"From God, For God" 1 Corinthians 15:25-26 Sunday Morning Worship Service

I am married, a father of three daughters.

I live in Annandale.

I am a Batgammon champion.

And I'm a pastor.

As I look back on my life, I can't remember a moment where I decided to be those things.

I never hatched a particular plan to bring them about.

I remember, of course, a long time ago, desiring to be married, certainly.

I remember the desire to have kids.

I remember even feeling like the Lord was calling me to be a pastor.

But I never sat down and said, you know what, my long-term plan is to be a husband and a father of three girls and to be a pastor.

And I definitely didn't sit down and plan to live in Anandale.

Like Annandale happened to me.

I didn't happen to Annandale.

The backgammon took a little bit more work, granted.

We sometimes just live our lives walking through open doors, passing by closed doors, making whatever decision seems best to us at the moment.

And it's only in retrospect where you see some kind of plan coming together.

And that's because we're volitional creatures.

We make choices.

And because we make choices, we often think of ourselves as autonomous and we lose sight of this basic theological fact that all things that happen in the world have been decreed by God from before the foundation of time.

That God, in his perfect and immutable decree, that just means it's not a decree that can be changed.

God, in his perfect, sovereign, immutable decree, before he created anything, contains all things that will ever happen in time according to his will and for his glory.

And so we live our volitional lives.

We make choices and we go this way and that, marry this person and not that person, or whatever the choices are we make.

We can, because we're the ones doing them, we can so easily lose sight of the fact that God has planned all of our choices.

Because we're making choices, we often think there's no plan behind them without understanding that we're actually choosing in accordance with what God had already planned for us.

That's just what it means to be a human.

We don't have access to the secret will of God.

We don't have access to the full plan.

We don't know why he chooses some things and not others, why this way and not that way.

We don't know those things.

We just live out our lives.

That's true of every human being.

Except one.

The one exception to that is our Lord Jesus Christ.

He, like us, made decisions.

He, like us, decided to live in this city and not that city, decided to be friends with these twelve and not those twelve.

He made choices about where to go, to go to Jerusalem for this feast or not to.

He made choices throughout his life.

However, unlike us, Jesus is also truly God.

And so he is the author of the very plan that he is acting out.

So as he's choosing to go this way and not that way, or to be friends with this person and then that person, it's always in accordance with the plan that he wrote.

It's as if he is the playwright and he wrote himself into the starring role.

He wrote the script that he lived out.

And so as he lives his life, he's doing so with full knowledge of what's next.

He knows what's coming because he he wrote it.

And then he lives it out.

There are literally hundreds of passages from the Old Testament that speak to the life of Jesus, that tell you things like where he'll be born and those kind of stuff.

That tell you about the nature of his life and what cities he'll be in and and all how he'll die.

So many intricate prophecies.

So this morning I want to focus on just four.

And the four that I'm choosing are four that come together on Easter morning.

Four different prophetic truths that are all fulfilled on Easter.

I've chosen these four.

Again, there's so many to choose from, scores to choose from.

I'm choosing these four because of the way they correspond and coincide and converge on that first Easter morning.

So I invite you to open your Bibles to the book of Genesis, chapter 3, page 15.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

I mean, Genesis 3.15.

Uh the page is on your screen.

Those page numbers, I believe, are for the red Pew Bibles.

So if you have a black Pew Bible, for you, Genesis is the first book of the Bible.

And you can find it there.

Genesis 3.15.

This is the oldest conversation in human history, really.

God made, in the book of Genesis, God made Adam and Eve.

He made mankind.

He made mankind good and perfect and yet capable of change.

And so people who are made in the image of God have access to a relationship with God.

They walked with God in the garden, for example.

They had fellowship with God that was unmarred by sin.

And yet the devil enters the world and brings sin with him.

Adam and Eve believe the devil's lie, they sin, and the whole human race is plunged into sin.

From the moment Adam and Eve sinned, division now enters the world.

Now there's division between God and man.

Without sin, there was communion between God and man.

With sin, division between God and man.

You remember, as soon as Adam and Eve sinned, what did they do?

They went and hid from God.

Which is a bold strategy, you have to admit.

Hiding from God.

I don't know how that'll work out for him.

Not very well, remember?

