Fulfillment Incarnation

[0:00] Listen, I am glad that we're here. We're ready to get into the Word of the Lord and take a look at just one verse this morning. And I know it's a danger preaching on one verse. The danger is taking it out of context because a verse was given to us in a whole book.

[0:17] But this morning, I think we've got it because this is a great verse. A lot of people just sort of read it and overlook it and run past it and don't think about what it says.

[0:28] And so the verse is Matthew chapter 1 verse 1. And this is the way it reads from the New American Standard. It says, the record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

[0:45] Other translations will read something like the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. However, your translation reads, that's what we're going to look at this morning.

[0:57] So let's let's pray together. Father, thank you for the privilege it is to stand here and to preach your word. And what do I recognize and confess that I cannot change a single heart or mind out there?

[1:11] Only you can change the heart and the mind. And it is our prayer and it is our sincere begging of you to please change hearts and minds.

[1:26] Melt hard hearts and stony hearts. Put in hearts of flesh. Open eyes that do not see. And give faith to those who have never walked in your way.

[1:39] And may you increase our delight and our joy and our happiness in Christ. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Our series that we've been in, Encountering God, we started with God as the creator.

[1:56] He is the creator of all things. We moved from the creation to the fall. We looked at how the fall happened and what that meant for us and how sin pervades the world.

[2:06] The arrogance of sin. And we looked at the covenant. We looked at the promises of God and how he's made promises again and again and again. And those promises were for a king and a kingdom.

[2:18] Now in Christ all of these things become fulfilled. And so where we are today is to see how Christ and him coming into this world fulfills these things. But before we start there, I want to ask you something.

[2:31] Have you ever hated it when people say something to you completely and entirely obvious? You get up in the morning.

[2:41] You make your way to the kitchen and someone looks at you and says, Did you just get up? I've been laying there for a couple of hours just, you know, waiting for the right moment, you know.

[3:00] Or you come home. You come home from, say, maybe you work or you come home from school. You walk in the door and someone says, You're home. Now I have to confess, that's me.

[3:16] I do that a lot. My kids call me Captain Obvious, but that's okay. Or what about this one? You're struggling with something. Maybe there's fear.

[3:28] Maybe there's a trial in your life. There's suffering. There's sorrow. And someone says to you, Well, just trust the Lord. I don't know about you, but I'm just going to confess that a lot of times when I'm going through suffering, trial, some sort of difficulty, and someone says to me, Trust the Lord.

[3:45] I just want to pop them right in the mouth. And the reason for that is that they've hit a nerve. You know, they've hit a nerve in there because there is a sense in which it feels kind of trite for someone to look at us and say, Well, you just need to trust the Lord.

[4:04] You just need to trust the Lord. And I know that there's a way in which it can be said in a very trite manner. But I'm just going to tell you, like, that's what we've got.

[4:17] Like, you know, you strip away all the fancy talk you can talk about all the things of the Bible, and you look at what your life is supposed to be like. Our life is to be a life of faith and trust in God.

[4:32] And so when someone tells me that and I get angry, it's because they have really hit on the problem.

[4:42] Because there are moments in suffering and difficulty that I'm just not trusting God like I should. And one of the reasons is because I've got a bunch of if-onlys.

[4:57] You know what I'm talking about? If-onlys? My friend and I, Craig, we used to sit on the steps of the church that was sitting in front of my house when I grew up, and we would talk about if-only.

[5:08] You know, we're getting older. If-only we get our driver's license, then we'll really be living. If-only we could graduate. You know, you get all these if-onlys. But they get more complex.

[5:20] They get more, I don't know, complex and deeper for us the older we get. We think to ourselves, if only I can make it through this dark time, then everything will be all right.

[5:35] Or if, you know, for kids, if my brother would treat me with a kindness, I would stop hitting him, you know. I could be happy and satisfied in life if maybe these health issues would just go away.

