The Narrative of God: Building an Altar of Remembrance in the Family of God Judges 2:6-11

We talked last week about how God wanted Israel to pass down the testimonies and statues of God from one generation to another, so that there would always be a people in Israel who remembered what God had done and remembered His commandments. God gave Israel an object lesson using 12 Stones through which they could tell the story of what God had done, and Israel was obedient to everything that God commanded them to through Moses.
What is the result?

I. The people did remember and obey:
Judges 2:6-9, When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. And the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the LORD had done for Israel. And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died at the age of 110 years. And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash.
However, let us not rejoice too long and rest on our laurels, because it takes just one generation that fails to pass down the inheritance which they have received.

II. What happens when we do not practice generational faithfulness?
The Bible is clear that when the generation who’s parents entered the promised land with Joshua died their testimony and obedience died with them.
Judges 2:10-11, And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals.
What will be said of us here? Are we a generation that remembers and obeys or are we a generation that forgets and worships idols? What about the next generations? It is a compelling question, and the answer depends on our response. So, We must lay down our own stones!

III. Laying down our own 12 Stones:
God told Israel to use 12 stones to remember the meta-narrative of truth.
Joshua laid the 12 stones so the people would not forget.
But in one generation of self-obsorbtion and self-indulgence the people defiled the altar and forgot. God wants us to remember and pass on to the next generation the grand story of the 12 Stones. If we do not tell our children and grandchildren, who will?
For Israel the story of the stones was one of God’s people, called from slavery to deliverance into a Promised Land. Our story is the same, but it is much more grand than a specific place and time and people. Our story is one of God creating for Himself a people and calling them from the slavery of sin to redemption by grace through faith in Christ alone that we might enter into the presence of God for all eternity. We must remember that we proclaim is not just a little story, and not just a series of little stories. It is the big picture. We are accountable to the big story of God’s work as it is narrated in Scripture.
It is not enough for us to have a deep repository of biblical facts and stories, and yet know nothing about how any of it fits together. That is why we do things like Truth Project and Walk-Thru the Bible. The Bible is not just a compendium of good short stories or moralistic fables, but a grand, life-encompassing meta-narrative of God’s work of redemption in the world, that should transform our lives!
So, we will bring 12 Stones, one for each tribe of the nation of Israel. Just as Israel set up camp in four sections while wondering through the wilderness, we will bring our 12 stones in four sections that outline the grand story that we want to remember and pass on throughout our generations, so that there never will arise a generation at Bush Memorial that does not know the Lord or the work that He had done for us. As a framework for thinking about how individual biblical texts fit into Scripture’s big story, the Bible’s story line consists of at least four great movements that are absolutely necessary: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation.

A. Creation: The Standard of Judah
Numbers 2:1-9
The Story’s first movement is creation. Every worldview, every meta-narrative, has a beginning. If we are to say anything meaningful about the world and where it is going, we must first know how it all started. Today, two stark alternatives seek to explain how this all came to be and the implications of these two worldviews are all-encompassing.
Naturalistic Meta-narrative; This is a materialistic, evolutionary assertion that everything that exists is simply and merely an accident.
Biblical Meta-narrative; This is a supernatural, creationist assertion which declares “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
The divergence between those two assertions is enormous. For, if we believe that God created the world and human beings as the theater of His glory, then we will approach all of life in a manner completely different than if we believe that all of this is merely an accident, that matter and time and energy produced all of this by chance.
The most important divergence between these two worldviews is the place of human beings.
Are we merely some kind of biological accident in the midst of a cosmological accident?
Or, are we the only creatures made in the image of God, and therefore the only ones with the ability to know God and have a sense of accountability to Him?
How you answer that questions will affect everything else you do in your life and everything your children and grandchildren will believe and do in their lives - from sexuality to the sanctity of life to the purpose of labor to the meaning of life itself.
This is literally the most basic and fundamental question: Are we made for a purpose, or are we the by-product of a chaotic universe?
That is why we will look at creation in three parts:
1. Creator God (Transcendence); Here we will be focusing on who God is in relation to creation, that He is distinct from and independent of creation, that he existed before creation and has no beginning, end or succession of moments in His being, that God is infinite and unchangeable.
2. Out of Nothing (Ex-nihilo); Here we will focus on the clear biblical teaching that God created the universe out of nothing. This means that before God began to create the universe, nothing else existed except God himself. 3. The Image of God (Imageo Dei); Here we will focus on the ideas that God’s creation was originally very good, and that He created it to glorify himself. In this, the uniqueness of man as being created in the image of God, meaning that man is like God and represents God, will be central.

