April 4, 2010
Scripture:
1 Corinthians 13:4-7
I can think of no other passage that better describes the Lord’s love for us.
Hymn 369 - Wide as the Ocean
Prayer
1 Samuel 10
Last time, Samuel anointed Saul as king. However not everybody in Israel knew about this; because Samuel sent Saul home, and Saul didn’t tell anyone.
Vv. 17-18. Samuel called all the people to Mizpeh. He started by telling them that they had rejected God. To reject something is to not want it. God had brought them out of Egypt and had kept them safe in the desert, He had brought them into this good land; and now they were rejecting Him. Why had they asked for a king? It was so that they could be like all the other countries around them. They had seen the Lord defend them from the Philistine army, but they reject Him from ruling over them and ask for a king.
This reminded me of a tract that I had read a little while ago. There was this farmer that had a dog that was very loyal to him and helped him around the farm. Finally, however, the dog was getting old, and the farmer decided to kill it. So he took the dog and rowed his boat out to the middle of the river. Then he tied a rope around the dog’s neck, and tied a rock to the other end. But as he threw the dog overboard the rope broke, and the dog began to swim and to try to get back into the boat. So the farmer took one of the oars to hit the dog. But as he stood up, he lost his balance and fell into the river. He couldn’t swim, but his faithful dog - who he had just tried to kill - saved his life.
Here was Israel, who God had done so much for, rejecting Him like the farmer rejected his dog. I hope that none of us go and do the things of the world, and reject the Lord who has done so much for us.
Well, God now guides Samuel in picking a king. Vv.19-21. The Lord directs Samuel to pick Saul as king. Now, Samuel already knew this, but now all Israel knows that Saul is supposed to be king. The problem is that they can’t find him. The Lord tells them that Saul is hidden among the stuff. V.23. We are reminded that Saul is a tall person, who looks like a good king; and it seems that he is very humble. He knew that he was going to be king. Sometimes God gives us things to do, but we shouldn’t be proud about them. Instead we should be humble. Vv.24-25. God has not turned His back on His people, and God will never turn His back on us.
Vv.26-27. The people had asked for a king, and God had given them a king. Now some of them are complaining. God has placed authorities over us - police, teachers, the government - that He wants us to obey.
Address: Simon Kemp
Maybe we could spend a few minutes looking at some aspects of what the Lord has done; not just for us.
Turn with me to the first epistle of John, and chapter two. When we think of the Lord, and as we did this morning, we think in remembrance for what the Lord has done for us. That is often the principal theme of our consideration of Christ’s work on the cross with reference to us, our needs, the needs of our souls, the needs of man. God had needs, too, though. And God needed to avenge Himself of sin and the damage that sin had done, and the offence that sin was to God, and to His holy nature.
And so in chapter two and verse two of this epistle it says, “And He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” And my main interest in this verse in particular is this word propitiation; because it overlaps with another word, which is atonement, but it’s different.
Back in Genesis - we’re going to come back to this verse, keep your finger there - if we turn to Genesis chapter six, verse three. “And the Lord said, my spirit shall not always strive with man.” Or struggle. “My spirit shall not always strive with man”. The Spirit of the Lord was striving, was struggling, with man, because of man’s sin. And as this chapter unfolds, we read that God punished man with a flood; and, with the exception of Noah and his family, He wiped man out. But is was not God’s will always to be wrestling with man on account of sin, and there was already a divine provision made. Not only for the needs of man, but to ensure that God would not always be in conflict with sin. And He’s already spoken about it, even at that time, and it was back in chapter three of Genesis, where in verse fifteen God says, He’s speaking to Satan, speaking to the devil, who had just come in and brought about the fall of man, and God says“I will put enmity -that is, conflict - between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed - that’s your offspring, and her offspring - and it -that is the offspring of the woman - shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heal.”
