God is in the Details

Thank you.

I wanted Susan to do one of those.

Here's Bill, but she didn't do that.

So good morning.

I am excited to be here.

It's an honor.

It's really an honor.

As she mentioned, my name is Bill.

And uh on a typical Sunday morning, a lot of times you'll find me in the sound booth.

Steve and I thought it'd be funny because we swapped places this morning.

So just kidding, made you look.

All right.

See uh Steve and Susan actually asked me to speak um a while ago, and uh as she mentioned, we've been uh leading a uh I've been leading a group on Wednesday nights that's focusing around Jesus's last week.

All right, and it's it's been an awesome group for for those who are in it.

Um it's uh really focused around um today, which is does anybody know what today's called?

Palm Sunday, that's right.

That's right.

Um next week is obviously Easter, that's right.

And so this is the week we've been focused on in our group.

Um it's a uh it's a day that marks an event.

The event is the triumphal entry, and it happened about 2,000 years ago, and it highlights Jesus' entry into the city of Jerusalem.

All right, he's he's greeted by huge crowds of people who are excited and happy, and they're openly celebrating his approach to the temple on what was gonna begin their Passover week.

Um, in order to understand why this event is so epic, we we have to kind of stop and pause, because in no less than five days, he's gonna be killed.

He's gonna be he's gonna be put on a cross and killed.

And there's a lot of stuff that happens from open celebration to being killed on a cross.

We kind of have to rewind and look back, try to develop an understanding of culture, um, tradition, religion, and the local environment of the time.

And we're gonna we're gonna try and do that just a little bit this morning to get a big picture viewpoint of what this week is all about, because this is a really big deal.

Um we this actually transitions crazy perfectly, only God kind of a way, with what we've been talking about the last seven weeks.

For the last seven weeks or so, Steve and Justin really focused on uh the life of Joseph and the story of Joseph.

And uh last week we kind of wrapped up that account.

We see Joseph, a man who had been had the highest of highs and the lowest of lows in his life.

Um he was a favored son of twelve.

His father singled him out, so much so that his brothers became just insanely jealous and thought about killing him, but ended up selling him off into slavery.

Um he was unjustly prisoned, imprisoned after that.

Um then he was brought out of that situation and was ultimately put in charge of the entire nation of Egypt, only reporting to Pharaoh, made second in command of the entire empire.

And when we finished last week, we learned how his brothers had come to him because of a terrible famine, and they didn't know it was him, and he had an opportunity to really kind of bring it to him, and he didn't.

He showed mercy on them.

And then they go back and get his father, Jacob, and they have this amazing reunion, and it's really an amazing story of mercy and love.

And that's kind of where we left off.

And he gives them safe haven in Egypt.

And that merciful act ends up saving all their lives, saving their heritage, and ultimately allowing their prosperity as a family to continue.

Jacob, the father of Joseph, he had been renamed by God earlier in his life.

He'd be given an alternate name.

His name was Israel.

So that's where that term comes from.

Where's the nation of Israel?

It's Jacob.

Jacob is Israel.

His father was Isaac, and his father before that was Abraham.

And his twelve sons, including Joseph, are the twelve tribes of Israel.

That's where all that history and stuff stems from.

And so we ended that story last week, and this is where we're picking up, picking up right this morning.

In Exodus chapter one, it says, In time, Joseph and all his brothers died, ending that entire generation.

But their descendants, the Israelites, had many children and grandchildren.

In fact, they multiplied so greatly that they became extremely powerful and filled the land.

Eventually, a new king came into power in Egypt who knew nothing about Joseph or what he had done.

He said to his people, Look, the people of Israel now outnumber us and are stronger than we are.

We must make a plan to keep them from growing anymore.

If we don't, and if war breaks out, they will continue or they will join our enemies and fight against us.

Then they will escape from our country.

So the Egyptians made the Israelites their slaves.

They appoint they appointed brutal slave drivers over them, hoping to wear them down with crushing labor.

They forced them to build cities of Pithum and Ramses as supply centers for the king.

But more the Egyptians oppressed them.

