SPEAKER_00: Genesis 15, starting in verse 1, says, After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.
SPEAKER_00: Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield, your very great reward.
SPEAKER_00: But Abram said, Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless?
SPEAKER_00: And the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus.
SPEAKER_00: And Abram said, You've given me no children, so a servant in my house will be my heir.
SPEAKER_00: Then the word of the Lord came to him, This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.
SPEAKER_00: He took him outside and said, Look up at the sky and count the stars, if indeed you can count them.
SPEAKER_00: Then he said to him, So shall your offspring be.
SPEAKER_00: Abram believed in the Lord, and he credited to him as righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: He also said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land, to take possession of it.
SPEAKER_00: But Abram said, Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?
SPEAKER_00: So the Lord said to him, Bring me a heifer, a goat, and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.
SPEAKER_00: Abraham brought all these to him, cut them in two, and arranged the halves opposite each other.
SPEAKER_00: The birds, however, he did not cut in half.
SPEAKER_00: Then the birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 17.
SPEAKER_00: On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, To your descendants, I will give this land.
SPEAKER_00: Would you join me in a word of prayer?
SPEAKER_00: God, as we have already sung this morning, you are the prize of our journey.
SPEAKER_00: You are the joy of our salvation.
SPEAKER_00: Seeing you face to face is what we long for.
SPEAKER_00: It is what we are made for.
SPEAKER_00: God, as we look at this challenging passage this morning, I ask that you would uh help us.
SPEAKER_00: Help us to see and understand, uh, clear away things that would get in the way of us seeing and and knowing what is here.
SPEAKER_00: And we ask, as we do each week, God, that you would change us.
SPEAKER_00: We ask that by your spirit you would enable us to see new aspects of the good news about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And not only that we would see it, but also that we would believe it and that it would change our lives and change our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we confess that we are not capable of bringing that level of change about inside of ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: And so we look to you.
SPEAKER_00: We look to you and ask for your grace this morning as we look into these words in your word.
SPEAKER_00: We pray all this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: This morning we are at the beginning of a new series of messages that we have titled Asking for a Friend.
SPEAKER_00: And really what we're doing today is we are exploring questions that you all have submitted to us.
SPEAKER_00: These are questions that uh maybe you had or a friend of yours, someone in your sphere of influence has, maybe about God or about the Bible or about faith.
SPEAKER_00: And before we get into the specifics today, uh I do think it's important to set the stage for a series like this uh by just mentioning a few things on the front end.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: Uh so the first is this the answer to these questions does matter.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, as we go about trying to explore and answer questions that are like deep, difficult questions, the answer to these questions does matter.
SPEAKER_00: And the way we answer questions also matters.
SPEAKER_00: The reason is because it it matters not just that we get to, quote unquote, the right answer or closer to the right answer, it also matters that we recognize that there are people behind every single one of these questions.
SPEAKER_00: There's the question, and there's always the question behind the question.
SPEAKER_00: There's always the personal life experience, the personal pain or difficulty or suffering or some personal thing that is behind each one of these questions.
SPEAKER_00: And so it matters that we respond to questions with love and with grace and with humility and with empathy, recognizing that there are people behind each one of these questions.
SPEAKER_00: And so we want to, throughout the series, model what it looks like to pursue what the Bible says and to hold tightly to it and to explore questions like this with charity and with empathy and with grace, knowing there are people behind each one of these questions.
SPEAKER_00: A second thing I'll mention is that in a 30-minute span on Sunday morning, we do not have enough time to engage these questions comprehensively.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you know this.
SPEAKER_00: You know this is true, but I want to reiterate and affirm that what we're going to be doing during these weeks is not giving you all there is to say about any of these subjects.
SPEAKER_00: What we're going to be doing is setting a framework, laying a foundation, giving some direction for you to continue to explore these questions on your own.
SPEAKER_00: But we are not capable of exhaustively saying all there is to say about each one of these questions here on Sundays.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm not asking you to lower your expectations.
SPEAKER_00: What I'm asking you to do is recognize the limitations of what we can do in a setting like this.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm asking you to be unreasonably gracious with me.
SPEAKER_00: Because as I answer these questions, you may think to yourself, Well, you didn't even touch this whole aspect of this thing.
SPEAKER_00: Or you went about this and said all these things about this over here and never even got to this.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I know.
SPEAKER_00: I'm very aware of all the things I don't have time to say.
