Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

a little liturgy that you might want to use or might not want to read it. However, talking about the seven O antiphons. The reason why we sing the particular verses we do of O come Emmanuel in the particular order which is a little change from what a lot of traditional churches do these days is because that was the order they were originally written to be sung in. And they trace the so-called seven O antiphons responses and those antiphons are described for you in the handout.

It’s also the basis for the cover of the liturgy today. On the bottom of the front page, you’ll see a rendering, artistic rendering of the seven O antiphons. And it’s very useful because it sort of tells us about various aspects of the Lord Jesus Christ. Multi-perspective, a jewel and different facets of the jewel that is Christ are described in each of those seven O antiphons. And then these are I think representations of virtues that have their foundation in those O antiphons.

And you’ll notice at the bottom of the second page of the handout, the second page of the O antiphon sheet, that these names, Sapientia for wisdom, Adonai for Lord, etc. If you use the first letter of the Latin names that were used in the liturgy as it was developed in the early church and spell it backwards, it spells out “Ero cras” which is Latin for “tomorrow I will be” or “tomorrow I will come.”

And so it’s thought that the early church self-consciously did this. You’re kind of counting down to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ’s birth and advent. And so the seven O antiphons are used this time of year traditionally in the church. And so that’s why we sing a particular version of O come Emanuel. And that also can provide you a nice easy devotional time for your family after dinner or whatever it might be.

Take that home, the outline and use that with your family and kind of meditate upon the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and its implications for who we are. Today is the first Sunday in Advent and that’s why we have done things the way we have. And for those of you who may be bothered by a Christmas tree, there is a tree of life in the heavenly sanctuary in the depiction of that in the book of Revelation.

Christmas ornaments are stylized fruit, the fruit of the Spirit. The Christmas tree light at the top of course is a representation of the star, but beyond that, the Shekinah glory of God that resides in the throne room of God in which throne room we are gathered together to worship him. And so it seems appropriate to have these forms of beautification of the sanctuary at Christmas time reminding us of the tremendous blessings of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ who is of course the tree of life for us and our glorification as a result again pictured by the lights.

Today I’m beginning the first of four Advent sermons and I’m going to take the first sermon roughly basing it on Matthew chapter 1. So our sermon text now will be Matthew chapter 1. Please turn there in your scriptures and stand for the reading of God’s word.

Matthew chapter 1. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob. And Jacob begat Judah and his brothers. Judah begot Perez and Zarah by Tamar. Perez begot Hezron. And Hezron begat Ram. Ram begot Amminadab. Amminadab begat Nahshon. And Nahshon begat Salmon. Salmon begat Boaz by Rahab. Boaz begat Obed by Ruth. Obed begat Jesse. And Jesse begat David the king.

David the king begat Solomon by her who had been the wife of Uriah. Solomon begot Rehoboam. Rehoboam begot Abijah. And Abijah begot Asa. Asa begot Jehoshaphat. And Jehoshaphat begot Joram. And Joram begot Uzziah. Uzziah begat Jotham. Jotham begot Ahaz. And Ahaz begot Hezekiah. Hezekiah begot Manasseh. Manasseh begot Amon. And Amon begot Josiah. Josiah begot Jeconiah and his brothers about the time they were carried away to Babylon.

And after they were brought to Babylon, Jeconiah begat Shealtiel. And Shealtiel begat Zerubbabel. Zerubbabel begot Abihud. Abihud begot Eliakim. And Eliakim begot Azor. Azor begot Zadok. Zadok begot Achim and Achim begot Eliud. Eliud begot Eleazar. Eleazar begot Matthan and Matthan begot Jacob. And Jacob begot Joseph the husband of Mary of whom was born Jesus who is called Christ.

So all the generations from Abraham to David are 14 generations. From David until the captivity in Babylon are 14 generations. And from the captivity in Babylon until the Christ are 14 generations.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows. After his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. And then Joseph her husband being a just man and not wanting to make her a public example was minded to put her away secretly. But while he thought about these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit, and she will bring forth a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophets, saying, “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which is translated God with us.”

And then Joseph being aroused from sleep and as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took to him his wife did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took to him his wife and did not know her till she had brought forth her firstborn son and he called his name Jesus.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this scripture. We thank you for the beginning of the genealogy or genesis given to us in the book of Matthew. We thank you for this gospel. Help us, Father, as we try to meditate on the incredible beauty of it and come to an appreciation and a transformation by the power of your spirit that we may have in our hearts prepared correctly for the wonderful truths we celebrate at this time of the year. Bless us, Lord God, with the sublime message of the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the hope of all hopes and the answer to all our fears. His advent 2,000 years ago, a celebration of that fact. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight. That is in a sense my sermon message for today. It is a piece of poetry that we don’t really necessarily know what was on the mind of Phillips Brooks when he wrote that in, I think, 1868. We know that he had been to Jerusalem and been to Bethlehem and penned the words there.

