EVERY STORY WHISPERS HIS NAME September 20, 2015 – December 13, 2015
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EVERY STORY WHISPERS HIS NAME September 20, 2015 – December 13, 2015 RED OAK CHURCH ANDREWS, NC (All Scripture references are from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted.) 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Genesis 3; Brody Holloway ................................................................................................. 5 Old Testament-New Testament; Zach Mabry .................................................................. 17 Genesis 4; Spencer DaVis .................................................................................................. 31 Genesis 5-9; Brody Holloway ............................................................................................ 43 Genesis 11; Brody Holloway ............................................................................................. 55 Genesis 22; Rob Conti ...................................................................................................... 63 Acts 7; Brody Holloway .................................................................................................... 73 Judges 13-16; Rob Conti ................................................................................................... 87 2 Samuel 7; Brody Holloway ............................................................................................. 99 Daniel; Brody Holloway .................................................................................................. 113 Esther; Brody Holloway .................................................................................................. 127 Isaiah 11; Brody Holloway .............................................................................................. 143 3 September 20, 2015 Storying Through the Old Testament Genesis 3 Brody Holloway Turn to Genesis 3. We are going to work through the whole chapter, beginning with the first six Verses. “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” It’s been a long hard day. It was a tough weekend and it’s been a hard day. I think it was maybe three or four Sundays ago, the week that we looked at complementarianism—that was a hard sermon and difficult preparation. It was a hard Sunday getting ready and John Michael and Alex were at our house. They were in town that weekend and I kind of bounced my sermon off of them. He was a heady, nerdy academic and theologically he was way deeper than I am and he was just twenty-four years old or so. As I was bouncing stuff off of him we had an amazing time. You know, when you get news like we got today1 you immediately go back to moments, and times, and memories that you had with that person. Maybe you haVe a mom or dad who has passed, or maybe passed thirty years ago, and there are still times where, in your mind, you go back to things that happened when you were a kid or conversations you had. This is for eVery human; if we don’t understand what happened on this day in Genesis 3 then there is not one day in the rest of history that will eVer make sense to us. It will not. There will be good days but they will be followed by bad days, and there will be bad days that are followed by good days, but history will not make sense if we don’t get this day right. If we don’t understand what went on in Genesis 3, then no other day in history will make sense, particularly and especially the day that God was killed on a cross. It won’t make sense. It won’t connect the dots. We won’t be able to connect history together in the way that it needs to be connected together. So, it’s critical for us to understand Genesis 3 and it’s particularly critical for us to understand Genesis 3 as it points to the cross of Christ and as it points to Jesus. And when we begin to understand the fall of man and the sin that came into the world and its implications for us and the repercussions in each man, woman, and child’s life, and heart, and physical and spiritual existence, then we can begin to understand the need for the cross and the need for salVation. I remember when I was a kid; I was about six years old when I haVe my first memory of recognizing the brokenness of the world. Maybe you can go back and you can think in your mind of something that you witnessed, or something that you saw, or something that occurred. Oddly enough, I was trying to think about when my innocence was sort of taken; not that little kids are innocent. I haVe a two-year-old and, if anything, he seems Very guilty often. But, the innocence in terms of naiveté; when did it happen that you realized that fairies and princesses aren’t real, the stories that you haVe heard are not accurate, the world is not a fairy tale; but the world is broken, people are broken, and sin is real? When did that start to become a reality? Go back in your mind and think about that. I remember in 1979, I would haVe been about seVen years old, and I remember my mother telling me that I could no longer play outside. I was so confused. We lived in the country and we didn’t really haVe any neighbors. There was an apple orchard beside us and the farmer was on the other side of that. But, mama wouldn’t let us go outside because there was a string of abductions and murders of kids between about age fiVe and fifteen in the city of Atlanta2, where about twenty-fiVe or twenty-six kids disappeared and were murdered. So, moms were freaking out all oVer the 1 John Michael Ritchie, a former staff member of Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters (the camp where Brody is director) and friend of many of Red Oak’s members, was killed in a tragic camping accident over the weekend. 2 Known as the Atlanta Child Murders, and locally as the “missing and murdered children’s case”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_murders_of_1979%E2%80%9381 5 country. I remember, as a seven-year-old, I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t go outside and I remember my parents haVing to sit me down and say, “There are bad people in the world; bad people who want to hurt little people. They want to steal kids, kill kids, hurt kids, and abuse kids.” I remember that sort of being this moment in my life where, as a seVen-year-old I realized that eVil people really exist, and I began to connect the dots. The world is really broken and the world is really fallen. Later that year, my Poppy, who was my great-granddad, died. I was in the second grade when he died. He passed away, and I remember seeing my dad, and a couple of my uncles, and my granddad weeping. They were just weeping at the funeral of this awesome, great, patriarchal man, and I realized for the first time that my dad could shed tears, and my uncles could shed tears, and pain was real for eVerybody. I began to get this insanely fast education into this reality that the world is broken, sin is real, and the effects are deVastating. The next year a young man came to liVe with us who was about fourteen or fifteen years old. My parents had fostered kids from the time I was real small and a kid came to live with us when I was about five or six years old. His feet were Very deformed and misshapen, and when he came to us I remember my mom explaining to me about how he had been taken from his home where he had been kept in a cellar. The story was just really dark. He had been abused, and beaten, and his feet became misshapen because he had to wear shoes that were too small and when he came to us he had bruises and broken bones. When I was in fourth grade – I remember because it was when the University of North Carolina was beating Georgetown in the national championship on Michael Jordan’s last second shot3 – we were all sitting around the liVing room at an uncle’s house. I don’t remember who all was there but there were a lot of family members and a lot of church friends. People didn’t haVe cell phones and I know that is completely shocking to so many of you. In fact, the phones that we did haVe actually had cords that connected them to something stationary in the wall. But, I remember that there was a phone call that came in and it was this kid who was, at this time, maybe seVenteen or eighteen years old. I think he was a senior in high school. Anyway, he asked for my dad and my dad got on the phone, and I remember my dad and a couple of uncles running out of the house. My mother gathered us all into the room and she told us that our brother – he was referred to as our brother because he was like an older brother to me because I was fiVe or six when he came to liVe with us – was not well and that my dad needed to go see him. Well, what had happened is that he had called my dad and told him to tell the family goodbye because he was going to end his life that night.