[5:49] I could be happy and satisfied in life if maybe the money issues would just go away. I'd be happy in life if maybe this toddler would just act the right way.

[5:59] And so often we fool ourselves into thinking that if we could have this external thing happen in our situation, then it would relieve the stress that comes to us from the suffering, the trial, and the difficulty.

[6:14] And what I'm saying to you this morning is that we just need to trust the Lord. And this passage, Matthew has written his gospel to Jewish audience to prove to them that Jesus is the Messiah and to encourage them to trust the Lord.

[6:36] And as a person who's not a Christian, that trust means coming to him for the first time in faith. But as a Christian, you're still supposed to trust the Lord. You're still supposed to live in faith.

[6:51] And we just need to know more about Jesus in order to increase our faith. And so that's what I want to do this morning. I want to give you five reasons from this one passage about why you should trust Jesus.

[7:07] And here we go. The first is because Jesus is the rest of the story. You'll notice that it says that the book of the genealogy or the record of the genealogy, if you were to translate that literally, it would be the book of Genesis.

[7:25] That's what it would say. The word Genesis here in the Greek is the same word that's used in the Old Testament Greek translation as the title for the first book of the Bible.

[7:36] It's also, this phrase is also used throughout Genesis 11 times to signify a new part of the story that's happening. So in other words, in Genesis chapter 5, 1, you get this idea of this genealogical table with the header that says the book of the genealogy.

[7:53] You get in Genesis chapter 2, verse 4, the generations or the genealogy of the heavens and the earth. Or in Genesis chapter 6, verse 9, the idea of the generations of Noah.

[8:04] In other words, Matthew is looking all the way back to the book of Genesis and he's pulling forward that same terminology and basically saying Jesus is the rest of the story.

[8:17] That you had the story of Adam and Eve and you had the story of the creation of the heavens and the earth. You had the story of Noah, the story of Abraham, the story of his children, and now you have the story of Jesus Christ.

[8:29] And what this means for us, and the reason that we should trust him is because this is a Savior who is not some sort of Johnny-come-lately. He's not some sort of new kid on the block, one one-hit wonder kind of rookie, tenderfoot, amateur, colt and fledgling who's come to save us.

[8:47] This is the one who is the completion of the story. This is the one who for several millennia, the plan and the purpose of the plot and the unfolding of history has been about the Christ, the Jesus, who was slain as a lamb before the foundation of the world.

[9:04] He is the rest of the story. He was there when God the Father created the heavens and the earth. He was there when Adam and Eve rebelled against God. He was there when Noah built the ark.

[9:16] He was there when Abraham was called. He was there when Moses was the instrument through which God brought the plagues upon Egypt. He is the long-awaited point of everything. He is the rest of the story.

[9:30] So why do we struggle to trust him?

[9:40] Why do we look at the flow of our life and the daily grind and think to ourselves, well, if only fill in the blank, then I would be okay instead of going, but Jesus has got this.

[10:05] He's the rest of the story. Second reason you need to believe in him, you need to trust him, you need to grow in your faith is because Jesus is human.

[10:19] He's human. The very next word is the word Jesus. And the word Jesus, this name Jesus, is the name of the human child. Joseph was told to name him Jesus in Matthew chapter 1 verse 21.

[10:32] Mary was told to name him Jesus, Luke 1 verse 31. And what this is saying is that Jesus is accentuating the humanity of Jesus.

[10:44] And what does it mean that he was human? It means he had to eat. It means he had to sleep. It also means that he has suffered.

[10:59] It means that he lost loved ones who died. It means that he had friends who denied him. And he had friends who betrayed him.

[11:12] It means that he lost his reputation with those around him. And ultimately, it meant that he was beaten and he died. The humanity of Jesus is something that ought to soothe us.

[11:26] It's something that ought to calm us. It's something that ought to comfort us. Knowing that this God that we serve, this omnipotent creator of all things, sovereign over all things, who spoke all things into existence, came into existence as a human and understands exactly what we're going through.

