This year during the season of Advent through Christmas and New Year’s Eve we are looking at some of the Old Testament prophecies concerning the coming Messiah, including the promise to Adam and Eve, to Abraham, to David as well as His birth place, His travel to Egypt, and finding the New Testament passages that confirm their fulfillment in our Savior, Christ Jesus.
Today we are again reminded of our need for forgiveness because of the sin of Adam and Eve and the curse of our world. We need this constant reminder of our need for forgiveness and we actually need the history of our need for forgiveness because too many in our world today actually think they are good people and do not understand our need for forgiveness. Thus, we begin with Adam and Eve. God created a perfect world and a perfect man and woman, Adam and Eve. He placed them in a perfect Garden and gave them work to do to care for the Garden and in order to give them an opportunity to respond to all His gifts He gave them one Law, to not eat from the fruit in the middle of the Garden. Of course, we know that history as we have rehearsed it from time to time, and as we are doing so during this Advent season, they sinned through their disobedience by eating the fruit and so their sin is passed on to us all so that we are all conceived and born in sin (what we call original sin).
God’s curse was death, the body would grow old and die a physical death, but worse, unless He stepped in there would be an eternal death in hell, which He had created for the rebellious angel Lucifer. And the world was cursed so that there would be difficulty in work, including thorns and sweat, painful labor, times of struggles and troubles.
And yet, because of His great love for His creation and for us, God promised a Savior, One who would bear the price of the sin of death and bring forgiveness in order to reconcile man with God, that is in order to bring back that original perfect relationship between God and man.
Later in the book of Genesis God reiterates the promise and at the same time He narrows the line of the fulfillment of that promise. Out of His grace and mercy, out of His love for him, God called Abraham and promised Him grace and every blessing. God promised Abraham a physical blessing, that is He promised to give Him a land and make his family into a great nation, a nation of many people and known by many. The physical part of the promise, which would later be given to Moses and be known as the Mosaic Covenant however, had a condition attached. The condition was that the physical blessings would only last as long as his people remained faithful to God and His Law.
Yet, more important than the physical part of God’s promise to Abraham was the spiritual, eternal part of the promise, later known as the Abrahamic Covenant. God promised Abraham that through his descendants the Savior of all nations would be born. In other words, this spiritual, eternal promise was not simply for Abraham and his descendants, but was for all nations, all people of all places, of all times and this part of the promise was an unconditional promise. This part of the promise did not depend on Abraham nor on any of his descendants.
Thus, as one follows the history of the Children of Abraham, the Children of Israel that is, they will see that Abraham’s descendants were not always faithful, but rebelled time and time again. The children of Abraham were truly unable to keep the conditional part of the promise and thus forfeited all those earthly, physical blessings. Yet, while the people of Abraham were not faithful, God continued to be faithful. Because the eternal part of the promise did not depend on Abraham nor his descendants, but on God and God alone, we know that we and all people are recipients of those blessings.
The Gospel writers Matthew and Luke both trace the lineage of Jesus in order to give proof of His Messiahship. If you have ever wondered about those genealogies in the Gospels and throughout the Bible, those genealogies provide not only a time line of history, but also a traceable family tree so that we might rejoice in the fulfillment of God’s promises. Both Matthew and Luke trace the ancestry of Jesus and both show that He was born as a descendant of Abraham. As a descendant of Abraham He fulfills God’s promise that the Savior would be born through the line of Abraham.
Matthew also makes the point to trace Jesus ancestry through the kingly line of David, perhaps the greatest king in the history of the Children of Israel. As we will be reminded next week, through another of God’s promises we are told that the Savior would be from the kingly line of King David, but again, that is for next week.
When God created the world His one Law, His one demand, His one command was to be perfect. God has never rescinded that one demand. Indeed, the only way to get to heaven is to be perfect. Adam and Eve failed as they disobeyed God. The Children of Abraham, the Children of Israel, although chosen by God disobeyed God and failed. And even we today continue to disobey God and fail. We cannot be the people God would have us to be. We are conceived and born in sin. We sin in thought, word and deed. We sin sins of omission and commission. Which is why God promised a Savior, a Redeemer. Jesus was born to do what Adam and Eve, the nation of Israel and what we are unable to do, live in perfection.
Jesus was born, true God in human flesh. Jesus had to be true God in order to be born in perfection, because only God is truly perfect. If Jesus were not truly God then He would have been conceived and born in sin and would have been unable to be our Savior. He had to be truly God in order to live in perfection, to be fully able to completely be perfect obeying all of God’s Laws and commands.
Jesus was also truly human and He had to be a human in order to be our substitute, that is in order to be able to trade His perfect life for our imperfect life. Jesus had to be truly human because the cost, the price for sin was human death for human sin. No other price would pay for our sins. Even the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, the sacrifices of animals did not forgive sins, but only pointed to the one ultimate sacrifice of the Savior, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
What does this mean? As we read and heard today and as you can read and hear many other promises and prophecies in the Old Testament, the promise of a Savior was always a promise of a Savior for all people. The promise of a Savior was made before there were any ethnicities, Jew or Gentile. While the promise to Abraham had a physical, temporal promise depending on the compliance of the people, which history bears out that they were not obedient, the eternal aspect of the promise was never dependent on anyone except God alone.
Jesus tells the Pharisees when they objected to His not recognizing their ethnic status, God can raise of children of Abraham from stones. Indeed, being a part of the family of God does not come about by birth, it is not in your genes or DNA, but it is by faith and faith alone. By faith in Jesus, the Christ we are Christians and children of Abraham.
God made His promises, His covenant and God kept and keeps His promises and covenant. Jesus was born of the woman, the Virgin Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit, true God and true man. Jesus was born from the line of Abraham and King David. Jesus lived a perfect life never sinning even once. Jesus was perfectly obedient and fulfilled all the prophesies concerning the Savior. Jesus took our sins and the sins of all people of all places of all times upon Himself and He suffered hell for us in our place. And yet, we know the rest of the history, death and the grave had no hold over Him as He rose victorious over sin, death and the devil. Jesus reconciled our account before God so that we owe nothing, rather it is God in His infinite grace and mercy who continues to give to us, pouring out on us and lavishing us with all His good gifts and blessings, faith, forgiveness and eternal life.
What a great God we have. What a gift giving God we have. We rejoice in our Lord’s gifts, in His means of grace through which He comes to us and pour out on us all the gifts He has to give. Indeed, as He comes to us through His Word, through Holy Baptism, through Holy Absolution, and through His tangible Word in His Holy Supper He gives us faith, strengthens our faith, forgives our sins, gives us eternal life and even stirs in us our response of faith, that is to rejoice and say, to God be the glory for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
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