Q&A Genesis 17

Hey everybody, this is Asher Griffin. I'm the pastoral administrator at Jefferson Park Baptist Church. If you normally listen to our sermons on Sermon Audio, you may find this one to be kind of different. What I'm doing is I'm sitting down with Keith Goad, the pastor of Jefferson Park, and just asking him some candid questions about his sermon, some application-type questions that we can take away so we can dig into what he studied throughout last week and how he kind of came about to preaching a sermon on Genesis 17. So Keith, one of the questions that I want to ask you is, during the service we read the Word of God a lot out loud. So we have a call to worship and then a scriptural reading, but then we also read the passage in its entirety. What's your conviction on reading the Word so much in a world that would probably see that as boring or not seeker-friendly? Well, the reason we want to emphasize the word read throughout the service is because the word is what we have to believe. The word is our only source for any hope or any truth. And so as we're singing, we're actually just responding to the word. We want to start a worship service, not with a confession of faith a man wrote, but with the Word of God, and then with songs or confessions of faith that men have wrote that either think those thoughts after them well, help us think about those thoughts well, or help us to confess them better. The Word of God is central, and I think the more we hear it, the more the Spirit uses it to encourage us. Right. So you would say that almost the point of the morning worship is that Every piece of worship is centered around the word of God itself whether through prayer and praying the word Reading the word you're preaching from the word or singing songs that are based on the word. Is that right? Yeah, and there's there's a bit of a strategy there in the sense that the call to worship the scripture reading in the middle of service and then the scripture reading of the sermon text and there's a thematic or a motif strand that runs through those. And so, what I'm hoping to do is help people see there's a great unity. So, we could read Genesis, Ezekiel, or Colossians, or 1 Corinthians, or whatever text we want to choose, and you can see God's unity, a great unifying theme throughout all Scripture. It should give us an encouragement that scripture is true and trustworthy. Is that why we also have like a 10-pound Bible right in front of the pulpit? Yes. Okay. One of the things you talked about within your sermon was Avram had great assurance. He had continual assurance. And just trying to get into who Keith Goad is, I think people want to know, what are some of the ways God has given you assurance personally? And how has that assurance impacted your relationship with Christ in his hope? Yeah, similar to Abraham. I mean, he hears a word from God and he fails and he hears a word from God and he fails. My life follows that pattern. I don't hear him audibly the same way Abraham did, but I certainly, as I read Scripture, the Spirit illuminates my heart and encourages me. As Calvin said, one of our greatest senses of assurance of Scripture is true as the Spirit tells us it's true as we're reading it. So as I sin regularly, one of the ways that I'm encouraged and assured by God is by reading his promises and knowing that those are true in Christ. I also, you know, I've been able to go to the New Testament and see that he who does not spare his own son for me, he still loves me in the midst of my failure and he's not giving up on me. My sin cannot separate me from Christ and from his love. So meditating upon what God has done for me and what God has said to me are the two main ways I've been assured, the church has been a great assurance. People telling me how what they've heard or giving me what C.G. Mahaney calls evidence of grace. Brothers and sisters telling me this is evidence of grace in you. I need that affirmation from other believers, not just some kind of internal affirmation, but actual others coming and being the instrument of God to tell me how God is working in me when I don't realize such. There's the internal and the external. One of the things you talked about that I was really fearful in coming into the sermon because you were about to approach a talk on covenants and that's a heavy subject. the subject that confuses Christians. It's something that bewilders many people and you took it very level-headedly. You were calm about it. You weren't trying to push a certain agenda. You just wanted to bring out a biblical approach to that. So one of the questions I have are what are the resources that some of us could look at to learn more about the biblical covenants in a way that you tried to learn about them as well? Yeah, so there's some books, but before I would go to the books, Gospel Coalition just had a conference where it was preaching Christ from the Old Testament. And I would highly recommend Alistair Begg, Tim Keller, Al Mohler, and D.A. Carson's talks, and Conrad and Beway's talks, because they really showed you how to get from the Old Testament to Christ. Some of them walking through in a lecture some preaching modeling, and just brilliant ways of doing that faithfully. Anything D.A. Carson writes is typically going to really accomplish this for you. Books that have helped me, I'm not sure if this is still in print. William Dumbrow, Covenant and Creation, is an excellent little text. One that I've recommended to the church and summarized, Vaughn Roberts, God's Big Picture. Another one which comes from a different theological tradition, but still trying to put together everything in a big picture is Elmer Martin's God's Design. It's an Old Testament theology, but