Every Tongue Will Confess

Posted by Christine Pack

To celebrate our anniversary, my sweet husband took me to hear the Atlanta Symphony and the Atlanta Choral Society perform their annual Christmas program. There is a longstanding tradition in our country that, when the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah is performed, the audience, wherever they are, rises to their feet during the performance. I love this part! And at the same time, it made me sad last night to look around at that audience in downtown Atlanta and know that most of those in the audience who were standing at this majestic song are lost, and do not even know it. And yet, God's truth, so powerfully delivered in this choral piece, almost cannot be denied. I think this must be why people, even lost people, get to their feet.

"The fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field and all creeping things that creep on the ground, and all the people who are on the face of the earth, shall quake at my presence. And the mountains shall be thrown down, and the cliffs shall fall, and every wall shall tumble to the ground." Ezekiel 38:20 

"Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." Philippians 2:9-11

 Additional Resources 

God Came Near

God Came Down

The Glory of Jesus

"Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" - Part 2

Posted by Christine Pack

 A Whisper of Hope  

The Mighty One, God, the Lord, 

    speaks and summons the earth 

    from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets. 

From Zion, perfect in beauty, 

    God shines forth. 

Our God comes and will not be silent; 

    a fire devours before him, 

   and around him a tempest rages. 

He summons the heavens above, 

   and the earth, that he may judge his people: 

“Gather to me my consecrated ones, 

   who made a covenant with me by sacrifice.”

And the heavens proclaim his righteousness, 

   for God himself is judge.

(Psalm 50:1-6)

What does the Lord mean when He utters these words in Psalm 50?

“Gather to me my consecrated ones, who made a covenant with me by sacrifice.”

He is telling us that our way to be reconciled to him - always - will be by a covenant made with Him by way of sacrifice. Way back in Psalms, there is a whisper, a hint, of the glorious salvation to come by way of Sacrifice.

In the Old Testament, this was pictured for us in the sacrificial system, a system practiced for thousands of years by the Jews. This involved sacrificing an unblemished animal (in itself a mercy, that God would allow an animal representative to temporarily cover the sins of the human who was bringing it for sacrifice, but still showing the seriousness of sin, in that blood was required for the sin to be covered).

“Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” Hebrews 9:22

In the New Testament, this sacrificial system was gloriously fulfilled in the One of whom John the Baptist said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29) That One was Jesus Christ, the God-man who was both fully God and fully man, the One who manifested himself in the flesh that He might fulfill the righteous requirements of the Law. This was done out of the great mercy of God, who sought us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8), while we were dead in our trespasses and following the ways of this world (Eph 2:1-2).

The Old Testament sacrificial lamb: this was but a shadow of the New Testament Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, who came and gloriously fulfilled this shadow.

“For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” 1 Peter 1:18-19

 Death in Adam, Life in Christ 

Jesus was "the last Adam" who did what the first Adam was unable to do: He fulfilled the righteous demands of the Law, and in so doing, He "earned" the right to give his life as a ransom for many:

“Thus it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being'; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” (1 Cor: 15:45)

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. 

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. 

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 5:12-21)

The path to reconciliation with God - both Old Testament and New Testament - has always been through faith in God and his plan for salvation. In the Old Testament, God's faithful believers did not know that this plan was a man named Jesus who was God's own Son, who would fulfill the Law on our behalf, that He would suffer and die on a Cross, and that his blood would be shed as a ransom for many. They did not fully know what God's plan was for them, but by faith, they obeyed God in offering up sacrifices to him in the sacrificial system implemented by Him.

New Testament believers have the joy of having Christ himself, who gloriously fulfilled all the types and shadows of the Old Testament sacrificial system that were but dim pictures of him and the work of salvation the He did. We also have the Scripture, the completed and finished canon, which reveals in full God's plan of salvation. Glory to God, that in his boundless mercy He would make a way for wretched, sinful man to be reconciled to him.

 Additional Resources 

How To Be Saved

The Gospel for Children - The Lamb

"Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" - Part 1

Who Says The "Begats" Are Boring?

