Beholding the Stricken Earth

Welcome! Today we continue our series entitled Beholding: A Wide-Angle View of the True Story of God with the message “Beholding the Stricken Earth.” The core idea of this series, of “beholding,” is to spend some time really thinking about connections and implications of what we read in the Bible. Last week, Brian had us reflect about the fall of man, the events involving Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and God, as described in Genesis 3. Both today and next week, we will be looking at the implications and consequences of the fall. Today we are focusing on the effects of the fall on our physical world, and next week we will look at the effects of the fall on the history of man right up to the present day.
 
As I mentioned at the beginning of the series, I am taking the Creation account in General as literal, especially when it comes to the nature of the fall of man. I am assuming that death entered the world with the fall but did not occur prior to that time. I realize that there are theologians and others who hold to a different view, who take Genesis more symbolically, and I certainly do not believe that a belief in the literal view of Genesis is necessary for salvation. What is necessary is that you believe that your sins have separated you from God, and that you have personally repented and placed your faith in Jesus Christ to save you. Such a person the Bible calls both “born again” and a “new creation,” and such a person will seek to continue to obey and honor God, although they will likely also have some measure of setbacks and failures when they take their eyes off of Christ. Such a person will normally grow in faith and obedience during their remaining days on earth, and then God will complete His transformation of them, making them suitable for the eternal life that is to come, a life that I believe the Bible shows has many things in common with the pre-fall world (although there are many differences as well).
 
Now, in preparation for beholding the stricken earth, I think a good place to begin is to remember God’s twin blessings on animals and on people in Genesis 1:
 
God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” – Genesis 1:22
 
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” – Genesis 1:28

Beholding Fallen Man

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”
“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” – Genesis 3:1–13
 
How would Adam and Eve know that they were in a fallen state?  You would think they would be able to see some clear differences.  They had been without sin in a place without the presence of sin.  Now, all-of-a-sudden, they’re forever different.  Each of us have been born into this fallen state.  We’ve kind-of got used to it.  Coming from NC State I had gotten used to a mediocre football team.  I didn’t realize what it was like to be in close proximity to a winner on a national scale.  You would have experienced clear symptoms of fallenness.  What were some of those symptoms?

Beholding the Creator

Welcome! Good morning! Behold, we are starting a new series! And the series is entitled, Beholding: A Wide-Angle View of the True Story of God. As the series title suggests, our purpose is indeed to stand back, so to speak, and take a look at the big picture of the story of God as found in the Bible, from Genesis 1 to the coming of Jesus. As we approach the Christmas season, I think this is a good time to do this series, perhaps especially given the events of the past two years.
 
Although most of us have come through the pandemic so far relatively unscathed, at least physically speaking, it is hard to overstate the degree that the past two years have changed the world, our country, our communities, our church, and even our personal lives. Although it is true that our daily lives are mostly back to “normal” apart from using masks in certain situations and testing requirements if you are associated with the university, I think we all sense that we are not the same, and indeed, nothing is the same as it was before all this started.
 
We have seen things, we have beheld things, that we previously could not have imagined. Probably all of us have a friend or a family member or a friend of a friend or a friend of a family member who has been impacted severely by the virus. But I feel that even these tragic situations do not get fully to the root of change. The world has been reminded of its mortality, yes, but perhaps even more significantly, the man-made systems and governments of the world have been exposed as having deep flaws and inadequacies. And I think most people have a sense that these problems may be fundamentally unfixable. Here I think the world is truly beholding the Biblical truth of the fact that man is indeed fallen.
 
And we have been reminded that the world itself is not safe. Dangers abound, such as this virus that jumped species to infect people. And regardless of the details of how it happened, of whether people or a lab was involved, it does not change the fact that we now know more deeply the truth that pandemics can happen purely naturally at any time. The world itself seems broken, and this speaks to the Biblical truth that God’s judgment on man at the fall did not only affect man; it affected the entire Earth.
 
And the past two years have highlighted how intractable our conflicts seem to be, between nations, between political parties, and even sometimes between friends or family members. Rather than the world coming together to work to defeat the virus, our world has been as turbulent and on the brink of war as ever. This reminds us of the long, sad story of sinful man through history, another major theme of the Bible. 
 
I could go on with more examples, but I think this serves to make the point that now is perhaps an exceedingly appropriate point in time to take the wide-angle view of God and His interactions with man. Not only because perhaps some of our idols have been exposed, especially our idols of science, of human “progress”, and of supposed innate human “goodness”, but because, after being shown the worthlessness of our idols, at least some people in the world realize that we have taken our eyes off of our Savior, we have put our hope in things apart from Him, and we have lost sight of who our Creator really is and what He has been doing. My hope and prayer for this series is that it would freshly ground us in these things and that we would then share these truths with those around us.

The Lord is There

Ezekiel 47:1 – 48:35
 

Today we conclude our study of the book of Ezekiel, with the final two chapters. Last Sunday John gave a topical review of what this book contains, but I thought of another way of reflecting on what we have considered over the past 7 months as we have made our way through the ups and downs of this book. Let’s try to get inside the head of Ezekiel. What was he thinking as he saw these visions and gave these prophecies over more than 20 years of his life?
 
His calling, when he was a thirty-year-old, came literally out of the blue, as he sat on the bank of the Kebar River in Babylon, where he had been living as an exile for 5 years. He had been uprooted from his career path as a priest in the temple in Jerusalem and faced with a disheartening sense of dislocation and uncertainty, living far from his home in a pagan land. What would happen to him and the other exiles, I’m sure he wondered. Had God abandoned them in his judgment of their sin as a nation?
 
Ezekiel’s first vision of God’s glory in the sky would have been awesome and terrifying, reassuring in one sense: that God still wanted to engage with him, but disconcerting in that the dazzling presence of God that he associated with the Holy of Holies was appearing to him in this foreign land. What was going on?