The Nations
Notes
Transcript
Call to Worship: Psalm 16:11 // Prayer
Call to Worship: Psalm 16:11 // Prayer
Adoration: We are weak, but you are mighty; you are our strong deliverer, who will bring us safely to the overflowing joy of your presence forever.
Confession: Yet, though you have given us your power, we are weak and wounded still, with the self-inflicted wounds of our sin. We placed our hope in wealth, in status, in worldly power, in physical comfort, in physical pleasure, in mere people, instead of in You. Forgive us, for we have sinned against you.
Thanksgiving: But we have trusted in your death, compassion, love, and power, Lord Jesus; and so we rejoice in the unshakable grace we because we are united with you by faith: we are yours forever.
Supplication: And so, Father, since we exist to shine your glory into the darkness, give us grace to do so. Give us wisdom in our families: for parents to teach the gospel to our children; for all of us love one another and to put each other’s needs before our own; and give us wisdom for work: in the stress and difficulty of it, to trust in you, to treat everyone justly and kindly, and to give glory to you // Laural CC: that God might make them worthy of his calling and might fulfill in them every resolve... // Japan: empower them with strong faith in your gospel, truth, boldness, and love in taking it to the lost, that the light of your redeeming love might shine through them in that land... // Cults: may they be dismantled; may your grace pierce even the darkness of their mind-control // to the word… help us to see the brightness of your glory in the face of Jesus
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Benediction
Benediction
Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.
Sermon
Sermon
Read: Genesis 9:1-11
Intro:
Intro:
This morning, we’re starting a 4 part sermon series, called “The Kingdom vs. The Nations.” And I want to kick it off by reading you a paragraph from nationaldayofprayer.org:
“[God] is the One who gave us this promise in 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” As we humbly and diligently seek Him, we’ll be changed, and we’ll see transformation in America through prayer!”
I think you’ve heard this idea before. For example, if you’ve seen the movie, “War Room”—very popular, and really, not a bad movie—this same Scripture is quoted with the same application for America, in the closing scenes. And so, as American Christians, we hear things like this often. And it puts the steel in our spines, and it gives us energy to engage in political prayer and political action for God’s glory, and it gives us great hope that America can be claimed for God.
But there’s something off in all of this: we rush into politics with a set of Christian ethics to implement, but without a Political Theology. That is, we have specific issues and ethical concerns that we vote and lobby for, but we haven’t taken the time to ask, “What does the Bible say about the relationship between Christianity and governments?” “How are believers actually supposed to relate to the nations we live in?”
And asking that question means asking other questions before we can even answer it:
What is a nation, and where do they come from?
What is the relationship between the Church and the nations?
And what is the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the nations?”
This morning, we’re going to look at that first question: “What is a nation?” And we’re going to see that nations, by the very nature of what they are, are a mix of good and evil, and are temporary. And we’re going to see this by examining three things:
The positive origins of the nations in God’s commission for humans to rule the earth.
The negative origins of the nations in the Tower of Babel
Satanic influence over the nations
And these things will give us the biblical testimony that Nations are, fundamentally, a mix of good and evil.
Adamic and Noahic Origins
Adamic and Noahic Origins
And it is important to emphasize that the nations really do contain good. Even the most wicked government on the planet—North Korea—probably sometimes saves human life by punishing murderers, however much evil it also does. But what is the Biblical explanation for this?
It begins with the design of humanity, found in the Genesis creation account:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So, human beings were designed to rule over the earth!
We are rulers by nature
And the idea is repeated and expanded, when the first man and woman receive their commission from God:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
So, when we were created, we were blessed to rule the earth!
Now, the problem is that, after receiving this blessing, we rebelled against God…
And so someone might ask, when we rebelled, did we lose the blessing entirely? Is there any sense, now, in which humans are supposed to rule over creation?
That question is answered by God’s covenant with Noah:
So first, God gave a covenant to Adam, which defined his relationship to God and to creation…
After he rebelled against God, humanity became so evil that God judged us with a catastrophic flood, and preserved only Noah and his family
And what happened after the flood, when Noah and his family entered the cleansed creation? God made a covenant him.