Posted by Christine Pack

It has been said that all of the Old Testament is an arrow pointing to Christ.  It is a grand account, filled with instantly recognizable characters: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jonah. It is an account of a chosen people, and the beginning of the unfolding of God's plan of salvation.  There are amazing miracles and epic stories of kings and nations.  There are amazing displays of God's might and power: the devastation of the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, water from rocks, a talking donkey. And yet, you can almost feel the excitement as the Old Testament comes to a close, and we find ourselves at the beginning of the New Testament.  There is a fresh wind blowing: Messiah is coming!  We open to the first page of the New Testament, the Gospel According to Matthew, and we find.....a genealogy?!  Bor - ing!!  Or is it?

Genealogies are those looong passages interspersed throughout the Bible that trace the bloodline of Jesus. They're also known as the "begats."  As in, so-and so-begat so-and-so, and he begat so-and-so, and he begat.......  The one at the beginning of Matthew, and running for several paragraphs, covers more than 2,000 years and 40 generations.  These are the passages that people joke about as being boring, even painful to read.  Can't sleep? goes the old joke, just read through a genealogy, that ought to do the trick.  And yet, one of the things that God used to save me was the genealogy lines in the Bible.  It's true. Here's how it happened.....

I grew up faithfully attending church with my family.  We loved our church and were involved in many activities: choir, Sunday school, youth group, food drives, retreats, etc., etc. But, it was a very liberal church, and by that I mean, I can't say that I ever heard a clear gospel message in all the years that we attended.  The messages would generally start out with the reading of a Bible verse, but would wind up being a blend of moralism, pop psychology, worldly wisdom and self-help, sometimes with a measure of good old-fashioned American work ethic thrown in.  But no gospel.  And the Bible was sort of viewed as the message given to us by God about how to live Godly lives, with Jesus of course as the primary example.  I remember hearing the story of Adam and Eve as a child in Sunday school, but being told, "Of course, this didn't literally happen since we know that the earth is millions of years old."  Obviously, we were told, God was speaking in metaphorical terms here.  "Adam" as a representative figure of mankind, and "Eve" as a representative figure for womankind.  But there was never a literal "Adam" and a literal "Eve."

Along with this, we were taught that Jesus didn't really perform all the miracles accredited to him by the gospel accounts.  One class in particular stands out in my mind: a teacher earnestly laboring to help us see that Jesus couldn't have possibly fed 5,000 people with just one small meal.  What really happened, he explained to us, was that Jesus brought the little boy with the five loaves of bread and two fishes before the crowd, and the people, being moved by seeing such generosity of spirit in a child, were shamed into pulling out their own secret stashes and sharing.  I'm convinced that this was how the Jesus-as-a-great-moral-example teaching became so entrenched in liberal circles. In bowing down to the false "god" of science (which put forth, among other things, that the earth was millions of years old and miracles weren't possible), liberal theologians had to find a way to make the miracles of Jesus make sense.  This was how they did it.  But, about those pesky genealogies.....

Flash forward 15 years. I have left the church long ago and wound my way circuitously through many different religions, all of which, ultimately, proved futile.  I'm an agnostic now, and back in church giving this Christianity thing a second look, though with massive amounts of skepticism.  Still, I'm attending faithfully with my husband, taking notes, listening intently.  Our pastor stands up one Sunday and says to us, "For those of you who have never read the Bible, I want to invite you to get a reading guide and start reading through it."  I mentally have a forehead smack moment.  As in, why hadn't I ever read the Bible? After all, I had read the Tao Te Ching, the Sutras and Upanishads, the sayings of Buddha, Theosophical writings, etc.  Somewhat sheepishly, I got my reading guide after the service, went to the store the next day and got a study Bible, and started reading.

When I got to one of the bloodlines, okay I admit it, my eyes did roll up in my head at the first reading.  But then I went down to the study notes, which rather matter-of-factly explained that the "begats" were given so that people would know that (1) the Bible was a real book, of real history and real people fixed in time; and was therefore (2) a bloodline that could be traced from Adam and Eve to Jesus.  My brain began to short-circuit.  All those years of allegorized, evolutionized "facts" I had been taught were clashing with this book being presented as historical fact.  I knew I could not reconcile the story of the Garden of Eden with the science I had grown up with.  Where did you squeeze in the millions of years of slow, evolutionary development? Adam and Eve were presented as two real people, the first two people, fully and completely formed. This was a big problem for me, you see, because I was thoroughly postmodern in my thinking.  My generation was probably the first full generation to be raised on the tenets of postmodernism.  Postmodern thought, in a nutshell, is this: your truth is your truth, and my truth is my truth, and even if they are different truths, they can peacefully co-exist. So that's why my brain was short-circuiting; all my postmodern thinking was being challenged by this presentation of Bible history as fact - fact which could not peacefully co-exist with the "science" of millions of years.

