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You probably know me as the person who writes on marriage and parenting and other Christian life issues. But the thing that really excites me, that gets me up in the morning, that motivates me to do what I do is the Word of God. I think of myself as a Bible teacher, that everything I write about emerges from the study of God's Word.

And so I am excited to launch this journey with you. We call it “The Gospel: One Chapter At A Time,” where we’re going to trace the redemptive story through every book of the Bible. The first time through, we’re going to do summaries of the various books in Scripture, and then we’ll go back and begin to look at the first chapter of every book of the Bible.

But before we begin that, I want to do some preparatory things that ask the question, “Why do I need to study the Bible? What is the Bible actually about? What will the Bible do for me?” And then when we cover those things, we’ll then launch into the study of the various books of Scripture.

I want to take you to a passage that really does address the question, “Why do I need the Bible in my life?” It’s Isaiah 55; I’m going to read verses 10 through 13:

You've all heard somebody teach that the Word of God will never return void but will accomplish its purpose. When I hear someone teach on that passage without teaching on what follows, I go crazy. Because if I said to you, “I will always accomplish my purpose in your life,” what would your next question be? “What in the world is your purpose?” That could be a scary thing to say.

Well, this passage does that. It uses this weird word picture that once you understand it, you get everything that the Bible is about. It is the word picture of rain and snow watering plants. It says when the rain and the snow come down watering these plants, now listen to the weirdness of this, “instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle.”

Now think about this, if I have a thorn bush in my back yard and it’s nourished by the rain and the snow, what do I expect to get? I don't expect to get a myrtle tree; I expect to get a larger thorn bush. It's a word picture that makes no sense. If I have a brier in my back yard and it gets nourished by rain and snow, the only thing I would expect is a bigger brier. What Isaiah is doing is it’s pushing this metaphor to let us know what the Word of God is about.

The Word of God has as its primary purpose the transformation of our hearts, and in the transformation of our hearts, the transformation of our lives. Not that we become bigger and better of what we are, but we become fundamentally different than we could ever have been apart from the Word of God. The theology of the Word of God is never an end in itself. The stories of the Word of God are never an end in itself. The wisdom principles of the Word of God are never an end in themselves; they’re always a means to an end, and the end is the transforming power of God's grace. When the Word of God is brought to you by the Spirit of God, propelled by the grace of God, the result should be heart and life transformation.

You need the Word of God in your life because you need to be transformed. All of us still have the artifacts of sin inside of us. All of us still need the power of transforming grace. If you're not satisfied with who you are, you’re not satisfied with everything you say, everything you choose, everything that you decide, the ways that you act, then you need the Word of God every day in your life. It's God's powerful tool of personal transformation.

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It’s not only important to know why you need the Bible, but if you’re going to get the best out of the Word of God, it's vital to know what the Bible is actually about. There’s massive confusion about what the Bible is about. Some people think it's just doctrine; other people think it's not a story, it's a collection of stories; some people think it's just, you know, practical wisdom for everyday life.

There is this dramatic moment in the life of Christ; it's the most dramatic moment between his birth and the cross that really does explode open our understanding of what the Bible is about. It’s what's called the Transfiguration; let me read for you from Matthew 17:

This moment dramatically pictures who Jesus is, but in picturing who Jesus is, it pictures for us what the Bible is about, why Elijah and why Moses are transfigured there with Christ. Why are they part of this vision?

Because God is declaring that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law. He will be the ultimate Law-keeper. Everything the Law is about is fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus is the promised one that the prophets write about, everything that the prophets hope in; everything that the prophets want are carried on the shoulders of Jesus. Jesus is what the Bible is about. All of the Law and all the Prophets are about him because what the world needs is more than theology, more than wisdom principles, more than interesting moral stories. What the world needs is a Redeemer!

Because I need to be rescued from me, I need One to come who will do what I'm unable to do, who will carry my penalty, the one that I should carry, who will conquer sin and death and resurrection power. The entire Bible, from beginning to end, is the story of the one solution for the human dilemma--it's Jesus!

It's Jesus who the prophets longed for; it's Jesus that the Law pointed to; it's Jesus that the Bible is about. And as you study the Word of God, you're meant to find more than theological wisdom and practical help for daily living; you're meant to find Jesus; you're meant to fall in love with Jesus; you're meant to find rest in Jesus; you're meant to find hope in Jesus; you're meant to surrender your life to Jesus.

Jesus is what you need and that's why the Bible is a massive introduction to the story of Jesus because, in Him, there is hope. The hope that everyone needs whether they realize it or not is found in the person and the work, the power, the presence, the grace, of Jesus. Elijah longed for Jesus; Moses longed for Jesus, and that Jesus is introduced to us and explained to us and given to us in God's Word. The Bible is the story of Jesus.

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It's really important to understand that you never come to the Word of God empty. You’ll always bring attitudes, and thoughts, and perspectives, and life experience, and ways of thinking about yourself, and ways of thinking about God, and ways of thinking about the meaning and purpose of life--all those things shape the way that you come to Scripture. And it's really important, as we think about walking our way through the entire Bible, to understand there is a huge danger in Bible study, and the danger is that you can be a student of the Word of God and entirely miss the point.

There’s this moment in the life of Christ when He's being followed around by Jewish leaders and these are biblical scholars; they’re scholars of the Old Testament, and they're trying to trap Him. And there's one moment where they’re sort of quoting Scripture to Jesus, and Jesus says this, I think this is so powerful, this is John 5:39, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you will have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.”

He’s saying, don't you understand it? In all of your Bible study and all of your pride of Old Testament literacy and Old Testament theology, you have missed the point of the entire story. These are people who spent hours unpacking the Old Testament, who taught it to their children; it was in their common way of thinking about life. These are people that studied the Messiah who would come; yet when He came, they didn't recognize Him.

Think about that! They missed the entire point of the Word of God; everything they studied was about Jesus; everything they studied was to prepare them for the coming of this one that they had longed for. This was the fulfillment of all that they were taught. This was the fulfillment of all the sacrifices that were made. He was the fulfillment of the law that they prided themselves in knowing and understanding.

You see, if you don't come to Scripture with a desire to know Jesus, to surrender your life to Jesus, it's possible that it just becomes abstract, impersonal theology and you pride yourself in your biblical literacy. But there's no evidence that that biblical literacy has transformed the deepest love of your heart.

Study of the Bible ought to alter more than the way you think; it ought to alter the deepest desires of your heart, the fundamental ways you think about who you are and what you need. The Bible should produce in you a fear of idolatry and a growing worship of the One who alone has offered you forgiveness, transformation, rescue, deliverance, life eternal. It's not enough to learn the content. It's not enough to become theologically literate. It's not enough to memorize large portions of Scripture--those are all wonderful things, but those have direction, those have purpose!

Jesus says to the Pharisees and the scribes, “How could you study Scripture and not love me?” What a question for me today? Do I walk away from my study of the Word of God, not just with more knowledge, but a deeper love for Jesus, a deeper sense of need for His grace?

Or do I walk away with a little bit of pride of how knowledgeable I’ve become, and what a good theologian I am, and looking for the next person to correct because I get what the Bible is about? May that not be for us! May humility and neediness and dependence and rest in Jesus, powered by a love for Him, be what the Bible does for us?

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There is a great spiritual war fought on the turf of your heart, fought for control of your soul in every situation, every location, every circumstance of your life. I sort of hate the way spiritual warfare is often talked about; it's this weird world of demons and deliverance (ooOoo!). Really, spiritual warfare is a very normal thing. We live in a dramatically broken world that doesn't operate the way God intended. We live with sin still inside of us. We live with seductive voices of temptation.

And so, marriage is spiritual war, parenting a spiritual war, and surely the study of the Word of God is spiritual warfare. As I said earlier, you have to know that you bring some kind of position, some kind of condition of your heart to your study of the Bible. And so that is war for your heart, that your heart would be open and ready and expectant. I love this parable that Jesus told in Luke 18 of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Let me read for you:

You come to the Word of God full of your own righteousness, proud of what you’ve become, trying to build a little bit of your knowledge base, or you come to the Word of God devastated by the continuing evidence of your own iniquity. You come dependent, crying out that this portion of the Word of God would be a tool of grace in your life, that you would meet your Savior there and that He would take you one more step toward what His grace gives you the potential to be, that through this study, sin would be defeated in your heart.

Or, you come like that Pharisee, reminding yourself of how righteous you’ve become. The thing that’s shocking about the prayer of the Pharisee is that he is basically saying to God, “Here I am, I'm in your temple, but I don't need you; I'm doing quite well on my own.”

I want to encourage you to pray that God would give you the grace to bring these three things to your study of the Word of God. First, an expectant heart; that you really believe God reveals Himself in His Word. You expect that Word to be a tool of transformation. Bring a humble heart. Admit how desperately you need what the Word of God is able to give you. And, bring an obedient heart ready to live in light of what the Word will teach you that day.

I'm afraid, if I'm honest with myself, that there's much of my study of Scripture that’s just a massive waste of time because I came with a proud heart, I came with a closed heart, I came studying for other people while forgetting that I desperately need the Word of God myself.

It’s shocking for me to say this, but I will, “There are many times rather than standing underneath the Word of God, I stood above it.” And it was just an abstract information exercise done by a proud man.

Listen, it takes grace to know how much you need grace! Pray for that grace as you approach God's Word every time. Pray for expectancy and humility and obedience and you watch what God will do through His Word.

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So we begin our journey through the Word of God, summarizing the content of each book of the Bible. I’m going to give every book of the Bible a subtitle, and the subtitle I’m going to give for Genesis is going to surprise you, and it’s going to take some explanation. I’m going to subtitle Genesis, “Welcome To The Story Of Jesus.” You may say, “Paul, Jesus is never mentioned in Genesis, what are you talking about?” Well, actually He is.

Genesis begins with the story of creation. It's not meant to be a scientific analysis of the creation of the world; it's meant to put God in the center of everything! He's the initiator, He's the controller, He's the designer. Life is about Him. I’m going to say more about this the second time we pass through the Scripture, but you could argue the four most important words in all of Scripture are, “In the beginning God,” because, if God is on the scene first, then everything in the human existence is about Him. He's at the center; we’re not!

But if you look at what Colossians says about Jesus, it actually says these shocking words that should change the way you think about Genesis, “All things were created by him; and without him was nothing made that was made.” The creator of Genesis 1 (Are you ready for this?) is Jesus. You are immediately confronted with the awesome glory, the awesome power, the awesome wisdom, the awesome love of Jesus to create this magnificent cosmos that is the place where we all live.

But that's not all. It doesn't take long in Genesis before we meet Jesus the promised Redeemer. Because what Genesis does is Genesis has embedded in it the three acts of the redemptive drama. Think of a play--Act I: Creation; Act II: The Fall of Human Beings into Sin; Act III: Redeeming Grace. All three of those acts, which will comprise the rest of the whole redemptive story, are found, first introduced to you with Jesus. In the redemptive drama, there is only one hero central character; it’s Jesus: Jesus the Creator, Jesus the Redeemer, Jesus the Hope of all of humanity.

Genesis introduces us to Jesus, and it's right to say that because deep inside of all of us is a hunger for and a need for what only Jesus is ever going to be able to supply. It's wonderful to think that the One who is my Savior is also my Creator. He knows everything about me. He knows the purpose for my existence. He understands how I function and operate. He knows how broken I actually am. He comes with the wisdom of the designer. Jesus as Savior comes with a willingness to exercise His power so that I would have everything I need.

