Covenants and Christmas

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Sermon by Josh Rice from various texts.

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So the church is called Covenant Baptist Church, and we have alluded, I think in several sermons, to some of the reasons for why it's called that, and yet covenant theology is a thing that's thrown out, and people...
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it's a hazy idea. And I've heard it described by a good friend of mine that most people, when they hear covenant theology, they'll say something like, there be covenants.
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All right, and that's the extent of it. And so what I want to do today is I want to show
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God's great plan and his overreaching plan that was outside of humanity, but then came into humanity and redeemed a people.
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And in order to do that, there are some things that I'm going to have to try to prove from Scripture, because they're not explicitly stated in Scripture.
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We arrive at them through good and necessary consequence of the bulk of God's Word. Another thing that we do that with, and we've made a test of orthodoxy, is the
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Trinity. There is no verse of Scripture that explicitly tells us that God is triune.
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And yet, we will throw you out of membership if you say that God is not triune.
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It is a test, a core doctrinal test of the faith. And so today, we're not going to be dealing with something of that gravity.
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If you don't follow along with me in covenant theology, that is not a test of the faith. But I think what
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I hope to show you is that there's a glory. And so when we come to Christmas, I think it's our tendency as American Christians where our culture has long pressed on us liberty, right?
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Liberty, liberty, liberty. Liberty of conscience. And what we get from that is my relationship with God is just that.
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It's a relationship between me and him. We walk together. He's good to me, and I try to pray to him and go to church and that sort of thing.
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And I'm so glad he came because he saved me in my sins, you know, and he made a way for me.
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And what we've lost entirely is that God was, it is true that he was coming to forgive you of your sins, but more than that, what
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God was doing was he was fulfilling a promise that he had made to a people that didn't even exist when he made the promise.
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And that's the glory of God, is that God stands outside of time and yet sees all of time that he created himself.
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He's not bound by it, he's not limited by it, and yet he uses it.
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And so in time, as we come to Christmas, I want you to think back, you know, over 2 ,000 years now to what it would have been like to be one of God's people around the year zero.
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And that situation would have been difficult because we're right in the middle of the prophecies given to Daniel, and we see the great beast that's come, the beast of the
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Roman Empire, that's come up and swallowed everything in the Mideast. And we've seen the coming of a
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Caesar, Caesar Augustus, who was a great man. And I mean that in the sense of he was very great, right?
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He had, his arm was strong, and he had much power. And the people in Rome said that it was the
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Evangelion of the Caesar. He brought the good news of peace. So if you would bow the knee to Augustus, you would have peace.
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Pax Romana. And the people of God sat in Israel, and they wondered, probably much like the
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Israelites wondered when they were in slavery in Egypt, God, how long are you going to be quiet?
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How long are you going to be silent? Because in Egypt, he was silent for 400 years.
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As the iniquity of an unconnected people, the Amorites, was filled up, God's people sat, and they made bricks, and they built the wonders of the world under oppression, and then
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God heard the cries of his people in Exodus. And he came, and he saved them.
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And what is the climax of the Old Testament? And so when we look at the year zero,
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God had been silent for centuries. Malachi had spoken, and in the greatest clarity in the
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Old Testament, Malachi had talked about the Elijah that was going to come, that was going to be the forerunner of the
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Son of Righteousness, who was going to bring healing and redemption, and then nothing. And the great
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Roman Empire rises, and oppresses, and takes over, and nothing.
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And that you have to think that from generation to generation, we're talking about almost twice the length of time that we've lived since George Washington.
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God had not spoken to his people through a prophet. And so the story is there. It's written on the scrolls, and they wait, and they wait, and they wait.
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And then a star shines in the heavens. And when we think of Christmas, I think we bring these tropes together.
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And what I want you to think of today is what happened with Christ at Christmas, and the person and work of Christ was something that burst out of the darkness of silence, and brought revealing light that every
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Old Testament Saint had desired to see, and that we live in the full light of today.
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Because when we look at the covenant of God, we see it with tremendous clarity, because Jesus has brought light to the promises of God.
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It's a long intro. So what I want to do here is I want to start with the proposition. And the proposition is that we have a covenant of redemption that was between God inside the
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Godhead. Now, I alluded to it in the call to worship. Jesus said this curious thing in John 10. I hope you caught it.
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I know Dad did. I saw him absorb it, this blow. It says, This commandment
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I received from my father. What commandment? The commandment that he would have the authority to lay down his own life.