it's trying to put together all the scripture together. And then you've got Christopher Wright knowing Jesus of the Old Testament and the Christ of the Covenants, O. Palmer Robertson. Now those are a number of books. If I could choose one out of all those, it would probably be God's big picture for someone to begin reading. One of the things I was kind of surprised about within your sermon is you made the statement of you don't want land. like some people think the Jews were going for. You said, I don't want land, I want heaven. Is there no point in a physical amount of land, or what do we have the Israelites for? What's that picture about? Well, to begin with, when I moved here, I looked for a house with land, so I do like land. I love actually working in the land. If you could have bought heaven, though, you would have bought that when moving here. All right, we need to talk about the gospel next. You can't buy heaven. No, so your question is, what about the land promises to Abraham? I wrestled with this, I mean, throughout all of my Christian education, what you do with those promises. And something that really struck me recently as I was studying it for this sermon is that the New Testament never reiterates specific boundary land promises. The New Testament seems to blow up the promises of land, as I mentioned in the sermon Hebrews 11 and Hebrews 12, to not just be some plot of land, but heaven itself. The author of Hebrews says, whenever God is making these promises to Abraham and Sarah, they weren't thinking about the land, they were thinking about the heavenly city. God is going to prepare for them. That's a big interpretation, and my hermeneutic is that I interpret the Old Testament from the New Testament. The folk who insist that Israel still has to have a piece of land in order for these promises to be fulfilled, they're just reading the Old Testament without reading it through the lens of the New Testament. Absolutely. I could be faulted for trumping all those promises, but I actually think they're fulfilled and they're better now in Christ. So, yeah, am I going to be disappointed if Israel ends up getting a piece of land all the way, you know, fulfilled on their boundaries and they have peace before we all get called back up into the heavens, you know, God's eternal feast with all tribes and all tongues? No, I just don't see it as likely, you know, in terms of how I understand all of Scripture progressively, God's Word and His will being revealed. Yeah, that's... I'm sure that was hard to summarize in about a minute and a half. Some people spend their whole lives talking about that subject. Well, I wish I could show you my charts. Yeah. Well, I personally have seen them and they're fantastic. One of the things that I do want to bring up and I'm going to ask you to elaborate more on them. You said, we think the problem is outside of us and the solution is inside of us, but rather the problem is actually inside of us and we need an outward solution. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, I was going to, in a sermon or two later, I actually hadn't planned on saying that, but it's just been something I've been meditating on lately and it kind of fit where I was in the sermon. Psychology will tell you, or you know, popular psychology will always want to make you think, you know, your problem is an external problem. You know, your mom didn't care for you well, or you had some kind of abuse in high school or middle school, or whatever your problem is, you have to go and find what happened outside of you to figure out what has caused your suffering or your depression or whatever it may be. And so the solution is to identify that external problem and then try to find some way to create peace inside of you, to have courage internally. I think that's missing the real problem. I don't want to make light of physical abuse at a young age and how that can change you internally. But I think our problem that we all have to realize is that our hearts, which were created to love God, are broken and they don't love God. Our problem is inside of us. The reason we don't have peace, happiness, joy is not because everything around us is chaotic. It's because our hearts are chaotic. They are not bent towards God as they were created to be. God created us to enjoy him and we are trying to enjoy everything else. That's what's wrong with us. And the solution is God who comes to fix us, to forgive us, and to heal us. So, our problem is inside of us in our hearts because our love is broken. The God of love, he comes and he fixes our problem by sending, the Father sending his Son to die for us so that the wrath of God is removed from us. He gives us the Holy Spirit to begin the healing process, the regeneration, and that's the basic theological position that our problem is internal and the solution is external. I've got two remaining questions. One of them, you said, you asked the question, how often are you celebrating your union with Christ? I think for most of us, the answer would be not often enough. And so I would ask you, just as a church member asking a pastor a question, how can I do that more? Are there practical ways? Is it only a mental path? Or how can I celebrate my union with Christ more? Yeah, God has ordered us to assemble regularly together as believers. I think every Sunday morning for me is celebrating my union with Christ. Why I want to meet with so many Christians during the week is so that I can experience Christ in them, experience Christ in that fellowship. That's a way for me to celebrate my union with Christ. As in marriage, you typically are very thankful for that person when you realize what they've done for you. So, every morning I'm very thankful