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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

When God Shows Up - Advent HOPE August 2019

Carlos Moretta

Abundant in Goodness and Truth and Keeping Mercy for Thousands

Heavenly Father, it has become apparent to me that as I prepared this message, that there is a huge disparity between who you are and who I am.

But Lord, I come to you this morning asking that you would set aside this broken vessel, that you would cover me with the grace of Jesus, and that the words that come out of my mouth be your words, That someone here might be encouraged along the way, might walk closer to you, and might cling to you, Father, in times of trial.

So in the original language, mercy is actually goodness.

Mercy and goodness are often used together and interchangeably in scripture many times.

It's funny, or maybe not so funny, that whenever tragedy strikes, like illness, disease, death, natural disasters, I find myself using this expression.

Have you guys ever used that expression before?

And it feels like, you know, it seems, just seems like I've been saying that a whole lot the last couple weeks with all of our shootings and everything that's going on.

It sounds like if I look at that phrase, It sounds as if I'm asking God to back off.

The Bible says that he keeps, it says, keeping mercy for thousands.

So why doesn't it say having mercy for thousands?

It sounds like there's this element, this language of permanence in his keeping his mercy.

Now, I know God has his limits, I understand that, but it's in the language, you hear it there, and it's for thousands, thousands.

Listen, in the Bible, The word billion and million, those are modern words.

So when the writer writes, when you see phrases and words like thousand or thousands or 10, 000 times 10, 000, What do you think the writer is trying to convey?

David wrote, O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good, because his mercy endureth for how long?

The psalmist giving a recount of God's consistent mercy, evidence from creation to his day, from creation to the day of David, he penned the words to Psalm 136 and he ended every single verse in that chapter with the words, his mercy endureth forever.

Now I close my brief summary on mercy because I want to get back to goodness.

It's not uncommon in a church to hear the pastor, this banter between the pastor and his congregation.

You hear this exchange and you've heard it before, the pastor says, God is good and the congregation says, All the time.

And then he says, all the time, and the congregation says, God is good.

But relativism is the rule of the day today.

We hear people say, well, That's true for you, but it's not for me.

Or that's good for you, but it's not good for me.

And those may be true statements, but I'm not sure that God intended his goodness to be for some and not for others.

Or in some measure for some and a different measure for others.

Often in the Bible, his goodness was proportional to how we responded to his goodness.

But in the proper context, God was and is consistently good.

I want to talk a little something about habits.

Ellen White wrote this quote, which I think has been corroborated and verified in medicine, right?

Never forget that thoughts work out actions, repeated actions form habits, and habits form character.

So, this right here is Don Jorge Bilicich.

He is my father-in-law of Yugoslav descent.

Some of you have met him on some of his visits.

He's a creature of habit, as you would expect at the age of 88.

He takes care of you while you're under his roof or while he's under your roof or whatever, if he's around you're not lifting a finger, which is why I love to have him around.

But service is 1 of his greatest attributes.

Decades of doing the same thing every day the same way.

Mate is this little drink, this tea that South Americans, you know, in varying degrees are very fond of, right?

A little tea, a little powdered milk, a little sugar, a little cup, a couple flakes of corn.

And I don't know how he does it, because that's all he eats, this little cup right here.

So that buys me about 25 minutes in the morning, and that's all, and I'm hungry again.

He was probably wondering, he was wondering why I was taking so many pictures.

But I didn't tell him that he was gonna be an illustration for my message today.

Every 1 of these steps repeated like clockwork for years.

You take this man to IHOP for a pancake breakfast and you have messed him up.

Like he is, His demeanor is completely distorted the rest of the day.

His behavior, his character, he's not in a good mood.

I took him out of that sequence of habits, of repeated actions.

So I was wondering, can I apply this to God?

We see thoughts, actions, repeated actions, habits, and then habits forming character.

I tried to stretch this 1 out, but I think I got something.