But then the words became a song later when he returned to his pastorate. He was an Episcopal priest in Philadelphia, 6’6″, 300 pounds, would get down on the rug of his office when little kids came in to play with him. Loved by children, loved children. And his famous song that we’ll sing here as our offering today is one of these beautiful pictures of poetry. Poetry is sublime. The message of Christmas is a sublime message.

It’s a message that when we try to articulate every detail of it and when we try to approach it with pure rationality, we fail. It is the proper subject of poetry, of song and hymn. And the texts that we’re given in the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus Christ are almost poetic in their wonderful descriptions of his coming and advent.

We were at a Mannheim Steamroller concert Friday night. Had never seen them before. And it is an amazing thing what they do, particularly for boomers, I think, you know, for us who when we were young children would sing Christmas carols and got to know them and love them and that was tied to particular Christmas memories of the past and in a way that is hard to express, impossible to express, I suppose. Some of my most beautiful memories, snatches of memories when I was a small child in wintry Michigan growing up.

And the Steamroller’s music tends to take some of those carols that meant so much to us and mean so much to us as boomers particularly, as I said, and gives them some of the ornamentation, power, and life that really is a pretty good expression of all the things that we treasure in our hearts about that time of year about Christmas and the celebration of Christ’s birth when we were children. So I think that’s part of the reason why it’s so successful.

Now there’s other reasons but there’s again a profundity to one’s experience of the time of Christmas in the particular way we have in this country with the beautiful poetry that we end up singing. All triumphant by the way—everybody becomes a good postmillennialist at Christmas time. We all sing about the increase of his government, there’ll be no end, etc. So, this is the time of year we’re in.

And what I’ve chosen to do is to address this in four sermons. One looking at the past, the other at the future. One looking at our Christian community, and the other looking at a missional perspective about Christmas as we extend out of here.

To young children, I am sorry, but I don’t know what I was thinking. I probably wasn’t thinking. I was thinking too quickly putting together your handout. Number 10, just forget it. Just disregard number 10 on the children’s handout. I’m not sure what I was getting at, but whatever it was, it isn’t clear there.

To young people, younger people, coloring people, you’ll see that you have a coloring sheet. This first week of Advent, we are going to use a text from Matthew. And there are four candles. I’ll talk about that in just a moment. And then there’s a priest at the bottom. And so I’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes, too. I don’t know why his arm is missing. Not sure, but I do know why I chose the priest and the four candles. We’ll talk about that.

So, Advent and the cross of life. I hope this thing works, right? So, I can just walk over here. And so, what we have is a visual aid, I suppose. Advent wreaths. Nothing necessarily that we have to do about them. Basically, they serve a useful function this year. This Sunday we light this candle, then we’ll move to this candle and this can be thought of as a timeline.

So as you look at this, if you think of a timeline the past is on your left and the future is on your right and that’s what we’ve done here. So I’ve lit the candle kind of on a timeline relating to the past and we’ll think about the past today. What’s happened? And then next week we’ll move to the future as we move down the timeline. And then what we’ll do is we’ll light this candle and we’ll talk about Advent and community.

Well, of course, we’ll talk about all these things all along because they’re all—it’s one story. It’s one event on Christmas Day, but we’ll emphasize in a couple of weeks community here at Reformation Covenant Church in the extended church. What is our community like? How has Advent formed our community? And then finally, in the last Sunday, we’ll talk about—so this is the in, this is the past, this is the future, and this will be the out because as we leave every Lord’s day we go out those doors and while we hang around for a while and eat, the idea is we’re going, you know, we’re gathered together to go out into the world and of course the coming of Jesus Christ is to be proclaimed everywhere.

There was a wonderful video at the Mannheim Steamroller concert taking the message all over the world and so that’s our job. There’s a missional perspective of Advent and Christmas and this last candle will represent that to us as we go out. So every week as you come, next week you’ll remember that we talked about the past. We’re going to talk about the future and then we’ll talk about inside the church, the community of Christ, and then finally the missional aspect of moving outside.

So today we’re going to focus on the past. And what I plan on doing in this series is to go through the four gospels. And there’s a sense in which the four gospels—the first gospels—are related to the past. First a note about advent and preparation.

However, Advent is not a time of year where we get together and we pretend that Jesus hasn’t come and we wait for him to come and get born on December 25th. That’s not the idea. Now, it is a time of preparation. I thought maybe an illustration to help kind of talk about this would be our anniversaries, our wedding anniversaries, right? You don’t pretend in preparation for your wedding anniversary that you’re not married.

Now, you may think back and it would be useful for you in preparation for celebrating the wonderful gift of your spouse. It would be good to think back, however, in preparation for maybe your 25th, your 30th, your 50th anniversary, maybe every year. It would be a good thing to think back on when you were single, not to pretend you’re single again, but to think about it and to think about the blessings of marriage.