What an amazing start to the Word of God that the very One who will bring all of us to glorious conclusion is the One who brought it all into origin. Isn’t that amazing? Jesus, He is the brackets of the Word of God. He's the One who keeps the drama moving; and from the very first start of Scripture, we are introduced to His glory, the glory that is the only glory that will ever satisfy my heart, the glory that I was designed to live for, Jesus.

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Where Genesis ends on a high point, Exodus begins at a low point. The people that God has placed His heart on are now in slavery. I would subtitle Exodus: “Slavery, Rescue, And Restoration.”

Again, the redemptive story is picked up powerfully here because what you learn in Exodus is God is willing to unleash His mighty power for the rescue of His people. That predicts what God is going to do through all the rest of the redemptive story because here's how the story goes. God will harness the forces of nature; He will control the events of human history; He will actually control the rise and fall of kings and princes; He will move the story by His power, so that at just the right moment, the Redeemer will come and will deliver us from the ultimate slavery, not a national slavery to a cruel nation, but slavery to sin--the one slavery that politics or education or government can't break. What a finger-pointing to where the story is going is the whole narrative of Exodus--the drama of slavery and suffering, the picture of redeeming blood of God who does unthinkable, magnificent things just because He loves His people.

There's another theme; it's the theme of God's Law. It’s really important to understand, as you will encounter God's Law in your study of Scripture, to know the place of God's Law. Remember, the Law is given after God has redeemed His people from Egypt, now that's important. You see, the Law was never ever meant as a means of those people achieving God's acceptance. They were now liberated from their slavery because they were already the objects of His love. They’re objects of His rescuing grace. Now He gives them His Law, the Law that has the power to do two very important things.

One, it has the power to expose their need of the grace that that God would offer them. The Law exposes sin. We would not know wrong if it were not for God's Law. And the Law is a beautiful guide for your everyday living. These poor people didn't know how to live. They had been under the bondage of slavery; they didn’t have choices. Now that they would have freedom, they needed to know how to live properly in light of that freedom. God gives them His Law.

Here's what you need to understand; God's Law was not a way of achieving the grace of His acceptance. God's Law is a gift of grace to people He's already accepted. We could never ever stand under the burden of God's Law. If God's Law was a means of us achieving God's favor, we would all be damned. And the history of Exodus makes it clear that was never the purpose of God's Law.

His Law is a continuance of His redeeming grace. The people that He has rescued, He will now restore to be what He has created them to be. Grace is not just rescue, grace is restoration, and that is powerfully presented to us in Exodus. And you and I need both aspects of that grace.

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I love Leviticus! I'm pretty sure that you don't because Leviticus has gotten bad billing. It just seems hard to work through when you get in all the details of the sacrificial system and all the repeated regulations and feast days, and you just get lost. Well, I want to give you a title for Leviticus that I think will help and then explain it. I would subtitle Leviticus, “Holy And Unholy.”

Leviticus is in the Bible to entertain and answer probably one of the most important questions that we could ever ask as we’re getting to understand the biblical story and it’s this: “How can a perfectly holy God live with such unholy people?” How can He do that without compromising His Holiness? How can He except unholy people?

Now the answer is not that the Trinity got together and said, “You know, these are pretty nice people. I know they’re pretty wicked. Why don’t we just turn our backs on that wickedness and just accept them?” No, God wouldn’t do that because God will not violate His justice in order to extend His grace. And so that's why God designed the sacrificial system that's there in Leviticus.

It's designed to atone for sin so that sinful people may have entrance into relationship with God; there could be forgiveness for unholy people. For unholy people to live with a holy God, there has to be penalty paid and forgiveness granted. That's the only way and that's what that system is about. And what you realize is God is not going to unleash His condemnation, but this story is going to tell you that God is going to unleash His forgiveness.

There are few more hopeful books in all of Scripture than Leviticus. Leviticus tells me that there is hope for me in my darkest, dumbest, stupidest, most rebellious moment; there's hope for me because God has made a way for sinners to know Him and to be accepted by Him.

But there's a second thing. As you're watching priests, knee-deep in blood, garments covered in blood, sacrifice after sacrifice after sacrifice, you begin to realize the inadequacy of this system. It's not enough because yesterday’s sacrifices covered yesterday, but they won't cover tomorrow. And so this whole system screams for a “once-and-for-all sacrifice.” Listen, every sacrificial lamb cried out for a lamb, The Lamb, The Lamb of God, Jesus. In the bleating of a lamb being slaughtered, hear a cry for Jesus, The Lamb, who would come. He would live perfectly; He would be the ultimate perfect Lamb, and when He would die as a substitution, once for all, forever ending the need for sacrifice.

If Genesis introduces you to Jesus, Leviticus is a cry, “Oh, Jesus, come. Come quickly. We need The Lamb.” It is the magnificent glory of my life that unholy Paul can stand in the presence of a perfectly holy God, and He wraps arms of love around me. There's nothing more magnificent in my entire life than that. He has the right to damn me, but He chooses not to.

And that hymn is not first sung in the New Testament; it's first sung in Leviticus. In Leviticus, you see Almighty God becoming the forgiving One who makes a way for an unholy people to know Him, to live in His presence, and receive all that He has to offer them. I love Leviticus and I hope you will too.

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I have to give you some time clues here because the length of a particular book doesn't tell you the period of time. Leviticus was all lived, the entire Leviticus was lived at the base of Mount Sinai, maybe about a year. Numbers encompasses forty years; Deuteronomy, probably anywhere from a few days to a couple weeks. So the time period doesn’t always correspond to the length of the passage, just a little thing on the side there.

Well, Numbers, what would I call Numbers? Well, my title for Numbers is, “Grace, Rebellion, And Travail.” What Numbers powerfully presents is that, even in the face of magnificent gifts of grace, we are still able, often willing to rebel against the plan, the purpose, and the call of God.

And that presents the moral struggle that the rest of the redemptive story will be about; it's about that struggle of submission of my heart to this God who owns me and has called me to Himself. You would think that, after the outpouring of grace, we’d get it and there would be no rebellion in our hearts. And you would think that in the life of Israel, what a magnificent outpouring of God's goodness on these people. And they were on a short trip to the land that He had promised them, and they rebelled against His purpose; they rebelled against His power; they questioned His goodness. And what resulted were forty years of travail.

It's a powerful message that rebelling against God never goes anywhere good. And yet in the middle of this horrible story of travail, forty years, you see again the grace of the Lord Jesus. These people can't provide for themselves, and so God sends down manna from heaven. We know, we have chapter and verse for the fact, that the manna was not very attractive, not very delicious. It says that you actually have a bit of a recipe that manna was cooked with olive oil. This is hysterical and it says, when it was done, it tasted like olive oil. That meant the manna had no taste of its own.

And God's people didn't like the manna, and they hungered for the leaks, and onions, and the things that they ate in slavery. Think about that! Jesus boldly declares, to us in John, that He's the manna from heaven. That provision of manna is actually a finger pointing to the Bread that would come that would ultimately satisfy the hearts, our hearts, the Bread of Life, Jesus.

Now, I want to make this confession. I’m like those people in the wilderness. The Bread of Jesus isn’t always a thing that attracts me. I'm still susceptible to placing my eyes on and setting my desires on other bread, bread that I think will satisfy me more…the bread of human acceptance, the bread of personal power and success, the bread of affluence, the bread of ease, fill in the blank. And in so doing, I'd rather have slavery than the freedom that Jesus can give me.

Numbers exegetes our struggle; we’re like those people more than we’re unlike them, and it warns us that rebellion never goes anywhere good. And what we actually hunger for will only ever be found in the Bread of Life, Jesus.

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Deuteronomy only summarizes a few days in the redemptive story. But it's nonetheless important because Deuteronomy addresses something that we all need to understand. What does it look like to live in light of the grace of God, the grace of God that is most powerfully brought to us through the person and work of the Lord Jesus? I would subtitle Deuteronomy: “Identity, Warning, And Responsibility.”

Deuteronomy basically is built around three sermons of Moses. And those sermons are meant to instill in the people of Israel a sense of identity as the children of God, that they are unlike the surrounding nations because they are the result of His rescuing grace, His forgiving grace, His restoring grace. And so they’re meant to live in light of that identity as the children of God. Now they’re going to go into this land of promise, and they’re going to be assaulted by all kinds of other identities.

And so a major portion of Deuteronomy is warning, warning to these people against the idolatry that is going to be tempting for them. Moses says it this way, “You're going to go into a land that you didn’t get by your own power, in houses that you didn't build, in fields that you didn't plant.” And then he says this shocking thing, “You’re going to forget the God who gave all those things to you, and you’re going to worship false gods.” How sad is that warning, but how needed?

You see, idolatry is not just rooted in the surrounding temptations. Idolatry is always coupled, for us, with God-forgetfulness. When we forget the magnitude of what He has given us and He alone is able to continue to give us, we are susceptible to begin to put other things in its place. That's where the call to responsibility is. Oh, that I would live every day as one who is a recipient of His grace.

Listen, my identity as a child of God should shape the way I approach my dear wife, Luella. It should shape the way that I spend my leisure time and should shape the way that I think about and invest my money; it should shape the way I parent my children; it should shape the way I respond to my neighbor; it should shape the way I eat and take care of my body; it should shape everything. And yet there are idolatries that creep in and compete for my identity as a child of God.

The warning of Deuteronomy is important for everyone who includes themselves in this story of redemption. You see, what God wants me to do with my life is to embed my little story in the larger story of redemption. So every day, I live not with the “Paul's story mentality,” but I live with a “God's story mentality.”

Deuteronomy says, Moses says, “Remember the story that you have been made part of; remember the God who has poured His grace down on you. Don't let yourself forget. Live out of that identity and know that you will face idols; you will face other identities. Commit yourself again and again to remember; and in remembering, live in every sector of your life as a child of God. That warning, given in three messages for three days, is a warning for us all; it's just as important today as it was when it was spoken by Moses.

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I'm excited about the next six studies; they take us from the shores of the Jordan River to Israel's captivity. And I'm excited about this because this is way, way more than dusty, boring, Old Testament history. You really do see things that will encourage your hearts, things that will leave you devastated and discouraged, things that are so awesome they're hard to take in, things that are humbling and convicting, woven in this history as a picture of who God is, and what He does, and who His people are, and what He wants for them, and what He wants in them.

We start with Joshua, this exciting moment when Israel is going to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land. And the thing that you're confronted with, which is a theme throughout the whole biblical story, is the massive difference between God's plan for us and our plan for our lives. Now think, God's about to fulfill this awesome promise that He’s going to give His people a land of their own. I would sort of title Joshua, “God gives, God's people get;” because there's no way possible that they would ever be able to conquer this land on their own. They are utterly dependent on the goodness of God.

But think with me for a moment. If I promised you a piece of property that would be your living place, when you got there, you would expect that that property would be empty. You wouldn't expect that somebody else would be living there. But that's exactly what Israel encounters, that this land is filled with other nations who aren’t really excited about turning over their property to Israel. Why would God do this? And when you face that history, you are immediately confronted, not just with Israel's position, but that's our position all the time--confused at the way God works, wondering why He's doing what He's doing, tempted to question His goodness.

You see, God wants more for His people than just a place; He wants His people; He wants their hearts; He wants to build their faith in Him; He wants them to live with a God’s-story mentality. And so, God puts them through things like Jericho where they see the unbelievable power of God on display and begin to think, “Hey, we’re the people of God. We’re going to be okay!” That's how God works.