SPEAKER_00: And so please just be gracious with me as we explore these questions together.
SPEAKER_00: So the first question that we're going to be exploring in our time during the series is this.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't the cross an act of cosmic child abuse?
SPEAKER_00: Isn't the cross where God the Father poured out his judgment and poured out wrath on the Son of God, isn't this an act of cosmic child abuse?
SPEAKER_00: Now, behind this question and every single one of these other questions, by the way, is an even bigger question about the character of God.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's safe to say that virtually all of us have a special kind of disdain for fathers who beat or abuse their children in any way, shape, or form.
SPEAKER_00: Some of us who sit here today personally know the pain of a father who is physically abusive.
SPEAKER_00: Some of us here know what it's like to walk on eggshells, afraid that the smallest little mistake we make is going to awaken the anger of our father and set him off into anger or even rage.
SPEAKER_00: Some of us have lived in fear knowing that we could be on the receiving end of our father's anger for seemingly not having done anything at all.
SPEAKER_00: Some of us know what it's like to wonder which father is going to walk through the door after work every day.
SPEAKER_00: Is it going to be the fun, loving, playful dad, or is it going to be the grumpy, angry, hurtful, mean dad?
SPEAKER_00: And so, based on these things that we've seen in others or have experienced personally for ourselves, we wonder, okay, is God like that?
SPEAKER_00: We may imagine God the Father as angry.
SPEAKER_00: We may imagine him as wrathful at the drop of a hat.
SPEAKER_00: You know, like he's this quivering mass of anger and sort of pent-up rage, and at the slightest little poker nudge, he's ready to just unleash it on anyone who would cross him.
SPEAKER_00: We may imagine him getting some form of twisted pleasure out of torturing his innocent, sinless son.
SPEAKER_00: So at the heart of this question is an actual is actually a deeper question.
SPEAKER_00: What kind of God is he?
SPEAKER_00: What kind of father is he?
SPEAKER_00: Is the cross an act of cosmic child abuse?
SPEAKER_00: As we explore this question, I want to approach it uh by looking at it this way.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna look at these verses in Genesis, and we're gonna see the promise, the covenant, and the cross.
SPEAKER_00: So, first let's uh think about the promise.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, Genesis 15, as you heard this read this morning, you understand this.
SPEAKER_00: Like, this is a difficult passage to understand.
SPEAKER_00: It's culturally very foreign to us in the modern world.
SPEAKER_00: And so, for us to make like any sense of any of this, what we have to do is kind of just zoom out and see where we are in the story of Abraham's life.
SPEAKER_00: And as we rewind the tape back to Genesis chapter 12, we see that God entered into a relationship with a man named Abram, who would later be called Abraham, and God made these incredible promises to him.
SPEAKER_00: He made a promise that he would give him biological descendants.
SPEAKER_00: This is a striking promise to make, and a surprising promise to make, considering that Abram and his wife are both old and she's physically incapable of having children.
SPEAKER_00: So these are like not exactly the kind of people that you would expect God to make this sort of promise to.
SPEAKER_00: But God makes them a promise that he is going to provide them with biological descendants, and he's going to provide them, secondly, a land.
SPEAKER_00: He's going to give them a place to call home.
SPEAKER_00: And both of these promises that we see God make to Abraham actually fit into a larger promise that God made back in Genesis chapter 3 when he promised that he would crush the head of the serpent.
SPEAKER_00: So God promised that he would take everything that is broken in our world, everything that is shattered, everything that is out of joint, everything that is not the way it's supposed to be.
SPEAKER_00: God promised he would take all of those things and make them right again.
SPEAKER_00: He promised that he would make all things new.
SPEAKER_00: And so he made this big promise to crush the head of the serpent, and then went about accomplishing that by calling a man Abraham and giving him these two promises that fit into this larger promise.
SPEAKER_00: So this is really the essence of the promise God made is that he would crush the head of the serpent.
SPEAKER_00: Chapter 15 marks the third time that God has made these promises to Abraham that he was going to give him a land and biological descendants.
SPEAKER_00: And so you see in verse 1, God says to him, Do not be afraid, I am your shield and your very great reward.
SPEAKER_00: And Abraham's response to this question is a response that you can hear some pain in his question, or in his response.
SPEAKER_00: I'm paraphrasing what Abraham says here when he says, I'm old.
SPEAKER_00: My wife is old.
SPEAKER_00: We don't have any biological descendants, nor is it physically possible for us to have any.