God calls them by name and then asks them, Did you by any chance sin?

And he asks them in such a way, like a parent might ask the five-year-old who walks in the living room with the cookie crumbs all over his face and chocolate on his fingers, Did you by any chance eat the cookies I told you not to eat?

You're not asking the question because you're trying to figure out.

You're not dusting for fingerprints.

You've already solved the crime.

You know what happened.

Why are you asking?

Well, because you're giving them an opportunity to confess, to recognize what exactly they've done.

And so it is with God when he encounters Adam and Eve.

He summons them and says, Did you by any chance sin?

And they start blaming each other, right?

They blame the snake, they blame each other, they blame everybody.

And so God responds with a curse.

He's gonna curse Adam and Eve with death.

Now that sin is in the world, they're gonna die.

He's gonna curse them with difficulty in work and in childbearing.

But first he starts with the devil, and this is Genesis 3.14.

He rebukes the serpent.

It says, Because you did this, you'll be on your belly.

I don't know if that means snakes used to have little legs or not.

I don't know.

But I like to imagine them with little legs, it helps me make fun of them more, and snakes deserve it.

But verse 15, God speaks to the serpent and says, I will put enmity between you and the woman.

This speaks of the divide and the hostility between those who descend from Satan and those who descend from Eve, namely all of the human race.

There is conflict between the devil and humanity.

Even though most of humanity serves the devil, they do so even conflicted.

We fight against sin.

Even non-Christians, those who are fully headlong into sin, fear death, they don't want to die.

Death in that sense belongs to the devil.

Death is the devil's tool.

He keeps us in slavery to him through that.

So there is hostility with every human being and the devil through our love of sin and the devil's wielding of death.

That's the way the world will go in constant conflict.

Beyond that, he says, and between your offspring, between those who come from the devil, and this is here pointing towards the source of the serpent here, the devil himself, and her offspring.

And here the word offspring is singular, it's the word for seed.

This is a prophecy that there will be one particular human being that will come from Eve.

Now, this is an odd turn of phrase because the seed of the woman, that's not how biology works.

The seed is from the man.

You would often speak of a person being born from the seed of a man, but not this person.

This person comes from the seed of the woman, which is an allusion to the virgin birth one day.

There is no seed of the man involved in the birth of Jesus.

He is, though, truly human.

He is a descendant, an offspring of Eve.

Jesus, when he is born, when the Savior will be born, he will be born as a human being from Eve, as like nature as Eve.

This is a singular person in mind.

Now we are all from Eve.

Every human being comes from Eve in some sense.

But there is one offspring in particular God has in mind.

It is not just any person, but it will be the one that will crush the devil.

And that's at the end of verse 15.

He shall bruise your head.

I kind of don't like the translation bruise there.

It's the word for like crush.

It's the word for being pushed down until it's broken.

That's the word here.

And when that happens to your head, you wouldn't use the word bruise.

Like, you know, if a middle schooler hits his friend too hard, he might get a bruise on his shoulder.

Like that's a bruise.

It's not a big deal.

That's different than getting your head bashed in.

You know, if you fight a snake and you're gonna kill the snake, what do you do to kill the snake?

You cut the snake's head off.

That's what people do to kill a snake.

And you probably lead with the foot if you're fighting a snake.

You don't lead with your face, of course not.

You probably don't even lead with your arm because you don't want to get bit in the face.

You lead with the foot and then you cut its head off.

That's the image here that the serpent is gonna have his head crushed by the foot of the person doing the crushing.

His head is going to be bashed in.

That will be the result of the devil here.

So God is prophesying a human being born to Eve who will come, who will bash the devil's head in.

However, that human being will have his heel bruised.

Now, bruised is fine for the heel.

Like if you're again, if you're fighting a snake, you're probably leading with the foot.

So if you're gonna get bit by the snake, it would make sense that it would bite you in the foot.

And that's what happens in this case.

The person who's crushing the devil's head and does indeed get his foot pierced.

He gets his foot pierced by the fangs of the devil.

That happens.

But it's not ambiguous over who wins this fight.

If I told you two people fight and one of them gets his head bashed in and the other gets his foot bruised, who do you think won the fight?

Like who would you rather be?

The head bashed in guy or the foot bruised guy?

