February 9, 2025, Brian

Mount Zion Community Church iconMount Zion Community Church

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Good morning. Well, it is wonderful to be here this morning.
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I especially appreciate, always appreciate being with the
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Lord's people, being with Christ's people. And it is especially wonderful just to see so many just kind and then just warm -hearted welcomes.
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That's definitely my impression. I think that this church is filled with people who have been impacted by the love of Christ.
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And amen, and it's so wonderful that in this world, filled with so many uncertainties, so many things that can go wrong, so many things that have gone wrong in the world, our solid rock is
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Christ. And that is a biblical truth that is throughout the entire
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Bible, especially and also in the Old Testament. One of my joys in preaching is preaching
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Christ, preaching Christ in the Bible and just studying
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Christ in the Bible. That's really the theme of this morning's message is hoping in the promise of the
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Messiah in the Bible, beginning the end, beginning to end. And before we get into the message and before I pray to ask the
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Lord to bless the message, I do just wanna quickly introduce myself and my wife,
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Elizabeth. So we have been studying and moving and preparing to look for a church one day to serve in.
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That's been us the last few years. I've been to a lot of churches. I went to a Bible college called the Master's University, went to Master's Seminary.
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I believe Pastor Matty went through Master's Seminary or has a connection there.
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He has connections there. That's where I met him was at a conference in Baltimore with a bunch of just people from all over the map, different colleges, seminaries.
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There was some people from the Master's Seminary there. And we were at a table with Matty and his wife, and we were just talking about some common things that we have an interest.
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Matty serves in the army. I served as a medic in the army for a little bit. So we had a great time getting to know
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Matty. We've had some phone calls and he invited me to preach this morning, and I'm just thrilled, just thrilled to preach
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Christ in his word. So with that, that's a little bit of who we are.
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So we're not too much of strangers. So the title of the message, again, is
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Hoping in the Promise of the Messiah in the Bible from Beginning to End.
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And what I'm hoping to do this morning, I have a couple of goals I just wanna throw out there as I preach
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Christ in the Bible. I want to help us find a way to think through looking at Christ in the
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Bible. That's one of the goals. And one way to do that in a message on a
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Sunday morning, I wanna take us to a verse that has the Messiah in it, and also a verse that has a huge impact on the whole
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Bible. And that verse is Genesis 3 .15. And some of you may have heard of the verse
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Genesis 3 .15. Sometimes it's called the Proto -Evangelion. It's pronounced different ways.
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Proto -Evangelion, basically it means the first mention of the gospel.
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Evangelion sounds like the word evangelical. Evangelical, basically, it just means gospel.
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Proto, first, first gospel. So we're gonna be looking at Genesis 3 .15. I want us to understand why do we call
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Genesis 3 .15 the Proto -Evangelion? What's in there? Do we have the name
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Jesus in there? We don't have the name Jesus in Genesis 3 .15. We have that in the New Testament. But there is a way, when we study
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Genesis 3 .15, we do see that this is the first promise of the hope of the
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Messiah in Genesis 3 .15. And then we're gonna look at a couple other passages throughout the
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Bible. And at the end, I'm hoping that we can be, on the one hand, like, wow, Jesus the
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Messiah really is throughout the whole Bible. And most importantly,
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I want us to see that wherever the promise of the Messiah is in the
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Bible, the purpose of him showing up is to give hope to God's people in hard circumstances.
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So with that being said, when we're on the topic of hope,
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I think the idea of hope is something that's been on our minds lately.
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It has been on mine. So for example, before the elections this past November, I was really hoping that a certain person would win.
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And when he was elected, I was very thankful, and I was, my hope shifted to hoping that he would make a lot of changes.
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Then the president started to make a lot of good changes. And I found myself recently shifting a lot of my hope to what happens in the next four years, hoping that the president will be successful in his endeavors, but what happens after four years?
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Now, I'm using all of this as an introduction and example, because there's lots of things that we could put our hope in.
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And I think that what we're seeing in the country right now is that God is using a lot of people to do things, and God is being very gracious and kind.
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And I'm using that as an introduction, because I don't know about you, but my temptation is to put my hope in temporary things, even good temporary things.
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So I'm using that as a springboard, not as a political statement, but as a springboard to have our hearts, to ask our hearts this question, what is our ultimate hope in?
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And as we think about the reality of experiencing these kind things that God is doing in our country at this moment in history, we should realize this is not the first time in history where there's been bad things happening in a country, and then
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God's gonna show some kindness for a short amount of period of time. For example, in the book of Judges.
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In the book of Judges is known as the darkest days in history.
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Terrible things have happened. And at the end of the book, the author says four times, in those days, there was no king in Israel.
