Let me pray again. Father, these are glorious things that we've considered and really they exceed our ability to even get our hearts and our minds around them. The mystery of divine love and power that work in the most unimaginable and unexpected ways. A God who has triumphed over invincible power through the seemingly greatest weakness. A God whose love has triumphed in self-giving. A God whose eternal purposes have become yes and amen in a way that the world can see and can recognize and embrace in Jesus our Lord. Father, I pray that you would make these things glorious in our own hearts. That like Paul, we would never get tired or weary or bored with this good news that our God has become King, that our God has taken up his reign in Jesus the Messiah. And that one day this renewal that is now working in the world through your church will take everything into its grasp. A day of transformation and renewal in which our God will be all in all. And finally at last the human race will be what you created it to be. We ourselves will be what you created us to be. And all things will attain to their eternal destiny. a creation that lives in and through and with you in a way that we can't even begin to imagine now, but we long for and we hope in. And in Christ, by the spirit that you have given us as an earnest, we have the assurance of that destiny. Help us to be faithful people, Father, to be a joyful people, to be an exultant and a resolute people. And even now, Father, as we come again to engage our time of study and consideration, I pray that you would help each one. Meet us each one according to our understanding, according to our need. Build us up in this faith and encourage us. Give us strength for the journey we ask in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, if you think about what is the big idea in the scripture? And in a sense, that's what this series is all about. If you were to ask a Christian, what is the big idea in the scripture? What are the scriptures really trying to get at? Somebody might say, well, revealing God, revealing the person and the character of God, the attributes of God. Or some might say, well, What the Bible is about is God's design of atonement, his purposes to save people. Some might say, well, what the Bible's all about is this theme of the kingdom of God. That's the big idea that it has in mind. And all of those things aren't untrue in a certain sense, but what I want to introduce today and camp on a little bit and argue is that if we really understand the scriptures as the story, the telling of the purpose and the work of God for and in this creation that he has brought forth, then what we can really say is that the central theme that permeates the scripture beginning from the very beginning to the end is this theme of exile. And I can say I've never heard a single Christian, if you asked them, what is the, if you had to pick one theme that kind of captures what the biblical text is all about, I've never heard anybody say exile. But I hope that by the time we're done today, we will see that that's the case and why that's even important for even bringing in the other things that I mentioned as, you know, grand ideas or central themes in the scripture. and how this thing of exile helps us to define properly all of those things, including the person and the character, the nature of God, the will of God. So we've so far seen in Israel's history the progress of the kingdom from David moving forward, the dividing of the kingdom, and ultimately both sub-kingdoms of Israel and Judah meeting their end in conquest, desolation, exile, and captivity. And that's where we sit now in our consideration of the Old Testament. Both houses of Israel are in captivity. And leading into that captivity, if we take what we would call the writing prophets, the prophets who have scripture, written scripture in our canon of scripture, the prophets before those captivities kept saying, this is coming. They kept calling the people, whether the people of Israel or the people of Judah or both, they kept calling them to return to the Lord, but they kept setting in front of them, this is what's coming if you don't return. And really that takes us all the way back to the prophet Moses who said, this is what's going to come to you even before they entered the land. So the prophets before the exile were warning that this is coming. The prophets who God sends to the people during the time of their exile were saying, this has come upon you for this reason, this is your fault. And even the prophets who, who speak after there's a kind of return back to Judea, even in the rebuilding of the temple, the rebuilding of the city, those voices are still saying, this is not the last word. This is not the last word. Captivity wasn't the last word. Return to Judea isn't the last word. Rebuilding the temple isn't the last word. Yahweh will yet fulfill his promises that he has made to Abraham and to David. So the prophets all speak in terms of the exile, or what we would call the exiles of Israel and Judah. And their message to Israel and Judah are focused on how you got here, the significance of this, but where God is ultimately going with that. And that's why I wanted to read those Isaiah passages, because