Of course, the guy with the bruised foot wins, and the devil is destroyed.

Now, without getting lost in the weeds of this prophecy here, the big picture you need to take away from this is that as soon as sin enters the world, God prophesies and promises the one who will ultimately defeat the devil will be a human being, will be a man.

That's the first component of the prophecy.

Second, the Savior will also be a king.

The first prophetic truth is that the Savior will be a man.

The second is that he'll be a king.

And from here you can turn over to Psalm 110.

It's more or less in the middle of your Bibles.

And again, if you're using a Pew Bible, the page number is on the screen.

Psalm 110 is written by David, a thousand years or so before Jesus would be born.

So this is written a long time before the birth of Jesus is the point.

Now we're skipping over a bunch of the Bible between Genesis and Psalms, of course, but the promise of the Savior gets narrowed through time.

To Abraham, God says the promise is going to come from you.

It's not just going to be any human being from Eve, it'll be somebody from Abraham or a Jew.

And then to David, God says the Savior will be a king from your line, David.

The Savior will come from King David.

And so David, as a result of that, writes this Psalm, Psalm 110.

This is picturing the day when the king from David is finally anointed and ascends back to heaven.

And it starts in a very shocking way, Psalm 110 does.

Yahweh says to my Lord.

That God, Yahweh, the God of the universe, speaking to David's king, Adonai, which just means my Lord.

And it's a phrase that we use all the time.

It's Adonai, Lord, is somebody who is a king, or has a lot of land and servants that people report up to.

Think of King Arthur and Knights at the Round Table, kind of thing.

The knights might address the king as my lord, that kind of language here.

That's what David's doing here.

So it's Yahweh, the God of the universe, talking to David's king, to David's Lord.

And in that conversation, what does Yahweh say to David's king?

Sit at my right hand.

That's outrageous.

A human being cannot sit at the right hand of God in heaven.

Remember, God in heaven is reigning over the universe from his throne over every detail of human existence which he decreed.

That's the throne we're talking about, the throne from which God reigns over the universe.

You can't just cozy up on a chair next to him.

But here, Yahweh invites this king to come sit on his throne and reign over the universe with him.

And this conversation happens at the time when Yahweh will use the king to crush the king's enemies under his feet.

Now, of course, kings have enemies, we're familiar with that.

But in this instance, the king will be crushing his enemies under his feet.

What you will lose in the English here is that Genesis 3 and Psalm 110 are using the same words in Hebrew.

In Genesis 3, I'll put enmity between you and the woman.

Here in Psalm 110, I will make your enemies, but it's the same word in Hebrew.

Enmity is how it's translated in Genesis 3.

Enemies here, they're even kind of the same in English, really.

Under your foot is his language in Psalm 110, crushed by your foot is the language in Genesis 3.

The idea in Genesis 3 is that that human being will crush the head of the serpent with his foot, and in Psalm 110, that human being will crush his enemies by his feet, as he puts his feet up reigning with God over the universe.

That's the promise.

First of all, it's a conversation that has happened before David, right?

Because David's writing it down.

So David's writing down a conversation that happened before him about somebody who's going to come after him.

How does that happen?

I mean, if you were to out if you're a you know a student in class and you had to outline the chronology of this passage, it seems to be written by David about a conversation before David that will be fulfilled after David.

How does that make any sense?

So I come I came with an analogy to help you get your mind around what's happening in Psalm 110.

Here's a good line for you.

Romeo, oh Romeo, wherefore art thou, oh Romeo?

Where does that line take place?

Where in the world does that line locate it?

Is it located in Italy in the 1400s, which is where Romeo and Juliet takes place?

Is it located in London in the 1500s, which is when Romeo and Juliet was written?

Is it located at Annandale High School, which performs the play 7 o'clock on Thursday night?

Like, where does that line take place?

Well, it takes place at all three locations for sure, right?

It takes place in Italy, it takes place in London when it's written, and it takes place at Anandale High School, 7 o'clock on Thursday night.

All of those are true.

And yet in different ways.

And if I were to ask you, where is that line from, you would be wrong if you said 7 p.m.

Thursday night.

Factually accurate, but conceptually wrong.

It's from Act 2, scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet.

So you have this idea when you think in terms of a play of that line taking place on all kinds of different horizons.