And so, Advent is a time of meditation on the past and ultimately our past is the coming of Christ to take care of all the hopes and fears of the world on that evening when he was born. So that’s I think a proper way to think about Advent in preparation. It is a celebration. Now we don’t want to ultimatize. We don’t—you know, another problem we have with Advent sometimes is it becomes just the beginning of Christmas and instead of 12 days we have like what is it, about 40 or 50 days of Christmas.

There was a story written years ago and I guess there was a Bugs Bunny cartoon based on this where, you know, in the story a little girl wanted to be Christmas every day because it’s so much fun. And a little fairy or an elf or something granted her wish and you could probably guess the rest of the story. After a couple of months, it gets quite boring and everybody gets pretty ticked off and by October they’re just throwing presents at each other and kicking them down the stairs and it’s always a mess.

And the idea is that if we take any particular moment in our lives and ultimatize those, then we sort of lose something. So the Advent season is a preparation for the final celebration. And you don’t want to take everything that’s in Christmas and bring it into Advent or you’ll sort of begin to lose some of the beauty of Christmas. So, we have this Advent period and it is a time of preparation.

It is a time, you know, when you move toward the celebration of your wedding now, you know and Christine and I we used to celebrate monthiversaries for years and years. The month we first started going to the day of the month—the 22nd of June we first started going together—we’d celebrate every month. And so there’s a monthiversary and well our celebration as Christians is a weekly right. It is the Lord’s day and this day should never be overshadowed by any other day. This day can be informed by the church year and I think it’s useful to do that. It’s not required but it’s useful to do it I think, and that’s what we’re doing but that’s our ultimate celebration.

Now having said that, back to the marriage illustration as I said, it is a good thing to not just celebrate your wedding anniversary, but to do it a little thoughtfully, to lead up to it with a thought about, you know, maybe even how you haven’t been such a good husband or a good wife. And when you, you know, certain couples do this on somewhat of a regular basis, they’ll listen to their vows or they’ll recite their vows to each other on their anniversary. And as you remember that covenant, you know, so it kind of brings it back to mind. You’re still married all year. You still have covenant obligations that you’re engaging in, but the celebration of an event in time, looking back at a past activity can be helpful and useful to prepare us for the proper celebration of that and it makes us better spouses.

So anniversaries, monthiversaries make us better spouses. Now ultimately that’s the Lord’s day for us as Christians but the church calendar can sort of help us to do that in a kind of concerted way. As we lead up to Easter the season of Lent, a time of, you know, a time of preparation and again it doesn’t pretend that Jesus never died but it does meditate upon that and upon who we are.

Okay, I’ve probably said enough about that. So that’s preparation and Advent. It’s not make believe, but it’s also not, you know, ignoring the fact that a meditation on what is in the past informs us here. I mean, after all, every Lord’s day, God calls us to remember something in the past. Now, I know that it’s a memorial to God. We’re calling on him to treat us that way, but of course, it’s a celebration of the historical fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross 2,000 years ago. He always has must look at the past.

Okay, so that’s a good thing to do as God in fact commands us to do that in the fourth commandment in the Deuteronomy 5 version. They were to memorialize a past event, the Exodus from Egypt. And as Christians, we are to memorialize the greater Exodus that Exodus pointed toward. When we do that, we’re remembering the past Exodus as well. That’s us coming out of Egypt. But ultimately, we know that pales in significance to the greater Exodus accomplished by our savior and God calls us to remember these past events and that’s what we’re doing today is focusing on what that event 2,000 years ago and then what led up to it.

Now a brief comment on the four gospels. So why the priest at the bottom of the page? Well, you know there are four gospels and in Ezekiel and Revelation there are four faces of these cherubim. There is an ox, there’s a lion, there’s an eagle and there’s a man. And so if you go to Europe, you know, back when churches were built to last hundreds of years, a thousand years maybe, and you’ll see whether it’s a Lutheran church or a Catholic church or whatever church it is, you’ll see representations of the four gospels related to these four animal faces.

The church has just always thought this way about it that there are these emphases. Now remember, it’s one man, Jesus, that all four gospels talk about. So nothing is it’s not cut and dry. It’s not as if one of them is focusing on king and the other ones don’t talk about him as king. It’s a matter of emphasis and there are different ways of thinking of this.

Think about the three offices of the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s prophet, priest, and king. And that’s the way we normally say it. Why do we say it that way? Well, the Westminster Confession of Faith talks about it in that order. Prophet, priest, king. Probably because the life of Jesus himself sort of looks like that to us. He taught. He was a prophet. He then did his sacrificial work on the cross. And he is exalted at the right hand of the father as king. So it probably tracks that.

But if we think about the Old Testament as pointing to the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, all depicting him, what’s the order there? Well we know the prophetic books are at the end right and we know the kingly books are in the middle and we know the first books are priestly books. The levitical covenant the Mosaic covenant in Leviticus part of the first five books—Pentateuch—these are priestly books, you know, more than anything else, how Genesis comprises the whole thing. But after that, we have priestly books.

