Sermon Tone Analysis
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[TITLE SLIDE]
The message begins with a discussion on holy war in the OT.
The whole idea of the conquest of Caanan was to drive the evil out of the land.
That was done 1) by driving out the people and their gods with them, and 2) by driving out the sons of Anak (giants who perpetuated evil in the land).
Holy war plays out symbolically in the life of the church as we pursue God’s perfect Kingdom.
The struggle is not just against this world and the desires of the flesh (), but against real spiritual powers.
Therefore, we fight to drive out evil from our midst by living holy lives completely surrendered to Christ.
But, holy war is not fought by us.
The Israelites failed to purify the land, but repentance belongs to Christ.
He has given us the power to do what the Israelites could not.
The powers of darkness in the world would have loved nothing more than to leave humanity struggling to live holy lives and failing at every turn.
And that’s why Jesus came.
He did not come to fight the battle for us, but to empower us by His Spirit so that we can have victory.
The message should focus on Jesus tricking Satan—the mystery of the Gospel.
And explore: How is it that we can have victory over evil (sin)?
How is it that we can have victory over evil (sin)?
Intro
chapter ten
Since the very beginning of time, God was working to accomplish the same purpose He is working to accomplish today.
God is building a Kingdom for His Glory.
That’s the plan that began in the beginning and which comes to fulfillment in the end of time.
God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply in order to spread God’s rule over the planet.
God wanted the whole earth to be a place where heaven and earth met, where humanity could enjoy the divine, and where the divine could enjoy earth and humanity.
Since the fall, God had been trying to revive his original goal for Eden: to live with both his divine and human family on earth.
God had told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, thereby spreading God’s good rule over the rest of the planet.
God wanted the whole earth to be a place where heaven and earth met, where humanity could enjoy the divine, and where the divine could enjoy earth and humanity.
We know how that went.
But, we know how that story goes.
Adam and Even sinned and were expelled from God’s presence.
The gates of Eden were closed.
The divine enemy, the Serpent, was banished from God’s presence to earth, the place where death reigns.
As we learned last week, he became lord of the dead, and had claim to every human being who would ever live—because they sin, and sin’s price tag is death.
A History of Failure
Humanity sinned and was expelled from God’s presence.
Eden was shut down.
The divine enemy, the Serpent, was banished—cast or cut down—from God’s presence to earth, the place where death reigns, where life is not everlasting.
He became lord of the dead, and therefore had claim to every human being who would ever live—because they sin, and sin’s wages is death ().
PAUSE
[TITLE SLIDE]
Later came the great flood and the story of Noah.
After the flood waters subsided, God had repeated His purpose to Noah and his family: be fruitful and multiply.
God was building a Kingdom for His glory.
But, humanity rebelled again.
Rather than obey God and spread the knowledge and rule of God everywhere, they would build a tower to make a name for themselves.
Failure again.
God mixed up the nations’ languages and turned the nations over to his divine council to rule.
And he decided to start again with a new human family, Abraham and Sarah.
This, too, was a failure of sorts, so the next phase in God’s plan was to bring the nation of Israel out of Egypt to the Promised Land.
And Israel failed!
Eventually God raised up King David, and then David’s son King Solomon.
But after Solomon died, Israel followed other gods and the Israelites turned on each other.
God had to expel them from the Promised Land in exile in Babylon.
Humans always fail.
The human story, apart from God’s presence, is a story of failure.
Humanity has been lost since the fall.
All humans are imperfect and estranged from God.
No human leader could be trusted with starting and maintaining God’s kingdom, because humans are fallible.
By nature we resist allegiance to God.
We go our own way.
Humans always sin, always fail, and inevitably join the lord of the dead, God’s great enemy.
But, God’s vision of a new Eden couldn’t happen without humans.
God is building a Kingdom for His glory and He chose to do so using sinful, broken people like you and me.
So, the only way humans will ever be able to accomplish our part of God’s plan would be for us to fixed, restored to the image of God like Adam and Eve were in the beginning.
And to accomplish that, God had…
A Plan
What God needed was a man who was more than a man—someone who could resist temptation, who would always obey, who was fit for kingship.
Only a man like that could reverse the curse of death by taking the sins of the world upon himself, dying and then rising again by his own power.
No mere man could do that…
The reparation of humanity could happen in one way: God himself would have to become a man.
— If you want something done right sometimes you have to do it yourself.
— So, God fulfilled his own plan as a real man, for all humankind, in order to restore Eden on the earth.
[A Plan]
But there's a problem.
This plan required that God Himself come to earth and be betrayed to death by the evil one.
God’s plan to save humankind required that Satan bring Jesus to the cross.
That was the plan.
The plan was that Jesus would come to earth and die at the hands of his enemies and then rise again to new life.
And you can imagine that Satan would do anything to stop God’s plan.
If the plan were discovered the forces of darkness wouldn’t fall for it.
Why would they have killed Jesus if they knew that is what God wanted to happen?
They wouldn’t.
In fact, when Satan possessed Judas so that Judas would betray Jesus, Satan thought He was winning.
He thought that if he could kill Jesus, the war in the heavens would be over and the earth would be His forever.
But, that’s not how God’s plan worked.
God was deceiving the deceiver so that Satan would betray Jesus.
That’s is exactly what the Apostle Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthian church:
This is precisely what Paul said in a letter to the Corinthian church:
But we speak the hidden wisdom of God in a mystery, which God predestined before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew.
For if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
( leb)
There, the term rulers, at least refers to the divine rulers of this age.
Paul said that the death and resurrection of Jesus, although it was predestined before time even began, it was hidden wisdom.
Jesus’s death and resurrection were a mystery, authored before the creation of the world, but hidden from the rulers of this age.
Who are the rulers?
Ruler is a favorite term of Pauls to describe the cosmic rulers, the powers of darkness.
For example, Paul wrote to the Ephesians…
The rulers are the disobedient divine rulers, not earthly rulers.
[A Plan]
So, why did Paul hide Jesus’s death and resurrection from divine rulers?
Because if they knew how God was going to save humanity, Paul said, “…they would never have crucified the Lord of glory.”
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