The more the Israelites multiplied and spread, the more alarmed the Egyptians became.

So the Egyptians worked the people of Israel without mercy.

They made their lives bitter, forcing them to mix mortar and make bricks and do all the work in the fields.

They were ruthless in all their demands.

So that's what happened after Joseph.

Joseph, kings forget, and here we are, they're slaves.

And most of us kind of know what happens next.

We've heard this story also.

There's a baby.

And in order to save his life, his mom puts him in a basket of reeds and floats him down the Nile River.

He's found by the sister of Pharaoh and raised as a prince.

His name was Moses.

His name was Moses.

And Moses also goes through a very kind of trying and enduring process of his own.

He becomes a man, which God uses for great things.

He's also a man favored by God, called to do things through faith, handpicked by God to deliver the Israelites from this oppressive rule of Egypt.

Moses ultimately brings ten plagues using God's power upon the Egyptian Empire.

Asking every time for Pharaoh to let his people go.

You had plagues where water was turned into blood, swarms of frogs and gnats.

On a side note, I'm confident or I'm fairly sure that South Georgia is still under this gnat plague.

I played golf down there.

You had flies, diseased livestock, skin boils, thunderstorms.

Anybody had those last night?

Except this time there was hailstones of fire.

That's pretty intense.

Clouds of locusts and the darkening of the skies.

All these things happened, Moses calling them out and trying to free his people.

And nothing convinced Pharaoh.

In fact, it says it made his heart harder, every one of these.

And it wasn't until a final plague that was brought upon Egypt that the people were let go.

It's an event that is still widely celebrated today, especially in the Jewish faith.

It's called the Pesach.

And that word means to Passover.

And that's where we get the term Passover.

God gave very detailed instructions for this event to Moses for his people.

To survive this plague, they were going to have to do some really specific things.

This was going to be the event which would produce their freedom, the event that will allow them to find escape from oppression, from bondage, from their physical enslavement.

Each house was instructed by God to find a male, unblemished lamb or goat.

They were to prepare it for a meal by slaughtering it.

They were given specific details to take the lamb's blood and place it on the top and sides of their door posts on their house, their doorframe.

They were to stay alert in the night, eating a feast, made in haste.

They were supposed to be ready to get up and move out for freedom the next morning.

The account that kind of showcases that preparation is found in Exodus 12.

It said, Then Moses called to all the elders of Israel and said to them, Go out and pick a lamb or goat or young goat for each of your families and slaughter the Passover animal.

Drain the blood into a basin, then take a bundle of hyssop branches, dip it into the blood.

Brush the hyssop across the tops and sides of the door frames of your house, and no one may go out through no one may go out through the door until morning, for the Lord will pass through the land to strike down the Egyptians.

But when he sees the blood on the tops and the sides of the door frame, the Lord will pass over your home.

Remember, these instructions are a permanent law that you and your descendants must observe forever.

When you enter the land that the Lord has promised to give you, you will continue to observe this ceremony.

And God freedom.

The angel came, Pharaoh said, Enough's enough, and let him go.

And it's true, they continued to celebrate this event.

And we can kind of bounce back now to where Jesus is in his time.

This Passover, this is the event that is about to be celebrated Palm Sunday 2,000 years ago.

It was a huge deal.

It was a big, big deal.

Especially in Jerusalem, thousands and thousands of pilgrims would flock to the city.

Weeks and weeks of hard work had to be put into the city to coordinate for the religious ceremonies that were going to take place.

They would have to build like big, giant ritual baths because you had to be cleansed.

They had to make these giant roasting ovens to account for all the lambs that had to be cooked.

They had roads that needed repair.

The temple had to be completely readied for the thousands of people and for the lambs that were going to be brought in for sacrifice.

It was an event that Jesus, if you didn't know, just Jesus was Jewish.

It's true.

I know.

I know.

He'd have been very familiar with this.

This was a part of his tradition, part of his faith.

Since as a young child, it's highly likely that Jesus actually would have come to Jerusalem for the Passover, maybe even annually.