So one of these was true and one was not...but which one?  I began to study the bloodline, and realized that it simply wasn't possible to squeeze those millions in.  So what was I going to believe? Well, in his providence, God led me to two things:

(1) Answers in Genesis. AIG is an amazing ministry with many scientists who have gone on record categorically stating that the scientific evidence, rather than proving millions of years, instead is beginning to point more and more to a "young earth" timeline.....as in, a timeline that lines up with about the same amount of time given in the Bible. You can go here to see a very long list of scientists in agreement with the "young earth" timeline.  Bear in mind that these men and women are experts in their field, most of them in some area of specialized scientific study (archaeology, astronomy, physics, biology, chemistry, etc.).  My point is this: you simply cannot look at this long list of scientists and give the standard worldly line: "Well, you must be an uneducated idiot to believe in the young earth theory!"  You can say a lot of things when you look at this list of scientists, but you definitely can't say that.

(2) James Ussher's 'Adams' Chart of History. James Ussher was a 17th century Anglican bishop who painstakingly charted out the bloodline from Adam and Eve to Jesus.  His chart features the Biblical timeline going across the top and the corresponding world history underneath it. It's so amazing to look at it, and see God's hand sovereignly guiding all of human history.  Below the scarlet thread of Jesus's bloodline, you see nations and kings rise and fall, but above it all, God's bloodline marches steadily onward toward the fulfillment of his purposes (Psalm 90).  And what are those purposes?  What exactly is the point of the bloodline? Well, the point is where it ends.  Like in the Old Testament, remember? All of it an arrow pointing to Christ?  This is also what the bloodline does, it puts the spotlight on the one single Person at the end of it:  Jesus, the Messiah.  Jesus, the Lamb of God "who takes away the sins of the world." Jesus, who came and did what no other human being could have ever done: He lived a perfect, sinless life, the life that not one of us could ever live, and he took his perfect life and offered it up as a sacrifice for many. He was crucified and buried, but on the third day after his death, he was raised, proof that his sacrifice was acceptable to God and efficacious for the cleansing of sin.  And anyone who repents and puts their trust in him will be given a new heart and new desires, raised from death to life, born again.  His ultimate reason for coming to this earth was so that He would die. And God put a great big spotlight on that with the begats so that we wouldn't miss the one life - and death - that mattered above all others.

As Americans, we tend to think that we are so mighty, the greatest nation on earth.  Well, when you look at Ussher's timeline, you realize that ALL these kingdoms once had their day in the sun, but where are they now?  Egypt was once the mightiest nation in the world, known for the architectural magnificence of their awe-inspiring pyramids, and for taming the Nile River.  Babylon, known for their acclaimed Hanging Gardens, and brilliant military campaigns led by Nebuchadnezzar.  Rome, their amazing Roman roads and contributions to education and government.  Where are they now?  Some of them are still around, but do they rule the world?  Looking at this chart is truly humbling. It brings the deeper realization of that corny old chestnut: "History is really His - Story"  All of history is "His" story, and it's all about Christ.  All of history is about him.  That's why the Bible so carefully and methodically lays out that bloodline time and time again.  The begats aren't boring - quite the opposite.  They serve the very important purpose of anchoring the Son of God in time and space, a real person, who really lived at a fixed point in history.  The begats take the Bible out of the realm of allegory, and make it something that must be contended with on its own terms.  There is no "filler" in the Bible; all of God's word is holy, inspired, valuable, important (2 Tim 3:16). Even the begats. And for some of us oddballs, especially the begats.

photo credit: Lawrence OP via photopin cc


 Additional Resources 

Answers in Genesis

Adam's Synchronological Chart of History (compiled by James Ussher) 

Scientists Who Have Examined the Data and Conclude that the Evidence Points To Young Earth

The Dark Side of Darwin (interview with Dr. Jerry Bergman)