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And we might have to sit, we brush by those verses, and what we don't sit and think about is like, who are you talking to,
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Jesus? Right? Like, what commandment? And so now we understand that there was a commandment that the
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Son was under that had nothing to do with any commandment given to mankind. There was a solemn promise and a commitment and a covenant of God to the people, on behalf of the people, but totally contained within the
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Godhead. And we call this, in Reformed theology, we call this the covenant of redemption. And that is that before the foundation of the world, before anything was created,
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God desired that He would build a community unto Himself, that He would create worshipers in His own image, and that He would draw the people made in His own image into a fellowship, and that He would adopt lowly creation as sons and daughters and give them the full benefits of inheritance through His mercy and His grace.
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The covenant of redemption. It's spoken of, and if you really, if you doubt me, because this covenant's never named in the
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Bible, but if you doubt me and you think, well, I don't know about that covenant of redemption, I would challenge you to do this.
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Read the book of John, especially starting in about chapter 6, and it kind of goes by evens, okay?
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Those even chapters. Just talk, just read and try to understand what Jesus is talking about when
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He's talking about His Father sent Him. There's this plan from before Him. And when you get into His high priestly prayer in John 17, which is one of the most precious chapters in all of Scripture, He's talking about, you have sent
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Me. From the beginning, we've desired this, right? There is a moving, motivating force in Jesus for His people that He's going to redeem.
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But we get it in other places. From the pen of John also, Revelation 13, verse 8 says, And all who dwell on the earth will worship
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Him, future, right? Everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the
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Lamb who has been slain. And I will make a little bit of fun of us Calvinists this morning. I know that not everyone here's a Calvinist, and you know how much that bothers me?
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None. None at all. Because what happens is, I think sometimes we take verses like this, and we go,
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C, Calvinism. And we take Romans 8, 28 through 30, and we say, C, predestined, predestined,
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Calvinism. And what we do is, sometimes as Calvinists, we flatten the greater meaning of what's going on.
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Because what we shouldn't say is, C, we were picked, we had nothing to do with that. Look, I will ascribe that that's true, and I make no apologies for believing that that's true.
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But there's something greater than that. And what's greater than that is take it out of your individuality, and take it to this, is that before anything was created,
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God knew that he was going to save a people. So why would you create them? Why would your plan,
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God, be to create enemies who rebel against you, who blaspheme you, so that you could die and claim them back?
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That's the essence of the covenant of redemption. And so we see other pieces of it. Psalm 2, a postmill favorite, right?
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Verses 7 and 8, it says, I will surely tell of the decree of Yahweh. He said to me, you are my son, today
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I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will surely give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.
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This is the Godhead, right? This is Father talking to Son, and the idea is that before anything was created, the
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Son was going to be given all of these nations. Now, we don't have to argue about eschatology.
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We all agree that that will surely happen, right? Whether you're postmill, aw -mill, pre -mill, pan -mill, whatever.
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It's all going to happen, and we know that Jesus is going to rule all of the nations at some point.
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We see over and over that God is timeless. And so a covenant of redemption is simply this, that before anything was created,
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God had made a solemn promise within the Godhead that he was going to redeem the people that he created, and that he was going to redeem his creation.
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That creation would not always groan in their sin, that we would not always be pining for the consummation of glory, that we would not always be be troubled and burdened in our spirits, waiting for that fulfillment of Eden and what it should have been.
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Because we feel that right now, don't we? I know this week, I got up out of bed, I think on Thursday, and I felt terrible.
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It was so bad this week that Kelsey was recording my snoring, and it was hilarious. I belly laughed when she played.
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It was awful. And I remember on Thursday morning, I got up out of bed, and I stepped my foot down on the floor, and instantly every bone in my foot hurt.
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Right? And as this has been in my mind this week, I was thinking to myself, like, man, like even small things like that would groan, right?
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It's not supposed to be that way. My foot's not supposed to hurt from stepping on it, right? Like, that's what it's for.
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I'm supposed to be walking around on that. It's not supposed to hurt. And people are like, well, you know, that's just part of it.
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But we groan for a day, right? We groan for a day when we don't have those aches and pains, when we don't have the decay of the body and the deterioration of ourselves that seem to get so much faster as we get older.
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Right? And we groan against them. And so God surely has a different plan for us. And then in His grace,
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He reveals the plan, and He gives us what's called the covenant of works. Now, I could go, look, there could be five sermons on the covenant of works.
