God Came To Set Life Free
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Dr. Jeff Myers:
Now this is interesting, the word offspring or the word seed there, the Hebrew word, is actually it’s a collective noun. A collective noun is a word like rice. Rice can refer to a single grain of rice or a bag of rice. It’s a collective noun. This word is also a collective noun, it refers to the one who represents the group but also to all of the offspring as a group. So God’s plan of redemption is not that you can save yourself for all of eternity, you simply can’t. You can’t even save yourself from the parasite. But in God’s plan of redemption when you’re redeemed your works actually begin to crush Satan’s work. It’s a pretty interesting discussion and especially interesting in that it doesn’t begin in the book of Matthew, which is the first book of the New Testament, it actually begins in Genesis chapter three. So, this is something that’s all throughout the entire Bible not just something that’s in the New Testament.
So what does this have to do with us today? That’s the big question, the closing question we want to ask here. The key word you want to write down is the word incarnation. Maybe you’ll see it in your notes there, incarnation. That God became flesh and lived among us. Some stories of the world say that only nature exists, there is nothing outside of nature. You can imagine a box and inside that label on that box is nature. What’s outside of it? Nothing. You can also understand that a lot of people believe that nature doesn’t actually exist, that only the spiritual world exists, but they still have a box and that box is just labeled spiritual or god, small g something like that. What’s outside of the box? Nothing because only the spiritual exists.
The Bible says the world exists because it was brought into existence by a God who exists outside of nature and that nature in fact is an open system. It opened up and into nature came the one who spoke it into existence, Jesus Christ. It resolves that tension that people feel about, “Well, if only nature exists then I can’t really know anything at all or if only spiritual things exist then I can’t really know anything at all.” It is because of the incarnation that God is made flesh and dwelt among us that so many things about Christianity have influenced the world where other religions have had maybe no influence or even a negative influence on the world.
Thomas Howard
is a theologian who put this in a very nice way, “The incarnation takes all that properly belongs to our humanity and delivers it back to us redeemed. All of our inclinations, and appetites, and capacities, and yearnings and proclivities are purified and gathered up and glorified by Christ. He did not come to thin out human life.” Underline that in your notes, that’s hugely important. “He did not come to thin out human life.” You see a lot of people think that about Christianity don’t they? That Christianity is what prevents you from living the good life. What Thomas Howard is saying is that story is exactly backwards from what’s actually so. “God did not come to thin out human life he came to set it free. All the dancing, and feasting, and processing, and singing, and building, and sculpting, and baking and merrymaking that belong to us and that were stolen away in the service of false gods are returned to us in the gospel.”
Jesus expressed the incarnation this way. He said, “I am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the father but through me.” I don’t think it’s coincidental that he named three things there, the way, the truth and the life. It probably would have had more meaning to his audience in that day because they would have been more familiar with the Greek philosophers than you and I are. But the Greek philosophers said, “If you want to understand life, if you really want to master life, you will recognize there are three important questions in life, what is good, what is true and what is beautiful.” And Jesus said, “I am the way,” which is refers to a moral course of action, “I am the truth,” what can actually be known, “And I am the life,” the aesthetic aspect of life, what constitutes a beautiful life. In other words Jesus was saying in this statement, “I am the answer to the philosopher’s quest.”
But if it’s true, we might be able to see evidence of it. I’m not going to go into all of the evidence obviously but we might take a look at a little bit of the evidence of it. For example when Jesus said, “I am the way,” referring to a moral course of action we can actually take a look at the world around us and ask the question, “Is the world better off because Jesus came?”
And you know what’s interesting, a lot of history teachers in the United States of America say, “Our system is based on the system of the Greeks and the Romans.” If that’s actually so we’re really in trouble because the Greeks and Romans were an elite, haughty, decrepit culture. Women had no rights in Greek and Roman culture. Slaves, slavery was not wrong in Greek and Roman culture. Children were disposed of if they became inconvenient in Greek and Roman culture. It is because of Christianity that we have the system that actually holds each person to have inalienable rights.
In fact, Luc Ferry the philosopher, he’s a French philosopher, Luc Ferry I guess is how you say his name in English. It’s probably appropriate to say Luc Ferry. Anyway, he is actually a very well-known French philosopher. He wrote a book called A Brief History of Time and in the book he said, now this is coming from an atheist philosopher, this is interesting, “It is to Christianity that Western civilization owed its entire democratic inheritance.” It wasn’t the Greeks and Romans who thought of this, it was through Jesus Christ.
In other words, cultures that reflect Jesus can develop things. We look at Christianity and realize it was because of Christians that we have the abolition of slavery. It is because of Christians we have hospitals, higher education, rights for women, rights for children, all of these kinds of things that were never true in history up until people began to believe and understand that human beings are made in God’s image. All right. Now, what about cultures that deny Christ? Well, there are a few, Soviet Russia, communist China, Cambodia, and a few others. And the number one characteristic of those countries if you put them into a list is the death toll, it’s the death toll.
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