And such is the case with Psalm 110.

When does Yahweh talk to David's Lord?

Well, outside of time, in heaven, obviously, and David writes it down.

When does David's Lord is even born?

That's in the future when he comes.

And when does this conversation take place?

When he ascends back to heaven after his life on earth and he reigns over the universe with God from heaven.

All of those details aside, the main point of Psalm 110 is that the Savior is not only a man, but he will be a king, the kind of king that reigns over the universe.

Thirdly.

The Savior will be a man and he will be king.

Thirdly, he will be a sacrifice.

You can flip over to Isaiah chapter 55.

Isaiah 55 · chapter mention

Or sorry, Isaiah 53.

Isaiah is more or less in the middle of your Bible, and again, the page number on the P Bibles is on the screen.

This passage, above everything else, teaches that the Savior will not just be a man and a king, but that he will be a sacrifice.

And the same kind of language that we've seen already in Genesis 3 and Psalm 110 is used again in Isaiah 53, and it really starts in Isaiah 52.

The chapter break is kind of unfortunately placed there, but if you go to Isaiah chapter 52, it says in verse 13, My servant will be high and lifted up.

Isaiah 52 · chapter mention

He'll act wisely, he'll be lifted up.

But then in verse 14, his appearance was so marred.

Do you see that in Isaiah 52, verse 14?

Isaiah 52:14

His appearance was so marred.

That word marred is a word associated with the animal sacrifices.

When you take a sheep and you cut its throat and you bleed it out, that sheep is now marred.

That's where this word is used.

It describes an animal sacrifice.

That's not the only word here that describes that.

In verse 15, it says, His blood will sprinkle many nations.

That's another phrase from the book of Leviticus.

When you sacrifice the animal, you take the sheep's blood and you sprinkle it on the altar.

That's demonstrating the atonement for sin, sprinkling it.

That's the word that's used here for the Savior, for the Messiah, this human king who will be a sacrifice.

And it goes on.

There's more and more examples of that.

In verse 4 of chapter 53, he has borne our griefs.

That word for bearing griefs, that's another word that's associated with animal sacrifice.

You take the scapegoat, the priests put their hands on the scapegoat, and the scapegoat bears the sins of the people.

That doesn't mean he has a backpack on the little goat, a goat backpack with all the sins in it.

Of course not.

It means the priest lays his hands on the goat and the sins are transferred to the goat.

So the goat is bearing the sins.

That's the language it's used for this person.

He's gonna bear our sins.

He'll bear our transgressions.

And then in verse 5, it repeats that same kind of language.

He was wounded for our transgressions.

That's animal sacrifice language.

You kill the animal for your sin.

The animal doesn't have his own sin, of course not.

This is why in the Old Testament the animal had to be spotless.

He couldn't be marred because he was going to be marred for sin.

If he was disfigured or maimed by a lion or something, you couldn't then offer that lamed lamb as an animal sacrifice.

No, because he was already marred.

The Savior will be offered for sin, not his own sin, but he's sinless bearing our sin in our place.

In verse 8, he's stricken for the trans for the sins, the transgressions of the people.

Or verse 7, all the subtlety is gone.

Look at verse 7.

Like a lamb led to the slaughter.

That's animal sacrifice language.

You don't have to go to seminary to figure that one out.

The Savior is like a lamb who is led to be slaughtered.

That's what happens to him.

Verse 10, the middle of verse 10, his soul makes an offering for guilt or for sin.

The Savior, over and over again, all eight of those passages, all eight of those verses teach that he is a sin offering.

And what kind of sin offering is he being?

Well, the kind that dies.

Look at verse 9.

He's gonna have a grave with the wicked.

He's gonna be buried because of this.

Now, who is offering him up?

Who is offering the sin the sin sacrifice?

Well, look at verse 4.

He was smitten by God.

God is the one who did it.

Or in verse 5, it was the will of the Lord to crush him.

I'm sorry, that's verse 10.

It was the will of Yahweh to crush him.

He was stricken by God, and it was Yahweh's will to put him to death.

Yahweh, the same one in the conversation in Psalm 110, who says, sit at my feet before he gets to his feet, he's being crushed for our sin.

This is the kind of sacrifice that will result in forgiveness of sin, but it will result in the death of the one who does it.

