CHRISTMAS WITH JEREMIAH AND HOSEA

(INTRO) GOD DIDN’T SKIP OVER THE PAIN AT CHRISTMAS

[1]WELCOME: Good morning Church! I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas Day this past week. It’s good to be with you worshipping. If you’re a guest with us this morning on campus, or just now joining us online, we’re glad you’re with us. My name is Nic Cook and I’m one of the pastors here at Cornerstone. For our teaching time this morning, we’re going to wrap up our…

SERIES: BC Christmas, Before Christmas a Christmas prequal. We’ve been going through the letter written by a follower of Jesus named Matthew. And as Matthew told his version of the Christmas story, he loved to point back to other stories that led up to the story of Christmas. Stories about Abraham, David, Isaiah, and Micah. Each one of these stories helps us see the heart of the God. A God who loves to bring outsiders, doubters, and failures into his family. A God who stepped into this world and lived among us and now lives inside us. A God who doesn’t want us to live in fear. A God who wants us to trust that his plans can never fail. Today, we’re going to look at the last two references that Mathew makes attached to the birth of Jesus. Christmas according to…

· HOSEA AND JEREMIAH: It’s the part of the Christmas story that talks about Herod killing babies and Jesus’ parents fleeing to Egypt. As I thought about this passage, I realized that in my entire life of going to church, I have never heard this passage preached at Christmas. It’s like we read right up to this passage and then stop. I’ll be completely transparent here, I tried to find a way not to preach this sermon for a couple of reasons. The first is that I don’t want to bum anyone out during Christmas. I want Christmas to be the most wonderful time of the year. It’s also the time when people who are new to Church and Christianity have a tendency to visit for the first time, so I don’t want to scare them away. Yet, I found myself wrestling with the fact that God wanted this included in his story of Christmas. He didn’t shy away from it. It’s like God wanted to say, Christmas is more than just a happy story about wise men, angels, and a baby. It’s the story of God dealing with the messiness and brokenness of this world. [2]GOD DIDN’T SKIP OVER THE PAIN OF THE WORLD AT CHRISTMAS. For some, Christmas is not the most wonderful time of the year. It’s a time when loved ones die, when our world is turned upside down. It’s a time when outside of the hallmark movies, there are wars, sickness, poverty, and a whole list of other things that make us say, THIS ISN’T THE WAY IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE. And Matthew says, in the middle of the pain and suffering, God came to do something about it. This world isn’t right, but I’m coming to begin making all the sad things of this world come untrue! So, if you’ll open up your bibles to [3][Matthew 2:13-18] Let’s look at what God has to say about the suffering of this world and his plan through Jesus. Let’s pray for the Spirit to help us hear, understand, and run to Jesus. [pray/read]

(TEACH/APP) SLAVERY AND EXILE (God)

Last week we talked about King Herod, the “king of Judea”. He wasn’t actually King but was the ruler in charge of Judea by the Roman Empire. He’s described as being both passionate and incredibly jealous. Historically, if he was worried that someone would threaten his power, he dealt with them. He had his brother-in-law drowned. He put his wife on trial and executed her and then killed his and mother-in-law as well. Then he kills his brother-in-law. Later on in his life, He then suspects his own kids of trying to overthrow him, pardons one and executes two others. This is the man who hears that there is a baby born in Bethlehem being called the “king of the Jews”. So naturally, a man who is capable of killing his own family, isn’t worried about killing a few babies. So, he gives an order to his soldiers to kill any child under 2 years old in the town of Bethlehem. God sends Joseph an angel to speak to him in his dream and tells him to take his family 80 miles south into Egypt where Herod is not in control. Joseph listens to God, trusts him, and is obedient and they flee. Matthew knows that the first people who hear this story are going to be good Jews who have grown up being taught two major stories about the suffering of God’s people. The major stories of suffering were about SLAVERY AND EXILE. Let’s start with their…[4]

