Things Into Which Angels Long To Look Sermon (1 Peter 1:10-12)

1 Peter 1:10-12 (ESVUK)

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and enquired carefully, enquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

Peter tells us that there were prophets that spoke of this grace, our grace. The grace we have received is our salvation by and through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is the story of the grace of salvation through Jesus Christ. God created us in love for his glory and for our joy. We were made in the image of God to glorify God in all we do, especially by loving God, seen in our lives by our love for each other. However, every one of us has fallen short of this glory. By demanding our autonomy and seeking the right to judge ourselves we’ve traded the glory of God for a false glory of self and Creation rather than the Creator. The Bible calls this failure to glorify God, sin. Because of our sin, every one of us deserves to be separated eternally from the God we have willingly abandoned. Instead, God offers us a free gift of grace, by which we may be rescued from our death penalty and returned to our original purpose. He accomplished this by sending Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to the fallen, wicked world he dearly loved, not with a message of condemnation, but an open invitation to be saved from our own corruption. Jesus, both God and human, lived a perfect, God-glorifying life, as God had always intended for humanity, and then willingly went to his death so that all of us, no matter how sinful or far from God, may have our debt paid for us. Jesus, who never sinned, took the curse of our sin for us once for all, and offers us his eternal life with God in return. When we receive this gift of grace through faith in Jesus our old life, corrupted by sin, dies on the cross, and we are given Jesus’ resurrection life in return. By his grace we are then given the power to live for the glory of God from that point onward and for all eternity, in love, satisfaction, and joy.

Click here to see the above paragraph with all relevant scripture verses included (opens in a new window),or see it with references only at the end of this article.

In short, it’s all about Jesus. Our sin separated us from God, who loved us so much that he paid the penalty himself, in Jesus. His death for our sin and his resurrection made available to us his life so that by grace, through faith, we could be restored to God.

The full audio of this sermon, parts one and two.

Peter is reminding his readers that people have been waiting a very long time for this.

Jesus said to his disciples prophets and kings wanted to see the things they were seeing (Luke 10:24). Later in the same gospel, twice it says that after his resurrection, Jesus twice showed gatherings of his disciples the prophecies found in the Hebrew Scripture that were about him. Once, in Luke 14:25-27, he is walking with two people on the road who do not recognize him, and he shares from the Torah and prophets about himself. Later, he appears to his closest disciples and illuminates the passages for them.

Luke 14:44-48 (ESV)

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things.

Kings and prophets longed to see Jesus. Prophets searched diligently to know who the Messiah would be and when he would come.

God’s grace for us is more than a theology to understand, or a sermon to preach. The gift of God’s grace is in the person, Jesus Christ. In the beginning was the Word, Jesus, and as many as received him, God gave the right to become children of God (John 1). We receive and know, and are known by, Jesus of Nazareth, the Suffering Servant, the Messiah, the King of kings, our Saviour.

It is for Jesus that people waited and yearned and looked and hoped. The last passage of their scripture gave them a hint of what they would see when the Messiah came.

Malachi 4:5-6 (ESV)

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

For four hundred years they waited for this prophet like Elijah. Then, one day, we have the appearance of a strange man in the wilderness in the beginning of the first recorded gospel account of Jesus’ life.

Mark 1:1-4 (ESV)
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,

“Behold, I send my messenger before your face,

    who will prepare your way,

the voice of one crying in the wilderness:

    ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

    make his paths straight,’”

John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

The book of Isaiah is the first of the prophetic books in the Hebrew Scripture, what Christians commonly call the Old Testament. It starts a part of the Bible with which many Christians are far less familiar. I discovered myself when I recently finished the Old Testament. I’d been reading for a few months, beginning in Genesis. By the time I reached Ezekiel, the fourth prophetic book after Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations, I realized how unfamiliar I was with so much of what I was reading compared to the New Testament, Genesis, and maybe the Psalms. So, I decided to read from Ezekiel to the end in a week to try and get the big picture all at once. The big picture I saw, was Jesus.