So the priestly stuff, if we want to go to the Old Testament and find where’s the priestly stuff, well, mostly it would be in the early part of the Bible. And where are the kingly stuff? Well, then it’s in the historical books and it’s in that wisdom literature that we said over and over again is kingly literature, right? The wisdom literature, the songs, the wisdom written by kings. So the king stuff is in the middle and the prophet stuff is in the end.

And someone commented on this and said that’s kind of the flow. A priest doesn’t make up new stuff. A priest hears the word of God. Dictation is in Leviticus. He hears the word and he does it simply. He instructs the people. He has to do that. But his instruction is pretty automatic. God tells him exactly what to say. A priest is involved in liturgical actions in the Bible. They have a prophetic sense to them. They point to the future. But mostly what they’re doing is they’re reminding us of the past.

When we go to the Lord’s supper, well, we can talk about the coming marriage feast of the Lamb and the conversion of the nations coming to the table. Yeah. But primarily what we’re doing there is memorializing a past event. The priestly action is kind of oriented backward. It, you know, if you want a tradition, the purpose of a tradition, a set ritual is to remember something from the past. And so whether you understand the ritual or not, it’s good to enter into it.

At the Mannheim Steamroller concert, I actually entered into rituals that two rituals that I almost never do at concerts. I don’t go to many concerts, but one was the ritual hand clapping during one of the songs and I’ve always been kind of like this. You know, I’m not going to do that, but it’s a ritual. And you know, if you do it, it, there’s interesting things that happen. You know, man, I’m an amazing world we live in when somebody playing music can project out beautiful music down to 20,000 people in an auditorium. That’s an amazing thing.

And just as amazing is all those people without any amplification. When they clap in unison and when the band stops for a while, you’re making a lot of noise together. And the ritual reminds you of the power of a group of people. And in terms of the church, our ritual singing together reminds us of that. They also had the ritual, you know, you got to applaud and say please, please, and then they come back and do a couple of encores. This is also a ritual.

Well, I entered into it because rituals whether we understand them or not are useful things and the rituals that the priests would perform would memorialize, remember actions of the past. The cycle, the ritual cycle of the Old Testament was based primarily on remembering the past. The gospel of Matthew—Jesus seems to be presented as a priest—focuses on the past. The word fulfilled is used more times in the Gospel of Matthew than any other gospel.

There’s all this fulfillment going on and we read it right in chapter 1. This fulfillment of Emmanuel. It’s focused on the past. And of course in the genealogies, it focuses us on history in the past. And in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus teaches. Well, that’s the job of a priest to teach. And it seems like the particular perspective of Matthew is this priestly action. And that’s why and the priest is connected to the past and that’s why on your coloring sheet, young people, you’ve got, you know, the Advent candles and then you’ve got the priest because we’re talking about the past and a priest reminds us of what we do from the past.

When you’re little children, you’re more like priests. Your parents are the voice of God to you. Brush your teeth, brush it this way. Just like in Leviticus, do the offerings this way. And you do them. You learn through ritual actions to obey your parents. A time comes when you’re going to leave the house and then you’re going to go out and be a king. You’re going to form your own way. You’re going to move into the future.

You’re not going to have ritual actions that tie you to the past that your parents have learned from their parents who have learned from their parents. But now you’re going to establish your own home. A king does that. He moves into the future based upon the training in the past. He moves ahead. When we get to Mark next week, it’s a kingly book. The lion face, I think, is prominent there because it’s a kingly book.

Jesus is a man of action. He’s going here. He’s going there. He’s doing this. He’s doing that. He’s moving out in Matthew. Five major discourses and instructions. He goes up on the mountain just like Moses did, you know, to get the ten commandments. Jesus, you know, preaches from the mountain. He talks about the law of God. It’s very much so.

Jesus is in Matthew 2, he’s taken down to Egypt because “out of Egypt I call my son.” So Jesus flees, he comes back. Herod is like Pharaoh. It’s all stuff from the past and it’s particularly the early books of the Bible where we’re talking about the priestly nation and so I think Matthew has that focus and today we’ll begin with a reading from Matthew but no, don’t you know, tell me all the errors in this. I know these are perspectives. They’re not hard and fast lines, okay? They’re perspectives.

And I think then with Luke we’ll talk more about community and the eagle face. And so we’ll just kind of, that’s the way we’ll do it, working through these four gospels. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. That’s why the priest is on the coloring page. That’s why we’re doing that. Okay.

So now let’s talk about Advent and what does it fulfill? Now I’ve used this line to sort of set up these two last points. Fulfillment of hopes and then the fears. Hopes and fears of all the years are met in me tonight.

