The God Who Rescues

Outline:

1. Christmas is just the tip of the iceberg
2. God's mission is seen in a series of binding relationships that he forms to save the world
3. The closer God moves to restore his bond with sinful humans, the clearer it becomes that such a bond is impossible
4. God himself becomes man to do what man could never do

Scripture passages:

• Isaiah 9:6-7
• Jeremiah 31:31-34
• Matt. 1:20-23
• Luke 22:19-21

Application:

• Do you read your Bible through the lens of God's mission?
• Do you see the world around you through the lens of God's mission?
• Do you seek escape from your problems and fears?
○ The story of God gives us hope that we can change because God is active through the message of Jesus today.
○ The story of God gives us motivation to change because we see the power and beauty of God's mission to restore all things.
• What is the mission that moves your life? Is your life mission connected to God's mission?
○ Follow me and I will make you fishers of men...
• What is it that gives motivation for men to love and lead their homes, even after they have failed numerous times?
• What is it that gives a mother endurance to keep loving and caring and instructing her kids in the heat of daily parenting and home making?
• What is it that gives us courage to evangelize, to speak our beliefs, to break out of our little bubbles?
○ God in action. God breaking into our hearts and into the world to save.
• Do you rest in your God?
• What is the mission that moves your life? Is your life mission connected to God's mission?
○ Follow me and I will make you fishers of men...
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/prepare-metaverse/
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A few weeks ago, Facebook unveiled its radical new direction as a company to move in the direction of the Metaverse.
what is the metaverse?

Facebook "the metaverse is the next evolution of social technology."
Its basically a more immersive experience of the internet, and specifically social media.
Its will give people that ability to use technology to be completely immersed into a whole different world - and to build whatever worlds they want.

Instead of typing messages, or even having facetime calls (who uses facetime anyways?) you will be able to put on a headset and sit in a digitally invented room and talk with someone across the world, or battle aliens in a faraway galaxy, or whatever else you can imagine.

(whatever we may think about this new technology, it is foolish to downplay it or to ignore it.)
You connect yourself to a machine, and you wake up in a completely new place - with a new body, new abilities, and new purpose.

What is so appealing about this idea?

• Escape to a different world
• God-like powers to remake yourself

Life is often stressful, difficult, dull. Change is slow. Relationships are challenging. True growth in wisdom and maturity takes more time and effort than we realize.

It is so much easier to go somewhere where we get to be whatever we want, where we can forget our problems, where we can embark on a new quest, have a new sense of meaning.

Before you start laughing at the idea of putting on a headset and escaping into a video game you have to realize that the concept of escape from reality is already all around us.

Social media, entertainment - movies and TV, alcohol, materialism - these are all pathways that the vast majority of our world is currently using to escape.

When we come to the story of Christmas, we are faced with a very special part of the biblical story.
Here we have the opposite of escape - we have an arrival, an invasion of an outside person into our world here and now.
This really is a radically new piece to the story of the world - God himself becomes human and enters our world.

Here is an interesting feature of the story of the Bible - while foolish and sinful humanity seeks to escape from its own reality - God himself is on a quest, he has set his course directly for the heart of life in this world, and all its brokenness and messiness.

Why does he do it? And how does this fit into the overall story of the Bible?
This Christmas season, we want to take a series of sermons and explore the topic of God's mission to and in the world.

When we see God and his mission in this broken world, his story is the only thing powerful enough to captivate our hearts and give us a clear sense of courage and meaning within the world.

1. Christmas is just the tip of the iceberg

Matt. 1:20-23
“Joseph, son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
22 Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
23 See, the virgin will become pregnant
and give birth to a son,
and they will name him Immanuel,
which is translated “God is with us.”
When we consider Christmas from the perspective of God's mission to the world, we realize that the birth of Jesus is just the tip of the iceberg.

The baby in the manger, the incarnation of the Son of God, bursts onto the scene in glory, power and celebration because it carries behind it a powerful message of a GOD who is acting on mission in the world.

At this point its important to pause and ask yourself - what is your perspective of God?

Do you see God as a being who is living active and on mission in his world?

When you look at the world around you - do you see a broken and detached, dull place? Or do you see it as a place that is crowded with the mission of God and his purposeful action?
God is the main character in the Bible
You cannot read the Bible correctly without seeing God as the main character who is actively responding to the sin and death that fills the world.