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So we're gonna do about three or four minutes here, hopefully. Here's the covenant of works, never named in Scripture again.
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This is a theological covenant, and this is the covenant with Adam, okay? So God is going to redeem all of humanity, covenant of redemption, right?
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The first way that He reveals that is He makes human beings, right? He makes Adam in His own image.
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He forms him out of the mud, unlike any of the other things created, which were created by His Word, right?
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But Adam is formed, and life is breathed into his nostrils, the intimacy between the
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Creator and the creation, right? This is a different kind of creation. And God sees that this man is not to be alone.
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And so He forms out of him, out from a rib, He forms woman who is taken out of man, and there is community.
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And this community mirrors the community of the Godhead. It's one of the ways that we're made in God's image. It's not good for man to be alone, right?
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We are a social being. And then in this covenant, God takes the man, it says in Genesis 2 15,
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He takes the man and set him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. And Yahweh commanded the man, saying,
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From any tree of the garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat from it.
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For in the day that you eat from it, you will surely die. Do you understand that man created in God's image?
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It's totally unnatural for man to die. You get that? You can't, like, if it's in God's image, one of the major truths about God is that He is immortal and that He is
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Alpha and Omega, that there is no beginning and end to God. And so to make man in His own image, there was no sin, there was no stain of corruption.
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And so when Adam was told this, he probably didn't even necessarily understand, what does that mean, to die?
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He hasn't seen death. But he does know one thing and he knows it well. I am not to eat from this tree.
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And so where does the enemy attack? Exactly at that point. Because I like to say that law given to sinful man, law is like having a red button and putting a sign on it that says, do not push the red button.
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Because as Paul describes to us, the only thing that we think about at this point is pushing the red button. And Lewis captures it beautifully in his novel,
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The Magician's Nephew, right, where they go into this alien world, Charn, and there's a bell, right?
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And the bell has a sign on it that basically says, beware to anyone who would ring this bell.
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And so the stupid little kid that's in Charn, like, all he can think about is, man, I got to ring that bell. And he does ring the bell and all hell breaks loose.
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It's terrible. So in this case, the covenant of works is this, do this and you will live.
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Do this and you will live. And so we know what happens tragically, right? Adam does not listen to God.
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And he desires to be like God. He desires to have knowledge of the law. He desires to have this moral knowledge that God himself has, that I firmly believe
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God would have given him as Adam grew into his relationship. I think that he would have had perfect knowledge of the law and that God would have lived among him forever, right?
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Just like God has promised. But Adam took of the fruit and he ate it. And God delivers a curse to him.
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In Genesis 3, 19, it says, by the sweat of your face, you will eat bread till you return to the ground.
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Because from it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you will return.
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The great Reformed Baptist, Sam Renahan, says that Adam falling in sin here was not like bonking his head.
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He created cosmic treason and he fell. It was a world -bending, world -changing sin.
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And Paul agrees with that. In Romans 5, 12 through 14, Paul writes this, Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.
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For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigns from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the trespass of Adam.
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That means that we didn't take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and eat it, but we certainly would have because we desire to be like God also.
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And our knowledge of the law inflames our desire to break the law because, as Ephesians 2 says, we are rebels.
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We follow the power of the prince of the air. And so the covenant of works is this, is God condescends to man and he steps inside of nature in a supernatural way and God says, you will live forever and I will walk with you every day in the cool of the garden and you will make this whole world like the sanctuary of Eden.
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You will grow and you will multiply and your people will love me and I will be your God and you will be my people and I will dwell amongst you and you will have full access to me and you will have my righteousness, but you can't eat of this tree.
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There's a period of time here. You cannot eat of this tree. And so Adam surely eats of the tree.
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And the covenant of works is this, do this and you will live, do it not and you will die.
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And so the covenant of works today, as far as the covenant of redemption goes, the covenant of works is no way of redemption for us.
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We are lost forever by our works. You understand that? We know theologically, if I was to tell you, you would throw me out of here if I said, hey, listen, you got to work really hard to please
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God and to be in his kingdom. And you would say, that is heresy. And I would say, you are right, okay?
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We cannot work our way to God. And the reason we cannot work our way to God is because in Adam all have sinned.
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We sin because we're sinners. You understand that? We sin because we love it.
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We sin because it's who we are. We sin because it's our nature. We don't have to teach our children to sin.
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They do it quite naturally and quite gleefully. They are not torn up by their sin because it's their nature.
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And likewise, outside of Christ, we're not tore up by our sin. We don't like some of the consequences of our sin.
