Advent 2023: The Prophets

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Morning. The reading is on your service sheets that you got when you came in. And the first reading is Jeremiah, chapter 33, verses twelve to 16. This is what the Lord Almighty says. In the place desolate and without people or animals.

In all its towns there will again be pastures for shepherds to rest their flocks. In the towns of the hill country, of the western foothills and of the Negev, in the territory of Benjamin, in the villages around Jerusalem, in the towns of Judea, flocks will again pass under the hand of the one who counts them, says the Lord. The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfil the good promise I made to the people of Israel and Judah in those days. And at that time I will make a righteous branch sprout from David's line. He will do what is just and right in the land.

In those days, Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is a name by which it will be called the Lord, our righteous saviour.

Next reading is mark, chapter twelve, verses 35 to 37. And it's on your sheets. While Jesus was teaching in the temple courts, he asked, why do the teachers of the law say that the messiah is the son of David? David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared, the Lord, said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet. David himself calls him Lord.

How then can he be his son? The large crowd listened to him with delight.

Well, good morning, everyone. I'm Johnny, as Chris said before, and it's really good to be here and talk and think a few moments about this passage. So Jesus was teaching in the temple courts and he asked the people there a question. And the basic essence of that question is, am I just another king? Or am I the one who is going to take everything wrong with the world and make it right again?

And as we read this part of the Bible, he's going to ask each of us the same question today. Am I just another king, just another good leader that you could look to? Or am I the one who will take everything wrong and make it right?

What will it be? So the people at the time, they thought that he was going to be another king, like King David. So you'll remember from our Old Testament mountain. Where was King David? On the mountain?

Yes. Sophie, did you go? Oh, yeah. You're just saying hi. Yeah.

I thought you were putting your hand up. Yes, he was really high up. They thought he was just going to be another great king like David, maybe David's son, a mini version of David that's what they were expecting. Look at the way Jesus puts the question. He says, why do the teachers of the law say that the messiah, the special promised king, is going to be the son of David?

He's saying, why do they think he's only going to be another kind of mini version of David? Well, we'll think about that question today. What's it going to be? Jesus, the good leader or Jesus the one who will make everything in the world right again? And we're going to think of that through shadows from the Old Testament because we're thinking about the prophets today.

So I need two prophets to come up and help me to make some shadows and give us pictures of what Jesus would be like for this. Bethany? Yes? Do you want to come up? You can be Jeremiah.

Anyone else want to be? Anyone else? Go on then. Sophie team Tanner, come on up. Come on up.

So the first. So we're thinking about the prophets. Yeah. If you guys head over there now, the prophet who, what are prophets? Prophets are people who speak God's words.

And in the Old Testament there's lots of words that they spoke that are kind of like pictures. They're like shadows of what was going to come in the future, what Jesus would be like. And we just see his outline. And then when Jesus arrived, we can look back and say, ah, that was a shadow of Jesus all along. So that's what we're going to get today.

And our first helper is Jeremiah. And Jeremiah lived at the very lowest point on the old Testament Bible storyline. So the first thing I'd like you to pop, and you'll have to pop this really close. Bethany, you're Jeremiah. Can you pop that really close so it looks really big?

So if you go over there to that, let's see if anyone can see what this is. You might have to hold it really close. I haven't actually tried this before. Oh, dear. It looks very blurry.

Okay, maybe move a bit further out, see if. Can anyone kind of guess what that might be a shadow of?

Yeah. A door or a gate. But what's the gate got on it? Bars. Yeah.

If you were a Lego man, you'd be stuck in prison. Yes. Yes, it's a prison. And I mean, the reason that's the first shadow is right at the beginning of where our passage is in Jeremiah 33. Jeremiah is in prison.

And it was a really sad time when Jeremiah was around because not only was he in prison, it was almost like the whole city he was in was in prison. They were totally surrounded by the babylonian armies. And as he looks out of prison, you get a sense of it from the reading, don't you? This place is desolate and without people or animals. So Jeremiah is looking out, he's trapped, and all he can see is emptiness on the streets.

Earlier in the passage that we didn't read, it says that the people were just breaking down their houses and the palaces so they could put more bricks on the walls to stop the Babylonians getting in horrible, dark times, that he was in the city surrounded. And it's a dark and horrible time. And it was worse than that because it wasn't just like there were enemies outside of the city, but actually the people were trapped by enemies withinside their own hearts. It says that they'd turned their face away from God, and God had turned his face away from them for the things they'd done wrong. And the reason that Jeremiah was in prison was he was talking from God, and nobody wanted to know, so they wanted to get rid of him and put him in prison.