So there was going to be conflict between the offspring of the woman, that was the descendant of Eve, which was Christ, as man; there would be conflict between Him, and between the devil. Damage would be done on both sides, but there was to be conflict. And part of what that involved was that God poured out upon the Lord Jesus all His anger for sin and what it had done. And in so doing God was propitiated. It’s the verb; God was propitiated, He was avenged, His anger was spent, was poured out upon Christ; who was made propitiation. He was the sin bearer; He was the One Who, in those hours of darkness, where none could see Him but God alone, in the eyes of God He became sin itself. And that was not just what we had done in wickedness, and not what man had done; i.e. “sins”, sinful acts and deeds. It was sin as a whole principal of opposition to God, and of offence to God. Sin, the very thing which, in the first instance had been conceived in the pride of that beautiful and all-powerful angel, Lucifer, Son of the Morning, when he thought that he was so good, so great, so powerful, so mighty that he would sit upon God’s throne. And sin was conceived then.
And the whole history of God with man, up until the time of the cross was dealing with man as a sinful fallen creature. God still wanted to have a relationship with man, in love, yet God was holy, thrice holy, we know that. And so how could he relate to fallen, sinful man? Well, the law was brought in, and we know the history of that. There was no failure on God’s part; and as one has said it was the very lowest position that God could take to reach out to man and relate with him, and allow man to relate to Him by setting out a list of things that he mustn’t do, in order to obtain holiness. And we couldn’t do it. We couldn’t even do that. And so God could not continue forever to relate to mankind in that way. We have failed, and God’s anger for sin had to be appeased at some point in time.
And so it was at the time appointed, that Christ came to endure, to bear, all the anger of God against sin; while being made sin itself in the eyes of God. That’s why He is not just the propitiation for our sins. Propitiation encompasses so very much more than just us. Propitiation is the work of Christ with respect to God, having met God’s requirements, having taken away the anger of God about sin. So that’s the anger of God concerning all sin. That’s been spent upon Christ, and exhausted upon Him. The other thought, overlapping with this, if we turn to Romans chapter three, verse twenty-five. End of verse twenty-four, “Christ Jesus, whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation, through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness - that is God’s righteousness - for the remission of sins that are past through the forbearance of God.” Now this brings in the perspective of time. We know that the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sin. That’s what Hebrew’s teaches us, and that’s what the whole record of the Old Testament teaches us. The thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of animals that were slaughtered upon Jewish altars could never take away their guilt of sin. But what those sacrifices expressed, in the eyes of God, was the work that His beloved Son was going to accomplish; and reminded God of the forthcoming work that Christ would do on the cross. And, so then, for the meanwhile, God could forbear, He could withhold the punishment of the sins of the people, because He was reminded of all that His beloved Son was one day going to accomplish on Calvary’s cross.
So Christ died, to clear the guilt, to endure the punishment of God for sins already done. In fact, all sin from the beginning of time. The guilt of it was heaped upon Christ in those hours of darkness. As you stop, and you think about that, it just gives you a glimpse of the magnitude of the burden that Christ bore. It is completely beyond our comprehension. I’m touching ever-so-briefly upon a subject which we cannot comprehend, we can’t fathom the depths, the dimensions of the load that the Lord Jesus bore, when He was made a propitiation, when He was appointed as the one that bore the full brunt of God’s anger. It wasn’t just for sins that were going to be committed, it was for all sin that had ever been committed. And it wasn’t just for sinful deeds; it was for the whole principal of sin itself, the thing that makes us sin. The principal of offence to God and opposition to Him.
Look in chapter five of Romans, in verse eleven. It introduces what Christ did with respect to us. We’ve spoken about God’s anger having been pacified, God having avenged Himself upon Christ. That’s the act of propitiation. But what about atonement, now that’s with respect to us. Verse eleven. “We joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ by who we’ve now received the atonement.” In the margin, an alternative translation of the original Greek would be reconciliation. The point being, we are reconciled to God because the Lord Jesus has made atonement for us. Our reconciliation depends upon atonement. And the process of atonement is God, as it were, closing His eyes to our sinfulness. It is passing over it. And if you look back in chapter three, an alternative rendering of the word remission of sins is the passing over of those sins. And our sins are covered with the blood of Christ. And we remember that in the Passover of the Children of Israel, God said “When I see the blood, I will pass over you.” He would not unleash His anger and His fury for their sins upon them, when He saw the blood. He was able to do that, verse twenty-five tells us He was able to forbear, because He knew that all His anger and fury would one day would be poured out and spent upon Jesus. He made atonement for us by having born the wrath of God for our sins. He even shed His blood, which, when God sees it, enables Him to, as it were, ignore our sinfulness.
