So, over the next four weeks, I'm kind of kicking us off here on a summer series, we're going to be teaching about some of the images and depictions of Jesus in the Old Testament.
Now, we talk about Jesus a lot, you know, in the Gospels and in, you know, the epistles and so forth.
But for me, in my own personal walk, as I come to know the Lord, everything for me personally came into focus when I began to understand that Jesus, all of Scripture is pointing to him.
The Old Testament, it's not just about battles and so forth, it's all pointing to Jesus.
And so we're going to be looking at some of those stories in the Old Testament and just depictions of Jesus as he was then.
And again, it's just from Genesis to Revelation.
You know, oftentimes in our own thinking and just general Christian culture, we think of Jesus as this guy that kind of came around the fourth quarter, like right?
God was just kind of dealing with us for a while and said, okay, send in Jesus, fix this thing up.
But it wasn't that.
You know, he's he's this was all instrumented.
This is all a story that's been told sovereignly over time and before time, as we'll get into this morning.
So that's what we're gonna be looking at over the next few weeks.
I am kind of the opening act, and everybody comes for the opening act, I'm sure.
That's why you're here.
Uh before we get into the content, let me pray for us and then we'll keep rolling.
Sound good?
Let me pray.
Father, thank you for this morning.
What an amazing gift you have given to us, to me and my family in this local church, to come together, to sing your name, to praise you, Lord, to read your word, and to share the good news with each other.
What a gift.
Help us see you this morning.
Help our study of your word to be spirit-led.
Let it become true for us, that it become true for me.
I ask you, Lord, to show us a glimpse, just a glimpse of your glory, Lord.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
Alright, so the verse we opened up with this morning, in the beginning was the word.
This is without a doubt one of the dynamite passages of all the Bible, right?
This is a big one.
Theologians love it for its sense of scale, sense of eternity, a sense of intimacy, and really for succinctly stating the significance of this man named Jesus.
I love it as well.
John, the author, is stating how all of Scripture is pointing to this man.
You could probably meditate and study this passage for a number of years, maybe your whole life, and never fully unpack it.
There's a lot, so we won't get to all of it in 20 minutes.
But there's a lot here.
We're gonna use it this morning as kind of a basis for our study.
Um, we're gonna be looking at John's words about Jesus.
We're gonna talk a little bit about space.
It's an illustration, we're gonna talk about science.
Um, and then we're gonna talk about eternity, and then we're gonna look at a brief glimpse of the Garden of Eden in Genesis.
And we're gonna be basically playing with this idea of scale this morning, the tension of like eternity and intimacy.
There's some mind-bending truth here, and I think we we don't think about them all the time, we think about the practical day-to-days, but I think it's useful to kind of step back and try to rack our brains on this stuff.
Okay, so let's look at John 1 again.
Senor Bulletin.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
So that phrase, the word, we see it here, repeated, right?
We generally in culture refer to, at least Christian culture, we refer to the word as our Bibles.
John is using this phrase, the word, that you might have picked up on to refer to Jesus, the God man.
Before Jesus was given his earthly name, Jesus, you know, we know he has other names.
Revelation tells us stuff.
We know this from the Old Testament as well.
King of kings, Lord of Lords, these are like his kingly names.
But John is using the word here as a stand-in.
And perhaps more importantly than all that, though, John is establishing here the eternal nature of Jesus.
He's saying, okay, you know this man named Jesus.
These are contemporaries, these people knew him, they saw him, they felt him.
Um he's saying, you know him in a slice of time, and there's eternity past.
And I want you to really understand and get that.
And so, around along the same terms, that phrase in the beginning, where it starts with in the beginning, it sounds like Genesis, right?
In the beginning, God.
In the beginning, it's actually referring to, if you break it down, it's like before the beginning.
Or really, maybe even more interestingly, before time.
So time was a thing God created.
And God is outside of time.
God created that time.
So what in the world?
How do we begin to understand that?
That's a big one.
For me, that's an interesting one to wrestle with.
So to try to put this in perspective, we've got kind of two short illustrations.
And the first one, I want you to think back to when you were a young boy or a young girl, you know, five, six, somewhere in there.
And I want you to picture your parents.
