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God Our Redeemer
! Introduction
What comes out of the back end of a cow stinks.
It is gross and we don’t want to step in it or get it on ourselves.
If we do, everyone smells it and avoids us.
Can anything good come out of that stinky mess?
For $39.95 you can get a cow pie clock.
Is that making something beautiful out of a stinky mess?
I am not sure I would want one of those hanging in my living room, but God does something even better.
If you take that manure and mix it into the soil of your garden and plant flowers, the flowers will grow well and a beautiful thing will come out of that which stinks and is gross.
That is what God does and what God is like.
We sometimes use a term for manure to express how we feel about a situation.
God can take the crap of our life and redeem situations and make something beautiful out of them.
!
I. Stories of God’s Redemption
There are many stories in the Bible and in life which illustrate this point.
!! A. Joseph
One day Jacob gave his son Joseph a special coat.
The importance of the coat was that it showed that he did not have to do hard work, but was a special person.
His brothers noticed the favoritism, which existed because Joseph was the son of his favorite wife, Rachel.
They began to hate Joseph because of that.
Then one day Joseph had dreams in which he dreamt that the sun and moon and 11 stars all bowed down to him.
When he told his family, that didn’t help matters at all and his brothers became even angrier with him.
One day when his brothers were looking after the sheep some distance away from home, Jacob sent Joseph to check up on them.
When they saw him coming, they began to figure out a way in which they could get rid of him, that is how much they hated him.
They decided that they would kill him and then dip his coat in animal blood and bring it to their father and show him that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal.
One of the brothers didn’t want to do that and so they put him in a pit and when some slave traders came by they sold him into slavery.
Then they did take the bloody coat to their father and Jacob thought that his favorite son was dead.
That is how Joseph got to Egypt and began to serve Potiphar as a household slave.
He did so well that soon he was in charge of all the other slaves.
But Potiphar’s wife tried to entice Joseph into committing adultery with her and one day she caught him and tried to trap him, but he ran away leaving his coat with her.
She was embarrassed and accused him of trying to rape her and Potiphar got mad and put him in prison.
What a mess he got into!
He went from being a favored son to a slave to a prisoner in a foreign land.
Can anything good come out of this?
Well, as you may remember, while in prison, Joseph had interpreted some dreams for some of Pharaoh’s servants and asked them to remember him before Pharaoh.
They forgot until another two years had passed by.
Then Pharaoh had some dreams and suddenly his chief cup bearer remembered Joseph.
He was called before Pharaoh and before he knew it Joseph had become second in command in the whole land in charge of food storage and distribution.
When the famine, which Pharaoh had dreamed about, struck, it also hit Jacob and his sons in their land.
They went to Egypt to get food, and can you imagine the thoughts going through Joseph’s mind when he saw his brothers?
Yet he did not seek revenge and he did not try to hurt them for the hurt they had caused him.
He knew what God was like and that God is able to bring blessing out of what looks like an evil mess.
Years later when their father died, the brothers were fearful that now Joseph would retaliate for his brother’s evil deeds.
But Joseph said to them in Genesis 50:20, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”
Because of the whole sequence of events including the evil done to Joseph by his brothers, the family was preserved through the years of famine.
The effect of this evil could very likely also have caused an even more important blessing.
It was in Egypt that this little family grew to a large nation, away from the evil influences in Canaan.
Four hundred years later they had become a great nation and then they returned to the Promised Land.
God truly was able to take something bad and make it into something good.
Wenham says, “…through sinful men God works out his saving purposes.”
!! B. Genealogy in Matthew
This is not by any means the only story like this.
There is a story in the Old Testament that involves a number of injustices and moral evils.
It is the story of Tamar.
Judah, another of the sons of Jacob, was married and had three sons.
The oldest son was married to Tamar, but he died.
As was custom, the second son was given to Tamar to raise offspring for his brother.
That is how things were done on those days and this was an important obligation.
The second son of Judah, however, refused to fulfill this obligation and God punished him and he died.
The third son was younger and Judah told Tamar to live with her parents until that son was old enough to fulfill the obligation.
However, Judah never carried through with this promise and Tamar realized what was happening.
When Judah was in the area where her parents lived looking after his sheep, Tamar pretended she was a prostitute and slept with Judah.
He did not recognize her because she had a veil on.
Later, when Judah found out that his daughter-in-law was pregnant, he was very angry and demanded her death.
When it was revealed that he was the one who had gotten her pregnant, he realized that she had been holding him accountable to his promise.
Out of this pregnancy twins were born to her.
What a mess!
It is a story of evil men failing to fulfill promises.
It is a story of adultery, prostitution and incest.
Can anything good come out of such a mess?
Another story which took place years later involves Naomi who in a time of poverty went with her husband and two sons into the land of Moab during a time of drought and famine.
There her two sons were married to Moabite women.
After a time, her husband and her two sons died and Naomi was left with her two daughter-in-laws.
One returned to her parents, but Ruth remained with Naomi.
What a tragedy this story represents.
To be a widow, in poverty in those days was not only terrible because you were vulnerable, having no man to defend you.
It was also difficult because you had no means of support.
Naomi and Ruth returned to the land of Judah, but even there they continued in poverty.
As well, we need to realize that Ruth would forever be an outcast.
Deuteronomy 23:3 says that, “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of his descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord…” She and her descendants for ten generations could not go to worship God in the temple.
What a mess!
Can anything good come out of such a story?
A number of years later we have another story of trouble.
David was king and one year when his army went to war, he stayed home.
While looking out from the roof of his palace he noticed a very beautiful woman bathing.
He desired her, called for her and had sex with her.
When he found out that she was pregnant, he called for her husband, who was engaged in the battle, to come home, hoping that he would lie with his wife and the pregnancy could be attributed to him.
Uriah didn’t do it, however, stating that he could not dishonor his vow as a soldier in order to enjoy his wife.
In response, David sent a message with Uriah to the commander to put him in the most dangerous position so that he would die in battle.
Now Bathsheba was a widow and David took her as his wife.
The child born to them died because of the evil which David had done.
Here was a man whom God called a “man after my heart” who did such a terrible thing.
It is a story of adultery and murder and is a terrible mess and a very clear evil.
Can anything good come out of such a mess?
In the gospel of Matthew, in the first chapter, we have a genealogy which describes the background of Jesus.
In this genealogy there are only 4 women mentioned.
Three of them are those we have mentioned in the stories above.
One who acted as a prostitute, one who was a foreigner and one who was an adulteress.
Jesus came from this background.
It is another way in which we see that God takes mess and brings something good out of it.
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