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We're in a world where everyone did what was right in his own eyes. So bringing all of this together to prepare us, prepare our minds for looking at Christ in the
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Bible is this truth. And there's this truth that penetrates the
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Bible from beginning to end. Is that until Christ sits on the throne of David in Jerusalem, until that day, this world will not function the way
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God intends it to. And that's really just the preface. And when we think about that, about that truth, that exposes a critical need for us as the church.
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This is the need to always have in our minds a proper view of the future and to set our hopes on Christ's future reign.
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To meet this need, we will be learning about what the Bible has to say about Christ's future reign from Israel over the nations so that we can have our hearts set on the one leader that will not fail,
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Jesus Christ. So the main idea of this morning's message is that the future worldwide reign of Christ, it's kind of a thesis for the message, the worldwide future reign of Christ is found throughout the
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Bible from beginning to end. And his purpose is to bring hope to God's people who hear it.
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And it's also a message for people who don't know Christ to realize and recognize that Christ is
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God, he is the King, and we must submit to him if we have not already done that.
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So here's the outline for this morning's message. We don't have time to go over every single verse in the
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Bible that talks about the Messiah. I wish we did, we could go two to three hours long, but I'm getting the feeling maybe
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I would enjoy that more than everyone else would. So we'll keep it an hour and a half, just kidding.
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So I want to hit specific verses. Some of them
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I think we'll be familiar with. Some of them I think that maybe we haven't came across that verse frequently, but we're gonna start off in Genesis 3 .15.
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Then we're gonna go to Genesis 22, verses 17 and 18.
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That's right after Abraham was going to sacrifice his son and the angel of the
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Lord stopped him. And then we're gonna go to Genesis 49, eight through 12. That's the prophecy about where the
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Messiah will come from Judah. It's that phrase, the scepter will not depart from Judah.
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And then we're also gonna look at Numbers 24 with Balaam. He has this prophecy about this future reign and the victory of the
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Messiah. So before we look at Genesis 3 .15, I'm gonna talk briefly about a few important notes on methodology.
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A methodology is simply the convictions we have about how something works.
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So when I'm saying we're gonna look at Christ in the Old Testament, I want you guys to know what
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I'm not doing with my methodology. I'm not looking for something and to try to put
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Jesus and the Messiah into that verse. Now, there are some wonderful believers who have that methodology, where they write whole commentaries on,
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I'm gonna put Jesus inside every single verse in the Old Testament. I think that comes from a heart that loves
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Jesus, that is just so excited about Jesus and wants to see Jesus everywhere in the
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Old Testament. That's not the methodology I'm gonna use this morning.
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I have good friends who use that, but I have a different approach. The approach that I was really trained in and have just a lot of appreciation for is something called literal grammatical hermeneutics.
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And basically it's like this. So the literal grammatical hermeneutics is basically looking for the author's intent in every passage.
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So there are some passages in the Bible where the intent of the author is not to talk about Jesus.
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Now, the whole Bible as a whole together glorifies and exalts Christ.
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So with this methodology, when we go through the
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Old Testament, here's something cool that we really find, that Christ is in the
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Old Testament. And throughout the Old Testament, the hope of people from beginning to end is this promise of Christ.
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We live right now in the reality where that promise of Christ began to be fulfilled.
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Jesus came with his first coming. He was born from the Virgin Mary, the eternal
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Son of God, became man. He lived a life fully, truly
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God, fully, truly man. And we are now waiting for his second return when he comes back.
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So the Old Testament didn't have that perspective. They had all these prophecies.
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There's gonna be this Messiah. He's gonna reign and rule. He's gonna die on the cross.
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He's gonna die. We find out it's the cross, but he's gonna die in the Old Testament. We have Isaiah 53.
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He's gonna do all these wonderful things. So the Old Testament didn't have the order of things, but where we live in history, we know the order a lot better.
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So with this conviction in mind, we're gonna start at the beginning, and that's
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Genesis 3 .15. So if you'd open up your Bibles, if you're not already there, to Genesis 3 .15,
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I will read the passage, Genesis 3 .15. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed.
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He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.
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What Genesis 3 .15 does, this one verse, it establishes the foundation of the promise of the
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Messiah by prophesying of a future seed who will accomplish salvation for his people and defeat
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Satan. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna look at the context of this one verse, because this one verse happens in a certain context.
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And the context that we see this verse occur in is in the first few chapters of the
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Bible. In Genesis chapter one, we have creation. God created the world, everything in it, in six days, he rested on the seventh day.
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On the sixth day, when he created Adam and Eve, he gave a mandate to Adam.
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In Genesis 1 .26, he gave a mandate, an instruction to Adam to rule, to rule and reign.
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And the use of that word there, rule and reign, is specifically for how a king rules and reigns over a certain area.
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And as we look at Genesis two, and we see the area that God placed
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Adam, the garden of Eden, we see that the location that Adam was placed in Eden was meant to have an impact on the world.
