The law brings curses but the good news of the gospel is that Jesus is cursed so that those who could not follow the law can be blessed. Paul has already said that the law cannot save a person (Galatians 2:16), but in this passage, he explains why the law cannot save. Because we cannot follow it.
Tag: gospel
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The Son of God allows us to be God’s sons. STUDYING JOHN 5:18
In John 5, Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath which draws the ire from the Pharisees who had more restrictive views of Sabbath practices. In John 5:17, Jesus says:
“My Father is working until now, and I am working.”
In response to Jesus pointing to God as his Father, the Pharisees begin to actively conspire against Jesus.
18 This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
We know the end of the story. Jesus is ultimately crucified. But it is because Jesus said that God was his father that jump started the Pharisees in their conspiracy against him.
In an event which is not recorded in John, Jesus is before the Pharisees. The sonship question comes up again.
Matthew 26:63-64:
the high priest said to him, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.” 64 Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
That’s the final straw in Matthew’s gospel and the Pharisees seek to have Jesus crucified.
Then the high priest tore his robes and said, “He has uttered blasphemy. What further witnesses do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy. 66 What is your judgment?” They answered, “He deserves death.” 67 Then they spit in his face and struck him. And some slapped him, 68 saying, “Prophesy to us, you Christ! Who is it that struck you?” (Matthew 26:65-68).
The pharisees look at the words of Christ as blasphemy.
But it wasn’t. It was the truth.
Incarnationally, morally, theologically, Jesus is the Son of God and God is his father.
But in John 5, we see the opposition rising.
What started as a miracle turned into a Sabbath controversy.
And what became a Sabbath controversy was intensified by Jesus pointing to himself and his relation to God.
The sonship of Christ and the fatherhood of God points us to the gospel.
We are God’s children, created in his image who had forsaken God through our sin.
Jesus is the perfect Son of God who was forsaken so we could be forgiven for our sins.
As radical as it is that Jesus addressed God as his father, he invited us to do the same when he taught the disciples how to pray in the Sermon on the Mount.
your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 9 Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name. (Matthew 6:9)
The Apostle Paul says in the opening salutations of all of his letters: grace and peace to you from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
The fatherhood of God is bestowed upon the people of God because Jesus is the true Son of God.
Jesus is the son of God who allows us to be adopted as God’s children and to approach God as our own father.
John 1:12 says:
to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God
The adoption language is used by Paul at the beginning of his letter to the Ephesians.
3 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, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 1:3-5)
That’s the Good News of the Gospel. The Son of God allows us to call God our father.
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People missed the significance of the first Christmas – but how do you respond to Jesus this Christmas?
There are the important days that we know are important at the time. And there are the important days when we only know of their significance with hindsight.
A couple weeks ago, we had the anniversary of an important day in American history when we remembered the 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks on December 7, 1941.
Other important days in American history.
November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy died.
September 11, 2001.
You knew those were historic days at the time.
And that’s also true in our personal lives.
There are some days that you know are monumental days at the time.
The day you get married. The day kids are born.
But as we begin in our passage this morning, I want to talk for a moment about the days that matter but that we don’t know matter until after the fact.
On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was killed. It was a story at the time, but to observers, it seemed like a regional matter that wouldn’t extend much past Eastern Europe. In reality that event was the spark that led to the outbreak of World War I, the most destructive war the world had ever seen at that time.
The days that matter that you don’t know matter.
The first time you ever heard of Covid-19 in China, you probably never imagined that it was going to turn our world upside down.
Think about the day the lightbulb was invented. The world was going to change but most people had no idea.
It’s always a fascinating thought to me. That such significant days can be days when you don’t know it at the time.
I think of one of the most significant days in my life. February 20, 2017. It was on that day that I talked to a girl on eharmony.com who I thought looked cute. I had no idea at the time, but that was the first day I ever talked to my wife.
Think about the day a famous person was born. No one knows it at the time. A future president, or leading actor, or star athlete could be in the process of being born this very morning and we wouldn’t know it.
And I think of that with the events surrounding the first Christmas Eve.
Human history was about to forever change.
For people who lived in Bethlehem on that first Christmas Eve, their little town was about to be center stage to events that we’d be talking about 2,000 years later, events that were so significant that time itself is calculated by its proximity to them.
And for the average person living in Bethlehem on that first Christmas Eve, they would have had no idea.
Think about that.
SONG – WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
One of my favorite newer Christmas songs of the last several years comes from the Christian band Casting Crowns. The song is titled “While you were sleeping.”