This also means that God is the main character in the story of the world - because the story of the Bible is the story of our world.

• God's mission to the world is deeply personal - it is all about restoring an intimate and binding personal relationship with humanity and the rest of creation.

Isaiah 9:6-7
'For a child will be born for us,
a son will be given to us,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
He will be named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
7 The dominion will be vast,
and its prosperity will never end.
He will reign on the throne of David
and over his kingdom,
to establish and sustain it
with justice and righteousness from now on and forever.
The zeal of the Lord of Armies will accomplish this."

2. God's mission is seen in a series of binding relationships that he forms to save the world

You cannot see God and his purposes correctly without seeing his covenant relationships, which form the backbone of the whole story of the Bible.
What is a covenant?
• A relationship between two parties that includes a binding agreement of commitment and promise
• Our most common example of a covenant is marriage.
○ Marriage is a contract - but it is so much more than a contract.
○ Marriage is a relationship - but it is so much more than a relationship
○ It is a binding relationship or commitment and promise.

How do we see this play out in the story of the Bible?
There are six very important points, six covenant making moments in the Bible, all of which add up to a collective mission that God is accomplishing in the world.

• Creation covenant
• Covenant with Noah
• Covenant with Abraham
• Covenant with Moses/Israel
• Covenant with David

To really understand this we have to go to the very beginning.

• Creation Covenant
○ From the very beginning of the story of the Bible, God is creating a world in a process that is deeply personal and binding to him.
○ "Let us create man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule over the whole earth..."
○ These terms communicate two very important things:
• we are created as sons and daughters of God - a deep relationship and connection to him
• we are created as servant kings and queens over God's world
○ God has a deep relationship to the whole world through his relationship with humanity, as he lives in deep fellowship and love with them, as they live in submission to his Lordship and authority over their lives
○ God created all this stuff, and he loves it and he cares about it and he shares it all with us, as he opens his heart to us.
○ Sin enters this relationship and brings death and separation where there once was harmony, unity, beauty and power
HERE is the key moment - all that he has created is broken and destroyed. WHAT is his response??

Genesis 3:15
"I will put hostility between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring.
He will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel."

Hope - someone will come, who will crush the dead of the serpent. Someone will come who will destroy the evil that has taken place.

Why does God do this? God responds to the broken covenant with a NEW promise. WHY? Because this is who he is.
From the beginning moment that sin and brokenness entered the world, Gods response to it is to move IN to the brokenness with the purpose of healing and restoration.
• Covenant with Noah
○ God promises never again to destroy creation, God knows that sin fills the sinful heart and yet he blesses Noah and his family to once again fill the world
• Covenant with Abraham
○ A new and more specific promise is made to Abraham - God will bless his family, make him a great nation, and make him a blessing to the whole world.
• Covenant with Moses/Israel
○ Israel is rescued from Egypt and called to be a nation of priests to God. He brings them out so that they may learn what it means for truly to really live with God.
○ God literally puts his tent in the middle of the camp.
• Covenant with David
○ God's promises become even more specific and focused in his covenant with David.
○ He promises David that he will establish his son and he will be a father to him, and that his kingdom will have no end.

3. The closer God moves to restore his bond with sinful humans, the clearer it becomes that such a bond is impossible

The is a continual growing tension in the whole story - how can this restoration project work?
• Covenant with Noah
○ A couple chapters later we see Noah getting drunk and exposing himself and his own brokenness
○ A few chapters later, humanity is once again driven by pride and arrogance, building a tower to the heavens to prove their own power and autonomy from God
• Covenant with Abraham
○ Abraham is a sinner himself. He struggles with trusting God. He lies and cheats.
○ How is it that the whole world will be blessed through this man?
• Covenant with Moses/Israel
○ God literally puts his tent in the middle of the camp.
○ But they betray him and break the covenant even before the covenant ceremony is complete.
∙ it's like a bride cheating on her husband before the wedding celebration is done.
○ What is God's response?
∙ He continues to lead Israel and provide for a way for their sins to be forgiven.
• Covenant with David
○ Solomon goes off the rails, kingdom is divided, a series of terrible kings

At the end of the day, at every turn in the story, GOD is the one paying the price for human unfaithfulness - and yet he continues to push forward.