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So if you turn to Genesis chapter two, one page before, starting in verse 10, we're gonna read about the description of Eden.
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Now, a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided and became four rivers.
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The name of the first is Pishon. It is the one that went around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
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Now, the gold of that land is good. The Bedellium and the Onyx Stone are there, and the name of the second river is
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Gihon. It is the one that went around the whole land of Capernaum, and the name of the third river is
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Tigris. It is the one that went east of Ashur, and the fourth river is the
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Euphrates. As we're reading this description, on one hand, we're reading about a location that was drastically changed by the flood.
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When the flood happened, if you know what water does, water transforms and destroys what's in its path.
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So when God miraculously had the ark and Noah and his family in it,
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God was protecting the ark and the people in it as he was destroying the world. And what emerged from after the flood was a world totally different from what came before.
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So here's what we're reading about what was before. Eden was a location where rivers came out of it and those rivers provided sustenance for the entire world at that time.
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If you notice how rivers work, rivers, water flows down, right? So for this river to be like this, it would have been on top of like a mountain.
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And it's interesting, as Bible teachers point out, there is this theme from beginning to end in the
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Bible where there is a mountain at the beginning where God's kingdom is established and Adam is set there to rule and have this huge impact on the world.
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And we see after Adam fell, after he sinned, after he sinned, we see passages in the
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Bible talking about a future mountain, Mount Zion, Jerusalem, where the second
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Adam, Christ, will rule and reign. I say all of this because I think we're used to seeing the second descriptions in the
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Bible. Well, that pattern comes from Genesis 1 and 2. God created mankind to rule, to reign.
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And we know that God's plans and purposes are perfect and they don't fail.
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So what we see with Adam and Adam's failure is to make way and make room for the greater
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Adam, for the true, for the Adam who will not fail, Christ. And what
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I want us to see this morning is that that foundation is laid for us here in Genesis 1 and 2.
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And so now we're gonna look at Genesis 3 because we have creation, we have man's purpose to rule, we have the failure in Genesis 3 where Adam and Eve sinned.
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And all this is important for the context of Genesis 3, 315, the promise.
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I want to draw our attention to verse 15. I want to draw our attention to the last two statements.
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He shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the heel.
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In this statement, God is talking to Satan. God is telling to Satan, he is gonna crush your head, but you will bruise his heel.
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So we have some questions. We have some questions to ask of these statements.
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One is, can we find a hope of the Messiah in this passage and how can we?
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I think it would be helpful to briefly introduce us to some of the hard work that's been done by faithful Bible teachers on this verse to answer that question.
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So there's three general answers, there's a lot more, but I'm gonna look at three general answers to that question.
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There are some people, some faithful Bible teachers, they would say, Christ is
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God, he is central on God's plan, but they would say, we don't have the promise of the
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Messiah in Genesis 315. And their argument would be, when we're looking at this word here, if you're looking in your
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Bible, I believe the Pew Bible is the LSB, Legacy Standard Bible, right? Their translation is amazing because it says, between your seed and her seed.
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This idea of seed is being used as a metaphor here. The idea of plants is that you have a seed, you plant this seed and out comes the plant that is appropriate to the kind of seed you planted, right?
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I don't know a lot about plant stuff, but I know if you plant apple seed, you don't get oranges.
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So this is a perfect metaphor here. This is a perfect metaphor because the idea of a seed, it could have two different ideas.
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You could have one seed and that seed could produce many other plants, which produces more seed.
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But also the word seed, it could, you could be thinking about, I got a handful of seed in my hand.
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So this is what's called a collective noun. A collective noun, you're saying this thing,
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I could be referring to something singular or something plural. So faithful Bible teachers, they look at this and they say, this is a collective noun.
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This is not referring to a single person, but this is referring to a group of people. And that is a valid argument.
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And that would be their reasons for saying like, well, we don't know if this is the
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Messiah yet. And that's not, they're not saying that because they don't like Jesus. They're saying it because they wanna stick to the literal grammatical hermeneutic.
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And I love that commitment. Okay, that's the reason number, that's view number one.
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View number two is that the verse is talking about the
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Messiah and that the seed is referring to the Messiah. And so their reasons for that would be, if you're looking at the verse, it says he.
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He is not plural, he is singular. So they would say, aha, we do have an individual here.
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And you know how Bible teachers and scholars, they spend a lot of time studying and they talk to each other.
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And so the first view, right, the collective view, here would be their response. They would say, it says he, but it should be translated it.
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And at this point, I wanna stop that conversation because they just get into the weeds, right?
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But here's what's important for us to see is that there are faithful people who wanna understand and interpret the
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Bible. And they're doing a really good job with all these different grammatical arguments.
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So that second view, they would say that this is an individual offspring.
