“Unhitching” our doctrine from our pastoral care makes sense if the goal of the Church is simply to help people live better lives. Reducing the Church this way only elevates the self. Ministry, once unhitched from doctrine, devolves into idolatry. Like the golden calf worshiped in the time of the Exodus, it is possible to claim God’s name while losing all moral direction.   

For the last few weeks, all eyes, at least evangelical eyes, have been locked on Atlanta. When North Point Community Church announced the “Unconditional” conference, held this past weekend, many noted that two of the speakers were men “married” to other men. Many of the rest were on the record as “affirming” same-sex relationships, recognizing LGBTQ as legitimate categories of human identity, and describing their work as hoping to convert Christians to their ideas about sex, identity, and marriage. Would this conference mark Andy Stanley’s final departure from historic Christian teaching on human sexuality?  
Stanley, who is among America’s most prominent pastors, defended the conference and choice of speakers due to the focus of the event. In his Sunday sermon, he responded to the criticism, stating that this conference was not about the theology of human sexuality, or even about talking someone out of an LGBTQ identity. Rather, he said, it was aimed at “parents of LGBTQ+ children and ministry leaders looking to discover ways to support parents and LGBTQ+ children;” in other words, parents who had already tried (and failed) to talk their children out of these identities and now only wished to stay in relationship with them.  
Even if the conference was intentionally designed to not address the questions of the morality of same-sex relationships and alternate sexual identities, as apologist and “Unconditional” conference attendee Alan Shlemon noted, it answered these questions “by virtue of who they platformed, their resources, their recommendations. It’s a confusing message at best, and at worst it’s … saying that homosexual sex would be permissible, (and) satisfying transgender ideations would be permissible. (To hear more of Shlemon’s perspective, watch his interview with fellow apologist professor Sean McDowell here.) 
On Sunday, Stanley maintained that the conference successfully met its stated goal without implying any kind of moral or theological shift. This is possible because of something Stanley has said both about this conference and about the overall work of the Church.
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Jesus will be the one who indeed obeys the covenant stipulations of Yahweh and, as Solomon prayed, would bless all the peoples on earth (1 Kings 8:60; 2 Chronicles 6:32-33). He is the one who delivered Hezekiah from Assyria and who will ensure the world will know who God is (2 Kings 19:15, 19). He is the one who, unlike the kings of Judah, will not lead His people into idolatry or fail in righteousness but will establish and uphold justice and righteousness from this time forth and forevermore (Isaiah 9:7).

An Analogy of Relationships
In human romantic relationships, progress is made through promise. When a man enjoys the company of a particular woman, and natural desires begin bubbling up in that man for her, well, he ought to be the one to ask her if she will become his woman. This is not an open-ended promise where he reserves the right to desire and spend affectionate time with a throng of women, but a personal pledge that she will be the lone object of his affection moving forward. His commitment and promise carries with it exclusivity.
When the relationship advances beyond the dating stages, progress is again precipitated by promise. Without new pledges of increased loyalty and commitment, the relationship will stagnate and usually wither into a relational bramble. But after a pledge of lifelong fidelity, the dating couple becomes engaged with a ring of promise, and the engaged couple standing at the altar with rings becomes lawfully wed.
This normative period is filled with promises that progress every relationship from strangers and acquaintances to friends, from pals to dating and betrothal, and eventually into marriage. This period is a finite allotment of time to establish interest, trustworthiness, and commitment before the era of promises is over. And I mean that the era of promises must end because no woman wants to marry a man who continually rattles off guarantees and assurances but never ends up keeping any of them. Once all the promises have been made, and the man and woman say I do, he does not need to go on making oaths and pledges and explaining his intentions. He must transition the relationship from being a promise maker to a promise keeper, or the only progress he will make will be toward separation and divorce. This movement from promise to fulfillment is the most natural step toward maturation for any marriage; it is how trust is baked in time and how marriages become iron-clad centers of love, life, and community for a clan of burgeoning people.
In some ways, we can apply this to what we spoke about last week. We transitioned away from the wrong views of eschatology to the correct view. And we saw how God Himself littered the book of Genesis with monumental promises. He promised to fill the world with worshippers through Adam. He repeated those promises to Noah. He kept those promises during the rocky era of Babel. He made those promises even more explicit and exclusive through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah. And like a young man making covenantal promises to the woman that He loves before their wedding day, God in those early years of Genesis was showering His people with all of His promises and was letting her know what He was going to do in covenant union with her and for her. And as we saw last week, the content of those promises was that God Himself would make His people into a fruitful, world-wide, people, who fill the earth with worshippers. Worshippers in the sciences, worshippers in local and national governments, worshippers in technology and engineering firms, worshippers in law practices, libraries, restaurants, public squares, plumbing and electrical businesses, and worshippers in faithful churches. God is going to fill the world, and every sector of this world, with His joyful human worshippers so that everything on this rebel planet will come under His dominion and will.