[11:48] He became like us. He knows what it is to live this life. He knows what it is to experience the pain, the loss, and the suffering.

[11:59] He knows what it is to experience the joys and the excitements. He knows what it is to be you. And he knows what it is to be you better than you know what it is to be you.

[12:15] And yet he never sinned. He never sinned. And because of that, he overcame death in the grave. And he came to offer us a hope that is unshakably relevant to this life.

[12:33] I mean, just think about this. We have this phrase and this saying that we say that misery loves company. And in part, it's true.

[12:46] We want to know that somebody understands and somebody gets us. Who better than the one who created us who understands us?

[12:58] Why? So why is it so hard to trust him? Why is it in the middle of a difficult situation does my mind immediately have the knee jerk that says, God, where are you?

[13:10] When I know in my head and from the scriptures, he came into this world to take on my suffering. Why can't I go there first? My faith needs to be increased.

[13:24] There's a third reason. The third reason is that Jesus is the Messiah. The New American Standard just says it outright, but the Greek that's there is really Christos.

[13:35] It's the Greek version, Christos. You've got Christos and you've got Messiah. Messiah is the Hebrew. So in case you didn't know, the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, 90% of it or so, a little portion written in Aramaic, but Hebrew in the Old Testament, Greek in the New Testament.

[13:52] And in the Old Testament, there was this word, this Messiah that was used often. And in the New Testament, they used the word Christos to refer to that word.

[14:05] What does the word Messiah mean? The word Messiah means anointed one. And it began to be used throughout the prophets to talk about this one who was to come. And they give him the name, say like the branch of Jesse or the stump of Jesse or the son of David.

[14:21] And if you trace that back, you can find that it begins, it begins at the point of Genesis 3.15. And Genesis 3.15 is the promise that the seed of the woman would come and destroy Satan.

[14:39] And so this anointed one, this anointed one is the one who's been promised from the beginning, whose destiny and plan and purpose is woven throughout. And he's the one who is this Jesus, this Messiah, this anointed one.

[14:59] He's the savior. He's the rescuer. You see, here's what it means to be anointed. Think about for a second, I'm going to just use this by analogy, the tabernacle. We've talked about the tabernacle, the tabernacle and the shape of it with the courtyard and with the altar and with the holy place and the holy of holies and it has all the furniture that's in it.

[15:19] In the book of Exodus, he spends time, Moses spends time telling the people what they need to donate. Then you hear about them donating it and then you hear about them building it.

[15:30] And once they have this thing constructed, one of the first things that they do is they anoint the tabernacle. Before they can do anything else with it, they anoint it. And one of the things that they anoint it with is oil.

[15:42] And you'll have to take my word for this because we don't have time to chase this out. But the anointing of oil in the Old Testament signified being anointed with the Holy Spirit. And so what you have in a picture in the Old Testament is that the place where the people meet God, the place where their sins were forgiven before it was put into service was anointed with oil.

[16:07] The analogy then comes to the New Testament and we see Jesus, before he begins his work, was baptized and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove and he was ready to do his work.

[16:19] In other words, he is the Messiah. He is the one who's promised. He's the one authorized to save. And because he's the Messiah, he's also the one who's empowered to save.

[16:32] When I say that he's empowered to save, I'm not trying to diminish his divinity, but you have to understand that he's the God-man. And so when he's born of a virgin, it says that he's born because the Holy Spirit came upon Mary.

[16:45] It was not the procreation of two humans who was sort of sanctified, but this was a miraculous work by the Holy Spirit. And if you trace out the life of Jesus, you will see that the Holy Spirit is the power behind all that he did.

[17:02] He did not use his own divinity to do things, but he used the Holy Spirit to help him. So he was both authorized and empowered to save.

[17:15] And so why is it would we as Christians, we understand and know that our final and full salvation is found in no one else, nowhere else.

[17:27] He is the one who is mighty to save and we've trusted him for our salvation. I mean, if I were to ask you, if you were to die today, would you spend eternity in heaven? And almost every one of you would say, yes, yes, yes.