You know, it's tempting to think of Joshua as being the hero of the book of Joshua; I mean the book has his name, but he’s far from the hero. As I've said as we’ve looked at other Old Testament passages, God's the hero of this Book. In fact, Joshua's name doesn't even point to Joshua. Joshua's name actually means, “Yahweh saves.” Joshua's name points to the need for a Redeemer, and that redemption is only ever found vertically; nothing horizontally will ever redeem us. In fact, Joshua's name preaches the importance of the coming of Jesus.

You know today, God won’t work the way you expect Him to work. He won’t deliver His promises the way you expect. But take heart, you're not alone--it's always been the experience of God's people. You can't judge the goodness of God by your little interpretation of your present experience because perhaps in that very difficult thing, God is doing something awesome, something you could never earn, you could never deserve, you can never achieve on your own. If you’re God's child, you know, “God gives, you get.” That's the grace of the gospel!

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Well, in Judges, we find God's people settled into the Promised Land. Now, you would think that after the awesome gift of a place, a fulfillment of God's covenant promise, and the display of God's power, that the people of Israel would get the point, and they'd say, “We were created for this One; He will provide for us everything we need. Our lives are meant to be shaped by this one thing--the worship of Him.” You would think that would be the next chapter of the story, but it's not.

There’s a way in which Judges should bring sadness into our hearts. I would sort of title Judges, “Faithful and Unfaithful.” You begin to see just how quickly the hearts of God's people, once they have a place to live, once their lives become regular again, how quickly the hearts of God's people wander away from Him and begin to serve false gods. You see, it shouldn't surprise us because sin, in its fundamental form, is idolatrous. It's wanting, it’s loving, it’s desiring something more than God Himself.

And so, God's people begin to look around; they begin to be attracted to the surrounding cultures; they begin to intermarry, and they begin to worship false gods. You're always confronted in these moments with that war for the heart that's always there throughout Scripture at street level--what will we really serve?

And you see the unfaithfulness of God's people; yet you see the incredible compassion and patience and faithfulness of God. God raises up a judge, out of His grace, to lead Israel. Israel ends up rebelling against that judge. They end up being attacked by other nations.

God rescues them again; raises up another judge, and that pattern goes throughout all of Judges--the faithfulness of God; the unfaithfulness of His people; the compassion of God; the unfaithfulness of His people. That pattern goes back and forth again and again.

And what it ultimately points you to is, as much as a human judge to deliver Israel is a wonderful provision of God, it's not enough of a provision. Because the one thing that a human judge can't do is deliver Israel from Israel. You see, that's what I actually need. I don't need just to be rescued from outside temptation; I need to be rescued from me because my problem is my heart. My problem is my propensity to wander. I love the hymn that says:

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love.
Here's my heart, take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above.

Judges is a cry for another judge that will come who has the power to deliver us from us because my wandering will never end until I am finally rescued from me. Israel continues to need judge after judge after judge because what they actually need, cannot be provided by a human judge. But there's a Judge to come who holds life and death in His hands and can offer us true life; true abundant life involves not just rescue from sin external, but rescue from sin internal; there's a Judge coming who can do that.

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Well, if you think of the book of Ruth, what comes into your mind? For a lot of people, it is this awesome love story, how Ruth meets and marries Boaz. And that story is there, but that's a sub story to the real story of the book of Ruth. This is one of these moments where you see God's zeal for advancing the redemptive story and advancing it in ways that are surprising. I would title Ruth, not a love story, but a redemptive story, a redemption story. It is about the plan of redemption, and there are so many metaphors in Ruth of the way God works and the way God works in each of our lives.

Ruth was a Moabite woman who had no claim to the promises of God, who had no natural entrance to relationship with God. She was an outsider, an outcast, an alien, a stranger who, by God's mysterious plan, His sovereign power, and His amazing grace, this Moabite woman becomes an heir of His covenant promises.

Are you hearing what I just said? That is the entire story of redemption in this lady's biography, that's us! Sin makes us strangers and aliens. We have no right to Covenant promises; we have no natural entrance to relationship with God. Paul says it very powerfully in Ephesians, like I can't read Ruth ever without hearing these words from Paul, “We were without God and without hope in the world.” That's Ruth; but that's us.

And we begin to get the picture that God's sights on the size of redemption are way bigger than just the people of Israel; that His grace is going to spread beyond the borders of one nation and actually encompass all the nations on earth. Seeds of that are here in this wonderful story.

You know, there's no doubt that redemption is the theme. Unlike any other passage in the Old Testament, words that have redemption as their root are used twenty-three times in Ruth. God is hammering home the message of this story.

And why is it a story about redemption? Because this is God taking one more step in delivering His promise, because out of this couple would come David, and out of David would come the Messiah Jesus. This is God through this alien woman, this stranger, making sure that the promised Messiah would actually come. It confronts us again with the wild ways that God accomplishes His work of grace.

God uses unexpected people and unexpected instruments to propel the mission. This is God protecting His promises, making sure that they’ll happen, creating the line, the genealogy, out of which Jesus, The Redeemer, will come. Yes, Boaz is a picture of redemption, but he's not the Redeemer. But he's in the line of the Redeemer because God makes sure it will happen. Listen, the physical history of Scripture is important because it's that history in which God works to make sure that His promises actually do take place for His people.

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Well, we’re in 1 and 2 Samuel, and my title for this portion of God's Word is, “Kings and The King.” It is again tempting to think of 1 and 2 Samuel as the biographies of two kings, King Saul and King David, and to make the big contrast in Samuel between Saul and David. The old way that that is handled is Saul was an unrighteous king, and David was a righteous king. And that really misses the power of the real content of Samuel.

Samuel is actually not a contrast between David and Saul; although there are contrasts there, and I'll talk about those in a minute. But a contrast between these two flawed kings and the King of kings, because what you really do see is how does God operate? What does He require of His people, and what does He do when His people fail? That's the message.

You see, Saul is a flawed king, but David too is a flawed king, David doing the unthinkable in adultery and murder. The difference between these two kings is with Saul; God is not central at all; there's no indication that God is central in the heart and life of King Saul. For David, God is central, and David ends up confessing sin and returning to his Lord.

But what you really get is that hope is never found in a human king; hope is found in the King of kings. That King, The King is righteous and will not, in holiness, tolerate the rebellion of His people. He couldn’t love them if He did that. But He’s also a compassionate King who is ready and willing to forgive and to reconcile and to restore.

If you’re going to read through 1 and 2 Samuel, how about asking the question, “What do I learn about the King of kings in this period of time? What do I learn about His heart? What do I learn about the way He works? What do I learn about what He wants for His people? What do I learn about myself and what happens to me when I decide I know better than God does?”

You know, sin is always rooted in, even for a moment, thinking I'm smarter than God, thinking that I know better, thinking my way is better than His way. And in that way, I deny my need for a king. Yes, it's true, Israel needs a king, but they need something more than human king. Every human king will be flawed; every human king will fail. There's one King that will never ever fail; it is the King of kings.

srael has a King; He is righteous, He is holy, He is powerful, He is faithful, He is compassionate, He will do what is right, and what He asks of you is always right. I love the Psalm that says, “All the ways of the Lord are right and true.” That's really the message of Samuel and all the evil of kings, there's a King who is not evil and will never ask evil and will only ever deliver what is good. How about seeking and celebrating that King; He's the hero of 1 and 2 Samuel.

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Well, as you read through 1 and 2 Kings, it's hard not to be discouraged; it's hard not to think that the whole plan of God has just blown up, that these people have gone crazy, corrupt king after corrupt king, kings murdering kings; it's a mess, and you wonder, “Where is God? Why is this happening?” as you watch Israel descend into political, cultural, social chaos. Israel is not a very nice place to be; it’s not led by very noble leaders; these guys don't want what is best for their own people. And you would ask, “Where in the world is God? What in the world is He doing? How in the world can this take place?”

I think, if you're honest, you've asked those questions too. Maybe you look around at your culture, and you say, “This thing just seems to be getting worse. People seem more lost and confused than ever; things that we thought would never change rapidly change. Where is God? What is He doing?” And in the middle of that chaos, in 1 Kings 8:56, there is this encouragement. Listen to these words, “Blessed be the LORD who has given rest to His people Israel, according to all that He has promised; not one word has failed of all of His good promises, which He spoke by Moses His servant.”

Now, think of the contrast. God is saying, “I have not failed to deliver anything that I've promised to my people.” Again, you get this contrast between God, the Promise Keeper, and His people, Covenant Breakers. And as you watch king after king after king after king, you would wonder, “Why doesn't God just turn His back and walk away, and say, “Enough already! I'm done! I'm not going to do that anymore!”

Well, you get another phrase in 1 Kings where God says, “I do this for the sake of my servant David.” Now think about what is being said, “for the sake of my servant David.” What is He saying? God is saying, “I am committed to the promise I made to David; that out of him, would come a kingdom that would never end, and that King would be the Messiah, the Lord Jesus. I have not abandoned my promise.”

And so God is saying, “I'm going to remain faithful to these unfaithful people, not because of the fact that I'm keeping score, and they’re still worthy enough to be rewarded by my love; I'm doing it because of what is inside of me. I’m a God of such awesome love; such burning, redemptive zeal; that even in light of the rebellion of these people that have led to such cultural, political, social chaos, I will not walk away because I will not deny myself. I will remain true to my plan; and out of this mess, somehow, my plan will continue until every promise I ever made will be fully delivered.”

You know, we still live in the middle of the mess because there are promises of God yet to be fulfilled. We still live in hope. There's a way in which, if you could summarize the whole theme of the Old Testament, it's waiting, waiting for this God because He's worthy of the wait!

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Well, when you read 1 Chronicles, you get greeted with a long set of genealogies. It's the genealogy of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and you may wonder why is that genealogy there? Well, it’s really meant to highlight the genealogy of two tribes, the tribe of Levi and the tribe of Judah. Levi, the tribe of Levi, is that priestly line; and the tribe of Judah is that royal line; and why are those lines highlighted? Because God again is reminding us of what this story is about.

This story is about the biography of a Priest and the biography of a King, happens to be the same person, the Priest King Jesus who is the ultimate mediator. He is not only the one who makes the sacrifice, He is the sacrifice, and He is the King of kings who invites us into His Kingdom, a kingdom not of this world, a kingdom where He rules our hearts. You get that time in this moment of genealogy, pushing us toward the coming of the Kingdom Priest.

You see a couple of other things; you see Solomon’s quest for wisdom. Solomon doesn't get wisdom because he had earned God's favor; he got wisdom because he already had God's favor. Wisdom is a gift of grace.

You see the awesome moment where the temple is finally built, and a fire comes down from heaven, and the glory of God is now living amongst His people. God chooses to dwell in the middle of His people even though His people could never earn, achieve, or deserve the right of His presence. His presence is a constant sign of the glory of His grace. You can't think of that Shekinah Glory filling the temple without realizing that God's plan is that His presence would not be just in one temple in one place, but we would become the temple of God, the place where God dwells, where He is wherever His people are.

Sadly, you see, in 1 and 2 Chronicles, a nation in decline; the end is near; and before long, this nation is taken in captivity. It’s another moment where you think, “Is the story over; is this the last chapter?” How could it be that Israel would be gone? How could it be that Jerusalem would be gone? How could it be? You wonder, “Is God faithful to His promise? Does God hear the cries of His people? What is going on with the plan of God? How could evil triumph over good? Is God really sovereign?”

