God Remembers

SERMON: 2003-06-09--lk0113--god-remembers SOURCE DURATION: 00:41:54.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with expository material discussing the intertestamental period (sermon). The final segment is part of a concluding musical/reflective passage that marks the end of the main sermon content before the absolute audio cutoff. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:36:36.220-00:40:58.400, 00:40:59.000-00:41:47.860 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- The period of time between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament is known as the intertestamental period. It covers approximately 400 years and in Protestant circles is often known as the silent years. It's known as the silent years because throughout those 400 years there was no recognized prophet or poetic voice from God. God was absolutely silent. Think about that, 400 years. It was a tough time for the people of Israel, aggravated by the political situation in which they found themselves because they found themselves constantly under the thumb of occupying forces. First they were under the authority of the Persians. Then they were overrun by the Greeks and by the Egyptians and then by the Syrians and eventually by the Romans. And the low point throughout all those years happened around 166 or 167 BC when a ruler by the name of Antiochus Epiphanes, a ruler who hated the Jews, desecrated the temple of God by establishing an altar to Zeus, the Greek god, and then by offering pigs on the altar. And for the Jews, of course, pigs were an unclean animal and this was an unspeakable blasphemy against the holiness of God and the holiness of the temple. So that produced what is known as the Maccabean revolt. And the Maccabean revolt was successful, actually led to a period of independence for the people of Israel and is celebrated to this day in the Jewish feast of Hanukkah, the festival of lights. And tradition has it that when they were reconsecrating the temple, they could only find one flask of oil that had not been desecrated by the pagans, it had not been opened, it was only enough for the menorah or the candlestick to burn for one night. Miraculously, the oil was multiplied and it lasted the full eight days that were needed before a new batch of consecrated oil could be prepared. And so Jews around the world continue to celebrate Hanukkah or the festival of lights to this very day. The silent years were years where God did not speak, where God's people cried out, many of them for deliverance. And those prayers were answered then by the events that confronted us in the opening chapter of the gospel according to Luke, when God in his sovereignty and in his wisdom sends the angel Gabriel to visit an old priest by the name of Zechariah. And he comes with an amazing message. He says to Zechariah, "You and your barren old wife are going to conceive a child and this child will be great in the eyes of the Lord. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, and his job, his job will be to make ready a people prepared for the Lord." Well, if you know the story, Zechariah was of course struck dumb, but nevertheless in the fullness of time, God fulfilled his word. The baby was born, they called him John, we know of him as John the Baptist, and when John the Baptist was circumcised on the eighth day and family and friends were gathered, the Spirit of God fell on Zechariah and he proclaimed prophetically the significance of the birth of this child. So let's read together the song of Zechariah as we have come to know it. Luke chapter 1, we'll begin at verse 67 and then read through to the end of the chapter. His father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, "Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he said through his holy prophets of long ago, salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. To show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham, to rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High, for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death to guide our feet into the path of peace." And then the chapter ends with these words, "And the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he lived in the desert until he appeared publicly to Israel." Now there's too much in that Song of Zechariah for us to do full justice to this morning, but allow me to highlight four main themes that are part of the Song of Zechariah and that I want to focus particularly on one of those. First of all, first major theme, God has come to redeem his people. Verse 68, "Praise be to the Lord the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people." To redeem means to buy back. Throughout scripture, God is committed to setting his people free. And just as the outstanding theme of the Old Testament is Israel's supernatural deliverance from Egypt, so in the New Testament the dominant theme is God's supernatural deliverance of his people from sin and Satan and death to be fully restored to the purposes of God. God has come to redeem his people, that's the first theme. The second theme that runs through this song is that this redemption will be through a descendant of King David. Verse 69, "He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David." A horn of salvation is Old Testament language for strength and for power. Think of a bull and horns and the power that that represents. And all through the Old Testament, of course, God has promised that one day one of the descendants of David would sit on the throne of Israel. And parenthetically, I want you to think about this for just a moment. For hundreds of years there had been no king in Israel. So imagine the stretch of faith to continue to believe that God would remember his promise and that he would keep his word. You and I, we complain sometimes because we don't see quick answers to prayer. Imagine the silence of God in this regard, not just for 400 years, but five or six or seven, almost a thousand years since King David was first upon the throne and hundreds of years surely when the last descendant of David disappeared from kingship. Redemption is through a descendant of David. Third theme that runs through this song is that John the Baptist will be the forerunner of this descendant of David that we know is going to be the Lord Jesus. Luke chapter 1 verse 76, "And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the most high, for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him." John