[17:41] Because you've trusted Jesus Christ with the eternity of your soul. And the question is, then why is it so difficult to trust him when trials come?

[17:53] Most of these trials that come have to do with the body. Whether it's our finances, whether it's somebody who's trying to persecute us, or whether it's the getting old process, or whether it's the sickness process, all of these things come at us and it's so difficult to trust God sometimes in the middle of all these things.

[18:12] We think that we would be happy if only we could get rid of them. But we've trusted him for our salvation. Why not trust him in every other way?

[18:26] When you and I allow our hearts to fixate on something as though that something is what we need to be whole and happy, having security and significance, that thing is our God.

[18:51] So why can't it be Jesus who is the authorized, empowered Messiah? There's a fourth reason we need to trust him and that is because Jesus is the king.

[19:08] He is the king. In our text it reads the genealogy, or the record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ or Jesus the Messiah, the son of David.

[19:20] To call him the son of David is to say that he is the fulfillment of Jacob's words from Genesis chapter 49 where he says that the scepter would never depart from the house of Jacob.

[19:31] To be the son of David is to be the one promised to David in 2 Samuel that one of his descendants would sit on the throne of David forever and God would establish his kingdom forever.

[19:43] To be the son of David is to be the subject of the great psalm writer David himself who wrote all of these psalms, much of the subject matter, about his Lord whom he calls his son.

[19:56] To be the son of David is to be the king that is ruling and reigning right now. In Peter's sermon at Pentecost he connects two things in that sermon.

[20:08] He connects the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to ascending to the throne of David. And what we see and what we have here is this, is that Jesus Christ by his resurrection was enthroned upon the throne of David and rules and reigns now.

[20:26] There's lots of stuff that people will get into about the end times with all of that. I'm not trying to get into any of that. I just want you to see this. We are not sitting here in this world waiting for Jesus to rule.

[20:40] We are not sitting here waiting for Jesus to be king. He is ruling. He is reigning. He is the king right now.

[20:51] We're not waiting for him to destroy the enemy, Satan. He has already done so. Hebrews chapter 2, verse 14, 1 John chapter 3. But just like in every war, when the war is won, there are still soldiers that fight because they haven't heard the news yet.

[21:07] That's why when we look out upon this world and it feels out of control and not ruled over, it's because Satan and his dominion are taking their last gasp of breath before they finally are destroyed fully and finally.

[21:23] The Bible is full of this concept of the already and not yet. That he has destroyed Satan already and not yet. The last days have come already and not yet.

[21:37] Your salvation is complete already and not yet. You understand that, right? There are three words that describe our salvation.

[21:48] The first is the word justification. It's something that happened a long time ago for me when I was 18. When I trusted the Lord, he declared me just and covered me with the righteousness of Christ.

[22:03] Since then, he's been sanctifying me. That's the second word. That's what's happening here and now in the process of my life is sanctification. That's helping me. This is the way I like to illustrate it.

[22:15] This is me as a dead sinner with a hardened heart and when I was justified or I was saved, he covered me with the righteousness of Christ. And now in sanctification, I spend my life trying to conform to that image.

[22:30] And one day, one day, either when the Lord comes back or I die and I go on to be with the Lord, then what's happening is glorification.

[22:42] It's the final part of my salvation. I don't have that yet because I'm still alive. Even though you might think I'm dead, I'm still alive.

[22:54] So that, I'm just using it as an analogy that there's this already and this not yet. It's the same with the rule of Christ. He rules and reigns supreme.

[23:04] He is the king of all things. nothing, nothing happens apart from his sovereign will.

[23:16] So what keeps you fearful? What makes it so? It's so hard to trust in him. He's the king.

[23:29] I think that's where I struggle probably the most because when, when a difficulty comes into my life, I have a tendency to think to myself that I can fix this.

