And so let's remain standing as we consider ourselves before the Holy God. I thought I would read from 2 Chronicles chapter 29. In the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of the Lord and repaired them. And this is Hezekiah. He brought in the priests and the Levites and assembled them in the square on the east. And he said to them, Hear me, Levites. Now consecrate yourselves and consecrate the house of the Lord, the God of your fathers, and carry out the filth from the holy place. For our fathers have been unfaithful and have done what was evil in the sight of the Lord our God. They have forsaken Him and have turned away their faces from the habitation of the Lord and turned their backs. They also shut the doors of the vestibule and put out the lamps and have not burnt incense or offered burnt offerings in the holy place to the God of Israel. Therefore, the wrath of the Lord came on Judah and Jerusalem, and he has made them an object of horror, of astonishment, of hissing, as you see with your own eyes. moving to verse 20 then Hezekiah the king rose early and gathered the officials of the city and went up to the house of the lord and they brought seven bulls seven rams seven lambs and seven male goats for a sin offering for the kingdom and for the sanctuary and for judah and he commanded the priests the sons of Aaron to offer them on the altar of the Lord. So they slaughtered the bulls, and the priests received the blood and threw it against the altar. And they slaughtered the rams, and their blood was thrown against the altar. And they slaughtered the lambs, and their blood was thrown against the altar. Then the goats for the sin offering were brought to the king and the church, and they laid their hands on them. And the priests slaughtered them and made a sin offering with their blood on the altar to make atonement for all Israel. For the king commanded that the burnt offering and the sin offering should be made for all Israel. And he stationed the Levites in the house of the Lord with cymbals, harps, and lyres, according to the commandment of David, and of Gad the king's seer, and of Nathan the prophet. For the commandment was from the Lord through his prophets. The Levites stood with the instruments of David, and the priests with the trumpets. Then Hezekiah commanded that the burnt offering be offered on the altar, and when the burnt offering began, the song of the Lord began also, and the trumpets accompanied by the instruments of David, king of Israel. The whole church worshiped, and the singers sang, and the trumpeters sounded, and this continued until the burnt offering was finished. When the offering was finished, the king and all who were present with him bowed themselves and worshipped. And Hezekiah the king and the officials commanded the Levites to sing praises to the Lord with the words of David and of Asaph the seer. And they sang praises with gladness and they bowed down and worshipped. Then Hezekiah said, you have now consecrated yourselves to the Lord. Come near, bring sacrifices and thank offerings to the house of the Lord. And the church brought sacrifices and thank offerings, and all who were of a willing heart brought burnt offerings. The number of the burnt offerings that the church brought was 70 bulls, 100 rams, 200 lambs. All these were for a burnt offering to the Lord. And I'll just finish reading there. I've changed one word. to the Septuagint's translation, the word church, so that you can understand something of what we're going to think about here today. Ephesians chapter three. And this is God's holy word. For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles, assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God's grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly, When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations, as it has now been revealed to His holy apostles, the prophets, by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus, our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory. And Father, we thank you for your word here this morning that we have been able to be privileged to read that you have preserved for us. that tells us about especially Christ here in the gospel. And we would ask that you would take the veil off of our eyes, that we would be able to understand what we have read, understand more of his work for us, and especially how he is the foundation of the church and why we gather here today. We ask that you would hear our prayer in Christ's name, amen. I'll give you the introduction to this sermon, and then I'm gonna tell you why I'm doing what I'm doing for just a moment. I love this movie and I love these books, and so I talk about them all the time, but that's okay. As Saruman secretly unleashes the Uruk-hai upon the unsuspecting Fellowship of the Ring, Legolas begins to grow uneasy. It is not the eastern shore that worries me, he tells me. A shadow and a threat have been growing in my mind. Something draws near, I can feel it. Now, I'm not a Legolas, and I'm not on my way to destroy a massive enchanted ring in the fires of Mount Doom. But I'm part of a fellowship. It's called Christ's Church. Both this local body of believers that we're sitting in right now, and the ones scattered around our city and our country and our planet, And like Legolas, I too have been growing uneasy about a dark threat that is just beyond sight in the woods on the eastern shore that threatens the very existence of our fellowship. Perhaps no other time in the last 2,000 years have we seen quite the threat that is now poisoning itself in the darkness out of view. But make no mistake, there have always been problems and enemies, like the Uruk-hai. And we will get to