you see that theme of captivity and God's intent in it sitting at the center of that. But I want to argue today, and I hope to show this, that exile is the fundamental theme for understanding the creation since the fall, and therefore it's the central theme for understanding the scriptural story. God creates, and he begins to work out a purpose for that creation, and sitting at the very center of that is this idea of exile. When we talk about exile, we're talking about a thing or a person's separation from its proper, appropriate, legal inheritance, place of habitation. It's a separation from something to which a thing is entitled or that it naturally or rightly possesses. Exile from your home, exile from something So it speaks to a separation, but it has both a physical and a relational aspect to it. Specifically in biblical terms, exile isn't just physical separation, and that's going to become important to our understanding. Exile isn't just, this is my home, this is my country, and I'm now an expat in Ecuador or something like that. It's not just a matter of geography. It's not just a matter of physical location. It's relational. And there are two ways in which we see that to be the case. The first thing is that we saw from even the creation account that everything in the created order by God's design is related to everything else. Everything is related to everything else. That's the principle of shalom. The harmoniousness of all things. And harmony speaks to the relationship of more than one thing, right? Even musically, harmony is two different notes that are rightly related to one another. If you don't have two notes, you have unison. You don't have harmony. Shalom speaks to the harmoniousness of all things in the created order. And you've heard me say many times before, we see that even in the world around us, in physical laws, in the cosmos, in ecosystems, the interrelatedness of the things that God has created. So exile then at the first level involves intercreational alienation, alienation within the creation itself. But because all of the relationships between created things presuppose and reflect and are even ordered through the relationship of created things with the creator, exile first and foremost has to do with the creator-creature relationship. And if you think about Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 and how the creation is ordered and God speaks of its functional operation and then what the fall actually does, the outcome of the fall, we see that these things are the case. And I use the example here that human beings are inherently related to one another in all sorts of ways, and I won't belabor that, but as image bearers, Specifically, we are related to one another as sharers, co-sharers in the image of God, so that the intra-human relationship, the relationship between human beings, is defined and ordered by and functions within people's relationship with the God whose image they bear. This becomes very much at the center of the New Testament theology of the church, right? As we become reconciled, summed up, gathered up in God's own life in the Messiah, our membership within one another, our union with one another becomes actualized in the way that God actually intended it to be in the first instance. So these two dimensions of exile in the relational sense, intercreational exile and creation and exile involving relationship between creatures and the creator, those two dimensions are explicit in the Genesis account. Man was created image son for the purpose of mediating God's relationship with this creation. Man's design, man's intent, man's nature is relational. His function is relational. His vocation is relational. So intimacy between the creator and the creation exists and operates in and through humans fulfilling their own created design and function as kings and priests on God's behalf. We've talked about all of this, and this is introduced and underscored even in the creation event. So what that means then negatively is that the scripture treats the fall in terms of relational alienation, not failed morality. relational alienation. If you go back and you think about Genesis 3 and the Fall, what happens because of the relational failure between Adam and Eve and God? Cursed is the ground because of you. Thorns and thistles it will bear. because the creation is related to God in and through human beings. And when the divine-human relationship is distorted or degraded or destroyed, undermined or alienated in any way, then the relationship between God and the creation is also affected The created order outside of the human realm didn't sin, it didn't do anything wrong. There was no failure on the part of the creation and yet now the creation is cursed. It's set at odds within itself and it's set at odds with man and so ultimately then it's set at odds with God himself. And you've heard me say many, many times through the years This is the sense in which primarily we have to think about the work of Christ as cosmic and universal as opposed to just the narrow limited atonement way that we've been taught to think, oh, how many people get saved? The work of God is comprehensive because the creation itself was made subject, as Paul says in Romans 8, to this