Light Warrior

I’m so proud of my daughter Rachel Sandifer.  Her senior film project, highlighting Madeline Feagin who calls herself the Light Warrior, is more than a mini-documentary.  In less than 7 minutes you’ll be immersed in an inspiring story that exalts Jesus Christ the giver of talents, abilities, and gifts.  May every person offer up a living sacrifice to their Creator and Redeemer all they have received from him.

The Preservation of the Godly Seed

In Philippians 3 the apostle Paul engages in a little playful boasting about his spiritual and family pedigree. Against folks who take pride in the greatness of their ancestors, Paul trash talks his way to the top of the dogpile. But to Paul it’s ultimately an empty exercise to find your identity and worth in your accomplishments or those of your forebears. Because whether your genes descend from royalty or rogues or just regular folks, what’s important is not who one’s genealogy points back to, but who it points forward to and how that should direct your life right now.

When it seems like the sky is falling, and the world is crashing down all around you, and even the supposedly godly people are disappointing, it’s tempting to wonder where is God. Is God still at work preserving a remnant to save the world—and how does Jesus fit into his plan? If you have spiritual eyes to see, a close reading of Genesis 11:10-26 sheds light on such questions.

Scripture traces the promise of a future serpent-crushing seed through a post-flood genealogy from Shem to father Abraham. As the primeval era ends, Genesis shifts focus to one man’s family through whom God will redeem the world from sin. Hope in Jesus Christ: the true godly seed and redeemer of fallen creation.

In the first 11 chapters of Genesis there are three genealogies. This one is the briefest and simplest, almost sprinting across ten generations to get to Abram. It signals a major turning point in world history, inviting reflection on how the story so far prepares us for learning about Israel’s patriarchs.

The Confusion of the Nations

The good old King James Version of the Bible says, “God is not the author of confusion but of peace” (1 Cor 14:33). So how to make sense of what God did at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9? Surely there must be more to the story. If unity is a virtue, and the Bible says that God plans to restore unity to the human race, then why do our human efforts to foster unity, especially at the global, world-wide, whole-earth level, seem to always be frustrated by heaven?

If we pursue cooperative projects to make ourselves a greater name than God’s, even our most ambitious, unified, and ingenious labors will finally disintegrate since God thwarts all power-grabs with spiritually-induced confusion. Lest you imbibe this Babylon spirit, leave a legacy by living soberly in Christ’s name.

The Genesis 10 Table of Nations is the companion section to the Tower of Babel story. Each interprets the other. The Table shows who are all the peoples of the earth, how we’re all related to Noah, and where his descendants settled after being dispersed. The infamous Babel origin narrative gives historical and theological reasons when and why earth’s unified monolingual people suddenly scattered.

We Are Indeed God’s Offspring

Usually I don’t read other preachers’s sermons to prepare for mine. But passages like this one are especially challenging, so I consulted a few for ideas. John MacArthur has the best sermon introduction: today you’re going to find out what seminary is like! Well, not quite. But I think that captures our initial fears about Genesis 10. Thankfully there is edifying and relevant sermon fodder here.

How should I think about our world’s most intractable problems such as racism, the strong preying upon the weak, and our collective inability to transcend barriers of geography, language, culture, and religion? Has God done anything to heal our age-old divisions? Will he? Genesis 10:1-32 testifies that God set the stage in ancient history for all these.

The Genesis Table of Nations that records genealogies and territories of the 70 nations descended from Noah’s three sons emphasizes: human unity and diversity, origins of tyrannical kingdoms opposing God, and peoples who forgot the LORD but whom God keeps in his plans. In Christ let us all bless the nations.

Here begins the fourth of ten sectional markers of generations in Genesis. This one records the genealogies and stories of Noah’s three sons who are the post-flood fathers of all the world’s peoples. As Noah’s story bridged the pre- and post-flood worlds, this section bridges the late primeval world which remains shrouded in the distant past, with the era of recorded and familiar ancient history.

