Follow Me II: Observing Through the Old Testament | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratia, and I'm here again this week with John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany, author and teacher of the

Behold Your God study series for Media Gratia. And we are in part two of a three -part series on what it means to follow

Christ. So following Christ, follow me, that's one of the most basic parts of Christianity, as we've said in part one of this series, you really can't read through the

New Testaments and the Gospels without seeing Christ say again and again, follow me.

And if any man desires to follow me and come after me, et cetera, and you can't read the rest of the epistles without hearing this other metaphor of what it means to follow and to walk with the

Lord. So these are incredibly important things, but they're the kinds of things that can be so common.

And we know these are Christian words that maybe we're not as careful with them and we don't derive the most benefit from them.

So that's our point. We wanna pull those things out and really think about what they mean and ask ourselves, are we doing it?

And can we do it better? So I wanna encourage you to go back and listen to part one if you haven't, but we'll do a quick review.

And before we get started, as we've been doing this podcast, we were just talking about how some of the subject matter sort of lends itself to more back and forth conversational things.

If we're talking about a letter that someone wrote or a series of things that someone did, that's the kind of thing that we can talk and say, well, why do you think he said that?

And you know, that reminds me of this. But then others of our podcasts have more of a teaching feel where John is really taking and exegeting passages and talking about theological concepts and teaching.

And this one really falls, I think, more in that category. So I'm gonna get you started.

And then for the most part, as much as I can, I'm gonna try to stay out of your way, but I'll probably interrupt you from time to time.

Yeah, do, do. So what does it mean, just a little bit of a review, what does it mean to follow a person?

Well, last time we talked a lot about walking and following is akin to that metaphor of walking with God.

But following includes some specific aspects of the Christian life, which are really helpful for us. One is that to follow a person, we have to observe him and then we have to imitate him.

So if we're following someone in a car and he gets in the left lane, we get in the left lane. You know, we don't know where we're at in this strange city.

Whatever he does, we do. And following is very personal. It's not like following a list of directions where someone says, let me just write that out, how to get to my house.

And it's not like following instructions when you buy something, you get at home and you think, I don't even know how this thing works.

So you get out the instructions. In those cases, you're really in charge of the pace. And, you know, you can pull out the instructions and then you can say, ah, this looks pretty involved.

I'm just gonna go have lunch now, come back and do that later. Following a person, there is no, you are not in control.

There is a relinquishment of control. There is a submission to another person. And so that's gonna involve trust.

And in the Christian life, it involves love. It involves a constant adjustment of the life to someone else.

Very personal, but it's also ongoing. When we think of following, we cannot say that following in the

Christian life is ever in the past tense. You cannot say, well, I remember imitating Christ or I remember watching Christ very closely.

You can be following a person to their home in your car there in front of you. The moment you quit watching them, you've stopped following them.

Or the moment you watch them, but stop imitating them, you can watch them drive down the street, you've stopped following them.

So for the Christian, what a helpful metaphor. The Christian life is having been made alive from the dead, given the spirit of Christ, eyes opened, heart, you know, made new and the will freed.

I see Him, I adore Him, and I want to imitate

Him. But that goes on day after day after day until we see Him enthroned at the end.

Yeah, and so clearly we don't see, we don't have the physical resurrected Christ with us as the disciples did.

And we might be tempted to imitate or to envy them rather, because well, you know, they could follow

Him. All they had to do is just literally keep their eyes on Him. But the Lord said it's actually better for us not to have

Him with us physically. And so how do we follow Him now? It's very easy to follow a

Jesus that we've imagined. It's very easy to follow a Jesus that our religious culture has presented us with.

And it may be that, you know, you go to a church that the picture of Christ that you're given is a carefully explained picture, very biblical.

So it's a wonderful help. And the picture of Christ you see in other people, very helpful, but not all of us go to churches like that.

And even if you're in a healthy church, that is not the Word of God. That is a wonderful means of grace, but it is not the authority.

So we go back to the Bible. We have the Old Testament. And that's like the black and white pictures of an old family album, you know.

You look there and you see your grandfather when he was your age and you think, oh, look at grandpa, like I never knew he was young.

