Hope Blog

▶ 1:06:05

With Advent beginning, Matt paused the Old Testament figures to teach on the coming of Christ — two Sundays on two truths that are both essential to Christology and to our salvation: that Christ is God, and that Christ is man. This week was the first.

Whose life was given?

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One of Matt’s favorite verses. So whose life was shed for us? He is incarnate, so it is man’s blood, “but he’s God — the very life of God given for man.”

▶ 1:07:26

To dovetail with the series, he revisited passages the church had already read, to show something he had not wanted to dwell on before: that “Yahweh God is maybe more than meets the eye,” and that the New Testament did not make up a multi-personal God. “We’re going to see where it already was hidden in plain sight.”

The angel who says “me”

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The angel talks about God almost as a third person — “you fear God” — and then says “from me.” Abraham names the place “The Lord will provide.” Then the angel calls a second time: “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord,” and promises offspring like the stars, “because you have obeyed my voice” (Genesis 22:15–18). Who is swearing, blessing, speaking? Whose voice did Abraham obey?

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Remember, Matt said, “angel” is not a kind of thing. “It’s a job description.” The word means messenger: it could fit John the Baptist, you, a donkey, a celestial being — or Christ.

Face to face

▶ 1:11:51

Back to the man who wrestled Jacob until daybreak. “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God.” And Jacob names the place Peniel, “for I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered” (Genesis 32:24–30).

▶ 1:12:57

“All I want us to see is the angel of God so far doesn’t just represent God merely, but is God. And I’m not saying that God is a mere angel. I’m saying this angel is Yahweh.” Matt suspected Paul taught Greeks this very lesson in preparing them for the Bible’s trinitarian monotheism.

▶ 1:13:40

At the end of his life, Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons: “The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day, the angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the boys” (Genesis 48:15–16). The verb is singular, and the lines are in parallel. The redeeming angel and the shepherd God are the same person.

In the bush, and “my name is in him”

▶ 1:14:50

At Horeb “the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire,” yet it is God who calls from the bush, “I am the God of your father,” and Moses hides his face, afraid to look at God (Exodus 3:2–6). Later Moses tells the elders that the Lord “has appeared to me.” Who was in the bush?

▶ 1:16:00

Some resolve it with an equal sign: the angel of the Lord equals Yahweh. Matt didn’t think that works, because of what comes next:

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What does it mean that God’s name is in him? Isaiah says, “Behold, the name of the Lord comes from afar … his lips are full of fury, and his tongue is like a devouring fire” (Isaiah 30:27). How does a name have lips? “The name of the Lord is the Lord.” And then: “If you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies.” Whose voice? Who goes before the people — the angel, the one who sent him, God’s presence, God? “Yes. That’s the answer. Yes.”

▶ 1:17:44

When Moses pleads, “Show me now your ways, that I may know you,” the answer is, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest” (Exodus 33:13–14). Others say the angel is merely an emissary representing God. That fails too: “The angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said, ‘I brought you up from Egypt’” (Judges 2:1). Who brought them out of Egypt? God did.

▶ 1:19:33

Jews who knew their Scriptures could not object that God can’t be multi-personal. “It was all right here all along.”

The commander of the army of the Lord

▶ 1:20:16

“And he said, No. I love that.” We sometimes root for Israel like a sports team with irrational loyalty; “we should really be rooting for God.” This is a man — corporeal, visible, touchable, holding a drawn sword — who receives worship and commands God’s armies. And the parallel with Moses is plain: both are commissioned face to face and told to take off their sandals, “because there was a holy one there.”

Both on the stage at once

▶ 1:21:32

The angel of the Lord sits under the terebinth at Ophrah and greets Gideon, “The Lord is with you, O mighty man of valor.” Gideon asks where all the old miracles went, “and the Lord turned to him” — physical language — “Go in this might of yours … do not I send you?”

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Gideon brings an offering; the angel touches it with his staff, fire springs from the rock, and the angel vanishes.

▶ 1:23:09

If this were a play, Gideon is still on stage and the angel is not — “but Yahweh is still there.” It is as if, all along, there is a God who is invisible, and an angel, a man, who is the true God, appearing to make God known.