Well, the hopes of all the years are certainly met in the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. God had made various promises and these promises men waited patiently for many years and then these promises God keeps them. Romans talks about the faithfulness of God, the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel. When Jesus comes, it’s a demonstration of God’s faithfulness to keep his word. It should cause us to keep our word of course, but that’s what it is.

And Matthew begins with this sort of an emphasis. He talks about Jesus being the son of Abraham and the son of David. Well, these are promised people, right? Abraham had the promise of nations coming forth from him. One from him would be the promised one who would get all the blessings of the covenant. There are covenant blessings that go along with it. Land, but he’s an influence to all the nations of the world.

And Abraham had been given all these promises. And yeah, he is a son of the promise, but ultimately that’s not the real fulfillment of the keeping of the word. But when Jesus, when the second person of God becomes incarnate in human flesh, God has kept his promise to bring the Abrahamic covenant to its full, its fulfillment. David, he’d been promised a son who will rule on your throne forever and ever and ever.

And of course, it wasn’t Solomon and it wasn’t Solomon’s descendants. This genealogy, you know, it ends—it moves from Abraham and David, but then it goes to captivity and so Jesus comes to bring us out of captivity. It’s not as if Jesus is the result of Abraham and David. Jesus is the answer to the promises to Abraham and David. Do you understand the distinction? They aren’t the basis for Jesus. That’s not what’s going on in this genealogical account.

It’s not that Jesus is there because of Abraham and David. It’s that Jesus comes to bring the promises. And that’s why we go right into fulfillment language in chapter 1. He comes to fulfill all the promises. What action happened in the past 2,000 years ago at the birth of the Savior? He kept—God kept his promises. He kept his promises to Abraham. He kept his promises to David. He kept his promises to restore a people.

As I said, the genealogy, did you notice it? Did you notice what’s funny about it? It’s not just a listing of names leading up to the birth of somebody. It doesn’t even end in his father. It ends in his mother. And it doesn’t even—it’s not the focus is not the names of people. There are those, but there are three groups. Did you ever see that? From Abraham to David, and then David to the captivity, and then from the captivity to Jesus.

Do you see what’s missing? The restoration is what’s missing. The return back to the land when Cyrus gave the decree and Jews could come back. No. From the genealogy of Matthew 1, the perspective is they never came back to the land because the promise of restoration, you know, was—was really the focal point was the coming of the one who would restore the fortunes of dead Israel who would bring her back to life.

The prophets are not primarily social reformers. They’re announcers of death—first to the north then to the south as we talked about a couple of weeks ago from Isaiah 8. And then there are promises of course and the wonderful promises in Isaiah that we associate with Christmas. These are promises of blessing at the restoration of Israel. Death and resurrection is what’s going on. But Jesus is Israel. Jesus identifies with his people.

They’re still dead. We could say from the perspective of Matthew’s genealogy when Jesus is born, God keeps the promise. All those wonderful promises in, not all the prophetic books but a lot of them including Isaiah of course, God keeps that promise. So for you know 700 or 800 years they had waited and they knew that the restoration to the land wasn’t ended. In fact most of them didn’t go back to the land. Most of them remained in the countries where they had been taken captive.

The diaspora continued, the dispersion. They weren’t brought back together. But now that Jesus Christ has been born, you see, it’s restoration time and that’s a promise and it’s an implied promise that’s fulfilled by the way the genealogy is actually constructed. We just sang about that. We sang, “O come Emanuel and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here.”

Where? Well, it’s the exile was, you know, as a result of captivity. They mourned in captivity. And from the perspective of that early Christian hymn, they understood that Jesus was the fulfillment of the promise to bring back to life the people of God, to restore the fortunes of Israel, to be saved from our sins. This is specifically given to us.

So we have the Abrahamic promises, the Davidic promises. That’s what in the past was accomplished and fulfilled when Jesus Christ takes on human flesh 2,000 years ago. That’s what we celebrate as we move toward the season celebration of Christmas. So we have those implied promises, the implied promise of restoration since he deals with the captivity and leading up to the coming of Christ.

But then very specifically we have the naming of the Lord Jesus Christ in verse 21. She will bring forth a son. You shall call his name Jesus for he will save his people from their sins.

Now this is important to stop on just a moment. Now we know at this church that salvation is much broader than just, you know, so-called fire insurance, where we’re going to go after we die. Salvation is holistic. And we know that the gospel, the good news is that Jesus Christ has come to change the world. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes. But we must not lose sight of the fact that the first thing we’re told about Jesus in terms of what he will accomplish at the very beginning of the gospel accounts is God will keep his promise to save his people.

Not from the Romans, not from the Babylonians, not from the Assyrians, not from the IRS, not from al-Qaeda. But Jesus Christ came 2,000 years ago and with his incarnation, the promise of God had been given and now was kept—that Jesus, his name was Jesus, because he shall save his people from their sins. We celebrate redemption, the salvation of us from those sins that so easily beset us.