Yet, in just the same way a man shouldn’t keep making promises with no intention of fulfilling them, God does not go on speaking without a plan for doing. He transitions the relationship from promise maker to promise keeper as we turn the page from Genesis to the book of Exodus. He continues that posture through the conquests and the histories of the people of Israel and Judah. And while Israel and Judah will be unfaithful to her husband and maker (Isaiah 54:5; Hosea 2:2), provoking Him to jealous fury (Deuteronomy 32:21), playing the harlot with the nations instead of bringing them into God’s covenant family (Ezekiel 16:15), causing Him to issue a decree of divorce to the ten northern tribes of Israel (Jeremiah 3:8), God is never once unfaithful to His promises. He will fill the world with worshippers who worship Him in spirit and truth (John 4:23-24). And what we will see in the history of Judah and Israel is textual evidence that this is God’s plan and that God will accomplish it with Israel’s help or not!
In what follows, I would like to sketch out how all of the promises made in the book of Genesis, where the entire world will be filled with worshippers (Genesis 1:28), where all the families on earth will be blessed by the seed of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3), all the nations on earth will come under God’s blessings through the seed of Jacob (Genesis 28:14) and will obey Yahweh their King through the promises to Shiloh as promised to Judah (Genesis 49:10), are now beginning to come true in the life of Israel. Like an acorn transitioning from seed to sapling, the Exodus, the conquests, and the Kingdom of Israel will show how God is committed to what He initially said and is delivering on those promises in the life of Israel. In the weeks ahead, we will see how those promises are fulfilled ultimately in Jesus, but for now, let’s trace the promises God made for a postmillennial and optimistic future out of the book of Genesis and see how they begin sprouting roots in the nation of Israel.
The Exodus and a World Filled with Worshippers:
After God had given promises to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and eventually Jacob’s fourth-born son Judah, the family of a dozen men and their wives and children settled in the land of Goshen, a providence of Egypt. You will remember from the book of Genesis that a massive famine hit the entire region. Yet, God, through wonderful providence, allowed Joseph to be sold into slavery and imprisonment, only to be elevated to the second position in the kingdom of Egypt, perfectly positioned to rescue Jacob’s family (and the future nation that would come from his own body) from starvation and death. That family was reunited in Egypt and began growing in Egypt. For four hundred silent years, where the Bible does not speak, they continued being fruitful and multiplying in that foreign land.
In fact, this is precisely where the book of Exodus begins. God promised Adam and Noah in the earliest parts of Genesis that He would make them fruitful and multiply them. And now, in Egypt, in the earliest parts of the Exodus narrative, God keeps that promise on the ground and in their families. Here is what the text says:
“But the sons of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly, and multiplied, and became exceedingly mighty, so that the land was filled with them. – Exodus 1:7
Do you see how God is fulfilling His promises? Do not overlook the significance of this moment. God created a world in Eden where His covenant people were destined to thrive under His blessings, a key component of which was their call to be fruitful and multiply, to expand and populate all the lands, establishing dominion over them. These events unfold within this passage, though not yet on the universal scale envisioned for the future, but significantly on a local scale within Egypt. The people of Israel proliferated exceedingly, their numbers swelling to such an extent that they filled the land, indicating that God’s hand of blessing was upon them.
In typical fashion, the native occupants, the adversaries of God, perceive this divine favor and are seized by terror at the prospect of losing their sovereignty. Egypt’s apprehension, fearing that Israel’s expansion and dominion will continue to the point of usurping their own, highlights a profound understanding lost on many today. God has not devised a plan destined for His people’s failure but has laid a strategy where the foes of God will be stripped of their places, nations, and statuses. In this divine plan, God’s people are destined to dispossess their lands, thereby extending Yahweh’s dominion far beyond its current boundaries.
The Egyptian Pharoah and his advisors grasped the enormity of God’s plan with all the visceral clarity needed, filling their hearts with dread and spurring them into a dark, desperate strategy of Jewish genocide, which became a futile attempt to thwart God’s holy intentions (Exodus 1:9-10). Yet, as is the inevitable fate of all who dare to challenge the Almighty, their sinister schemes crumbled into dust flakes. Moses recounts with poetic justice that the harsher Egypt’s tyranny became, the more prolifically God’s favor was poured out, blessing His people with unimaginable success and growth (Exodus 1:12). In a twist of irony, when Egypt sought to drown the Hebrew legacy in the Nile, God orchestrated a covert resistance led by fearless midwives. These unsung heroines, under God’s watchful eye, not only safeguarded the lives of countless infants but became unwitting architects of Israel’s burgeoning population, further frustrating Pharaoh’s draconian decrees (Exodus 1:20).