No one has ever seen God

▶ 1:23:41

“It’s the same stuff. The apostles weren’t making things up.” There is a God no one has seen, and the true God at his side who makes him known — and when Jesus says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), we are forced to a conclusion.

▶ 1:25:08

“It wasn’t some church council that got together with cigars in the back rooms — all right, let’s do this Trinity thing. No. We’re forced to conclude that there’s one God, but he’s multi-personal. We have no other option. The texts force us into that corner.” We wouldn’t otherwise go there, because it is beyond our comprehension. “In other words, it makes sense that it doesn’t make sense.”

▶ 1:25:34

That is how you get “the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord” (Genesis 19:24). Likewise the word of the Lord comes “in a vision” (Genesis 15:1); with Samuel, the Lord “came and stood” and revealed himself “by the word of the Lord” (1 Samuel 3:10–21); and to Jeremiah, the Lord “put out his hand and touched my mouth” (Jeremiah 1:9). Ideas don’t stand. John’s Word made flesh draws on this theme (John 1:14).

The cloud rider

▶ 1:27:24

Baal was hailed in the north as the charioteer of the clouds — a divine thing no human could do. Psalm 104:3 takes the title back: “he makes the clouds his chariot.” Not Baal. “Yahweh is the cloud rider.”

▶ 1:28:32

The Ancient of Days is seated — that is God. And one like a son of man, someone you could see and touch, comes riding the clouds. He is distinct from the Ancient of Days, “but then again he has to be the same, because he’s God — because only God could do the thing he’s doing.”

▶ 1:29:40

So when the high priest adjures Jesus to say whether he is the Christ, Jesus answers, “From now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven,” and the high priest tears his robes: “He has uttered blasphemy” (Matthew 26:63–65). Why was it so obvious? “That’s only a God thing.”

“The Lord is one”

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What about the Shema — “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4)?

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The same word, echad, appears when husband and wife “shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). “If you’re married, are you multi-personal? Surely you’re not the same person — I think you’ve realized that by now.” And at Babel God says, “they are one people” (Genesis 11:6) — however many there were. The Lord being one means one being, not only one person. “We worship one God, but he’s multi-personal.”

Who is this child?

▶ 1:32:06

Matt said he could do the same with the Holy Spirit. But this is what we celebrate now: a Word, a man who is truly God, making known the God no one has seen. So when we celebrate the birth of our Lord, who is that?

▶ 1:32:39

The offense for many was not that God could be touched; the angel of the Lord could be. Perhaps it was: why a baby, instead of a fully formed adult with lightning? And why that guy? “We know his parents. We know that he’s a carpenter.”

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That is why we are so secure in his offering: “the very source of life giving his own life to us.” Matt prayed that God would help the church behold him as he really is, receive him, and long for his return: “You’re not sending someone else. You’re sending yourself.”

▶ 1:11:40

Matt asked for prayer for clarity: the Lord had put “lots of kind of odd things on my plate to speak from the texts” this week. It was the last of the Old Testament figures before Advent — though, he hinted, there would be a sneak preview of the coming King.

Who is feeding this nation?

▶ 1:12:45

Delivered from Egypt, Israel complains of hunger in the wilderness, then of thirst. It’s easy to call them “complaining pants,” Matt said, but a forgotten lunch can ruin our workday. God feeds them miraculously and brings water from the rock (Exodus 16:1–4; Exodus 17:1–6). These stories show “it actually takes a lot to take care of a nation,” and when the people complain to Moses, Moses asks why. He isn’t taking care of them. God is.

A treasured possession, a kingdom of priests

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Two things God asks — obey my voice, keep my covenant — and what they will be in his hands: a treasured possession, priests to the nations. God wants a name worldwide, and the fear of God is part of that.

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The people answer, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do,” and Moses carries their words back to God. Then: “Behold, I am coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you, and may also believe you forever” (Exodus 19:7–9). Hold onto that, Matt said: God wants the people to see him in Moses’ relationship with him, and to believe what Moses says.

Putting the fear back in the fear of the Lord

▶ 1:17:44

Matt has always longed to have been there — “but on the other hand I feel like if I was there, I would be doing the same thing they’re doing: trembling.”