Fourthly.

The Savior will be Yahweh Himself.

So the Savior will be a man, he will be a king, he will be a sacrifice, he will be Yahweh Himself.

You can turn to Zechariah chapter 12.

Zechariah 12 · chapter mention

Zechariah 12 is the very end of the Old Testament.

It's the second to last book of the Old Testament.

So if you hit Matthew, go left a few books, and again the page number on the screen, Zechariah chapter 12.

Zechariah 12 · chapter mention

Zechariah 12 is interesting because it's written before Jesus.

Of course, it's in the Old Testament.

But it is pointing forward to an event that is after even us.

What's described in Zechariah 12 is future, even from our perspective here.

It's describing an event at the end of this era of human history when the Antichrist is risen in power.

The nations go to war.

It's a global war.

The Antichrist betrays them.

They go to war against him.

All this war converges on Israel, on Jerusalem.

The nations of the world go to war in Israel.

They're after the Jews, of course, but the Jews are hiding in the wilderness.

This is not a war where there's a good side and a bad side.

Everybody's bad in this war.

They're all under God's judgment, and it's all the nations of the world.

It's filling the valley of Armageddon with blood, the valley of Megiddo.

That's the description from other passages in the Old Testament.

This is described all over.

Zechariah 7, all the way to the end of Zechariah, is describing this scene.

So it's not just an isolated verse here.

It's a long description in the Bible about this future war.

But towards the end of this war, Zechariah 12, verse 10, I, God speaking, will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy.

Zechariah 12:10

The nations are attacking Israel, and everybody's dying, and all seems lost.

But at that moment, God will send his Holy Spirit to open the eyes of the Jews.

And when the Bible speaks of that kind of language, it's talking about salvation, repentance, regeneration.

The Jews will have their eyes opened.

The valley of Armageddon is filled with their blood, but there's a particular trail of blood that goes through the streets of Jerusalem, and their eyes will be opened to it, and they will see it, and they'll follow it, wondering who does this blood belong to?

And they'll follow it through the streets and they will encounter the cross, high and lifted up on the cross.

And there on the cross is the one who is bleeding for their sins.

And they'll believe in him.

They'll put their eyes on him.

And they'll try to investigate who it is.

And look what it says in verse 10.

When they look upon me, on him whom they pierced.

The word pierced, you recall, it was used back in Isaiah 53 as well.

Remember, it says he was wounded for our transgressions.

That word wounded in Isaiah 53, wounded is a fine translation, but the word wounded means to have, you know, to be hit so hard it hurts you, but goes through you.

In the Bible, that word speaks of the sun shining on the clouds and the sun piercing the clouds.

It gets through the clouds.

It's used of people.

In Psalms, the psalmist has his hands and his feet bound and then pierced.

And of course, the concept comes from Genesis 3, when the Savior's heel is bruised.

So Genesis 3 describes his heel being bruised.

Isaiah 53 says it's the will of the Lord to wound him or crush him or pierce him, is the word.

And now the same concept is here in Zechariah when they look at the one on the cross, the cross that has cast a shadow over Jerusalem for thousands of years.

That cross, their eyes follow the blood to that cross, they look at the one on the cross, and lo and behold, it's Yahweh.

It's their God whom they killed.

They see him on the cross, they see the blood of the Savior on their hands.

Remember when Jesus was crucified, they said, Let his blood be on us and on our children's hands.

And now in the future, they'll look up to the cross, they'll put their eyes on it, and they'll see the God of the universe, their covenant God, Yahweh by name, is the one nailed to that cross, pierced on that cross, and his blood is on their hands.

It's their blood.

What are you gonna do when you wake up one day?

They're supposed to be God's covenant people.

They're supposed to keep the covenant, not kill the covenant God.

And they're gonna wake up to this reality one day, turn their eyes on Jesus and recognize we killed the Lord.

And they'll mourn, it says in verse 12.

Or sorry, verse 10.

They'll mourn, they'll mourn for him as one mourns for an only child.

They'll weep bitterly over him as one might weep for a firstborn.

They will mourn and weep.

The Savior died thousands of years before this.

And they'll be crushed by it.

They'll be pierced by it.

How is this possible?

How is this possible?