Now, this is like the marriage covenant when we celebrate our marriage anniversaries. May the Lord God grant us grace and understanding to try to be better spouses because of it. And it’s part of the preparation for the celebration of these historical facts. May the Lord God grant us that we would fully appreciate that the Lord Jesus Christ came and fulfilled the promise to save us from our sins. We don’t have to work to be saved from our sins.

But we certainly should work at having lives that demonstrate the redemption that Jesus has accomplished from our sins. May not one, a little boy, little girl, man or woman here today, may there be none of us who fails to examine ourselves and to take seriously the calls for preparation for the celebration of Christmas. Part of that Advent season is a preparation of our hearts, not because we’re pretending that it didn’t happen, but because we know that it did happen, that we’ve been saved.

And it is our gratitude, our proper response of gratitude to God to root out sin that we tend to let live in the context of our lives too often and too easily. May the Lord God grant us grace to understand that we celebrate a past action of God delivering us from our sins.

Now, it goes on the next thing, the very first word the fulfilled is used is verse 22. So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet saying behold the virgin shall be with child and bear a son and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which is translated God with us.

So you know clearly the emphasis here is that God has promised to be with us and he has now fulfilled that promise in the past 2,000 years ago. God is now with us in a dramatic sense in terms of our humanity and that is the primary meaning of course but there’s another subtext to this I think that if we understand which prophet he’s talking about and they did and what he was saying will help us to understand a little broader of what’s going on as well.

The prophet he’s speaking of is Isaiah in Isaiah 7 we read this prophecy: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you—that’s King Ahaz—a sign behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall be called Emmanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that thou abhorest shall be forsaken of both her kings.”

What does that mean? Well, if you were here when I preached on conspiracies from Isaiah 8, you will have had the historical background for what’s going on in Isaiah 7. Who are the two kings?

Do you remember the first great crisis for the south? It was the king of the north of Israel was working with the king of Syria to throw off the Assyrian yoke. But God had put that yoke upon them, had he not? They were conspiring against the king of the south, king of Judah. And this was the cause for fear. So the promise of Emmanuel, yes, it follows the promise to save us from our sins, but it immediately goes on to talk about saving us from our enemies.

This is a child that actually was born in the time of Isaiah and King Ahaz. I mean, it points to the coming of Christ. But it was true at its time. And the point was before the child gets to be whatever it was, 12 or 13, why the two kings you’re in dread of will be taken care of. God will deal with them. The fear will be passed.

It seems to me that it’s hard not to see in this a foreshadowing of the death of Jesus Christ and his resurrection at the hands of the Romans and the Jews. We have a Gentile nation and a Jewish nation conspiring in the Gospel accounts or in Psalm 2 rather, the gospel accounts against Jesus, right? Got the Romans, the Jews, they work together. They kill Jesus. He’s raised back up.

And in Isaiah, you’ve got the Syrians, Gentiles. You got the northern tribes who had forsaken God essentially conspiring together now against Judah because she wouldn’t join in rebellion with her. Jesus wouldn’t join his forces to those of the apostate church and the Gentiles. And so he was executed.

So here as well, I think God is saying that don’t worry, they were under the oppression of Rome. I mean, we don’t know what it’s like. Gata probably has a better sense of this. I mean, they were under the oppression of the Russian, the Soviet Union, at least her parents will tell her stories and grandparents, I suppose. We don’t have anything like that. But you can imagine when you’re under the oppression of a foreign army that can kill you at will and the economy is horrible and bad things are happening.

Jesus Christ will be tortured to death, right? Tortured and then killed. This is what they did. This is the times in which they lived. And it was great assurance to them to hear that at the end of the day, the birth of Jesus Christ, God with us, was the fulfilling of God’s promise to save us from our sins, but also to save us from the conspiring powers that we sit in the midst of.

The lousy Herod, the governor, you know, Pontius Pilate, whoever it was at this time, you know, they had to know and they were assured by God that what had happened with the coming of Christ was the defeat of all their enemies. That’s what happened. When we celebrate the past, when we celebrate Jesus coming to be the savior of our sins, savior of us from our sins, we also come to celebrate Emmanuel. And the implication of that is he’ll save us from all of our enemies.

The hopes and fears of all the years, right? The hope that the Abrahamic promise would come fulfilled that day. David’s promise would come fulfilled. The hope that they would have an actual restoration, not some kind of sham restoration where they weren’t really being faithful to God, but the restoration would be accomplished. That hope—the hope that finally the thing they believed in through the sacrificial system, but that they knew it was pointing to an animal can’t take away sins.

My sins aren’t ultimately taken away ultimately until Jesus comes. The hope that our sins would be forgiven was met in the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. The birth of Jesus and the great hope that God would deal with our enemies. You see that quiet peaceful night in Bethlehem in that sublimely beautiful event, God kept all these promises and he assured them that he was with them and he would save them.

