Allen Jackson - I Choose Life - Part 1
The goal is really simple. I want to encourage you to read your Bibles. We're a Bible reading church. It's become a part of the fabric of who we are as a people. Not randomly, but in an intentional, systematic way we read through our Bibles every year. There's some tremendous benefits from that. It gives us a common talking point when we interact with one another. When you hit a part that you don't understand, it doesn't make sense to you, somebody in your sphere of influence is reading it too and you can talk about it, and together we're gaining an insight and a revelation into the character of God.
If you've never done it with us, come on. If you were busy in January or distracted in January or not here in January or you didn't have a Bible in January, come on. Say I'm behind, just a minute. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, I absolve you. Now you're up to speed, let's start the day, all right? Don't let the guilt and shame of being a couple of weeks behind keep you out of the book. About ten minutes a day you can read through your Bible from Genesis to Revelation in the course of a year. We'll bring it to you in the sermon outline every week, you can get it off the web page, you can download our app to your portable devices, lots of ways to get to it beyond the ways we would share.
But read your Bible, and you know, it's Jeremiah 23 and verse 29. The prophet says, "'Is not My word like fire and like a hammer which shatters a rock?'" God describes his Word as a fire or a hammer that can shatter rock. If there are barriers, burdens obstacles, immovable things before you in your life, God's Word will make a pathway. I believe in it. It's important. We don't worship the book, but through the scripture we learn about the character of God, the purposes of God, the intent of God. If you haven't read your Bible, you are incredibly vulnerable to deception. You have very little to provide a rudder for yourself. You're vulnerable to other people's opinions and other people's expressions. You need to know God's Word and character for yourself. It really does matter.
In Matthew chapter 4 and verse 4 Jesus is speaking. He said, "It is written, 'Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.'" You know when Jesus said that he was talking to the devil? Some of you don't believe in the devil. Jesus did. Maybe we should. I mean, you've heard that statement from Jesus before. It's pretty often quoted. It's not like an obscure statement. That man doesn't live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. He'd been fasting for 40 days and at the end of that the devil showed up and said, "If you're the Son of God, turn this stone into bread".
Well, he was the Son of God and he could have made a pizza out of a rock if he'd wanted to. But he answered Satan with the scripture. But you know, that was not original with Jesus in the 1st century. Look in your notes... I'm sorry, Deuteronomy chapter 8, Moses is speaking to the Hebrew people and he said, "God humbled you and he let you be hungry, and he fed you with manna which you didn't know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord".
In Matthew 4, Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy to the devil. The short lesson on that is Jesus read Deuteronomy. See, last time you read it, you thought, even God doesn't read this. But he did, and so should you. In our Bible reading right now we're working through the books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. "Genemesis". Genesis is a pretty interesting read. It's the book of beginnings, big picture stories, big ideas, Creation, floods, high drama stuff. Hollywood's made a living out of Genesis. In Genesis 12 we meet Abram and God starts the process of developing a people for himself. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the patriarchs. When Genesis closes, Joseph, son of Jacob, has moved to Egypt, gotten a really good job, and brought the whole family down to ride the gravy train.
When the book of Exodus opens, it says that Pharaoh came to power that didn't remember Joseph and the good job he'd had, and he was threatened by the Hebrew people, so he enslaves them. And Exodus is the book that tells you the story of how the Hebrew people escaped hundreds of years of slavery into freedom. It's a high drama book, Hollywood's helped with that. You know the story of Exodus, either with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, or with Disney and, "The Prince of Egypt". Either way, they've helped you. But when you get to the book of Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, if Jesus hadn't told us, we wouldn't have thought anybody read those.
And so I wanted to take two weeks and see if I could add a little momentum, while we're reading through those books, to help you not to grow weary and give up because there are some very important things for our spiritual life in there. Doesn't mean every page is a thriller or every verse is filled with excitement. Some of the chapters are rather dry, to be candid. But in the midst of those books, there are some powerful, powerful revelations of who God is and what he will be in your life. And that's these two weeks, and I wanna come back to an idea that we began to unpack last week because it's so central to the story, and it's introduced to us so early on and it is a primary theme of scripture. It's the holiness of God.