In reading commentaries in Zechariah 12, I came across a line that just I have to share it with you.

One commentator says, this scene is problematic to understand because the idea of God being put to death poses difficult theological questions.

Yeah, no kidding.

How can God die?

And so let's not make that a rhetorical question.

Actually, think through in your mind.

How can God be crucified?

An angel can't die, angels don't die.

How can God die?

And that's where you need to zoom out and look at all four of these prophecies.

God can die if he becomes a man.

How does a death do any good?

Well, it does good if it's a sacrifice for sins that actually atones for your sins.

It's not good news to tell you that somebody died for you in your place unless that death actually takes away wrath.

If I told you somebody's trying to kill you, and by the way, they got your neighbor, you wouldn't say, oh, that's good news.

You'd say, oh no, they mean business.

God is after you with his wrath, and yet he puts forward a sacrifice who dies in your place.

He can only die because he's a human.

His death matters because he's a king.

And he is God himself.

Where do all these passages come together?

Well, one place.

I want you to picture, though, first before I tell you the verse, I want you to picture a present wrapped with one of those really nice bows.

Not the kind of wrapping job you do at one in the morning on Christmas Eve.

Not that kind of rapping job.

The kind of wrapping job that your wife does on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

That kind of wrapping job.

It's like a nice bow.

And it goes off in four directions.

You chase the ribbon, there's four different strands of ribbon going off around the box, and you think that's just wizardry right there.

How?

How?

And then on Christmas morning you untie it, you pull the bow, and it comes off, and you realize the whole thing is actually only one thread.

It's just one piece of ribbon that goes in all four directions with magic somehow.

But how does that work?

That's the nature of these prophecies.

They look like they're four very different prophecies, don't they?

That he's a man, he's a king, he's a sacrifice, and he's God.

You don't get four more different prophecies than that.

And yet they all come together in a bow that you find on that first Easter morning.

So I want you to turn now to 1 Corinthians 15, verse 25.

1 Corinthians 15:25

Now we're in the New Testament.

1 Corinthians 15, verse 25.

1 Corinthians 15:25

And here is a place where Paul, who writes 1 Corinthians, uses language from all of those verses to describe the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

You see it most clearly in verse 25, but it is all over this passage.

He must reign, speaking of Jesus.

He must reign.

Notice the word reign.

He's the king, he's Adonai, he's the Lord, he's the true king, described in Psalm 110.

He must reign until he's put all his enemies.

That's the word from Genesis 3, enmity.

That's the word from Psalm 110, that he'll put his enemies under his feet.

In fact, 1 Corinthians 15 says exactly that.

He must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet.

Feet there connects you back to Genesis 3.15, where he'll crush with his foot.

Psalm 110, where he puts his enemies under his feet.

Isaiah 53, where his feet are pierced.

Zechariah 12, where his body is run through.

And the last enemy to be destroyed is death.

There's no better enemy to destroy.

You can fear a lot of things in this life, but you fear death most of all.

You know, it doesn't matter what else you fear if you die.

You're afraid of taxes?

What?

It's a tax day in two weeks or whatever?

You're afraid of taxes?

Well, if you die, you don't have to file taxes.

Some of you are like, I'll hear that out.

Death is the ultimate fear.

Hebrews 2, Paul says that people are kept in slavery to the devil through fear of death.

Here it says the Lord defeats death by crushing it under his feet.

This is described all over this passage.

Look at verse 21 of 1 Corinthians 15.

By one man came death, so by a man can come the resurrection from the dead.

God can't bring resurrection into the world because God can't die.

It requires a human being to die, descend into the grave, so that he can resurrect conquering death.

That's what happens in verse 21.

That a man brought death, namely Adam brings death into the world.

A different man, the Lord Jesus Christ, will bring it right back out.

Verse 24, then comes the end.

After he dies, he's going to resurrect and he will deliver the kingdom of God to the Father after destroying every authority and power.

This is speaking about the man Christ Jesus delivering the kingdom back to God, having destroyed every authority and power.

What's an authority?

Death.

What's a power?

Death.

He destroys them.

He in verse 25 will reign until he crushes them under his feet.

Verse 26, and the last enemy, to be super clear about this, the last enemy destroyed is death.

He destroys even death itself.

And he does that by rising from the grave.

