14: Hope & the Promise (Advent: Part 1)

Stephanie (00:02): Alright, Season 4, Episode 14.

Hello, Father, and Happy Thanksgiving Week!

Marcus (00:08): Well, hello Daughter! And it’s a very nice week. I’m looking forward to it. It should be a lot of fun. It’s this kickoff of a lot of very fun things coming up.

Stephanie (00:20): It is. I love this season so much. And it’s time for Advent season, which means it’s time for the Advent series.

Before we get into our first episode of our Advent series, I have just a couple of announcements. The first being, it is the time of year when I start praying and thinking about my personal end of year giving. And we just hope you’ll keep Deeper Walk in mind as you consider yours.

Keep watch for holiday sales starting this week at Deeper Walk. The FISH courses, books, all that kind of stuff. Keep an eye out. Exciting stuff happening there.

And then also, time sensitive, School of Ministry deadline alert! If you want to join the prayer ministry certification cohort that starts in January, the deadline for applying is December 1st. Father, anything you want to say about the School of Ministry?

Marcus (01:19): Yes, I just continue to hear glowing reports from the people going through that. In fact, after we’re done podcasting, I’m going to be joining one of those cohorts to answer questions and interact with the students. And it’s always a delight. It’s been really cool seeing what God’s done so far with the school.

Stephanie (01:38): Yeah, we love our School of Ministry. So visit deeperwalk.com/schoolofministry if you want to check out more details and apply.

All right, Father, for Advent we are looking at the Abrahamic covenant of promise. I’m so excited for this topic. First, give us some context for why we celebrate Advent.

Marcus (02:01): Why we celebrate Advent. Okay. I was thinking context for the covenant. My brain was in a different space. We’ll get there.

Stephanie (02:06): We’ll get there, we’ll get there. I’m going big to small.

Marcus (2:10): So I did not grow up in a liturgical tradition and Advent was not a part of it. I think I discovered Advent after I went to seminary. I just didn’t even know it was a thing. And so the wreath and the candles and all of that, and I was like, “This is so cool. Why are we not doing this?”

That got my attention. It’s been part of a high church since the early days of Christianity, whether the Catholic tradition, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, all of them have some version of Advent. We’re going to be doing an Advent wreath at our church this year. In fact, I’m preaching the first two sermons of the Advent series. And I just think it’s a great opportunity.

This and Lent have somewhat similar roles in that they’re meant to be times of reflection, to kind of call us back to, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of life, let’s set aside some time to reflect on what really matters.

And while Lent and Easter focus on the passion of Christ and the resurrection of Christ, Advent focuses on the incarnation and this amazing reality of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us and everything that God did for us through incarnation. And then living a life worthy of the calling that we’ve received.

So all those things get packed into Advent. It’s a very important time of the year.

Stephanie (03:48): Mm-hmm, it’s a very rich season. So give us some context for, why would we be talking about the Abrahamic covenant during this season?

Marcus (03:56): First of all, I realize a lot of people are not intimately acquainted with what the Abrahamic covenant is, so let me start this way. I had a professor when I was doing my Old Testament studies, his name was Walter Kaiser. For those people who know the Old Testament, that name will be very familiar. He wrote a series of books called Toward an Old Testament Ethic, Toward an Old Testament Theology. It inspired my title Toward a Deeper Walk, right?

Stephanie (04:23): I was gonna say, I’m sensing an inspiration here.

Marcus (04:25): Exactly. So he was the dean of the faculty at Trinity for a while, but he was famous for talking about that the center of the theology in the Bible was this covenant to Abraham called the promise.

And in the Old Testament, it’s not called the promise, but several times in the New Testament, it’s referred to that way. In Acts, we see it that way. I think it’s always Paul who refers to it this way. And it’s the idea that God promised some things to Abraham and then he put those promises into a covenant.

Paul understood that the promises that were made to Abraham in this covenant actually were the gospel proclaimed ahead of time and that there is a direct correlation between the gospel in the New Testament and the promise in the Old Testament.

