He needs you!

 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.  Genesis 3:15

Enemies go to war.  Enmity between the woman and the serpent was not merely a prediction, it was a covenant made between man and God.  The Lord God proclaimed this covenant of enmity with full knowledge that He would fulfill it Himself.  The contract made between God and man was sealed by the shedding of blood (3:21).  The Lord made it possible that His precious people could be wrapped in love.

Meanwhile, human destiny is worked out in the presence of the serpent.  Heel bruising and head crushing war is part of God’s promise to us as those who choose to side with Him.  Jesus sees the trajectory of the falling star of Lucifer/satan when His disciples report victory over evil (Luke 10:17-18  And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils [demons] are subject unto us through thy name. And he said unto them, I beheld satan as lightning fall from heaven).  Humans experience the good will of Jesus because the good thing He wants for us is victory over evil that is subject to His blood and His command. 

The startling thing to consider is that the overwhelming assault on the enemy’s primary position in this realm of time was not a display of power, but a display of weakness.  How much more vulnerable could God be than to become the seed that made a willing virgin woman great with child?  How else could God fulfill the promise to truly be one of us so that, in death, He could be one with us?  Naked, He came, vulnerable and dependent upon the stout heart and strong hands of that unsung hero of the Nativity, Joseph, Son of David.  Chosen by God because His father, David, before Him would risk his life for a lamb or a cringing army, Joseph is the warrior prince who will raise the King of kings.  Jesus became a man and won the greatest of all victories in war. The war of human nature.  The war to rebuke the devil.  The war to gain freedom for slaves.

Come to Jesus.

Come to the Cross.

Who is He looking for?

And the LORD God
   called unto Adam,
   and said unto him,
      Where art thou?   Genesis 3:9 KJV

Many things can be killed with analysis and classification.  To regard the words in Chapter 3 of Genesis as "The Fall" or the outcome as "Original Sin" may make it impossible to read the story for what it really says.  When something becomes the property of the experts, then ordinary people are excluded from having the right to see it in a different light; they may have flashlights but are not provided with batteries.  Instead of looking only at the story of "The Fall," why not ask about the story of the Lord God, Himself?

Apparently, the Lord God had grown accustomed to taking walks in the garden that He had planted and into which He had placed the man.  Perhaps He went there after countless hours of painful spiritual warfare and the ugliness it presented.  Whatever had been happening in God's life before He arrived, He was about to encounter the new sinners and would have to adjust to the emptiness of the garden in the near future.  The interesting thing to notice is that He did not enter the garden in the pomposity of omniscience.  Instead, the Lord began His walk and, eventually, had to search for His customary companions.  Adam and Eve were hiding and God was seeking.  They had invented a game that God would be compelled to participate in for many years to come.

Many years later, Jesus (Jesus is God) is worn out from a long ordeal of spiritual warfare and sits down at a well near the town of Sychar (John 4:5).  A woman comes to get water at the well and Jesus asks her for water to drink.  The amazing conversation that follows invigorates the Lord God because He has won through at the game of spiritual "hide and seek."  Having told Jesus deep painful truths and revealed that, in spite of being a sinner, she still wanted to worship God, Jesus acquaints her with the garden variety style of the Living God:
But the hour cometh, and now is,
when the true worshippers
shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth:
for the Father seeketh such to worship him. (John 4:23 KJV)

Amazing! After all these years, God is still looking for and calling out to people who will trust Him. Obviously, it is a foolish human invention that views God as relying upon His omniscience to get the job done in advance.  Instead, the Bible clearly points out that the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are at work in time to bring an end to spiritual warfare in the finality of new creation (Revelation 20:10-21:1).  The blessing of the good news that has been spreading for hundreds of years is that the place for enlisting on the winning side is always open for those who long for a walk with God that will never end.  The cross of Calvary is the victory of God.  The blood of Jesus cannot be cut off from humans who are sinners.

Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.

Tree huggers...

And they heard the voice of the LORD God

   walking in the garden in the cool of the day:

And Adam and his wife hid themselves

from the presence of the LORD God

      amongst the trees of the garden.   Genesis 3:8 KJV

Adam and Eve sought shelter from the singing voice of the Lord God among the trees to which they were now trying to conform themselves.  Wearing fig leaves and trying to appear nonchalant about their new alliance with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the loving presence of the Lord was painful to their newly awakened consciences.  But, like it or not, there He was; walking, talking, singing and enjoying life as only God can live it. 

The devil’s plan for Eve and Adam was to reconstitute the life that the Lord God had given them into something they could live on their own terms.  He wanted them to share his distorted condition that rejected the boundaries that God had creatively set for them…Satan’s as a bloodless angelic creature and the humans’ as blood-filled biological spirits.  The Lord had prescribed certain by-products from other plant “biologics” as sustaining life while others were unhealthy, dangerous or deadly.  The fig was designed to provide a spiritual death: all the ramifications of which are still being explored to this day.