Jesus had come to take on human flesh to die for them. Jesus had come to redeem them from all the powers of sin but also to save them from all their enemies, all their enemies. And Isaiah is just full of this. The increase of his government, there shall be no end. When Jesus comes, he begins to govern. That’s what it says in Isaiah. And at the increase of his government, there’ll be no end. We’ll talk more about that next week in terms of what the future will hold.

But it all began 2,000 years ago with the incarnation. And if we understand that, then we have to have a peace about us. The hopes and fears. Our fears are that, you know, the conspiracies, real ones that are formed against us. And the enemies of the Christian church and the Christopher Hitchens of his day and age and the radical atheists and al-Qaeda and the secularists and whoever else is out there. Our fear is that God won’t deliver us.

But he already has. 2,000 years ago, Emmanuel, God with us, was the sign, was the reality that God had come to defeat all of our enemies. The hopes and fears in Jesus’s day were the hopes of the great fulfillment that would finally come after thousands of years in terms of some of these promises by God. And the fears were at least in part maybe it won’t happen. It’s been a long time fears. But the hope was something else.

And then finally, the last thing that I want to talk about—God fulfilling the promise of is mankind himself is changed, altered, renewed, reborn through Jesus. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, if we recognize that the genealogy shows them still in captivity, still dead, then we recognize that there’s significance to Jesus’s life. The other thing we need to recognize about the genealogy at the very heading of Matthew’s gospel, the beginning of this list is the book of the genealogies, right?

Well, it’s a book. It’s a formal introduction to this whole gospel. And the word genealogy is actually genesis—the book of the genesis, the origins, the starting point. And what we have here again is the new creation of man. We could say the fulfillment of what man is supposed to be.

For 4,000 years, mankind was not on the throne. Mankind was immature. Mankind was subject to other authorities and powers to animals and angels and spirits and all kinds of stuff for 4,000 years. But when Jesus Christ comes, this is the new beginning. This is the Genesis. This is the first man coming again to fulfill the promises of mankind and to bring mankind to its rightful place ruling at the right hand of the father.

Jesus comes to take on humanity so that he can take humanity to the right hand at the throne room of God at the right hand of God the father and to reign in that position. He rights the wrongs at last, right? We sing that in our version of one of the psalms. He rights the wrongs at last. Jesus comes to put the world to rights. That’s an anti-woke term, but I really like it. He comes to put the world to rights. He’s going to defeat enemies. Yeah. But more than that, there’s a comprehensive overturning.

The world was upside down for 4,000 years. And what we celebrate at Advent is the coming of Jesus Christ that would make the world right side up. This was the gospel message. This is the gospel. Remember that, you know, in the house of Jason, they arrested the Christians because they were, you know, turning the world upside down. Well, what we were doing is putting the world to rights, turning the world right side up because that’s what the coming of Jesus affected.

And our message now is that this isn’t wishful thinking. It isn’t something that’s totally future. It is now a fact that Jesus Christ has brought humanity to the throne room. He rules at the right hand of God. And in that rule and authority, he is putting the world to rights. Mankind has come of age.

Romans 1, I mentioned this last week, Paul, a bond servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God, which he promised before through his prophets in the holy scriptures.

The gospel is that what God promised has come to pass in the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Concerning his son, what is the gospel? Concerning his son Jesus Christ, our Lord, who was born of the seed of David. But that’s the old dead seed. That wouldn’t work. According to the flesh and declared that is appointed with power to be the son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead.

Jesus Christ now rules at the right hand of the father. Mankind rules in Jesus Christ. Galatians—we read that we were, you know, formerly we were those who were under tutors. Galatians 4 tells us this: that we were under tutors but now we’ve been brought of age. Galatians 4.

Now I say that the heir as long as he is a child does not differ at all from a slave, though he is a master of all. That was us in the Old Testament. But as under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the father, even so we when we were children were in bondage under the elements of the world, the elementary principles of the world. We were in bondage. The angels ruled us. The animals showed us what to do. We were under the law in that sense.

But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his son born of a woman, taking on human flesh. In other words, the genealogy we have, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of his son into your hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father.” Mankind has come of age. That’s what happened 2,000 years ago. That’s why the world is radically different today than it was for the 4,000 years that preceded it.

God has kept his promise to bring humanity back to its position, to mature it, to cause it to inherit the world. And what does Paul say immediately after this in Romans? He says, “Therefore, well, I’m sorry, that’s Galatians.”

Going back to the Romans text, through him we have received, we have received. So Jesus Christ has been appointed with power to be the son of God, the ruler of all rulers. Through him we have received grace and apostleship for obedience to the faith among all nations for his name among whom you also are called of Jesus Christ.

And so he tells us right from the get-go in Romans that what God promised was to rebirth man, to bring man to maturity in Jesus Christ, and as a result of that to put the world to rights, to have the obedience of the nations be carried out. It’s an odd thing. In some of our political discussions, we talk about the divine right of modern countries or something like that. We don’t think of it that way, but it’s almost—I almost get that sense.