In fact, you could even just say that the gospel and the promise are basically the same thing.The gospel is the New Testament fulfillment and the promise is the Old Testament promise that is coming.

And so with that in mind, it makes perfect sense to start Advent with a look at the Abrahamic covenant, called the promise, because this is where all comes together and launches out into our anticipation of the Messiah to come and the gospel that would come from the Messiah’s arrival.

Stephanie (05:57): Mm-hmm. And the first candle that we light in our tradition is the candle of hope and this is very apt for our gospel message here. Can you first talk a little bit about the nature of hope and promise?

Marcus (06:07): Yes, hope is an important word in our family, right? It’s your middle name, Stephanie Hope. And part of it, when I was in seminary and studying Hebrew, one of the things I learned was that in English, when we talk about hope, what we usually mean is wish. Like it would sort of like, “I hope that happens,” meaning, “I wish it would happen this way.”

But that’s not what it means in Hebrew. The idea of hope in Hebrew is the idea that something is promised and you can expect it. So there is an expectation involved in hope. And the idea is that therefore we wait for it.

I think of it sometimes like somebody who’s in a trust fund and they know that when they hit a certain age, there’s like millions if not billions of dollars going to be available to them. And that is a hope that they have. It’s not wishful thinking. That trust fund is there. As long as they get to that age it’s gonna click in, and they’re expecting it. They’re waiting on it. They’re counting on it

That’s kind of the way that the Bible uses the word hope. It is that God has something that he has promised. It is certain. It is an expectation and so we wait patiently for what has been promised to us knowing that when it comes it’s going to be worth anything that we endure along the way.

Stephanie (07:45): This is good. Over the course of our little Advent series here, we’re going to unpack the promise to Abraham and the different layers of this. And they even coincide very well with our Advent candles here.

So would you give us that story context, that overview of what was the promise, exactly, that was made to Abraham?

Marcus (08:10): Sure. Abraham, his name was Abram, later changed to Abraham because of this covenant. When he was Abram, he lived in Ur of the Chaldeans. And there are some interesting traditions about that, of who his father, Terah, was and his connection to all the things going on in Mesopotamia. But those are traditions outside of the Bible.

We know that he moved to Haran, or Heron, if you put the American spin on it, and there God called him to leave his family and his relatives and go to the land he would show him. When he got there, God makes a very simple promise to Abraham, and it is to your seed, I give this land. So you got these two things right there. Your seed.

Well, what is that? Well, seed is the idea of descendants coming, it’s children coming, it’s that there’s going to be offspring. And so you’ll rarely see the word ‘seed’ in the Old Testament. You see ‘offspring’ or ‘children’ or ‘descendants’ or something like that in English translation.

But Paul makes a big deal out of the fact that it’s seed. And he said the promise wasn’t given to seeds, plural. It was given to one seed, which is Jesus Christ. And so we’re gonna be talking about that.

So the promise to Abraham in the context came as part of his call to leave Mesopotamia, move to Canaan, and the whole reason we call it the promised land is that the covenant promised this land to David’s seed. And it all gets built out from.

Stephanie (09:59): We actually, if you’ve ever heard Dad teach the Bible, he has www.Plaxn.com and the P is the promise on the pinky, that helps us remember overall covenants in the salvation theology of the Bible.

On this hand that we remember, you put a ring to remember that covenant and it’s an acorn to represent a seed. Will you give us a quick little look at what the acorn seed is?

Marcus (10:37): Yeah, sure. So we talk about the ring because rings symbolize covenants, like the marriage covenant. And then the gemstone on the ring we use an acorn and it’s because an acorn is just a big seed, first of all. And so because it’s a big seed, it helps us remember the main idea of the promise is the seed through whom all nations on earth will be blessed. And what I like about it is, acorns come to a point at the bottom.