Look in Leviticus chapter 11. God is speaking through Moses. He said, "I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy. Don't make yourselves unclean by any creature that moves about on the ground. I'm the Lord who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy". Now, one of the first things God says to this group of slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of them that are really just vomited out of Egypt, they've been there hundreds of years. And they're released into the desert and God accepts the assignment of making this disparate group of people with no common heritage, nothing to bind them together, except a season of suffering, he's gonna fashion them into a people with a message for the whole world, in fact, they still occupy the little piece of land God promised them way back there. And they're still hated on by most of the world.
And you know, God could care less. The UN apparently does not intimidate him. Isn't that good to know? But one of the first challenges, God told them how to eat,he told them how to worship, he told them what to wear to worship, when to worship. He showed them how to build a place to worship, the furnishings they would need in the place to worship. He gave them the whole portfolio. But the first revelation he had to give them was of himself. They'd been in Egypt for hundreds of years. They knew the Egyptian gods, the Egyptian idols, they knew how the Egyptians worshiped and what the Egyptian temples looked like. They knew the Egyptian holidays and the food they offered to their gods. In fact, every one of the plagues was a pointed personal humiliation of one of the Egyptian idols. And now the people are free and God said, "You'll worship me. I am a holy God, and you'll have to be holy".
Now, we don't know much about holiness. We don't talk much about it. If you go to the Christian bookstores, you would think God had said, "I'm a happy God and I want you to be happy, happy, happy people". I don't think God's opposed to happiness. It's not either/or, but happiness isn't a revelation of his character, holiness is. See, holiness is, it's a complex word and it's more difficult for us because it's absent from us. Holiness will not exist within you or me apart from the character of God. So we kind of step away from it because I think we intuitively understand we're not. And so we'd just rather not be bothered with it. It seems like an incumbrance, but it isn't an incumbrance. It's an invitation.
In the holiness of God there is purity. He's clean. It's about integrity. He isn't deceptive or selfishly ambitious or unfair or unjust. He's holy. He can be trusted. You can come close to him, you can invest your heart in him, and your future in him. You can feel secure in him. He's a holy God. He isn't a mean spirit. He doesn't have some selfish hidden agenda. He's a God who delights in revealing his character to you and me, his creation. He doesn't hold his guards close to his vest. He's a holy God. And that's what he says to the people. He said, "I'm a holy God and you're gonna be my people".
So he said, "Now you be holy". And so he begins to talk to them. He said, "This is how you worship". And when you're reading Leviticus, you think, really? A drop of oil on the ear lobe and a drop on my big toe? I have to, you care about what I wear and what day I come and what food I eat? Why do you care? God said, "I'm not random". You see, if God was random and whimsical and every day was different and it didn't matter when you came or how you came or how you behaved, you wouldn't know how to approach him. It would leave you always anxious or tense. You'd be indecipherable.
But he said, "I'm a holy God, so there's no shadow of turning in me". That's one of the damaging ideas when you think the God of the New Testament is different than the God of the Old Testament. How would you know him? How would you approach him? How would you have a relationship with him? Is he moody? Did he get a Prozac in Malachi and chill out before Matthew? "I'm a holy God". And we're to be a holy people. Holiness is not burdensome. It's not about diminishing you or taking something away from you. In holiness there comes a cleanliness, a purity, a freedom, because the character of God is being formed in you. It's a fundamental theme of scripture.
In fact, in the book of Isaiah... now, Isaiah is written hundreds of years after Leviticus. We've come a long way from the... in Leviticus, they still got the mud from the brick pits of Egypt under their fingernails. When we get to the book of Isaiah, the Hebrew people have been in the Promised Land for hundreds of years. David's already come and gone, the temple has already been built. They have a whole national history. Battles won, battles lost, all kinds of stories. We're hundreds of years later, and in Isaiah chapter 6 the prophet has a vision of the throne room of God and he describes it for us. We can read it. It's in your notes.