the Baptist's job is to bring people back, to teach them the forgiveness of sins, to make ready a people prepared to receive the Messiah. Then the fourth major theme, and the one that I want to talk about a bit with you, is that all of this is rooted in a promise that God made to Abraham almost 2,000 years earlier. Listen again to verses 69 through 73, "He that is God has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he said through his holy prophets of long ago, 'Salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant.'" And then these words in verse 73, "The oath he swore to our father Abraham." He is saying all these activities that are taking place now is a fulfillment of an oath that God made to Father Abraham almost 2,000 years earlier. So let's talk about that for just a little bit, because this is incredibly profound and I just hope before God not only that I can put this into words for you, but that God will use it somehow in the deep places of our hearts to show us the incredibly good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So what is an oath? Well an oath is defined in the dictionary as a solemn appeal to a higher power that what you are saying is true or a promise you make that will be fulfilled. And typically we take an oath by appealing to God. Are you telling the truth? So help me God. And the idea is that God is witness to what I am saying and that if what I am saying is not true I am opening myself up for His judgment. That's what an oath is. That's why when you go to court you get to swear on the Bible traditionally that what you're saying is true before God. An oath is a very serious business. Now typically as I say you swear an oath by somebody who is greater than yourself. Problem for God of course is what? There's nobody greater than God so what does God do? He swears the oath by Himself. That's referenced for us by the writer to Hebrews in Hebrews chapter 6 where scripture says men swear by someone greater than themselves and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of His purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised and what did He do? He confirmed it with an oath. Now listen to verse 18. God did this why? So that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged. Two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie. Now put your thinking cap on. What are the two unchangeable things that make it impossible for God to lie? Number one is the fact that God has made a promise and scripture says that God is not a man that He should lie or the son of man that He should repent. Has He promised and will He not fulfill? So the very fact that when God makes a promise that ought to be good enough but God knows that you and I have a lot of difficulties believing Him so what does He do? He not only makes a promise but He takes an oath and He takes an oath by His own name saying this is what I'm going to do and it is impossible for God to break not only His promise but to break His oath. Are you with me? Now then, here's the next question of course, what is the oath that God made to Abraham? What is the promise God made and then what is the oath with which He confirmed the promise? Well you'll find it in the Old Testament book of Genesis, Genesis chapter 22, the verses 16, 17, and 18. I'll read those to you in a moment but let me give you the context of those verses. The context of Genesis chapter 22 is Abram's sacrifice of Isaac. You remember that God promised Abraham that He would give him a son and that through that son He would multiply his descendants and give him the whole earth as his inheritance. That is how the New Testament interprets the promises made to Abraham. So Abraham and Sarah waited a long, long time, they got themselves into all kinds of trouble. Eventually there is Isaac, the son of promise and now what does God do? He says to Abram, "Take Isaac, your son, and do what with him? Sacrifice him on the altar." Now get your head around that, that is huge. That's not only, "I can't do this to my son," this is, "How can God fulfill His promises if my son gets sacrificed?" This is the place where you and I take matters into our own hands and we say, "God, I don't know if I can trust you here." Isn't that true? But what did Abraham do? He was faithful to God. He put his son, his only son, as Scripture puts it, not really his only son, but you know what I mean, and he placed him on the altar in obedience to God and the book of Romans tells us that he did so in faith knowing that because God had made a promise that through Isaac his descendants would be named, God, if need be, could raise them from the dead. That's the kind of faith that Abraham had by this time. Now you know the angel of the Lord interfered and God saw that he had sustained the test and it is in the aftermath of this that the angel of the Lord comes to Abraham and he swears this oath on behalf of God. Genesis 22, 16, 17, and 18, "I swear by myself," there you have that oath, "declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies and through your offspring all the earth will be blessed because you have obeyed me." What's the promise? You will be multiplied over, you will possess the nations, and the nations will be blessed through you. But that in contemporary terms, God comes to Abraham and says, "Abraham, I'm going to not only be your God, but I'm going to be the God of your descendants, and I'm going to bring them into their inheritance. I will free them from the power of the enemy. They will be my people and they will be the head and not the tail." Are you following me? Because this is going to become very profound in a few moments when we start talking about Jesus. Are you with me here? So notice now how Zachariah picks up on this theme in his song. He says in verse 74, "This is the oath that God made to Abraham, to rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days." Earlier he says that through the holy prophets of long ago, God promised salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. But this in New Testament terms, God says to Abraham and to his descendants, "I am going to set you free from everything that oppresses you, and I'm going to bring you into the fullness of God." Again, graphically we could illustrate it this way. God creates Adam and Eve to have what? Dominion. They have dominion because of their relationship with God. The devil comes along, that relationship gets broken, what happens? The world falls into sin. All the stuff that we