Feast and Follow with Knollwood

Picture of a Promise, Part 2

Have you ever kept a letter from someone that you love, even if that person is still with you? Or maybe you’ve saved voicemails or text message threads of the same. It is an strange thing that we would keep these messages when we still have a relationship with the real person, but then it isn’t. These messages that we have are moments where the other person has revealed something about themselves, and that act is what is special. I still have the first messages that Abby and I exchanged when we were dating because those messages revealed that budding love between the two of us. It was a witness to the relationship we already had that gave the place for those messages to be exchanged. 

Keeping that in mind will help you understand why Presbyterians get so excited about covenants in the Bible. We’re big on this! We name our churches, colleges, even children after this concept because a covenant is like a letter from God. A covenant reveals Who God is, what He is like, and most critically, how He works. Covenants are the first messages that God sends to His people, and in fact, covenants are how God gathers His people (Myers, 2).

Picture of a Promise, Part 1

When I was growing up, I remember seeing a brand that was outdoors related that had little stickers that said, “Life is good.” It depicted little stick figures relaxing in hammocks or driving little Jeeps. We’ve often used the phrase ourselves after a great meal, or sitting on the back porch watching our kids play in the yard. There’s nothing wrong with that at all; life is good. But when the hammock isn’t out, or when life is hard, another common phrase in our fallen world, the statement “Life is good” can feel glib or in really dark places, can feel like a lie. That’s where this passage comes in to help us. This passage tells us that not only is life good and worthy of preservation, life is precious because it is made in the image of God. Life is good, and because it is, it has real demands, actual, personal responsibilities on how we treat it. Questions 135-136 of the Larger Catechism go into great detail that the command “you shall not murder” goes way beyond just not killing people, but goes into preserving life as well. In fact, in 136, it sees that the sins this commandment forbids goes all the way down to “desire of revenge; all excessive passions, distracting cares; immoderate use of meat, drink, labor, and recreations; provoking words, oppression, quarreling, striking, wounding, and whatsoever else tends to the destruction of the life of any.” This passage has a lot to say to us today!  

And Like A Flood

Our world is under the judgment of God today. It is not just that the world is doing things that will bring judgment, the things that they are doing ARE the judgment. I don’t have to describe to you what you see on the nightly news about the sexual revolution and transgenderism. I don’t have to rehearse the images that you’ve seen coming out of the various wars around the world. You all see these things plainly every day. And while there will come a day when there will be a great judgment over the whole planet, as we will see in a minute, we already have the seeds of that right in front of us. In Romans 1, we see God hand over people to their sin as part of their judgment. Essentially, God would be saying, “Do you want to bend nature and rebel against God’s rule for marriage and intimacy? Ok, let’s see you do that. Let’s see how far that can take you.” We are seeing this play out in hatred leading to war. We are seeing this play out in apathy to the Bible and faithful living. We are seeing the consequences of God handing our world over to what it wants. 

 

Now admittedly, that seems a little scary, doesn’t it? I mean, we have to go along for the ride! Yes, we will be spared ultimate judgment, but boy, it doesn’t look like things are going to be all that smooth leading up to that either. What do we do? How do we react to seeing the world handed over to the sin that it wants and us having to suffer the consequences of that? Well, this passage is going to tell us how to do that. Noah had to literally go along for the ride of judgment on the Earth. Noah didn’t like anything that was going on in the world, yet a planetary flood was coming to the planet Noah lived on. This was going to make an impact on his life. How did Noah react to being in the midst of God’s judgment? Well, he hoped only in God and responded in worship. Coincidentally, those are the main points for today: God is your only hope in the midst of judgment and The proper response to judgment is worship. 

You Will Pass Through the Waters

The story of Noah’s ark is one of the most misrepresented stories in the Bible. We see this story depicted in children’s bibles and nursery room walls in cute, colorful illustrations of animals floating in a boat, with a long giraffe neck sticking outside the boat because it is too long as they float peacefully on the waters. You would never see a children’s book drawn that way about hurricane Katrina. There would be no happy looking people floating in boats in New Orleans. Why? Because people would rightly complain that we wouldn’t be capturing the devastation that the hurricane brought. What we are looking at here makes Katrina look like a sunshower. This story is of the judgment of God against sinners who finally exhaust His patience. But those children’s bibles and nursery walls captured something right about this story. Because it is also the story of surprising grace given to Noah and the future humanity that will come from him. God is going to do something amazing through Noah, and the amount of work that Noah is going to do to make that happen is going to provide a great encouragement for us. Our two points today are God really did flood the whole earth for human sin, and God really did save His people from it.

The End is Nearer

Doesn’t it seem like the world is falling apart? There are many times in history in which one could say this. Just in the last century we have seen two world wars, the development of the atom bomb, worldwide terrorism, and most subtly, the terrifying falling population rates that will cause some countries to disappear nearly entirely in the next century (China is looking like its population will be halved in the next thirty years). If you are watching the news nightly, or heaven help you if you are getting your news constantly on your phone, you will find many reasons to think that this is a hopeless situation. 

