The Jesus Family (part III) - “The Family of Old”

September 23, 2007 8:26 pm admin Chapter 8, Romans, Sermon-Texts

The third of a sermon series called “The Jesus Family.” The sermon title is “The Family of Old” and addresses the theme of how God’s Spirit leads us and his purpose in the way he leads. The sermon is an exegetical treatment of Romans 8:14. This sermon was originally preached September 23rd of 2007 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA.

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:: The Resolved Church :: September 23rd, 2007 :: Pastor Duane M. Smets

The Jesus Family Series
Part III - “The Family of Old”

Romans 8:12-17
12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Introduction
I. The Exodus Story
II. The Pillar of Fire and Cloud
III. God’s Spirit Leads His Family
Conclusion

Today we are going into sermon three of our Jesus Family Series. This morning I’m dealing with just a few words, “led by the Spirit of God” in vs.14. Last week we began talking about these words but we didn’t really get into them a whole lot. I brought up the point that all of us want leadership in our life. There are times and decisions which come up in every person’s life, whether you are following Jesus or not, and you just wish someone would tell you what to do. It would be a lot easier that way.

At that point, when you really got to make a decision, a lot of people get super Christian all of a sudden and they are praying and trying to figure out what to do real hard. That’s how half the people who now live in San Diego ended up here! They were praying and praying and the result was that God told them to come here. Don’t get me wrong. But I think our beaches and and our sun the girls that go along with that often have a lot more to do with that than God.

So I made a point that God isn’t stupid and he doesn’t just expect us to make decisions based on some voice we hear in our head which we make up to be him. Instead he gave us a book, the Bible written by men who knew God, the real God, and they wrote down the things he told them to in their own way and style. 2 Timothy 3:16 says the Bible is Spirit-breathed, so the main author of the Bible is God and the main way God expects us to make decisions, to be led by the Spirit is to get to know the Bible so that we can make wise informed decisions. The danger of following voices in our head is that what we like, or experience, or what is comfortable becomes the driving force behind our decisions and we are just putting a God tag on that and he is calling us here and then there and then over here and our God starts to look real schitzophrenic.

That’s the kind of Christianity I grew up with. So when I was in college I went out to pray on these clifffs that overlooked the ocean and I kept waiting for some bush or rock to catch on fire and start speaking to me to tell me what to do with my life. I should have just kept reading my Bible and figuring out my gifts, which is what I ultimately ended up doing anyway.

Today we are going to be looking at a story in the Old Testament. The whole Bible is about Jesus and the Bible is divided two parts, just as history is divided into two parts…the time before Jesus came to earth and died on the cross and the time afterward. Everything is about Jesus, he is the center focal point of history and of the whole Bible.

The Exodus Story

The reason I want to go to the Old Testament today is because we are not into using the Bible to make up our own meaning and interpretation…we want to get in the author’s head and the human author of Romans, Paul, he was a Jew. He was a really really good Jew, sort of like the valedictorian of Judaism…circumcised on the 8th day, of the trible of Benjamin, trained in Jewish law, before coming to believe in Jesus a very prominent and well respected professional Jewish lawyer. He, undoubtedly had the Jewish law, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, memorized word for word. Even mediocre Jewish boys in his day had the Torah memorized by age 13. So Paul, in this verse of Romans says, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” Those are his words, and I cannot conceive that there is any way he could have written that without thinking of a certain passage in the Old Testament.

Let me read it for you, this is Exodus 13:17-22. ” 17 When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near. For God said, “Lest the people change their minds when they see war and return to Egypt.” 18 But God led the people around by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea. And the people of Israel went up out of the land of Egypt equipped for battle. 19 Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for Joseph had made the sons of Israel solemnly swear, saying, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones with you from here.” 20 And they moved on from Succoth and encamped at Etham, on the edge of the wilderness. 21 And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night. 22 The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people.”