And so you can literally say the point of the promise is the seed, Christ, through whom all nations on earth are blessed. And that blessing Paul defines as being justified by faith and the receiving of the Holy Spirit. So that’s the gospel, right? You can be justified by faith and receive the Holy Spirit, become a child of God.

Paul anchors all of that in this idea that the blessing promised to Abraham comes to us through this seed. Acorn, big seed, the point of it. Through this seed all nations on earth will be blessed. Now, that’s the first half.

The other half of this is that acorns have a lid. You can take that lid off. Sometimes people whistle through it. But that lid, if you take the lid off, you think of it as the other part of the promise. Whereas the point is the gospel, this other part represents the promise specifically to Abraham.

And the promise to Abraham is that he will have a seed. Well, that’s a big promise because Abraham did not have children. And so to promise him, “Look, you’re going to have children,” was a big deal to him. And then later he says, “You’re going to be the father of kings, you’re going to be the father of nations. Your descendants are going to do amazing things.”

And the promise kept getting bigger to Abraham of this and yet he had to wait until he was 100 years old until the first of the seed came into existence, which was his son Isaac. So he was promised seed, he was promised land, and yet he was largely a nomad wandering around most of his life. He didn’t get that until later.

And then eventually he was told that his descendants who would live in the land would have a unique relationship with God so that it could be said of them, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”

So we see all of those promised blessings to Abraham come true with Moses and Joshua. That in Egypt, the seed multiplies as vast as the stars in the sky, they’re an uncountable kind of thing. And then they go to the land of Canaan and there’s the invasion under Joshua.

They enter into this covenant with Moses in which they become God’s people and he becomes their God and everything is fulfilled. And so you got these two parts of the promise. You got kind of the lid that represents the promises to Abraham and then you got the bottom part that comes to a point, the point being, the promise to all nations that through Jesus, blessing is coming.

There’s the summary.

Stephanie (13:50): Can you talk a little bit more about blessing to and blessing through?

Marcus (13:56): Yes, I think of the lid of the acorn as blessing to Abraham and the point as blessing through Abraham. And so the blessings to Abraham, there are three core blessings: seed, land, and a relationship with God. And so those three things you can associate, these are the blessings promised to Abraham.

Now there’s some others that go along with it, like, “I’ll make your name great and you will become great,” things like that. There are other promises factored in, but those are the three core ones.

Then the blessing through Abraham is that through the seed that comes from him, all nations on earth would be blessed.

Stephanie (14:35): So how can we meditate on this or put into practice this teaching in relation to Advent and hope?

Marcus (14:46): Well, promises call for hope, right? The idea of a promise is, I can now count on this, I can expect it, I am waiting for this. And this promise of the gospel and seeing how wonderfully it was fulfilled is a point of meditation in and of itself.

It is the faithfulness of God to love us so much that he took human history to make sure that redemption took place and that reconciliation with him became possible. There are just so many things to meditate on relating to the whole idea of just the salvation that is offered to us and the processes that led to it.

There’s also a point of meditation just on the idea of promise and fulfillment in and of itself, and that is the faithfulness of God, that all of the other promises that God has made are just as reliable, that we can have a sense of expectation on those two.

His promises of his presence, of his provision, of an age to come and all the things that that holds. And so this is a wonderful time to meditate on the character of God and this idea of his faithfulness in particular. And that is really the anchor of our hope – that things have been promised to us.

And so you cannot separate hope from promise.because without promises there is no hope.

Stephanie (16:14): Yeah, it strikes me as you’re talking, there’s also, very key to this word hope, the word wait, for Abraham and for us. So often we are in that time of waiting and that’s why we need the hope. I mean, we’re in that time of waiting, which is why we have hope in the waiting.

Can you speak a little bit more to people who are in the time of waiting?

Marcus (16:47): Yeah, it would be nice if it was promised and then the next week it was fulfilled, but there’s always this gap, right? There was a gap for Abraham. He had to wait until almost the end of his life before he had Isaac. There was a time of waiting as the people were in bondage in Egypt and they had to wait for a deliverer and they had to wait to get into the land.