[23:48] I think at heart, I'm kind of like a fixer. You know, that every time there's a problem, every time there's a situation, I want to try to fix it the best I can. And there's some things you just can't do anything about.

[24:00] And it's hard. It's hard to just sit on your hands and do nothing sometimes because that situation is totally out of your control. But it's never out of the control of Jesus.

[24:14] And if he's sovereign over all of these things that come into my life, then he's good too. And I know he has my best at heart. Well, let me give you then the fifth and final reason.

[24:28] Fifth and final reason of why your faith ought to be in Christ and turn to Christ. And it's this last phrase. He's the son of Abraham and that is that Jesus is the gift. Again, Matthew is going all the way back to the book of Genesis once more and he's looking at the promise of the seed of the woman and he's seeing it being developed through the book of Genesis and it comes to Abraham and his offspring and so often through Genesis the promises and the covenants that God makes with Abraham are all about you and your descendants, you and your offspring, you and your seed.

[25:06] And one of the things that happens when we get to the New Testament is Paul the Apostle in Galatians chapter 3 shows that the seed who was sharing in the promise with Abraham was Jesus Christ himself.

[25:21] that he was going to be the son of Abraham who is to receive all of these promises. And you remember that these promises were kind of summarized in three words, land, seed, and blessing.

[25:36] Land, seed, and blessing. And part of what's going on here is that not only is Christ receiving the land, this earth belongs to him, but then all who are in him get this same promise from him.

[25:50] In other words, he comes and rules because he rose from the dead. He's the rightful ruler of this world and all who are in him are now rightful rulers of this world with him and we receive from him the fullness of that promise.

[26:06] So in other words, I'm just going to use this one example of the land. As we are in Christ because he is the one who received the land and he owns all things, then for us to be with him is for us to be home.

[26:26] You see, in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, it talks about being absent from the body and as Christians, we know that the moment we die, we're immediately in the presence of the Lord.

[26:37] But I want you to think about that passage because what that passage does not say is that to be absent from the body is to be in heaven. What it says is to be absent from the body is to be with the Lord.

[26:54] In other words, though we understand that there is a place, it's not the place where we're headed to. It's the person that we're headed towards.

[27:08] Jesus is our home. He is the land. He is the seed. He is the blessing. Do you understand what I'm saying? Let me say it maybe in a different way.

[27:20] Of all the blessings that we could get as a Christian, of all the blessings we could get in salvation, of all the things that he could say, this is yours, you can have forgiveness. You can have your heart of stone removed.

[27:31] You can have the law written on your heart. You can have heaven. You can have all of these things. The greatest gift that we get in all of these blessings is Jesus himself.

[27:42] He is the greatest gift in the gospel. We do not come to Christ to get other things.

[27:57] And there's a number of people who would come to Christ because we tell them, listen, if you come to Christ, He'll make you have a better marriage. If you come to Christ, He'll help your children behave. If you come to Christ, you'll have great finances.

[28:10] If you come to Christ, you won't have to live life alone. If you come to Christ, you'll have success in life. If you'll come to Christ, there'll be a little suffering but not very much at all. If you come to Christ, you'll have everything that you want.

[28:21] And they present Jesus as a way to get all of these things. But the gospel is not about getting stuff. The gospel is about Jesus. And we get Jesus.

[28:33] He is what we get. He is the greatest gift. So why do we struggle to trust Him?

[28:59] For some of you, you probably need to trust Him for the very first time in your life because you're not a Christian. And if you were to die today, you would probably not go to be where the Lord is.

[29:16] And the proof of that is in your own life. Proof of that is in your own life. You can ask yourself and test yourself by the Ten Commandments and ask yourself, have you ever broken any of them?

[29:29] Because one day, there's coming a judgment day where God is going to judge the world by His moral law. And that moral law is the Ten Commandments, summarized at least in the Ten Commandments. And if you stand there on that day and you've never had any sort of salvation experience with Jesus Christ, you're going to stand there and all of your broken commandments that you have broken are going to be marshaled out and there will be no payment and hope for you.