Here is what is going on…I’ll set up the story for you. The first five books of the Bible and really the whole Bible itself, follow this theme of God gathering a people for himself…creating a spritual family of worshippers who come to know him and love him and care for each other and the world around them. God is big on having an intimate and special family. He starts out with Adam and Eve, they botch things up pretty good because they lose it and start talking to snakes, one of their sons ends up killing the other one, the family falls apart. Noah comes along and he’s able to do some good stuff for awhile but he ends up drunk and naked in his tent and his sons are trying to get him to have sex with his daughters.

Then God comes to Abraham, who lives in ancient Mesopotamia and tells him that he is going to take him out of his land and create a people from his descendents who will be God’s people, his family. Abraham believes God and his belief is credited to him because as righteousness. And Abraham needed it because he tries to pimp out his wife to the local king in order to try and find favor with him. Abraham’s son, Isaac, like father like son, he ends up doing the same thing and trying to pimp out his wife to a guy named Abimelech. Isaac’s son Jacob ends up this lying swindling theif, who robs his brother and everyone else he knows and is always lying about it. He and O.J. were good friends.

Isaac has several sons and one day they take the youngest son Joseph and beat him up and sell him to these Egyptian guys traveling through. While in Egypt Joseph ends up making friends with the Pharaoh and before you know it he is running the place, literally. So all his family ends up moving out there and they stay there for a few hundred years and their family just grows and grows.

Somewhere along the way things took a turn for the worst and the whole Israelite family, the ones who were supposed to be God’s people, end up at the bottom of society as slaves and are no longer getting invited to the kings mansion in La Jolla for the good meals and instead they are scrubbing toliets in National City and making bricks. It’s no fun. Life sucks. They are all on meds and freaking out. And what do you do when life sucks? Then you start praying and become super Christian right? J

But God is a God of grace and compassion and so he listens to their cries and says okay, I’ll deliver you out of Egypt and when I do I going to show you what kind of God I am. There is this great line in Exodus 9 where God says why he did all this and he says it is so, “My power …(and) my name might be proclaimed in all the earth (Ex. 9:16).” Life is about God and his glory. There is only one true God and only one who is worthy of worship and praise. That is the God we serve.

Egypt was much like San Diego, where you got a lot of different gods, a lot of different religions. And each person was just sort of free to pick which God and religion you like and worship them. That didn’t make the real God to happy, so when he delivers Israel out of Egypt he attacks all their gods. The goddess of the Nile was Hapi, so in the first plague God, Yahweh, the real God, turns her river blood red. In the second plague God, Yahweh, goes after the god of the crops, a statue they worshipped named Heqt who had the head of a frog, so God sends a swarm of frogs into the land to kill all the crops. In the third and fourth plagues Yahweh goes after the god Kheper, a bettle who was supposed to be the insect god of the life and creation, so Yahweh sends gnats and flies all over the land covering it like dust. Apis, was the god of the cattle, so in the fifth plague God kills all the livestock. Imhotep, was the god of medicine, so in the sixth plague, Yahweh sends incurable boils to break out on man and beast. The god, Nut, was to control the weather in order to protect the crops, so God sends this gnarly hail strom to ruin all the fields in the seventh plague. The god, Seth was the god of the harvest, so in the eighth plague Yahweh sends in locusts to eat up any remaining food not yet damaged. In the ninth plague, Yahweh goes after the god of the sun, Ra, and causes an unheard of visible and internal darkness to cover the land. And in the tenth and final plague Yahweh goes after Pharoah himself, who was considered to be the people’s divine ruler, and Yahweh strikes down his family.

The lesson is don’t piss God off. I worry about some of you guys sometimes and the decisions you make, and the other functional saviors other than Jesus you turn to. God is a good God and he cares and he will judge. He is slow to anger, but he does have a limit to how much he will take from us.