It is high time that humans revisit this moment in our history with our hearts.  Admittedly, we men need to be led humbly back to this place where our mother was deceived (1 Timothy 2:14) and our father’s love for her compelled him to throw himself into the fray of spiritual warfare by wrapping himself in the death that she had died.  Too long has humanity had to endure the foolishness of cerebral men who work out logical systems and inflict them upon philosophy and theology.  “Original sin” did not make humans that followed by procreation into spiritual filth any more than it did so for the original sinners.  All of humanity is still qualified to participate in spiritual warfare just as all of humanity is subject to spiritual attack.  The devil takes seriously that humans are worth something to God, even if many human philosophies scream loudly that it is not so.

The place that the Lord God prescribed as His rallying point for humans in the war against evil is the Cross of Calvary (1 Peter 1:19-20).  Christianity demands that believers be tree huggers of a different sort than Adam and Eve attempted.  We must meet Jesus in the place where His shed blood became available to all humans.  We must not depart from the cross since it is prescribed for us to take it with us (Luke 9:23).  It is the only tree that has value and the only one from which the onslaught of the enemy tries to separate us.

Come to Jesus.

Come to the Cross.

Clothed in servanthood.

Also for Adam and his wife

the LORD God made tunics of skin, and clothed them.  

Then the LORD God said,

"Behold, the man has become like one of Us,

    to know good and evil.

And now, lest he put out his hand

   and take also of the tree of life,

   and eat,  

   and live forever" --   Genesis 3:21-22 NKJV

After the Lord cursed the serpent, He left the newly dead/living couple and found the sheep where they were grazing.  The ram saw Him approach and wondered what the sorrowful look on the Lord’s face could mean.  Later, as He adjusted the fleece on Adam’s shoulder, the Lord saw the man gazing thoughtfully at the Tree of Life behind Him.

The man and woman were first established in the Garden of Eden under the authority of direct fellowship with the Lord.  Death within the humans shattered this authoritative protection and left all of mankind subject to angelic authority (Luke 4:10, Hebrews 2:7-9).  To offset the evil authority of the fallen angel(s), the Lord provided the protection of servant/sacrificial authority for mankind.  The ram that gave his shed blood for the first couple paved the way for God’s use of sacrifice/servanthood to hold satan at bay until the coming of Jesus.

By default, Jesus (Jesus is God) affirmed the servant role of government as a protection against satanic power.  Jesus did not interfere with any 1^st century governing body on earth.  Ultimately, all government behaves to maintain order within a nation and works because of its spiritual link to sacrifice/servant authority (Romans 13:4).  Jesus affirmed the power of and fulfilled the position of servant/sacrifice by His death on the cross.  Jesus opened the door of enlistment to humble hearts who wish to join Him in warfare against satanic evil.  Our choice of work clothes points to the quality of our faith.  Jesus offers to dress us so that the cross is in full view over His shoulder.

Come to Jesus.

Come to the Cross.

Murdered! she was!

And the serpent said to the woman, "You surely shall not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it (the fig tree = tree of knowledge of good and evil Matthew 21:19) your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Genesis 3:4-5   

My plan for this week's blog was to move on to the book of Exodus... that was my plan.  Then I read some things that made me angry.  So back to Genesis 3 and the temptation of Eve.

Jesus is God.  In John 8, Jesus is in a verbal battle with Pharisees.  According to John's way of framing the narrative, the verbal battle is based on the outrageously merciful way that Jesus (God) has treated a woman caught in adultery.  Pharisees want her stoned and they want Jesus to lead the charge in establishing their bent ideas of lawful justice.  Here is His opportunity to throw in with them and show that their agenda and His is the same.  Jesus' strange idea of justice is that He becomes the champion of the woman and drives away her accusers.  In reading this account of the heart of Jesus, I was reminded of the things discussed last week...Adam freely gives himself over to the sinful condition of Eve and is identified with her - no matter what.  Jesus freely gives Himself over to the sinful condition of mankind and is identified with us - sin and all (Isaiah 53:12).

The thing that made me angry was in reading certain modern day Doctors of the Church who seem to reverse engineer the sort of sinful condition and flavor of death that is found in the adulterous woman into Eve before she ate the fruit.  Think about it for a minute... God made the first couple innocent and their approach to anything and everything was from the perspective of innocence.  Innocence.  Granted, it is very difficult for those of us that have fig juice in our veins to step into Eden and comprehend the story from this point of view.  If we don't, then we must accept the alternative.  The alternative is to continue teaching the bad idea that Eve was filled with sinful pride and ate the fruit in defiance of God.  From this approach, Eve has sin built into her and the fruit eating is incidental.  But surely this is nonsense.  Innocence is innocent until the deed is done that is sin.  If she drops it on the ground before taking a bite, she remains innocent.  Guilt and intent are not linked together until the law expands the offense.