And he looks a lot different than he did, you know, when he was 70. But because you know him at 70, you look back and you say, no,

I know who that is, that's grandpa. We look at the Old Testament and we see these foreshadowings, these types, these symbols of the coming

Messiah. And even though there's not that high definition detail there of Christ, we, knowing

Christ from the New Testament, knowing Christ from the experience of those realities of the New Testament, we look back and, you know, and the

Bible says, this is Christ. And we say, I see him. Maybe you can think of like a silhouette.

People have silhouettes done of their children. So you walk in a home and on the mantelpiece, there'll be like three or four, they have three kids, let's say.

So there's three little silhouettes and you just see the dark shadow of a face and the outline of their profile.

And you look at them and you go, I know which one that is because you know them in real life. We look back at the

Old Testament. The Old Testament, the New Testament says, this was Christ that you were reading about. And we look back and we go, oh yeah, that's my

Lord, you know? And so we want to use the Old Testament. We do not want to treat the

Old Testament like it's a series of moral tales for Sunday school. There is the unfolding of redemption and in the unfolding of redemption, that great scarlet thread running through the entire

Bible, we're going to have God pull us aside frequently and say,

I will let you see my son in this distant picture. So we go back and it really is precious to us to use those.

Yeah, yeah. And I remember last week you saying that in the New Testament, instead of this fuzzy black and white photo where by farther steps redemption is revealed to us, but it's like a documentary.

It's full color. We get to walk alongside the Lord Jesus. We get to see him as he interacts with people in all the different situations that are presented to us in the gospels.

And then we have almost the director's commentary there, you know, in the epistles where the experts, those who walked with them and who had been given the apostolic authority to explain what it is that he taught, we get to read them directly.

So we see Christ in the scriptures. Yeah, and we don't ever want to forget that.

There's so many helps, great books, but it's the scriptures. Next week, we want to talk about the

New Testament, but for this week, we wanted to just give you a couple of examples from the Old Testament. Where do we see

Christ? How do we know that's Christ? And, you know, we aren't the Messiah, but we're called to follow him.

So there ought to be a healthy question mark in our mind. How does that, what does that look like?

And we are imitating his humanity in its perfect responsiveness to the father and in the way he lived among others.

So Matt, why don't you read our first example from Psalm 40? Okay, so Psalm 40 in verses six to eight, we read sacrifice and meal offering you have not desired.

My ears you have opened. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.

Then I said, behold, I come. In the scroll of the book it is written of me.

I delight to do your will. Oh my God, your law is within my heart.

When we read the New Testament, we hit the book of Hebrews, which is, you know, the book for understanding the

Old Testament and how this has all been unfolding. And in Hebrews chapter 10, we read that God was actually never interested in the blood of any animal.

That didn't actually pay for anything. The great value of that was the response of faith on behalf of the people, but also that it was a type, that it was a picture of the coming sacrifice that would not like the

Old Testament be merely symbolic, but that when Christ came in the perfect obedience of his life and the substitutionary death on the cross, he was the sacrifice.

His sacrifice was effective, really took away sins. His sacrifice was once and for all finished.

But in that passage, when we read it, okay, so we know that's talking about our Lord. We know the context is his atoning life, his atoning death, his perfect life.

How could we follow Christ? Well, we have two descriptions there, very simple descriptions. And if we want to be really simple,

I like simple because look, Sunday morning sermons can be pretty complex, but Monday morning, I can't even remember the sermon.

You know, if you ask me the outline from yesterday, I think, hold on, hold on, let me get it. But I can take simple pictures with me through the whole week.

Ears, heart. Here we have a description of our Lord. His ears were opened by his

Father and he listened. And his heart, he delighted to do the will of his

Father. So a very simple picture of a Christian, not merely a person that joins a church, is baptized, makes a profession of following Christ, you know, really joins in with the life of a body of believers, et cetera, et cetera.

A Christian is a person who fundamentally has opened ears and a heart that delights in the

Father's will. So regeneration, have my ears been opened ever? Or am

I like the person that, you know, reads the Bible and you say, so what did you get out of that? And the guy says, just words on a page, man.

I don't know what this is talking about. Has God opened our ears? Do we understand the scriptures when we read them?

And second, do we delight to do his will? I mean, there's different motives for obedience.

There are so many good motives, but they're not good enough, you know? Well, I wanna be a good person.

I wanna be the right kind of husband, right kind of dad, right kind of kid. I wanna be a nice person. Or there's other motives.