SLAVERY: Matthew uses a prophecy from a man named Hosea who lived around 700-800ish years before Jesus. God used Hosea to deliver both a beautiful and gut-wrenching message to the Jewish people. He was called to marry a prostitute who continually ran away from him and ran back to her old life. He would go and bring her back to him and she would leave him again. This was a real-life physical picture of the spiritual reality of God’s relationship with his own people. God was trying to show his people what he was like and what they were like. He was the loving husband who had rescued them from a life of oppression, exploitation, abuse, and brokenness and brought them into his family, care, and protection. Yet Israel was like an ungrateful, unfaithful wife that kept running back to their old life. So the theme of Hosea is of God’s love and Rescue, and of Israel’s rebellion and unfaithfulness and running to other gods. So, Matthew is points us back to God’s message through Hosea in [5-8][Hosea 11:1-7] While the metaphor of God being a loving faithful husband that rescues his broken and unfaithful bride is the major image, Hosea shifts to the image of a Dad raising His son. God reminds his people of when they were slaves in Egypt. How he loved them and used his power to rescue them. He led them in the wilderness and brought them into an abundant land. He’s a loving Father who protects them, teaches them how to walk, shows them right and wrong, and provides for them. Yet they take the things God has provided for them and use them as sacrifices to false gods. They use their wealth to pay for protection from Egypt and Assyria. They run back to slavery. They were meant to be free and they kept running away from God and back into slavery. Now, what does this have to do with us here and now?

· [9]SOME OF THE SUFFERING WE BRING ON OURSELVES BECAUSE WE CHOOSE TO SERVE SOMETHING OR SOMEONE OTHER THAN GOD: One time as Jesus was teaching, he started talking about how listening and applying his teachings would lead to being free. Some people said, we’ve never been slaves, why would you talk about freedom and being set free. [10]Jesus responds by saying “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” [Jn 8:34-36] Later on one of Jesus’ disciples named Peter said it this way [11-12]“For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.” [2 Peter 2:19] We don’t like the word slave, so we use words like driven, focused, or maybe obsessed on the acceptable end of the spectrum, or addicted on the more serious end of the spectrum. We’re driven by my GPA, or our income, or climbing the ladder, being the best on the team. No, we’ve become slaves to our performance. We’re focused on our fitness, on developing our online presence, or being active and involved in everything in the community. No, we’ve become a slave to our appearance. I’m dedicated to caring for people. It’s my goal to make my spouse happy. No, we’re slave to being needed, wanted, or liked. We’re obsessed with sports, hunting, this show on Netflix or Amazon. No, we’ve become slaves to escapism and entertainment. Or we’ve become addicted to alcohol, drugs, pornography. No, you’re a slave to the bottle, substances, and pixels on a screen. The God’s of appearance, achievement, pleasure, comfort, will take all of your time, all of your money, and demand even more. You’ll never be fit enough, never popular enough, never achieve enough, never accumulate enough, never be secure enough, never make everyone happy, always let someone down. But we try to get the good life through those things and people anyway instead of turning to God. It is God’s great desire to set us free! He wants to win our hearts! He wants to change our hearts. He wants us to turn to him to find the love, significance, and security we desire and then live well! Jesus came to deliver us from slavery to sin! Happiness can’t be found apart from him, so he allows us to deal with pain because it’s an invitation to run back to him and find what we truly need. Matthew then switches to the second major time of suffering for God’s people as they were…

[13]LIVING IN EXILE: [Mt. 2:18] says… Matthew quotes part of the message that God gave through Jeremiah. The Jewish nation were descendants of a man named Jacob who had two wives, one named Leah and one named Rachel. When the Jewish Kingdom split in two after David and Solomon, the people who came from Rachels children made up the northern kingdom. They were the ones that the Assyrian army came in and defeated and then deported. Ramah was the place where they took the prisoners before marching them off into exile. He compares the weeping of the mothers whose children lost their children in Bethlehem to the weeping of the mothers in the Northern Kingdom of Israel hundreds of years earlier when their cities were destroyed, and their children were enslaved and taken away. Jeremiah had promised that this would happen in advance because of the rebellion and unfaithfulness of God’s people. He was using a brutal and sinful empire like Assyria as part of his plan. Yet he also promised that exile wouldn’t last forever. Matthew quotes [14][Jeremiah 31:15] What’s important is that yes, there is mourning and weeping because the people were going to suffer and live in exile. God tells his people, you’re going to go into exile. You won’t be were you want to be. You won’t be able to live like you want to live. You will experience suffering. [15]But [Jer. 31:16] says, Thus says the Lord: “Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward for your work, declares the Lord, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy.” Although the majority of people were suffering in exile because they had been rebellious, you know there were people suffering simply because they were being affected by living in a world broken by sin and the consequences of other people’s sinful choices. For example, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, didn’t end up in exile because of their sin. They hadn’t turned away. Yet they still had to deal with pain and suffering. So God says to both those who sinned and those who were being affected by sin, YES, YOU’RE IN EXILE, I have WORK FOR YOU TO DO WHILE IN EXILE, and I PROMISE AN END TO YOUR EXILE AND BRING YOU HOME. What does God mean, don’t mourn, there’s a reward for your work? What work does God want them to do as they are suffering in exile? If you jump back to Jeremiah 29, the people who are currently living in exile in Babylon are told this [16-17][Jer. 29:4-7] As long as you’re in exile, become neighbors, settle in, be a blessing to the people you’re surrounded by. Pray for them. Seek their good. You may be suffering, but show the world around you what it looks like to still trust and follow God in the middle of it.That’s the work I’ve given you to do. Be examples to the world. I believe that part of the Christmas story is that…[18]