those in due time. But I have increasingly grown burdened by an apathy, and an indifference, and ignorance, and unguardedness, and in some places, an all out hostility toward the church, not from enemies without, but from friends within. What Legolas and others did not understand as they so carefully watched those shores for other enemies was that the power and seduction of the ring would go after them too. They were not immune. The fellowship is breaking Galadriel, warned Frodo. It's already begun. He will try to take the ring. You know of whom I speak. One by one, it will destroy them all. And as they crossed that very shore, Boromir, the valiant and faithful, had been seduced and sought to take the ring from Frodo himself. So I've decided that I wanna take a short break from our study of Luke and enter into a five-week series during Reformation month that culminates this year in a fifth Sunday, which then takes us both into Halloween, that day of darkness when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest, and the very same day on which Martin Luther decided, not coincidentally, to nail his 95 thesis to the church door at Wittenberg, Germany, in an attempt to reform the what? The church. In my initial attempt to find fodder for the opening of this series, I went to Google, and I typed in anti-church mentality, and I wondered what I would find. Now, knowing, of course, that Google has deliberately suppressed certain websites and elevated others for culturally subversive and deeply political purposes, I was nevertheless fascinated to see the results. The first one that came up was the wiki, anti-Christian sentiment. Then, avoiding an iChurch mentality. This was followed by a response to Christians who are done with church. That was one that I was very interested in. Others included, why are Christians so mean? Five signs your church may be going woke. Anti-intellectualism in the church. How to know you're in a Christian fundamentalist church. How politics poisoned the evangelical church. The trouble with Sunday school answers. There's no sharp distinction between cult and regular religion. Psychology versus Christianity. What's so dangerous about the emerging church? Religion as a weapon of war. Why I no longer identify as a conservative Christian. And many, many, many, many more. Now in these titles, you can hear many problems that could take us down probably an infinite number of rabbit holes. But many of them get at the thinking behind this threat. While some people want to, but are extremely frustrated that they cannot find a good local church to go to, and this is really a profoundly difficult problem in its own right, I think it's fair to say that many people, people who identify as Christians, are simply suspicious of the very idea of church in the first place. They don't like church. They don't wanna go to church. They've been hurt by church. They don't see the importance of church. They don't care about church. They have no idea what church is or why it matters. They find the very idea antiquated or pointless or irrelevant. They have many reasons. Many of them are valid. Many of them are invalid. But it's troubling to me because we Christians have become perhaps the greatest threat of all to the church. We have been seduced by the power of the ring, that is the culture around us that tells us how hypocritical, how abusive, how power hungry, how shallow, how harmful, how man-made, how religious, how political, how judgmental, how out of touch the very idea of church is, let alone almost all actual churches are. And now in less than a generation, we are seeing what were once the most church-oriented of all nations move to absolute total secularism. Our churches are empty. But it isn't just secularism in terms of church attendance. No, this new generation has not adopted an atheist mentality, but a profoundly spiritual one. A spirituality that despises creed, hates organized religion, loathes any kind of mutual accountability, and wants only to worship God at the church of one. We're not going to spend our time thinking about everything that's wrong with the church and then try to find solutions. That might only make matters worse because at this point, there are so many problems that focusing on them could actually backfire and reinforce the very reason people are giving for justifying their opposition to it. Instead, I want to put forth a positive vision of the church. A few years ago, I spent much of one sermon going through a famous song on the church In fact, we just sang the wrong song, believe it or not. So that's okay, I'm gonna tell you about this song and then we'll sing it in the weeks to come. In these five weeks, I will go back to it from time to time as it lends itself to a bit more systematic study than what the song is able to give. A song I've been singing since childhood, I've long been amazed at its incredible depth and breadth of teaching, and this is precisely what the apostle says is the main purpose of church music, which is teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. So let me tell you about this. In 1866, a little book was published called The Liar of the Faithful. Now that's not L-I-A-R. It's the lyre as in the harp. It's a musical instrument, and the subject of the book was discussed in the subtitle. It was called 12 Hymns on the 12 Articles of the Apostles' Creed. Samuel Stone, who wrote the book, was an Anglican priest, and he wrote his hymns as a response to serious theological controversy that was brewing in his church down in South Africa. The opponent was teaching that much of the Old Testament was mythology and that Jesus had taught wrong things about Moses. So Stone believed that the very