It would have been a big part of what his family did every year.

He would have been a part of picking out a lamb or goat on the tenth day of the month.

And you just didn't pick out a lamb or goat.

You kept it in your house for four days, in and around you, and you watched the lamb.

You observed it to make sure it was healthy, make sure it was clean.

You bonded personally with this little lamb or goat.

Jesus would have had to take his goat, almost a pet, right?

He would have had to take it to the temple and watch a priest slit its throat and slaughter it.

They would take the blood from this lamb and it would pour it directly from the lamb into chalices of gold or silver.

And the bottom of these chalices had a rounded bottom on them because they couldn't be set down or the blood might coagulate.

And a priest would have it, and it would have been this really ornately dressed priest in formal attire, a Levitical priest standing on the temple courtyard, the altar to one side, the Holy of Holies to the other side.

And he would have taken this cup filled with blood, and he would have passed it to the next priest, and he would have grabbed an empty cup.

And there would have been roses of these priests, and it would have been this dance, this assembly line of gold and silver twinkling in the sunlight.

And that the whole time they're shouting and singing praises to God from the book of Psalms.

They're just worshiping God, the God who set them free from their enslavement.

It had to have been an amazing thing to witness.

Brutal, yet beautiful.

It was full of circumstance and pomp, pageantry.

But you know, there was a problem at the time of Jesus while this was going on.

Israel was again under oppressive rule.

The Roman Empire, under the control of Caesar Augustus, had complete political power over the holy city and the temple.

Now they allowed them to celebrate, they allowed them to worship, but there would have been this really large and apparent military presence in the region to control the people.

And the Romans would have been very short with any unruliness.

They took national security extremely seriously.

And they were always in an active process of squashing a potential uprising.

Jerusalem's not much different now in a way.

At the time of Passover, however, this was a prime location for Rome to showcase their political and military strength.

Among the Jewish people, conversely, there was a growing and really kind of what's the word I'm looking for, a really big sentiment, this kind of hope that they would again be freed from their oppressive rule.

After Egypt, they had just gone through wave after wave after wave of other people controlling their holy city.

And they kind of had had enough.

And they were hoping for this political or you know physical freedom to regain itself.

And they were looking for a person kind of in the mold of Moses who might be able to wield God's power through faith to bring them out of this situation.

And so here we have this prophet guy named Jesus, right?

Clearly, he's a man of God's favor.

He's known for supernatural miracles.

He's recognized as one who might just be able to use God's power to bring that type of freedom.

A man who mirrored days before Palm Sunday, days before, took this guy named Lazarus who happened to be dead and raised him back to life.

Alright, you're in that situation, you're hoping for freedom.

You hear about this Jesus guy, it's about to be Passover, and then you get news that this guy just brought a dead man back to life.

It spread like wildfire and really ignited this hope and charged the city with this desperation for freedom.

So here we are sitting at the top of the Mount of Olives 2,000 years ago, Palm Sunday.

Traditionally, this is the same spot where the Passover festivities begin.

They would take a national Pesoch lamb or a national Passover lamb.

All right?

This is the lamb that symbolically would represent the entire nation of Israel.

It would have come down the hillside path in a parade, if you will.

And this national Passover lamb would have been greeted by hundreds and thousands of onlookers, all praising God, excited for the week to get started.

I think of it, I've always translated it to how we kind of start our Christmas holiday.

Right?

Who here watches the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade every Thanksgiving morning, right?

Yeah.

You got the marching bands, you got the roquettes, right?

You got the giant cartoon balloons, you have that terrible lip-syncing guy on the float, you know, right?

And who's always at the end?

Santa.

Santa.

Now it's a party.

Now it's a big deal.

Now we can have Christmas.

In the same way, I kind of see that same parallel happening with this national Passover lamb.

You know, people would have had palm branches out, and they would have waved them and they would have sing songs of praise and they would get all revved up and excited for a week-long party, a feast.

And in Matthew 21, this is where we find Jesus.

As Jesus and his disciples approached Jerusalem, they came to the town of Bethpage on the Mount of Olives.