Here’s the passage in Isaiah that Mark is quoting:

Isaiah 40:1-5 (ESV)

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

 Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

    and cry to her

that her warfare is ended,

    that her iniquity is pardoned,

that she has received from the Lord's hand

    double for all her sins.

 A voice cries:

“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;

    make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

 Every valley shall be lifted up,

    and every mountain and hill be made low;

the uneven ground shall become level,

    and the rough places a plain.

 And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,

    and all flesh shall see it together,

    for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

Isaiah is an amazing book, more often quoted directly in the New Testament than any other book of the Hebrew Scripture other than the Psalms. It was written and compiled during the time of the Kings in Israel. In the books of the Kings and Chronicles, we see a story of corruption overtaking the nation of Israel, as the nation turns from God to idolatry, and from there to injustice and oppression against the poor and vulnerable, contrary to their own law that demanded justice. The kings of Israel covet the power and wealth of the empires surrounding them, and build armies and do violence and prepare for war, rather than being a blessing to the nations of the earth, for which purpose God has told them they were originally called from Egypt and made a nation. For this corruption and violence and injustice, Isaiah prophesies that the nation will suffer violence by the empires they so wished to become, and be forced into exile. But then he also prophesies of God’s salvation for them, the miraculous resurrection of a defeated nation arising from their scattering over the earth, returning to their home, and being reestablished with their temple and covenant and mandate for justice under the blessing of God.

This is the story of Jesus. God sent his son to the world he loved, so that the scattered exiles, God’s people in all the nations of the world, would be drawn together and come to him. For our sin, our corruption, our wicked coveting of the shiny distractions of the violent world instead of God, we deserved to be delivered to their violence. Instead, Jesus was the one broken by the wickedness of humankind, and buried in the earth. Jesus became God’s people for God’s people, taking the punishment of exile from God’s presence in our place. But like Israel, the broken and defeated nation, he was miraculously resurrected. Jesus became God’s place, his body God’s temple in which the fullness of God could now dwell, and from the entire world the scattered people of God now come to Jesus and dwell in him.

John 12:28-34 (ESV)

Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not mine. Now is the judgement of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die. So the crowd answered him, “We have heard from the Law that the Christ remains for ever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?”

The people knew that to be “lifted up” would mean he would be crucified. And they knew who they meant by the “Son of Man.”

Daniel 7:13-14 (ESV)

 “I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven

    there came one like a son of man,

and he came to the Ancient of Days

    and was presented before him.

 And to him was given dominion

    and glory and a kingdom,

that all peoples, nations, and languages

    should serve him;

his dominion is an everlasting dominion,

    which shall not pass away,

and his kingdom one

    that shall not be destroyed.

Jesus is a son of man, a human being. And this human being now sits on the throne as King of kings and Lord of lords. But he is also the Ancient of Days, whose beginning is long before the day of his birth. Jesus was present in the beginning, with God, it says in John Chapter One. And then it says that Jesus was God.

Isaiah 9:1-7 (ESV)
But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.

  The people who walked in darkness

    have seen a great light;

those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,

    on them has light shined.

 You have multiplied the nation;

    you have increased its joy;

they rejoice before you

    as with joy at the harvest,

    as they are glad when they divide the spoil.

 For the yoke of his burden,

    and the staff for his shoulder,

    the rod of his oppressor,

    you have broken as on the day of Midian.

 For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult

    and every garment rolled in blood

    will be burned as fuel for the fire.

 For to us a child is born,

    to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

    and his name shall be called

Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,

    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

 Of the increase of his government and of peace

    there will be no end,

on the throne of David and over his kingdom,

    to establish it and to uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

    from this time forth and for evermore.

The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

Isaiah prophesies that the Messiah will come as a child, to the land of Galilee of the nations. It’s very significant that Jesus was called a Galilean. He didn’t identify with the centre of the nation’s culture. Galilee was right on the edge of Israel, a rural community in the North known as “Galilee of the Gentiles”, and not in a nice way. Isaiah calls it “Galilee of the nations”. Jesus grew up in a multiethnic neighbourhood, shining light among a people who didn’t know the beginning of a Torah from the end of it. Jesus became God’s people manifest in a single man, a blessing to all the nations of the earth as God originally mandated for Israel, his kingdom of priests.