core of Christianity was at stake and so he attempted to counter the heresy in a pastoral, devotional, and catechetical manner through hymns that exposited the apostles' creed in the form of writing that would touch both the head and the heart. Now the most famous of these poems deals specifically with article nine of the creed, which is, I believe in the holy Catholic or universal church, the communion of saints. The song is based on 1 Corinthians 3.11, where it says, no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus. Now we just sang a song about that, but so does this song also. Hence the title of his, tune, The Church's One Foundation. Now, most hymnals will have this song in it, and most of them will have either four or five stanzas in the song. However, the poem originally contained seven stanzas. Now the book is laid out so that you can read the poem on one side and then you have all these biblical passages that inspired each line on the opposite page, which is pretty neat. Each stanza is composed of lyrics that contain no fewer than four biblical allusions and one stanza has as many as seven. And I've given you the whole lyrics at the very beginning of the sermon if you go back and read that at some point later. Now these are just the Bible passages that Stone cites and he could have well have chosen many other parallel passages. So the point is this whole song is infused with the scripture as he talks about the church. Now, for whatever reason, of all the poems in this little book, this one became the most popular, probably due in part to the music that is now inextricably linked to it, a tune called Aurelia, which means golden. It was written two years earlier by Samuel S. Wesley. Originally, it was set to the music to a tune called Jerusalem the Golden, And that song, ironically, was from the 3,000 line poem called The Contemptible World, written by a 12th century monk named Bernard of Cluny. He lived in France and he used this intricate hexameter rhyme scheme to satirize the evils of his culture as well as those of the church and his own monastery. To put his poem in sharp relief, he began by focusing on the glories of heaven, to then describe the perversions we men have made of God's earth and his church. So, some things never change. You think that the church is bad now? He wrote 3,000 line poem to talk about how bad it was then. Curiously, both of these songs have in them the idea of the new creation and the church, and so they could easily be sung together. At any rate, the song became popular, and even more than 20 years after it first appeared, one account indicates that it was sung with such vigor by such a large congregation that, quote, some people say this hymn was really more than they could bear. It made them feel weak at the knees, their legs trembled, and they really felt as though they were going to collapse. When they sing the church is one foundation, have you ever had that happen to you? First verse of the song teaches the church is one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord. This is what we're gonna focus on today, the foundation of the church from stanza one. But to do this right, we need to go beyond the lyrics of this amazing poem and do some deep investigation into the origins of the church. My aim in doing this is to impress upon you something that Edmund Clowney says in his discussion of the church in relation to the apostles' creed. This is really profound. And yet, how many people have ever thought of it? We say, I believe in the church. Right? That means that the church is a matter of faith. And as such, It is that which a Christian must see with their spiritual eyes. But the only way that you can do this is to have the Word of God tell you by the Spirit the glorious truths of this great mystery, the church. So that's what we're gonna do here. And I'm gonna begin with this idea of a mystery. Because I think it's right here that we have a fountainhead of so much bad thinking. Thinking that started off probably in their minds as good and right, but which has turned sour over time into many bad ideas about the church. It is the thinking that has created a massively unpassable chasm, like that between the rich man and Lazarus in Jesus' story. That chasm is this gaping divide between Old Testament and New Testament, which has been responsible for so much theological mischief and trickery. In what is the densest population of the word mystery found in the New Testament, Ephesians 3, which we read for the gospel, verses four through nine, uses the word mystery four times. The idea of the church is found several times in the immediate context. And so we read some people saying things like this, quote, according to Ephesians 3, nothing about the mystery and the new creation, that is the body of Christ, was ever revealed before. Or Paul calls the church a mystery because it was not known to the Old Testament patriarchs or prophets. Or these truths are not included in the Old Testament at all. Now these views have made their way into pop culture so much so that people today think that the church was this completely brand new thing that poofed into existence ex nihilo. And when we divorce such a teaching so completely from the Old Testament, thus making the Old Testament virtually irrelevant to us on the subject, it isn't that far of a stretch to start doing it with the New Testament as well. And that's how you get people today not caring about the church. It isn't necessarily a logical leap, but it's one of emulation. You see, if we really don't need the 39 books of the Bible to teach us about the church, then why do we really need the other 27 either? Here's what the apostle specifically says, verse