· SOME OF OUR SUFFERING IS BECAUSE WE ARE STILL LIVING IN EXILE: When the Jewish people were able to finally able to return to Jerusalem, did their suffering end? No! They were still dealing with living in a sinful world where empires were oppressive, wars raged, disease still ran rampant, and death still reigned. Exile wasn’t about leaving Babylon. Do you see a pattern here? Slavery didn’t stop because people left Egypt and Suffering didn’t stop just because they returned from exile in Babylon. Yes, we can suffer because we have sinned. We can also suffer because we’re living in a world affected by sin and sinful choices made by others. We’re not truly home yet! We long for the day when this world will be made right. When heaven and earth are no longer separated and the exile from God’s presence is finally over! When we suffer, we must ask, is this because I’ve run away from Jesus, or is this a result of living in a world that turned it’s back on Jesus? EITHER WAY, THE ANSWER IS RUN TO JESUS. TURN TO HIM, LEARN FROM HIM, PUT YOUR HOPE IN HIM…

Matthew is looking at the fact that Jesus came and saying, keep holding on to the promise that the exile will end!Matthew looks at the two major ways God’s people suffered through slavery and exile and says…[19]

(JC) JESUS SETS US FREE, AND LEADS US OUT OF EXILE

The birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus is God’s complete and satisfactory response to suffering.

In the birth of Jesus we see that God himself took on flesh and stepped into this world to be with us. God did not leave us on our own. He did not turn a blind eye to the fact that our sin was destroying us. He didn’t disregard that our world was full of pain, sickness, and death. He made promises, thousands of them, and he kept them all. Promises to deal with our sin and to end our exile. He knows exactly what it feels like to suffer. He experienced suffering from living in a broken world. He was hated, mistreated, lonely, abused, and rejected.

Yet He lived a perfect life. The life of Jesus is the most beautiful, compelling life that has ever existed. If you want to know what a good and beautiful life worth living looks like, it’s the life of Jesus. He loved the unlovable and blessed those who cursed him. He did the work of God while away from his home and here on earth. He blessed, loved, and served those he met. He taught us that God and his ways are so much better and more fulfilling than ours. He showed us what a life of freedom from sin looks like. He never once chose to put pleasure, achievement, appearance, security, or anything else in front of his love of God and his trust in him. He never sinned. Not once.

Then because of his love, he showed us what sin does to us and where it leads us by his death on the cross. He showed us how it destroys us, how it distorts us and disfigures us, and leads us to death and separation from God. He took the consequences of all our sins, even though he never sinned. He showed us how a sinful world deals with its enemies, by killing them. He showed us how a loving God deals with his enemies, by dying for them.

His resurrection shows us that he is powerful enough to overcome death. That suffering isn’t the final word. He proved he was God. His resurrection was the first reversal of the exile. He made it possible to go through the door of death and enter into our true home!

His ascension into heaven means that he is alive and still at work. He is guiding human history to his intended conclusion. He is using his holy Spirit to help us overcome sin in our lives. He is using us to do the work he has for us while we’re still in exile. He’s calling us to love the outsiders, to forgive each other and our enemies, to be a blessing to this world. To be lights in the darkness and messengers of hope in the middle of suffering. And one day he’s coming again to finally lead us out of exile. He’ll make all brokenness and sadness come undone. He’ll bring restoration and healing. We’ll be with him face to face. The Christmas story unashamedly tells the story of suffering because it is the turning point where Jesus comes to put an end to slavery and give us hope that our exile from his God’s presence is coming to an end! AT CHRISTMAS WE STAND AND WORSHIP BECAUSE OF TWO COMINGS. THE FIRST COMING THAT SET US FREE FROM SIN, AND THE SECOND COMING THAT ENDS OUR EXILE.