experience, the darkness, the confusion, the brokenness, the difficulties of life, the illness, and the death are ultimately the result of our estrangement from God and the fact that the whole world is under a curse. God comes along, calls Abraham out of Ur the Chaldees, and what does he say to Abraham? "Through you and your descendants I will surely bless you. I will make them numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. They will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations will be blessed." Through your offspring all nations will be blessed. Now here's where it gets really interesting, because who's the offspring of Abraham? Jesus, listen to what Paul says in Galatians chapter 3. "The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The scripture does not say 'and to seeds,'" meaning many people, "but 'and your seed,'" meaning one person who is Christ. Let me sum it up this way. God comes to Abraham and he says, "I'm swearing an oath to you. And under the terms of my covenant with you that I have sworn by myself, your descendants, I'm going to deliver from everything that oppresses them, and I'm going to bring them back into the fullness of what I have intended for the human race, which is to sit at my right hand and have authority over all things." And the New Testament comes along and says this is fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the offspring of Abraham. And as we'll see in a moment, that has huge implications for the moment. Just keep in mind that all these events now that start happening in the book of Luke, the birth of John the Baptist, the visit of Gabriel, the visit of Gabriel, a little bit later on to Mary, these are all based on a promise that God has not forgotten, a promise he made 2,000 years ago to Abraham that from his descendants, God would make a people who would be blessed by God. Now let's bring that close to home, because if you're tracking with me at all, and I hope that you are, the implications of this are huge. In the time that remains, let me give you two of those. Number one, if you're in Christ, God remembers you. Let me say it again. If you're in Christ, God remembers you. One of the songs that we sing around here sometimes is that song by Kast and Kranz, "Who am I that the Lord of all the earth would care to know my name, would care to feel my hurt, who am I that the bright and morning star would choose to light the way for my ever wandering heart?" And that's a profound question, who am I? I'm one of over seven billion people that live on the face of the earth. I am surrounded by people far more important than I am, far more successful, far richer, far more accomplished. Who am I, really, because I'm a flower quickly fading. I'm here today and gone tomorrow. I'm a wave tossed in the ocean and a vapor in the wind. And still as the song goes on to say, "You hear me when I'm calling, you catch me when I'm falling, and you've told me who I am, I am yours." Why? Because you see, if I'm in Christ, that is to say, if I've put my trust in Christ, then I am a descendant of Abraham. You get that? If I'm in Christ, I am a descendant of Abraham. And the promises that God has made to Abraham and to his offspring now apply to me. Paul develops that theme and you can read it on your own sometime in much more detail in the book of Galatians. He says in Galatians 3.29, "If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise." You are heirs according to the promise. Heirs of what? You are destined to inherit the whole creation. You are destined one day to sit at the right hand of God in Christ and rule over all creation. Everything that you've ever hoped or longed for has been realized through your union with Christ. Now, that gets intensely practical because it means, first of all, if you're in Christ today, then God has chosen you. And if God has chosen you, then He has given you the gift of faith. Have you ever thought about that? Why should you believe when most of the people around you don't believe? Not because you're so smart, not just because you're brought up maybe in a Christian home or went to some evangelistic meeting and gave your life to Christ. Nobody can come to the Father, says Jesus, unless the Father who sent me calls you. So how did you come to faith? Because God in Christ chose you, gives you faith, gives you the Holy Spirit, and through the Holy Spirit helps you to begin to understand spiritual things, helps you to understand what sin is, helps you to understand that all the problems in the universe are the result of our alienation from God, helps you to understand that God is making a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness reigns, in which you have a part simply by faith in Jesus. And through Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God guides your life, gives you wisdom, gives you direction, enables you to know how to pray, comes to you in places of brokenness, lifts you out of the miry clay, puts your feet on a solid rock, and one day will establish you in glory where nothing and nobody can stop you from coming into the fullness of the purposes of God. That's the gospel. You are crowned prince to the universe regardless of who you are, no matter how badly you're put together, or how good you're put together, or how smart you are, or how dumb you are, how good you are, or how besetting your sins are. God says to Abraham, "I'm making covenant with you and with your offspring." God says, "Jesus is the offspring in whom the promises have been totally fulfilled because he is now at the right hand of God in glory and because you belong to Jesus. What God has done for Jesus, he will do in you." And that means that God comes to us in the places of our brokenness and he breaks through to deliver us from all that which we could not be delivered from in our own strength and in our own power. Let me try to drive it home with an illustration. Just this past week, got an email from one of the women in our congregation, and this is a woman who some years ago gave her life to Christ, but who still struggles in places of her heart with a deep sense of shame. The shame comes from some shameful things that happened to her in her youth, things that should have never happened. Shame comes from decisions and actions that she has undertaken in her youth as she was growing up that were not necessarily good and wise. She knows the reality of forgiveness and is grateful for the forgiveness that Christ has given her, but there is