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So the question is for us is how do we reconcile this? Because both sides are making true observations.
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It could be a group, it could be individual. Now there's a third view that's been really helpful.
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And it actually explains why we have both views. There's a third view.
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The individual is the representative of the group. Now with that, let's look again at verse 15.
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Do you see where it says, and between your seed and her seed?
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So those are groups of people. We have one group of people, the seed of Satan.
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Those would be, again, this is a metaphor, is not saying someone who physically came, who was physically born from Satan.
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It's a metaphor. People who resemble Satan. And how people resemble
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Satan is they're opposed to God. They're rebels. And we were all born that way, born in sin, opposing
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God, rebels to the Lord. And then the other group, the woman's seed, are a group of people that are against Satan and belong to God.
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And then you see next, he shall bruise you on the head. The he there refers to an individual who is the representative of the group, of the woman's collective group, of those who belong to God.
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And the advantage of this view is that it explains all the grammatical observations.
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It explains all the grammatical observations of like, yes, this is a collective noun. Yes, it does refer to a singular individual.
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And it also explains the relationship. The relationship between this singular seed to the woman's collective seed is that he is their saviour.
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And if you read the next line, read this line, this singular seed will defeat
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Satan. So on one hand, in this verse, we don't have the name
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Jesus. We don't have some of the other language used throughout the whole Bible to identify
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Jesus. But we have this foundation that an individual male come is going to come from Eve and is going to accomplish salvation for his people and will defeat
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Satan. And here's what's really wonderful about that. Stepping aside from all the scholarly conversations, this was a real message of hope to people who are the first sinners, to people who heard from God and walked with God and had disobeyed him, had rebelled against him.
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And there was great pain. There was great consequences. And Eve in her life, when she had her son grow up and one murdered the other son, those were part of the consequences of sin.
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With our sin, there is real pain. There is a real regret.
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There is a real consequences. But for Adam and Eve, there was also hope.
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And we see that Eve understood this hope. For example, if you look at Genesis chapter four, verse one, it says, now the man knew his wife
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Eve and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. And she said,
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I have gotten a man, I have gotten a man with the help of Yahweh.
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When she says with the help with Yahweh, she's acknowledging that God will provide a savior one day, that God will provide a savior.
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It is God's help. It's been said before that in every false religion is the idea that we can earn our salvation, is that we don't need
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God. What Eve is doing here, Eve's acknowledging she can't do this without God.
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You can't earn your way back to him. You can't be good enough. You can't work a job that's in a high enough position to earn favor with God.
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So we have this promise of Genesis 3 .15. We see immediately that it becomes the hope for Adam and Eve.
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And here's what we also see after Genesis 3 .15. The fulfillment of this promise becomes the trajectory of the
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Bible. Everything in the Bible, everything in history moves toward the fulfillment of what
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God said would happen, will happen. And we even see this throughout Genesis.
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That brings us to our next verse we're gonna look at, Genesis chapter 22. So as we are turning there, verses 17 to 18, this is at the end of a story where God told
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Abraham to take his son of promise. God had promised
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Abraham a land that would eventually become the land of Israel. God promised
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Abraham seed that would be as many as the stars of the sky and sand of the seashore.
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God promised that his family, his descendants would be instrumental in bringing blessing to the world.
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And God told Abraham all of this would happen through Isaac.
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And in Genesis chapter 22, God tells Abraham, I want you to take
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Isaac. I want you to slaughter him and sacrifice him. And as you read
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Genesis 22, you see Abraham obeying God in every detail to the point where he has the knife risen.
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He's up, the language of the text is he is bringing it down with the purpose to strike his son and kill him in obedience to God.
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And the angel of the Lord stops him. And because of Abraham's obedience,
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God reassures, reaffirms his promises to Abraham.
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In that promise, we learn that it is through Abraham's descendants the
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Messiah will come. So let's look at verse 17. Indeed, I will greatly bless you and I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and as the sand which is on the seashore.
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And your seed shall possess the gate of his enemies.
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In your seed, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because you have listened to my voice.
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As we're reading this verse, I think we can see some similarities to Genesis 3 .15.
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So first of all, we have the word seed. And also we're brought back to that context of future blessing.
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When it comes to the word blessing, I think in our culture nowadays where we hear the word blessed frequently like after someone sneezes, like someone sneezes and you say, oh, bless you, right?
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The biblical concept of blessing is nothing short than the return to a right relationship with God.
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And that such a relationship with God amongst people in the world where Christ comes back to live with His people, that is the biblical trajectory.
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That is what we see with this idea of blessing. And in the New Testament, in Ephesians chapter 1 .3,
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where it says, blessed be God because we have all of the heavenly blessings in Christ Jesus is bringing us back to the
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Garden of Eden of a right relationship with God. So when we see this word blessing here,
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God's promise, God's plan is to make everything right again.