These are the questions, the deep theological questions of these passages of Scripture. These questions are forced onto us. You're meant to ask those questions. You're meant in moments to say, “Where is God? What is He doing? Is He sovereign? Does He care? Is He near? Are His promises faithful?”

Because asking those questions as you read through the Old Testament will prepare you to ask those questions in your life. There will be moments where you will say, “Where is God? What is He doing?” And the way you answer those questions will determine everything in your life. Nation in decline! Is God here? Does He hear? Does He care? Lord, where are you?

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I love Ezra! Well, I love the whole Bible, but I just love Ezra. You have this moment where Israel returns from captivity, and you can say, “Ahhh! God's not done; the story is not over. Maybe out of this ragbag of remnant people, He can do something.”

But there's something else that confronts me when I read Ezra that is mind blowing to me, and I'm just going to ask you, as I talk about this, to put this in your theological pipe and smoke it. Or, if that offends you, get out this theological gum and chew it because you have to have this in your theology. God is willing and able to use evil to accomplish good. Are you rattled? Does that bother you? Is that outside of the way you think about spiritual things?

I think often we have this good God and bad god thing where there’s two sovereign gods. One is evil; we call him Satan. One is good; we call Him God. And every bad thing is under the sovereignty of Satan; every good thing is under the sovereignty of God. Well, that's not what's presented in Scripture. God raises up Cyrus, a pagan, evil king, to supply what is necessary and to lead the rebuilding of the House of God in Israel. God actually works in the heart of this man to do this unthinkable thing.

Now it should not surprise us because, elsewhere in Scripture, we’re told that God rules over the affairs of nations--that He raises kings up and He casts kings down. Proverbs says, I love this, “The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wills.”

Listen, God's toolbox, the tools that He can use to accomplish His purpose (Are you ready for this?) includes everything. Everything is in His toolbox. He is unshakably Sovereign, and He can use whomever He wills to do what ever He wills, whenever He wills it for the sake of His people and for the sound of His glory. That's the God we serve.

And in the celebration that we should all feel as Israel is coming back, we should weep with joy that these people are coming back, and the plan of God is not done, and it’s going to continue, and God’s going to find a way to fulfill His promises even though unthinkable things have happened. We should not forget that God raises up people whom you wouldn't normally trust, whom you wouldn’t normally think that anything good could come from them, to provide what is good for His people. God's toolbox is everything.

What do we see happen? We see God's Law being read again. We see worship happening again. We see life again for the people of God. Captivity was not the end of the story. We’re all exiles and captives, and God uses a variety of means to bring us back to Him, back to relationship with Him, back to the worship of Him, back to the love of His Law, what He says is right and good.

Now maybe your problem today is your God is too small; He’s too limited; you don't understand the hugeness of this God, how big His toolbox is. He can really use everything to do what is best for His people and His glory! That’s your God!

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If I love Ezra, you just have to love Nehemiah. It’s a companion book, same sort of period of time of the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the rebuilding of the wall. It's a time of restoration and reconciliation and rebuilding. And I love the picture of those three words; think of those three words: Reconciliation, Restoration, Rebuilding.

Those three words are at the heart of the redemptive story. Reconciliation-God reconciles us to Himself; Israel is reconciled again. God restores us to what we were meant to be and what we were meant to do. And God rebuilds us-your heart is in the process of rebuilding. We call that progressive sanctification. It's God's process of a moral rebuilding of all of us because the house that has a heart has been broken down by sin.

And so what Nehemiah teaches us, in this moment in redemptive history, is embedded in restoration, reconciliation, and rebuilding, is this bright hope, the hope of fresh starts and new beginnings. That what grace offers us, what redemption offers us, what God offers His people is fresh starts and new beginnings.

Listen, God, in His righteousness, would have been completely right in turning His back on these people and saying, “I am going to walk away from this.” They were covenant breakers; they were lawbreakers; they were idolaters. But God is not just a Righteous Judge; He's a Compassionate Redeemer; and so He finds a way of delivering fresh starts and new beginnings to His people without compromising His holiness and His righteousness. And so without a moment of compromise, God offers that second opportunity, that fresh start and new beginnings. And in that way, Nehemiah preaches the cross; because on the cross of Jesus Christ, justice, holiness, and grace kiss.

You see, God would not walk away from His holy requirement, and say, “You know, these are kind of nice people, let's just forgive them and move on.” Jesus had to come; He had to live a perfect life; He had to die an acceptable death, because God would not turn from His justice in order to deliver His grace.

On the cross, justice and grace intersect, intermingle. The hope of humanity is that God would not abandon His righteousness. If this world is not run by One who is righteous, we have no hope! But the hope of the world also is God would not abandon His grace.

Restoration, Reconciliation, Rebuilding--that was not just the plan for Nehemiah; it was not just the hope of the people in that period of time that God would restore them, that God would reconcile them, that God word rebuild for them. It’s the hope of every human being who has ever taken a breath that there is reconciliation, there is restoration, there is rebuilding. Welcome to the hope of Nehemiah!

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If you read the book of Esther, you may wonder why in the world is this in the Bible? It is the one book of the Bible that does not mention God at all. Yeah, you heard me right--God's not in the book of Esther, and you would wonder then how does this fit in this redemptive story? I thought this story was the biography of God, God’s story, the redemptive story, ultimately the story of Jesus. We’ve seen God's presence in all these books; we’ve seen the way that He works; we've seen His love for His people; we've seen Him; we've seen Him; we've seen Him. And now we don't see Him. Why? What in the world is going on?

I think the absence of God in Esther is why Esther is in the Bible. It's about those moments in the history of God's story and in the history of our story where God does not seem anywhere to be found, where God seems absent. And maybe the drama of Esther is how will the people of God live when God doesn't seem near? How do you live in those moments when God doesn't seem near?

Listen, don't judge the quality of your faith by your excitement on Sunday morning when you're surrounded by people with hands raised, and you’re remembering the truths of the gospel. Judge the nature of your living faith in those moments where none of that exists, where you're alone, and it seems like the heavens are brass, it seems like the promises of God don't include you. It seems like God has walked away, when it looks like bad people are prospering.

You see in Esther arrogant kings, no heart for God, who have power. And you would think maybe that Esther then is a different biography; it's a biography of a woman who gains power and changes the story. But it's not that. It’s that in those moments where God seems most absent, God is actually actively working. He will never stop working until His work is complete.

And as I have said before, this is a theme throughout all the Old Testament. God raises up unlikely instruments; He raises up this woman whom He uses to continue to protect and propel His plan for His people and His plan for the ages, His plan of redemption.

This God who seems absent is actually working to protect and preserve His story. You shouldn’t conclude, because you can't see the hand of God, that God isn’t at work anymore then you should conclude that the sun isn't shining because you’re in your basement and you can't see it. These are these moments where you have to do what Hebrews 11 says, “You must believe that God exists and He rewards those who seek Him.” I'm not going to give way to belief in the functional death of my Redeemer even in moments where I do not see His hand.

The power of the message of Esther is that God is not absent even in the moments where He seems He's absent. I'm thankful for Esther. I'm thankful this book is in the Bible; it confronts the deepest of our questions and gives us hope.

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Everybody knows about Job. Everybody knows the suffering of this man. Everybody knows the sort of details of this story. Job could be the oldest book in the Old Testament; maybe it's foundational in ways that we haven't thought about. If you think of this story, what would you think is the big deep question of Job? I think Job asked the question of questions, and it's a question so deep that human wisdom fails to answer it correctly. Wise people don't answer this question correctly.

Maybe you would think that the primary question of Job is, “Why do bad guys prosper and good guys suffer?” And you do see that question here; you see the suffering of a righteous man. You would be tempted to think, “Doesn't my righteousness get me something?” Job echoes Psalm 73, where Asaph is looking around, and the bad guys are prospering, and the good guys are suffering, and he says this, it's rather humorous, he says, “Surely for no reason have I kept myself pure. I've obeyed for this? This is the game?”

Now the assumption of Asaph at that moment and the assumption of Job's counselors get at what is the ultimate question of Job. Here it is--Is relationship with God a meritocracy?

You say, “Paul, I don't know what that means.” Do we achieve the favor of God, the blessing of God, by means of our performance? And the devastating answer of Job is, “Absolutely not!” Because human righteousness always falls short of God's standard, and so Job destroys, decimates, human understanding of what's fair, because you would read Job and say, “It’s not fair for Job to suffer!” Fair on what standard? No one deserves God's favor; no one deserves His blessing!

The most righteous person you could name falls short. That's the penetrating drama of Job, that all of our human wisdom, all of our scorekeeping falls short, doesn't answer the question. It's not right to say, “Job suffered because of his sin. It’s not right to say Job deserved blessing because he was righteous,” because, all of those deny the existence of a holy God who cannot be pleased by our righteousness, who must provide for us another righteousness so that we can have a relationship with Him.

The last four chapters of Job say, “You're not like me. You don't know what I know. You can't do what I do. You must not question me. I am magnificent in the ways that you will never be magnificent. My glory is beyond what you can understand. You cannot cross that creature-creator line. I'm good, I'm holy, I'm righteous, and I will do what I will. And hope is found in placing your trust in Me, not your trust in your righteousness!”

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Before we look at our next study, I want to remind you of what we’re doing with these summaries of books of the Bible. We’re not doing a historical summary; we’re not even doing a content outline. Our goal is to find the gospel thread that goes through every book of the Bible.  Now here's what's important to remember. The Bible is not a collection of stories or a theological outline or just a bunch of wisdom statements for everyday life.

The Bible is one story; maybe the best way to say it is it’s a theologically annotated story. It’s a story with God's application and doctrinal notes, and the one story is how God moves to rescue foolish and rebellious people with the gift of a Redeemer. That is the thread that unites every book of the Bible. The Bible, with all of its various authors and all of its various periods of time, tells us one story, and what we’re trying to do is find that story in every passage of the Word of God. Well, that brings us to the Psalms.

As you’ve probably noticed I like to give these books of the Bible a subtitle and I would title the Psalms, “Honest Grace.” There are probably few portions of Scripture that are better known than the Psalms because the Psalms portray for us a picture of a world that we’re all familiar with. It's a world where dark things happen; it's a world where God confuses us; it's a world where it looks like the bad guys are winning; it's a world where unthinkable things happen. Yet it’s a world inhabited by God, a world marked by His presence and His promises.

And so you have, in the Psalms, depicted something that all of us experience--it's the messiness of faith in this fallen world. God surprises you and does things that you didn't expect, and you're never sure what's around the corner; and yet you hold on to His presence, and you hold onto His promises. That's the world of the Psalms.

The cries for help in the Psalms are the cries of everyone. Maybe the two biggest cries in the Psalms get to the heart of every human being, here it is. Will somebody love me in this broken world where all this stuff happens? Is there somebody that loves me faithfully, continually, with restoring and rescuing power? And that's accompanied with a second even deeper question that creates fear and anxiety unless you know the answer. If they know me, will they still love me?

And that's the Psalms; and those cries, that are the cries of every politician and every educator and every rock musician and every person who ever lived, are not answered by theology in the Psalms. It's answered by the hope of a Redeemer. There is no system that can meet the depth of human need that's depicted in the Psalms. There is no system that can heal the world of the Psalms. There's no system that can bring peace where there seems to be no peace and hope where there seems to be no hope. The Psalms cries for a Redeemer, and so the grace of the Psalms is honest grace; it's grace that is honest about what we face every day and gives us the only honest answer ever.