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The covenant of works, the positive promises of the covenant of works, do this and you will live forever, are gone.
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They are unavailable to us. Our father, Adam, broke it on behalf of all of us and so through Adam comes death for all of us and we will all surely die.
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You know this. That's why my feet hurt in the morning is because I'm getting one step closer to death every day that goes by.
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Morbid thought, but very true. Very true. Because in Adam, I sinned. And God helped me.
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In Adam, before Christ changed my heart, I loved my sin. I loved it.
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And my sin took on a very special manifestation, much like Adam's, where in my sin, I think that I am like God.
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And I think in my piety, in my virtue, that I can be like God and that I can twist him around to owe me something.
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But the covenant of works is dead, except for one thing, the curse lives on. So what do we learn from the covenant of works?
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There's no hope for any of us. Because Adam fell, we all fall. I know it was more than three or four minutes.
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Sorry. It's an important one. And now we get to the bulk of the Old Testament, the covenant of grace.
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So because the covenant of works failed, there's only one way to be right with God and that is through his grace.
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Because legally and judicially, we're all doomed. We cannot follow the law.
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We cannot follow the law well enough and so we're all dead. Because of Adam, which is the fall of all mankind, there is a new covenant.
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And this covenant, this covenant gets revealed slowly in the Old Testament, slowly.
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Because what God does now is that he saves us only out of his good pleasure.
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Does that make sense? God saves you. If you love the
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Lord this morning, the reason why is because out of God's pleasure, he saved you.
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Because out of his grace, his love for you, because of nothing you did, all you did was sin, he loves you.
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And in the Old Testament, there was a revealing of this and this revelation of the covenant of grace starts in Genesis 3 .15,
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the proto -evangelion. It says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, speaking of the serpent, and between your seed and her seed, he will bruise you on the head and you will bruise him on the heel.
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And we sit here today in 2024, and for those who have been in church a long time, we know exactly what that verse means.
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Do we not? I don't have to exposit it to you this morning. We know what that means. We know what Jesus did. But in the
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Old Testament, there's mystery to this verse. Do you understand that? There's mystery. Who exactly is this son?
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Who is this seed? And the devil doesn't know either, right? He doesn't know. And so there's these attempts over and over to kill the seed.
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We see it with the edict from Pharaoh to destroy all the firstborn sons. We see it in the
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New Testament era as it begins with Herod making a decree, that all the sons of a certain age would be killed.
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That is the work of the devil trying to thwart the promises of God that are becoming more and more clear.
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And so we know that the covenant of grace gets revealed progressively. This is hard to understand, okay?
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So we have covenants in the Old Testament. We have Noah, Moses, David, Abraham.
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Okay? Not in that order. And we see that every one of those covenants shows us more of the character of God.
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It shows us more about the gift that God has given, of the revelation of himself. And by the time Malachi comes around, we even have pretty explicit promises.
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And as Barth preached last week, when Isaiah comes around, we're starting to get more clarity. There's much more clarity about what the
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Messiah is going to do and who the Messiah is than there is in the Pentateuch. Okay? There's promises in the
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Pentateuch. And you can follow through the Savior, but we really have to have the light of the New Testament to understand what
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God was doing in Genesis through Deuteronomy to show us that. So it's revealed progressively.
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From Noah and the covenant with Noah, we learn that God will not destroy all man again using water, but instead will use water for salvation.
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You understand this? In a terrible act, we draw pictures about this, right? And we talked, you know, men that I get with on Wednesdays, we talked about this last
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Wednesday, is that we draw these cutesy little things. And even in my son's room, my son's named Noah, and in his room, he has a little ark.
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And what we lose in that story sometimes is that that is maybe the most fearsome display of wrath that we have seen from God in creation, is that God destroyed everyone except one family.
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And then God promised that that would not happen again. And he recapitulates, and he gives the mandate to be fruitful and multiply, and he gives us our first law.
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The law in the day of Noah is that if you murder, then the blood of man that's slain by man, the ground calls up for that.
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That's against the law to murder, the first law. And we get common grace. And so man is given tools to be fruitful and to multiply.
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And we see the perversion of the common grace of man today, is that in Christianized world, what we have done is we have become extremely unfruitful and subtractive.
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As our populations decline because we raise our middle finger at God and we say, yeah, you say to multiply, and I say, that's hard work.
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You say to disciple your children and to not let them go out from seeing my name on the doorpost, and on your forehead, and on your hands, and both in thoughts and words and in actions.