But God had not given us up on his people. So let's go to our second branch now, Jeremiah, second shadow. Gave that one away. Yeah. Do you want to hold that up and kind of wave it around in front of there?

I mean, there's been a lot of spoilers for this one, but this is a righteous branch. I don't know if you saw that in our reading in verse 15, God speaks to Jeremiah when he is at the lowest point of his life, really, and the darkest moment in the people of Israel's history that far. And he says to him, verse 15, in those days, and at that time, I will make a righteous branch sprout from David's line. So God's saying, I'm going to send someone who's going to be called the righteous branch. And it's a bit like David is a tree, and one of David's great, great, great great grandsons is going to be like a branch, and he's going to be righteous.

He's going to be a good king. Finally, the leader who's actually going to do the right thing and help us.

So at the lowest of the low, when he looks around in all of the despair and fear and emptiness, God's answer to that is, I'm going to send a king like David, and you will be safe with him. Did you see what the verse 16 said? In those days, Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. So at the point where all their enemies are around them, and even they themselves have turned away from God. God comes in and says, peace and safety is coming.

Jesus is coming. So that's Jeremiah. He's our first helper. He shows us the branch, the righteous king. Our second helper is David.

Thank you, Sophie. So branch can go now. So Jesus takes us to our second helper in those verses from Mark twelve.

Now, King David was at the high point, wasn't he? The very highest king of the Old Testament? And Jesus says, listen to what that King David said. Am I just a mini version of him? Well, look at what King David says.

The Lord said to my lord, sit at my. Can you put your right hand in front of me?

Go a bit closer so it gets bigger.

Right. What's that? I mean, yeah. Can anyone see what that is? Yeah.

Naomi, what was that? Yeah, it's a hand. I got that over there. Yeah. And it's.

And it's Sophie's right hand or King David's right hand. No, in fact, it's the Lord's right hand. The Lord said to my lord, sit at my right hand. Is he just another mini version of David or is he the king who's going to make everything wrong with the world? Right again?

This picture, or the shadow is a picture of what Jesus is like. And the shadow of being at the right hand means that God is putting Jesus at the highest imaginable place, the place of his total strength in his right hand.

So Jesus sits at the most important place you can imagine. How could he be another king just like David? If even David at the highest point is saying, there is someone who is so much higher than I am?

Let's just take a moment for that to sink in. This is really a passage telling us that there is nobody more powerful than Jesus. There is no greater name than Jesus. There is no conceivable superior to him. He is the one at the right hand of God.

So then we have the last shadow, which is a foot with shoe off.

There we are. Look at that foot.

So if you could hold it there for the next three minutes, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet. This is a shadow that is saying God is going to take everything wrong with the world and make it right again.

Jesus has many enemies in the Bible, but they are not people. They are all the things that are wrong with the world. And being put under his feet means he is going to finish them. He is going to dominate over them and bring them to an end.

Jesus enemies are everything wrong with the world. And there's a long list of things there aren't there things like sin, what the Bible calls the wrong things that we do in our hearts, the wrong thoughts we have? Satan, he's an enemy of God. Death itself is his enemy. God is saying to Jesus, sit at my right hand and have all the strength of my right hand until I bring an end to all of the pain caused by sin, all of the hurt caused by Satan, all of the fear caused by death, sit there and rule in power until I finish everything that's wrong with the world.

So we see that Jesus is not just going to be a great leader like David, who has armies and some land and brings a bit of peace for a while in a particular nation at some point in history. But we can remember the shadows that the prophets taught us, that he will be the one to make everything wrong with the world right again. We'll pause there and we'll sing of this great king. So if you'd like to stand as the music stars, I wonder how you'd answer Jesus question then if he was to put it to you, am I just another king? If he was to ask you, am I just another leader, another religious figure, another political leader?

Or am I the one that the deepest cry in your heart has been longing for, the one who's going to make everything wrong turn right? And the prophets have shown us, haven't they, through these two passages, David and Jeremiah, they've shown us the branch that he's going to be. The righteous son of David shown us the hand and the power that God has given him and the foot, and how he will bring to an end everything wrong, all the wrong things in the world will be stopped by Jesus and he will make the world right again. And that idea just leaves us thinking, well, why is the world so messed up if that's true? And if you look at what David says, I don't know if you spotted the word until when the Lord said to my Lord, when God the father says to Jesus, sit at my right hand, he says, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.

