NEW! That's the theme of the messages this month…

We are after all in a New Year and most of us are looking for "new" things in our lives.

What I am trying to show you, is that this concept of "newness" is a much bigger deal to God than it is to us.

God is the author of all that is New!

…from the beginning of time… right up until the beginning of eternity and then beyond for trillions of years…. God has always been, and will always be- the author of all things "new".

From the first verse of the Bible:

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (10 words)

To:

Pause with me here… do we realize the potency of a handful of Bible words like we just read…

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (10 English words… only eight words in the original Hebrew)

The complexity of nature around us is awesome enough but if you step outside on a clear dark, night and look up some 3000 stars will come into view. If you set up your Walmart telescope you can instantly turn that three thousand into 100,000 stars. Wow… now God's creation is starting to be impressive. What you can't see is that just beyond that 100,000 stars that you can see is 100,000,000,000 stars that you can't see… and that is just in out Milky Way Galaxy! There are an estimated hundred billion galaxies…each with a hundred billion stars. With less words that we use greet one another…God flung:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 -ten billion trillion

If we were to split them all up and give everyone on earth an equal share in the "Christmas star registry"…everyone on earth would get;

1,500,000,000,000

Let me tell you another amazing detail… All of those stars are moving…are expanding outward at an ever increasing speed. Oddly, the entire universe is expanding outward …from here. Scientist try to theorize a Big Bang but isn't it odd that the center of the Bang is here in our galaxy… and where did all that compressed matter come from that banged and what could have possibly sparked the bang?

And distances.. we can't fathom that our galaxy, alone, is 100,000 light years in diameter,

One light year = 6,000,000,000,000 miles

You do the math… God whipped up that little recipe and set it into motion all in a matter of a few hours… But I'm not done, here, yet:

Revelation 21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared… 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven…

In twenty more words at the end of the Bible, God tells us, matter of factly, that he is going to do a complete make-over, not just of this earth but of the entire universe! He's going to create a completely new earth…and oh - by the way -while He's doing that few minutes of work, He is going to redo the entire sin-tarnished universe.

Revelation 21:5 And the one sitting on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new!” …

One more little morsel before I share where this is all going…somewhere, right now God is preparing this New Jerusalem, (a cube 1400 miles by 1400 miles by 1400 miles). This "holy city" is going to travel through space and connect to this earth.

At its base, the New Jerusalem will be more than half the size of the United States (55%, actually). This is almost exactly 1% of the Earth’s surface. If each “story” in this gigantic structure is a ½ mile in height, the accumulated surface area of the New Jerusalem will be more than 30 times the surface area of the Earth! .. Let’s say God brings two billion people into the city. Every person could be allocated 1,756 acres each!

God sets up a pattern… stay with me here…

God creates the New

That's the pattern God uses in the whole physical universe to achieve his ultimate Divine purposes. It's also the pattern he uses, and reuses, at the center of the universe here on earth to achieve his Divine purposes. What I really want you to see is that God has an M.O… His response tends to be decisive and
________________________________________________________________________

Let's see how this divine principle affects the subject of LIFE.. Here on Sanctity of Life Sunday.

God creates all of life….where-ever it might show up in this vast universe. But the center of the center… the centerpiece of God's creation is when he creates humans with his divine stamp etched into them.

27 So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God breathed into mankind's soul the "breath of life". A lot of talk this week about cloned meat showing up in our stores, and the possibility of cloned human just "months" away. Yesterday an article emerged out of England saying a Doctor had manage to clone himself and the clone lived five days. Make no mistake… God's image…"LIFE", was implanted by God, and the best we can ever do is to transfer God's breath of life from us into another new human being. We don't make life… we don't conceive life. We don't get the option of starting that breath of life and we don't get to make the choice to stop it… either.

The issue of stopping or now starting life is said to be a political football… but from a theological standpoint… Messing with God's "breath of life" - the implant of His image in mankind is dangerous business!

…And it's not even just God's breath in the lungs or the beating heart issue. Inside every strand of human DNA there are more coded messages than on the hard drives of every computer owned by this congregation. Every strand of your DNA has an unbelievably complex divine message that affects every aspect of your years here on earth. That tiny encoded multimillion gigabites of information is personally etched into every new human being millions of times over… with the finger of God Himself.

Enter in to that picture of the perfection of human creation : SIN…

What do we know about sin… from the Bible; from human history, from our own lives?

Sin Kills - The wages of sin is death! Sin tries to eat away at the perfection of God's creation and in this case at the very roots of life itself.