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And we say, yeah, but it's more fun to go on vacation. You say,
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God, God says, store up, give an inheritance to your children. And we say, spend it all now because you can't take it with you.
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And God waits unbelievably. So he gives us common grace.
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In Abraham, we learn something even more striking, and that is that God carves out a people. We get the concept of the elect as a people for the first time through Abraham.
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And this people would number in the multitudes. I think we forget this in Christendom sometimes. You know, the promise of Abraham was that his descendants would be like the sands of the seashore and the stars of the sky.
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That means we can't count them. I follow a guy on X who takes pictures of the heavens.
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He has high -dollar telescopes, right? And what you can see is the greater our equipment and magnification, the more expansive the universe looks.
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To think about counting the stars is insane, right? We can't even count the galaxies, much less the stars.
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And that is the miracle of the promised child given to Abraham. And so we see notice with the grace.
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With Noah, we get, don't murder, go be fruitful and multiply. With Abraham, we get, I'm carving out a people.
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This is by my grace. I took you, Abraham, out of this pagan nation, and I'm going to make you a people.
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And I'm going to make, through a promised child, sound familiar? Through a promised child that I'm going to instruct you to kill on a hill, right?
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Through this promised child, I'm going to bless you. And anyone who blesses you will be blessed, and anyone who curses you will be cursed.
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And so we see this carry -through, and we get a huge picture, right? What's the Messiah going to look like? Well, the
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Messiah is going to be a promised child. The Messiah is going to die on a hill. His father will not spare his hand because Jesus is the
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Lamb of God. Do you understand what that means when John says it? Jesus is the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.
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That's because there was a lamb caught in the bramble when Abraham took Isaac up on the hill to kill, to sacrifice for God.
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But Jesus was not spared that because he is the lamb caught in the bramble, because he wears a crown of thorns on his head where he was stuck in the bushes.
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He was the sacrifice. What a picture of the covenant of grace we get from Abraham. For Moses, we learn the character of God through the law, and we were enlightened to our own sinful condition.
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Without sin, we struggle to understand grace. Did you know that? The furthest person from grace is the person who thinks they don't need any, right?
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And if you think you're self -assured and you're good works, if you think that you're oh -so -holy and you're clean in your life, you are far from grace, and you are in a pitiable position.
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So the law awakens in us a rebellion, but it also shows us the perfect character of God. And much like the covenant of works, the
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Mosaic covenant shines a light on our tremendous need for righteousness. Don't we need it?
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When you look out in the world today, don't we need righteousness? Every pagan that I talk to, if I tell them, hey, look, the goal of being a
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Christian is that through Christ, we follow the law of God with everyone. And they're like, oh, that sounds good. Truly. Because in their heart, they think they follow the law of God, and they are mistaken, because no one follows the law of God.
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And then from David, we get this tremendous picture of the grace that the Lord's going to establish an eternal throne, and that from that throne, he will rule all of the nations and administer the law of God.
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And if we had gotten a chance to go into 2 Samuel, we would see even more how astounding this covenant is, because David messes it up.
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David's a great man. I love David. I can't wait to meet him someday. I can't imagine what he's like.
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I really can't. He would probably scare me to death, right? But he is a fallen man, and God promises him, because of his love of God, he promises him that he will have this throne forever.
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And so now here we go. We have a picture. God's going to redeem everyone. It's not going to be through works.
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It's going to be through his gift. What is this gift? And now we come back to the silent period, and this is the situation.
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Death reigned. Even those who had not sinned were a type of Adam. Even those who had sinned were a type of Adam.
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We needed a type of him who was to come. We needed a better Adam. Because you understand, to be saved, we have to reverse the curse of the covenant of works.
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Someone has to be righteous. And so when Jesus came, he fulfilled the covenant of works because he did not give in to the temptation.
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And Hebrews tells us that he was tempted in every way, yet without sin. That's extremely important.
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That Jesus did not carry the sin nature of his father Adam, right? Because he was conceived by the
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Holy Spirit through the Virgin Mary. And so he is the seed of Eve. He's the seed of Eve who does not have the trespass of Adam, who does not have the federal headship of Adam.
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And so he comes on the scene without the original sin, and he lives a perfect life without temptation, and therefore fulfills the covenant of works.
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And so for us, the covenant of works is the glory of God today, is it not? We love the covenant of works, and here's why.
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Because when God looks at us as the elect, when he looks at us, he sees Christ's righteousness.