Jesus claims that Eve was murdered.  Back to the debate in John 8.  Jesus knows that the Pharisees want to murder Him.  He reminds them that they are working from an old sense of family loyalty... "You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature; for he is a liar, and the father of lies. John 8:44.  The devil murdered an innocent woman in the beginning by talking to her as the slick trickster he was.  The murdered human took a new approach to the issue of the fruit of a tree God had expressly forbidden her husband to avoid.  When her teeth touched the skin of the fig, she sinned.  Not before.
At the beginning of John 8, Jesus encounters the children of the devil who have conspired together to trap a woman in adultery.  Jesus covers her in the same way as He covered the first couple.  He makes available His own saving blood from the cross.  He defends her and provides a picture of unfailing love toward her.  He reminds unfaithful Israel and humanity that easily departs from the love of the Living God that the Cross is available to any and all.

Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.

Beginnings

And when the woman saw

   that the tree was good for food,

   and that it was pleasant to the eyes,

   and a tree to be desired

     to make one wise,

she took of the fruit thereof,

 and did eat,

 and gave also unto her husband with her;

and he did eat.    Genesis 3:6 KJV

Here is one of the earliest pictures of Jesus in the Bible.  Many who are looking for power and proof of their own agenda miss this picture.  When we look for the love of God Himself, we cannot miss Jesus here.  The love of God was not only built into Adam, the first man, it was also trained into him in his daily walk with the Lord.  When Adam was faced with the devastating condition of sin in the woman to whom God had wed him, He did the thing that God Himself would do.  In love, he joined himself to Eve in the deadly knowledge of good and evil. 

When the Apostle Paul draws our attention to this picture, he reminds us that Adam behaved according to the godly power of love toward Eve.

For Adam was first formed, then Eve. 

And Adam was not deceived,

but the woman being deceived

      was in the transgression.    1 Timothy 2:13-14 KJV

Clearly, Paul is teaching that when the man took the fruit from the woman’s hand, his own knowledge of good and evil had been injected into him by her fall into sin.  What happened to her became intrinsic in him.  Eating the fruit sealed his death and joined him to her indelibly.  Mankind would continue to be defined as man and woman even in their sinful union.  God Himself would not undo this definition of mankind when He took on flesh and established Himself as bridegroom to all of humanity. Paul, again, declares that this union of man and God was chosen before creation:

For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother,

    and shall cleave to his wife;

    and the two shall become one flesh. 

This mystery is great;

but I am speaking with reference to

    Christ

    and the church.  Ephesians 5:31-32 NIV

Here, then, is a picture of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ who is described as the one who “became sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21).  Unlike Adam, Jesus was able to join humanity in her condition and provide a new life through His shed blood on the cross.  The love of Adam was great and noble but his ability to join Eve was an act of hope; hope and trust that another could come with the power of everlasting life to set mankind free.

Jesus came to give us life.

In love, He calls to mankind from the cross.

Come to Jesus.

Come to the Cross.

Introduction

Beginning with Moses - Luke 24

When the dust had settled a bit from all the resurrection uproar on the first Sunday of New Creation, two of the disciples decided to hike it out of town and spend some time in Emmaus.  Less than 20 miles away, it was a full day's walk in hill country.  Somewhere along the road, Jesus met the pair and they did not recognize Him.  Learning that they, who had followed Him for years, were unable to grasp the message of the Old Testament prophets, Jesus preached the messianic truth to them from Genesis to Malachi.

The Old Testament is a collection of writings that were written mostly in the Hebrew language in a variety of forms.  Poetry, saga, history - of a sort, collections of poetic sermons and drama - of a sort, the Hebrew Bible is linked together by the inspired theme of Jesus...Savior...Lord...Creator.  This is the claim that Jesus makes upon the Old Testament: that it owes it's Holy Spirit inspiration to having Him as it's subject, object and most important verbs.

This blog is devoted to spending time in the Old Testament realm and searching for the answer to the simple question, "Where is Jesus?"  From Genesis through Malachi (or 2 Chronicles if your Hebrew Bible is so arranged), the answer is shouted and whispered, sung and chanted, wept over and exulted, hidden and obvious.  It is time to explore this ancient collection with the view that it belongs to Jesus.  He has made it His own since before the foundation of the world. 

Finally, it should be pointed out that the Emmaus road experience for those two disciples who were blessed to hear one of the greatest sermons ever preached, centers around the event that rocked Jerusalem; the resurrection.  But, still stuck in the top of the skull shaped hill was the bloodied cross which separates the Old and New Testaments in time while combining them intentionally.

Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.