You hear of how Jesus, comes from the line of David and Jesse and Boaz (remember the Ruth story) and Judah and Jacob and Isaac and Abraham back in time to Noah, and back further all the way to Adam, and then you hear that Last verse, and it hits you!
Have you ever read over or skipped the genealogies in the Scriptures?  It’s easy to do. I just read Luke 3 this morning (as part of the Reading Plan I developed for 2022), and it ends with the Genealogy of Christ…and for some reason I was captivated, and I got excited as I started hearing the names…then I got to the last verse, and I was so touched (even though I knew it was coming).  Do you know what I’m talking about? If not, don’t cheat by going there now. Read on.
I think the fact that I read the Whole Chapter, and didn’t just read the Genealogy helped me to get into the story.
I heard about John the Baptist, and I was transported into the time, and his calling Israel to repentance after such a dry spiritual dry spell in the land.  And then came the expectation of the people regarding this wild man in the wilderness.—“Is He the one?!”
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Accountability to a fellowship is good, but without honesty, is insufficient. More often than not I have coddled my sin rather than killed it. I’ve fed the beast, thinking that I might keep it at bay, all the while it has been plotting its attack. We cannot co-exist with sin, making excuses for it, placating it with promises of tomorrow. Our idols are ruthless task-masters; we have made them too heavy to bear up, their weight will crush us. We must grind them to powder and throw them to the wind, or we might find that God has ground them for us, though the taste will be bitter on our tongue.

The lights dimmed. The movie began. A man waking in a hospital bed repeatedly pressing a buzzer that is never responded to. He gathers his strength to stand, slowly exploring the empty halls, calling repeatedly to his echo. He’s alone.
The lonely man wanders the quiet streets. He seems small in empty world. Wind blown waste shudders down the side path, newspaper headings about a virus, the date read 28 days earlier.
That’s when the zombies attacked.
It was also the exact moment I left the cinema. Like a fool, I walked in to watch a movie I knew nothing about while attempting to kill time on an interstate layover. I don’t watch Zombie flicks. I’d like to say I have some grand theological reason why that’s the case, the truth though is simpler—I don’t like scary movies. It baffles me why zombie movies are so popular, why the idea of the living dead still attracts a crowd—but it does. ‘Fright’ is cheap entertainment.
I don’t need to entertain fictional zombies, I have enough of my own to contend with. I’ve been a stumbling follower of Jesus since my mid-teens. I’ve had my moments of victory, mountain-top experiences of joy that modern worship songs love to extol. But sin has plagued me. Of course, the sins of youthful lusts and pride were present, and my twenties were a decade of struggle. My thirties saw the struggle change, but still present. I thought I’d left much behind, but in my mid forties, a new army has arisen—a zombie squad intent on tearing apart what God has built.

“So then, brothers and sisters, we are not obligated to the flesh to live according to the flesh, because if you live according to the flesh, you are going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” (Romans 8:12–13, CSB)

Here’s what I am learning. Paul asks me to slay sin, a theme that John Owen would later riff off as he famously quipped, “Be killing sin or sin will be killing you,” and I thought I was. But I was wrong.
Burying sin is not the same as killing it.
I’d take a stab at killing my sin, I’d strike at it with my willpower and see it step away into the shadows again. My foolish mistake was assuming I’d dealt it a mortal blow, some fatal slash, and so I would consider it dead and buried. I’d rise on the mountain-top victoriously. But now the horde grows close again. Buried sins. The ugly undead.
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As Christ’s salvation is a salvation from sin, from the love of it, from its dominion, from its guilt and penalty; then it necessarily follows, that the first great task and the chief work of the evangelist, is to preach upon SIN: to define what sin (as distinct from crime) really is, to show wherein its infinite enormity consists, to trace out its manifold workings in the heart, to indicate that nothing less than eternal punishment is its desert!

The nature of Christ’s salvation is woefully misrepresented by the present-day “evangelist.” He announces a Savior from hell rather than a Savior from sin! And that is why so many are fatally deceived, for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of Fire who have no desire to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness!
The very first thing said of Jesus in the New Testament is, “You shall call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people [not “from the wrath to come,” but] from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Christ is a Savior for those realizing something of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, who feel the awful burden of it on their conscience, who loathe themselves for it, and who long to be freed from its terrible dominion. He is a Savior for no others. Were He to “save from Hell” those still in love with sin, He would be a minister of sin, condoning their wickedness and siding with them against God.
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