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So we have the word seed. We have this idea of blessing. And here's what we also see.
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We have the idea of nations here. God's plan was never only for the people of Israel.
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God's plan was never just for them. They were a part of God's plan, and they are part of God's plan in the future, but they served a role.
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That one role is to bring the Messiah, and their role, their purpose, their intention, they were supposed to serve the nations by being a kingdom of priests.
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So we have here in Genesis chapter 22, this word seed. And you'll note that in verse 17, we have this word he, singular.
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And you might be surprised of how much attention we're putting on one word.
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And really it comes from this idea and this conviction to every word in the
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Bible is important. And we say that, and sometimes we can just say it. And sometimes
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I can just say it. And here's a blessing of God's word is that we can get so much out of even one little pronoun, the pronoun he.
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Because what that does is that with this promise for Abraham, where Abraham obeyed the
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Lord, and God is revealing to Abraham his plans for the future, is dependent on his physical descendants, is dependent on Israel, but even more so, is dependent on the one right man to get the job done.
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And this is something that was instrumental for them. If you read later in Genesis with the different patriarchs and their wives, some of their wives are repeating this very promise of a singular son that will come from them who will possess the gate of his enemies.
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So we think about the idea of possessing the gate of his enemies, that is defeating one's enemy in war.
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It is a victory. And so we see here, again, another glimpse of that promise that was in Genesis 315, and it's developing.
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We're getting more information. And again, in the context of Abraham and how this brought hope to them.
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When God called Abraham, his wife was barren. They lived in a land that worshipped false gods.
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God called them out of that land. God revealed himself to Abraham.
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And part of God revealing himself to Abraham, part of Abraham getting to know this one true
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God is that his plan involves a future singular seed who will get the job done, who will save his people.
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Now, this brings us to another passage, Genesis chapter 49.
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And before we look at Genesis 49, I want to bring out one of the strategies that Moses has in revealing the promise of the
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Messiah. And the strategy that Moses uses as he's writing Genesis are genealogies.
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Here's something we see at the beginning of Genesis. We see the creation, we see the fall, the promise, and then genealogies.
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And I don't know about you, but when I was younger, I was like, why are these genealogies here? So one reason is that it really demonstrates and showcases the
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Bible is a historical, reliable book. It is making claims about real history.
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And then two, here's how Moses uses those genealogies. He's tracing the promise of the
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Messiah from Adam and Eve to the tribe of Judah. So we see that because the promise of the seed goes from Adam and Eve, it goes through Seth, it goes through Noah, through Noah, his three sons,
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Shem, Ham, and Japheth, it goes through Shem. And we see this idea of the promise being passed to certain sons.
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And then from Shem, we eventually get to Terah. From Terah comes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.
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And then Jacob has 12 sons. So the question we should be asking as we turn here to Genesis 49, if Moses is using these genealogies to trace this promise of the
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Messiah throughout Genesis, Jacob has 12 children, the question that we should be thinking is, okay, which child will the promise of the
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Messiah go through? We know that all of Jacob's children, all 12 of them have important roles in Israel in the future.
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The 12 tribes of Israel are named after Jacob's 12 sons. But one thing we see in Genesis is that there's a special role passed on to certain sons.
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So we even see this with Jacob and Esau, right?
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They were fighting for the birthright. That birthright involved who would have top status among the other brother.
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Well, there's that same dynamic of Jacob's 12 sons. Who's gonna have top status?
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So when we get to Joseph, and Joseph's given a special coat, right?
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The coat of many colors. Very interesting and fascinating. People try to think, okay, what is so special about this coat?
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Well, it's not that it had colors that made it special. It's what those colors were meant to signify.
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And those colors were meant to signify royalty. The word used for that coat is used only one other time, and it was used with King Solomon, one of his royal coats.
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So if we were to ask Jacob, which son do you want to get top status?
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I think his brothers figured it out. They wanted Joseph to have it. And so this, again, made his brothers jealous.
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It's the wrong kind of jealousy. In one degree, it's not wrong for them to want to have that top status for God's promises to pass through your family in a special way.
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But we see that God was refining his brothers. And throughout this story,
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God was also refining Joseph. We read in Genesis that God used the evil intended against Joseph for good.
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And God was also refining another man, a man named Judah. In Genesis chapter 38,
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Judah made some terrible decisions. Judah sinned, he sinned against the
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Lord. Not only that, as you're reading Genesis 38, you see he has a disregard for the importance of his sons to get married and to pass on the lineage.
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He has a disregard for the promise of the seed. And even as you read
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Genesis 38, the word seed keeps popping up. Because as Moses is writing this story, as these events are happening, as God's ordaining these events to happen, we're supposed to have our mind on the promise of the seed.