I know the thoughts that I think towards you, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end, Jeremiah 29.11.

Desire of ages, just a couple things here in red.

By coming to dwell with us, Jesus was to reveal God both to men and to angels.

Carissa Vitorovic

Healing the Generational Pain

Heavenly Father God, Lord, we come to you today because you are a God of mercy and compassion and grace.

We come to you, Lord, because you are a God who knows our hearts.

And Lord, we come to you today because you have said that we can.

And Father, I just want to thank you for this honor.

Lord, my prayer is not by might nor by power, but by your spirit.

In the name of your son, Jesus Christ, I do pray.

After 400 years in slavery, the Israelites are set free from Egypt and they begin their journey to the Promised Land.

As we know, over those 400 years in slavery, they had developed, they had grown in many misconceptions of who God is.

In fact, we find them in Exodus trying to contain the God of the universe in the image of a golden calf.

Constantly in their own spiritual journey, they are wandering from the wilderness to the promised land, to the wilderness to the promised land, constantly turning to God and then rejecting him once again.

And here Moses is, as he faces yet again another rebellion from this people who are called by God's name.

And he there in the mount is pleading with God and he's saying, don't abandon your people, God, don't give up on them.

And that's where we pick up the journey that we've been experiencing over this past few weeks together in Exodus chapter 34, beginning in verse 5.

Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord.

And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious.

Merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation.

Today, that is the portion we are going to focus in on, the concept of visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation.

Is that starting to raise some questions in your mind?

A complementary passage is found in Exodus chapter 20.

Of course we know Exodus 20 for containing what?

And here God writes, You shall not make for yourself a carved image, any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers." Again, we're seeing it repeated here.

"'Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments.

You see, I believe this morning we need to wrestle with this question.

Does God punish for 3 or 4 generations for the decisions, for the choices of our ancestors?

Are we punished for the iniquities of our grandfather?

Is that the picture that God is offering here in Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 16?

We find that Moses, the same author as Exodus, battles against that Battles against that misconception.

And here the same author Moses writes, Father shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their fathers.

A person shall be put to death for his own sin.

Again, we're seeing a conflicting picture here.

Ezekiel chapter 18 continues this theme, yet you say, why should the son not bear the guilt of the father?

Because the Son has done what is lawful and right, and has kept all my statues and observed them, he shall surely live.

The Son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son.

The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself." So here again in these 2 passages, in Deuteronomy and in Ezekiel, we again are reminded, no, you do not suffer, no, you are not punished for the iniquities of those who came before.

But if that's the case, then how are we to reconcile that with the theme that we see in Exodus chapter 20 and Exodus chapter 34?

What does it mean that God visits the iniquity upon the children to the third and the fourth generation?

Do the choices that we make, do the propensities that we have affect our offspring?

In fact, there's a growing field, and I'm going to just nerd out for a moment here, so if you're feeling like you're back in class, ignore me for 5 minutes, and then we'll get back together, okay?

You're fascinated by it as well, aren't you?

And let's just read what it has to say here.

In epigenetics, the fetus becomes a crucial node in space-time, simultaneously archiving the past while becoming the future.

Because of this, the prenatal temporality is not limited to conception and pregnancy, but to everything prior to birth, grandparents, exposures, etc.

Similarly, the effects of the prenatal environment extend to future generations, as the epigenetic outcomes of exposures in one's own lifetime become factors for future generations, whether through direct inheritance or through the social environment.

In epigenetics, what organisms are now constitutes the environment for future generations.

If that didn't make any sense at all, let's try it again.

Genes aren't a fixed, predetermined program simply passed from 1 generation to the next.

Instead, genes can be turned on and off by experiences and environment.

What we eat, how much stress we undergo, what toxins we're exposed to can all alter the genetic legacy that we pass on to our children.

In this new science of epigenetics, researchers are exploring how nature and nurture combine to cause behavior, traits, and illnesses that genes alone can't explain.