I want God to notice me and love me. But the motive of the Lord Jesus, and the only way to really follow

Jesus is not just obey in the way he obeyed, but same motives.

Do I love to do the will of my God for love of him?

Because of whose will it is. So different than religion, so different than morality.

So very simple picture of Christ, Old Testament, Psalm, you read it, you think, hmm, is that David or what?

New Testament, that's Christ. You go back, you look at that black and white photo, you say, oh yeah, that's my

Lord. And then you plead with God morning by morning. Oh God, you sent the spirit to teach me about your son and to transform me into his image little by little.

So give me that kind of ear, that kind of heart. Another passage we wanna look at, one that's a little more descriptive, but along the same lines of open ear and responsive life is found in Isaiah 50.

Isaiah 50 is the third of four songs that the prophet wrote about the coming Messiah.

And in this, Isaiah gives a contrast verses one through three, he describes one type of servant versus four through four and following, he describes a second type of servant and they couldn't be more different.

Verses one through three describes the failure of the servant Israel. And then verse four and following describes the perfection of the servant,

Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Matt, you wanna read us those verses? Sure, so the failed servant, thus says the

Lord, where is the certificate of divorce by which I have sent your mother away? Or to whom of my creditors did

I sell you? Behold, you were sold for your iniquities and for your transgressions, your mother was sent away.

Why was there no man when I came? When I called, why was there none to answer?

Is my hand so short that it cannot ransom? Or have I no power to deliver?

Behold, I dry up the sea with my rebuke. I make the rivers a wilderness.

Their fish stink for lack of water and die of thirst. I clothe the heavens with blackness and make sackcloth their covering.

When we first read this, we might think, that's a strange description. I don't know what it's talking about, you know, all these pictures.

But if we slow down, we notice just a few things about the failed servant. And this is certainly one that we don't wanna imitate, but it's one that we wanna learn from.

There's a few things that really jump out at us. Now, the context is that Israel has been drifting from the

Lord for some time. And God has sent repeated messages. Isaiah is one of the messengers, but he's not the only one.

And generation after generation, they have continued to move away from a living God to an idol. So this is a period of what we would call gracious judgment, where God, like Hebrews tells us in chapter 12, will show that he's our father when we drift from him by disciplining us.

So God begins to discipline Israel, and Israel doesn't understand what's going on. And so they fall prey to the lies of the enemy about God.

And these lies that they've grabbed onto paralyze them, make them an unresponsive people.

And you can see the lies through the kinds of statements that God attributes to them, all right? So first of all,

Israel basically is accusing God that he no longer loves them.

And that is seen in two things. In the first part there, God's divorced us. God's divorced our mother and just put the whole family away.

Well, has God thrown Israel off? No. And then second, God says, to which of my creditors did

I sell you? So it's obvious by God's question that he's implying that this is the way you're acting. You're acting like you're divorced, all right?

So you're like a divorced woman who says, well, look, I need a husband. I'm about to go find another husband. And God is saying, I never divorced you.

Why are you looking for other lovers? Second, we're like people that are sold and we belong to a new master.

So God is saying, I never sold you. Why are you listening to other masters? And another evidence of the failure of Israel is their lack of response.

He says, when I came, when I called, no one answered. And then the final question he asks him is regarding his ability.

Is my hand so short that it can't ransom? Have I no power to deliver? And then he just reminds them of some of the

Old Testament deliverances, how he moved heaven and earth in times past. Now, when we look at that, we want to stop and do some tests for ourselves.

Are we like the failed servant? Have we drifted from the Lord? Have we become cold toward him?

And has God entered into a gracious judgment, a judgment that's meant to awaken us, to turn us back, to bring us out of the shadows, back into the light?

If we misunderstand the working of God, these are two very easy lies to believe. Number one, he doesn't love me anymore.

I feel like God's just thrown me off. I feel like he sold me. And hey, you know, I deserve it.

If I were God, I would have done that too. If you believe that, you totally misread the discipline and you will not respond to him.

Who goes to the door when the person at the door is the one that you think, that person hates me now? You know, let's just pretend like I didn't hear it.

And so Israel misunderstanding, we misunderstand sometimes. And then we forget, has

God changed? Does he no longer have the power to rescue us? Well, he does. So are we like that?