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And here's the catch of the story. So was Judah, and Judah didn't. So at the end of the story, as you read in Genesis chapter 38, where God reveals
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Judah's sin to him in the most uncomfortable, unpleasant way, Judah recognizes his heart was not on the promises of God.
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He even names one of his sons, Zerah, which is the Hebrew word seed.
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So Judah got it. And as you continue to read Genesis, you see that Judah starts off at the bottom.
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Not a good guy. You're reading Joseph, and you're like, wow, that's someone I would want to have as king.
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And God promotes him the second in Egypt, second to Pharaoh only.
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And God is also transforming Judah to the point where Joseph, when his brother has come,
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Joseph tells his brothers, puts them in a trap basically, doesn't reveal to them who he is.
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And he takes one of the brothers captive in jail, and Judah finally gets it.
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And Judah offers himself in place of his brother, because Judah got it, that God's promises for his people are most important.
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God's promises for his people. Judah wasn't doing that to save his own skin. He was willing to sacrifice his own skin to save one of his brothers.
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And that brings us to Genesis chapter 49. God did not choose for the promise of the
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Messiah to come from Joseph. God chose the promise of the Messiah to come from Judah.
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So I'm just gonna pick out a few highlights from Genesis 49.
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That way I don't hit the three hour mark this morning. But Genesis chapter 49, verse eight, is
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Jacob talking to Judah. And before we look at verse eight, really quick, look at verse one.
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Then Jacob sent his sons and said, gather together that I may tell you what will befall you, what will happen to you in the last days.
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So this particular phrase, in the last days, is not just saying, oh, in a future time from now, because future time is vague.
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It could be a week, it could be a month, it could be 2 ,000 years. Last days is a phrase that's referring to the end of time.
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God's plan for the future. This is what God will be doing through Judah and through his descendants.
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Verse eight, Judah, as for you, your brothers shall praise you. Your hands shall be on the neck of your enemies.
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Your father's son shall bow down to you. From the prey, my son, you have gone up.
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He crouches, he lies down as a lion, and as a lioness, who dares rouse him up?
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The scepter shall not depart from Judah. Tween his feet.
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Are you guys able to hear me right now?
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Is the mic going in and out? Okay. If I turn the mic off, would you guys be able to hear me still?
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Okay. Then it won't be recorded, though. It won't be recorded, okay. Sorry. No worries. He ties his foal to the vine and his donkey's colt to the choice vine.
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He washes his garments in wine and his robes in the blood of grapes. His eyes are dark from wine and his teeth white from milk.
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There's a lot here. I'm just gonna draw out a few important parts.
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One, we have the tribe of Judah. Also, you have this language that this tribe and this king who comes from this tribe will be like a lion.
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And this is something that the New Testament authors also understood was about the
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Messiah. The apostle John in Revelation chapter five, verse five, talks about Jesus and calls him the lion of the tribe of Judah.
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John is saying that because he's in heaven. He sees the glorified
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Christ. The book of Revelation is about a time or after Christ comes back to take his church where Christ unleashes wrath on the world.
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And that's gonna culminate at the end of it with the return of Christ to set up his kingdom in Jerusalem to rule the nations.
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And so in this vision, the apostle John calls
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Jesus the lion of the tribe of Judah because they understood this is the future that Moses was talking about in Genesis.
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This is the future of the tribe of Judah. So you have that language there of a lion.
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The scepter shall not depart from Judah. In the book of 2
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Samuel 7, the Davidic covenant, you have in the Davidic covenant this language of scepter.
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You have this idea that David is going to continue the line of the promise of the
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Messiah. And David's from the tribe of Judah. Not only that, one of Jesus's favorite titles for himself is that he's the son of David.
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So again, I hope what we are seeing here is that we're seeing more and more detail about the promise of the
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Messiah as the Bible's continued to be written and later authors in the
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Old Testament, like Samuel, Isaiah, they're describing their prophecies of the
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Messiah using these ideas from Genesis 49, from Genesis 315, from Genesis 22.
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And so this is Genesis 49. And again, we have to think about not only recognizing with our head these promises of the
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Messiah, but also reflect what these promises are meant to do to our hearts.
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And we can see what this promise was meant to do for their hearts.
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I think out of all the brothers, Judah may have probably felt the least worthy to carry on this promise.
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And I really think that represents the heart, the same heart that God gives us once we recognize that we were
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God's enemies, that we were not God's enemies. I don't know about you, but growing up, I never saw myself a
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God's enemy. If you asked me in the Bible verse, yeah, I would have given you a Bible verse and said, yeah, I was born in sin, I was God's enemy.
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But deep down inside, I really thought I was a good person. I mean, I took my Bible to public school in Los Angeles.
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You know, I mean, of course I was a good person. And that is the danger of our hearts, so our hearts are deceitfully wicked.