So we're Seeing that these traits, epigenetics is revealing that these behaviors or these things that we have been exposed to, they influence the generations that follow.

Whether that is through nature, whether it is through nurture, or maybe it's a combination of the 2, the choices that we make or what we experience affects those who come after us.

We see this clearly revealed, that's the end of science in case you had zoned out.

Coming back together, we see this clearly revealed time and again in the biblical story as well.

You see this behavior, these traits that continue to replicate themselves, such as in the story of Abraham, a man who we know was among the men of faith, and yet we find him pretending that she is not my wife, lying about Sarah because of lack of trust in God's protection.

His son Isaac follows in his footsteps and soon he is lying about Rebecca being his wife, a lack of faith in God's provision.

And I'll just point to 1 where he again is claiming to be Esau and he comes before his father.

He is doubting that God can fulfill the promises that were given to him.

You see again, it's this generational tendency to turn to lies, to turn to deceit when their own faith begins to falter.

And we can see this pattern again and again and while we are not responsible for the sins of our ancestors, we are particularly susceptible to their weaknesses.

Maybe you've seen this in your own life, these funny little patterns you find yourself inheriting from your parents.

My mom was talking 1 day about how a friend of hers was teasing her because she picked up a magazine and my mom began to flip through the magazine, but she always flips through the magazine from the back to the front.

Well, yeah, that is a pretty unusual trait.

You always start at the front, go to the beginning.

Until a few days later when I picked up a quilting magazine and I started flipping through it from the back to the front and I looked down at myself, what am I doing?

But these little traits that just pass their way through and I would love to hear some of your stories, some of the things that you've inherited from your parents.

Both the positive things and maybe also the little quirks that come along with that story.

The nature and the nurture that affects us in our own life and our own natural tendencies.

Now for some of us here, we might be thinking about our background, our lineage, and we might say, well hallelujah, mine's perfect.

Adrien Charles-Marcel

When Waves Begin to Roll

Dear Lord, thank you so much for this Sabbath day.

Thank you for bringing us through another week, for giving us life.

And thank you for giving us the chance to study your word now.

And I pray, Lord, that as we go through and as we reflect on what we've studied these last 4 weeks, that you would help it to take root in our hearts and to become part of our lives.

So I titled the presentation this morning, When God Shows up, the waves begin to roll.

And you'll see as I go through this morning that it's an illustration that I'm using.

It's not an in-depth theological study, so please don't hold me to any exegesis, eisegesis, any of that kind of stuff.

But it is looking at an illustration of how we can understand the relationship between God's character and our lives today.

So I was given the challenging task of summarizing what we've been studying this last month.

We've been studying Exodus 34 and God's character and what it means when he explains to Moses and describes who he is.

And putting it all together at the end now, and thinking where do we go from here?

How do we take what we've learned and apply it for the next year, 2 years, however long God gives us life.

As I was thinking about it and pondering, I was actually on a beach and looking at the waves, the ocean, and thinking about how as the waves come in, when you're sitting on the shore, you're constantly seeing waves coming in.

And it's kind of a reminder of how God's character, God's characteristics, and who he is, he's constantly trying to convey to us more of himself and more of who he is.

And as I was sitting there and looking at the waves as they were coming in, it made me think a little bit about how in the Bible sometimes there's a few verses where it compares God and the ocean and the waves.

And so A couple of them are there on the screen.

Your way was in the sea, your path in the great waters, and your footsteps were not known.

Deep calls unto deep at the noise of your waterfalls.

All your waves and billows have gone over me." So thinking about the waves, thinking about the ocean, thinking about what correlations we can see between God's character and that, I was thinking how the waves are sometimes unpredictable.

Sometimes when you are there at the beach or in the ocean, it's hard to predict what's going to come next.

You know that the waves are coming, but you don't know if it's going to be a big 1.

You don't know if it's going to be a small 1.