for my wife because she has pre-made my coffee. All I have to do is hit the button. Every morning, I thank God for my wife because all I've got to do is hit the button when I make coffee. Well, whenever I think about what Christ has done for me as a sinner, I celebrate that marriage. But that means I have to do some reflection and realize how often I'm sinning and how often I need that forgiveness and that grace. This is why Calvin said we have to know ourselves and know God. We have to be reflective in terms of who we really are and that helps us know how much we really need God. You would say remind yourself of the gospel in the name. practical way, meeting with people, I mean basically being, you're saying basically be a good churchman where you are worshipping God, loving other people, reminding yourself of who God is continually. I think it starts with the assembling of the brothers and sisters. It's singing together with other Christians who are praising God and rejoicing with them. I don't always feel like rejoicing. I'm thankful that I have brothers and sisters who do what I don't and therefore they lead me into rejoicing. We're called to do this as a body, unified together, and I think that's one of the more helpful ways that I've learned to celebrate better, and that's with others. Would you say that your study within Genesis has caused you to think about your sin more as you see God being, as you call it, faithful and patient to his people? I mean, you see snippets of like, yeah, I'd be like that. I'd fall away from God and then go praise Jesus that he was sent and died for me. I don't know if it's caused me to think about my sin more. It's definitely made me more appreciative of how patient God is though. The answer to your question is yes, but it's more of just seeing how God is this constant I mean, I know I'm always up and down and resent and whatnot, kind of like Abraham is, but the very fact that God is this stabilizing, promise-keeping, patient force, this personal God who's caring and watching and leading his people, even though they're rebelling against him, that's really what's been so amazing to me from Genesis thus far. All right, one last question. You talk about wanting to have a unified message within your sermons and within your teaching outside of the Sunday morning worship. How do you go about studying to the effect of you think, okay, when people come in the door, I want them to leave with a unified message of what the Word is saying, what the gospel means. So how do you study within the effect of bringing us to a unified point and message of what the Bible is teaching us? Yeah, this is somewhat of a difficulty when I take a larger chunk of scripture because I want to make sure there's one message being presented. The first thing I do is I look at the passage and I say, what does this teach me about God? What does it teach me about my sin? And how do those two connect? And so what I want to be able to do is help people see where they are and how God is being good to them in the same way he was good to Abraham or David, wherever we're at in the text. So I look for what I want people to walk away with about God. I mean, the sermon's about God. So, you know, this week was all about the promises. So, I wanted people to walk away realizing these promises are theirs and how they're theirs in the New Testament through being fulfilled in Christ. Now, one of the complications with this, especially in Genesis where, you know, I start in Genesis 17 and I go all the way through Romans and Hebrews and Galatians. is I wanted to make sure I had some kind of unifying motif. So, when I proclaim the gospel, I always try to make sure the substitutionary atonement is very clear, penal substitution. And I've been using the metaphor of adoption a lot lately. And so, as I was thinking a few weeks ago, I need to start using other metaphors. There's lots of metaphors to help us understand the beauty of God's love in his gospel. So I actually started thinking about the metaphor of marriage and how to incorporate that. And it just so happened that it really worked out well with this sermon because as I was trying to think of a symbol in our culture that's like circumcision, I couldn't stop thinking about circles. And so I eventually thought, okay, the ring, the marriage ring, that was a, it worked out to be a helpful intro, I think, to kind of get us thinking about how the symbol and the covenant relate to one another. And then, you know, the name change, that also worked well because, you know, when a woman is married, when the bride is married to the bridegroom, her name and identity changes. So that worked out well as well. I try to make sure we're thinking about, okay, this is what we're learning about God, but then trying to kind of come up with what I call hooks, something that's familiar to us enough where you can walk away with it. Well, before you get away, I just have to ask you one personal question. You told me not 20 minutes before you were going to preach that you were not going to wear a jacket, and then you showed up to preach wearing a jacket. What was that last-minute decision? Did you break under the pressure? Was it cold inside the room? No, I was very feverish and very hot. It was peer pressure. It was peer pressure. Well, summer's coming quickly. Yes. All right. Well, Keith, thanks so much for answering the questions. If those of you who are listening want to ask Keith a question after a sermon, you can contact us through Email at congregation at jpbc.org or catch one of us after a sermon and we'll be sure to ask your questions so that Keith can help us pursue God better through the reading, teaching, and preaching of his word. Keith, thanks so much.