Do we accuse God of not loving us anymore because of the hardness of our life? Do we accuse God of having sold us off and so we go live for another master?

Have we forgotten that God is powerful? And the evidence of all of that is, do I have a responsive heart or not?

You know, when I open, when I wake up in the morning and there's my Bible, do I put aside other things so as to meet with him?

When I open the scriptures, I read what God is saying to me.

Do I respond? Or am I like the guy that hears a knock at the door and says, I hear the knock,

I'm not getting up. You know, so a picture of a failed servant. Now, the complete opposite picture is found in verses four.

And Matt, if you just read verses four through seven for us, we'll look at a quick picture of Christ. The Lord God has given me the tongue of disciples that I may know how to sustain the weary one with a word.

He awakens me morning by morning. He awakens my ear to listen as a disciple.

The Lord God has opened my ear and I was not disobedient, nor did I turn back.

I gave my back to those who strike me and my cheeks to those who pluck out the beard.

I did not cover my face from humiliation and spitting for the Lord God helps me.

Therefore, I am not disgraced. Therefore, I have set my face like flint and I know that I will not be ashamed.

So here's a description of the Messiah. We know it is because we see some phrases here that remind us of the

New Testament. You know, my cheeks, verse six,

I gave my back to those who strike me, my cheeks to those who pluck out the beard. You know, we have the picture of the cross there.

Set my face like flint. Yes, set my face like flint. It's couched right in the middle.

You know, the next servant song is 53 and 53 is so clearly the description of the cross.

But this is what leads up to the cross. What a wonderful privilege that the

Father takes us, you know, centuries before the coming of the Son and stops us as we're walking along through the

Old Testament, says stop, look through that window. And we know the cross is the next window, but we see what kind of life leads to the cross.

And it's very shocking. The one servant that is perfect is the servant that dies.

But this servant is crushed under the wrath of God, not for his unresponsiveness, but for his perfect responsiveness on behalf of his people.

So real quickly, description of Christ here. We have the first thing he describes is the effectiveness of his ministry.

He has words to sustain the weary ones. Now he doesn't start off with the roots.

He starts off with the fruit. Look, I know what to say to the person that's in front of me that needs help.

And then he describes the roots. He says, morning by morning, the Father wakes me up. Morning by morning, he opens my ear.

Again, that picture of a clear channel between the Father and the Son. And then he says,

I was not disobedient. I did not turn back. I didn't rebel. Well, let's think about that.

Christ as a man woke up every morning and as a man heard from the Father.

But how did he know what to say? Well, did he have a divine antenna? I mean, we've talked about this before.

At Christ Church, we've talked about that. Well, you tend to think, well, I can't do that.

You know, I'm not God. No, he was a man. And as a man, he woke up.

We read it through the Gospels. Long before the sunrise, he gets up, he goes and he gets alone with the

Father. All through the night, he's with the Father. There is Christ, heart and ears open to the

Father and the Father and him communing through the Word. And of course, there's an unclogged, perfect ear.

And we don't have that, but we have the same tools, the Spirit, the Word, the access to the

Father. So he hears from the Father and then the wonderful statement, I was not disobedient.

And in the Hebrew, he uses two descriptions. One means rebellion. I did not openly rebel, all right?

I did not say to the Father. And in the context, you know, we're looking at the cross. One morning, you know, in a very simplistic way of saying it, one morning he wakes up and he realizes the cross is near or today is the cross.

What's he do? Well, all these years, he's always obeyed. Well, when this message from the Father is today, you will be the sin bearer.

Does he say to him, no, I will not. I will not be covered in that filthy shame. No, he says,

I didn't rebel. Second word he uses, I didn't step back or step aside.

It's the word in the Hebrew for a person where something's coming at you and you just quietly step aside and let it pass by.

You don't stand in front of him and say, oh no, you don't. You just let it go. So there's two ways to disobey

God. We wake up, we listen to what God says in the word. We want our ears to be opened.

But what happens when he says something to us that's costly? Do we say to him, I will not.

I draw the line. Or not wanting to do that, do we just say, well, let's pretend like you didn't say that in your word and I just sidestep it.

So a wonderful, clear picture of how to do that. But what did he hope in?

Well, he says it right there. I will not be ashamed. Because the father, he trusts in the father.

