God's Plan of Salvation Holy Week - Palm Sunday
Today on this Palm Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week we begin what I hope will be a great week for us here in Mure Memorial. We will during today and the services in this coming week look at the reality and nature of God's Plan of Salvation. This will in the course of the week take us through the Bible from the Book of Genesis to the Book of Revelation. We will I hope be able to see by the time Easter Sunday draws to a close the wonderful and perfect plan that God has made for our world. I hope to we will all understand the nature of the plan of salvation, the reason why there is one, how it will all end, our own role in it - and perhaps most importantly why Jesus had to die and why the resurrection is such an essential part in the whole process.
I therefore wish to encourage you to give serious thought to attendance each night this week. For we deal with this on every night in this coming week and draw it to a conclusion next Sunday morning when we celebrate Easter Day.
Now I think we have spent more than long enough in outlining what we are going to do. We will get out of this precisely what we put into it. So coming to this with an open and teachable mind will bring great rewards if God continues to be gracious to us and blesses us in this coming week.
So let us begin.
"In the beginning when God created the universe........."
What did God create? Was it what we see before us on the earth or in the sky. The answer is no what we see is not what was created. What God created was perfect! Look at verse 4 - God makes light and then we read: "God was pleased with what he saw....", verse 10,: God creates the earth and the sea and we read: "and God was pleased with what he saw" ;verse 18 we read of the sun and moon being created and then we read:"and God was pleased with what he saw"
God creates life in the water and all kinds of birds and we read again "and God was pleased with what he saw" and so it continues in this vain.....we find it again in verse 25 after the creation of animal life.
Finally after the creation of mankind we read at verse 31 " God looked at everything he had made and was very pleased." Or as some of you might prefer it:"And God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good."
Like a recurrent chorus in a song we hear again and again in this account that God was pleased with what he saw and that what he had created was very good.
This was not nature red in tooth and claw, but a beautiful and perfectly balanced world, in which man and God were in perfect harmony. Where animals and birds were under the control and protection and authority of man. A veritable paradise. We read in Isaiah Chapter 11 a wonderful description of the new heaven and the new earth but I think we would not be too far wrong to think of this as being quite close to the reality of the Garden of Eden - to the reality of God's perfect creation.
Listen to it as we read it from verse 6 : "Wolves and sheep will live together in peace and leopards will lie down with young goats. Calves and lion cubs will feed together and little children will take care of them. Cows and bears will eat together and their calves will lie down in peace. Lions will eat straw as cattle do. Even a baby will not be harmed if it plays near a poisonous snake. On Zion, God's sacred hill there will be nothing harmful or evil. The land will be as full of knowledge of the Lord as the seas are full of water."
What a wonderful picture this paints. An ideal world of perfect relationships. No death, no hatred, no decay, no killing, just a paradise of love and fellowship with the creator.
This then is the most important point for us to grasp - God created a perfect world - a perfect universe. And God looked at all that he had created and it was good!
And in that perfect creation God set man. Not man as we know him but man as he should be - made in the image of God and perfect creation.
And as a created being we could have been created no higher as we read in Psalm 8, " what is man, that you think of him; mere man that you care for him. Yet you made him inferior only to yourself, you crowned him with glory and honour. You appointed him ruler over everything you made; you placed him over all creation, sheep and cattle and the wild animals too; the birds and the fish and the creatures in the sea." And we read in Genesis 1v27:"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them."
So in earthly parlance we might say all in the garden was lovely.
Into the Garden came the great tempter, the evil one who tempts Eve to disobey God. He does it so subtly he tempts for he tempts Eve to reach beyond her perfect state and become like God. But of course being perfect and close to God where else can she go but down. It is like being on the top step of a ladder and then trying to go one more step higher.....disaster follows.
Let me quote to you if I may two short passages from Nigel Cameron's excellent little book - "Complete in Christ".
"Man was made in the image of God and he was made perfect. His humanity, his existence as a bodily creature with will, mind and emotions, far from being evil reflects his constitution as God made him. That is, in the physical and conscious form of Homo sapiens - body,mind will and feelings - man is the image of God, God's finest creature and the one creature made for fellowship with himself." and then in talking of Adam he writes, "For what poor Adam could not see was like God he already was as like God as ever a creature could be. And though in his vain search to rise above his God appointed station he succeeded only in bringing down the human race into sin, he could not destroy God's purposes. In incarnation and atonement his folly has been undone and God has taken human form in order to lead man back to himself. Adam's folly lay in believing he could ever rise higher than his human station. There is no higher station open to any creature."
And so we have two vital verses in Genesis 3. At verse 17 we read: "To Adam he said, "because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'you must not eat', Cursed is the ground because of you, through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. " And then in verse 23, "So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken".
The FALL OF MAN had of course cosmic consequences since it was not only man that fell under the curse but also all of creation, from the atom to the galaxy, from the amoeba to the elephant - the pollution of sin spread throughout all of God's perfect creation.
This then is the scene against which everything else must be viewed. For we can have no true understanding of the role of Abraham, Moses and the prophets nor indeed of Jesus and the Church unless we firstly understand the cataclysmic and cosmic nature of The Fall.
And there can never be a true understanding of the nature of the events of Palm Sunday of the way in which Jesus declared himself to be the Messiah until we understand the nature of perfect creation and the total fall of man the and outworking of God's great and glorious plan of salvation.
So we have established the groundwork and the basis on which we must build our understanding of the Bible and our world. This is the bedrock, the foundation of our argument that we will tease out in this coming week. God's perfect creation was polluted absolutely and totally by man's wilful disobedience. It is in that tragic situation that we must now leave the story for today. Adam and Eve trudge from the garden, banished into a hostile world. Within there bodies lie the seeds of physical death, their fellowship with their creator is over.........they reached for that which could not be obtained and fell from grace.... and hard on their heels comes the tempter to do his evil work at every turn..........the world as we know it had begun....and in the days that lie ahead we find murder, hatred, anger, lust and every perversion of what was and is good.
In the days that lie ahead people begin to worship other gods, strange gods, strange lumps of created material made in the image of created things. And man walks into darkness.