B. Fall: The Standard of Rueben
Numbers 2:10-16
The first movement of the story can not explain everything we experience, so we must continue to the story’s second movement, The Fall, because we cannot understand anything about ourselves in our present condition without immediate reference to this.
It is, in fact, the fall into sin that explains all of the suffering and strife, pain and conflict in the world. Without a clear understanding of the fall and its effects, we can not understand our lives or the world around us.
We can not rightly understand the fallenness of human society, nor the groaning of creation, nor most importantly our deep need for salvation.
Sure, we know about Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit. However, what we may not understand, and what our children must understand, is the importance, the catastrophic significance, of that sin.
The fall changed everything. The earth itself became hostile towards man, childbirth would become painful, and as they were expelled from paradise, what God had made for them and for us was lost. We are blocked from seeing it, prevented from experiencing it, prohibited from eating from the Tree of Life. Where we once walked and talked with God in the cool the day in the garden and cultivated it for our joy, we are now aliens in a hostile land.
Rather than worshiping God in the perfection of Eden, naked and unashamed, we are now reduced to weaving fig leaves and hiding under a bush to cover ourselves.
That is really the only way we can make sense out of ourselves. If we think that we are essentially good - or even morally neutral - we delude ourselves!
The fall explains why we are spiritually dead apart from Christ, and why we deserve to be. For condemnation and eternal judgment is the only just response of a holy God to the reality of who we are and what we have done. That is why we will look at the Fall in three basic parts:
1. The Deception (Satan’s False Gospel); Here we will be focusing on the context and events leading up to the fall, particularly that two sermons were preached, but only one believed and Satan’s deception in preaching a false gospel in Genesis 3.
2. The Action (Unbelief: Original Sin); Here we will talk about the origin of sin and how sin entered the human race through Adam’s choice to exchanged the truth of God for a lie: chose to be like a god instead of in the image of God.
3. The Consequence (Separation, Falling Short, Death); Here we will focus on the clear biblical teaching that sin is falling short of the glory of God, that it results in physical death for the entire human race and spiritual death for those whose sins go unforgiven, and that spiritual death is characterized primarily as eternal separation from the presence of God.

C. Redemption: The Standard of Ephraim
Numbers 2:18-24
If we left the fall as the end of our story, total destruction would be the only appropriate conclusion. But there is a third movement to the story, redemption. What we could not do for ourselves, God did. In order to bring all glory to himself, God acted to save us from our own sin.
Every great storyline needs a scandal, and this is it; that a righteous and holy God would die to pay the sin debt of a totally rebellious people, so that both His justice and mercy could be satisfied and we could be made right before Him, by Him.
We must now recognize that this story is much bigger than we could have at first thought. By redeeming sinners, God glorifies Himself and declares His holiness in a way that we would never have known if we simply knew Him as creator, as Adam did. He is now for us not just creator; He is our creator and our Redeemer!
So, we will look at redemption in three parts:
1. Grace (Propitiation); Here we will talk about the work Christ did in His life and death to earn our salvation, particularly His penal substitutionary atonement, or that He took our place in bearing the just wrath of God to pay the penalty for our sin.
2. Faith (Imputation); Here we will focus on our justification by faith by talking about how our sin was accounted to Christ and how Christ righteousness was accounted to us in order to overcome the sin of Adam that was accounted to us and our past and present sin.
3. Christ (Sanctification); Here we will talk about our growth in likeness to Christ by pointing out the difference between justification and sanctification, by looking at three stages of sanctification, seeing how we cooperate with God in sanctification, and rejoicing in the effects of sanctification.
Salvation by Grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone!

D. Consummation: The Standard of Dan
Numbers 2:25
We fail to really teach the gospel to our children and grandchildren in its awesome massiveness unless we point to the fact that God is about not only redeeming sinners but also creating a new heaven and a new earth.
He is not merely restoring the world to the paradise of Eden. For Eden was only a foreshadowing of the new earth. God is creating something far greater than the garden ever was!
Consummation is not just a return to where we began, but an arrival at what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor heart of man ever imagined. The vision of consummation held out at the end of Revelation is greater than Genesis ever knew. It will be greater than what God called “very good.” How could the new creation be better than the original? Because Eden was never what God ultimately intended. He intended the Kingdom of Christ from before the beginning. The mind of God conceived of a world where His glory would be more magnificently demonstrated! In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve certainly knew many songs they could sing of God’s glory as Creator, but they did not know to sing “In Christ Alone!” We are more privileged than they were. We get to sing “My Savior, My God!”
That is why we will look at the consummation of the Kingdom of Christ in three parts:
1. Kingdom (authority of Christ); Here we will talk about Christ’s authority as Lord, both in this life and the life to come, by looking at the tension between the “already” inaugurated Kingdom of Christ and the “not yet” consummated Kingdom and how we ought to respond to that authority.
2. Resurrection (fullness of Christ); Here we will talk about what happens when we die by focusing on the significance of Christ’s resurrection for us and the significance of our own resurrection in terms of our own bodies and the Kingdom of God.
3. Heaven (presence of Christ); Here we will talk about heaven as both a place and as the reality of the presence of God, by looking at both the physical and spiritual aspects and what gives them value.

Many of our people are dying of spiritual starvation because they do not know the Bible’s whole story. We are on the verge of loosing an entire generation who grew up in our churches because we have not been faithful to tell the story of what God has done. So, they do not find themselves in the story. They know the moral fables and the facts about the little stories, but a little bit of knowledge is not a big picture.
We will help them know the beginning, the middle and the end; creation, fall, redemption, consummation.
In doing this, we will help them know who they are (who we are) and where they are going. We may even find where we are going in the process. We will all be able to incorporate our little stories into God’s grand meta-narrative, and press on with burning hearts toward maturity and completeness in Christ.
But it starts with a personal commitment to the whole truth of God’s word and to intentionally passing it down to those who come behind us. Anything else is idolatry and sin. It starts with having a personal story of faithfulness of your own to tell.
Where are you today?
Where do you find yourself in the meta-narrative of God?
Some are stuck in creation and see themselves as very good.
Some are stuck in the fall and see themselves beyond hope.
Some are in redemption and see the need for the ongoing sanctification into Christlikeness.
Some others are already in consummation and think they already have what has not yet come.
Whatever God has called you to today, humility, forgiveness, grace or conviction, won’t you put your own small story aside and enter into the grand epic of God?