Nothing will solve the problem of the Psalms but the coming of a Redeemer, and so the Psalms are about Jesus. You don't have a few Messianic Psalms; every Psalm is Messianic because every Psalm cries for Jesus or every Psalm carries with it the promise of Jesus. You should live in the Psalms because there you find yourself and there you find Jesus.

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I love Proverbs! I've lived in Proverbs; when our kids were at home, we would go through Proverbs, and we would have them memorize one verse from each chapter. But I have to admit I don't think I understood the Proverbs for a long time. I didn't understand what this was about. I want to subtitle the Proverbs, “The Rescue.”

And the reason I'm doing that is sin reduces all of us to fools. A fool has the world inside out and upside down. A fool looks at true and sees false, and wise and sees foolish, and good and sees bad. He’s just got it wrong, and the Bible tells us that the epicenter of foolishness is, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”

Now I don't think the Bible is talking at that point about philosophical atheism, but rather living as if I am a self-sufficient human being, and I know everything I need to know in order to live the way that I should live. That's craziness! That's insanity!

And so the Proverbs are designed, be prepared to be humbled, to rescue you from you because the greatest danger in your life is not outside of you; the greatest danger of your life is inside of you, it’s the foolishness of sin. And as long as sin remains inside of us, there will be artifacts of that foolishness.

It's humbling to understand that I need daily, moment by moment, to be rescued from me. And the Proverbs are all about that rescue, how God, in His grace, pours down His wisdom, wisdom we could never know on our own, wisdom we could never achieve or earn, only because He's a God of grace.

Now there are two things that I think are important about the gospel in Proverbs. First, we understand that the Proverbs are about Jesus. You say, “Well, how could that be?” Well, because the New Testament lets us know that wisdom is not an outline; wisdom is not a concept; wisdom is a person, and His name is Jesus. The wisdom on the pages of Proverbs is the wisdom of Jesus. This is Jesus, the sweet Savior coming to us, whispering in our ear things that are true. How beautiful is that?

But there's something else to realize about the Proverbs. This is where I think you unlock the Proverbs. The whole biblical story is embedded in every proverb because the Proverbs see the promises fulfilled in the future and embed those in the Proverbs. 

Let me give you an example. There's a Proverb that says, “A soft answer turns away wrath.” Now it's not meant to be mechanically true; it's not true that every time you respond softly to someone, they're going to cease being angry in a miracle because that's not exactly what the Proverbs teach. But when you decide you're going to love in the face of hatred, you’re going to make peace in the face of war, that you’re going to be kind in mistreatment. You are now living in the way that the world is moving by the plan of God. The meek will inherit the earth! Ultimately, the people who live God's way will win! That's the Proverbs.

How about marching the way wisdom is marching? How about living the way Jesus, the wise one, says to live? When you do that, you’re moving the way God is moving the story, and you will experience the benefit of that in your life. Every proverb tells us the whole biblical story and embeds in us the promise that Jesus the King will win! What a beautiful thought that is. Run to the rescue of the Proverbs. We all need that because there is foolishness inside of us.

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I love Ecclesiastes and I think you should too. It's a reminder that you should run to again and again. I would subtitle Ecclesiastes, “The Search,” because this is a dramatic book. It captures the drama of every human being's existence. We were made in the image of God; and one of the aspects of that is we’re rational human beings, we’re meaning-makers, we want life to make sense to us.

I say this a lot and I mean it, “Everyone, everyone is a theologian whether you're a baker or a painter or a mechanic or an accountant, you’re a theologian. Everyone's a philosopher, everyone's an archaeologist, and you'll dig through the mound of your existence to make sense out of life.” That's why a little child will ask 200 "Why?" questions in a row till their parents are ready to go crazy, because a child wants to understand his world. He wants to know why things are the way they are.

You know, in Ecclesiastes, you see that everyone searches for hope. Everyone is going to hook their hope to something; you want to be hopeful. Everyone searches somewhere for meaning. Everyone looks for truth. Everyone attaches his/her identity to someone, to something. Everyone searches for fulfillment. And what the Ecclesiastes says to us, which is just such good gospel talk, “Everything in this world will fail you.”

You think that your job will satisfy you, and five years later, you’re thinking about working somewhere else. You think your spouse will make you happy and unhappiness creeps back in. You think that money will satisfy your problem, but it won't.

You see, this created world was never designed to satisfy that deeper longing, that deeper hunger for identity and for meaning for satisfaction. All the success in the world doesn't do that. It's always amazing to me, sad at the deepest level, when we’re confronted in the news with some ultimately successful person who has committed suicide. They’ve looked for meaning where meaning can't be found.

And so there's this theme in Ecclesiastes that what we’re searching for can't be found under the sun. “Under the sun” sort of is, if the world, the universe was a sheet of paper, and you would tear off the heavens, you're left with a world that can't provide meaning for you.

Ultimately, meaning is only found in God. We were made for Him, and our hearts will only ever be satisfied and our minds will only rest in union with Him. And so the Ecclesiastes points us to Jesus because Jesus is the One that makes the union with the God who alone is able to satisfy our hearts possible because sin separates me from this One. Sin causes me to look elsewhere for meaning and hope. Sin makes me think that I can be and do what I cannot be and cannot do on my own. Sin causes me to worship at the foot of things that I was never meant to worship.

It's only Jesus who can rescue me and unite me with the One who will bring peace to my heart, satisfaction to my soul, who’ll give me hope that circumstances can't take away, meaning that success cannot buy. No philosophy, no thought, no human action can do what God can do for my heart, and Jesus makes relationship with this One possible.

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You know, you’re working your way through the Old Testament and its history and the theology that's there, and you're beginning to get this worldview, and you’re beginning to tune into the gospel themes, and then you hit Song of Solomon, and you think, “What? Why is this in here? What is this about? Do I really need these embarrassing details in my Bible? There's too much sex in the Song of Solomon.”

Well, I want to call this little song, “God cares about the details.” You know, there's a beautiful picture here of the intimacy of pure marital love, it's just gorgeous. And the details are poetic and picturesque and moving. If you are at all interested in love, in what pure, committed, faithful love looks like, what the deepest joys of intimacy feel like, they’re there in the Song of Solomon.

And I love that this is in the Bible because it reminds me that the deepest, most intimate details of my life are not outside of God's attention. God cares about even the most intimate details that I wouldn't talk about, that I wouldn’t share with somebody else, that are as private as they can be, even the moment when two human beings in marital love are naked next to one another with no protection, God's there!

His presence is there, His love is there, His concern is there. God's present in those moments; there is no place, no situation, no location, no matter how seemingly private and intimate, where God is absent. God is all over the pages of the Song of Solomon, and that picture of His presence is grace to us. It’s grace that He would paint a picture for us of something that sin has so terribly broken and so terribly distorted, that we’re reminded again of what sexuality is meant to be. That's grace to us that God would paint a picture of intimacy that would be a correction and an encouragement to us,

But there's something else to remember about Song of Solomon. Although it's not an allegory of the Church, know that the highest purpose for marital intimacy is to point a picture to Christ’s relationship to His church. We see that in Ephesians 5, that there's no more beautiful marital love, there is no sweeter marital intimacy, there is no better purity of marital faithfulness than the love that Jesus has for His Church. It’s faithful and pure and intimate and lovely.

And so Song of Solomon is a finger pointing to a level of love that we will experience with Jesus if we never experience it with another human being. Jesus loves us! He loves us with the depth of purity; He loves us in intimate, personal moments that you can't stretch the human language to its furthest elasticity to capture. He loves us! He loves us! He loves us! And God cares that we would know that we are loved, and we’re loved with a pure and faithful love, the love of Jesus. Song of Solomon is a finger pointing to that love!

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So you probably don't need me to say this to you if you're at all familiar with the Old Testament, “You're familiar with Isaiah.” Maybe there's a way in which Isaiah is the most comfortable of the Old Testament books for those of us who tend to spend most of our time in the New Testament because it reads a lot like the New Testament because there's no Old Testament portion of Scripture where the gospel is more apparent and more obvious than it is in Isaiah.

I would title Isaiah, although this is really a title for every portion of Scripture in the Bible, “Looking for Jesus.” You know, I do appreciate how all of the gospel themes, the themes of the gospel that we’re familiar with are apparent in Isaiah, apparent there with a whole lot of digging.

Isaiah presents us this central reality; it’s a God who is in our world and is holy beyond our understanding. There's this moment in the throne room that's captured in Isaiah 6 where we get to look into the throne room of Almighty God. We get to eavesdrop on the voices there, and we hear, “Holy! Holy! Holy! is the Lord God Almighty. The earth is filled with His glory.” That glory of His holiness; it's trying to capture the expansiveness of the holiness of God.

God's holiness is not one of His characteristics; it's His essence! He's holy in every way. He's holy in grace and holy in righteous and holy in justice and holy in mercy and holy in faithfulness--He's holy!

But there's a second reality powerfully depicted in Isaiah. It's people who are corrupted by sin, unholy. You see gross idolatry; gross materialism; horrible, sad, cultural corruption; injustice; lack of care for the needy. You see a world as broken as the world that you live in. You know, as you look at the Internet or you follow the news, you think, “How can this world be this broken?” Well, that's Isaiah as well.

And then you see a God who acts. He doesn't just exist; He acts. And He acts in two ways. He acts in judgment and mercy. You wouldn’t want to live in a world where there is no righteous judge because evil would reign without challenge. You wouldn’t want to live in a world where there is no mercy because none of us could sustain life in that world. There's a God of justice and a God of mercy, and in that there's hope.

There's a fourth thing that’s clearly there. Hope can't be found in us; it's only found in God. And so it makes sense that as Isaiah talks about justice and mercy, you have some of the clearest prophecies of the coming Messiah because that justice and that mercy will meet on the cross. Because of God's justice, Christ will die. Because of His mercy, He will die, and there is redemption found for us.

Isaiah preaches the gospel to us; the gospel that is a combination of bad news and good news. The good news culminates in the person and work of the Lord Jesus, which is the joy that's put before us, the joy of His coming in Isaiah!

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I find myself wanting to say, every time we launch into one of these studies, “I love this book,” because I do. The study of these Old Testament books has been so much fun for me, so deeply encouraging and joy producing. Don't just spend your entire life in your New Testament; there are gospel riches to be found in your Old Testament.

And Jeremiah has an important place as a thread in this gospel cord. There's huge tension in Jeremiah; it's the tension that's inescapable in the gospel story. I would call Jeremiah, “The Paradox” because Jeremiah, as clearly as any of the prophets, presents to us the paradox that's in the Prophets. It's a question that lurks in the background all the time, and that question launches us into the center of the gospel and pushes us toward the necessity of the cross of Jesus Christ.

In ways that often we don't notice, Jeremiah presses the cross toward us because Jeremiah presents these people who have sinned grievously and repeatedly against God; it puts that rebellion in our face. These are people who have rebelled against a God of boundless love and faithful grace and tender mercy. This is the God who rescued them, who provided for them, who gave of Himself and His promises, who literally dwelt in the middle of them, and they’ve turned their backs on this God. And yet, He's everything that they need.

Now, here's the paradox; how can this holy, righteous God turn a blind eye to this sin? How can He have relationship with these people? It seems like it's over! A holy God cannot live with unholy people without turning His back on His righteousness; and if He turns His back on His righteousness, He's not a God worthy of our trust.