As we saw last week, God will not give up on His plans. He made promises to Adam and Noah. He came and elected a sinner named Abraham. He gave that man children in his old age who would eventually settle down in Egypt. And now, under the mighty hand of God, who is pouring out His blessings and favor upon them, they are doing what Yahweh promised. They are being fruitful, multiplying, spreading out, and threatening the enemies of God’s security and dominion. Sounds a lot like postmillennialism. If you ask me, it sounds like God is ensuring He will extend His dominion globally until the world is filled with worshippers.
This plan, of course, ran afoul of the Egyptians, who whipped the Israelite’s backs a little harder each day, all the while increasing their miseries in labor, that is, until a breaking point occurred. At first, the strapping forty-year-old Moses, whom God miraculously orchestrated by divine providence to grow up in the palaces of Egypt, took matters into his own hands, killing an Egyptian and attempting to work for the freedom of his people by his own strength and Vigor. This was not God’s plan, so God exiled Moses into the wilderness for an entire generation so that he could cool his jets a bit and trust that the Lord would do precisely what he promised.
As an octogenarian, God summons Moses back to Egypt with a mandate to reassure His people that He had not left them to languish in the desert sands, He had not turned His back on them, and He would assuredly rescue them from the shackles of Egyptian servitude with a mighty hand (Exodus 3:7-10). This liberation was aimed not just about freeing them from bondage but at relocating them to a land reminiscent of Eden — a garden land brimming with milk and honey and other beautiful blessings. There, they were to flourish, tend the garden land, extending Yahweh’s sovereignty across its breadth, and transform it into a region where God’s will had come on earth as it always had in heaven (Exodus 3:8). This elaborate plan traces its way all the way back to the pages of Genesis. This was not merely for the benefit of the Israelites alone, but it was being enacted by a God who wanted the entire earth to hear about Him and worship Him because of His awe-inspiring deeds. God had appointed Israel as His emissary to bring His blessings to all the world. And He announced that purpose to the obstinate Pharaoh just before He crushed Him. God says to the Pharaoh in Exodus 9:16:

“But, indeed, for this reason, I have allowed you to remain, in order to show you My power and in order to proclaim My name through all the earth.” – Exodus 9:16

Why would God tell the egotistical Pharaoh that His intention was to fill the earth with His name, stories of His power, and glory if He had no desire to fulfill it? Would God boast in a plan He had no intention of completing? I think not.
God rained down a furious assortment of ten devastating plagues on Egypt, crushing their egotistical pride, crashing their agriculture, farming, shipping industries, and the entire economic system that kept them afloat as an empire, bankrupting them for generations. More importantly, God was laboring to set Israel free so that Yahweh’s name would echo in every hole, hollar, cave, plain, and hilltop on earth. This alone reminds us that God is still committed to His original plan and purpose. He will make His name great by multiplying His worshippers everywhere the sun shines, everywhere the shadow falls, and no one in hell or on earth will stop Him. If you doubt that, ask the Pharaoh of Egypt, who hardened his heart and got the unenviable opportunity to see all the wealth and power that remained within his empire flushed down the Red Sea toilet.
The Law and a World Filled with Worshippers:
From there, God brought this newly freed nation of Jews along with an assortment of Egyptians (Exodus 12:38), consisting of a couple of million people who walked out of Egypt (Exodus 12:37), to the base of Mount Sinai, where He would enter into a covenant relationship with them. Like all covenants, this one would have specific stipulations, rules, and precepts that the people of God were to follow in order to be in a relationship with this holy God. If they followed these stipulations, they would inherit the blessings of the covenant, which God describes in various sections of the Law. For instance, He promised to walk among them as God walked amid Adam and Eve in the garden (Leviticus 26:11-12). He promised they would be fruitful and prosperous in a garden land (Leviticus 26:9). He told them He would give them dominion and authority among the nations on earth (Deuteronomy 28:13). And He told them He would partner with them in filling the world with worshippers, as He had said to Adam before, reminding them: ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’ (Leviticus 26:12).