You can see this explicitly in Genesis 9:9, where the word “covenant” is used, which tells us that the whole passage is a covenant… but there are four things in this covenant that we especially need to see:
First, this covenant with Noah is a renewal of the covenant with Adam… listen to verse 1:
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
This is the same covenantal blessing originally given to Adam and Eve!
Noah is sort of like a new Adam
Second, this covenant with Noah again has us ruling the earth:
The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.
Here, Noah and his offspring are confirmed as rulers of the earth
Notice, though, there is a dark tone in these verses that wasn’t present in the creation account: now animals will fear people, and people will eat animals.
So, we are still, by God’s design and blessing, rulers over the earth. That’s a significant part of being human, even if the glory and harmony of the original creation has been lost.
But third, this covenant with Noah explicitly establishes human government. Just a couple verses down, in verses 5-6, we read:
And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.
Do you see that? God added a new category of rulership for humans in his covenant with Noah: Human beings are now God’s instruments of judgment against murder.
Human life is so precious—verse 6 tells us—that if you unjustly take the life of another human, God requires that your life then be taken by other humans. He requires human justice.
And the picture implied here is not vigilante justice, but a law court and an executioner—a human government
And so sum it up: we were designed to rule the earth. And now, because of the reality of human evil, God has added human government for us as one of the ways that we pursue our task of ruling the earth. We participate in human government to rule over or restrain evil.
And the fourth point, looking at Noah’s covenant, is that it is a preserving covenant, not a redeeming covenant. Look at verse 11, which gives the ultimate reason for the covenant:
I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
So, the purpose of the covenant was to preserve the earth, even in the face of human evil.
Why? How did this fit into God’s plan?
The earth would continue without catastrophic judgment, so that God’s plan to redeem his people could unfold…
So the bottom line is this: Noah’s covenant says nothing about redemption/gives no promise of redemption—it only says that the natural world would continue on in spite of human evil. Noah’s covenant only makes space for redemption to happen.
So then, to summarize what we’ve seen in Noah’s covenant: Human governments were instituted by God, and are a natural expression of our God-given task to rule the earth. But, Human governments don’t come from a redemptive covenant. They aren’t part of the realm of saving grace—of God’s grace to redeem. Instead, they come from a preserving covenant. So, they belong to the realm of common grace—the good gifts that God gives to all people, saved and unsaved alike.
OK. So now let’s step back and reflect on what Genesis 9 teachesus about our government today, as US citizens.
First, our government exists because, like every other government, it was instituted by God when he made that covenant with Noah. That’s where it comes from.
So, second, our government is not redemptive—it isn’t part of God’s plan of redemption—at least not in any remotely direct way. Governments were not designed by God to redeem people or to fix what is broken in our world—only Christ can do that!
So, third, our government is very limited in the good it can do for us, even with the very best people at the helm. But—and, I know this may seem strange, but it is what we just heard from Scripture—our government is a good gift from God
That is why Paul could say, about the violent and idolatrous Roman Empire:
For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.
But someone might say, “But there is so much evil in our government!” Yes. And that’s the history of the world: the people who engage in governing are fallen—just like all human beings. And so, they bring the evil that is in their hearts to the task of governing. Which means that, fourth, the good of human government is always heavily tainted by human evil. And it always will be, to one degree or another, until Christ returns
So, by the very nature of what it is, our government is a mixture of good and evil. That’s the story we get from the first nine chapters of Genesis.
OK, so now, let’s apply that to thinking about our nation as a whole. It’s not that nations can’t be better or worse. It’s not that governments can’t be more righteous or less righteous. And I’m not denying that we’ve become less righteous in recent decades. But like every other nation, our nation always has been, and always will be, a mix of good and evil, that exists in the realm of God’s common, preserving grace, not his redeeming, saving grace. And that should make us think twice before we set off on quests to redeem our government or our nation for God.
Babel and the Table of Nations
Babel and the Table of Nations
But there’s a second picture about the nations, painted for us at the tower of Babel.