three. He speaks of the mystery made known to me by revelation. Now this one is important because in the same verse he adds that he had already written briefly about it. That means somewhere before in Ephesians he had told you about this mystery. And what did he say before? Well, he said it was the mystery of God's will. in chapter one. Not the church itself, but God's plans for the church. He goes on to talk about the mystery of Christ. The mystery that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body. And again he says the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God. I'll come back to what that plan is exactly a little bit later. Because it's a glorious truth that should cause every single self-professing Christian to jump as quickly as they can to a good local church to begin working towards the end of being part of it. For now, I wanna look for a little bit at something I never once heard from anyone in these circles that taught that the Old Testament never said anything at all about the church. We have to begin, though, before we get to that, in Matthew 16. This is the famous saying that Jesus tells Peter, near the entrance to the cave of Pan, near the temples of Augustus and Zeus, Like when I say near, I mean literally just yards away at Caesarea Philippi at the foot of Mount Hermon. Jesus famously says, I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Now what many people believe is new here is the term church. They seem to be of the opinion that the new thing is therefore the church. But this is profoundly incorrect. I can't tell you how bad of theology this is. You see, Jesus deliberately chose a word packed with Old Testament meaning and context. Now, it wasn't in the original Hebrew, of course. Ekklesia, the word that Jesus uses here, is a Greek term. However, when the 70 translators of the Old Testament into Greek and the Septuagint needed to find a word to translate the kahal, a word that means to assemble or to summon or to call, they chose ekklesia. Ekklesia literally means ek, out of, and kaleo, to call, to call out of. So an ekklesia is literally a called out group that assembles together because they are summoned to do so. The word perfectly fit an idea found throughout the Old Testament for Israel, and that's why they used it. For example, the very first use of ekklesia is in Deuteronomy 4.10. It says, on the day of the ekklesia, here God commanded Moses to gather the people before me. They were summoned. It's here that God covenanted with Israel. Later, this day was simply called the Day of the Ecclesia. It was a day set apart for sacred assembly and worship and official business. It had rules about who could or could not attend, who was to do what, what was supposed to be done on it, and so on. This continues with Joshua. When Joshua assembles the people on Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim to read the blessings and curses, it was done, quote, in the hearing of all the people of the Ecclesia of Israel. Now from here on, church, since that's the English word that we've used with Jesus and Peter. I think this will have a more profound effect on our hearing and thinking. In the days of the judges, when the concubine was killed and all the Israelites gathered together to decide what to do, they were called the church of the people of God. Anyone who would not come up to that church was to be put to death. When David speaks to Goliath, he declares that all this church shall know that the battle is the Lord's. Before David brings the ark from Kiriath-Jerim, he speaks to all the church of Israel. When he announces that Solomon will build the temple, he does so in the midst of the church. When Solomon finished building the temple, he blessed the church. On this day, the church feasted for seven days. In the days of Jehoshaphat, he stands in the church of Judah in prayer to God. When Hezekiah restores sound worship, the church laid their hands on the male goats of the sin offering. When the prophet Joel urges Israel to repent, he tells them to consecrate the church. When Babylon conquers Jerusalem and the temple is destroyed, Jeremiah says that those whom God had commanded not to enter had come into God's church. And in this verse, it even seems to be referring to the building. We find the ecclesia being used throughout the books of poetry. Job says, I have stood in the church crying, which is really interesting because he predates the nation of Israel. Perhaps the most important poetic use of the term is found in Psalm 22, 22. It says, in the midst of the church, I will praise you. This is so important because Hebrews quotes this passage directly right down to the term ekklesia. Amazingly and bewildering to me, seriously unbelievable, the Lexham English Septuagint and the older Brenton English Septuagint only translate the word ecclesia a single time with the English word church of the almost 30 times that it's used in the Old Testament. And it's only in one of them and it does it right here. with this word. Perhaps even more disconcerting, almost all modern English translations of Hebrews 2.12, where this is quoted, refuse to translate ecclesia as church there. In order to get the word church as a translation, you have to go back to the Geneva Bible and the King James. Does this not betray a presupposition of what we find in the Old Testament is in fact not the church at all, but merely a generic assembly? This is troubling, to say the least, because the vast majority of times that the word appears in the Old Testament, it describes a body of people summoned together before God, called out by Him, assembling to worship Him, to appeal to Him, to repent to Him, to stand together before