▶ 1:19:40

We casually ask God to show up. But without supernatural power to stand, “it might make you throw up … it would melt your face right off. I know that’s pleasant. Good morning.”

▶ 1:20:14

And who is blowing that trumpet? It is the Bible’s first trumpet, mentioned so casually. The last trumpet in the Old Testament is the Lord’s own, in Zechariah 9:14, and John later hears “a loud voice like a trumpet” (Revelation 1:10; Revelation 4:1) — an allusion, Matt thought, to this mountain.

▶ 1:21:18

Then God speaks the ten words: no other gods; no carved image; not taking his name in vain; the Sabbath; honoring father and mother; no murder, adultery, stealing, false witness or coveting (Exodus 20:1–17).

▶ 1:22:27

“God’s good at nailing stuff that he wants to happen.” Without the Spirit’s power, Matt admitted, he too would have said, “make it stop.”

▶ 1:23:40

Today we often treat the fear of the Lord as “a wink and a nod in the general direction of the Lord … maybe a wink and a gun,” or a solemn friendship. But in the biblical sense, it means what it sounds like: afraid, because his power is so intense, and because Israel had seen him judge sin with death. That is the fear that is “the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), the fear that is “hatred of evil” (Proverbs 8:13).

▶ 1:25:34

To see the terror God inspires and then grasp that he wants to call you friend magnifies both. If we church up the Bible and keep only the sweet parts, “we’ll become spiritually diabetic.”

The blood of the covenant

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Matt pointed to Meredith Kline’s work: the proceedings at Sinai match the form of Hittite treaties between overlords and vassal states. Israel would have understood it as a legal ratification, not a string of random acts; God adapted the legal forms of the day as an object lesson that he is their overlord.

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Then the sneak preview of the King. In the middle of a confusing book, Zechariah speaks of a coming king, the Lord’s trumpet, and this:

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And Jesus at the table: “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28).

▶ 1:31:11

They should have died; this is God’s kindness. Then God calls Moses higher still, apart even from the elders and Aaron, to receive the tablets: the covenant mediator speaking God’s terms.

▶ 1:32:31

“They beheld God and they ate and drank” — so much like the disciples. “Seeing Christ is seeing God” (John 14:9). In the upper room there is covenant blood, terms and stipulations, and leaders of his choosing, eating and drinking in his presence.

“Why were you not afraid?”

▶ 1:33:02

Later Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses over his Cushite wife, and ask, “Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” (Numbers 12:1–2). Technically, Matt said, they had a point. Aaron was the front man: his staff, his voice before Pharaoh and the people. “You would have thought, oh, surely God has spoken through Aaron.” But something about this challenge irritated God, “because it actually was directed against him, not Moses.”

▶ 1:34:55

“Come out, you three, to the tent of meeting.” The Lord comes down in the cloud, calls Aaron and Miriam forward, “maybe there’s like a long parental pause,” and then:

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“There’s that fear again.” Miriam is struck with leprosy — not being Egyptian is no immunity — and Aaron begs Moses to heal her. She is shut outside the camp seven days, and the whole camp waits (Numbers 12:10–15).

Why Moses’ authority matters to us

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Israel needed enormous care, and God gave it, even keeping their sandals from wearing out. But he also wanted them to know him. “Who knows what God is like? God does. So who is able to authoritatively say what God is like? God.” He chose Moses and spoke to him plainly, which is why it was arrogant and wrong to speak against him.

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That cuts against our culture’s sense that God speaks to all of us equally. An Israelite could have said, “I heard his voice on the mountain too.” And it is true God wanted a nation of priests: “I will be their God” (Genesis 17:8), “I will take you to be my people” (Exodus 6:7), “I will dwell among the people of Israel” (Exodus 29:45). “But God wanted it his way,” and he reprimanded even Aaron — “big dog Aaron,” the front man of the whole freedom movement.

▶ 1:39:52

The parallel to Jesus is plain. He ratifies his covenant in his blood at a feast, for whoever eats and drinks; he gives his disciples stipulations; and while he spoke to the crowds in riddles, to the men he chose he spoke plainly, as God did to Moses.