When Jesus came the first time and he died and he rose again and he went back to the father, it began, he began to bring an end to everything wrong with the world, and he continues to do it. And there's a day coming when he's going to return and he will finally finish it. And we live in between those two.

So let's take a few minutes and just think about what each of these shadows, what does it really mean for us as we go from here? And live our lives, because Jeremiah was in a really awful situation. And, you know, we've been seeing a lot in recent weeks on the news of what it is like to live under a siege, and he was in a sieged city in probably the most painful time in his life.

And he needs to know, in that moment, he needs to know that God is strong enough to deal with what he's going through. And we need that as well. We need that too. Even in the hardest situations we go through, we need to know that Jesus is strong enough to deal with what we're facing.

And that's worth thinking on.

Jesus says to us in Mark twelve, I am that king. I am that one for you. And there are many ways, aren't there, that we might feel trapped like Jeremiah did, surrounded by enemies, confined in and afraid? There are many times that we might lose hope or feel that we look out and there's just emptiness or fear, and that's going to be different for each of us. But let's just think about a couple of things.

Often the thing that makes us feel trapped is actually ourselves, isn't it? It's what's going on in our own minds, really.

And thinking about that idea of what the Bible calls sin, the idea that we know what we want to do and what we want to be, but we just can't do it. We feel trapped by the enemy on the inside, as it were. Like, our hearts just love doing wrong things that we know harm us and other people, and we just love everything else apart from God all the time. It just flows out of us.

And I wonder what that is for you. Perhaps it's that you crave other people feeling really good about you. That's a common one, isn't it, for us? Or perhaps it's a certain physical feeling that you find that you just have to have that, and it's become a habit, become a pattern of your life. Or often we start craving control over our circumstances, or I don't know what it is for you, it's probably something different.

But we don't have to look far inside ourselves to find desires that we know are wrong, that are too strong for us to deal with on our own. And in that moment, how do we know that the darkness isn't going to win? Like, how do we know that it's going to be okay, that God will bring us through? And we know it because of Mark twelve, because Jesus is not just the son of David. And we can look up at him and we can see one who is strong enough to deal with anything that we are facing.

And it began when he died, didn't it? And all of our sin was nailed to the cross with Jesus. And then he's with us through every step of our lives, isn't he? He never leaves us in the struggle. And there is a day coming when we will see our righteous king, that branch, and our hearts will be changed.

We will be like him.

There are other enemies, too, that God describes in the Bible. He tells us about spiritual beings that exist, not just physical ones.

And that might sound really strange to you, but I guess if God exists, it's not very surprising that there are other spiritual beings out there that exist. And some of them are described as evil. We hear about Satan, one who is an evil spirit who tempts and accuses and attacks people.

And that might be a case for you. You know, that is a real experience for people in their lives at times. And it might be that this is a time of spiritual battle for you. How do you know? How do you know it's going to be okay and you're going to make it through, you know?

Because Jesus is sitting at the right hand of God in the place of absolute power, and he's strong enough to deal with what we're going through.

When Jesus died on the cross, he took away more than just our sins, didn't he? He took away the power of Satan, the Bible says. And he's with us through the struggle. And there's a day coming when he will finish it and all his enemies will be under his feet. Well, for some of us, the thing that makes us feel trapped and surrounded like Jeremiah did is actually death itself.

Death is an enemy. And I know many of you are struggling with serious illnesses or with periods of just intense grief.

And when Jeremiah was there in a city full of grief and disease and fear, God said to him, I'm going to send Jesus. And we can look up to that same Jesus and see that he's strong enough to deal with what we're going through.

When Jesus rose again, the Bible says that he broke the power of death, didn't he? And he's with us through our struggling every day of suffering. And when he comes again and says to those who've died, come out, there is a future day where there will be so much life and resurrection breaking in that death will be finished forever.

We need Jesus. We need Jesus. The one who is really strong enough to deal with our worst enemies, who has broken the power of sin and broken the power of death and broken the power of Satan. We need the king who's at the right hand and is going to bring all his enemies under his feet. So is he just another king?

Or is he the one that you need more than anyone else? The one who's going to make everything wrong with this world right again? Let me pray.

Father, just thinking about these words that you've given to us. We pray that all of us would experience more and more that Jesus is the king, our king, who makes everything wrong right again. And that you'd give each of us freedom from the sins that plague us. Victory in the spiritual fight against Satan. Strength in the temptations we face and hope in the face of death.

And we pray this because of the amazing name of Jesus. Amen.