 days without eating.

I don't know how anyone does this.

And he's doing this in preparation for his battle with the devil.

It says after fasting for 40 days and 40 nights he was hungry.

In my notes, duh.

Of course he's hungry.

So the tempter came and said to him.

Now watch.

If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.

What's the devil going after?

Well, the context helps us.

If you look just back into chapter 3, you remember Jesus is baptized by John the

Baptist and the voice of the Father is audibly heard.

What does the voice of the Father say?

This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.

So here's the temptation of the devil.

He always has to go after the Word of God.

God told Adam and Eve, don't eat from that tree.

The day you eat of it, you'll surely die.

The devil comes along and says, you will not surely die.

Don't believe God.

He's a liar.

So here's Jesus in the wilderness, hungry, duh.

And the devil says to him, if you are the Son of God, I'm sure you are.

But I mean, you heard that voice, the Word of God.

Let's test to see if that's really true, Jesus.

Then command these stones to become bread.

And then Jesus, his first counterattack against the devil's battle plan,

quotes Deuteronomy.

It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.

Repulses the devil with the Word of God.

No secret ninja moves.

None of that.

No power -ups needed, for those of you who play video games.

None of that.

He just simply quotes back the Word of God, and oh, he's hungry.

So the devil basically thinks, alright, he wants to play that game.

He can quote the Word of God.

Well, I can quote the Word of God, too.

But remember, Jesus tells us about the devil.

He's a liar, and the truth is not in him.

So when the devil quotes the Word of God, trust me when I tell you he's quoting it out of context and misquoting it.

So the devil took him to the holy city, set him on the pinnacle of the temple, said to him, if you are the son of God,

throw yourself down for it is written he will command his angels concerning you, and you should put dot,

dot, dot, and on their hands they will bear you up lest you strike your foot against a stone.

He's quoting Psalm 87, but leaving an important little piece of it out to make it look like the Bible is teaching

that the Messiah, when he shows up, can do crazy things like jump off of cliffs without a parachute and that

the angels would catch him.

But that's not what the text is saying in Jesus.

You can almost see Jesus kind of going, listen, I got things to do here.

It's written you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.

This doesn't even seem like a fair fight.

So again, the devil took him to the very high mountains, and by the way, important things happen on high mountains, and the devil knows this,

thinking this is the pinnacle moment, I'll take Jesus up on a high mountain, we'll recreate Sinai, and this time I can be

God.

And so the devil takes him to the high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to them, all

of these I will give to you if you will fall down and worship me.

What a sick, sick, narcissistic creep the devil

is.

And Jesus said, be gone.

It's written you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.

As far as epic battles go, that was the least epic of the epic battles I've ever read

have anywhere.

And yet, in listening to the voice of God and not listening to the voice of the devil,

unlike Adam and Eve, unlike us, Christ defeats the devil that day.

It says the devil left him, behold the angels came and were ministering to them and hopefully they brought him a Big Mac.

So Jesus won.

He defeated the serpent.

Now I want you to think about this, the implications of it.

We, like the 14 year old boys of the south that Faulkner talks about,

we look back through Genesis 3 into Genesis 2 and we try to imagine what it was like

before the serpent struck.

But with Jesus' victory over the devil, we no longer need to look backwards.

We can now begin to look forward.

And the reason for this is quite simple, because also in Genesis 3 we heard these important words.

The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, curser you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field, and on

your belly you shall go.

And dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her

offspring, singular referring to Jesus.

He shall bruise your head, you shall bruise his heel.

Jesus will literally crush your head.

Mortal blow.

And already we read in our Gospel text, Jesus is on military

campaign and the first toe to toe battle with the devil, the devil comes up the loser.

First time in human history.

And then Jesus ultimately crushes the head of the serpent by going to the cross,

and bleeding and dying for our sins.

Taking all of our guilt and shame upon Himself, so that God can say to you and

to me, innocent, forgiven, pardoned, not guilty.

So that we can be set free from the dominion of darkness.

And all of this these consequences that we are suffering because of the defeat that

we suffered at the hands of the devil.

By listening to Him rather than to God, Christ is undoing all of that.

And so we read in our psalm today, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,

and whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man and woman against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there

is no deceit.

And so our psalm today tells you of your blessed state because of what

Christ has done because your transgression is forgiven.

Your sin is covered.

The Lord will never count against you your iniquity because it was imputed to Christ.

He bled and died for it.

And now all of your sins have been cast into the sea of God's forgetfulness.

And there's a posted sign that says no fishing allowed.

Talking of our languishing under the curse.

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all the day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me.

My strength was dried up as like that of the heat of summer.

But I acknowledged my sin to you.

And this is what it talks about when it talks about repentance.

Repentance is acknowledging your sin before God and saying I am guilty.

I have sided with the devil.

I have listened to his voice and not yours and done what is evil in your sight.

So I acknowledge my sin to you Lord and I did not cover my iniquity.

I didn't hide it.

I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.

And then you hear these wonderful words and you forgave the iniquity, the shame and the guilt

of all of my sin.

Here's the therefore.

So therefore let everyone who is godly and that is you and me because we are in Christ.

Clothed with the righteousness of Christ.

Remember the text said the gift of righteousness given to you.

Therefore let everyone who is godly now offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found.

And today is the day of salvation.

Christ can truly be found.

He's here today forgiving sins.

He's here today in the Lord's supper in His body and blood broken and shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins.

He's here today.

He can be found today and because He can be found today you can be forgiven.

You can be assured of the life to come and it's all given as a gift.

So surely in the rush of the great waters they shall not reach Him.

And now we can say of Christ you are a hiding place for me.

You preserve me from trouble and you surround me with shouts not of

defeat.

You surround me with shouts of deliverance.

What a great victory Christ has won for us in the face of our

cataclysmic defeat by listening to the voice of the devil.

All of this is by grace.

All of it is received through faith.

So let us again repent.

Acknowledge our sin before God.

Let us again acknowledge that we have fallen short and receive the

abundance of grace in Christ so that our sins may be covered.

Our iniquity atoned for so that we can be covered with shouts of deliverance and

have a hope.

A hope of the world to come when the final battle takes place and Jesus returns in glory

to judge the living and the dead and kills the devil with the breath of His mouth and

casts Him into the great lake of fire and makes all things new.

The defeat that we are all still languishing under is going to be flipped over,

done away with, and we will live in Christ's victory and in the shadow of His wings

forever.

In the name of Jesus, Amen.

We thank you for your support.

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And again, thank you for listening.