Let me illustrate this in this way.

This illustration is based upon a true story.

A family from IBC with several kids loves the church, has been here several years, gets transferred, deployed to somewhere like Bahrain or somewhere like that.

They go there, but the kids are sad, leaving all their friends.

And so the moms start scheming a chance to get all the kids back together again.

Well, over the course of time, those other families that their kids are friends with, they also go to all over the world.

They're scattered all over the place.

And yet the the moms fix a date that on such or such a day, all the families will reunite back here in Springfield so all their kids can see each other.

And you know, this this takes a fair amount of planning, doesn't it?

Like the husband's got to put in for leave at a certain time.

You got to work on the plane flights, and some of them fly back to DC, and some of them to Andrews, and you got to find places to stay here.

And so they're, you know, messaging different people hey, my family's coming back in town.

Can we stay in your house?

And you're like, Yeah, there's a lot of you.

But we'll my family will go on vacation, then you have the whole house.

And so now you're planning out your family gets on vacation, and and lo and behold, the day comes, and like all six families come together.

And the number of families has grown in all the sermons this morning, just so you know.

All six families get all together back in the house, and their kids are seeing each other for the first time in years face to face, and they're so excited.

And one of like the eight-year-olds looks at his mom and is like, Oh, mom, this is amazing.

Have you been planning this all day?

Mom's like, No, it's been longer than that.

All week?

You know, truth be told, the parents are planning that from the time they first got transferred out.

When you encounter the death and resurrection of Jesus, this is not something Jesus started planning on Monday when he walks into Jerusalem.

This isn't something he decided on Thursday as he was betrayed and arrested.

Like, well, I guess see where this is going.

It's not something he figured out on Friday when he was whipped and flogged and even crucified and tells the thief today, you'll be with me in paradise.

This is not planned then.

This goes back before the Garden of Eden.

This goes back before time in the mind of God.

So that when Jesus comes, he's doing exactly what he planned for his own purposes and his own reasons.

And one of those reasons, one of them, is so that you would have the ability to have your sins forgiven from you.

The end of all this isn't you.

You're not the center of the story.

The center, of course, is Jesus Christ, resurrected and reigning over the universe.

But you are a part of that story by God's plan and his design.

You are born into this world as a sinner, loving sin and living for yourself.

And yet God engineered all of human history to bring you to a point where you would hear how your sins could be forgiven.

You would hear that a sinless human being, namely the Lord Jesus Christ, fulfilled all of God's laws and lived the perfect life in your place.

So that God's anger and wrath that you deserve for your sin, it should be poured out on you, is diverted from you and poured out on the Lord Jesus instead.

So despite him being sinless, he suffers and dies on the cross, bearing God's wrath for your sin.

He's then buried and resurrects from the grave on the third day, destroying even death, so that you who're sitting here this morning can think my sins mean I should die, and I don't want to die, I'm afraid of death.

And yet Jesus has resurrected and is in heaven right now and offers for me to have my sins forgiven, and offers for me to resurrect with him, and so I can be freed from the fear of death, knowing that when I die physically, I will live with him spiritually forever and ever, because he died for my sins.

He can do that because he was truly a human being.

He can do that because he's the high king of heaven and the Lord of life.

He can do that because he was a sacrifice for my sins, and he could design this whole plan with me in it because he is Yahweh, he is God himself.

Those are all the chords of history leading forward to you.

And so this morning, I hope and pray that you this morning would see yourself as the recipient of these promises, that you would place your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, you would believe in his death and resurrection, and you would find your sins forgiven.

God, we are grateful for the promise of Easter that you made a way for our sins to be forgiven.

I pray for the hearts of people here this morning that perhaps are invited by friends or less familiar with the gospel.

I pray this morning that their hearts would be opened to the truth.

And they would believe that you died in their place.

Not of course that they would know all things about the Bible this morning.

Of course not, but that they would know enough about the person of Jesus to believe and have their sins forgiven.

Lord, I know you hear these prayers because you are reigning now from your throne in heaven.

Your eyes go to and fro throughout the world now, your ears are extended to us now because you are on your throne, and our prayers are being brought before your throne.

So we know that you will hear them and rule from your throne.

We're grateful for these promises on this resurrection Sunday.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.