It's Isaiah 6, said, "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. And above him were seraphs," these angelic beings, "each with six wings: Two wings, they covered their faces, and two covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.'" The glory of the Lord, the best definition I know for the glory of the Lord, is when the power and the majesty of God is made apparent to your senses. When you can experience, see, understand, acknowledge, recognize the majesty and the power of God, that's the glory of the Lord in your midst. It doesn't begin at that point. You can just recognize it at that point.
But when Isaiah sees this majestic vision of the throne room of God and he sees these angelic beings, he hears them speaking, and they're saying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty," holiness leads us to the glory of God. It's holiness that leads us to experiencing the power and the majesty of God. Don't think of it as an option, don't think of it as a burden. It's an enormous doorway of invitation. God said, "I'm holy, you can be holy. My character can grow in you". But it doesn't stop there. In the book of Revelation chapter 4, and we're moving hundreds of years further along in the story. The book of Revelation is from the New Testament. You happen to remember who wrote the book of Revelation? It's not a trick question. The apostle John, the one that Jesus recruited.
By the time we get to the book of Revelation, John is near the end of his life. By, at least, church tradition, all the other apostles have been martyred. John's alone. He's been exiled to an island by civil authorities. And the scripture says on the Lord's Day he has a vision of Jesus. Jesus trusts his old friend with the revelation of the end of the ages. He knows John will write it down as it's given to him, and we still benefit from it. But in Revelation chapter 4 John has a vision of the throne room of God. Sounds familiar to Isaiah 6.
Now, I just gave you one verse. You can read the larger context at your leisure, but when John looks towards the throne room of God, he said there were "four living creatures," the seraphs again. "They had six wings and were covered with eyes all around, even under their wings. And day and night they never stop saying: 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.'" Sound familiar? We just read it in Isaiah, hundreds of years early in a completely different historical context. The consistency of the character of God, it reaches all the way back to the Negev, to the deserts of the Middle East and the book of Leviticus, when God begins his journey with his people and he said, "I'm a holy God". It's noteworthy that the word holy is used three times. It's the only word I know of in scripture that's used three times in succession in identifying a characteristic of God. It's a very clear emphasis.
For instance, God says of himself that he's a God of love or a God of wisdom or a powerful God or a God of mercy, all accurate characteristics of the character of God. All of them can be reflected, admittedly, in some broken way, but reflected our lives as human beings, the love of God or the mercy of God or the grace of God or even the wisdom of God. But when holiness is described, it's done in triplicate: God is holy, holy, holy. And holiness isn't something intuitive in us, it comes from the character of God formed in us. But it brings us to a better place, to the glory of God, his power and his majesty. So we wanna incubate a desire for holiness. If we don't have the desire, it's highly improbable it will ever emerge within us.
Now, here's the real challenge: I don't think we've cared that much about it. Most of us begin our God journey in some sort of a church experience, and you know, we come to church and we learn to sit and stand, sit and stand, sit and stand, stand and run. Not bad, it's just kind of how we learn, and we kinda get coached towards the idea that you want your "get out of hell" free card and you wanna keep it in your wallet with your driver's license and your other important papers because if you ever need it, you want to be able to play that bad boy. "No, no, no, I get out". But we really haven't been invited to have an imagination that the character of God would be formed in us. We haven't cared that much about it.
Now, I don't want to add to your burden of guilt and shame today, but I do wanna hand you an invitation. And I would encourage you to be just as honest with the Lord as you know how to be. Say to the Lord, "You know, Lord, it really hadn't mattered that much to me. I've been a lot more interested in who my favorite team was recruiting or drafting. I've been more interested about if the fish were biting. I've been more interested in the fashion trends or my kids getting on the team I wanted them on". None of those things are inherently evil, but let's be honest enough to say, "You know, God, I couldn't care less about being holy. I just didn't care. But, God, I would like to learn. Would you help me"?
You know what? If you'll say that, he will. He will. In fact, "let's pray" is kind of a theme around here right now, huh? So I think on that topic, how about let's pray? All right, you want just bow with me? Father, you have said, "Be holy," and we would like to learn. Help us. In Jesus's name, amen. All right, one sentence and then move on, right? I'm not looking to you for a while. That's Leviticus, where we're introduced to the holiness of God. The book of Numbers is an equally exciting read, and you're in the midst of it right now, I can tell with your enthusiasm. But there's some very important things in the book of Numbers. There is a location shift in the book of Numbers. Leviticus is principally centered around Sinai. It's a mountain, but it refers to a season in the Israelites's journey.