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Our hearts will justify sin. Our hearts will use the
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Bible to justify sin, but by God's grace and His kindness, he changes hearts.
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He gives us new hearts, hearts that love God, hearts that recognize and confess, yes,
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I am a terrible sinner and I do not deserve God. God's love and God's grace, but I am so thankful that He chose to give it to me because I'm so unworthy of it.
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Now, Judah didn't say all those words, but I think we see
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Judah's heart here. Heart of a man who's sinned, consequences, and maybe thought there's no way forward, but we have this promise of hope of the
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Messiah. Not only that, but Judah was given a significant place and privilege.
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And as we consider where we are today in history, we have the privilege to be called sons of God, to belong to Christ, to have
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Him as our Savior. The last verse
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I want to take us to today is in Numbers chapter 24. Numbers chapter 24, and as we are turning there, just to give us a little bit of context, in Numbers, the book of Numbers, the nation of Israel, God delivered them from Egypt, from slavery there.
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God brought them to Mount Sinai, officially made them His nation.
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And then from there, they started to disobey, rebel against God immediately. That eventually culminated in Israel not having faith in God when they were about to enter the promised land.
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So God punishes Israel, has them wander in the wilderness for 40 years.
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And in Numbers 24, they're at this transition period.
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They're at this transition period where the end of the 40 years are almost over.
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And that most of that previous generation that God had banned from entering into the land of promise, most of them were dead.
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So in this transitional period, God was continuing to provide and protect
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Israel, because they were vulnerable. They were this large group of people traveling the wilderness with no home.
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And also we see in the book of Numbers, surrounding nations heard what
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Israel did in Egypt. And these nations were afraid. And whenever these nations were attacking
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Israel, God protected them. So even in Israel's rebellion toward God, God remained faithful.
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Numbers 24, there is a king in Numbers 23 and 24 named
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Balak, and he devised a scheme. His scheme was that he would hire this false prophet named
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Balaam. Balaam had a reputation apparently where he could like talk to gods and convince them to obey his will.
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He thought that he could do that with the Lord, with Yahweh, found out the hard way that it does not work, that God is the true
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God, and he does not listen to Balaam. And instead,
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God used Balaam to bring a prophecy of the Messiah.
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Balak wanted to use Balaam to curse Israel, to destroy Israel. Instead, God demonstrating his sovereignty, demonstrating that his plan will happen as he says it, uses
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Balaam to bring a prophecy of how Israel will actually defeat the nations through a king.
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So if you look at verse five, how fair are your tents,
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O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel, like valleys that stretch out, like gardens beside the river, like aloes planted by Yahweh, like cedars beside the water.
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Water will flow from his buckets, and his seed will be by many waters, and his king shall be lifted up higher than Agag, and his kingdom shall be exalted.
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God brings him out of Egypt. He is for him like the horns of the wild ox. He will devour the nations who are his adversaries and will gnaw their bones in pieces and shatter them with his arrows.
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He crouches down, he lies down as a lion, and as a lion, who dares rouse him?
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Blessed is everyone who, blessed is everyone who blesses you, and cursed is everyone who curses you.
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Again, there's a lot of really exciting material here. Just to point out a few highlights, we again get this word seed.
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We get this word seed and we get this word king. And we get a description about what this king will do.
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This king, what we see here, will have complete victory over his enemies.
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It even uses this metaphorical language of gnawing their bones. Again, how metaphors work, that is expressing a truth, and the truth, the idea of gnawing your enemy's bones is that there's nothing left of them.
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There's a victory here of this king from Israel, having such a complete victory over his enemies and the nations has not yet happened in history.
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And as we look to the book of Revelation, we see its future fulfillment, that Christ, the king, will come back to this world.
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He will have real victory over enemies, over his enemies.
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And this passage here, this idea of this hope is not just for one nation,
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Israel. The hope here is for the nations. And we also see how this verse here, this promise of the
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Messiah, was important for a woman named Hannah. If you turn to 1
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Samuel 2, verse 10. In 1
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Samuel 2, verse 10, we hear the prayer of a woman who just like the patriarchs and matriarchs in Genesis who were barren, just like them,
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Hannah was barren. And we see that God provided Hannah a child in her barrenness, gave her a son,
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Samuel, who would one day be the prophet to anoint Saul and then
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David as king. And if you were to take the time to read all of chapter two, you would see that Hannah has a high view of God.
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And also as you're reading chapter two, if you're following some of the cross references in your
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Bible, you'll note there's a lot of cross references to verses in the Bible, to earlier scripture, such as the
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Torah or Pentateuch. That's because Hannah knew her Bible. Hannah knew her
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Bible well. And here's also another thing in the Bible that she knew. She knew about the promise of the
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Messiah. Look down at verse 10. It says, this word anointed here, in English is the word anointed.
