Darkness to Light

Luke 2:25-39 · 2024-12-01 · Jason Wolin · Advent 2024

Luke 2:25-39 · Holiness. Darkness to Light — sermon from Cypress Bible Church on BibleSlides.

Darkness to Light Slideshow for this message PDF Message Download Introduction Today we take a break from our study in the gospel of Mark and we begin a four week advent series entitled “Gifts for the Weary” And in each of these messages we will survey one of the key reversals that we see in the Christmas story. And today we are going to look at the theme of Darkness to Light. And so what we are going to do today is trace the prophetic arc from the darkness of sin that falls in Genesis 3 to the birth of the Light of the World that we read about in Luke 2. We are really going to tell the story of the Old Testament today from the perspective of the darkness of sin to the light of redemption. Story History is God’s story it’ HIS story. And the Bible is the book in which that story is told. The Bible is very selective in what it chooses to record. It’s not just what is included that is interesting; how about what is not included? Is it not interesting to you that China does not show up in the Bible? China is a massive civilization that has its own culture and history moving right alongside Abraham and David and Rome and Greece. China is cooking along right next to the biblical narrative and yet we never hear an ounce of her history anywhere in the Bible? One of the greatest battles of history, the battle of carchemish, which literally changed the course of world history, the Bible just skims over it as if it’s just a footnote, and yet the battle against Ai, a place that archeologist are still trying to find because it is such a small, insiginifcant town, a town which Israel thought they could crush with a mere 3000 soliders, gets two entire chapters. Why? God has purpose. What is that purpose? 2/3 of your Bible is preparing you to meet Jesus Christ. There’s a redemptive story being developed that God wants you to understand. Any good story is like a magnificent tree. It has roots in core ideas and themes that are unseen but essential to the stories depth. And then there’s the main plot the trunk and the branches and subplots. And you have the details out at the ends. Normally when we read our Bibles we aren’t reading along the grain of that grand storyline from roots to branches. We chop out a cross section of the grand redemptive story and analyze this round. We read our Bible’s like this. And this is a very good way of reading our Bible. It’s not a criticism. We might, for example, study the book of Ruth. We pluck it out of the Bible. We isolate it from what’s going on around. And we take out the magnifying glass and we inspect the rings of this round that we have chopped out of the grand narrative. Now many of us know the story of Ruth. There is a Moabite woman named Ruth who has an Israelite mother in law is named Naomi. And she is widowed at an earl…

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