still a deep place in her heart that resists believing that God can really love her and that other people can really love her. It's a deep place of anger. It is a deep place where she locks everybody out, and no matter how hard she tries, she can't receive God's love in that place, and she can't really receive love from people around her. And very often when she comes to church, because that's what happens in church when God draws near, those places bubble to the fore, and last week she was at a service and she went home feeling so unclean and so hopeless. How can I ever get beyond this place in my heart? Perhaps there are times you feel that way. And so she went home and she shared it with her husband, and her husband is a wise man in the Lord, and he told her sort of a modified version of the ugly duckling. And he said, "An eagle fell out of its nest. It fell into a vulture's nest. All its life it was trained to be a dirty scavenger, never knowing its true identity. Then one day it found out that all along it had never intended to be a scavenger, but actually had always been an eagle designed to spread its wings and soar above the sky." And she goes on to say that her husband said, "I'm that bird." She just found out that she's not what they told her she was all along. She was bold and beautiful eagle, and now she's just finding her wings, and someday she's going to fly. And then he said that he wishes that someday I could see what he sees. Now here's what's interesting. He had told her that, or the equivalent of that, many times over, but it never penetrated beyond the barriers of her heart until just last Sunday. She says, "Do you want to know what happened next?" Those words, in that moment, like a laser beam, somehow made their way through the barbed wire fence around my heart. The steel walls, the door, the gate, everything that was ever crafted to keep my heart in one piece, I couldn't keep myself together. And she couldn't contain the emotion of it all because it went so deep into those deep, frightening places. And I don't know if you understand that, but if all your life you have felt victim to forces and powers that were intent on destroying you, then letting anybody into those places is incredibly difficult. But in that moment, God penetrated that fortress. And she ends her email by saying, "I will never forget it as long as I live." You see, that is the result of a promise that God made to Abraham 2,000 years ago that he would deliver his people. And every so often in your life and in my life, there will be those moments of divine breakthrough where God says, "I remember you." And it may be preceded by 400 years of silence, but God has an incredibly long memory. And when you hear the stories that we have been sharing, when you hear Virginia's story last week and the stories that we've been sharing in evening services, then you know that God remembers. Tonight Graham Quick is going to share the story of how his son Frank killed himself a number of years ago, and the pain of that, especially in light of the fact that he had prayed for all his children since the moment he knew that they had been conceived. How do you put that all together? He's going to share tonight how God remembers, and he remembers you and he remembers me. And there's a lot more that I wanted to say about that. We're running out of time, but as we start moving towards communion, I want us to understand that in the cross of Jesus, we have the ultimate demonstration of God's love for us. I had somebody else in this past week, and they have one of the most horrific histories of abuse of anybody that I've ever met, and they've had to deal with that perennial question of where was God when these things were happening to me, why did he not stop them, the perennial question of why is there evil in the world? And I said to her, "You know, I don't know how to answer that question because I don't know that anybody can, but all I can do is point you to the cross of Jesus, because in the cross of Jesus, God absorbed all our pain and suffering into himself, and he demonstrates that he is not aloof from our pain, but that he takes it into himself so that by absorbing it into himself, we can be delivered and experience the fullness of the promises that are made to Abraham." And so as we celebrate communion, here's what I want us to do. Reflect on where you find yourself. Reflect on not just your own failures, but reflect on the promises that God made to Abraham. Then remember, remember that those promises have been realized in Christ, and that if you're in Christ, those promises are for you, and no matter how silent heaven will sometimes appear to be, God, not only made a promise, he swore an oath, and he said, "It'll come to you, and one day I'm going to present you without any wrinkle or any blemish or any spot before the presence of my glory in rejoicing." He says, "There is nothing that is impossible for me. I don't care how sinful you are, I don't care how broken you are, I don't care where you have been, I don't care what you've done in Christ, I'll get you to glory." Amen? Amen. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:36:36.220; remove through 00:41:54.000] I've become His righteousness, He humbled Himself, and carried the cross. Love so amazing, love so amazing, Jesus, Messiah. Name above all names, blessed Redeemer, Emmanuel, the rescue for sinners, the ransom from heaven, Jesus, Messiah, Lord of all. His body the bread, His blood the wine, broken and pulled out, all for love. The whole earth trembled when there was talk, love so amazing, love so amazing, Jesus, Messiah. Name above all names, blessed Redeemer, Emmanuel, the rescue for sinners, the ransom from heaven, Jesus, Messiah, Lord of all. The Word that came flesh and dwelt with us, Son of God and Son of man, born to save the lost on earth, love so amazing, love so amazing, Jesus, Messiah. Name above all names, blessed Redeemer, Emmanuel, the rescue for sinners, the ransom from heaven, Jesus, Messiah. Lord of all, all our hope is in You, all our hope is in You, all the glory to You, God, the light of the world. All our hope is in You, all our hope is in You, all the glory to You, God, the light of the world. Jesus, Messiah, name above all names, blessed Redeemer, Emmanuel, the rescue for sinners, the ransom from heaven, Jesus, Messiah, Lord of all. The Lord of all, the Lord of all [CUT]. [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:41:54.000; resume after this marked segment]