alienation principle. It's groaning in its own estrangement to which it was subjected because of human decision. So as man is alienated now from God, that's expressed in his first and foremost in that severance from God's life. That's what the tree of life was all about. No more access to the tree of life. And that's expressed in the text in this imagery of expulsion from the garden. The garden is the place where God dwells. So man is expelled from God's presence. That relationship is alienated. and at the center of that is that man is cut off from the one who is life and in whom man himself obtains life. Think again of Jesus' words later that will come, unless you find life in me, you have no life. You have no life in yourself. Life in the biblical sense adheres in God, and it's communicated to people through the intimacy of that relationship. So the text shows this fall of man in terms of cut off from the life of God. No access to the life of God expelled from his presence. And because man is the interface between God and the creation, that divine human estrangement results in creator creation and human creation estrangement. So the fall left the creation cursed, severed if you will, exiled from its intended design as alienated from both its creator and the human lord created to administer its relationship with the creator. That's what Genesis 1 through 3 teaches us. So the fall itself, here's the point, the fall introduced the theme of exile. And it follows all the way through to the end of Revelation. exile as the fracturing of the creator-creation relationship at all levels, in all dimensions, and the rest of the salvation history focuses on remedying that problem. And because that fracturing of the creator-creation relationship leaves creatures severed from their own true nature and function, and that severance from a thing's true nature and function, the scripture calls death. A thing dies to itself when it can no longer know itself and function according to its true intended design. That's what death is. It follows, then, that death is the consequence of exile. Exile always means death. So in the scriptures, we see that the scripture's preoccupation with ending the creation's exile is equally its preoccupation with life out of death. From the very beginning, death has come on the creation. Eve is named Eve, the mother of all the living, right? She's to be the instrument through which life will return to the creation. And we see over and over again this theme of life out of death, life out of death, life out of death, but in connection with this principle, this reality of exile. That's some kind of introductory considerations to establish my claim, hopefully. But now I want to show that in the progress of the salvation history. So expulsion from Eden is the first and the fundamental, the foundational, the ultimate manifestation of this thing of exile. Everything that comes after that that we would call exile is just a reflection or further working out of that, a further expression of that. So we see that that exile from Eden is followed very quickly by this thing that we call the flood. That was the next great episode or a testing of exile. Why? It involved God remedying the creation's disorder. God brought a world into existence, but in the beginning it was tohu wabohu, uninhabited and uninhabitable. And God now begins this work of ordering and filling, ordering and filling. And what comes through this thing we call the fall is the disordering, the disraveling of that. Not the doing away of God's creation, but the twisting and perverting of it, the disordering of it. And so God meets that disorder by reducing the creation again to non-order. emblemized in covering the world again with the watery deep. The deep is the symbol, the great representation of non-order. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, right? And the deep, darkness was over the face of the deep, a non-order, not disordered, non-ordered creation. And so a now plunging of the world back into the watery deep is God going back to non-order in order to reorder it in a kind of second creation. So the deluge addressed the creation's estrangement from God by purging it and reordering its relationship with the Creator, once again now in a new creation with man the image bearer at the center. And God's instruction to Noah is centered in man is image and likeness, right? Even the prescription against murder. Whoever sheds man's blood by man, his blood will be shed, because man is the image and likeness of God. Be fruitful, multiply, subdue the earth. It's a new creation. God reordering again out of the watery deep. But even that is only provisional. It's not really dealing with the ultimate problem. So we go from there to Babel. And Babel is another episode of the same sort of issue of trying to resolve this problem of exile, Here we have it being man's attempt to end his exile at the human level by seeking human unity. Exile means the alienating of relationship, and we saw that that happened at all levels of creation. And so you have a man's attempt to bring the human race back together again in order to, as human, as a unified mankind, to make a name for itself and ascend into the presence of God, to put right this