The Greatest Promise In History

EASTER SUNDAY 

Community Sunrise Service

John 3:16

April 15, 2001

In a nutshell: The greatest promise in the world is found in the history of God's love to human beings, which culminated with the death and resurrection of Jesus, God's Son.

I. Introduction

Illustration: Former Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan, who served under Ronald Reagan, tells the story of one time being on the President's plane--Air Force One. He was in the back compartment of the jet with all the other presidential helpers, while President Reagan was in the front of the jet in his private compartment. The phone rang in the back compartment and the voice said, "Mr. Donavan, the President would like for you to join him for lunch." Secretary Donovan straightened his tie and thought to himself how important he was to have the President ask him to join him for lunch.

Just as Secretary Donavan walked through the doorway into the President's compartment, the Red Phone rang--the Red Phone is the Presidential Hotline, that is always next to the President. Wow! What a moment to be in the presence of the President of the United States! What major event could the President of the United States be involved in deciding. Thousands, No, millions of lives could be affected by what happened in the next few seconds. What could it be? Were we possibly going to war? Was there a major world crisis that had to be averted? Were our troops in severe danger of attack?

The President picked up the phone and said, "Yes--uh huh--Yes--Alright, what are my options?" Secretary Donovan's heart almost stopped. His mind raced. Then the President continued, "O.K. I'll have the Iced Tea!" and hung up. So much for an important event in the world's history!

Transition: Friends, there are a lot of events that have gone on in our lifetime that we think are of major importance, but they turn out not to be very much. But listen, there is no more important event in all of history than what I am about to tell you this morning.

For some of you, what I am about to say will seem very elementary–very simple. If it does, I make no apologies. Because the most important event that the world has ever seen was designed by God to be so simple, even a child could understand it.

II. For God So Loved The World

This most important event, of all events, is summarized in my favorite verse in the entire Bible...

John 3:16
16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life."

Let me tell you how this came to be.

A. In the Beginning

The very first verse in the Bible says...

Gen. 1:1
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Now, in this universe that God created, He put angels. Many, many angels. And over all the other angels, he put one that was more beautiful and wiser than all the rest. The name of this beautiful angel was Lucifer. And Lucifer governed things for God. He over saw the universe and the only other living creatures in the universe, the other angels. Lucifer carried God's government to the angels, and he took the angels praise back to God. And everything was going along quite well until one day, Lucifer got proud. He probably thought something like this...

"I'm doing all the work and God's getting all the credit." He probably continued to think, "I don't need this menial work any more. I'll get the angels to worship me. I'll become like God. I'll get the angels to give me praise, instead of God." And he tried it. Some of the angels followed Lucifer or Satan, and he had enough for an army. And with that army, he tried to rebel against God, and take over the universe.

But Satan lost that battle. The book of Isaiah tells us...

Isa 14:12
12 How you have fallen from heaven,
O morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
you who once laid low the nations!

And after all this took place, when God was good and ready, in the words of one of my favorite poets, James Weldon Johnson, "And God stepped out in space, and He looked around and said, ‘I'm lonely! I think I'll make me a world.'"

God spoke the words, "Let there be light!"
-And the mists that were around this earth began to clear away, and the light came into being.
-He harnessed that light to become a warming source, called the sun. And the earth became warm and bright.
-And God spoke yet, again, and the earth was covered with beautiful trees and grass and flowers and every living growing thing.
-He made the oceans and the sky above.
-He created clouds.
-And he made the atmosphere so that it would support life.
-He spoke again and birds, animals, insects and every living thing came into existence.

Then He created man. He gave man a mind of his own and the privilege of making his own choices. And this is where Satan perked up. He must have thought, "Now I can get even with God, and rule the world He created."

When God made man, He named him Adam. When He made woman, He named her Eve. And He put them in a beautiful garden, and He told them they could do anything they wanted in that garden. He told them they could eat anything in that garden, except one thing. They could not eat the fruit from a tree in the center of the garden, called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Now, here's where Satan capitalized on the privilege God gave man to make choices. God said, "Don't do it." And Satan said, "Do it. Go on, do it. Do it. Do it."