The combined theme of both Testaments:

Sin brings physical death; God's complex coded DNA will dim, this amazing super computer we call a brain will falter, this miraculous casing that houses our soul that we call a body will deteriorate and finally the lights will go out.

(Sins kills others as well)

Here's the question I want us to answer. Based on what we have seen about God and Creation: how do you think he is going to respond to this challenge of sin in the world?

Imagine that God is going to deal with the sin issue in the world using the same M.O. that he used in the creation of the universe.

Is God going to attack our sin problem in a half-baked way. Is he going to put a band-aid here and a piece of gauze there and squirt a little superglue in this gaping hole.

No! But how do you know that??? Because that is not the way God functions! God's way is not to do enough to get by… Look at Creation…

We could have gotten by with a half dozen stars… A universe one light year across would have worked out just fine. But that not the way God does things. When God addresses a problem he always over-addresses the problem.

1) He reversed the spiritual death sentence by taking every sin of every human being on himself and personally paying the death penalty for every single person ever born. He extends his offer of salvation to all who will repent and believe… to his chosen people??... no to everybody no matter how rejecting or wicked they are!

2) The Bible says that while Jesus was paying the penalty for our sins, that he went on to take on satan, and sin and defeat the power of sin in this world. If that wasn't enough he literally fought death itself… and in a battle bigger than any of us can imagine he rose through the fog of deadness until his eyes blinked back open and he literally defeated the power of death itself.

Jesus set up something brand new… the power to physically resurrect after having died…. And He didn't make that neat new option available to Abraham, Moses, David and the first 100 lucky contestants who call in…

Jesus made the option of defeating death and rising back to consciousness after the effects of sin has killed this body off available to… everybody!

Are you getting the MO of God here??? God does nothing halfway! Whenever God is doing something; he overshoots the mark of "just enough to get by" by several trillion percent.

So once you rise back from the dead… how many years of living with God in heaven do each of you get? (God has a formula where if you were a Christian on this earth for 30 years he multiplies that by how many times you were kind to your boss, and divides that by how many swear words you used???_____________________

God reverses the effects of eternal death by giving each person who embraces his gift… eternal life

How long does eternal life last? Forever! How long is forever…"Forever is a long, long time"… Do you see what I am saying about God? He does nothing part way! Whatever God sets out to do… He overwhelmingly overachieves!

I said all of that to set up this last point:

Last week I took you through the Old Testament describing how God carves out a people on this earth who would turn from their sin and develop a relationship with him. With all the power God has… the only place He applies limits is in relating to us. He obviously could force us to do anything he wants us to do… but then it wouldn't be a relationship… and he created us to love us… and to give us the opportunity to love him back

The bulk of the Old Testament/Old Covenant is mankind in a rejection mode against God's wooing.. but we saw the prophets begin to tell Israel that God was going to give them a New Covenant.

Jeremiah 31:33 “But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel on that day,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

Ezekiel 36:26 And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.

Q: When God does something new…about how "new" does it tend to be?

Based on what we have seen so far today…about how much weight can you put on God carrying through with what he says he will do?

Based on what we have seen here today, is God willing to do just enough to be able to say he fulfilled his promise… or will he over-achieve yet again?

__________________________________________________________________

OK let me then take you into the New Testament/Covenant and show you what God says he is planning to do inside of each one of us under the New Covenant.

Romans 5:18 Yes, Adam’s one sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone.

1 Corinthians 15:22 Just as everyone dies because we all belong to Adam, everyone who belongs to Christ will be given new life.

Titus 3:5 He saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit.

Q: Alright so that is the part where he washes away your sins and declares you his child, right. New birth, new life…kind of a metaphor for joining the new Jesus Club…right?

Q: when God says something is going to be new…approximately how new can you expect it to be?

2 Corinthians 5:15 He died for everyone so that those who receive his new life will no longer live for themselves. Instead, they will live for Christ, who died and was raised for them.

2 Corinthians 5:17 This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!

Romans 12:2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.
Here's the thing that's so striking to me. Most of what I've said about God's ways and intentions up to this point… most of us will grab on to as clearly seen and absolutely truth.

When I say that God is going to make over this entire universe and make it over in an instant of time we all yell; Hallelujah!

When I say he uses the exact same words in Scripture to describe what he wants to do inside every one of our hearts and lives… we tend to shorten or hallelujah to:

H-----u--h! Not me!… not in this life!…