alienation, to end it. And God responds in two ways. He first exposes and condemns that attempt as fraudulent and unfruitful, and then he goes on immediately to choose out of the human race a particular man Abram, through whom he will reunify mankind. And he will restore the divine human relationship with the ultimate goal that the creation would be freed from its exile. So Babel is man saying, we recognize this problem of exile. We're going to solve it. And God says, no, you won't. I'm going to solve it. But I will solve it through a man that I will choose. That leads us into Abram and Abram then becomes the source of the whole Israelite people and Israelite story that fills the balance of the Old Testament, right? So centuries later, then Abraham's descendants. echoing their forefathers' own personal exiles from Canaan, found themselves in exile in Egypt, and their deliverance and restoration to the Creator God becomes the great prototype of the final deliverance by which the creation's exile with man at the center would be remedied forever. That's the Isaiah 51 context. Arise, awake, O Lord, as you did. Put on the arm of your strength as you did when you slew Rahab the dragon, when you brought your people through the dry seabed. And so once again, Yahweh will arise and the redeemed will return to Zion with joy and shouting on their heads. God delivered his covenant people from their exile in Egypt, and he brought them into his sanctuary land to dwell with him as he had pledged to Abraham, I will be your God, you will be my people. When he met with them at Sinai, he said, build me a sanctuary that I can dwell in your midst. He ended their physical exile by bringing them out of Egypt back to Canaan, but their essential exile, their estrangement from him, that remained unresolved. Remember, exile can have a physical manifestation, but ultimately it's a relational reality. And so bringing the people out of Egypt and bringing them into Canaan didn't resolve the problem, In fact, all of the first generation except Joshua and Caleb perished in the wilderness. They didn't even inherit the land. But God's verdict later is that they disbelieved me. They were estranged from me in Egypt. I brought them out for my own sake because of my faithfulness. They disobeyed me and they were unfaithful to me in the wilderness. I brought them into the land. They've continued to be unfaithful. So they remain in exile in terms of what exile actually is, even though God is present in their midst. And that alienation showed itself, as we saw repeatedly, through the ear of the judges. First of all, even in God's presence, he's behind multiple layers hidden inside a sanctuary and nobody can see him. A priest can approach him once a year, that's it. But through the ear of the judges, we see Israel's in the land, and yet they continue to show their and grow in and manifest their alienation from God. And the Judges is this cycle of indifference, disregard, apostasy, and then God brings against them a captivating power from within the land, one of the Canaanite powers to subjugate them, enslave them, oppress them inside of the land, and they cry out to God to deliver them and he raises up a deliverer, a judge, who delivers them from that exile inside of the land only to begin the process all over again. So the covenant household continued in exile throughout its history evident in their relationship with God and their relationship with one another, ultimately manifested in the two national phenomena that we've just spent time considering the last several weeks. First of all, the fracturing of the Abrahamic household into two kingdoms, exiled from one another in a divided Canaan, in a divided, ultimately Davidic kingdom split into two, with only two tribes remaining to David and then ultimately the exile of both kingdoms from the covenant land. And that high or ultimate end, that ultimate expression of exile in the Old Testament, as with all of the previous incidences of it, reflected Israel's relational exile from their God. And that is underscored by the fact that before Even Judah, the house of David, is sent into exile. Yahweh departs. You see this in Ezekiel 10 and 11. The Lord leaves. He abandons the land. He abandons his people. He abandons them to the Babylonians. So the Lord had been warning of this all the way back to before they even entered the land. If you go back and read Deuteronomy 28 and 29, Moses while they're still on the east side of the Jordan, God is already warning them, when they get into the land, this is what's going to come. And even when they were in the land through all those centuries, he continually exhorted them to return to him under the threat of desolation and expulsion. The prophets kept telling them this was coming, and yet it was inevitable. Why? Because relational exile ensured physical exile. What happened to them physically was just an outward showing of the actual reality of their alienation from God. So in the end, the people that God chose as his agents for ending the creation's exile were themselves hopelessly subject to it. Adam and Eve's exile from Eden was their exile, and they couldn't resolve it. Exile, exile, exile. So exile then involves displacement from one's proper sphere or place