I want you to picture, you know, your mom or your dad, or maybe just the person who took care of you if your mom and dad weren't around.
Picture them.
Now, seemingly they had just always been, right?
They were just there.
You had no choice in this.
You just ended up in their family, and these are your these are your parents.
And that's something really fascinating about that.
By the time you showed up, they had lived for some time, right?
They lived that.
And as a kid, you know this, like relative to your age, uh, they were in some sense eternal.
So then as a kid, you start asking questions, you know, okay, so were you around before the car?
Okay.
Was electricity a thing when you were a kid?
Or iPads?
Was that, you know, like that's the thing?
Um, you know, and you almost assume maybe they were just, okay, dinosaurs.
I've heard of dinosaurs.
They were they writing on the backs of them, like what?
It's a big thing, right?
These are your parents, and you happen to know them at a particular point in time, like Jesus and his disciples knew him.
And, you know, because of your parents' age, you probably assume that they just know everything, too, because they've just been around forever.
They're ancient.
Right.
Now, what I think is pretty amazing is that it's a bit of a miracle that kids actually get this heavenly concept right.
Really kind of zoom out and say, like, there's wisdom in in this.
There's actually something there.
Um, kids understand that their parents knew them before they were even all around, before they were even like born into the world, right?
We knew them, at least in spirit.
And the kids understand that their parents knew them before that they could even form a memory.
Their parents are already tracking those things.
So that's pretty amazing.
They can't imagine you not existing before them.
It's just the fact, it's just the way it goes.
But you get the idea, right?
Jesus, our earthly father, seemingly like our parents, he has just always been, and he truly has.
That's what John is saying here.
Another one that I hope is useful in establishing.
So we talk about this idea of before time.
What does that even mean?
What is God is outside of time.
How do we begin to think about this?
There's not many examples of things that are outside of time in our day-to-day.
Everything has an expiration day, right?
Everything is gonna just decay and die.
And the time is kind of what does that, right?
Well, something that's really profound to me that I was kind of just studying.
This is a personal study that I was kind of getting into, was this study of black holes.
So if you're familiar with anybody familiar with like what a black hole is?
Yeah, a few of us, yeah, probably most of us have heard of them.
Um I just kind of got obsessed about them recently.
Uh, we can't get into all of it.
It's kind of over my head, I'll be honest.
It's gonna be not over David Russ's head, probably, but so what is a black hole?
A black hole, I'm I read that, so I I could I've taken a few excerpts from an article that was really just illuminating to me.
They really broke it down and told it in plain English that even I could begin to wrestle with.
So, what's a black hole?
It says it's essentially a puncture in space-time.
I've probably lost you there.
Space, I thought space and time were two different things, and space-time is one thing, it's a puncture through that.
Think of space-time as a rubber surface of a trampoline, and a black hole as a bowling ball placed on that surface.
The ball f causes the fabric to sag, right, drawing smaller objects into the depression.
And since black holes are believed to have infinite density, I'm reading here, infinite density, crazy, they create bottomless pits in space-time.
It says astrophysicists don't know where matter that falls into them winds up.
That's crazy.
Things don't just disappear.
What is that?
A few more things that just, again, I just want to share this with you.
Uh, they're formed when a star collapses in a stuff.
How are they formed?
A star collapses at some point.
That's crazy.
How many of them are there?
There's billions, they say.
And it's suggested that in our galaxy alone, there's over 400 million of them.
That's in our neighborhood.
These things are out there.
In some sense, they're invisible, so I'm still curious how they actually find them.
Um but, and then the size of these things is also amazing.
Again, I want us to get, we're gonna come back to scripture, but this is I want us to get a sense of scale and something that's breaking through time.
This is the only example that I think we know of, and there's something that we get to look at this and learn from.
The size of these things, okay, you know the sun's probably the biggest thing we look at, right?
The sun is huge, right?
On a given day, that's the biggest thing we look at.
A black hole can be a million to a billion times more massive than a sun, right?
A million to so who knows how big that's huge.
They're big, right?
Scale.
What's inside of them?
We're almost done.
Well, Matthew McConnell Hayes down in there somewhere.
Is the movie Interstellar?
If you've seen that movie, you know he's down in there lingering.