Noah, we saw, was like a second Adam. He entered a cleansed creation, and was given the task of filling and ruling it.
After him, his descendants grew in number, formed a civilization in Mesopotamia, and began building a city and a tower. But because of their evil motivations for building the these, God confused their languages and scattered them. It was like another fall. Genesis 11:8-9 explain:
So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
And as chapter 10 records, this event is what launched people groups out from Mesopotamia, to scatter into distant lands, and to build their own civilizations there. In fact, Genesis 10 is often called, “The Table of the Nations.”
So, this is a second biblical point of origin for the nations: because of human evil, God broke up civilization into distinct nations and languages, dis-unified from each other. Or, from another angle, God graciously broke up that single civilization into many different nations as a way to restrain human evil.
And so the nations scattered across the earth, carrying with them both their God-giving task of ruling and governing, and also the evil that broke them apart from each other in the first place.
And down through the course of human history, this lead to the particular nation that we, ourselves, belong to—the US. One of the scattered peoples of the world, a mix of good and evil. Like every other nation, a good gift of God’s common grace, but heavily tainted by sin.
Application
Application
So, what wisdom does all this give us, for American politics?
On the one hand, if human government is a natural part of being human, we should not be afraid to be involved—to vote, or even to be involved at a deeper level, for the good of our neighbors
Politics are messy, since the political arena will always be a mix of good and evil—but they are not “unclean” so that good Christians avoid them
But on the other hand, politics bring a dangerous temptation. Let’s look at that statement from nationaldayofprayer.org again:
“[God] is the One who gave us this promise in 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” As we humbly and diligently seek Him, we’ll be changed, and we’ll see transformation in America through prayer!”
Is that true? Is that biblical?
The first thing to notice is, that verse is quoted badly out of context: that promise was given to the nation of Israel—to the one human nation that actually had a specific part in God’s plan of redemption. The one human nation which was both a human government and the covenant people of God at the same time.
That verse does not apply to the United States of America. We have no promise from God that any volume or fervor in our prayers will cause the US to stop sliding backward, or will cause our culture to be healed. That is simply not a promise God has made!
Nor is this a small error: convince Christians that a certain level of prayer will heal their earthly nation, and you’ll take our eyes off of God’s actual promises! Listen to how Hebrews 11 describes Abraham’s faith in God’s promises:
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.
Two verses later
For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.
And then, talking about the faith of Sarah and Abraham
But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.
And a couple of chapters later, talking about you, brothers and sisters, it says:
For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.
This next year, election year, many voices will ask you to put your hope in a plan, a party, a candidate, rather than in the City that is to come. And how do you know when they’ve succeeded? If your candidate wins, and you feel that the Kingdom of God has advanced, and begin to think of your earthly city as if it was the heavenly city. Or, when you candidate loses, and you feel as though the Kingdom has suffered a blow, and you derive little confidence in this life from God’s promise to make it happen.
You’ve been hoping that Babylon can be polished up into Zion.
If you’ve been there, that’s called idolatry. I know I’ve been there.
Kyleigh and I just got our passports in the mail...
Good news is, my photo doesn’t look like I’m a criminal in a mug shot
I don’t look particularly intelligent… but… what are you going to do?
But we were so excited to receive them… crisp, clean
But here’s the real good news: passports for that better country are written in blood—the blood of the lamb, slain for you. It’s blood that speaks a better word, that forgives our idolatry, and welcome us in:
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
If you’ve not yet received this forgiveness, this citizenship in Zion, this friendship with God, we urge you, do not place your hope in the nations of this world, which cannot cleanse you or make you right with God. But place your hope in the blood of Christ, shed for you, and you will be redeemed.
Brothers and sisters, where is your hope today? Is it in a quest to Christianize America, a nation that will some day pass away? The downward slide of our nation is a real tragedy, and worth working against. And we’ll think more about doing that wisely during the next three weeks.
But where is your hope? Is it in this present evil age? Or is it in the better country, which is to come?
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