Well, one country isn’t supposed to invade another or take out their ruler no matter what they’re doing because well, they’re sovereign nations. What does that mean? There are no sovereign nations. There are nations that have rulers who are ruled by the Lord Jesus Christ. And I’m a lord in my home and you’re a lord in your home, but if you know one of us or if my next door neighbor is out there cutting the fingers of his children off with a looper, I’m going to do something about it.

And I’m not going to do it because it offends me personally. I’m going to do it because I’ve been called in the Lord Jesus Christ for the obedience of the nations to put the world to rights. That stuff has to end. And that’s what the gospel was. Jesus came, he fulfilled the father’s promises, and now everything is being put to right. That stuff’s got to end. And if a Christian nation sees another Christian nation doing all kinds of horrible wicked things to its people, it may want to think—now it’s a calculated decision, but I don’t know why we would want to rule out a Christian nation doing that under the guise of some sort of divine right of sovereign dictators and nations. That’s ridiculous.

Christianity says that from the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, we now are working for the obedience of all the nations and he’s going to save us from our enemies and he’s going to put the world to rights. His justice—that’s what we sing about at Christmas time, right? “Joy to the world, his justice will flow his blessings will flow”—now that’s what Christmas is all about. It’s this wonderful declaration of what God has done in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

The hopes of all the years, all these things we’ve talked about, were met in thee tonight. They were fulfilled. These promises were fulfilled with the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. The hopes and fears—what were the fears? As I said, we’re fearful we don’t think it’s true. We don’t know. The Bible seems to indicate this. And as it’s explained, it’s what it seems to be, but how can this be true? We fear that it won’t be true.

We fear that in our own lives, those that we love and know, you know, won’t—bad things will happen to them, bad things will happen to us. We have fears. And that song is a tremendous reminder, as is Matthew 1, that the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Christ.

He is the hope of all hopes. He is the basis for hope. And he is the cure for all fears—is recognizing that he is now ruler. He’s the sovereign ruler of all the world. It’ll be all right. And that’s what God told the world in that sublime way in a quiet—we don’t know how quiet it was, but you know, a cave. God turned the world inside out again. It was righted from the middle, you know, almost like a picture of the coming death and resurrection of Christ.

But he comes out of the cave as the ruler of the world. The Shekinah light shines, wonderful things happen. Tiny little baby born and God says that in the birth of that baby all the hopes and fears of all the years are met. They’re conquered.

There are other fears as well. Herod was fearful. Matthew 2 goes on to say—well, we understand through the story told he was fearful. That’s right. All the nations who reject the Lord Jesus Christ should fear when they hear the simple Christmas story proclaimed in song and in word. But you and I, in this Christmas season—they fear and their fears are, you know, the demons knew what had happened when Jesus was born and they feared as they should.

You know one of the debates last week they asked the candidates what would Jesus do in terms of the death penalty and the best answer was given by Rush Limbaugh the next day which I wouldn’t have necessarily expected. He said he should ask Pharaoh what Jesus would do about things the death penalty. He recognizes it’s the same God in the Old Testament in the New. Jesus puts rulers, disobedient, stubborn rulers who enslave his people to death. That’s what Jesus does as the sovereign ruler.

And so the fears of those in rejection of Jesus Christ are real. And there’s no answer for them until they turn their fear into hope. And it’s the same with us. Christmas is a time when whatever fears we have, we bring them to the manger of the Lord Jesus Christ. We believe what this past story is all about. That all the promises are yea and amen in Christ. All of our hopes have been filled, fulfilled 2,000 years ago in the coming of Christ. It’s being worked out. We’ll talk about the future next week.

And all of our fears are answered by the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, his birth, his advent. It’s a delightful story, isn’t it? It’s a wonderful story. It’s a story that is beyond telling with simple words. It can only be told in these wonderful poetic ways that the story is told. And in that song about to sing, we read, “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given. So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.”

Let’s pray. Father, we bless your holy name for the beautiful way that you moved. You waited and then fulfilled all your promises in this sublime, beautiful poetic way with the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, his birth 2,000 years ago.

Help us, Father, as we meditate upon that birth this month. As we think about the implications, help us to remember that you came to save us from our sins. That Jesus came to remove all of our fears and bring us hope. Help us to cast off fear then to bring it forward and put a stake through it through the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ that he rules now at the right hand of you, the Father.

Bless us, Lord God, in our celebration. Help us in our preparations, Father, to put off the sin that we’ve been saved from to put off the fears that Jesus Christ says are no longer to be seen as real since his coming. He’s putting the world to rights. Help us to believe that by the power of your spirit. Accept our offerings now, Lord God, and transform us to be people whose hopes and fears are met in the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we ask it. Amen.