Uh but no, they say, again, it's a total mystery.
It's a total mystery.
What's inside of it?
And this part really, really, really messed me up.
They say, we need to invent new physics.
We need to invent new physics.
Which is interesting that they believe that's actually possible to invent new physics, because that's what I thought I was doing at Georgia Tech when I was taking physics a couple times.
Like, I my parents are here, they know I took that class a few times, and I was, I thought I was inventing new physics, and it wasn't the kind of physics they wanted to say.
But you get the idea, like we understand space-time in our current day better than any civilization kind of behind us.
Um, and we're still finding it unknowable, right?
The depths of God's creation are unknowable.
And the amazing thing is that Jesus was here before all of it.
Right?
He was there before there was any concept of space-time to poke through.
He was there before all of it.
Jesus was, not just God, Jesus, the Trinity.
This is spoken of in a few verses I want to share with you, but in the Bible.
Look at uh Jude 1.25.
I'll read it, it's a short one.
Jude 125.
To the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time, now and forever.
Amen.
Again, before all time.
Even the writers of Scripture had this in their heads.
Before all time.
Now, I want to, before we leave that verse, I want to kind of land on this for a moment.
Like, unrelated to our message a little bit today, do you ever find sometimes in your prayer life that you just don't know where to begin?
Either you are completely overwhelmed by something, or you have been praying for something, and you just feel like, I've prayed about this.
I don't, I don't know what else there is to say.
I've prayed, I've prayed, I'm not hearing anything.
I've been there.
We get stuck on ourselves, I get stuck on myself, on my needs.
But I think what Jude is doing here is he's just literally, he's just describing the qualities to God.
And I think that's a useful way to break through that, I find.
It's just kind of tell God who He is.
You say, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority.
I find, you know, that it just will bring me a perspective that will help me break through a problem.
And eventually it kind of will humble me.
It'll say, okay, God is in charge, God is sovereign, God is outside of time, before all time.
We all just did that with the doxology song, right?
We all just said that praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Praise him, all creatures here below, praise him, praise him, praise him.
And that's what Jesus modeled for us when they said, How do we pray?
He started the Lord's Prayer with just acknowledging who God is.
This is who you are, this is who you are, this is who you are.
2 Timothy 1.9.
Another good one.
He saved us and called us to a holy calling, not just because of our works, or sorry, not because of our works, but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Jesus Christ before the ages began.
Now that is a powerful verse.
That's a very succinct way to tell the story of the Bible, to tell the story of the gospel, right?
He saved us, which means, okay, God, God's first, saved, which means we we couldn't save ourselves.
We actually needed saving because it says, like, it's not because of our works.
Nothing we can do.
We needed salvation because of his purpose.
His purpose is to magnify his son through grace, which he gave us in Jesus Christ before the ages began.
There is no Old Testament God, and there is no New Testament God.
Again, we're gonna be unpacking that this month.
Scripture tells us the opposite: that before time and into eternity, he is an intentionally gracious Father, a gracious son, and a gracious spirit.
Listen to these words from the book of Proverbs.
Now, Proverbs, of course, is was written before the time Jesus showed up in flesh, and it's it's saying something here about him.
Pretty phenomenal.
Proverbs 30, verse 4.
Who has ascended to heaven and come down?
Who has gathered the wind in his fist?
Who has wrapped up the waters in a garment?
Who has established all the ends of the earth?
What is his name?
And what is his son's name?
Surely you know.
What's his son's name, guys?
You can say Jesus, right?
We can say it, Jesus.
Jesus is his name.
Feels good.
Jesus gathered the wind in his fist, Jesus wrapped the waters in a garment, and he established all the ends of the earth, and he's always been.
There's a little picture there of the creation as well.
We'll get to that.
Finally, before we leave this ark, I want to note how we are also mentioned as having been known before time.
This is where it gets.
You take this profound truth of eternity, which is enough in and of itself, and then it also gets personal.
That's where we're going to go to the last half here.
This is what Paul says in Ephesians.
This is a bit of a long one, but I want to read it, it's just so rich.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.
In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.
You see that?
His will, his will, his will is always the plan, sovereign.
According to the will and the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the beloved.
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.
It's all about him.