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In Hebrew, it's pronounced Mashiach. And that's actually where we get the word
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Messiah from. In the New Testament, the word Christ comes from the
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Greek word Christos. And the only difference between the word Christ and Messiah is that Messiah is just the
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Hebrew way of saying the word. Christ is the Greek way of saying the word. They both refer to the same thing.
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So here's what we see in 1 Samuel 2, verse 10. We see a woman who lived a hard life.
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Not only was she barren, but her husband took on a second wife.
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So her husband had sinned by taking on a second wife at the same time.
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Not only that, but the other wife, Panina, would mock her every year they went up to the temple to worship
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God, would mock her because of her barrenness. This woman was truly living in misery.
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And we see in verse 11, in chapter one, verse 11, she cries out to God for a son.
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God answers that prayer. And her rejoicing prayer afterwards, she's praising
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God and ends with a reference of her future hope for the
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Messiah. Because here's what Hannah understood. God wasn't done yet. God did a wonderful change in her life, answered a wonderful need.
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But that's nothing compared to the change and the transformation that is going to be a blessing for the world when
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Christ comes back. And to conclude our message this morning,
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I want to explain briefly how does it work with all of these promises of Christ in the
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Old Testament and what's He doing now? How do they relate?
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I certainly can't answer that in its entirety, but the direction of history of these promises, they depended on an event to happen.
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The promise of this restored earth could not happen without the birth, life, and death of Christ.
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You see, at the beginning, when we started out, the context of what went wrong was sin, and sin distorts our relationship with God.
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Does more than that. Sin separates us from God eternally.
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What Christ did on the cross, the perfect eternal Son of God, He did something to fix our relationship issue we had with God.
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See, God is just, He is holy. There is no one like Him.
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There's these movies coming out nowadays where you have these superheroes snapping their finger and making these big changes.
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God is holy. God cannot just look past sin. Even in the
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Old Testament, the sacrifices, what they were doing was just putting off the penalty for another year.
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So when Christ died on the cross, what that moment was is that that was salvation.
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We read in the Bible, in the book of Hebrews, that Christ made
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Satan powerless on the cross. By his death,
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Satan was made powerless. And so we think and we ask, well, the book of Hebrews chapter two says that Satan was made powerless.
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That's in verse 14. But we also see in the Bible that Satan is the prince of the power of the air in Ephesians chapter two.
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Not only that, but 1 Peter 5, eight, while Satan was made powerless by the death of Christ on the cross,
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Satan is like a lion walking around and seeing who he could devour. So we see the
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Bible's telling us about two realities. Satan was made powerless.
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Christ's death on the cross fixes our relationship for those who by faith believe in Jesus and trust him as their savior.
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And at the same time, Satan is still a powerful foe, but we get more hope.
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Romans 16, 20 says that Satan will come to a total defeat in the future.
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The Bible says that God will soon crush Satan underneath our feet.
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Again, that language is language from Genesis 3, 15. We see that the final fulfillment of Genesis 3, 15 is still to come, but this is what we must always remember.
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No one will see the blessings of that final fulfillment unless your faith is in Christ, his life, his death, his resurrection.
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No one can experience the blessings without believing that first.
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And these blessings that we're still waiting for, Revelation 20, one through six, says that God will bound
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Satan for 1 ,000 years in hell. He will not be able to function from there.
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At the end of the thousand years in Revelation 20, seven through 10, Satan is released.
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Why God would do that, I don't know, but here's one thing I do know. His ways and his plans are perfect and they're to bring him glory.
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And in all of the bad things we see happening in history, we see that the answer is
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Christ. And we see at the rebellion that Satan will start at the end of that thousand years,
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Christ himself puts an end to it. Our lives are very much impacted by temporal, imperfect, and limited leaders.
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The Bible teaches that from beginning to end, God's people should put their hope in the eternal, perfect, and limitless
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King, Jesus Christ. And our hope in Christ is specific.
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It is a hope that first believes Christ is the eternal Son of God, that he was born from the
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Virgin Mary, that in a miraculous conception, the eternal
01:08:54
Christ became the Son of God. Truly and genuinely
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God, truly and genuinely man, that he lived a perfect life, fulfilling
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God's law perfectly. He died on the cross as a substitute for the sins of his people.
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And he rose from the dead. This glorious Christ that the
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Bible exalts from beginning to end is the only hope that can satisfy what our hearts truly need.
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And he is the only one worthy of our praise. Let us go to this high
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King of heaven as we close and pray. Father God in heaven,
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Lord, we thank you, Lord, for all the blessings that we have in Christ. We thank you for your word,
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Lord. We thank you for one another, Lord. We thank you for those brothers and sisters in Christ that we have the fellowship and share this common hope with.
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We pray, Lord, that you would bless us to glorify you this day in your Son's name, amen.