You see a swell, and you think, oh, this is going to be a big wave.

And then it turns out it's a really small 1.

And when we started out this month, we were looking at a couple of things that we sometimes didn't understand, some things that we thought were a little bit unpredictable about God, and how it seems like sometimes there are some contradictions in his description of himself, and things that we couldn't quite make sense of.

And sometimes we might expect certain things from God, and it turns out that we don't get that.

And sometimes we might find that God surprises us by the way that he reveals himself.

So what was the verse that we were studying this last month?

I'll give you guys a chance to look that up in your Bibles.

And I just did that so that I wouldn't miss the verses and my nervousness up here.

But please look for it in your Bibles, and I'll give you a chance to find that.

The Bible says there, and the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation." And so over the last 4 weeks, we've looked at that verse.

We've cut it down into its pieces and studied what does it mean when God says that he's merciful and gracious and long-suffering?

What does it mean when God says that he keeps mercy for thousands?

What does it mean when he says he forgives iniquity, he forgives transgression, and yet he doesn't clear the guilty?

And what does it mean when he says that he visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation.

So I've summarized in just a few sentences what basically, at least what I got out of what we went over the last month.

And I'm sure each of us probably got something slightly different.

But we learned in God's long suffering that we have the opportunity to experience God's goodness, God's love in our lives over time, over a period of time that sometimes may be longer than we anticipate.

Sometimes there are things in our lives that God has us wait for that we weren't anticipating waiting for.

And through that wait, we have the opportunity to understand his long suffering and his love towards us.

And sometimes that's in contradistinction to the evil that we see in the world.

And we've learned that despite the bad, God is still good.

We've also learned that God is forgiving.

And that even though the verse says that God forgives and does not clear the guilty, that's not at odds with itself.

It actually is showing us how God takes the guilt upon himself when we allow him to, pays our sin, and gives us the opportunity to be forgiven.

We've also learned how God allows for free choice and for free will, and that although our choices do have consequences and have effects on those that come after us, God is able to turn situations around for good.

So this verse that we've been studying didn't happen in a vacuum.

And in just a few words, It was when Moses was asking God to show him who he was.

He had been given the task of leading the children of Israel, and he didn't quite understand all that God expected of him.

And so he asked God, Please show me yourself.

And so God responds in that verse that we've been studying.

Well, after that, Moses was drawn to come even closer to God and to bring his people even closer to God.

We see that in the next verses that God's response draws Moses in to want to go even closer.

And so if you can look in verses 8 and 9, the Bible says, so Moses made haste and bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.

Then he said, if now I have found grace in your sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray, go among us, even though we are a stiff-necked people, and Pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as your inheritance." So we see that the response of God, the self-revelation of God is not just something that Moses wanted to just sit back and observe from far.

It was something that attracted him to God.

And we can see that as we've studied God's character, it's a beautiful character.

And it should draw us to want to know him even better.

It kind of reminds me, going back to the illustration, when I was sitting there on the beach, I noticed that some people were not content with just watching the waves from the shore.

They wanted to go and experience them up close.

So I don't know about even half of what it takes to surf.

But as I was watching, I noticed that there were people out there that were trying to catch the waves.

And it was a lot of fun to watch and see how they try to time it just right so they can ride the waves into the shore.

And again, that reminds me of what God wants to do with us.

As we see more of who he is as we're drawn closer, he wants us to become spiritual surfers, as it is.

And that's not supposed to be like a, that's just an illustration.

The verse after Moses' response to God and says, please take us as your people, take us as your inheritance.

God says, and he said, behold, I make a covenant.

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Series

When God Shows Up - Advent HOPE August 2019

When Waves Begin to Roll

Transcript

Parent Series

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Recorded

Parts

Abundant in Goodness and Truth and Keeping Mercy for Thousands

37m

Healing the Generational Pain

40m

When Waves Begin to Roll

35m

Sound Doctrine