And the song considers this world-changing event. Christ coming into the world, and how it happened on – for many people – just any other ordinary night.
The song says:
O Bethlehem, what you have missed while you were sleeping
For God became a man
And stepped into your world today
O Bethlehem, you will go down in history
As a city with no room for its King
While you were sleeping
While you were sleeping
The world kept turning. On that first Christmas and over the coming weeks and months, people continued to live their lives.
For the average person living at the time, that seems to be the most likely response at the advent of Christ. Unawareness. Obliviousness.
But there were some who had heard about the birth of Jesus. You have wise men who sought this newborn baby out. You have King Herod who heard the news but who was not overjoyed at the prospect of another king living in his territory. And you have Herod’s priests and scribes, those who were most learned in the Old Testament, yet who would miss the significance of the moment.
The first Christmas, many didn’t realize what had happened. But since that first Christmas, the rest of history has been turned upside down.
It was easy to be blissfully unaware of Jesus as a baby. But what do you do with him as a man? What do you do with him as a teacher? What do you do with him as a prophet? What do you do with him as a savior? What do you do with him as Lod?
Some will continue to ignore him, some will continue to miss the significance of who he is, some will continue to actively oppose him.
But will you come to him and worship him?
It might have been easy to dismiss a baby, but that baby grew and became the savior of the world. That baby went to the cross. That tomb was empty on the third day.
What do you do with all of that?
Will you continue to overlook the significance of Jesus and who he is?
Or will you come to him and worship him as Lord?
People ignored and overlooked the significance on the first Christmas but what are you doing with Jesus this Christmas?
He invites you to come to him, to know him.
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Jesus, the Son of Abraham. Studying Matthew 1:1
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
-Matthew 1:1
In the last two posts, we’ve looked at the identity of Jesus in Matthew 1:1. We’ve seen Jesus as the Christ. We’ve seen Jesus as the Son of David, the promised Messiah of the Old Testament. In this post, we see Jesus called the Son of Abraham.
Abraham is the major figure of the Old Testament.
Abraham warrants mention given his theological significance in light of the Bible. Abraham is the Father of Israel, therefore all ethnic Israelites are related to him.
Abraham is the great patriarch of the Old Testament through whom the Lord had made his covenant promises of land, offspring and blessings.
ABRAHAM – PROMISE
In Genesis 22:18, the Lord had promised Abraham that through him, all the nations of the world would be blessed.
Jesus is the son of Abraham who brings the ultimate blessing to the nations. God’s blessing is to be found in Christ and advanced throughout the world by the spread of the gospel.
That idea will recur in this gospel, but most notably at the end of Matthew’s Gospel where the risen Lord Jesus gives the Great Commission to the disciples and tells them to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19).
ABRAHAM – PROMISED SON
One of the great promises that the Lord made to Abraham was for a son.
Abraham and his wife Sarah were old, Sarah was beyond child bearing age. But the Lord promises a Son.
Isaac is born in Genesis 21. In Genesis 22, the Lord asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his promised son.
Skeptics and atheists always have a field day with that passage. “How could God possibly ask Abraham to sacrifice his son?”
But the Lord intervenes and stops Abraham and provides a ram for him to sacrifice. The point was to ultimately point to the Lord who would provide the sacrifice.This introduces us to the idea of substitutionary atonement. The ram died in the place of Isaac. And it also gives us a picture of the gospel. Abraham did not have to sacrifice his promised son. But the Lord would not withhold his only begotten son, Jesus.
Isaac is the promised son of Abraham. But Jesus is the descendant of Abraham who would be the ultimate and greater sacrifice.
The fact that Abraham was willing to make that sacrifice is also meant to be a picture of faith.
But even before that happened, in Genesis 15, Abraham believed the Lord’s promise that his offspring would one day outnumber the stars.
The text tells us that Abraham believed and it was counted to him as righteousness.
And that too points us to the gospel.
That we are not saved by works. We are not saved by what we do. We are saved by faith. Abraham believed. Everything else he did in his life was an outflow of that faith.
I mentioned in the beginning that Abraham is the father of Israel. But more importantly, because of his faith, Abraham is the Spiritual Father of all who trust and believe.
Through Abraham, in the Old Testament, before the law was given to Moses, we see what ultimately mattered and brought salvation. Faith. Believing in the Lord.
And it once again points us to why it’s important to begin this gospel by establishing that Jesus is a son both of David but also of Abraham.
