Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro:

We are part of a cosmic story.

We may feel comfortable in our lives.

We may just want to live our lives out in peace and be left alone.

But, we are part of a cosmic story.

And central to this story is Jesus.

That makes all the difference.

We each are a part of this magnificent, cosmic story that should shape our life.

How we live our life.

What is important in our life.

The purpose of our life.

We connect our lives to the story through the kingship of the Anointed one (Christ!)

Jesus.

The Bible tells this story.

It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

There is a goal to this story.

There is drama in this story.

There is conflict, tension, and a happy ending to this story.

Our life is part of this story.

We each have a role to play.

Central to this story is that each of us must have a relationship with Jesus to see the happy ending in our part of the story.

First, let's look at the overview of this story.

Overview of the Story

You probably know some of this story.

Maybe not, if you are new to attending church.

But the overview of the biblical story is one of Creation - Fall - Redemption - Restoration.

Creation

God created a perfect, beautiful garden and put man and woman inside it to guard and tend it.

Creation was perfect and Good.

Fall

The man and woman fell to temptation, disobeyed God, and were driven out of the garden.

Redemption

But God had a plan to make things even better than they were before.

It involved a promise of a coming offspring of the woman who would defeat the enemy and restore all things.

We know that offspring is Jesus, who died, rose from the dead, and comes to claim his kingdom and rule over this fallen world.

Restoration

And when He reigns, Jesus will restore all things and make an even better home to dwell with man.

So let's look a little harder at the story of a Garden in the Bible.

First, we begin in the Garden in Genesis and how it was ruined.

Story of Garden and Sin

And what a beautiful place this garden was.

These are elements of the first Garden, perfect in creation, home to God and man together.

Beautiful.

Pleasant to the sight, meaning that visually, it was tremendous.

It also met all our physical needs, was fruitful, bountiful.

idyllic.

God's presence was part of this picture.

God also assigned a task for the man and woman who inhabited the Garden.

But you know the story.

You know what happened.

There was one prohibition in this garden.

But that is what they did.

The Serpent - who is Satan - came and tempted Eve, and Adam failed to protect the garden from the Serpent or counter the temptation.

So they fell into sin.

And we must not forget this imagery of Satan as a serpent, a venomous dragon-like snake, because that imagery will repeat itself in the rest of Scripture.

God curses the snake in verse 14.

But remember, Adam and Eve were not cursed.

Instead they were recipients of the promise that we see in God's pronouncement on the serpent in

This offspring, literally the word seed, looks forward to a descendant of the man and woman that, it is promised, will crush the skull of the serpent, inflicting a mortal wound and resolve this cosmic conflict by a glorious victory over evil.

But our story today is one of geography, not genealogy.

Genealogy is important, critical to the story, but this morning we look at place.

While we wait for the victory of the offspring of the woman, we live outside the garden, as per

The serpent is cursed, the ground is cursed, the beauty is lost, the conflict continues.

Evil has entered God's good creation.

And remember this Cherubim with his flaming sword.

He keeps the man and the woman from returning to the garden.

Now that they are condemned by their sin and rebellion, they cannot enter into the presence of a Holy God.

They cannot eat of the tree of life.

They have been exiled from the Garden, driven away to the east.

But God has a plan.

Story of a Promised Land

A major part of this plan is that God called out a man, Abraham, to become a great nation.

And out of this nation was to come the lineage of one man, an offspring, or seed of the woman, who would defeat Satan by crushing his skull.

But as I just said, this morning we are considering another aspect of this story, that of land, a location, a place.

We live today out of place.

I love the Flint Hills.

I love prairie more than woodlands.

Tall grass is, to me at least, better than tall trees.

So I love this place in Kansas.

Here we find the last tiny portion of the most endangered ecosystem on the planet, more endangered than jungles or forests, that of the tallgrass prairie.

Place is important.

But even the tallgrass prairie is not the garden of eden.

We are still prohibited entrance to that garden.

You might love the mountains, the beaches of the world, or whatever splendor you find in a created place.

But they all pale in comparison to the Garden, where we were created to live in the presence of God.

And God's plan is to get us back into the garden, back into his good creation, free of the curse, and in his presence.

So God prepared a land for his chosen people, the sons and daughters of Abraham.

God promised many things.

Among them was the promise of place, a land.

But the Serpent opposes this plan.

There is enmity, conflict, opposition from the serpent.

We pick up the story with Abraham's family having moved to Egypt because of the famine.

There, they grew numerous, but were enslaved.

And the Serpent wanted to keep them enslaved.

The book of Exodus portrays the pharaoh, who wears the symbol of a serpent in his crown, as the seed of the serpent who is judged by God in the 10 plagues.

We must understand the pharaoh here represents the serpent, the serpent's interests.

This is cosmic conflict.

The serpent wanted to keep Israel out of the land.

There is much we could discuss at this point.

The promised land was full of Canaanites, the cursed descendent of Ham from the story of Noah.