Him. put it differently, it is his church. He made it, he created it, he calls it, it exists by him and for him. And Hebrews, in quoting the psalm and applying it directly to the New Testament church audience, to whom the letter is written, is showing that there is a profound continuity between the Old Testament and New Testament church. to quote Psalm 22 of the church in the New Testament is to directly link the church in the Psalm to the church in Hebrews. Do you understand that? And this is why we find, including the word ekklesia, at least a dozen phrases taken in the New Testament, taken straight from the Old Testament, that are then used to describe the people of Israel and then the church of the apostles. So these include how the church and Israel are both called the circumcision, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, Jews, The Israel of God, sons of Abraham, the vine, the chosen people, God's temple, the tribes of Israel, the new Jerusalem, the bride, the church, all are applied to both groups. So are they exactly the same? Well, the answer is of course not, and no one has ever suggested that they are exactly the same. But they are organically related to one another, like an oak tree is related to an acorn. Or like a butterfly is related to a caterpillar. Have you seen any of these caterpillars running around, man? There's tons of them right now. It's hard to see that ugly little thing and think in just a week or so this thing's gonna turn into a beautiful butterfly. But it's organically related, that's the point. Like the pot to the clay from which it's taken. There's a relationship between them. You cannot divorce the one from the other. Most important of all in this regard is the church's one foundation. As the song says, it is Jesus Christ her Lord. Now we'll look at what the song called his new creation by water and the word in a moment, but first you must see that the church's one foundation in the Old Testament is the same person. The one our Lord's half-brother Jude calls Jesus in the Old Testament. It's Jesus' church. That's what he tells Peter. He made it, he called it. It is through him and for him. In an amazing verse, Jude says, now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. Similarly, Paul says, we must not put Christ to the test as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble as some of them did and were destroyed by the destroyer. So how in the world can they make such a fantastic claim that Jesus Christ was there with the people, saving them and guiding them in the wilderness? It's because Jesus didn't come into existence in the womb of the Virgin. Rather, he has always existed. He is the firstborn and by him, all things were made. What was new in the New Testament in the womb of Mary was that he incarnated as a human being. But he was there in the Old Testament, personally present with his people. The angel of the Lord says to Abraham, do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. In that verse, God is distinct from the angel, and yet God is the angel. That's a mind blower. You did not withhold your son from me, he says. Jacob recalls the same being, saying, the God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who's been my shepherd all my life to this day, the angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless these boys. Athanasius said of this verse, none of the created and natural angels did Jacob join to God, their creator, but in saying, who delivered me from all evil, he showed that it was no created angel, but the word of God, whom he joined to the Father in his prayer, through whom, whomsoever he will, God does deliver. and many before and after him have agreed. And why? Why would they say that the angel of the Lord is the word of God? Well, listen to what the angel himself says. This is what he tells Israel. In Judges 2, now the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bakim and he said, I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers. I said, I will never break my covenant with you and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land. You shall break down their altars, but you have not obeyed my voice. What is this you've done? So now I say, I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your side and their God shall be snares to you. Do you see it? Do you see there? The angel of the Lord is the God who covenanted with Israel. He is the God who calls them to himself, gave them the law, taught them to worship, assembled them at Mount Sinai, led them in the wilderness, was the water from the rock and the manna from heaven. He was therefore the foundation of the church in the Old Testament too. Same foundation. The church's one foundation is always Jesus Christ, her Lord, no matter the time or the place. That's a very powerful word that people must hear. This is not something that's optional if it's all about Jesus. If this is his church, we dare not say bad things about it. But the promise was, says Malachi, taking parts of that judge's passage and Isaiah 40 and Exodus 23, the promise was that the angel would come in the future in a new way. Malachi says, the angel of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he's coming, says the Lord of hosts. And that was Isaiah's prediction as well. His name is called the angel of the great council. Malachi had said in the same verse that before this angel would come another messenger who would prepare the way before me and the Lord will suddenly come to his temple. And this is exactly what happened, Matthew says, when John the Baptist came, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. That's what Malachi predicted. This is what happens, says Mark, before