Because Jesus is the Messiah from the line of David who had been promised. And he’s the one from the line of David through whom God would fulfill his promise.
And Matthew begins his gospel by telling us where the family of Jesus came from.
What better way is there to start this gospel?
We read John, and more systematic. We hear talk of eternal life and being born again. We read Paul’s letters, again, he’s very theological and systematic. Justification, sanctification, adoption, union with Christ.
Matthew is pointing us to historical theology and the history of salvation.
Jesus doesn’t appear in a vacuum. He doesn’t come from nowhere.
He comes in fulfillment of all that God had promised.
We see the Lord working throughout time.
And to know where Jesus comes from and to know what God had promised, it points us to the glory and the wonder of God’s salvation that he had worked for centuries leading up to Christ.
Because we see the plans of God, the power of God in achieving his plans, the faithfulness of God in the fulfillment of his plans.
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Jesus the Son of David. Matthew 1:1
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
-Matthew 1:1
In my last post, I talked about how Jesus is a prophet and priest. In this post, I will talk about how Jesus is also a king.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is referred to as the Son of David eight times.
The idea is important because the coming Christ was said to be from the line of David, the king who’s dynasty ruled Israel’s southern kingdom from Jerusalem before the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.
In the Old Testament, we see prophecies of one who would come from David’s line.
MESSIANIC PROPHECIES
In 2 Samuel 7, it was promised that one of David’s descendants would establish an unending kingdom.
2 Samuel 7:12-14: I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. 14 I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.
We also see this thinking in Psalm 89:3-4:
3 You have said, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one; I have sworn to David my servant:
4 ‘I will establish your offspring forever, and build your throne for all generations.’
One more, and perhaps the most well known comes from Isaiah 9.
A popular Christmas time passage, it says:
Verse 6:
6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
So it’s describing a child who will be born and it’s giving descriptions of him, and the next verse says:
7 Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
And so it’s pointing to the Christ as the Son of David and Matthew 1 is saying that Jesus is the promised one from the Davidic line to establish an everlasting kingdom.
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Jesus is the prophesied Messiah who has come from the line of David. But he didn’t quite do things in the way people would have expected.
In Jesus’ time, there were various expectations for what the Son of David would be like. Some expected a great military leader or a great king who would liberate Israel from Roman tyranny.
Jesus is a great king. He’s the king of kings!
But the biggest problem with the Messianic expectations of the first century was that their ideas about Jesus were too small.
He’s the king of the universe, who sits on the throne, at the right hand of God and rules and reigns in heaven.
He was the the liberator who would liberate people from the tyranny of sin.
He did have a kingdom, but it was not just about a kingdom in Israel. Jesus came to preach the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven. His rule and reign in the world would extend beyond Israel to every corner of the earth, to people of every tribe, and tongue, and nation.
And the kingdom of heaven idea in Matthew is that Jesus came from heaven to preach the good news of the kingdom of heaven to a fallen world. We will one day be in his presence in the literal kingdom of heaven.
As people from days of old longed for the day of seeing the coming Messiah in the world, our hope and promise is for the final and ultimate realization and consummation of his kingdom.
They waited for a savior to come into the world. Our hope and promise today is for that same savior to come again. To set all things right. To bring forth his kingdom.
But while we wait, as the people of Christ in the fallen world, we have an opportunity to live today for the kingdom.
ON EARTH AS IT IS HEAVEN
To live as kingdom people.
Jesus preached “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17).
Jesus begins and ends the beatitudes by talking about the ethics of the kingdom of heaven. He taught the values of heaven in a sinful world.
In the Lord’s prayer, he teaches us to pray to God “your kingdom come, your will be done.”
Jesus tells us not to worry, but to instead seek first the kingdom of God.
Jesus will compare the Kingdom of Heaven to the pearl of great price, worth everything a man has. This kingdom is compared to a mustard seed that starts small but grows, like a net that’s cast into the sea and catches fish of every kind.
And as followers of Jesus, he calls us to live on earth as it is in heaven.
To love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. To love our neighbor as ourself. To make disciples of all nations, to be salt and to live as light in a dark world. Jesus calls us to treat others as we wish to be treated and to store up treasures in heaven.
Jesus is the king who ushered in this kingdom.
Descendant of the line of David. The Christ had to be. And that is why Matthew’s gospel will immediately go into a genealogy which will link Jesus to David and also to Abrhaam.
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