of inhabitation. And biblically speaking, exile is an imposed and an enforced circumstance. And what I mean by that is that it's not a willful choice. That circumstance of being displaced or being alienated is not something that is eagerly chosen, and it always involves some form of forcible constraint. Biblically speaking, even with the patriarchs and their families who had their own personal exiles from Canaan, it was imposed on them by famine or by threat. Jacob fled the land because his brother Esau was going to kill him, right? It wasn't their choice to leave in that sense, and circumstances kept them from returning. Remember, Jacob wanted to return. He couldn't. Finally, he was able to. So exile biblically involves, in a sense, not one's own willful choice. Gee, I want to do this. And it also is held in place by some sort of constraint. That means that the remedying of exile involves liberation. A person has to be freed from what prevents his return to his rightful habitation. In the scriptures, there's something that keeps this thing of exile in place, and that's why the remedy to exile is liberation. If you think back, and maybe you go back and read these Isaiah passages again after what we talk about today, and you see these dynamics woven together, God says, I will arise, I will liberate, I will set the captive free. So what is the remedy then to exile? Redemption. Redemption is the remedy for exile. And once again, the Egyptian Exodus is the singular, great, enduring example or prototype of that throughout the Old Testament. That passage that we read from Isaiah 51 is referring back to that and saying, God, do that again. Do that again. this time in an ultimate and in a determinative way. I mention here that Christians, if you ask Christian, well, what is redemption? It's part of our vernacular, right? That's one of our Christianese terms. But if you ask people what is redemption about, people will generally think in terms of Jesus dying, and they'll think redemption is just like a synonym for atonement. And I'm not saying they're not related in any way, but that redemption isn't atonement. They're not synonymous in that sense. And redemption isn't just Jesus' cross. Redemption refers to liberation from constraint, from constrained displacement through the payment of an appropriate price or valuation by a suitable intercessor. In the Old Testament, it's most commonly associated with these three ideas that I mentioned here, Pada, Kafar, and Ga'al. Pada, as it speaks to redemption, focuses, and these overlap, and this isn't an absolute distinction between these three, but if you can distinguish them, Pada tends to point to that which is actually paid, what is actually the price, what is the thing that is paid, and what is the nature of that payment. Back in the day, some of us are old enough to remember when people collected green stamps, and when you went and you purchased something, you redeemed your stamps, right? You basically got out of them the value. There was an assigned value, a price that liberated that stamp in a sense so that you could now have that accessible to you. That's the idea of redemption. So pada speaks to what is it that's paid? What's the nature of that? Kafar, we think of Yom Kippur, Kippur is a cognate of this Kafar idea, but that has to do with what is it that is coming from that payment? What is the result of that? And the idea of Kafar is this idea of appeasement or propitiation, which is the bringing together of estranged parties. The idea of Yom Kippur and the offering on the Ark of the Covenant was to reconcile Yahweh and his people. Kafar is about relational restoration, relational reconciliation. And then Ga'al, we all know the idea of the redeemer kinsman, right? Ga'al speaks to the fact that redemption, that doing of the redemptive work, has to come from a recognized suitable representative. And in the Israelite Hebrew way of thinking about that, it was a person who was related not just by blood, not just by some kind of a blood relation, but even relationship in possession. You're invested in that person's life somehow. There's a connection in there. It's not just an arbitrary, anybody can step up and do this. So the redeemer kinsman, the closest relative was the one who would be looked to first to do this redemptive work. So together these three things flesh out this idea of redemption through a payment, liberation through a appropriate payment of some sort suited to the valuation of the thing by a suitable intercessor, redeemer. So because exile expresses relational alienation, redemption is unto reconciliation. Why is that important? Because we tend to think of, again, the work of Christ strictly in terms of the payment of a debt in a legal sense, like someone paying off your car loan or your mortgage. People have done wrong things. The wages of sin is death. Jesus dies, pays your debt. It's very forensic and very sterile and impersonal at a certain level. But redemption, because it's dealing with the problem of exile or alienation, which is a relational thing, it is about reconciliation. And that was the case with the Egyptian redemption. It was unto Israel's ingathering. Israel hadn't done anything wrong The Exodus was not about payment for sin. It was