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Did you know that? You have fulfilled the covenant of works through Christ. And if you're not in Christ, you will be judged like Adam was, and we know what the judgment is, right?
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Death. Death. It's the harshest penalty.
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Everything you do will be futile, right? You will bang your head against the wall trying to work and trying to cultivate thorns out of the ground.
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And in Christ, Eden. Perfection. Consummation.
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The gracious gift of God is not like the transgression God, Paul goes on to say, for if by the transgression of the one, the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of one man,
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Jesus Christ, abound to the many. You see that? Jesus' obedience was more powerful than Adam's disobedience.
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Why? Because he's the Son of God. Why? Because he was in the covenant of redemption.
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Because he is the arbiter. He is the executor of the covenant. We get that from Hebrews, right?
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The covenant was enacted through Jesus Christ. He is the active enforcer of the covenant, of this new covenant.
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One transgression resulted in condemnation to all men, so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.
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For as through the one man's disobedience the many were appointed sinners, even so through the obedience of the one the many will be appointed righteousness.
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Now the law came in so that transgression would increase, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.
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So that as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our
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Lord. Amen. You see, Moses, the Mosaic Covenant, gave us this illumination of the character of God, and it also illuminated to those who should have been afraid of God, who fear
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God, that we are without hope. Because there was a fault in that covenant, and the fault in the covenant was there was an ethno -national sense to the covenant with Abraham, right?
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It was his sons. It was his descendants, circumcised on the eighth day.
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And now we know from Galatian that circumcision has nothing to do with the people of God, because we are a spiritual people of God.
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If we backed up in John 10, what we would have read there is that Jesus said because of what he did we are all one now.
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It was not enough to save just the Jews. He came and he saved everyone. Everyone.
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God promised in the new covenant of Christ that he would put his laws into their minds and on their hearts he would write them, he will be their
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God and they shall be my people. What an amazing thing. Grace, it's forever applied, never removed, legally imputed, wrath satisfied, death paid, all completely supernatural and foreign to man's nature or ability.
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Man does not understand grace. It makes us uncomfortable. We rebel against it. I will honestly say people say in pre, you know, the
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Calvinism stuff, what they don't like is unconditional election, and I agree with that. But what people really, really don't like down in the core of their being is they don't like grace.
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They don't like grace. When somebody gives you a lavish gift out of nowhere, it makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn't it?
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Because we like rules and we like boundaries and we like to look at you and say, you know,
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I can stand on equal footing because I'm just a little bit better than you or I'm at least as good as you. That's the foolishness of man.
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But in Adam, that's obliterated for us. We cannot do that. And so I will submit to you that when we rebel against God, the chief thing that we rebel against is his lavish grace on us, that he has imputed righteousness to us, that our sins are gone.
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Our sins are gone. Grace. What an offensive thing it is.
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And so at Christmas, we celebrate the fulfillment of these covenants. Why? Well, let's look real quick.
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Advent is the clarifying light out of the darkness. 400 years of silence, darkness, the people cry out, what's gonna happen here?
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And then some things start happening. Some things start happening. Crazy thing number one, we have a virgin birth.
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This is also core to the faith. If you deny the virgin birth, you are not a Christian.
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I have no hesitation in saying that. This is a safe thing to say in the pulpit. Deny the virgin birth, not a
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Christian. You're worshiping some other God, okay? Matthew 1, 24 and 25, and Joseph got up from his sleep and did as the angel of the
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Lord commanded him and took Mary as his wife but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a son and he called his name
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Jesus. This is critical. The virgin birth is critical because it fulfills the promise of Genesis 3, 15.
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It keeps Christ outside of the headship of Adam and puts him in his own headship.
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That Jesus is the new Adam. He's not bound by the same corruption as Adam, but he stands as the new
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Adam because he fulfilled the covenant of works. Understand that. That's why it's important, right? That's why redemption, works, grace, they're really important because Jesus doesn't just get to come on the scene because he's
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God and forgive our sins. No, it's because a covenant is in place and covenants have restrictions and stipulations and they have rules to them.
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And one of the rules in place is that the covenant of works has to be fulfilled. That is the agreement that God has with man.
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Obey and live. Obey and live. There's no way around it. And so Jesus, born of a virgin, makes it possible for us to obey and live through him.
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We know this, that he comes right on time. In Matthew 1, 17, there's a symmetry of the generations.
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And if you read in Daniel, if you'd been paying attention, Daniel gives 70 weeks.