Two points of clarity

▶ 1:41:09

First: if most of us err, Matt said, we err toward painting God “like a Precious Moments doll,” struggling to fear him because it seems to undercut his niceness. But he really did show up and people really did freak out, and he himself was the destroying angel. “I want to embrace the softness of calling him Father,” and of Jesus calling us friends (John 15:15). “But who is being nice to us? The one who, if he showed up all the way, would just blow you to smithereens.” Have only one side, “and you’d end up with neither … you’d have an idol.”

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Second: in our culture’s battles — over Christ’s role, repentance, and especially sexual ethics — we do exactly what Miriam and Aaron did. Doesn’t God speak to me too? Do I really need to submit to Paul or Peter or John? “We often feel like because Paul’s not Jesus, we can be like, ah, that’s just Peter. But we should be afraid to do that. And I mean that really, in a literal sense.”

▶ 1:43:36

Matt spoke personally. He felt called to ministry in high school, after moments when God’s presence fell on him like a heavy blanket. He never imagined how often people would ask him about sexual ethics, a topic that doesn’t especially interest him.

▶ 1:45:43

Hope holds a conservative sexual ethic, he said — not condoning premarital sex or blessing cohabitation without public vows, condemning adultery, and not performing gay weddings. Why does he hold it, even as a millennial for whom it “pricks against me”? “Because I fear to do otherwise. And when I say fear, I mean in the ordinary sense of the word.”

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But it isn’t really about that topic. In a hundred years there will be some other awkward sermon. Sexual ethics is a minor theme in the Bible; “what’s cover to cover heavy is how you relate to God’s authority, even especially when it bothers you.”

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And how he does it is many-sided: defender, strong tower, refuge, warrior who sets his people free, forgiver, friend. In Christ we inherit every promise. He is also the mighty God who will judge the living and the dead, and it will be fearsome even to see him from behind, as Moses did (Exodus 33:22–23).

On his terms

▶ 1:48:46

So, to recap: we struggle to fear God appropriately, and we should embrace that fear, letting it guide how we handle any controversial passage. “There’s what I want — this is what would make my life easier — and then there’s: I tremble before the Lord, because I want to serve him as he is.”

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That includes the New Testament. Paul, Peter and John will all “smack you in the face a little bit” at some point, and we can say “I don’t follow Paul, I follow Christ” — which Paul himself mocked in Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:12). We submit to God’s word not in competition with submitting to God, “but because we want to submit to God himself … and apparently, if you read the Bible, he wants to relate to you on his terms.”

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“There’s not another option out there. So we’ll just follow Peter’s advice: where else are we gonna go? Who else has words of life?” (John 6:68). He closed with a blessing, thanking God for forgiveness “in the blood of your covenant,” for “friendship, softness and terror,” and asking that the church embrace him as he really is.

▶ 0:54:07

The series on Old Testament figures reached Moses, and for the first time a figure got two weeks — “there’s so much Moses in the Old Testament.” Part one was Moses and the delivering God.

A family becomes a nation

▶ 0:54:45

Four ways of saying it, “brought to you with emphasis,” and the echoes of creation and of God’s word to Noah are unmistakable (Genesis 1:28; Genesis 9:1). Exodus is not some random new thing. The chieftain clans of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob have become a nation — which frightens Egypt into ordering the midwives to kill Israel’s baby boys.

▶ 0:56:41

Moses is placed in a little ark sealed with bitumen and pitch — another echo of Noah. Born into slavery, helpless in a basket, he is “a microcosm for Israel as a whole.” Pharaoh’s daughter finds him, his sister arranges for his own mother to nurse him, and he is raised in Pharaoh’s house. Matt doubted Moses was taught much of the God of Abraham there; the house raising him was the one trying to wipe out Abraham’s clan.

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He knows at least his ethnic tie to Israel. He kills an Egyptian who is beating an Israelite, his secret gets out, and he flees to Midian, marries Zipporah and tends his father-in-law’s sheep, “probably wondering if he’ll ever go back.” Josephus records that he had once been a general in Egypt’s army. Now almost nothing of that life continues.

“Who am I?” — “I will be with you”

▶ 0:59:36

Then the angel of the Lord appears in a flame of fire in a bush that is not consumed. Moses turns aside, and God calls, “Moses, Moses,” and says, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Moses hides his face. God has seen the affliction of his people and heard their cry: “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh” (Exodus 3:1–10).