After they came out of Egyptian slavery and crossed the Red Sea, God takes them to Sinai, and there's a covenant put in place and all the aspects of the covenant and how to worship and who's to worship and what the tribes are gonna do, all that stuff is involved. But God moves them from Sinai in the book of Numbers to the Plains of Moab on the banks of the Jordan River. They can see into the Promised Land. In rather short order, God has taken them from the brick pits of Egypt and has walked them to the borders of the land that he said, "I will give it to you. It's a prosperous, good land".
And that's what's happening in the book of Numbers. Now, there's hundreds of thousands of people that have made this journey through a barren, barren place. The Negev wilderness is not a lush place, there's no vegetation there. And for hundreds of thousands of people not simply to survive there but to thrive there is a powerful statement to anybody that's paying any kind of attention whatsoever. So the surrounding nations and the surrounding peoples are getting, they're very threatened by the Hebrew people because they are thriving in a place where people can't thrive. And it's apparent to them that there is some force working on their behalf other than themselves. There is no food there, there is no water there, and they're thriving there.
So they are terrifying the surrounding peoples. God is preparing them to occupy their inheritance. And in the book of Numbers we get a little window into that. In chapter 22, one of the local kings wants to hire a prophet. His name is Balaam. Now, he's not a prophet of God, but he's a spiritual fellow. He's a man who has insight and understanding into spiritual things. On your notes I called him a spiritual hireling. He has no allegiance to God or to the character of God or the purposes of God or the plans of God. Candidly, he could care less. He understands spiritual things, their influences and their impacts to some degree, and he will sell his services to the highest bidder. He is motivated by selfish ambition.
Some things haven't changed a lot. We have those folks in the 21st century. Now, the Israelites, the Hebrew people, are on the shores of the Jordan. Balaam lives over by the Euphrates River. He's quite a ways away. So he has a reputation that is rather broad and expansive. He's a well-known character. And a local king says, "We will hire Balaam to come and curse these people, because there's a spiritual force for them that if we can't disrupt it, we can't defeat them". We can read a portion of it. It's in your notes.
It's Numbers 22. Says, "The Israelites traveled to the plains of Moab and they encamped along the Jordan across from Jericho. Now Balak the son of Zippor," don't let the names and places bother you, call him Barry from Smyrna if it helps, "saw all that the Israel had done to the Amorites, and Moab was terrified because there were so many people. Indeed, they were filled with dread because of the Israelites. And the elders said, 'This horde is gonna lick up everything around us, as an ox licks up the grass of the field.' So," Barry from Smyrna, "who was king of Moab, sent messengers to summon Balaam who was near the river," it's the Euphrates River, "in his native land. And Balak said: 'A people has come out of Egypt; they cover the face of the land and have settled next to me. Come and put a curse on these people, because they are too powerful for me. Perhaps then I'll be able to defeat them and drive them out of the country. For I know that those you bless are blessed, and those you curse are cursed.'"
The king says, "Even though we're an established country with a standing military and these people are not, I recognize there is a force with them that I cannot overcome, so I'm gonna hire the most spiritual person I know to put a curse on them that we might be victorious on a battlefield". He believes that a spiritual force has a physical impact not only on individuals but on a nation. Now remember, we're reading our Bibles not just to gain historical information but to understand the character and the working of God in the earth. And the principles that were introduced to us early in the story, many of them are continued to be carried throughout the rest of the book. And I believe this is one of them, the impact of spiritual forces in our lives.
I wanna take a minute to pray before we go.
Father, I thank you that you love us. I thank you that you, that in your great mercy and compassion, you have made a way for us to be at peace with the Creator of all things, that you're not angry with us, that you are not resentful of us, that you have welcomed us into your kingdom and made peace with us through Jesus Christ. I thank you for that today. Nothing's hidden from you, no part of our past, no thought within us, and yet you love us. May that love grow in us every day and bring a boldness and a courage within us to face the challenges before us. In Jesus's name, amen.