That's the tension; what's going to happen now? They've ignored all of His warnings, ignored all of His offers of grace. How can a holy God live with unholy people? Well, the answer is this, unless a payment is made so that forgiveness can be given. Jeremiah cries for a payment so that sin can be atoned for, so that sinful people can be accepted by this holy God. There's the tension of the biblical story, and so Jeremiah pushes the cross at us.

Oh no, you won't find the cross mentioned in Jeremiah, but the cross is there; because without the sacrifice of Jesus, we are doomed because we can never ever be accepted by this Holy One because He will not turn His back on His own righteousness. Jesus comes, the righteous Lamb, and He pays the penalty so that broken, rebellious, foolish sinners can be accepted by God--now with their penalty paid! Jeremiah pushes us to the cross of Jesus.

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Lamentations picks up an important theme. I think it's a theme that all of us would like to deny. In fact, I think every human being has told the lie to himself or herself that Lamentations confronts. I know I have and it's this, “That I can do what is wrong in the eyes of God and it will be okay, that sin doesn't have consequences.”

And Lamentations is a very, very sad portion of Scripture. The content of Lamentations is five mournfully sad poems; because what Lamentations puts in front of us, in ways that are impossible to deny, is the horrible consequences of rebellion against God, the horrible consequences of acting like you know better, you're smarter, your way is better, the consequences of rejecting God's Law and writing your own.

We find these consequences in the life of Israel. We now see the suffering of Judah and Jerusalem under the siege of Babylon. The unthinkable has happened; in terms of biblical history, it’s unthinkable. Jerusalem is destroyed; the temple is gone! How could this happen? God warned His people; they denied His warning. Remember, a warning is never judgment; a warning is grace. If all God is going to do is judge you, He wouldn’t warn you first. And yet those warnings were ignored.

As you’re reading those sad poems, it looks like God has been defeated; it looks like His promises have failed; it looks like all hope is lost. But that's not what's going on. What’s going on is God's people are experiencing the consequences, the seriousness of sin.

Listen, even that experience is grace because it confronts the lie in us that we can do whatever we want to do and it will be okay. It's not okay to scream at your wife; it’s not okay to look at pornography; it’s not okay to mistreat your children; it’s not okay to misuse your money; it’s not okay to cheat on your taxes; it’s not okay to be a prideful, arrogant person; it's not okay! Sin is serious and has consequences!

I would title Lamentations, “The Exiles,” because God's people are now living in horrible exile. And Lamentations reminds us that there are three exiles in Scripture. The first one is in Genesis 3 where Adam and Eve are exiled out of the garden because of their sin. The second one is the exile in Lamentations and these prophets that talk about God's exiled people. The third one is when Jesus, the Messiah, is exiled, driven out of the walls of the city, put on a mountain of death, treated as a criminal, so that exiles could finally be brought home.

You see, all of us are born as exiles, separated from God, outside of His kingdom of love and grace, and we need to be brought home, not by our righteousness, but by the righteousness of another; not by our goodness, but by His grace. There's hope for exiles because Jesus was willing to be exiled so that we would be brought home.

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Ezekiel is one of those places in the Old Testament where the gospel themes are not hard to find. I would call Ezekiel, “Resurrecting Grace.”

Maybe the big questions of Ezekiel are: “Where do you look? What do you think? How do you act when life makes no sense? When the things that you depend on have crumbled?” Maybe that’s your job that you thought you would have forever. Maybe that's a marriage that has broken up--it's unthinkable to you. Maybe it's physical sickness that's robbed you of your strength. Maybe it's a church that you thought would be a place of refuge and now is in horrible controversy. Maybe it's your family of origin that’s just a place of controversy and division. When life is hard, when it doesn't seem to make sense, where do you run? Where do you hide? That's the world of Ezekiel.

It's a broken world. It’s a world that looks like death is reigning and life is dead. And in that moment, it's tempting to question God's promises; it's tempting to question His power; it's tempting to doubt His presence; it's tempting to bring God into the court of our judgment and to question His faithfulness and His love.

On the surface, Ezekiel seems to be a portion of Scripture that you should not read if you're depressed already because it seems very depressing. But there is this moment in Ezekiel that’s hope-given, so beautiful. It's that valley of dry bones; this word picture is just amazing. Dry bones as far as you can see, and the ultimate question of the whole biblical story is asked in that moment, “Can life come out of death?”

The reason that question so important is if the answer isn’t, “Yes!” then we’re doomed. And the answer is, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” God has that power and God has that willingness, and you can't look at life coming into those dry bones in Ezekiel without thinking of Ephesians where we’re told that, “We who were once dead in sin are made alive in Christ.”

You see apart from God's resurrecting life-giving grace, we’re all just dry bones, we’re just dead people walking. Out of death and destruction, God brings life! That's the story of Jesus. He who died conquered death so that we could experience new life in Him. In the darkest of moments, the gospel shines the brightest!

I am persuaded, and this will surprise some of you, that hopelessness is the doorway to hope because it's only when you give up on finding life anywhere else that you will seek life where it can only ever be found. When you look around and say, “There’s death all around me, death inside of me, I can't look this way, and I can't look this way for hope,” then you are ready to find the hope that can only be found in the person and work of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.

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Well, before I talk about the gospel themes in Daniel, I want to talk about a problem we seem to have with Daniel. And the problem is that we tend to miss what Daniel is about and make heroes out of the characters in Daniel…like Daniel, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And the reality is there is only one glorious hero in Daniel. In fact, the heroic nature of this one is the dominant theme of Daniel, and it just really sadly misses the point when we focus more on the action of the human characters and not the One that is on center stage in Daniel.

I would title Daniel, “Lord of Glory.” There are three themes in Daniel that I want to look at, but I want to say this. Daniel clearly presents to us this God who rules over the affairs of human history and the affairs of nations, and that is a central theme. This is a God who is in charge; He is in control. The Lord rules and that's a central theme of all of the biblical story.

But there are interesting details in Daniel. First is, you see the willingness of God's people to step into danger for the sake of the Lord. Now you have to ask yourself the question, “Where would they get this willingness?” Listen; if I am ever willing to risk my life for the sake of something other than myself, you know that grace has visited me because it's counterintuitive for a human being to do that. We are self-oriented, self-protecting human beings, and so the righteous, courageous acts of God's children in exile point to the grace that enables them to have those responses because that's not natural to a human being.

Along with that, you have prayers all over Daniel; Daniel is a book of prayer. Those prayers are prayers of worship and cries of help and cries for wisdom. And once again that demonstrates that these characters we make heroes of are not self-sufficient; they're getting their strength, they’re getting their wisdom, they're getting their courage from their Lord even though they are in exile.

You see a second theme. You see, in Daniel, very powerfully presented the war between human glory and the glory of God. We are self-aggrandizing human beings. You would have to wonder why we have all the fine-grained details of the story of Nebuchadnezzar, for example. Well, because there’s a whole lot of Nebuchadnezzar in all of us. And you see the battle between human glory and the glory of God very clearly presented.

And then that grand theme of the sovereignty of God over all things! God will continue to advance His story until that story is complete. Nations will rise and nations will fall; kingdoms will come; kings will live; kings will die--nothing will thwart God's story because God rules and He will advance His work until that work has completed its work. In that, there is hope! Daniel gives us a Lord of glory.

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I’m going title Hosea, “The Ultimate Payment.” Maybe there are few places in the Old Testament where you see such a graphic, shocking, humbling picture of sin and God's grace. This is a shocking book of the Bible, on the surface, hard to understand. And so I want to put this in context; you will never understand the shocking nature of Hosea without understanding the warnings that God made to the children of Israel as they were entering the Promised Land.

I want to go back and read for you from Deuteronomy 6, verses 10ff:

And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and…Jacob, to give you…(to) build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant—and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. It is the Lord your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear. You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you— for the Lord your God in your midst is a jealous God—lest the anger of the Lord your God be kindled against you, and…destroy you from off the face of the earth.

Hosea presents to us a sad marital drama as an illustration of what sin is. Sin is spiritual adultery; it's being unfaithful in the same way marital adultery is an act of unfaithfulness. And it’s the exact warning that was made by God. You will think that you have everything, and you will first forget me, and then you will forsake me, and then you will run after other gods, other lovers.

God calls Hosea to marry a sexually immoral woman. The thing that you think is going to happen, happens. She leaves and she prostitutes herself. What a sad and horrible thing. It's in ways, a bad marriage that's gone worse. And then God tells Hosea to go and buy her back and make her his own again.

That shockingly, is us. We are the unfaithful ones; we run after other lovers. There are moments in my marriage where I would rather win an argument than to do what pleases my Lord. There are moments where I would rather use my money to buy me a nicer steak or another pair shoes than I would to give it in-service of God's kingdom work. There are times when I treat people as objects for my pleasure rather than as those made in the image of God.

Sin is spiritual adultery, but God takes spiritually adulterous people, and He pays the penalty for their unfaithfulness and buys them back by His redeeming grace so that we may be wed to Him in an eternal, spiritual union. How amazing is that! I bring no righteousness; I bring no worthiness; I bring nothing but my sin. But He places His love on me, and He will not turn His back on me. Jesus takes every ounce of our rejection; so in our marriage to our Lord, we would never again see the back of His head.

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Joel, in very obvious ways, carries foreword the logical, theological structure of the redemptive story. It is organized very clearly in that bad news-good news structure.

You see, the gospel is the worst news ever because the gospel puts before us the harsh reality of sin, and that sin is not just a matter of our environment, it's more prominently a matter of our heart. That's why that bad news devastates me because I can run from a situation, I can run from a location, I can run from a relationship; but I can't run from me. I’ve found that whenever I try to run from me, I show up with me at the end of the run. So, it doesn't work.

And so, I’ve got to accept the bad news before the good news is ever going to be interesting to me because it's only when I say, “I can't find the solution here, and I can’t actually find a solution here,” that I begin to look for the solution here. And so, you have in Joel a theme of the bad news, the judgment of the Law of God, and the theme of the good news, the rescuing grace of God.

Without the Law, there's no need for grace. But you cannot ask the Law to do what only grace can accomplish. The Law does a brilliant job of exposing our sin; the Law is a wonderful guide for our lives, but it has no capacity whatsoever to rescue and restore our hearts. So, you have to have both of those themes, Law and grace, bad news, good new; that's the gospel. You drop either one of those themes, you either have no hope or you have false hope. It's important in a culture, Joel is important in our culture that has abandoned the category of sin, to remind us again that we need that category in order to seek and celebrate God's grace.

Two really wonderful gospel themes that are here. First of all, is the promise of the Spirit. It's in Joel that we hear, “I will pour out My Spirit on these people.” Now, we see that promise in its fulfillment in Acts, chapter 2, as Peter says, “This is happening now in your presence; God has poured out His Spirit into the hearts of His people; God now dwelling in His people; His people now becoming His Temple.”

And then I love this message in Joel; I’ll say it this way because it's the exact words. God says, “You repent, and I’ll repent too.” You say, “Well, wait a minute, what does that mean?” God says, “You repent, and I will turn, I will turn from My judgment, and I will turn towards you in grace.”

What a beautiful picture of God who repents! He doesn’t repent of sin because He has none, but He repents from that move of judgment and replaces judgment with mercy. “You turn and I'll turn too!” That's the beautiful promise there in Joel, chapter 2, “You come!”

Joel even says, “You bring words with you, you make confession, and I will gladly turn.” And, then he says this, “And I will bring a blessing.” Isn’t that beautiful? Not physical blessing, but the blessing of His love, the blessing of His grace, the blessing of His indwelling Spirit. I love Joel! I love the honesty of the bad news, but I love the good news so much more!