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“Objection number one, your honor” — a soft one, and an honest one, though he is already talking to God in a bush. One fair reading of God’s answer: you’re not really much, but I will be with you. “We don’t need to address who you are. There’s a lot of application for that, isn’t there?” And the sign is that he will do it — “I wonder if that’s God saying, I don’t take your objection all that seriously.”

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A God who knows Pharaoh

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“I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand” (Exodus 3:19–20). Before arguing over what it means for God to harden Pharaoh’s heart, Matt said, first see that God already knows Pharaoh’s heart.

▶ 1:03:57

Samson saw a Philistine woman at Timnah and demanded her, and his parents “did not know that it was from the Lord” (Judges 14:1–4). When Ahab was to die, a spirit offered to be a lying spirit in his prophets’ mouths, and God said that would work (1 Kings 22:19–23). Is God flipping switches in people’s brains — or does he simply know them? “It’s like, yeah, that’s going to work. I know him pretty well.”

▶ 1:05:00

So when God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, he uses Pharaoh’s own obstinacy, perhaps drawing it out so the whole world sees the battle. Had Pharaoh repented right away, it would have been “like an argument in the hallway in school.” Instead God makes it louder, “so that everyone can hear it,” and the world will know there is a God most high.

Objections, and a reluctant prophet

▶ 1:06:07

Moses says they won’t believe him, and God gives him three signs he can do at will. He says he is slow of speech, and God sends Aaron to speak for him. Then, with no objection left: please send someone else (Exodus 4:10–13). And the next time we see him he is back home in Midian, asking his father-in-law’s permission — “maybe hoping his father-in-law says no.” God has to speak again: go, everyone who sought your life is dead.

▶ 1:08:21

When Moses and Aaron finally gather the elders and do the signs, the people believe, just as God said, “and they bowed their heads and worshiped.”

“Who is the Lord?”

▶ 1:08:58

Notice the “who” theme. Moses asked, Who am I? God answered, I am with you. Moses asked, Who are you? God said, This is who I am. Now Pharaoh asks, Who is the Lord? “I do not know the Lord — that’s foreshadowing. He will.” Pharaoh takes away the straw and keeps the brick quota, and the people are too discouraged to believe Moses.

▶ 1:10:27

Aaron’s staff becomes a serpent, and so do the magicians’. These were not stage performers; they presided over high religious ceremonies and invoked the power of their gods. “But Aaron’s staff eats their staffs. See, Moses? No words required.”

▶ 1:11:03

“God can play both sides of a chess game” — the will of God and the will of man working together, even in a hardening.

An attack on the gods of Egypt

▶ 1:12:12

Pharaoh was believed to be Horus incarnate, ruling “with a mighty hand and a strong arm” — Egyptian royal language, which Israel turns on its head when it speaks of God’s outstretched arm. Pharaoh’s spiritual job was to maintain ma’at, order against chaos. The Nile itself was revered as a god bringing life. “God is about to attack the gods of Egypt.”

▶ 1:13:34

The first plague turns the Nile to blood — a nation dependent on its river, digging for water, and a Pharaoh visibly failing at his job. And the magicians copy it. “If you had magicians with powers, what would you ask them to do? Turn that back to water. What do they do? They just make it worse.” Even their best efforts could not stand against God’s hand.

▶ 1:14:44

Frogs, and the magicians obligingly make more. Egypt had a goddess of fertility in childbirth; “she apparently cannot” control this. When Pharaoh begs for prayer, Moses lets him choose when — tomorrow — “so that you may know that there is no one like the Lord our God” (Exodus 8:9–10). That was a main purpose of the whole showdown: to make a name for God on the world stage, “and what better place than Egypt.” Then the first false promise to release them.

▶ 1:16:27

Gnats or lice: Herodotus wrote that Egyptian priests shaved their whole bodies every other day to stay clean for their gods. Now they are covered, disqualified from their own temples. Flies, but none in Goshen, “that you may know that I am the Lord in the midst of the earth” (Exodus 8:21–22). Then sickness on the livestock, except Israel’s.