Jesus sent two of them ahead.

Go into the village over there, he said, and as soon as you enter it, you will see a donkey tied there with its colt beside it.

Untie them and bring them to me.

If anyone asks what you were doing, just say, the Lord needs them, and he will immediately immediately let you take them.

I want to pause there because I just think that's hilarious.

Hey, you're gonna go to this city, and there's gonna be a donkey.

Just untie it and take it.

But there's probably a guy, he's gonna pop out, and he's gonna be like, What are you doing?

And you just say the Lord needs them.

And they'll be like, Okay.

And it says, this took place to fulfill a prophecy that said, Tell the people of Jerusalem, look, your king is coming to you.

He is humble, riding on a donkey, on a donkey's colt.

Now, this is from the book of Zechariah.

It's a direct mention of the coming Messiah.

And here Jesus is doing exactly what a prophecy, whom all these religious pilgrims who are lining the roads, they know these prophecies.

And here he is on a donkey, coming down the hillside path.

The two disciples did as Jesus commanded.

They brought the donkey and the colt to him and threw their garments over the colt, and he sat on it.

Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road ahead of him, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.

Jesus was in the center of the procession, and the people all around him were shouting, Praise God for the Son of David.

Blessings on the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

Praise God in the highest heaven.

The entire city of Jerusalem was in an uproar as he entered.

Who is this?

They asked.

And the crowds replied, It is Jesus, the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee.

In one of the other gospel accounts of this entry, it says they shouted, Hosanna.

Hosanna, which means deliver us, free us, save us.

This man, Jesus, who the crowds are praising and celebrating, however, in four short days will be beaten.

Paraded now through the city wearing a crown of thorns and carrying a cross.

A cross will be nailed to between two criminals to be executed.

The Passover account, the Passover event that these crowds are focused on isn't just a story in the Bible about the freedom of the Israelites.

It's a picture.

It's a symbolic depiction of what Jesus will go through through the exact final days of his life.

Check this out.

At the same time Jesus is entering the city, going to the temple, the people of Israel are finding their lamb or their goat.

On the same four days that those lambs are being brought into homes to be observed, to be watched, to make sure they're clean, make sure they're healthy, make sure they're a proper lamb for the sacrifice.

Jesus spends those same four days in and around the temple being questioned by the Pharisees and by the Sadducees, being tried before the governors of that region in that time, trying to find out is he worthy?

Is he, excuse me, my mic, is he prepared?

Is he perfect enough to be our sacrifice?

At the same time, Jesus is being nailed to the cross.

The lambs are being taken into the temple, being sacrificed.

At the same time, those blood of those lambs is being poured onto the temple altar, flowing down through the gutters and into the streets.

The blood of Jesus is pouring down the wood of the cross, soaking into the earth.

When we start to parallel these events, God's plan is unbelievably detailed.

Supernaturally aligned, if you will.

These weren't just separate things that happened.

It was purposeful.

If we think about the lambs at Moses' time, the blood that the Israelites had to use in that account when it actually happened, they were instructed to take the blood and put it on the lintel, which is the top of the door, and the door post, which is the size of the doorframe.

The blood would have poured onto the The ground, and we can begin to see the picture of a crown of thorns where the blood would be, and where the blood uh through pierced hands would be.

Do you see the picture?

The people were given odd instructions at Passover.

You you couldn't disembowel your lamb and you couldn't break any of its bones.

But then they were told they had to spit them on two pieces of pomegranate wood.

And in order to do this without ruining the meat, they literally had to hang these slaughtered lambs on crosses.

We come here every week and we know that Jesus is good.

We celebrate his offering of freedom, and that's awesome.

That's good.

But when we begin to really, really focus in on God's plan, God's awesomeness, his power is revealed when we get to the details.

It's the particulars, it's the small areas kind of where we have to work to see, where we have to dig a little bit.

When we get there, we kind of brush away just the broadness of our faith and we get to really who God is and how he works.

It's where we find a solid and boundless foundation to build a personal relationship with God.

This is the place where we realize that we can have intimacy and passion with our Creator.