The lesson really isn’t don’t piss God off, although that is there. The lesson is God is gathering a people for himself and showing them that he is the true God and he is a God worthy to be worshipped. So finally, after all the plagues, the Pharoah let’s God’s people go and God leads them. Verse 21 & 22 of Exodus 13, “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and night. The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people.”

The Pillar of Fire and a Cloud

This story gets ingrained in Jewish history and identity. This pillar of fire and cloud is going before them and it stays with them for years and shows up in several places even after that. We hear about it in Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Nehemiah, in the Psalms, and we see it again in at the end of the Bible in the book of Revelation. A pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day. What is that all about?

The Rastafarians and all the potheads love this story. They think the pilar of cloud and fire is Moses and Aarron way up in front of everybody, smoking this giant peace pipe. I love talking to those guys. All you got to do is walk down Newport Ave. in OB and strike up a conversation with one of the many guys smoking a blunt. They love talking about God! They’re always like, “yeah man, I read the Bible, it says God made the herb…”

So if that’s what you were thinking I’m sorry, it doesn’t mean that. In the Bible whenver the presence of God is mentioned, it is often accompanied by one of these two things. Either fire or a cloud or both. It is called a theophany. Where God manifests his presence in a particular way. And these two things symbolize some important things about God. He is a powerful God and he is to be feared. He can smoke you if he wants. There is only one God and I’m not him. I may not agree or understand sometimes but I have a small brain. God is holy and none can defeat him.

The fire of God often represents God’s purity. God is a good God. In the ocean of his existence there is not a single drop of impurity, not a single crack or error. All his ways are perfect and all his judgments are true. When he strikes it is usually long-over due. He sees and understands things in correct proportion and knows the true heart of man. Fire has this purifying power. If you boil something it rids it of germs or pestilences. If you have an open wound on your arm and you burn it with hot metal it will heal. So fire represents not only God’s power but also his purity.

What about the cloud? Clouds or smoke show up several times in the Bible. A cloud fills the temple after it is first build and the priest is exposed to the glory of God inside the temple. After that they started putting a rope around the priests ankle in case when he went in the glory of God overwhelmed and he died, they could pull him and without having to go in. In the New Testament, God speaks to the people when Jesus starts his ministry and says, “This is my son, listen to him.” And then toward the end of his ministry, Jesus goes up on a mountain and the glory of God descends in a cloud and Jesus face turns as bright of the sun and some of the disciples see it. And after Jesus dies on a cross, he returns to heaven, levitating on a cloud.

Clouds, throughout the Bible, often represent God’s presence and with them a sense of mystery and awe. There is a sense of God being overwhelming and transcendedent…that he is greater than this whole world and greater than all that we can conceive. He is the one true and awesome God! And he concsends and makes himself known to us. He is a present God. Who who cares and takes care of his people. He protects and provides for his family.

God’s Spirit Leads His Family

Okay. So what’s the point? How does all this jive together? Romans is saying God leads his by his Spirit and those who leads are the ones in his family. And I’ve been saying that he doesn’t do that mainly by leaving us to the whim of our subjective individual experiences but more through his written Word which is sure and reliable. But in this Exodus story, which says almost the exact same thing, that God leads his people by His Spirit, there it is by some experience where his people see and feel the effects of having a pillar of fire and a cloud in front of them. I’m guessing it was off in the distance, like you couldn’t go touch it and talk to it or anything. But it was visible. So what is going on here? Don’t those seem to be two different things?

I think this is what was up. I believe God was teaching his people to trust his Word. God made a covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…that the Lord would make them into God’s people. And when Israel was back in Egypt and crying out to God for deliverance, God responded and verse 24 of chapter two says it was because God “remembered his covenant.” God remembered his covenant and want to demonstrate to his people that they could trust him. His word is sure and true. Now they didn’t have the written Bible yet, but their story became the written Bible when God asked Moses to record it, and it became the source for rememberence and for trusting God. God wanted to uniquely reveal himself, not as a god who could be pictured in statue form but as a God who acts and makes himself known in written accounts of his actions. And that is exactly what this story became.