about dealing with the problem of captivity and enslavement that the Israelites could not overcome themselves. And above that, it was about God fulfilling his covenant promise. He had said to Abraham, I will be your God. You will be my people. I will make you a great nation. I will dwell with you. You will dwell with me. You will be my people. Egypt stood between that promise and its realization. And so even in the making of the covenant, God said, no, for certain your descendants are going to be enslaved, but I will bring them out and I will gather them to myself. And so even in Exodus 15, the song of Moses is not saying God brought us out of Egypt and he paid the debt for our sins. So now we can get on with our lives. There was no sin debt to be paid. It was a great redemptive work by which bondage was broken so that God could gather his people to himself. And that's what they said. You have brought us out to bring us to yourself, to be with you in your holy mountain. So if the Exodus, the Egyptian Exodus, is the great prototype of God's ultimate design for his creation, dealing with this thing of exile through redemption, we have to look at it through that sort of lens. And again, you've heard me say many times, it's very significant that Jesus chose Passover as the time and the circumstance to interpret his cross, not Yom Kippur. He chose the episode that had its focal point in the Egyptian captivity and God arising and liberating his people to gather them to himself, he said, that's the context for understanding what I'm doing tomorrow when I go to the cross. And don't get me wrong, I'm not denying this issue of atonement, the death of Jesus, payment of sin. I'm not denying any of that. I'm saying all of that has to be looked at and understood through the lens of this. So God liberated his people to bring them to himself so that he could dwell among them, just as he pledged to Abraham. And as long as exile continued, the covenant could not be fulfilled. And only Yahweh's redeeming hand could liberate Israel from its bondage and gather them back to the sanctuary land. The payment that God had to pay was a power greater than Egypt. He had to overcome the gods of Egypt, the power of Egypt. He had to be mightier than the subjugating power to liberate his people, but he didn't just set them free. He set them free to be with him. Reconciliation in that sense. They hadn't done anything wrong, but they were alienated geographically from him. They could not be with him in his dwelling place until he liberated them. So redemption resolves exile, and that was the case in every instance in Israel's history, whether outside or inside the covenant land. As I said, in the time of the judges, they never were exiled from the land. But this reality of exile and liberation, redemption, came from within the land by God raising up Redeemers. liberators, judges, who overcame the oppressors and led the nation back to God, relationally. And so it was with Cyrus, as we read in Isaiah. Cyrus was God's mashiach, his messianic redeemer. whose decree, because of his sovereign power, enabled him to issue a decree that released the captive so that they could return to rebuild the habitation that their god would again take up his place in. So physical captivity and exile, whether inside or outside the land, characterized Israel's long history but it reflected and it underscored that ongoing unresolvable relational exile. And if physical exile contradicted the covenant promises and hindered their fulfillment, Israel's relational exile absolutely precluded the fulfillment of that covenant and its promise. Wherever Israel was in proximity geographically to their God, they could not solve their problem of exile. Why is that important? Because Cyrus released exiles who returned to Judea. And they rebuilt the temple. And later, under Nehemiah, when he came later, they rebuilt the city. And many people, I would think, I would guess, probably most Christians, and even some Christian theologians, say that was the end of exile. It lasted for those 70 years, and then through three episodes of return, you know, the Jews came back to Judea and that was the end of the exile. Well, they didn't view it that way. The Jews didn't view it that way. Physically, yes, they were back in the land. But if you look at Nehemiah's prayer, and this is after the hundred years after the temple is built, or nearly, and they've completed the city walls, and he says, we remain slaves to this day. Why were they still in exile? Because the problem of relational alienation, relational exile, had not been addressed. Painfully evident in the empty sanctuary, Yahweh had not returned to Zion. Painfully evident in the throne of David being presided over by Gentile powers, a succession of Gentile rulers. Yahweh had not returned. He left before the desolation of Jerusalem and he had not returned. That meant that the relationship between the Abrahamic people and their God had not been restored. They were still in exile. So the enduring hope of Abraham's household Even after they returned and rebuilt the temple and the city, it was a hope that Yahweh Himself had inspired in them, and He continued to nurture and press them towards through His own affirmations through His