[30:00] This is the life. This is the time. This is the now. Today is the day of salvation. Not tomorrow. Not once this life is over. Because you see, the whole point, the whole point in Jesus' coming is that we have broken God's law and God, in love, sent His Son to pay the price for us breaking that law.

[30:25] And if we will repent of our sins and turn to Christ, make Him the boss of our lives, then all of our law breaking is paid for by His righteousness.

[30:41] But Christians, why are we struggling to trust Him? Two years ago, it was Christmas in our house and we decided to take a little bike ride for Christmas because everybody needs a new tradition at Christmas every so often.

[31:02] So we decided to take a bike ride. It was all, is it all seven of us? I think it was all seven of us. We decided to go to Goliad. You ever been to Goliad? Anybody ever been to Goliad?

[31:14] They have this really awesome bike trail and you can ride on this bike trail but there is a whole section of the bike trail from one of the parks that is like the world's largest deck hallway.

[31:30] I don't know. Like it's just, it's just about as wide as this aisle right here and it goes and goes and twists and turns and some downs and ups and this kind of a thing.

[31:40] And I believe, I believe Davy Crockett must have built that thing. I mean that is about the oldest, scariest looking thing I have ever seen in my life.

[31:51] You know how deck boards will do, you know, in the sun and just pop up like that and they'll start to splinter up and everything and it's got, it's got its, its post going all the way down the ground but you can't really see it and I'm not sure I trust where the posts are if the deck boards look this bad.

[32:08] I mean so bad that, I mean I'm a big guy, okay, like I know that. I'm okay with that and I'm riding down this thing and I'm thinking to myself I'm riding on the nails.

[32:20] Like I just, I know there's something solid under those nails somewhere, somehow so I just kept riding on the nails as I was going because like this thing is just not going to hold me up.

[32:31] Of course I was wrong, I'm still here today but you know I thought about that as I was thinking about why don't we trust Jesus? And it has to do with our perception of how worthy he is of our trust.

[32:45] And I think that most Christians we don't trust Christ in the difficult times that we go through because we don't know Christ as we should. I mean today, think about these things that I just preached to you.

[32:59] Come on, right? How many of you, how many of you, if I told you Jesus is the rest of the story, the fulfillment of the Old Testament, everybody in here should be going like, yeah, and?

[33:12] Or if I tell you Jesus is human, you should be going like, well yeah, that's kind of like the whole Christmas thing. What are you saying? And then if I tell you that he's the Messiah, like you know that, like when you say Jesus Christ, that's not his last name, right?

[33:25] That's a title. He's the Messiah. That's what that is, right? And then if I said to you, Jesus is the King, nothing new to you. You're going like, yeah sure, I know all of that.

[33:36] Yeah, yeah. And then I tell you that he is the gift in the gospel. Maybe, maybe that might have escaped you because you never thought to yourself this question that if you could have heaven and everything else but Jesus wouldn't be there, would you go?

[33:50] And if you say, no I wouldn't go, then you understand Jesus being the best gift in the gospel. So why, why go through this? because I'm convinced that we don't think about it deep enough and hard enough and we don't think to ourselves that saying that Jesus is human has anything to do at all with getting up at 2 a.m.

[34:16] to feed a baby, change a tire, pay bills, or sit there and hold a loved one's hand while they're sick because we've not thought deeply enough about who Jesus is and I think that's the reason we struggle to trust him.

[34:37] And so what I want to encourage you to do is to look at him carefully, look at him closely and I'll say it this way, what you believe about Jesus matters about not only your eternal destiny but also how you face life.

[34:59] And I challenge you, know, read, understand, and learn about Jesus. You're not going to learn about Jesus by mowing the grass. You're not going to learn about Jesus by paying your bills.

[35:14] You're going to learn about Jesus from the Bible and that's it. So look at him. Look at him closely and your faith will grow.

[35:28] Let's pray.