I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way. This is what happens, says Luke, and you, child, will be called the prophet of the most high, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways as it is written. And this is why Jesus is the one foundation of the church in the New Testament. It's because he was its one foundation in the Old Testament. Same Jesus, same foundation, same God. This is his church. So if the church and the foundation are not what is new in Ephesians 3, then what is what is new? If the foundation and the church are not the mystery because they've always been known and understood, then what is Paul talking about in Ephesians 3? Well, he tells you. It's not that the church exists or somehow come into being for the first time in the New Testament, but rather that through the church, a thing of heavenly origin, a proclamation of the gospel through faith in Christ, the Gentiles are now fellow heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the same promises. And this is the remarkable truth that should make all Christians not flee from the church, but to her. For here, there is safety. Here, there is victory. Here, there is Christ himself. This mystery is made known to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit, Paul says, and in the parallel to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. And I believe that the apostle gets this from Jesus' words there to Peter at the bottom of Mount Hermon, and then from the transfiguration event at the top just a few days later. So I want you to think about what I just read. It's through the church that the mystery is made known. And this is, it was made known to the holy apostles and the prophets and to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places, Paul says. So what do I mean that Paul gets this from the top and the bottom of Mount Hermon? Well, let's go back to Jesus' words to Peter. Something truly remarkable is going on here. Christians have long fought over what Jesus meant when he talked about the rock. upon this rock. Well, what rock? Well, rather than see an either or logical fallacy and fight between them, I believe we have a beautiful and almost unparalleled quadruple entendre with the rock. The rock actually means four different things here in one word. The rock, Petra, plays off Peter's name, Petras. So there's the apostle being given the mystery as Paul says in Ephesians 3. The church is founded on the apostolic historical reality of history. It also plays off Peter's confession of faith, that he is the Christ, the son of the living God. Now there's the faith that Paul talks about in Ephesians 3. The church is necessarily about creed and confession. But the rock is Christ himself of the Old Testament, as we find in many, many passages. As Paul says himself, the rock was Christ in 1 Corinthians. And Paul said as much that the mystery came through the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. So that's there in Ephesians 3. And then there's the literal rock upon which Jesus is standing there at the entrance to the cave of Pan, the rock at Caesarea Philippi, Mount Hermon. This is what Paul is talking about when he says that the mystery is made known, not only to the apostles like Peter, but to the rulers and authorities in heavenly places. Jesus didn't say this in a secret closet. He didn't say, hey Peter, get some home. He said it right there where Pan and the other entities were busy, most likely during the evil Lupercalia Roman festival of the city, creating evil worship for themselves. You don't think that they heard what Jesus said too, do you? But it isn't just here at the bottom of the mountain that we find this happening. It also happens at the top of Mount Hermon, at the Transfiguration event, just a few days later. And it happens, as Psalm 89 says, according to prophecy. So go to Psalm 89 here for just a moment. Along with its sister Psalm, Psalm 88, this song is written by someone called an Ezraite, which scholars say was a Canaanite who had converted to the worship of the true God, which is interesting, come up in again in a minute. Now there's over 20 direct verbal parallels between these two songs and these two very short stories found in the Gospels. These parallels are clearly presented as prophecy, a prophecy of the new covenant. Psalm 89 says, I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth. My steadfast love I will keep for him forever, and my covenant will stand firm for him. It's a prophecy. And it's into this that we need to understand a couple of related facts about the psalm and the church. First, The word ecclesia appears in Psalm 89 in verse five. Second, it does so in the context of the rulers and authorities in heavenly places, just like Ephesians 3 tells you. The heavens shall declare thy wonders, O Lord, and thy truth in the church of the holy ones. It goes on, for who in the heavens shall be compared to the Lord and who shall be likened to the Lord among the sons of God? The point seems to be exactly what Paul is saying in Ephesians. In and through the church, this heavenly entity, the wisdom of God is made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places according to the eternal purpose that God had realized in Christ through our faith in him. Long ago, Theodorette said on Psalm 89, all who put their trust in God in the church will keep faith with Him. It's proper, therefore, for your praises to be sung by all, not least by the inhabitants of heaven, who look down on your wonders more precisely and understand the reliability of your promises. When the church presents the gospel of what Jesus has done for us, it is doing its most fundamental job and the heavens themselves bear