Isaiah says that he will be born as a child, a human, a son of man. But then he says this man will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Jesus is God. Jesus, the child, is the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. His became the story of violent exile and death. Ours becomes his story of resurrection. He becomes our King, different than any other king on earth, one who would become a baby, a servant, falsely accused as a criminal, our Saviour.

The exile is not the only story of death and resurrection in the Hebrew Scripture. Before they were a nation, Israel was in slavery in Egypt. By God’s hand, he brought them out. When they were pursued by the Egyptian army, God told them to only be silent, and God would fight for them (Exodus 14:14). He brought them through the Red Sea, and into the Sea their former slaveowners were destroyed.

This was us. We were slaves to sin. Only by passing through death and being brought back up to life could we emerge on the shores of the Red Sea free from sin, from Satan, from death. Jesus passed through the waters of death for us. In him, we have passed through the Red Sea. Our old life, the empire of violence and slavery that ruled our spirits has been drowned in the waters of our baptism into the person of Jesus Christ. We were plucked from nothingness as orphans and slaves, and given a name, adopted into the family of God, priests of blessing to the world, just as Israel was intended to be, just as Christ is.

                                                             

Noah lived in a time of great wickedness. From the mass of humanity God put his finger on this one man and his family, who would pass through the waters of death in a floating coffin, until the entire world would be made alive again around them under the covenant of the God of the rainbow. Jesus is our ark, in whom we rest in death, and emerge from the tomb into a new world made alive by the seed of the son of God planted in our midst.

In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void. It was useless. It was a mass of purposeless waste. By God’s word it was made alive with God’s purpose for fruitfulness and life. Into the garden of new life God placed his priests to the world, ambassadors of his image and nature to Creation. We were that void, cast blindly in the mass of humanity, without direction, unable to see. By God’s word, the Word made flesh, we were called out from the void, called out of wicked humanity, called out from slavery in Egypt, called out from the wilderness, called out from exile, called out from death itself, and given God’s purpose, given true life, according to God’s word.

For us, Jesus entered the void. From the grave, he grabbed our wrists, and pulled us into light, and gave us authority to speak the words of God, to name Creation, to introduce the world to Jesus.

End Part 1 of 2. Click here for Part 2 of 2. (To be posted Thursday, June 19, 2014)

Click the image above for the entire series.

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Here is the text of the story of salvation from the beginning of this entry. An expanded version, including the full text of all the Bible passages is available here.

 
God created us in love for his glory (Isaiah 43:6-7) and for our joy (Psalm 16:11). We were made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27) to glorify God in all we do (1 Corinthians 10:31), especially by loving God (Matthew 22:37), seen in our lives by our love for each other (John 15:12). However, every one of us has fallen short of this glory (Romans 3:23). By demanding our autonomy and seeking the right to judge ourselves we’ve traded the glory of God for a false glory of self and Creation rather than the Creator (Romans 1:21-23). The Bible calls this failure to glorify God, sin. Because of our sin, every one of us deserves to be separated eternally from the God we have willingly abandoned (Romans 6:23). Instead, God offers us a free gift of grace, by which we may be rescued from our death penalty and returned to our original purpose (Ephesians 2:8-10). He accomplished this by sending Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to the fallen, wicked world he dearly loved, not with a message of condemnation, but an open invitation to be saved from our own corruption (John 3:16-17). Jesus, both God and human, lived a perfect, God-glorifying life, as God had always intended for humanity, and then willingly went to his death so that all of us, no matter how sinful or far from God, may have our debt paid for us (1 Peter 3:18). Jesus, who never sinned, took the curse of our sin for us once for all, and offers us his eternal life with God in return (Galatians 3:13). When we receive this gift of grace through faith in Jesus our old life, corrupted by sin, dies on the cross, and we are given Jesus’ resurrection life in return (Galatians 2:20). By his grace we are then given the power to live for the glory of God from that point onward and for all eternity, in love, satisfaction, and joy.