SPEAKER_00: Who exactly is going to inherit this great reward that you're going to give me?
SPEAKER_00: I don't have any children.
SPEAKER_00: I've got no one to pass this stuff on to.
SPEAKER_00: And every time God makes these promises to Abraham or brings up this reward, this inheritance he's going to give to him, it's just another reminder that these promises are yet to be fulfilled.
SPEAKER_00: And so God reaffirms his promises to give him land and descendants, to which Abraham responds, as many of us would, and say, Okay, God, you keep saying, you keep saying that you're going to do this.
SPEAKER_00: You keep saying you're going to make to fulfill these promises to me, and it's been years, and I still don't have any children, I still don't have this land that you're promising.
SPEAKER_00: How can I know?
SPEAKER_00: How can I be certain?
SPEAKER_00: What assurance do I have, God, that you are going to fulfill these promises that you've made?
SPEAKER_00: And so God makes a covenant with Abraham.
SPEAKER_00: So the promise is that God's going to crush the head of the serpent.
SPEAKER_00: And the covenant is, that's what all the, you know, all the dismembered animals in this passage.
SPEAKER_00: The covenant is really what that's about.
SPEAKER_00: So listen to verse 9 and 10.
SPEAKER_00: It says, The Lord said to him, Bring me a heifer, a goat, and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.
SPEAKER_00: Abram brought these to him, cut them in two, and arranged the halves opposite each other.
SPEAKER_00: The birds, however, he did not cut in half.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this uh everything we read in this passage feels so strange to us, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00: Uh this this feels bizarre, this feels grotesque in ways.
SPEAKER_00: But we have to just for a moment, I want to invite you to suspend your feelings and suspend your modern sensibilities, and just remember that this is the way that covenant relationships were established in much of the ancient world.
SPEAKER_00: This is just how they do it.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we think this is weird.
SPEAKER_00: Like cutting animals in half and walking between them, we're like, that's crazy.
SPEAKER_00: But if Abraham were here today, if he could be transported from their culture to ours, we would say, it's weird to make a contract by cutting animals in half.
SPEAKER_00: And he would probably say, Yeah, so is an e-signature.
SPEAKER_00: So is clicking a box that says accept terms and conditions, knowing you never read any of those terms and conditions.
SPEAKER_00: This is just how covenants were established and formed in parts of the ancient world.
SPEAKER_00: So here's how it worked.
SPEAKER_00: There were two parties that would desire to enter into a covenant relationship with one another, and each party they would together bring animals, and then they would cut those animals in half, which is a very messy process, by the way, if you're talking about like large cattle, like we see here, and they would walk between them.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I thought about bringing props for this, but I didn't because I didn't know what I would bring as props.
SPEAKER_00: Also, I didn't want to scar my children by using their stuffed animals.
SPEAKER_00: I see people going, don't do it.
SPEAKER_00: I have enough sense not to do that, guys.
SPEAKER_00: So you're just gonna have to use your imagination with this, okay?
SPEAKER_00: What would happen is that the parties would agree to the terms of the covenant that they had made, and they would walk between the pieces of these animals that they had sliced in half.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason why they did this, the reason why they cut them in half and walked between them was to act out the consequences of breaking the covenant.
SPEAKER_00: So they would walk between them, and it was a way of saying, if I don't keep my end of the bargain, if I don't keep my end of the covenant, may I be torn to pieces like these animals.
SPEAKER_00: So each party would make commitments and they would walk through the pieces as a way of acting out the consequences or the curses, as they were called, of that covenant.
SPEAKER_00: And what they were doing is they were binding themselves to the obligations that they made to this other person.
SPEAKER_00: They were binding themselves not only to the obligations, but also to the curses or to the consequences of breaking the promises that they made.
SPEAKER_00: And so this was a serious thing to enter into a relationship like this.
SPEAKER_00: This is no pinky swear, this is no, you know, in a dark backroom handshake agreement.
SPEAKER_00: This is a serious thing to enter into a covenant relationship like this.
SPEAKER_00: So in every covenant, there were obligations for both parties, and both parties would walk between the pieces, and we see a picture of this in verse 17, where it says, When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces.
SPEAKER_00: On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, said, To your descendants I will give this land.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this language of uh the smoking firepot and the flaming torch, uh that's that's again another weird part of this passage for us.
SPEAKER_00: But it all makes sense when you read the book of Exodus.