God also encouraged them that if they were holy (Leviticus 20:26), they would obey His voice (unlike their Father Adam). They would follow His decrees, and He would make them fruitful and multiply them (Leviticus 26:9). He would bless them in the land that He was giving them (Deuteronomy 6:3). He would use them to bring His covenant blessings and extend His royal dominion to all the nations (Exodus 19:5-6). In the Law, God promises to enter into a Genesis 1:28 relationship with Israel and allow them to assist Him in accomplishing His Genesis 1:28 outcome of filling the world with worshippers.
From the outset of national Israel, God invited them into a covenant whereby they could partner with Him – like Adam long before – to bring God’s glory into all the earth (Numbers 14:21). They were commissioned to live such holy and fruitful lives, aided by the Law and sacrificial system, that the nations would see the glories of God and would either stream into Israel to know this benevolent deity (Deuteronomy 4:5-6) or they would tremble in fear of Him and His people (Deuteronomy 28:9-10). Either way, the Lord was committed to His earth-filling promises. As long as Israel was faithful to Him, God would allow them to join Him in that work, using them as a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 42:6). But, as we know from the story, Israel was regularly unfaithful to the Lord, they refused to be obedient to the terms of the covenant, instead of reaching the nations and filling the nations with the knowledge of God they polluted the land with the idols of demons. Instead of inheriting the covenant blessings, they often languished under the torrent of covenantal cursings (Deuteronomy 28).
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He came to endure the penalty, he comes to procure the reward. He came to serve, he comes to rule. He came to open wide the door of grace, he comes to shut to the door. He comes not to redeem but to judge; not to save but to pronounce the sentence; not to weep while he invites, but to smile while he rewards; not to tremble in heart while he proclaims grace, but to make others tremble while he proclaims their doom.

Spurgeon lived during a time when the doctrine of the incarnation was being challenged. With the growth of German higher criticism, the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture were increasingly being questioned. The translation of David Strauss’ The Life of Jesus into English in 1846 led many to adopt a rationalistic understanding of the Gospels, stripping it of its supernatural elements. For them, the incarnation was no longer the miraculous joining of the eternal Son of God with our humanity. Instead, it was simply mythical language pointing to the disciples’ high view of their rabbi. Even as Christmas grew in cultural popularity, its meaning was increasingly lost.
But Spurgeon would have none of this. Even as he led his church in celebrating Christmas, Spurgeon made sure that this was a celebration rooted in doctrine. They rejoiced in the arrival of the Son of God, the miracle of the incarnation for their salvation. Jesus was no ordinary man. He is the Word made flesh. And His first coming lays a claim on our lives because He is coming back again.
On his first Christmas Sunday at the newly-built Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861, Spurgeon drove this point home as he chose Hebrews 9:27-28 for his Christmas sermon text: “And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.”
His takeaway was this: to understand Christ’s midnight birth rightly, we must see it in the radiance of his second coming. Even as we adore the Savior-infant in the manger, we must recognize He is also the coming Judge and King. What difference would it make in our Christmas celebration if we kept both advents in view?
Consider, then, four ways his second coming will be different from his first.
“How different I say will be his coming.”
At first he came an infant of a span long; now he shall come— “In rainbow-wreath and clouds of storm,” the glorious one.
Then he entered into a manger, now he shall ascend his throne.
Then he sat upon a woman’s knees, and did hang upon a woman’s breast, now earth shall be at his feet and the whole universe shall hang upon his everlasting shoulders.
Then he appeared the infant, now the infinite.
Then he was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, now he comes to glory as the lightning from one end of heaven to the other.
A stable received him then; now the high arches of earth and heaven shall be too little for him.
Horned oxen were then his companions, but now the chariots of God which are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels, shall be at his right hand.
Then in poverty his parents were too glad to receive the offerings of gold and frankincense and myrrh; but now in splendor,
King of kings, and Lord of lords, all nations shall bow before him, and kings and princes shall pay homage at his feet. Still he shall need nothing at their hands, for he will be able to say, “If I were hungry I would not tell ye, for the cattle are mine upon a thousand hills.” “Thou hast put all things under his feet; all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field.” “The earth is the Lords, and the fullness thereof.”
“There will be a most distinct and apparent difference in his person.”
He will be the same, so that we shall be able to recognize him as the Man of Nazareth, but O how changed!
Where now the carpenter’s smock? Royalty hath now assumed its purple.
Where now the toil-worn feet that needed to be washed after their long journeys of mercy? They are sandaled with light, they “are like unto fine brass as if they burned in a furnace.”
Where now the cry, “Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but I, the Son of Man, have not where to lay my head?” Heaven is his throne; earth is his foot-stool.
Methinks in the night visions, I behold the day dawning. And to the Son of Man there is given “dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him.” Ah! who would think to recognize in the weary man and full of woes, the King eternal, immortal, invisible.
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