Relief From Our Painful Toil

There’s a chapter in the OT where Moses lists miscellaneous laws for Israel. One says, “you shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain” (Dt 25:4) Fair enough. But in the NT Paul quotes that verse to argue it’s not primarily for oxen that God is concerned. In terms of the applied spiritual meaning, God wants the farmer (worker) to plow and thresh in hope of sharing in the crop (fruit of his labor; 1 Cor 9:9-10). Thank God, because like farming, life is hard enough without getting to enjoy the job perks along the way.

Life can be really hard because work is painful and toilsome. In this sin-cursed world is there any rest and relief I can enjoy from my labors when it feels like I’m barely making ends meet? Am I destined to always be a lowly worker scraping by only to enrich others, but never having my portion enlarged? Surely the Israelites in the wilderness were asking such questions. But they weren’t the first. These fears had earlier occurred to Israel’s (and our) forefathers in the faith: Noah and his sons. In Genesis 9:18-29 we learn:

The account of Noah ends with an origin story of earth’s dispersed peoples. National destinies are forged when Noah renders judgment for each son’s response to his drinking wine and disrobing to lay in his tent. Enjoy rest and relief from our painful toil first won by Noah and finally by Christ our true Man of Rest.

In terms of the length of his story (four chapters), Noah is the first major character in Genesis after Adam. This last episode gathers together and concludes the themes of Noah’s life, while at the same time foreshadowing the full scope of Scripture’s unfolding drama of worldwide redemption.

Remembering Richard: A Eulogy

Richard Warren Stumpf (March 29, 1957 – April 9, 2024)

For most of us, last Tuesday was the first normal day after the magnificent total solar eclipse on Monday. Tuesday morning, we all got out of bed and got back to our regular routine. Richard did too. He worked a full day at his job in St. Louis before coming home to get ready to go to his Men’s Journey Group Bible study. All week he had been preparing the lesson. It was going to be his first time to teach at our weekly meeting. Of course you know we didn’t get to meet that day. But Richard still taught us well. Do you know what the lesson what going to be about? “Accepting Suffering: The Christian’s Response to Pain.” His wife Paula loaned me his notes so I might help us gain some insight into what Richard was really like because he was a private man in public, but an amazingly influential man in private.

Following Richard’s sudden and shocking death, one thing I heard over and over again about the public Richard was, “But he was so strong!” Yes, Richard was a guy who many knew for his pumped physique. He lifted weights, exercised, and worked hard with son Ben in the garden. In his younger days he was quite a softball slugger, jacking legendary home runs over the fence that hit houses in the distance. There’s even a story from the Police Force of Officer Richard besting a burly Russian in an arm-wrestling match. His victory was so impressive the guys at work gave him a gaudy Russian bear stuffed animal as a goofy trophy. Apparently Richard had a strong appetite too. Legend has it that as a college student at U of I, someone dared him to win the cake eating contest after eating a meal. Richard put away 22 pieces on a full stomach! His family remembers he’d always repeat that trusty police proverb, “The more you sweat in the gym, the less you’ll bleed on the street.” Lest we get the impression that Richard was a cocky jock, he is also remembered for saying, “Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.” In that quote we get a glimpse of the private side of Richard he revealed to family and friends.

The Covenant of Preservation

Not long ago my wife’s sister moved in with our family to heal from a broken heart and get a fresh start. She was with us less than two months before she suddenly died. Now we were the ones heartbroken. That’s not how we envisioned helping her would end. In a few days many relatives gathered at our home for comfort and grief. It was raining which added to the feeling of dreary sadness. But after the storm, a bright, full-colored rainbow appeared outside. Not in the distance, but almost as if its apex was arched right over our house. Everyone stood barefoot in the backyard, heads cocked skyward, mouths agape, at such a wondrous display bridging heaven and earth.

Rainbows are stunningly beautiful and almost heavenly in appearance—what should we think about them? Genesis 9:8-17 holds the answer. After promising Noah and all his descendants that he will never again flood the earth, God confirmed his word by establishing an everlasting covenant with all living creatures, making the rainbow the covenant sign of his promise. See and take comfort in the Divine Warrior’s stunning bow set at rest after the storm.