SPEAKER_00: And you see that when God led his people out in the Exodus, he appeared to them as a pillar of fire and as a pillar of cloud or a pillar of smoke.
SPEAKER_00: And so essentially, what's being depicted here with this smoking firepot and blazing torch passing through the pieces of these cut apart animals, what's being depicted here is that God Himself passed between the pieces, covenanting to Abraham, making a promise to Abraham, saying, Here's all the things that I promise you.
SPEAKER_00: If I don't keep my promises, may I be torn to pieces like these animals.
SPEAKER_00: There's a pastor and scholar, Tim Keller, who's really uh shaped my thinking on uh this passage in particular.
SPEAKER_00: Many of you are familiar with him.
SPEAKER_00: You're familiar with him through me, whether you know it or not.
SPEAKER_00: Um, but he's he made a really important observation about this passage that I think is is is really like the the the linchpin, the key to this whole thing.
SPEAKER_00: What he says is that the most important part of this passage is what doesn't happen.
SPEAKER_00: Abraham never walks through the pieces, only God does.
SPEAKER_00: Now, it's not because Abraham didn't have, there was no obligations, it's not that there was no end of the bargain that he needed to keep up.
SPEAKER_00: No, I think something far bigger is happening here.
SPEAKER_00: God passed through the pieces of these animals on his own behalf, saying, if I don't keep my promises, may I be torn to pieces like these animals.
SPEAKER_00: But God also passed through on Abraham's behalf.
SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, he said, Abraham, if you fail to keep your end of the covenant, I will be torn to pieces like these animals are.
SPEAKER_00: I love you, Tad.
SPEAKER_00: The gasp.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they didn't keep the covenant like they were supposed to.
SPEAKER_00: They were unfaithful.
SPEAKER_00: God promised that if Abraham did not remain faithful to the terms of the covenant, he would take upon himself and bear those covenant curses.
SPEAKER_00: And that is exactly what happened at the cross.
SPEAKER_00: So the covenant God made with Abraham, he promised that he would bear those covenant curses.
SPEAKER_00: And the cross is the place where we see that coming to fruition as we let the story of the Bible lead us forward to the person and the work of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: In the same way that God stood in Abraham's place during that covenant ceremony in Genesis 15, God stood in our place when he went to the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Another question that's related to this one we're exploring today, and you'll see a connection with this in a moment.
SPEAKER_00: Another question that's related to this one is why can't God just forgive?
SPEAKER_00: You know, all the stuff the Bible says about judgment and about God's justice and uses the language of God's wrath.
SPEAKER_00: We don't like that type of language.
SPEAKER_00: And so all of that can lead us to maybe think or to see or to believe that God is like some wrathful, angry, uptight God who simply can't let things go.
SPEAKER_00: That he holds on to the smallest little grievances, he won't let those things go, why can't God just forgive?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think the answer to that question uh lies partially in our own personal experience.
SPEAKER_00: If you have ever been deeply wounded, if you have ever been hurt by someone, if you have ever been taken advantage of by someone, if someone has ever done something to you that can never be undone or taken something from you that can never be given back, when you have been deeply sinned against, you know this, that you can't just forgive.
SPEAKER_00: You see, the question, why can't God for just forgive, assumes that forgiveness is totally free.
SPEAKER_00: But we all know that forgiveness is never free.
SPEAKER_00: When you choose to forgive someone, it costs you to do so.
SPEAKER_00: When someone has sinned against you, when you are wounded, you've got two options.
SPEAKER_00: You can make that person pay.
SPEAKER_00: You can hold it against them, you can rub it in their face, you can try and ruin them, you can bring it up all the time and remind them of how they've hurt you, you can make them pay for that sin.
SPEAKER_00: The only other alternative when you have been wounded is that you pay.
SPEAKER_00: You absorb that sin into yourself, you give up your right to get even, and that's what it costs you to forgive someone is it costs you your right to get even with that person.
SPEAKER_00: So either you make them pay or you absorb that pain into yourself.
SPEAKER_00: And this is exactly what God did at the cross.
SPEAKER_00: So remember what the Bible says about who Jesus is.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says that Jesus is not some innocent bystander, that he's some unaffiliated third party who got, you know, caught in the crosshairs or somehow, you know, accidentally drew the wrath of God the Father.
SPEAKER_00: No, the Bible says that Jesus is God Himself who has taken on human flesh.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says in the person of Jesus, God Himself took on flesh, became a part of the world he created, and joined us in our humanity.