There was a time of waiting throughout all of the Old Testament period for the Messiah to finally come. And we are currently in a time of waiting for justice and righteousness and the kingdom of God to fully come to the earth. And so that’s just built into it.

That’s why promises always call for patient endurance, because sometimes not only do you have to wait for things, but sometimes you get persecuted during the wait and life gets hard because the enemy knows what has been promised.

And the enemy is like, if he can’t stop what you’ve been promised from coming, what he’s gonna do is he’s gonna try to stop you from trusting in that, try to stop you from being faithful. He’s gonna throw everything at you to try to get you to give up. And so that’s part of it. We need to kind of expect it.

Part of what we meditate on is not only God’s faithfulness, but the call that’s implied in that for us to be faithful, for us to be patient and to realize that whatever we have to go through now, it’s going to be worth it in the end.

And the fact that we’re going through things now does not mean that God is not faithful. It does not mean that God does not keep his promises. It just means we have a very real enemy who is trying to keep us from experiencing all that God has for us.

Stephanie (18:42): Amen. Forgive me if this is too large of a question, but could you give some strategies for people to be faithful in recognizing enemy tactics, or for keeping focused on making the main thing the main thing? That’s a large question.

Marcus (19:07): Well, it is. The enemy comes in a lot of different forms. One of them is hopeless despair. And that is the idea that it is out of my control. Fixing this problem is out of my control and therefore there’s nothing I can do about it and that makes it feel impossible. A lot of times when our faith wanes, it’s because we’re dealing with hopeless despair and the fact that I can’t fix this.

And so some of this is coming back and just saying to God, “God, I cannot fix this. I need your grace to face this because from where I stand, it looks like I’m going to have to go through something I don’t want to have to go through. But you’ve promised that your grace is sufficient. You’ve promised that your presence will always be there.” We have to remind ourselves of things when that’s what we’re facing.

For other people, it’s anxiety. It’s like, “What if this happens? And what if it gets this bad? And what if it gets even worse than that?” And our ‘what ifs’ take over and accelerate. And so it’s the same thing. We have to face some of these fears, some of these emotions, invite God into those emotions and to try to stay present and grounded with him and where we’re at and not get too far ahead in our imagination of what the future will hold.

Stephanie (20:35): Yeah, those are good words. So I want to remind people, since I’m already segueing, I’ll just go ahead and do it. If you are interested in the School of Ministry, make sure you’re jumping on that deadline for December 1st, because the next cohort starts in January and it’s going to be epic. And also keep watch for fun holiday sales coming your way.

And thank you for keeping us in mind as you are praying through your end of year giving.

Father, I not only want to ask you for your final thoughts, but I would love to have you kind of usher in our Advent season with a prayer.

Marcus (21:20): You know, I’m looking forward to it because I’m looking forward to Advent. Not only because it’s Christmas season, but because I know in my own life, I need calls to do a little bit extra in terms of my pursuit of God and my connection with him.

And so that’s what I’m praying for each of you and each of the listeners is that they will take advantage of the Advent season to spend a little more time pursuing God and the grounding that comes with His presence. So I’m gonna pray to that end.

Father God, we are well aware that without you we can do nothing. And we are well aware that we can’t make anything happen, good or evil, and guarantee it’s gonna happen because, you know, we don’t know the future. But Lord, we know that you know the future, and you hold it in your hand, you hold us in your hand, and I just pray for each one now, as we get ready for the Advent season, that you will meet us in a special way and you will give us new insight, new truth to hold onto, new experiences of your presence to embrace, and God, that through all of that, we would become a channel of blessing to others. That just as Abraham was both blessed and he became a blessing, that you would do the same with us, that you would bless us and that you would make us a blessing in this Advent season. In Christ’s name, amen.

Stephanie (23:09): Amen.