Dear Church family,
I pray that you experienced genuine worship towards our Lord Jesus yesterday and that the worship continues today and throughout your week.
Remember that worship means placing your faith in God Who provides everything that you need and more. Worship is closely tied to provision. We worship whatever we think will provide our deepest and greatest needs. Genesis sets us up for this most fundamental definition for worship because the context is that our Creator God has made everything, including us. Therefore, worship begins when we recognize that God is a good Creator Who provided everything for us to enjoy (Gen. 2:9). And our worship response is that in everything we are and in everything we think and everything we do, we react to God’s provision with praise, thanksgiving and trust that He has and will continue to provide for and meet our smallest & greatest needs. And of all our needs, salvation from death and forgiveness from sins is our greatest one. Therefore, we worship God throughout the week and every day because He has sent Jesus to provide forgiveness of sins, spiritual hygiene (a bath from the dirt of sin!), and eternal life in Christ! We have a bright future all because God has provided it for us in Christ! (Eph. 2:4-7!).
As you heard yesterday, in Genesis 5, Seth’s lineage was a godly line of worshippers (4:26) as Seth’s progeny started “calling out on the name of the Lord.” That is to say, they looked outward towards God in order to provide for their greatest needs, salvation from sin and death (remember the “and he died and he died…” format of Genesis 5’s genealogy). They would have been worshiping by faith in God’s promise to the serpent in Gen. 3:15, believing that God would indeed provide via forming an offspring from their relative Eve in order to save the world from the curse and crush that evil snake.
And in their faith formed worship, these folks were looking for the first coming of Christ, which would come thousands of years later through Eve’s offspring (see Luke 3:23-38). And during Christ’s first coming, we know that He died for our sins, became crowned with the curse of life (a crown of thorns), and rose from the dead, conquering the climax of this cursed world, which is death. He did it all for us so that we can be saved from sin and death.
Now I want to insist on something for us: if we will be worshippers by faith too, then that entails:
- We look back on Christ’s first coming as our rescue from death & sin.
- All of these worshippers by faith in Seth’s linage were looking for their hope to be fulfilled in the coming Christ. Lamech shows this in his confession of faith in 5:29 says, “out of the ground that the LORD has cursed, this one (Noah) shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.”
- Lamech believed that Eve’s offspring, based on the promise of God (Gen. 3:15) would bring relief from all pain and the cursed condition of the world.
- And our act of worship is believing in God’s Word that has recorded this promise fulfilled, that in Christ, He has become our sin on the Cross so that we can become the righteousness of God and that we are now “new creations in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:17-21). God has begun removing the curse of sin in our life through the Cross of Christ. Our act of worship is believing that Christ has really done that, and it is enough (He has provided eternal life for us!).
- However, there is a second element of worshipping by faith that should define us: We look forward towards Christ’s second coming when He will wipe out the wicked, judge all sin, and save us fully from this decrepit and delipidated world.
- It’s not enough to just look back on God’s fulfilled promise of Christ’s first coming in which He provided and secured eternal life for us and victory against eternal death. To complete our faith-worship in God, we must stay alert and awake to the second coming of Christ when He will finish what He started.
- It’s the second coming of Christ that will perfectly fulfill Lamech’s confession of hope in 5:29 where an individual will “bring relief from the painful curse.” Revelation 21:4 describes that day following the second return of Jesus.
- Noah will be our exhibit A for this kind of worshipful faith, since, he believed God’s Word about a coming judgment, acted in obedience by building an ark, was saved from the flood of future judgement, and saved to a new world as he knew it.
- And this needs to be the way that we worship by faith too.
- If we will worship God by faith as we ought, then not only should we look back at how Jesus has provided spiritual salvation from our sins, but we need to look forward to how Jesus will provide physical salvation from the diseased conditions of the tangible world around us. The New Testament constantly beckons the Church to “set our hope fully on the grace that will be revealed to us at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 1:13)
So to my WOL Chapel family, I want to encourage you to place your faith in Jesus’ coming back again to fix all of your brokenness. This is how we complete our worship—worship that believes that God will provide all that we need, to save us from spiritual sin and guilt and bring us into a right relationship with God, but also to save us from the fallen effects of this tangible world. This includes judging the wicked so that an evil culture no longer exists.
And in order for us to worship effectively, the lineage of Seth shows us how to do this…like Enoch (5:24) , if we walk with God by faith, calling upon His name, He will save us from death, ultimately, and we will experience life with God forever. But like Noah (6:9), we must walk with God by faith, believing in a coming judgement and refusing to live our life as if nothing will change (like buying and selling and marrying as if God won’t interrupt our plans…Matthew 24:36-50!).
I believe one of the greatest temptations for believers in our part of the globe, and for me personally, is to forget about the second coming of Christ. It just seems so unbelievable. Perhaps we remember the first, but we don’t steak all our hopes on His second coming. Therefore, in the meantime, we get distracted with other lesser and temporary solutions to this broken world, like medical advancements and technology (remember Cain’s evil lineage, 4:16-24, numbing the effects of the curse through nifty cutting edge invensions), but we don’t place our full faith in Christ’s future coming when He will fix everything perfectly.
May we all complete our worship with faith in God’s future provision of Christ’s second coming. May we all say, ‘come Lord Jesus come!’
With love in Christ,
Aaron