The place where we can build trust, grow faith, and recognize and realize hope.

As we get to know Jesus better, we start to see his work in the very details of our own life.

I've been there, I know, I've been there, I'm sure you have too.

My account, one of them that I can remember really well is I was 20 years old, right?

And I was that guy that just didn't have a lot of direction at that moment in time in my life.

Any other 20-year-olds been there?

Yeah.

Um I I was kind of that ship without a sail or a rudder.

Um now I I was a United States Marine Corps reservist at the time.

Hurrah.

There they are.

All right.

I I was a physics major at Southern Polytechnic State University, but it was a subject I was good at, but I didn't really care about.

Um I didn't have a girlfriend.

I worked full-time at Old Navy um just to make money.

Yeah.

That's funny, I know, yeah.

And I had just moved back in with my mom and dad, 20 years old, and I drove a late uh 90s model Hyundai Elantra.

Hindsight, the no girlfriend part makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?

Anyhow.

All right.

Um at the time though, I I was given this kind of unique opportunity to go through a really amazing process to become a firefighter for the city of Marietta.

Um it was a perfect fit for where I was at the time, um, where where everything all my skill set kind of honed in, and truthfully, it gave me direction, it gave me purpose.

I couldn't have been more excited.

Um, the selection process started off with 250 candidates in a room taking aptitude and intelligence testing.

Um I made the cut.

You know, they went from 250 down to 50.

At those 50, they did panel interviews.

I sat in front of a table of 15 or 20 different guys.

It was it was more than you would think for that kind of position.

I mean, they would just they grilled you about all sorts of personal and professional questions.

Um, about 30 minutes.

I made the cut.

They narrowed it down to 10.

They had eight slots open, two alternate positions.

And I was informed informed I was their top choice.

All I had to do was pass kind of their just simple tests.

That was the hard part.

A medical exam, no worries.

I was already in the Marine Corps, I had already gone through all that.

Um, piece of cake.

Physical fitness, I I wasn't a problem at the time.

I had just gotten out of Paris Island.

I could run three miles in another 20 minutes without breathing hard, do 15 pull-ups without thinking about it, 100 sit-ups in in a couple minutes, not a problem.

Bring it on.

Polygraph test.

Made you take a polygraph test, lie detector.

I didn't have anything to lie about.

So easy peasy, right?

And then I got to the psychological exam.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Thanks.

I remember, yeah.

I remember walking into that doctor's office, right?

And he says, I don't even get through the door, and he's like, Stop.

Okay?

Count backwards from a hundred by eight.

Here I am.

I'm a United States Marine.

I am trained to handle the most pat pressure-packed environments on Earth.

I'm trusted to carry a fully loaded N16 and handle C4 both.

At the same time, I'm a physics major at a state university in a college calculus class.

And I can't subtract eight from a hundred more than one time.

It was a total fail.

It was a total fail.

The next day I received a call from the fire chief himself in disappointment.

He was heartbroken over the event.

They had to cut me.

They had to cut me.

I was crushed.

I mean, everything that, all the purpose, everything that I, I was, you know, I was just afloat, finally had direction, finally had drive, finally had focus.

Gone.

For me personally, in that moment, it was one of the most frustratingly dark periods of time I've ever had.

I felt I had no focus, no plan, no future again.

I can look back though, and everything's different.

Isn't that amazing sometimes how we can do that?

Weeks later, and I'm not kidding, weeks later, while working at Old Navy, a job I would have just left, I met a girl.

A really hot girl.

Months after that, and I mean months, two months, I find a new career and I ask her to marry me.

I married that beautiful old Navy chick.

And now we have amazing kiddos, dogs, family and friends.

I have life.

I have life.

If I had passed that test, who knows?

Everything's different.

See, God knew that.

He was working on the details of my personal life the entire time.

What appeared to me as a complete disappointment, a total disaster in the moment, a personal failure.

God made it a stepping stone for so much more.

And he did it with me, and he's doing it with you too, whether you realize it or not.

He's relevant and active in every detail.