witness and they worship. But the context of both the Psalm and Ephesians seems to be more than willing praise from these creatures. Rather, it seems to be that God is making this known to the fallen heavenly beings and they too must praise him. Remember what Paul says in Philippians, every knee will bow Remember how Paul ends his letter in Ephesians? For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Certainly some of these creatures are holy angels. However, others are not. And when you see this very clearly, for instance, in the Psalm, when it says, you crushed Rahab like a carcass, you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm. Rahab is a fallen heavenly being, and she's not the only one in Psalm 89. We have the moon, which a Canaanite believed was a god or a goddess. It is there with a faithful witness, which I think is Christ himself, who is being given the covenant promises. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that Ethan the Ezraite, as a believer in the Lord, thought of the moon the same way he did when he was a pagan Canaanite. Nevertheless, in putting the moon here, he's clearly hearkening back to the divine counsel and the fallen angels. And they too are witnesses, even as it said back in verse six, with the whole counsel of the sons of God. And then finally, and I brought this up a couple months ago when I preached this, this entire psalm is a subversion of the Baal cycle. In that story, Baal, one of the sons of El, which God is called in this psalm by Ethan, Baal usurps his brother Yam, the sea, as the high god of the pantheon. Yam is the beloved son of El. However, in Psalm 89, the beloved son is Christ the Messiah, and that's exactly what Jesus is called in the Mount of Transfiguration, my beloved son. And yet, the father is, as in the Baal cycle, called El, and this is all because God inspired a Canaanite believer to write this entire thing. You go to the Transfiguration, this makes a lot more sense. Remember that Psalm 89 and the Transfiguration included all these parallels. As many have argued, the transfiguration took place on Mount Hermon, and in fact, Mount Hermon is found in Psalm 89. Mount Hermon is where El met with the divine counsel of heavenly beings in pagan traditions. This includes Baal. And thus, the Heavenly Father speaks before the witnesses of Peter, James, John, and Moses, and Elijah, who are witnesses. He says, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. There were surely others there to hear the pronouncement, as Psalm 89 says. You see, Jesus chose this mountain of all the places for this to happen for very good reasons. Those other fallen creatures include Elohim angels, like Baal himself, And it's into this that if Baal and Zeus and Satan are all the same entity, which I've told you many times, then we now know why Satan was so raging mad and sought above all other things from that moment on to put Jesus to death. And this then makes sense of Jesus saying, just before this event, that the gates of hell will not prevail over the church. Here, the war begins with the church. The transfiguration is the first offensive battle that Jesus wages against the gates of hell, which just so happened to have been believed to have been there at the cave of Pan at the bottom of the mountain. Through the witnesses of Moses, John, James, Elijah, and Moses to the transfiguration event, we have, as it were, the heavenly church gathered there on the mountain, witnessing the declaration of the new covenant for the first time there on Mount Hermon. And through this declaration and all subsequent times the gospel goes forth from the church, the powers are put on notice, the church goes on the offensive, a theme that we're gonna look at in future weeks. I'm gonna return to Ephesians for a moment. When Paul speaks of these powers and heavenly places, those enemies of the faith that are our true foe, as I said at the end of Ephesians, who was our battle really against? Not flesh and blood. When Paul speaks this, he would have had someone very specific in mind. She was a goddess, and her name was Artemis of the Ephesians. Her temple was there in Ephesus, and in fact, it was one of the seven wonders of the world. We find out more about this in Acts when Paul visits the city. In this story, Luke tells us about a man named Demetrius, a silversmith. He made silver shrines of Artemis, and these brought no little business to the many craftsmen of the city, Luke says. But when Paul came and started preaching the gospel, Demetrius got angry because many men's livelihoods were at stake. Because Paul was going around persuading many people to turn away from Artemis, saying that they are not gods who are made by hands. So Demetrius persuaded the city that if Paul were allowed to continue preaching that quote, the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence. She whom all Asia and the world worship. And so all the people start yelling great is Artemis of the Ephesians throughout the city. And thus, when Paul tells us about the powers and rulers of heaven being told about the mystery through the church, he would have first and foremost have had Artemis in his mind. But what happened to her worship as the gospel went forward? Well, you wanna know something? Demetrius was right. It declined. And what has happened to the worship of these evil creatures is the gospel has increasingly been lost and the church has grown weak and tired and powerless through it. has increased. Do you see why the church is so vital? We'll get more to that in later weeks. As I conclude, I want to take us through a bit more of the song. After telling us about the church's one foundation, which we've seen we needed to go to