▶ 1:17:42

Matt addressed the natural-disaster theory, that a scummy red Nile set off a chain reaction. It doesn’t explain why Goshen was spared; the text never links the plagues; and Egyptians who watched the Nile constantly would not have been impressed by something ordinary. “It’d be like coming to Texas and saying, my God says, to show this to you, it’s gonna be super hot. We’d respond: it’s always like this.” The showdown depends on the events being abnormal — and the theory leaves out the last plagues.

▶ 1:19:20

Boils, and the magicians cannot even stand before Moses. Then: “this time I will send all my plagues on you yourself … so that you may know that there is none like me in all the earth” (Exodus 9:13–14). Pharaoh says, “This time I have sinned; the Lord is in the right” (Exodus 9:27) — genuine-sounding, “except we’ve only done seven plagues.”

▶ 1:20:20

Locusts, which God wanted told from fathers to sons for generations (Exodus 10:2); Pharaoh’s own servants now want Israel gone. Then three days of darkness so thick people could not see one another — except in Goshen. “The god of the sun, Ra, can’t even help you.” Pharaoh will let them go but not their animals; Moses answers that “we won’t know what to offer God until we get there.” “Never see my face again,” says Pharaoh. “You have spoken,” says Moses.

When I see the blood

▶ 1:21:59

Then the preparation for the last plague: a one-year-old lamb or goat without blemish, its blood on the doorposts and lintel, eaten in haste.

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▶ 1:23:23

Matt grew up assuming an angel did this; the text says God himself. And just as God did not fixate on whether Moses was enough, but said “I am with you,” here “he doesn’t say, I will look within your households and determine over whom I pass. Instead he says, I will look to see if there is blood.”

Still afraid at the sea

▶ 1:24:02

Israel is released, and God goes with them in a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night (Exodus 13:21–22). Pharaoh changes his mind one last time and chases them with chariots, and Israel panics.

▶ 1:24:43

Matt found that assuring: he has seen miracles in his own day and still faltered. These people had just watched unbelievable spiritual warfare, and were still afraid.

▶ 1:25:16

The waters part, dry ground appears — another echo of creation — and Egypt’s army is destroyed: God’s complete victory over Egypt, its king and its gods.

The deliverer and the delivering God

▶ 1:25:57

Moses mirrors Israel: born into slavery, delivered through water, raised in Egypt, fled into the wilderness, met by God in fire, called to serve him — and a younger brother who leads, “very Israelite of him.” This redeemer identifies with the people he redeems “in a really intimate way.”

▶ 1:27:16

And the parallels with Jesus are many: a confusing humble nobility; delivered as a baby from a ruler killing boys; called out of Egypt, with word that those seeking his life were dead (Matthew 2:13–20); command over water; miraculous bread; forty days of fasting; delivering and teaching their people; faces shining with glory.

▶ 1:27:51

But where Moses is a deliverer who is also weak and helpless, in Jesus God takes on the weak frame of man while leading with his own strength. “Jesus’ role integrates these — the weakness of man but also the strength of Yahweh. So we see Jesus being the leader like Moses, but also the delivering God as well.”

▶ 1:28:23

He is also the Passover Lamb. Like Israel hidden behind the blood, “we are hidden by his blood.” The wages of sin is death, God himself is coming, “there is shelter, but only in him.” Matt closed: “Thank you that even in the face of our human weakness, your answer is, I am with you.”

▶ 1:06:44

The series on major figures of the Old Testament gave Steve Joseph — the longest story, twenty-three chapters. He promised not to cover them all. But to make sense of the part he would tell, he said, we have to go back to the beginning and run through the whole of Genesis.

Reading the long story

▶ 1:07:29

We usually read Bible stories for lessons and principles, and that is often good. “But in fact most biblical authors wrote and told these stories as part of a larger, longer story, and the importance of the single story is in how it plays in the long one.”

▶ 1:08:06

Take David and Goliath. In Sunday school Steve learned that David obeyed his daddy by bringing lunch to his brothers. The grown-up version asks, got any giants in your life? But David himself told Goliath he came “in the name of the Lord of hosts … that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel” (1 Samuel 17:45–46). “So David’s confused. He doesn’t know what we know now, that God wants to help you over your problems. He had this confused thought that it was all about God making his name known throughout all the earth.”