And man did it. He ate the fruit of the forbidden tree.

It's as simple as that. When man made the choice to disobey, he took his life out of God's hands. And, friends, that's what sin is. It is a rebellion against God. It is saying, "I know better than you do God. I'm going to live life according to my rules, not yours."

Does that sound familiar? That's just what Satan said to God before this world started. And God cast him out of His presence. And, now man was deserving of the very same thing.

But it was at this time that God gave the first promise we have recorded in our Bible. He basically said, there is hope...

Gen. 3:15
15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel."

In that promise, God was saying that He would send someone who would put things right between God and man. That person would crush the power of Satan forever. He would be the Savior. But in the process this Savior would be hurt.

This Savior would rescue men and women, boys and girls from God's just and right anger over the sin in their lives, and the penalty of sin that each person deserves. That penalty is what the Bible calls death–eternal separation from God.

The Savior would take God's punishment for human beings' sin on Himself. This would be God's gift to the creation that He loved so much. Choosing to receive this gift meant that each person could take his or her life and put it back in the hands of God. What a happy ending to such an awful beginning!

B. Things Didn't Go Smoothly

Do you think things went smoothly from there on out? No, they didn't!

Because the first two people on earth, along with all the others that were born after that, had something inside of them that always said, "Don't obey God, obey what you want to do!" Which was exactly what Satan wanted to happen.

In fact, the very first child born to Adam and Eve started hating his brother so much that he murdered him. And things just kept getting worse.

At one point, the world got so bad that out of all the people living on the face of the planet, only one man and his small family were found obeying God, and believing in God's promise of a Savior. That man's name was Noah. So during the life of Noah, God decided to start all over again. He wiped out everything in the whole world that was evil with a flood. Only eight people were saved, along with enough animals to re-populated the earth after the flood.

But soon after this terrible flood, people forgot the promise of the Savior and chose not to obey God, and they returned to practicing evil again. That's when God talked with a man named Abraham. He made a promise with Abraham. God said, "If you live, believing in the promise of this Savior, and follow my ways, not your ways, then I will always be your God. And I'll make you and all your decedents into a mighty nation." And that's where the nation of Israel started.

There were different times in that nation's history when these people obeyed God and believed His promise. And when that happened, God provided a very happy and good life for His people. But there were other times when the people of Israel refused to obey God and believe in His promise of a Savior. And these were the times when He had to send special people into history to bring His chosen people back to Him.

He used leaders like Joshua, Gideon, Samson, and Deborah. He used prophets like Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah and Jeremiah. And He used rulers like Esther and David to accomplish this purpose, again and again.

C. Then One Day Something Happened...

Then one day, something happened. A baby boy was born to a virgin Jewish girl, named Mary. The baby was born in a dirty old cow stall in a stable in Bethlehem. Mary named the baby, Jesus.

Jesus and His family spent their first years living in Egypt, then later in the town of Nazareth. Jesus spent the first 30 years of his life growing up and doing everything a boy and then a young man had to do in order to become a carpenter.

But about the age of thirty, Jesus left his home town and started to teach people about God. He made some startling statements, and He taught people much differently than the other religious leaders of His day. He said that God was love. He said that God really didn't care about all the special rules that the religious leaders of the day had set up. He said that all the rules did were to call attention to humans beings, not God. And God wasn't pleased with rules that didn't honor Him.

Jesus' message was simple--God loves people so much that He wants to save them from an eternity of misery, without love and without God. God wants all humans to live with Him forever in heaven.

But most of the people who heard his message, and especially the Jewish religious leaders didn't like this message. It messed up their neat system of control. It destroyed their rules that made them feel important. It threatened their lifestyle. So after three years of listening to Jesus, they had him crucified to death.

Remember my favorite verse in the Bible, John 3:16? "For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son...? Well, this is when it happened.