When I get up in the morning I read my Bible every day. That is what God’s word says his people are to do. So I do that, whether I feel like it or not. But the other day as I was working on this sermon I just happened to be reading Psalm 78. I’ve been reading through the Psalms for awhile and it was just the next Psalm. And Psalm 78 recounts the whole exodus story and about a quarter of the way into the story mentions how God led his people by a cloud by day and a fiery light at night (Ps. 78:14).” That story had become the Psalmist’s story, even though those events had happened so many years before him. And in the same way, the exodus story becomes our story…the story of our God and what he is like and that he leads and guides us.

Have you ever wondered why sometimes you read the Bible and all these crazy things seem to happen and you are like, “Well, I’ve never seen that.” I think it is because God doesn’t do that stuff very often. It’s not like he needs to do it for each and every generation because he already did it and its recorded. And even if we did experience that, it is no guarantee it would even help us.

Exodus says that God was leading them. He was leading them to the promised land…the place where they would build a city and a house to worship God in. But several of those people did not enter the promised land, in fact hardly any did. It is because seeing something, or having something proven to you, does not make you love God. Love doesn’t work like that. You can put a beautiful woman before me and tell me all about how great her features are, but that doesn’t make me love her. It is something that happens in the heart. I love my wife, and she is very beautiful, but that is not the thing which drives my love for her.

Something has to happen in our hearts because our hearts do not naturally love God. Which is why Jesus came. In exodus they were on a journey to the promised land. And in the journey God showed his people how much they needed him, how they needed a savior. Today, we are all on a journey as well. Our last sermon series was all about that, the walk we walk while on earth and how when Jesus came, he became the promised land. The exodus journey to the promised land was all a set up for the time when Jesus would come, when he becomes the center of worship. In John 4 Jesus said a time was to come and had then come in him, when true worshippers would no longer worship in a distinct geographical location but would worship in Spirit and in truth.

That is Jesus. He comes and lives a perfect life and then dies on a cross for our sin, for our broken, messed up, disbelieving, hard hearts and then he gives us a new heart and starts to redeem and change us. He gives us his Spirit and as we get to know him through God’s word he leads and guides and direcets the course of our lives. He makes us wise and strong. Just as God was teaching his people of old to trust him and his word is is trying to teach us that today. To trust him and to follow him and to believe his word is true and that his son Jesus did actually come and die and rise again so that we can have new life.

Conclusion

This is the great exchange. Humanity is broken and continually broken. The whole Old Testament goes through story after story to show us that. God is to be worshipped and adored and we don’t do that, which deserves death and destruction and judgment. But God is a great and a good God and sends his son to die in our place, to satisfy the wrathful judgment of God. He takes it on himself and in so doing becomes our savior. He stands in front of us and saves us.

Jesus changes our heart and from that point on he continually gives himself to us. We spend a life of seeing how much our hearts have been contaminated…how much and how often we continually turn to other Jesuses, other saviors, and Jesus continually offers himself to us and saves us and spares us.

What Jesuses you ask? You know them better than I do. The things you are most afraid of and where you turn for help. When you are down, how you try and find comfort. It’s how you deal with the things you complain about and make you angry and bother you. Do you turn to some functional messiah like the arms of a boy, or the kiss of a girl? Do you turn to some stimulatant like a pill or ten beers so you don’t feel a thing? Do you turn to work and try and save yourself by building a big bank account? What do you live for? There are a ton of answers and we all turn to other saviors and need Jesus again and again to apply his gospel to our hearts. Take away our sin and pour in himself.

God is all about his family. He has done everything to gather together a people for himself. He created us and He died for us. He has been patient with us as we have all failed him and continually do. Jesus came into this world for us. So don’t turn to any other savior’s but Jesus. Let him, by his Spirit, lead you. Make your life all about Jesus and being part of his family.