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There are a lot of people out there who are sort of afraid of the Old Testament and don't really think there is anything for them there. There are wonderful encouraging gospel themes in the Old Testament. You see who God is; you see His love, His power, His zeal for His redemptive plan, His zeal for His people. 

You see yourself revealed there and the ways that every person who has ever taken a breath needs God's grace. It is just wonderful, and I would encourage you to again, spend time in the Old Testament.

We find ourselves in what is called the Minor Prophets and, you know, if you would read quickly through the Minor Prophets you would say, “Well, this is really pretty repetitive.” What has impressed me is there's a unity of theme through all of these prophetic writings; yet there's a specificity of content that meets the needs of the moment and the audience of the moment, and isn’t that the way God works in our lives as well? We all experience the beauty of His grace, but we experience it in very, very different ways. God meets us exactly where we are.

Now we’re in Amos. I would subtitle Amos, “Mercy Produces Mercy.” And it's clear in Amos that God's plan for His people is not just to claim them and forgive them when they mess up, but to transform them that they would become His people, not just by means of His choosing, but demonstrated by the way they live; they live like they're the people of God. And what you see in in Amos, surprising in a book about mercy, is the harsh hand of the Lord.

I want to read to you from Amos 4:

“I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities,
    and lack of bread in all your places,
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.

⁷ “I also withheld the rain from you
    when there were yet three months to the harvest;
I would send rain on one city,
    and send no rain on another city;
one field would have rain,
    and the field on which it did not rain would wither;
⁸ so two or three cities would wander to another city
    to drink water, and would not be satisfied;
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.

⁹ “I struck you with blight and mildew;
    your many gardens and your vineyards,
    your fig trees and your olive trees the locust devoured;
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.

¹⁰ “I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt;
    I killed your young men with the sword,
and carried away your horses,
    and I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils;
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.

¹¹ “I overthrew some of you,
    as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah,
    and you were as a brand plucked out of the burning;
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.

Now you think, “Who would follow a God that is that harsh?” Well, the refrain is the giveaway. “I did this, but you did not return to Me. I did this, but you did not return to Me. I did this, but you did not return to Me.” The harsh hand of the Lord is at once His hand of restorative mercy. God brings those difficult things to His people so that they would return to Him and then know His life, His hope, His grace. You see, God's mercy doesn't always come to us in comfortable forms. I think we need to teach, preach, and encourage one another with a theology of uncomfortable grace because often God's grace comes to us in uncomfortable forms.

And the reason you have that harsh mercy is because God is dissatisfied with the way His people are living. He charges leaders from being uncaring, celebrating their wealth and their power, while the rest of their people are suffering! You see God's mercy is not just forgiving mercy; it’s transformative mercy! And so He will bring hard things our way in order to mold us into His image, to mold us into the people of God.

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Well, Obadiah is an oracle against Edom. Now, you probably don't know what an oracle is, so an oracle is a message passed down by one of authority. And Edom was a neighboring nation, hostile toward Judah. The Edomites were the descendants of Esau, and that sort of brings the whole history of the Old Testament into focus. And so, because of that, I would entitle Obadiah, “Salvation is from the Lord.”

You would read through this set of charges against Edom, and you would say to yourself, “Okay, Paul, your model that the Gospel is in every one of these Prophets has just been busted because it doesn’t seem there's anything you can ever find of the gospel here in Obadiah. But it is there, and it goes right back to the fact that in every way you would mean these words, “Salvation is from the Lord.” It is God who chose to place His grace on Jacob and not Esau. And it's God who now is extending His favor to Judah and not Edom. And where's the hope in that?

The hope is this, if God did not first choose me, I would never choose Him. It takes grace to desire grace; and unless God meets me in His grace, I would never ever desire His grace. There are four ways that Obadiah demonstrates that salvation is from Lord.

Here’s the first. It's the Lord who chooses. The remarkable message of the Old Testament is God will set His mercy on whom He will set His mercy. You could not argue, in any way shape or form if you're ever faithful to the history the Old Testament, that Israel deserved God's mercy. If you watch these people rebel again and again and again, do exactly what God has asked them not to do, you would have to conclude, “These people do not deserve God's mercy. God chooses whom He will place His mercy on.”

Second, the Lord is the final judge. Judgment is in the hands of the Lord, and that immediately drives us to the cross because, at the cross, God's judgment and God's mercy kiss. Judgment is meted out on Christ as a penalty for sin so that mercy would be delivered to those whom God has chosen.

Third, the Lord defends. God will defend the people on whom He has set His mercy. He defends, He protects, He delivers. He fights battles for His people even when His people don't have the sense enough to fight those battles themselves.

And then finally, the Lord blesses. The Lord placed His blessing on Abraham. That blessing was extended to Jacob. That blessing was then extended to Judah. You can see the passing down of the blessing of the Lord. And we know out of Judah came Jesus Christ; and we know that in Galatians, it says that those who are in Christ are now the heirs of the promises made to Abraham.

Like other prophets, Obadiah is a finger-pointing down the years from Abraham to Jesus, to you and me, the unshakable chain of the blessings of God. He will not forsake those upon whom He has placed His favor, and He will continue to promote His redemptive plan till that plan is complete. When you read Obadiah, you should hear echoing in the background the words of Christ, “It is finished!” God will complete His plan. He will do what's necessary. He will bless His people.

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Well, you sort of have to ask yourself, “Why in the world is Jonah in the Bible?” This weird story of this rebellious prophet and this big fish, and it's listed as a prophet, but there's almost no prophecy in Jonah, a forty-eight-verse weird narrative. Well, I would propose that Jonah is in the Bible because this narrative captures an entire biblical worldview in a podcast.

There are four elements that are part of a biblical worldview that are so powerfully depicted in Jonah. First, you have, in Jonah, a God of awesome, inestimable glory. This God is in absolute control of His world. I love, as you begin to go through the narrative, that first you see God sending the storm; He's that in control. And then it says that He appoints a fish to do something. Now either you say, “That's just a metaphor or this is real history.” Near the end of Jonah, we find God appointing a worm; I mean think, how many worms are there that a single worm will do the bidding of this One? It’s a God of just mind-boggling power and glory.

You see a world that's terribly broken by sin. You see sin in its ugliness in Jonah both in the huge corporate sense in Nineveh, which was a wicked city, and in the heart of Jonah who would rebel against God and fall into such spiritual insanity that he could actually believe that he could escape the presence of God. Let me just say this; “If, in any moment, you think you are able to escape the presence of God, you are spiritually insane!”

And then you see, in Jonah, just beautifully depicted, the existence of powerful, rescuing grace. In fact, the subtitle I would give to Jonah is, “Unrelenting Grace.” You see grace in its most amazing forms, surprising grace. You see grace operating so that this fish that has swallowed Jonah, now vomits him up on the beach. Sometimes grace looks like vomit! We have chapter and verse for that! It's surprising. God will do whatever is necessary. He will use whatever tool is necessary to draw us back. He will not abandon His work of grace.

And then we see the fact that we human beings were made to live for something bigger than us! Jonah was called to live for something bigger than Jonah's comfort, Jonah’s vision of what his life should be, his political leanings. Every human being was created for transcendent life, way, way bigger than what we would normally choose for ourselves.

But what really captures the power of the message of Jonah are three words; three of the most important words that have ever been written down on a page, three of the most important words that you could ever, ever consider, three words that have the power to change you and everything about you. Here are the three words, “But the Lord.” What changes the narrative of the book of Jonah, this man was heading for disaster, was the divine interruption.

And that's our hope too, “But the Lord;” there would be no covenant promises. “But the Lord,” there would be no Bible. “But the Lord,” there would have been no coming of Christ. “But the Lord,” there'd be no church. “But the Lord,” there would be no conviction in our hearts. “But the Lord,” there would be no ability to believe. “But the Lord,” there would be no protecting, providing, delivering, transforming grace. Our life hangs on those three words, “But the Lord.” If Jonah were only three words long, “But the Lord,” it would be worth its place in the Old Testament.

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So, Micah is covering and written in the same time as Hosea and Isaiah. And Micah is basically a warning of judgment against Samaria and Judah. And God is outraged because His people are doing this unthinkable thing; they've combined Temple worship with the worship of idols. These are people that would actually worship, stop and worship an idol on their way to the Temple. It’s a shocking ability for us to have duplicitous hearts, and Micah is in the Bible because it mirrors our struggle. You can confess allegiance to the Lord and disobey Him almost at the same time.

You may be driving your family to Sunday morning service; you're going there to celebrate the grace you've been given, and you’re screaming and yelling at your children on the way! You are a person of absolute un-grace; you are absolutely contradicting the very thing that you say you want to celebrate, and your life is about. Micah pictures a struggle that is in all of us.

And so, what would you say about the gospel and judgment? Well, here's what's really important to understand and it travels through all of these prophets, that warnings of judgment are always grace. Because if all God wanted to do was to judge us, He wouldn’t warn us first, He would just judge us. Whenever God announces His judgment, why is He doing that? To give us a chance to listen, and to see, and to confess, and to turn. The core message then of Micah is that this righteous Judge is also a tender Savior, and He will not forsake His righteous requirement in order to deliver His mercy. But He will not forsake His mercy to be a Judge.

I love how this begins to culminate the crescendo here in Micah. Let me read for you, “But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be the ruler of Israel, whose coming forth is from old, from ancient days. Therefore, he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has given birth; then the rest of his brothers shall return to the people of Israel. And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God. And they shall draw secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth. And he shall be their peace.”

Do you know when that passage was quoted? It was quoted by the wise men when nervous King Herod was wondering where is this One, “Who has been born King of the Jews?” Pretty amazing! A direct prophecy in the midst of this warning of judgment of the exact place of the birth of this Shepherd King who would come!

You see in the midst of the judgment, God holds out the hope that there's a Shepherd coming who will draw His people back, and He will rule His people in righteousness. Running right alongside of the warnings of judgment are the themes of mercy and grace and a very specific promise of Jesus. Jesus would be the Shepherd; Jesus would be the King. And His methodology of being that would be that He would be the Lamb, who would pay the penalty that would open the floodgates of mercy so that people would have a Shepherd and have a King forever!

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The structure of Nahum is, in a basic way, different than any of the other of the Minor Prophets because this is a book that is not written to the children of Israel. It's actually, the primary audience of Nahum is Assyria, that marauding superpower that had crushed Israel. But here's what God is doing. The implicit audience is Israel; it's sort of like this. It's sort of like a mom who's correcting one of her children, but she’s speaking loudly enough because she wants her other children to hear, that’s what’s going on. God wants Israel to hear what He's saying to Nahum because there are things that they need to get a hold of that are in this message to this ungodly, not God-fearing, idolatrous nation that has so victimized Israel.

The hope of Israel is, in ways, defined by God's message to Nahum. Here are some of the elements of that message. First, that God is holy and righteous in all His ways. All of the ways of the Lord are right and true.

I think one of the things that has happened to us culturally is we have lost the category of holy. No one ever talks about holy anymore. And that sense of that there are things that are holy and there are things that are not and that the One that rules it all is absolutely perfectly holy, and holiness is not just one of His characteristics; He is holy in all of His characteristics. God is holy in faithfulness, and holy in sovereignty, and holy in justice, and holy in power, is the epicenter of our hope.

Second thing, because God is holy, He's angry with sin. It's hard for us understand that the anger of God against sin really is the hope of the universe. You would not want to live in a world where the one in charge of the world did not care about evil.