Insert text: "oh jerusalmen jerusalem!"
God continues to make his promises to people that he knows can't keep theirs.

It becomes more and more obvious that any human, no matter how good or how perfect, cannot successfully keep their side of the promise of a true relationship with God.

"Its like a ship trying to anchor to a dock in the midst of raging wind, the closer it gets the worse the waves and danger..."
At the close of the OT, God makes one last promise of a final covenant, a promise more grand than any before, and seemingly even more impossible...

Jeremiah 31:31-34
31 “Look, the days are coming”—this is the Lord’s declaration—“when I will make a new covenant ...This one will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors on the day I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt—my covenant that they broke even though I am their master ...Instead, this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days...I will put my teaching within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people...For I will forgive their iniquity and never again remember their sin."

This all sounds really amazing - but HOW will it happen? The system of sacrifices and rituals didn't work. How will all sin be wiped out all at once, and the whole heart be transformed from the inside out??
Here is the great plot twist

4. God himself becomes man to do what man could never do

Matt. 1:20-23
“Joseph, son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
22 Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
23 See, the virgin will become pregnant
and give birth to a son,
and they will name him Immanuel,
which is translated “God is with us.”

The only way for God and man to be restored to an everlasting covenant relationship, the only way for the whole world to be restored - is for God himself to become man and do what man could never do.

God's grace overcomes every obstacle to restore his love to the broken world.
God's mission to the world is essentially about the restoration of an everlasting relationship - and this mission comes essentially at a massive cost to God.

The fierce opposition of sin to God's holiness can only be bridged by an infinite price.
Luke 22:19-21
19 And he took bread, gave thanks, broke it, gave it to them, and said, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
20 In the same way he also took the cup after supper and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you."

All along the way, God is paying the price.

He is allowing his grace to pay the price for human unfaithfulness and rebellion.
And all that payment was stored up for the final moment when the son of God would himself arrive on the scene.
He came in poverty and weakness.

He taught, healed, loved and preached.

He reached out to the outcasts and the forgotten ones.
And at the final day, he took our sins and our sorrows and he himself bore our debt on the cross.

The cross of Jesus is the bridge in history that spans between two things that were impossible to bridge - our sinfulness and God's perfect, holy and glorious presence.

At the final moment he experienced wrath and rejection so that we could be welcomed back in as the sons and daughters of the King that we were first created to be.

God's grace overcomes every obstacle to restore his love to the broken world.
this is why we celebrate Christmas. it is that moment of God's in-breaking into the world. God took on flesh and became one of us to lead us home.

People who have this story, people who know this God, have no reason to seek escape.
This story changes the way we interact with reality.

To become a christian, a follower of Jesus, is so much more than just getting your sins forgiven. It is to enter a different way to view all of reality.

Application:
• Do you read your Bible through the lens of God's mission?
• Do you see the world around you through the lens of God's mission?
• Do you seek escape from your problems and fears?
○ The story of God gives us hope that we can change because God is active through the message of Jesus today.
○ The story of God gives us motivation to change because we see the power and beauty of God's mission to restore all things.
• What is it that gives motivation for men to love and lead their homes, even after they have failed numerous times?
• What is it that gives a mother endurance to keep loving and caring and instructing her kids in the heat of daily parenting and home making?
• What is it that gives us courage to evangelize, to speak our beliefs, to break out of our little bubbles?
○ God in action. God breaking into our hearts and into the world to save.
• Do you rest in your God?
• What is the mission that moves your life? Is your life mission connected to God's mission?
○ Follow me and I will make you fishers of men...
• the only way we build unshakable hope is when we anchor ourselves to the mission of God and his unshakable faithfulness.
• God is on mission in the world around us. He cares about EVERYTHING. Its all his stuff, and he is engaged in a grand restoration project to take it all back.
• God is present in your life and all around you, spreading the work of his kingdom through the message of Jesus.
• They only way we find our place in his story is if we allow it to captivate our hearts.
• True change in your life will only start to happen as the story of God takes root and starts to change the reason you do everything you do.
○ Christianity is not a self help manual. It is not a plan of personal improvement.
• God is busy in the world. We are busy in the world. But is the business that is consuming us the same business that consumes him?