▶ 1:10:24

So watch for repeated words and ideas, and for God promising and fulfilling — because God, not people acting well or badly, is the dominant figure. “One of God’s favorite things to do is to partially fulfill a promise or a prayer, and then it’s going to be answered later and even greater.” That is why hope is something God has framed us for, and why Steve loves that this church is called Hope Chapel.

▶ 1:11:37

Joseph is usually taught as an example: he resisted seduction, worked hard, forgave his brothers. “But Joseph, it turns out, is the crescendo to the entire story of Genesis, and prefigures the end of the whole story throughout all generations.” And that matters to you: “You are part of a much larger and longer story. Your story started thousands of years ago.”

“In you all the families of the earth will be blessed”

▶ 1:13:25

Evil grew after the fall until God saw that “every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” and was grieved he had made mankind (Genesis 6:5–6). After the flood, Babel actually turns out well, as God spreads humanity out into languages and families to fill the earth. Then we meet Abram:

▶ 1:14:36

▶ 1:15:41

What is blessing? On day five God saw that his creatures were good, and then for the first time he blessed them: be fruitful, multiply, fill (Genesis 1:21–22). “What was good, God made gooder.” Teaching that in Hawaii once, Steve learned the local word for it: mo’ betta. Blessing is “the mo’ betta factor.”

▶ 1:17:25

The blessing promised through Abraham brings a measure of fullness of life: a growing relationship with God, increasing peace among families and peoples, and from those relationships a flourishing of economy, education, health, ecology and even artistic beauty. Yet Abram had no children and no property, “just a difficult nephew he’s traveling around with.”

▶ 1:18:32

God repeats the promise as Abraham intercedes for Sodom, now adding children and a household he must teach in righteousness (Genesis 18:18–19). After Isaac is offered, God promises descendants like the stars, and again, “in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 22:17–18). He says it once more to Jacob in his dream (Genesis 28:14). And so we come to Joseph, Abraham’s great-grandson — one of God’s partial fulfillments, “a nice fullness, but it’s going to get fuller later. And I’m not saying that just because I went to Fuller Seminary.”

A foolish teenager, sold

▶ 1:23:17

At seventeen Joseph brings a bad report on his brothers to their father. Jacob loves Joseph more than all his sons and makes it obvious with the coat — “not good parental things going on” — and his ten older brothers hate him and cannot speak peaceably to him (Genesis 37:2–4). Then he tells them his dreams of sheaves and stars bowing down: “remarkably unwise.”

▶ 1:25:16

They plan to kill him, settle for a pit, and sell him to traders headed for Egypt — “human trafficking and the whole thing.” He is sold to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh’s guard.

“The Lord was with Joseph”

▶ 1:26:31

▶ 1:27:09

This is not the abstract truth that God is everywhere. “There’s a certain kind of collaborative nearness when it says the Lord was with him” — and it was observable; his master saw it. The house prospered, its relationships and dealings and its fields. Three things recur: God with him, prosperity, and favor, all described as blessing. Joseph worked hard, but “something observable and unusual was going on — something we would call supernatural.”

▶ 1:28:56

Then Potiphar’s wife falsely accuses him of attempted rape, and he is jailed without trial — a slave, as powerless as a person can be. “But the Lord was with Joseph,” showing him steadfast love and favor, and whatever he did the Lord made it prosper (Genesis 39:21–23). Prosperity in jail.

“It is not in me”

▶ 1:31:24

Joseph interprets the dreams of Pharaoh’s butler and baker, asking only that the butler remember him. The butler promptly forgets, for two years — until Pharaoh dreams of seven fat cows eaten by seven lean ones. Joseph is shaved, cleaned up and brought from the dungeon.

▶ 1:33:49

“I love this answer”: “It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer” (Genesis 41:16). He names God four more times in the conversation. Seven years of abundance, then seven of famine — and without pausing, Joseph tells Pharaoh what to do: find a discerning and wise man, store the harvest of the good years as a reserve “so that the land will not perish during the famine.”

▶ 1:35:34

Pharaoh sees God at work: “Can we find a man like this, in whom is the Spirit of God?” — a rhetorical question — and sets Joseph over all the land of Egypt (Genesis 41:38–41).