You could argue that it’s the anger of God with evil that drove Jesus to the cross because He would not let evil win. You should be heartened that God is angry with sin because His anger with sin is part of the zeal to deliver us from sin by the mercy of the Savior.

Because God is holy and because He's angry with sin, He will meet out His justice. There will be penalties to be paid; and the fact that there will be penalties to be paid, again, points us to the One who would come, who would bear the ultimate penalty for sin. So at the cross, we see God's anger; at the cross, we see God's justice; at the cross, we see God's mercy, all coming together.

And then, He is faithful to His righteous cause; He will not forsake His righteous cause. And so, we see history marching toward this moment where Jesus would come, justice would reign, righteousness would reign, anger would do its work, mercy would be the result. And we know, because God won't forsake His righteous cause, that He’s not done yet. There will be the final defeat of sin, and we will live forever in a place where sin is and suffering are no more, and we will live with Him in righteousness and peace forever and ever and ever! That's the hope of the people of God; it's rooted in His holiness.

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Habakkuk really addresses this question, “How is it that you make sense out of your circumstances?” We need the shockingly honest message of Habakkuk. Where does your heart go when life makes no sense at all; when God doesn't seem near; when He doesn't seem caring; when, from your vantage point, God seems inactive; when it feels like your prayers are bouncing off the ceiling?

I love Habakkuk because it's a dialogue between the prophet and God. And probably the two questions that are asked that everybody, if they’re honest, asks at some point in their relationship with God, “Where are you? God, where are you? I've hooked my life to you; are you there?” And second question, the corollary question that hooks to the first one is, “And what in the world are you doing?”

I would subtitle Habakkuk, “Is God absent?” Here's what Habakkuk challenges. It challenges the temptation that all of us have in letting our circumstances define God for us, that our theology is a circumstantial theology. It's driven by our personal, temporary, narrow interpretation of our lives. And so, if good doesn't seem to be happening in our lives, then it seems okay to question the goodness and faithfulness of God. It never works! You can never ever have a stable hope-giving, life-transforming theology based on your read of the circumstances. The opposite is the case, that what is called for in Habakkuk is you let God's careful, consistent revelation of Himself be the means by which you interpret your circumstances.

Let me give you an example. Let's say it's a bright, sunny day; the sun is shining brightly. But you're down in your basement that has no windows that's completely dark. Now you know it would be an act of personal insanity to conclude, because you're in the darkness, that the sun no longer exists. But it doesn't seem so insane for us when we let a particular hard set of circumstances begin to cause us to question the goodness, the faithfulness of God. And sadly, we become comfortable in bringing God into the court of our judgment and question His character.

I love the resolve of Habakkuk. In fact, this is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture; it's a passage that does get me up in the morning. Here's the final verses of Habakkuk, “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor no fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls. . .”

Now if you're in an agricultural economy, that means it's over. Now here's what follows, “…yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places.” And then it says, “To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments,” and that means, “Sing this every day because God is faithful to His declaration of who He is.” You have reason for hope, reason for joy, no matter what your circumstances may say to you.

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Well, I like where Zephaniah is positioned, and I like his function. Zephaniah’s review, that’s just what it is. And you read through Zephaniah and you should be thankful for the rescuing power of divine repetition that God knows this, that these themes of redemption are not intuitive to us. It’s not our normal way of thinking about ourselves; they’re not our normal way of thinking about the world; they’re radical and counterintuitive mainly because the whole redemptive message is other-centered rather than me-centered. My narrative often has me in the center and it's about my hopes, my dreams, my comfort, my ease. I love me and have a wonderful plan for my life versus this radical message that God has chosen us to be part of something transcendent, part of something hugely bigger than us, namely, relationship with Him.

And so, we need those themes repeated to us again and again and again. Listen, you will never ever reach a point where it doesn’t benefit you to hear the gospel again, and you should never be bored when you hear the gospel again. You should never be bored when God repeats those themes again because it’s so deeply counterintuitive for all of us. We need to be confronted with those truths moment by moment by moment till our thoughts are really like God's thoughts.

Well, here are the familiar themes in Zephaniah. It's the redemptive pattern that's depicted from the Garden to Revelation; God sets His love on His people. This whole plan is initiated by God and by the move of His love.

The second step is sad, but it happens again and again. In the face of that love, His people rebel against Him. Don't be too hard on the children of Israel because you do it too. In fact, it's a good possibility, today, there will be a moment of rebellion in your life, where you speak to somebody in the way that you shouldn’t speak or you’re a bit greedy, a bit selfish, a bit lustful, a bit angry, a bit impatient.

Third, God disciplines His people in His judgment. He disciplines His people because He loves His people, and He wants to deliver them from this evil that is their destruction. And then after His discipline, He extends, once again, to His people His mercy.

Now, if you pay attention to biblical history, that theme is repeated over and over again. If you pay attention to your own life, that theme is in your life; God loves you with an everlasting love. You find it hard to follow Him because you still want your own way. And so He disciplines you to draw you back and then He extends His mercy once again to you.

How do mercy and judgment live together? How can this God be both of those things? Once again, that's answered most powerfully by the cross. God's love is demonstrated there; His discipline is demonstrated there; His mercy is demonstrated there. Those themes need to be repeated again and again and again because we are so forgetful.

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Well after talking about the power of divine repetition, we come to a prophet that’s unique. Haggai has this unique central theme; it is the theme of the rebuilding of the Temple. In fact, I would subtitle this prophet, “The Rebuilding.” And in focusing on the rebuilding of the Temple, this little prophecy gets to the heart of the gospel message. You could not get more to the core of what our hope really is than this.

You see, our hope is not in theology; our hope is not in religious institutions. The function of theology is that it would be shorthand for the narrative of the work of God. So instead of having to tell the whole narrative of the justifying grace of God and how to accomplish this, I can use the term ‘justification.’ But my hope is not in justification; my hope is in a God who justifies; our hope is in the presence of a person, God Himself! God's greatest gift to His people, the ultimate transforming gift is Himself. He is grace, He is hope, He is life, He is mercy, He is the source of our hope.

Now, what does that have to do with the Temple? The Temple stands as a visible symbol of the presence of God with His people. And that Temple is a finger-pointing to that moment when the church, the people of God, will become the temple where God dwells. God’s no longer located in a building; He’s located in His people. He literally dwells in His people.

And the reason we have hope is because God is with us. And Jesus will take the name, ‘Immanuel.’ What does Immanuel mean? “God with us;” you could not get more at the center of what our hope is. Our hope is not in a thing; our hope is not in a philosophy or a theology. Our hope is in God Himself.

God looked at the brokenness of this world, at the devastating rebellion, lostness, and brokenness of the people He created and understood that the only fix for this was Himself. And that's why, in that night with rather nervous Nicodemus, Jesus says these words, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son.”

This rebuilding of the temple is a reminder to us that we have no hope if God separates Himself from us. We have no hope unless people who don't deserve it, who could never earn it, could never demand it, could never deserve it, have been blessed by the presence of God. God comes and He dwells with His people. Today, no matter what is going on in your life, you're blessed because God is in you, and He's with you, and He’s for you, and that presence changes everything for you.

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Well, if you're a person that likes mysterious and rather confusing visions, read Zechariah. Zechariah is a mysterious, confusing vision after vision after vision. Zechariah was a prophet and priest around twenty years after the return of God's people from captivity in Babylon. And things are not as good as people of God would've hoped. In fact, Zechariah is addressing discouraged people.

The Temple foundation has been constructed, but the Temple is unfinished, and it's that living between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ that is so hard. It's that life in the middle where you sort of see the promises of God, but you don't see them really realized fully. And I think that's very helpful because that's where we all live. You see glimpses of God's promises, but you don't see them in full bloom yet, and there are times that is so discouraging. God promises me peace, but I get shreds of peace; but I don't get complete peace in my heart, and I don't have complete peace around me. And it's that weary middle that is addressed in Zechariah.

Where are the glorious promises that the earlier prophets spoke of? If you were living in Zechariah's day, you would say, “Don't read me that stuff, I've heard that; it doesn't seem to be happening. It seems to be little to be encouraged with.”

Yet in the midst of this are some of the most beautiful promises of God. Zechariah 3, says this, “I will remove their iniquity in a single day.” Now what possibly could that be talking about? Do you have a clue? When is this ‘single day’ that sin is once and for all dealt with? You could not get a more direct prophecy of the cross of Jesus Christ unless those words, “the cross of Jesus Christ,” were there.

And then you have these words written in the 12th chapter of Zechariah, “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on…whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn. On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad-rimmon in the plain of Megiddo. (And) the land shall mourn, each family by itself: the family the house of David by itself, and their wives of by themselves; (and) the family the house of (Nathan) by itself, and their wives by themselves.” And the passage goes on.

Again, who is the One who is pierced and what is that mourning about? What God consistently does for His people is He keeps saying, “Don't be discouraged; this is not all there is. There is more to come.” For people in the Old Testament, that was the promise of His first coming; “I'm not done yet, there's a Lamb Redeemer King coming. He will be pierced for your sin so you would receive my mercy.” For us, it is, “I'm coming again; don't give up, don't be discouraged, there's more to come!”

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So, we come to the final book of the Old Testament and the content of Malachi should be familiar to you. Well, let me say, “If you're willing to be honest, it should be familiar to you.”  

I would entitle Malachi, “Doubt and Grace.” Malachi is a recording of a series of disputes between the people and God, disputes that question God's goodness, His faithfulness, His presence, and His love.

Listen to how Malachi begins, “I have loved you,” says the LORD. But you say, “How have you loved us?” “Is not Esau Jacob's brother?” declares the LORD. “Yet I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste to his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert. . .” and it goes on. So, God says, “I have loved you,” and the people of God said, “Yeah, like how?  Doesn't look like we’re being loved.”

Now all of us carry on disputes with God. “Why did I have to get sick? Why did this person have to betray me? Why did I lose my job? God, I thought you loved me…” And it's back to that struggle that is in all of us between doubt and faith. And so I want to talk about that struggle a moment and it really emerges out of the content of Malachi (?). 

There are two types of doubt. There's the doubt of wonderment; it's very clear as we complete all of these prophetic writings that God will surprise you, God will confuse you. God's way of working won't always make sense to you. So, there's nothing wrong with the doubt of wonderment; that's a necessary part of faith. If you have hooked your life to this One, you will go through moments of wonder.

That's very different than the doubt of judgment; that's where I have concluded that God is not good, I've concluded that He is not faithful. And once you do that, you quit going to Him for help because you won't go to help from someone whom you no longer trust.

The message of Malachi is, once again, that our doubt, the wobbliness, and weakness, and fickleness of our faith proves once again that we are not chosen and capped an object of God's mercy because of our righteousness, but because of His grace.

And what's the plan? He won't say, “I've had enough of your weak faith.” The plan is, “I'm going to come, and I'm going to make my presence known, and I'm going to refine, and I'm going to cleanse.”

Isn't it amazing that, in the spiritual struggle that we have seen, this war of the heart that we have seen, the way the Old Testament ends is a theme of redeeming grace? “I'm coming, I'm going to purify, I'm going to strengthen, I'm going to cleanse, and there will be a day when your faith will be weak no more. There will be a day when your questions will be silenced. I will do this for you, I am the Lord!” What a beautiful way to end this story of travail and we know what's coming. The Gospels are coming, Jesus is coming; cleansing will take place.