June 4/7 - One Prayer: God is Good

Worship Leaders

Berthoud: Travis - http://www.planningcenteronline.com/plans/639747
Loveland: Jorie - http://www.planningcenteronline.com/plans/63979

Text
Gal. 3:28

Big Idea

Four Weeks Out (June: It is the first week of One Prayer – Clay is preaching on week one. This week the theme is “God is…” Possibility for title:”God is My Redeemer”.

People are reading through the Bible and there has been a lot of mixed emotions about all the shenanigans that goes on in the history of God’s people. The key verse to kick it off is: Deut 22:28-30. (regulations concerning virgins). A verse that presents a challenge to say the least. How do we pull this verse into the story about a redeeming God? The woman’s life is ruined in the cultural context. Her future is devastated without God’s redemption. In the culture we see God’s intervention in the story of Tamar (Absalom’s sister). We talked about the fall of man – the story of the dramatic fall and the gradual revealing of the redemption plan and God’s grace. But it is a long journey to the cross and then to the second coming. Looking back through the cross – the Deut 22 law seems so stark, wrong, etc. The only way you can understand any scripture is to look back through the cross. But God’s redemptive plan continues to progress. He is a patient God. He presses culture/gradually leads through his church to move towards his plan – this story about the raped virgin is heinous from our point of view – but in the time it was more protective (she would have simply been cast aside and abandoned with no options – and this forces the man to take care of what he took). This was NOT his final teaching on the value of women – it was merely a cultural step forward. There was much more that he had to say about women. And is continued to affirm value and equality especially in the new testament.

Application: ‘a woman should have her head covered’ – is this universal or cultural? You need to seek the principal. Principals could be: Submission to authority, Protection, Modesty => the sense of appropriateness. At the application level there is a lot of apparent contradiction – but the actual principles illustrated are never in contradiction.