As Noah’s ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, all living creatures with the breath of life in their lungs and blood flowing through their veins stepped into a new world. The first thing Noah did off the boat was to worship God. And the first thing God did was make another covenant and give it a sign. Just like in the beginning with Adam, things were playing out with Noah in the new creation according to God’s familiar pattern. Yet none of it felt rehashed for God’s ways are always fresh.

Not Quite Eden

A family from my old church survived their home’s complete destruction from a tornado. It felt so traumatic they decided not to rebuild and instead move far away from Oklahoma to start fresh. But they still suffer from PTSD and a nagging fear it might happen to them again. Once your home is wiped out, it’s hard to ever feel safe again. We’re all trying with some futility to return to Eden.

Since God destroyed the primeval world in judgment for human violence and spiritual rebellion, who’s to say God won’t do it again and again? How would God have us now curtail and deal with the sins that prompted the Flood so we might respect his Lordship and gain his favor? If you’ve wondered about such things, then take a close look at Scripture in Genesis 8:20-9:7.

After God accepted Noah’s animal sacrifice, he promised to perpetually sustain the re-created earth so man can exercise dominion. As in Eden, God also named a forbidden food (bloody meat) and a law to honor his Lordship (do not murder divine image-bearers). Multiply, treasure, and protect all human life.

At God’s command, every person and animal disembarked from Noah’s ark into a new world, a new Eden brimming with possibilities. There was much to do after the Flood. Where to begin? If you were Noah, what would you do first? How would you order your priorities?

Why Are You Weeping?

Do you remember the syndicated newspaper cartoon “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”? It featured factual oddities from the world of sports, the human body, and history. The popular Ripley’s brand spun into books, radio, movies, television, the internet, computer games, and Odditorium museums. A common thread in all things Ripley is that everything featured is trivial, rare, and amusing, but none of it is truly significant. That’s why I think the unusual Ripley’s collection does not include Jesus Christ’s life after death. The resurrection is certainly odd, but it doesn’t belong because it matters.

The Bible doesn’t report Jesus’ life after death as if it were some quirk of history, so what are the meaning and significance of his resurrection? At the garden tomb the disciples Mary Magdalene, Peter, and John found circumstantial evidence that Jesus is alive, but later that day Mary encountered the risen Christ there. Jesus sent her back with good news that means Scripture is true, eternal life is real, and God’s victory is sure. Weep not, for he is risen!

At the end of all four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), we read the story of Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection. In John 20:1-18 we drop into the story early Sunday morning, the scene still shrouded in darkness before sunrise. Darkness is also the prevailing mood. No disciple of Jesus is happy or hopeful, and no one expects the world-shaking event they’re about to discover.

Perfect Sacrifice, Perfect Priest

Historically the Church has commemorated significant events during Holy Week: the last week of Jesus’ life on earth (eight days counting inclusively from Sunday to Sunday). We celebrate Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Three days later is Holy Wednesday when some church traditions remember the betrayal by Judas as an occasion for our self-reflection and lament. The next day is Maundy Thursday which memorializes Christ’s institution of the Lord’s Supper, sometimes with a foot washing ceremony. Then comes Good Friday, the “good” day when the Lord Jesus (who embodied the hope of God’s kingdom come) died a horrible, shameful, cursed death (!).

Good Friday obviously celebrates Jesus of Nazareth’s death, but no one who loved Jesus celebrated on the day he died, so what is “good” about Good Friday that makes it worth celebrating every year?  The book of Hebrews (Heb 4:14-16; 5:7-9) teaches:

Jesus of Nazareth has many titles in the Bible (Christ, Lord, Son of God and Man), but High Priest is the role highlighted in his crucifixion. Jesus is a perfect priest because the perfect sacrifice he offered to God was his own perfect life that atones for sin, and his heavenly ministry of sympathy fits sinners like us.