Class Outline:

Sunday January 29,2023

                 

Some three or four decades before the birth of Christ, Rome’s first heated swimming pool was built on the Esquiline Hill. The location, just outside the city’s ancient walls, was a prime one. In time it would become a showcase for some of the wealthiest people in the world: an immense expanse of luxury villas and parks. But there was a reason why the land beyond the Esquiline Gate had been left undeveloped for so long. For many centuries, from the very earliest days of Rome, it had been a place of the dead. When laborers first began work on the swimming pool, a corpse-stench still hung in the air. A ditch, once part of the city’s venerable defensive system, was littered with the carcasses of those too poor to be laid to rest in tombs. Here was where dead slaves, ‘once they had been slung from their narrow cells’, were dumped. Vultures, flocking in such numbers that they were known as ‘the birds of Esquiline’, picked the bodies clean. Nowhere else in Rome was the process of gentrification quite so dramatic. The marble fittings, the tinkling fountains, the perfumed flower beds: all were raised on the backs of the dead.

 

Picture: Tell Barri (eastern Syria) and Tweini (western Syria on Mediterranean Coast.

 

The old world is a cursed world in which everything leads to death and burial.

 

GEN 3:17

“Cursed is the ground because of you;”

 

GEN 3:19

“For you are dust,

And to dust you shall return.”

 

In the old world, the new things are built upon the old or the dead. Every city is built on top of what was there and died years before.

 

Picture: Mayflower II

In the seventeenth century, a surge of people left Europe and came to America. When it became apparent that what Columbus had discovered was not Asia, the explorer Vespucci called it the new world. I suppose it became easy to think of Europe as the old world and soon enough, all sorts of people departed the old for the new. These settlers were entering a rugged and undeveloped land for all sorts of reasons: religious freedom, economic desires, desires for freedom in general, criminals promised that they could work off their sentence as slaves, or a fresh start. What was seen in North America was a bounty of rivers, deep water ports, natural resources, good soil, and, as they say, the rest is history. America became the freest, most prosperous, most powerful nation in the history of the world.

 

We also have the Old Testament and the New Testament, and like old shoes, some want to bury the OT, thinking wrongly and ignorantly that it is superseded by the New, when the New is a fulfillment of the promises in the Old and you need both to understand all that God has done and is doing.]

 

LUK 5:33-39

And they said to Him, "The disciples of John often fast and offer prayers, the disciples of the Pharisees also do the same, but Yours eat and drink." 34 And Jesus said to them, "You cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? 35 "But the days will come; and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days." 36 And He was also telling them a parable: "No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment; otherwise he will both tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. 37 "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. 38 "But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. 39 "And no one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, 'The old is good enough.'"

 

But what is also shown as old and definitely to be discarded is the old self and the old world. We mean discarded in the way of want and desire, not actual death (that is in the sovereign will of God and is coming for us all, and at the final judgment, for the world).

 

Every believer has been crucified with Christ. The old self is dead.

GAL 5:24-26

Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

 

25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. 26 Let us not become boastful, challenging one another, envying one another.

 

GAL 2:19-20

For through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God. 20 "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.

 

Another aspect of the old world is the Law. The Law is holy, but it was given as a gift to the old world. This we will see in the coming week.

 

Every believer has been delivered from the old world to the new world (the kingdom of God); from the old self to the new self (in the image of the King).

 

The old world is the fallen creation and the old self is the fallen creature.

 

We find that the devil is a real creature who has really rebelled against God and who rules this world and ever seeks to devour Christians, or more specifically, devour the experience of eternal life in their everyday lives.

 

ISA 24:5-6

The earth is also polluted by its inhabitants, for they transgressed laws, violated statutes, broke the everlasting covenant. 6 Therefore, a curse devours the earth, and those who live in it are held guilty.

 

Sounds like a nice place to live.

 

It is a world where people exalt themselves, where selfishness is pervasive, where people live in fear, worry, lust, slavery, and isolation. You know the place. It is a dungeon is the tiny window up high that lets in a little bit of light. That tiny light in the Law that Satan has deceived the world is the means of salvation, when in fact, it was given by God so that people would see their need for salvation.

 

It is from this place that we have been delivered and it is back to this place (in our thinking and emotions) that Satan uses secondary means to draw us into. He calls us to it, deceives us to it, scares us to it, and may other of a variety of ways that we give the blanket term - temptation.

 

MAT 6:13

‘And do not lead us into temptation (peirasmos: from the devil), but deliver us from evil (evil one).’

 

The verb and the noun (peirasmos) are used for the temptations from the devil.

 

Satan tempts us through secondary agents. You and I have not likely come across Satan’s presence. Even if we did, we wouldn’t know it. As we will see, it will not for anyone be like our Lord’s temptation in the wilderness where He spoke with and saw the devil. However, the temptations that we all face will be found in the categories of Jesus’ testing, but with us, the devil uses people, situations, and circumstances that entice our flesh (old self) to return to the ways of the old world.

 

The Lord’s Prayer speaks to our desire. Do we desire to have the Lord lead us only in the new world (the new and living way of Christ)?

In the great Christological poem of COL 1:15-20, there are two parts, creation and the new creation. Christ is the Creator and ruler of the old creation (which had become stained with sin and rebellion), but the resurrected Christ is supreme over the new kingdom, the new world, which is revealed as God’s purpose for all time. God wasn’t fixing a mistake. He was taking mankind into a new world in the only way that men and women could enter and truly live - and that way is through Christ.

 

People who believe in the existence of God and reject Christ as Savior (deists) are no better off than atheists. Without Christ we do not see our wretchedness (the old) and without Christ, we do not have a Mediator (the only way to become new).