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And so if you had been an astute observer, which the wise men were, they knew that the Messiah was coming and they knew when he was coming.
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Amazing. They knew. Jesus shows that he is the maker and the Lord over time.
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Do you think it's coincidence that the Caesar calls for a census of all the people? No, it's not a coincidence because God is orchestrating time to his plan and Jesus comes right on time.
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It's exactly the time. His people have called out their symmetry in the Bible. 400 years of slavery in Egypt, 400 years of darkness as the greatest beast comes on the scene that had ever been in the
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Roman Empire. Jesus comes because he is going to overcome the oppressors. And notice what Jesus did.
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He died on a cross, he rose again, and that stone, that stone that was not made of human hands, destroyed the
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Roman Empire. How could we imagine it? 12 guys following Jesus, one of whom betrayed him, and give it 300 years and the whole empire is
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Christian. I think things happen right on time.
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I think God ordains them. We see that God is the God of the heavens through Christmas. Matthew 2 .2,
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where is he who has been born the king of the Jews? For we saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.
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This is the Magi. And the Magi were preordained and they were trained in Babylon. They were of the school of Daniel.
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And so they knew these prophecies and they knew these scrolls and they were looking at the weeks and they saw the time and they knew that the time was right for a king to come on the scene.
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And for these men of Orient to know that a king was coming shows the divine providence and the prophecy, the inerror, the lack of any uncertainty in prophecy.
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It's spelled out to the day. And so they come and we know that's not enough. It's not enough for the wise men to see the star that leads them to the point.
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Notice the star was not about the timing, the star was about the direction, right? The wise men knew he was there and the star in the heavens guided them to the spot so that they could come and show that Jesus is the king of all the nations.
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Do you understand how weird it is? In the time where the Jews are an oppressed people in the middle of the
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Roman Empire that these great kings from Orient come and worship this king.
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This is the Gentiles streaming to the mountain of Zion to worship the king. What an incredible thing it is that we miss.
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But that wasn't enough. That wasn't enough. Luke 2 13 and 14, suddenly there appeared with the angels a multitude of the heavenly hosts praising
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God and saying, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.
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Notice the language. It's a heavenly chorus, a choir. They're singing.
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We know from the New Testament this instructs, it exhorts. Singing gets in people's ears and it changes their heart.
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And this is kind of a bizarro reversal of the day of the Lord. Zephaniah 1 14 through 18 speaks of a different kind of heavenly host.
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Listen to this. Near is the great day of Yahweh. Near and coming very quickly. Oh the sound.
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The day of Yahweh. In it the mighty man cries out bitterly. A day of fury is that day.
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A day of trouble and distress. A day of destruction and desolation. A day of darkness and thick darkness.
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A day of clouds and dense gloom. A day of trumpet and loud shouting against the fortified cities and the high corner towers.
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I will bring distress on men so that they will walk like the blind because they have sinned against Yahweh and their blood will be poured out like dust.
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Where we heard that? That's the curse, right? And their flesh like dung.
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Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to deliver them. On the day of the fury of Yahweh and all the earth will be devoured in the fire of his jealousy.
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For he will make a complete destruction, indeed a terrifying one, of all the inhabitants of the earth.
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You see, if you miss the message of the heavenly host that came to show the unveiling of the new covenant that was going to completely fulfill the covenant of redemption, the covenant of works, and the covenant of grace, understand that, right?
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We stand with all three of those covenants fulfilled in the person and work of Christ through the new covenant. If you miss his coming, if you miss the grace that he came, he is coming again.
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Make no mistake, it doesn't matter what your eschatological position is, it doesn't matter what you believe about in times, he is surely coming again.
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And when he comes again, it's not going to be like the first time. Oh, there's going to be a loud noise, for sure.
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There is going to be a heavenly host, for sure. But this is going to be a reaping.
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He's going to come and he's going to destroy with his iron scepter all of the kings that would thumb their nose at him.
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Because right now, currently, you know what he's doing with the kings that turn their noses up at him and rebel against the living
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God? He's laughing at them, but he won't laugh forever. And when he comes back, it's going to be great and terrifying.
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Terrifying is the day of the Lord, but that's not his first coming. John 3 17 says that the Son came not into the world to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved.
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Jesus' first coming was to save the world, but his second coming is going to be about condemning the world.
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Don't miss it the first time. It's a dangerous thing to fall into the hands of the living God. He is a consuming fire.