It's all about him, it's all about him, which he's lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will.
Again, his will is something that we'll spend our whole lives and you know just kind of unpacking.
According to his purpose.
And we talk about this idea of sovereignty and church, this word sovereignty is kind of a big church word.
When you hear us talk about that, think, or when you hear that word, think, okay, sovereign, God is sovereign.
That means he is my issue, he cares about, but he is he and he's also like he can meet me in that issue.
He's also outside of time, and he's been, he has a purpose, he has a will.
The fullness of time to unite all things to him, things in heaven and things on earth.
In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.
So in Ephesians, we just learned that it's not only that Christ was in existence, which is an amazing and of itself, but that the names of his people were too.
God glorifying himself through Jesus Christ in the salvation of his people, the salvation of you and me, that's the story of the book.
That's the story.
It's not just the New Testament, that's the entire story.
So we've begun, we're almost done.
We've begun to establish this morning about this infiniteness of Christ, right?
Christ outside of time, Christ before time, Christ to the end, to the to the future.
We talked about his scale, the majesty, big things, his eternal nature.
The final thought I want to land with you this morning is this Christ is as intimate as he is infinite.
Christ is as intimate as he is infinite.
He is this, right?
And he is simultaneously this with you and me, right?
He is all these things simultaneously.
So we're looking at Jesus in the Old Testament.
Let's quickly pop back to Genesis.
Chapter 3 tells us the story of the fall of man, right?
If you know Genesis 1, 2, and 3, 3 is kind of where things went really wrong.
Um and that's how we generally look at that chapter.
But I think, you know, that's where sin entered the perfect world, a perfect setting.
But if we begin to look at it from a couple other perspectives, some other things I think start to pop out, at least popped out to me.
A few observations and then we'll close.
Number one is if marriage is a representation, marriage here on earth, is a representation of Christ and the church, which is what Paul attests to, then in the garden we have a picture of that, right?
We have Adam and Eve.
There's a nakedness, there's a vulnerability that they share with one another.
The husband and the wife, they they fully knew each other.
That's incredible intimacy.
There was nothing even to hide.
There's nothing to hide.
There was a holy and perfect oneness.
We tend to fast forward right to the sin and say, oh, it was Adam and Rose of Eve who did it.
This is there's something really special there before that.
And number two is like when things went wrong, God sought them in the garden.
God, again, we talked about him being outside of time and knowing all things, but God sought them.
He said, He went to find them.
He said, Where are you?
And he knew.
He said, What did you do?
He knew.
But what was he doing?
He was meeting them, and he was saying, I want you to speak.
I want to hear you, I want to, I want to hear your voice.
That's amazing.
This is the God, this is the intimacy that our God allows us to have with him, while at the same time, he is above all these things.
It's amazing.
Now, he, you know, things went wrong and they lost some things.
Not to put it lightly, they lost some things.
But he made their coverings.
He went further, he made their coverings, he protected them.
And their coverings, which they then wore in the garden to kind of account for their shame, this was essentially the first image of a sacrifice.
We've talked about this before.
This is the first sacrifice to atone for their sin.
God made these things for them.
Jesus, of course, would later become that covering for you and for me, the final covering, the final atonement.
So, really, this is it, guys.
He is infinite in his being, and despite our sin, he is also infinitely intimate with us.
And so my hope and my prayer for all of us is that we can go there sometimes.
Is that when we are dealing with day-to-day issues, we can say, okay, God, you are you are huge.
We don't think about God, we talk about God as being personal a lot.
But I think, you know, we talk about there's also the corporateness.
He's personal, he's with the church, and he's outside of that, he's huge.
And so I've just found that to be a very helpful thing over the last few weeks.
It's all new to me, honestly.
It's been new stuff for me.
So I'm happy I could share this with you.
Rest in that truth this week, everyone, and praise his name.
Let me pray for us, and we'll close.
God, thank you for this morning.
What an amazing thing to get to hear from your word, hear your truth.
Thank you, Lord, uh, for Russ and for Christy for just their constant devotion to this community.
I pray blessings over them as they take some time away to rest.
Help it be good for the two of them and good for their family.
Um, God, thank you for this church.
Bless your name.
Amen.