Sunday message

First, though, to my amigos in the Great Postcard Campaign, they are on their way!!!

Anyway, I got up this morning thinking it would be a great idea to lead into Christmas by looking at the prophecies about the coming Messiah.  Now, I'm really good at taking my concordance and beating raw facts from it.  Putting moving meaning to it is what separates me from effective preachers.  So I looked up my facts and then got dressed, hooked up my earphones to Turning Point with David Jeremiah, and off Scrappy and I went.

Along the way, Dr. Jeremiah read from a poem that got to me.  The basics are, the speaker is a sorrowing sinner, looking for a means to lift the burden from their soul.  This person fashions "a lash of remembered sin" to whip themselves with.  But it does them no good; and in desperation they turn again to Calvary.  Looking into the eyes of the dying Jesus, He says to them, "What you see as scarlet, I see as white as snow."  With that, the lash disappears and the burden is lifted.  Just for a moment, that spoke to me and my throat choked up.  And I was reminded that dry facts are great, but it's how God sees them that is important.  Dry facts hand me the lash; His mercy evaporates it.

Gotten that far, let me try the "dry facts " portion.  The first prophecy of the Messiah is in Genesis 3- the judgement God proclaims on the serpent.

 ¹⁵ And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.”   

The first thing we pull from this is that, at the moment of Eve's sin, the world became divided.  "Enmity between you and the woman" does not mean everybody hates snakes.  The serpent is Satan; the enmity is between humankind and Satan.

Second thing is "and between your seed and her Seed".  The "seed" of the serpent, Satan's "offspring", are not a race of serpents, nor are they demons.  The serpent's seed are the unrepentant of humankind.  However, the Seed of the woman (note the capitalization) is Christ.  The enmity is between sinful man and Christ.  Thus, Joshua, we explain your hatred of all things Christian.  You see my friends, I have an atheist acquaintance who feels that, as an atheist, it is not only his choice to disbelieve God, but his duty to fight against, tear down, and mock Him (or if you prefer, the "belief" of Him) at every opportunity.  I posit that someone who simply doesn't believe in a god should have no real drive (other than to be left alone by preachers) to attack the belief in others.  But that is not the case, and it is the enmity of God's curse so long ago that makes it so.

So where do believers fall into this?  At the "heel."  You see, a "serpent" cannot strike the Head; it is beyond his reach.  So he has to strike at the heel.  What is the "heel" of Christ?  The word for heel is the same one that we draw the name Jacob from.  Jacob, the birth name of Israel, the name taken on by God's People.  So in the battle of enmity between Christ and Satan, we are the "heel " which he strikes- because it is the only means to strike at Christ that he has.

And Christ Himself?  He strikes at the "head" of the serpent- Satan himself.   The verse never says that the head removes the heel from the field of danger.  His perspective is the destruction of the head- by the salvation He brings.

A quote Dr. Jeremiah uses is, "God whispers to us in good times, talks to us in trouble, shouts at us in pain.  Pain is God's megaphone for a deaf world."  So many times I hear, "A loving God wouldn't do this or that". Sometimes I say it myself.  But, the catch is, he would allow it.  Because the making us white as snow for the next life is more important to Him than anything in this one.  He won't reverse the enmity.  He won't remove the heel from the serpent's bite.  But He will take the lash from our hands.  Atheists like to think we're the end product on earth of evolution, the peak of what is and thinks.  Jesus wants us to be the heel.