You know, the Bible says our Heavenly Father is unchanging.

This is Jesus' daddy.

And he's adopted you and me as sons and daughters.

This God, he is the orchestrator of time from its inception.

He gave us a plan at the very beginning of humanity through the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden.

That's something we talk about a lot here.

He's given us a literal outlining of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross through this historical account of Passover.

And there's tons more.

We can't even get into it all.

In fact, I don't know if it's humanly possible to know it all.

God's love for us is just really, really grows so much more.

And we can understand his passion and his love for us once we look for him and understand him in those details.

Just days after Moses and the nation of Israel were fleeing Egypt, Pharaoh again became angry.

His heart again became hard.

And he sends his armies out to massacre the Israelites.

Moses and the people were trapped.

They had an approaching army from one side and they had a sea in front of them.

Through faith in God, Moses commands the seas to part, and Israel passes through.

The armies of Egypt are swept away as the sea collapses on them.

And then their freedom was completed.

It wasn't completed at the at the Passover, when the animals are slaughtered.

It was completed days later.

That same day, thousands of years later, when we parallel it, it becomes our Easter Sunday.

Jesus is resurrection and death is beaten that day.

When Jesus was hanging on the cross, while the screams of the lambs are coming out of the temple, it's likely he could hear it.

He could see it possibly even.

He's hanging there, and his final words, he said, It is finished.

You know, our freedom from the bondage, from oppression, from our slavery to this thing we call death was in that moment finished.

And on that Easter Sunday, it was completed.

God's in our details.

God's in our details.

If the worship team wants to come up, I've got a couple more things.

In 1 Peter, it says this it was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God.

God chose him as your ransom long before the world began.

But he has now revealed him to you in these last days.

Through Christ, you have come to trust in God, and you have placed your faith and hope in God because He raised Christ from the dead and gave him great glory.

You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters.

Love each other deeply with all your heart, for you have been born again, but not to a life that will quickly end.

Your new life will last forever, because it comes from the eternal, living word of God.

See, God's plan is amazing, isn't it?

Let's pray.

Father God, we just thank you for everything you've done for us.

We thank you for Jesus and for his amazing life, and how you used everything, every detail in all history to point to him as our source for freedom.

I thank you for the details in my own life and how you just continue to show me your love and your favor for me, God.

And I just pray the same for everyone else here today.

That you'll just, Holy Spirit, pour out into their hearts and to their lives.

Reveal to them how you're working in their lives with their details.

Thank you for everything you've done in Jesus' name.

Amen.

I want to suggest something, if you could.

One thing this week, if you get a chance.

We can stand if we want.

If you get a chance this week, and this isn't anything I'm like begging for or anything, but just a suggestion, because this is a really cool week as we're approaching Easter.

We're kind of sandwiched between these two Sundays.

And Jesus did this with his disciples, and we celebrated it this morning a little bit, but take a meal.

Breakfast, lunch, or dinner, it doesn't matter.

Schedule it.

Make it grab, you know, put it on your calendar.

Make an appointment with Jesus this week and have a meal, just you and him.

Just you and him.

Grab your Bible or your smartphone with your Bible app or your tablet with your Bible app.

That's how I do it, right?

And just talk to him.

It can be quiet, it can be open.

People might look at you funny.

But just talk to him about where he's been active in your details.

It's amazing when we just sit back and we kind of think about where we've been and where we've come from individually, how he's been there the whole time, and maybe we didn't even recognize it.

He wants to share those moments with you.

He wants to be engaged with you in those moments.

He wants nothing more than to connect with you.

He's very cool.

And God, his plan is unbelievably intricate.

In fact, the past couple weeks, God's done it again, even just here.

You know, Justin spoke the last couple weeks and he shared a verse, and both times I was like, man, that's exactly what I was gonna say.

He highlighted a verse and he highlighted it for me too.

It's Romans 8.28, and it says this.

And we know that God causes everything, everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.

He causes everything.

Not a couple things, not the big things, not the small things, everything.

He is in the details.

And he's in this next song.

Thank you, guys.