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God does not feel jealous. He is jealous. He's the only being on earth that can be jealous with no sin, because all glory and all honor and all praise and all good is properly ascribed to him and to no one else.
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Any glory that you're taking for yourself, you're being a selfish glory hog. God himself, there is no limit to the amount of glory that he can rightly receive, because he is alone, transcendent, glorious.
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So Jesus doesn't come the first time as the Prince of Destruction. He comes as the Prince of Peace, Isaiah 9, not to condemn the world, but to save it, and he will turn enemies into friends.
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That's what Romans 5 is about. His first coming, he doesn't come to destroy his enemy. He comes to convert them, and he makes enemies into friends.
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That's Ephesians 2, right? And it was long prepared. Matthew 2, when they saw the star, the wise men rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.
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And after coming to the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell to the ground and worshipped him. We know what they gave him.
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They gave him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold for the king, frankincense for his priestly duty, the aromatic smell before the
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Holy of Holies, and the myrrh, the embalming of death, right? What an amazing thing.
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And then they deceived Herod by walking away from him, but I'm not talking about lying anymore. Isaiah 60, nations will come to your light, kings to the brightness of your rising.
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That describes the first coming. All nations who you made will come and worship before you, O Lord, and they shall glorify your name.
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And have they not? They have. We sit here today, and we wring our hands and say, woe is me, and there are like two billion people who claim the name of Christ on this earth.
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Hey guys, we can be happy, and we can be joyful because the king rules.
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He rules. And if he has, this is what the covenants are all about. Let's lay on the plain. If God has truly promised to redeem his elect, irrevocably through the person and work of Christ, it has implications for us as his people, right?
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We should remember this every day, but we should especially remember as we gather this week, why do we gather as family?
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Because we're in the image of God, right? We gather as family members over Christmas, and Christmas is about family because the faith is not individual, and we are not individual people, right?
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We are in covenants with each other. We have covenants in our family. We honor our father and our mother.
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We obey our parents, right? Our parents don't provoke us to anger. We have all kinds of covenant strictures that are on us.
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We are beneficiaries of God's immutable faithfulness. These covenants were not natural. God had no, no thing impending on him.
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There was no righteousness at all forcing God to make a covenant of redemption with his creation. He could have created all of us and smashed us all in the second day, and no sin would have been done, and God would still be every bit as good and glorious as he is today.
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But he didn't, because he shows his grace and his mercy, and these are attributes. Let me ask this question as we end.
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Are we defeated? You sure see it sometimes.
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Woe is me. Everybody's so bad out there. The world's dark.
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Everybody lying all the time. It's terrible. Oh man, this
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Christmas, like I can't. Hanging out with my family. It's gonna be rough. Gonna be fighting, right?
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Do we grumble, or do we not see what God has done? The family of God is huge. Did you know that?
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The family of God is huge, and it grows every day. It's growing like wildfire today in Africa, in Southeast Asia.
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It's growing in America today. Did you know that we have young people who have been fed a bill of goods for a long time?
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And it's on us to be faithful, to preach this gospel, because it is the hope of man.
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There is no way of salvation apart. Why do we act like we're so defeated when we have such a
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God? We should love to be with our family even when it's difficult.
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God had special... Did you know this? Jesus showed us. He had special affection for his mother. Did he not?
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We don't know where Joseph went. Most scholars think that he died at an earlier age, but we do know when
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Jesus was being crucified that he looked to his best friend John, and he looked at his mother, and he said, behold your mother.
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It's not wrong to have special affection for your family members. That's a good and godly thing. So enjoy this week, and even when it's difficult, even when you don't see eye -to -eye, understand that it's a grace to have family, and it's a gift of God that he's given us, and it's a picture.
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God is not silent today. Did you know he's never been silent again? We live in the full light of his revelation.
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Hebrews 1 tells us that in many times in the past God spoke through prophets, but today he spoke through his
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Son, and we know who his Son is, right? John 1. He is the Word, and so we have the
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Word. The Word was made flesh, and so we can see it today, and many would rather keep in the darkness.
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We know that from John 3. Many would rather stay in the darkness, but there are many, there are many. The fields are white for harvest.
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So be encouraged, Christian. You don't bring salvation, the Lord does. But we should be bold, understanding that we have a
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King who reigns, and a King who lives, and a King who triumphs, and he will surely triumph. Just as sure as his promises of grace to his people are his victory over his enemies.
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So we can bank on that. So be thankful this week. Be thankful, and praise God for his graciousness to us through covenants.