So no matter what the father says through his word to the son that day, the son's response is 100 % obedience, 100 % submission, and a delight to do it.

How can that be? I know the father is trustworthy. So a very simple pattern for the

Christian. I wake, I listen, I don't turn back, I don't step aside, I don't rebel because my hope is in God.

Let's pause here and we'll have a short break and then let's come back and tie it all together and talk about what we're gonna talk about in our next episode.

So we're here on the last day of the Shepherd's Conference 2019 at Grace Community Church and I've run into Justin Peters.

Justin is an evangelist and you will also recognize him from the American Gospel film.

Thank you so much. You're welcome. I really appreciated your, I mean, your testimony here and your testimony to not just to be anti -prosperity gospel, but to be this is the gospel and to see how beautiful it actually is in contrast.

Right. How did you come to be involved in this? Well, Brandon Kimber contacted me a few years ago and told me about the project that he was working on and when he described it to me, it sounded like it was right up my alley and something

I very much wanted to be a part of and I'm very glad that I was.

I'm glad that he reached me. I think he did a great job with the film, put together really, really well, very compelling and I think it does put in stark relief the contrast between the false prosperity gospel and the true gospel.

That's right. Well, and this film does a great job of that. It's not just a hit piece. You know,

I think he takes about the first 40 minutes and just expounds what is the gospel? What's the message of the gospel?

And then the rest of it, you know, you just almost let these other guys talk and the viewer says, wait a minute, they're not saying what the scripture is saying.

God in his good providence is using that film and the truth they're in to open people's eyes.

Well, I know that I speak on behalf of so many of the people who'll see this to say, thank you. Thanks for spending time with Brandon and Brandon, great job.

You know, we love your film and we're grateful to see the Lord continue to use it. Yeah, amen.

All right. For more information about American Gospel, Christ Alone, visit themeansofgrace .org.

Well, thanks for staying with us. This is, there's so much that we could say about this subject and reducing this down just to three episodes and then a short half hour to look at these things.

We've just run through these things, but I hope that it's clear to me listening just how incredibly important this is.

And the truth is that this introduces the subject, but you, listener, viewer, will have to spend time.

I and John will have to spend time with an open Bible before us and with the spirit of God in us asking, let us observe

Christ, show us really who he is and what he's done and how he lived as a man and how we're to now live.

And then it will require keeping our eyes on him. You know, if we take our eyes off, we know that feeling.

When we feel lost and we realize, oh, I'm lost because I took my eyes off the one

I was supposed to follow. And, you know, the great news is that's not the end of the story because God has given us the gift of faith and repentance.

And so we repent and he's, it's not as if the Lord is desiring to hide himself from his people when we go to him in repentance and faith.

And so, John, you talked about in the Rethinking God Biblically study, an illustration that following Christ really prevents us from having a certain kind of sort of almost plastic

Christian life. So why don't you close us with that? I think I would compare the kind of Christianity where, you know, you're really fascinated with the idea of following, but you don't follow to a person who maybe they're kind of reclusive and they only, they stay home, they don't ever get out.

And you visit them and they have these, all these pictures of exotic places around the world.

They're postcards. And so you say to them, man, have you been to, you've been here, you've been to Britain, you've been to, you know,

Europe, you've been. And they say, well, actually, I don't leave the house. You say, oh, no, these are pictures that I purchase.

And they're beautiful, aren't they? Well, they are, but that's not Christianity. Christianity is not a bunch of beautiful scenes that we read of in scripture of other people's travels.

Christianity is us risking everything because he's worth it, because he's trustworthy, and putting our afraid little hands in his hand and say, here's a passage, teach me.

And then, God, I want to walk like this with you today, wherever it goes, you know. And to me, that's the adventure.

And I am afraid. As a preacher, you know, with all these books and things, I am afraid of gathering a large pile of postcards.

And at the end of life, looking back and saying, you didn't go there, John. You just read, you know, talked, so.

Well, two very helpful Old Testament pictures of the

Christ that we are to keep our eyes on and follow this week. And there is no danger that if we do that, that we won't go to some of the most exotic places that there are in all the world.

Next week, some illustrations from the New Testament on the same theme of keeping our eyes on Christ and following.

So please join us again next week. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to the

Behold Your God podcast. All the scripture passages and resources we mentioned in the podcast are available in this week's show notes at mediagratia .org

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