 

If you were alive at the time of Genesis 6, though, these days would seem tame! In Genesis 6 we are seeing the beginning of the first end. We are going to find out why a world-wide flood was the proper response to this world. 

 

But there are a number of confusing things in this text! Is this text talking about fallen angels having super-babies with humanity? Is God giving the world 120 years to repent, or is he setting the new human age limit? What is this saying that God regrets making humanity? Did God not see this coming and thus doesn’t hold our future? AHHHH! Indeed, these are important questions, and it is right here, in some of the scariest parts of Scripture and our lives where God’s promises shine the brightest. Some of the above questions are matters of debate and mystery, and some are going to be left unsolved, but what we are going to walk away from our time together with is a new confidence in God’s ability to both know and control the future. Our two points today are Evil has dominated in the world before yet God knows how to save His people 

The Bible’s First Obituary

Genealogies don’t get much love. These are often the place where our eyes glaze over in our Bible readings, wondering why these things are even here. There are all these strange names, often strange places they lived that are just so unfamiliar with. But just because we don’t immediately understand something doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from it. We covered at the beginning of our time through Genesis that these genealogies serve as introduction to new sections of the Genesis story. You can tell the family that is going to be focused on by whatever name shows up near the end. They also tend to start with the name that the previous section told us about. But they do more than just provide us with a Star Wars-like title crawl to a new episode. As we will see today, there is much that we can learn from the details of this particular genealogy, as well as some of the other ones that we will study in the future. 

The Cain Stain in Us All

Sin is incredibly productive in its destructiveness. Sin works harder than we can imagine to make life worse. It is always looking, always on the hunt to see if it can get you into something new, something deeper, or just bring more people along with you. Today, we are going to see an example of exactly this. What we may view as an extreme example of becoming a murderer because a church service didn’t go well, is really an example of the compelling power of sin and how we ought to take it seriously. It is worth our looking at what sin is capable of so that we take appropriate action when it shows up in our own lives. If we never stare at the possibilities, we might not even know what kind of danger we are in. 

It is only by knowing the seriousness of a thing do we take appropriate action to deal with it. We are going to see the awesome possibilities of sin and yet the overwhelming power we have access to in order to deal with it. Today we are going to be looking at two points: Sin desires to rule you and Sin will not rule God’s plans. 

Far as the Curse is Found

Today we are going to look at the curses of chapter 3 to get an understanding of God’s grace-infused judgment. That may seem like an impossible thing to put together, but I think that is exactly the beauty that we are supposed to see out of this passage and by extension the rest of the passages in the Bible. We serve an incredibly merciful God that even when He is by no means clearing the guilty, He is merciful in His punishments. 

 

Paradise Lost

Sin is really hard to deal with honestly. We’ve all seen the fake apologies from politicians or celebrities that did something wrong and got caught. Sometimes the non-apologies are easy to spot: “I’m sorry you were offended.” That’s rookie stuff. Sometimes they are a bit more sophisticated: “Mistakes were made.” A phrase like that gently moves responsibility off of the speaker without it seeming like that. This is a phenomenon related in a really fantastic book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). In the book, the author, though writing from a non-christian perspective, points out all the ways that we justify ourselves when we do something wrong. It is so automatic, subconscious, and universal, all of us can feel seen in a book like that. Seriously, I read that book and questioned everything I was thinking for weeks (or was I?). 

 

However, once we look at our passage today, I think you will be able to see the roots of this sort of response to sinful actions. Right after the first sin on Earth is committed, the first appearance of shame and blame begin. Shame and blame are two ways of dealing with sin that when used in the wrong way just lead us even deeper into sin. We will see the wrong way of dealing with our sin, and then we will see how Jesus’ work saves us from both. 

The Roadmap of Sin

Today, we discuss the very sad topic of sin. It is something that isn’t pleasant to think about and can trigger many painful memories of people sinning against us, or it can resurface deep regrets that we have in the ways that we have sinned against other people. Sin is not a very popular doctrine and has been watered down tremendously in our culture. Sinning comes up more often in the context of dieting than anything else! People feel guilty for that extra cookie and what it means for their waistline rather than their selfishness and what that means for their marriages. 

We have to know what sin truly is. It is no exaggeration to say that if you don’t understand sin, you will not understand anything in this world. Why do certain approaches to government work and others don’t? Because one takes into account sin and the others don’t. Why do we have Christian leaders elevated to great platforms only to watch them fall in big ways? Because we don’t understand sin and take appropriate measures against it. 

Sin is our enemy, and if we are going to fight our enemy, then we need to know how sin works. By this, I don’t mean that we need to dive deeply into the world and consume all of these terrible things to understand sin. Sin isn’t going to tell you what it is. Sin is just going to lie to you (as we talked about a couple weeks ago). Instead, we are going to dive into God’s Word to see Sin lies about God and God’s goodness offers more than sin.