Not generic altruism

▶ 1:36:50

In all five times the promise is repeated, Steve noted, it never says, “I’ll bless you, so share with others.” “It’s not generic altruism, doing something for others — that’s nice. No. What this promise is all about is not just nice; it’s outrageously impossible: that one family is going to become God’s gift to all the peoples of the earth.” You only see it fulfilled by stepping back and looking at a global scale.

▶ 1:37:30

And becoming God’s blessing often engages what we call spiritual gifts — in Joseph, prophecy and interpretation, and the discernment and wisdom Pharaoh named. God was at work in him by his Spirit, observably.

▶ 1:39:34

The famine comes “in all the lands, but in all the land of Egypt there was bread.” It spread “over all the face of the earth,” and “all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain” (Genesis 41:54–57). God was working on a global magnitude through Abraham’s descendant, for people from many lands and languages.

“God sent me”

▶ 1:41:59

The famine reaches Canaan. Joseph’s brothers come to buy food and do not recognize him; he speaks through an interpreter but understands every word. He tests them, and when he threatens to keep Benjamin, Judah offers himself in his brother’s place for their father’s sake (Genesis 44:33–34).

▶ 1:43:59

“I can relate to Joseph. I’m a weeper.” Joseph clears the room and weeps so loudly that Pharaoh’s household hears, and his brothers, who tried to kill the most powerful man on the planet, cannot answer him.

▶ 1:45:24

▶ 1:46:07

We pray over people we call missionaries and send them out with hands laid on them. Steve reckoned more people than could fit in the room have gone from Hope to one Middle Eastern country alone. “But they didn’t send off Joseph with a nice new coat.” This is not how we usually think of God sending. Yet Joseph says it three times: God sent me, “to keep you alive by a great deliverance” — a prefiguring of a great exodus to come. “It was not you who sent me here, but God.”

You meant evil; God meant good

▶ 1:48:48

After Jacob dies, the brothers grow nervous and report a convenient last request from their father: forgive your brothers. Joseph weeps, and they fall down before him. “Do not be afraid, for am I in God’s place?”

▶ 1:49:32

▶ 1:50:13

Steve called it one of the culminating verses of the whole book. Genesis began with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and here are the same Hebrew words for evil and good. The brothers purposed, plotted, schemed evil; and the same verb is used of God: he purposed it, repurposed it, for good. “You sold me, but God sent me.”

Your story too

▶ 1:52:35

What does this have to do with ordinary people thinking about lunch? Are you Abraham’s descendant? Most of us cannot trace our line to Abram. But:

▶ 1:53:38

▶ 1:54:16

“Neither Jew nor Greek” does not cross out anyone’s culture. We honor ancestry and celebrate diverse backgrounds; we are not trying to invent a Christian culture or impose sameness. “We don’t try to pull off some kind of uniformity. Instead we enjoy unity. There’s a huge difference.”

▶ 1:55:31

And don’t skip verse 29. If you belong to Christ, you are Abraham’s offspring, “the heirs that Abraham saw in the sky. He saw you winking in the night sky like a little star.” Abraham and Sarah died without receiving the promise but welcomed it from afar (Hebrews 11:13). “You have been long awaited.” You can take it personally that God wants to bless you and bring from you a part of a global blessing.

▶ 1:57:37

Not by being nice people: we are as wretched and wrong-headed as any. “The story of Joseph declares that God will co-work with ordinary, broken and foolish people.” Genesis is full of lying, scheming, favoritism and murderous jealousy. That encourages Steve: God knew exactly what kind of people he was making his promise to. Joined with Jesus — the seed of Abraham, the risen one — his people are becoming his blessing among all peoples. “This story is your story.”

Praying for the persecuted church

▶ 2:00:30

It was the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. Steve noted estimates of 260 to 300 million Christians in afflicted and persecuted situations — North Korea at the top of the list, Afghanistan, India and many more. There has never been more persecution, he said, and never more people following Christ: “We’re living in quite a day of fulfillment of this ancient promise.”

▶ 2:02:48

So he had the church stand and pray Joseph’s words over them: that what gospel-hostile forces plot for evil, God would turn for good; that he would give strength and wisdom to believers, some in prison, as he once blessed a man in prison; and that they would become the very blessing upon those who persecute them. He asked each person to think of one country, and one woman or young man there, and pray.