SPEAKER_00: And what this means is that at the cross, as Jesus suffered and died for us, what was happening was that God in Christ absorbed the pain and the sting of our sin.
SPEAKER_00: As Jesus suffered and died, God in Christ absorbed the consequences that we deserve for the sin that we have committed.
SPEAKER_00: God in Christ bore the covenant curses that we deserve for our sin and for the ways that we have looked to things and people besides God, given our hearts and our allegiance to those things instead of Him, for the ways we've created idols out of good things that God has given us.
SPEAKER_00: God in Christ bore the covenant curses for our unfaithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: And the good news is that because of what Jesus has done, because he absorbed the pain and the sting of our sin, forgiveness is now available to every single one of us who comes to Jesus in faith.
SPEAKER_00: Forgiveness is now available to anyone, doesn't matter what where you have come from this morning, doesn't matter what things you've done or have been done to you in your life, forgiveness and newness of life is available to anyone and everyone because God in Christ absorbed the pain and the sting of our sin into himself.
SPEAKER_00: Having absorbed that sting and that pain, God extends forgiveness to us.
SPEAKER_00: God gives up his right to get even for those of us who come to him in faith, and we can be forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: And so this is this is the kind of God he is.
SPEAKER_00: He is the kind of God who would bear the pain and would bear the sting of our sin in himself.
SPEAKER_00: He's the kind of God who would take upon himself the curses and the consequences that we deserve for our unfaithfulness to him.
SPEAKER_00: He's the kind of God who was willing to pay the cost of forgiveness so that our relationship with him could be restored.
SPEAKER_00: This is the kind of God He is.
SPEAKER_00: So, no, the cross is not an act of cosmic child abuse.
SPEAKER_00: The cross is a cosmic act of love and generosity and grace and forgiveness because at the cross God Himself absorbed the pain and the sting of our sin.
SPEAKER_00: The cross does show us that yes, God is just.
SPEAKER_00: The cross shows us that our sin matters.
SPEAKER_00: It shows us that our rebellion against him.
SPEAKER_00: It shows us that the ways, for all the ways that we have done what is right in our own eyes, instead of following his good instruction, all of that matters.
SPEAKER_00: God takes that very seriously.
SPEAKER_00: So the cross does show us the justice of God, but it also shows us that his heart overflows with love for his image-bearers whose lives have been ruined by sin.
SPEAKER_00: It shows us his heart of compassion.
SPEAKER_00: It shows us that he was so filled with love and mercy and compassion for us that he was willing to suffer a loss that we could never imagine.
SPEAKER_00: The loss of his son, so that we could be forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: So, no, the cross is not an act of cosmic child abuse.
SPEAKER_00: The cross shows us that the exact opposite is true, that he's not an angry, mean, vindictive God who just is just can't wait to punish people.
SPEAKER_00: It shows us that his heart is for our good and that through Jesus he has accomplished our ultimate and eternal good.
SPEAKER_00: That's the picture of God that we see at the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, he's just.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, our sin matters.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, the Bible says that those who do not turn to Jesus in faith will bear the weight of the consequences for their sin.
SPEAKER_00: But the Bible tells us that in Jesus we can be forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: And that God's heart overflows with love for us.
SPEAKER_00: His heart is good, and he has accomplished through Jesus our ultimate and eternal good.
SPEAKER_00: So, friends, that good news is for you today.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what you walked in here with Karen this morning.
SPEAKER_00: But what I do know is that this good news is for you.
SPEAKER_00: And so will you receive, will you accept, will you rejoice in the good news this morning?
SPEAKER_00: That God Himself absorbed the pain of your sin into himself so that you could be forgiven, so that you could have newness of life.
SPEAKER_00: One of the ways that we respond to the message of the good news each week here at Elmwood is we come to the communion table.
SPEAKER_00: And as we come to the communion table, we see a picture of both the justice and the love of God.
SPEAKER_00: We see that God, our sin matters, and we see that God's heart overflows with love.
SPEAKER_00: And so as we come forward to receive the broken body and shed blood of Jesus, we are reminded that we come forward because we need God's mercy, because we need God's grace and his forgiveness, and we come forward in rejoicing with hearts that are full because God in Christ has provided for us the means of forgiveness, the means of salvation for us.
SPEAKER_00: And ultimately through Jesus, it's through Him that the head of the serpent will be finally and fully one day crushed.
SPEAKER_00: And we look forward to that day.