prophets, as we read even this morning. That enduring hope was that a day was coming when their covenant God would arise and redeem them from their essential exile and its bondage, which was their enslaving alienation from Him. So Cyrus was that symbolic mashiach, that anointed regal deliverer, the one God raised up to redress the Babylonian captivity and rebuild the temple and city, but he had no power to overcome this invincible power that kept Israel and the creation captive and exiled from the creator Lord. Liberation from that bondage would demand another mashiach, a redeemer who would exercise God's own supreme liberating power, That's why we see the Cyrus context immediately yield to another servant, another messianic figure, who would actually do what Cyrus only did in a physical way. That Redeemer would free the entire creation from its bondage by addressing human alienation, thus bringing true liberation and return to God through forgiveness, through reconciliation, And then when that happened, then Yahweh would return to his sanctuary and begin to administer his rule in the earth through his ordained king, the son promised to David. That's what Israel was waiting for. That's what they were hoping in. And that hope was grounded in their God and his promises and his faithfulness. And that's what was proclaimed as good news in Jesus of Nazareth, both by him and by his ambassadors around him. Good news. The time is fulfilled, the kingdom is at hand. And that was accomplished in the great exodus of Calvary. How do we most think of Calvary? As God arising, using his mighty power to liberate the captives from that which had enslaved them, that from which they could not liberate themselves. Pada, kifar, gaal. What is this payment? What does it accomplish? Who is the suitable one who can make that payment? And if you, you know, we're all familiar with John and the upper room discourse, and that is very much Jesus interpreting what's gonna happen the next day, and he's doing that in the context of what? A Passover meal. It's in the Passover that we understand what he's doing. Is there payment for sin? Yes. But the issue is sin as an alienating principle, not simply a catalog of bad behavior. Sin is deviation from the truth, and God will make things right. He will put things right in the son who is the one who is right, the son who lives the authentic human life, the son who puts to death pseudo-humanness, the son who is raised from the dead as the consummate human being to now be the fountainhead of a new humanity. That's the payment of sin. And that redemption is ultimately realized in the reconciliation that came at Pentecost with the outpouring of the Spirit where we become members of God. Our reconciliation is I in you, you in me. Again, the upper room. It's more than just God isn't mad at me anymore. If redemption is under reconciliation, what is that reconciliation? It's the restoring of relationship in the ultimate sense. What is that? I in you, you in me. See, this is why exile is so critical to us understanding the scriptural story and the work of Christ, our Christian lives, what ultimately the journey that we're on and where this is all going to go in the end. So I hope that in some sense we can see that this is a very, very, very important theme, one that is crucial to the lens through which we look at all that God has purposed, what his designs were, what he has accomplished, and where this is all going. Let me close in prayer then, and then we'll sing this last song, which is a Christmas song, but it speaks very much to this theme. Again, looking at it, it's the song, Come Thou Long Expected Jesus, and it deals with this in the multiple dimensions of that coming, the idea of his coming. both in terms of arising to do this mighty work and then arising to consummate that work. So let me close this then in prayer. Father, as always, I pray that you will work these things deeply into our hearts and minds. I know that they may be in some regards in certain pieces and portions more or less familiar to all of us who are here, but I pray that they would be, as Jesus said in his parable, like a treasure found in a field, that when a man stumbled on it and discovered it, he went and sold everything he had to go back and to be able to acquire that treasure. I pray that these things will be determinative for the way we think, the way we understand ourselves, the way we understand you, the way we celebrate and exalt and worship our Lord Jesus Christ, the way we walk in the Spirit and give ourselves to the work that He is doing, not just in our personal lives, but in renewing this creation toward the day when everything will be summed up in the Messiah and our God will be all in all. Cause these things to be precious to us. Cause them to be the marrow of our understanding in our existence, who we are as people. Cause them to be fruitful in us and through us as we are heralds and ambassadors of this good news of the faithfulness of our God. We implore these things of you. Recognizing, Father, that this is the intent that you have, this is the work of your spirit, and may we be fully yielded to your spirit as he accomplishes this glorious end. We ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.