They arrested Jesus and convinced the Roman authorities to have Him crucified. Jesus carried a heavy wooden beam, weighing about 110 pounds through the city streets of Jerusalem. He was supposed to carry it to the outskirts of town--to the junk yard--the place of the skull, as it was called--where He would be crucified.

But he couldn't make it by Himself. He was weak. You see, just before all this, he had been kept up all night with a trial that was a mockery of justice. He was beaten twenty-nine times with a cat-o-nine-tails whip. So as He walked the streets of Jerusalem, He came to the point where He collapsed because of fatigue and loss of blood.

So, the authorities grabbed an African visitor, named Simon, from the crowd, and made him carry the heavy wooden beam the rest of the way to the hill called, Golgotha.

Once they reached the hill, this heavy wooden beam was laid on the ground, and Jesus' arms were slightly stretched across the board. Nails were pounded into the center of the wrist of each of Jesus' arms, and then the beam was hoisted up and set on top of another pole that was permanently buried in the ground for just such an occasion as this.

Hanging about six feet in the air by the nails in his hands, His feet were put one on top of the other and a single nail was driven through both feet and into the beam that was already sitting in the ground.

For several hours Jesus hung there suspended between heaven and earth. He was dying the most agonizing death ever devised by one human against another. Finally at the end, he raised himself up to take in a gasp of breath and He said, "It is finished." Now, I don't think He said it softly. I think He shouted it, "It Is Finished!!!" And He died.

What was finished? What was completed that was so important to use your final dying breath to cry out to all that were standing around. Well, I'll tell you. It was that strike against the heal of the Savior that God had promised way back in the Garden of Eden to Adam and Eve. But you'll remember that that promise had two parts to it. Yes the heal would be struck, but the crushing was coming.

D. The final part of the Promise

One day passed. Then another. Then another. On that third day, something happened. The body of Jesus was lying dead in a hollowed out cave, with a two ton boulder rolled in front of the mouth of that cave, with Roman guards standing guard in front of the boulder. But the ground started shaking violently. And the guards at the tomb were so frightened by what they saw, that they fell over just like someone had shot them with a gun. An angel came swooping down from heaven and rolled the two ton stone away from the opening, and SAT ON IT! And Jesus walked out of that tomb, ALIVE! He conquered death and fulfilled the second part of that very first promise from God--the Savior had just crushed the power of death and Satan, forever!

III. Conclusion

Up until this point, I've just been talking about the first part of John 3:16. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son..." If you want to understand the Bible, that first phrase of John 3:16 is really most of the Bible in a nutshell... right up to the point of Jesus' resurrection.

But there's a second part to the Bible, and that's wrapped up in the second part of John 3:16. It says, "...that whosoever believes in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life."

The key to understanding that second part, is in the word, "whosoever". Who is whosoever? Whosoever is me, and who so ever is you.

What do we have to do? We have to believe that Jesus' death and His resurrection is all that's needed to give us real life in place of the death we have–real life is...
...a life of purpose,
...a life of true joy,
...and a life that will have no end, even after our bodies wear out here on earth.

This is just like God originally intended it to be, way back before Adam and Eve sinned.

But our part is to believe. That means we have to take the gift from God. You all have been given gifts at your birthday, or at Christmas time. And you know, that the gifts don't become yours until you take them from the giver.

You can dream about that present in the wrapped package until you are old and gray. But it's not yours until you personally take it. A gift becomes mine when I take the gift into my possession.

It's the same way with God's gift of Jesus. You take that gift by believing and having faith that if that gift is for nobody else, it still is for you. That is faith in Jesus Christ as your Savior.

I had to decide to take that gift when I was a sophomore in college. Some of you took that gift when you were 4 or 5 years old. Some of you took that gift of salvation from God when you were in your teen age years or maybe later on in life. But nevertheless, you took it.

But some of you have never taken the gift. You believe the promise in theory, or you hope that the promise is true. But you've never showed faith by believing that even if you were the only person living on the face of the earth, that promise would be for you. What are you waiting for. John 3:16 says...

"For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that WHOSOEVER (and you can put your name right there, right here, right now) believes on Him will not perish, but have everlasting life." Give invitation.