in the Old Testament to fully understand, which then took us on an excursion to understand the mystery related to the church in Ephesians concerning its origin. This is what the line says. She is his new creation by water and the word. From heaven he came and sought her to be his holy bride. With his own blood he bought her, and for her life he died. It's here that we see what is new about the church. She is a new creation, it says. Christ's creation, he makes it. It's not a man-made entity. This new creation fits the new covenant that was prophesied in Psalm 89, declared on the Mount of Transfiguration and cut in the blood of Jesus at the cross. When we speak of newness, we can talk about newness in a couple different ways. You can think of something as brand new that never existed before, like windows. We can make an argument that windows should never have existed. but Windows was brand new at one point in time. Or you can think of it as new and improved, like Windows whatever they're on version now, right? Well, Greek actually has two words that reflects those two usages. The word kynos, new, is about quality. It's new and improved. The word neos, new, is about timing. It's brand new. Now here's the thing. All but one time that the new covenant of the new creation appears in the New Testament, it is kainos. And thus, we have continuity between the church and Israel with those terms. It is new and improved, not brand new. The church in the Old Testament is the caterpillar, the church in the New Testament is the butterfly. This new creation could only take place if God himself came down as one of us to make a way for all the nations to be able to enter and become the temple of God. So God incarnated in the womb of Mary and Jesus was born. And Jesus obeyed God to all things, even death on a cross. He did this to the point of sacrificing himself as the high priest who sacrificed himself as the lamb. His blood was spilt. All things were made clean in him and by him and through him. This was better than the sacrifices of the old covenant system, as Hebrews says, because they weren't able to take away sins, only cover them. But now through Christ, anyone who turns to him in faith has forgiveness of sins once for all. And think about what it says specifically, because the song is talking about particular redemption. With his own blood he bought her, And for her life, he died. There was a specific intent that he had in his death on the cross, and it was for his church. Now, when we have faith in Christ, we become part of Christ's church. We're engrafted into the vine, into the Israel of God, into his bride. This is not something that people can appreciate unless they comprehend it by faith. This includes Christ himself and what he has done as well as his church. Clowney says this, why is this so? Because the church is God's creation, not simply a human institution. It is different, even strange. The favorite fantasy of science fiction is true of the church. Its members are aliens, even though they lack pointed ears. Their astral home is not another planet, but God's own heaven. It's not surprising that sociologists find the church rather puzzling. Even Christians have extraordinary difficulty in describing the church. Luther claimed that a girl of seven knows what the church is, but that he had to pen thousands of words in order to explain what she understood. The church is different because it is the born again family of God, the assembly and body of Christ, the dwelling of the spirit. adding to the fact that we are a peculiar people, a people born not of flesh and blood, a people who belong to a kingdom that cannot be seen with our eyes or located on a map, are the amazing things going on with the origins and foundations of the church and spiritual realms that we cannot see. And so now it becomes apparent that this is why the church confesses that we believe in the church. The church is a matter of faith. This is why so many people mock it. They lack the faith to see what God has told them about her. Stop looking at the church the way that the world does. Look to her as Jesus does. He is her foundation. He always has been, even into the deep origins of her beginning in long, long ages past. He calls her to himself, he always has. He calls her to assemble together, to worship. It's what we've always done. But you can only appreciate this truth when you believe in him and his church. You've heard the word tell you about Christ's church. Will you learn to love her as he does? Father, we ask that you would help us to hear these words. It really is a burden of mine, and it's been growing for a long time, and I think I'm not the only one that has this burden among this group of people, that your church is being despised from friends within, and this needs to stop. for us to mock something that you died for, that Christ died for, that you chose before the foundations of the world and to give little to no heedance or care about her is a travesty of our age. And I would pray, Lord, that you might bring correction through the preaching of these words in this month. to many who hear them that each of us would learn to love the church in ways that maybe we have not before. To see her as the bride of Christ and all the things that we will look at in these weeks to come help us to know that this is the place through which great and extraordinary workings in spiritual places take place. Through the ordinary gathering of this called out assembly, I would pray that you would do a great work here in this local congregation and then through your church throughout the world as we ask you and entreat you to bring reformation in our day. It's in Christ's name that we pray, amen.