Another scripture that supports that, in the first epistle to the Corinthians, speaks again of Christ our Passover. It’s in chapter five and verse seven. First of Corinthians, chapter five, and verse seven, end of the verse, “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.” God has passed over us, because of the atoning blood of Christ. As you see, atonement is with respect to our needs, in sin; Christ’s provision, the Divine provision, for our sins. Propitiation is the work that Christ has done for God to allow God to avenge Himself, and to appease the wrath of God.
So we’ve mentioned that, the Lord suffered for sins already committed since the beginning of time and the fullness of His work provides forgiveness for all sinful deeds in principal. We know that requires confession of those sins, by those who put their trust in Him.
But there is more still to the work of Christ that Hebrews gives us a little glimpse of. If we turn to Hebrews, it’s in chapter nine. Verse twenty-two. “Almost all things are, by the law, purged with blood. Without shedding of blood is no remission -or, as we’ve seen, no passing over - it was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavensshould be purified with these - that is, with blood; the blood of beasts, the blood of animals - but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.”This is a really extraordinary passage of Scripture. It gives us a glimpse of something; I can’t think of anywhere else in Scripture that does it in quite the same way. The apostle Paul here is talking to Jews, Jews who were mostly now Christians, in the early days of the Church, and they were very, very familiar with the the pattern of the articles in the tabernacle and in the temple. There was the altar, there was the laver, there was the mercy seat, there were the vessels, and the basins, and the candlesticks and so forth. And they, in various ways, spoke of Christ Himself; but they, before the gaze of God, spoke of heavenly things. And I think that there is a certain mystical quality in that. But there were features in the very design of those articles that spoke to God, and God only, of the heavenly realms; the domains, the dimensions out there in which we do not live or walk or move because we are restricted to this sphere of light and time. But there are other domains out there, inhabited by other creatures, namely the spirit world. And it is in the heavens, there are different types of heavens, the heavens are not just the place that the stars shine. There are the lower heavens so-called, which are the inhabitations of demons and spirits, not holy. Then there is the higher heavens, which is the holy presence of God. And many of the articles in the tabernacle spoke, in their forms, of things out there. Now Christ, upon resurrection, has not gone into a temple that we’ve built, He’s gone into the holy place notmade with hands. He’s gone into the very presence of God. And, His blood, this tells us, has purified things in the heavens. Which, if you think about it, means that sin did not just ruin things on earth, and it did not just ruin man; but sin has left it’s ruinous mark throughout the whole of creation. And that includes places inhabited by spiritual forms that we know nothing about.
And so, it gives us a glimpse of the burden that was placed upon Christ at the cross; that it didn’t just concern the guilt of man, or our sins. We’ve seen that, as the propitiation, He was the One that bore the anger of God for all sin, and all that sin had ever done. And this, rather uniquely, verse twenty-three, telling us that the heavenly things themselves were purified with better sacrifices than animals. They were purified by the very sacrifice of Christ Himself, which means that they required purification. It was not just us who needed purification; sin had done damage elsewhere, and that we really can’t comprehend, this just tells us that. And the eye of God alone could see the stain and the ruin that sin had inflicted upon all that he had made and established. And for it all Christ suffered and the virtue of His person and His work provided purification for everywhere where sin has ever been and for all the damage that sin has ever done. It’s an awesome thought when the Lord cried, “It is finished.” That mighty work was completed. And all the judgement for all of that had fallen upon the Lord Jesus. When we consider the breadth of that, which is immense and quite beyond us in it’s fullness, it makes us realize how our sins, hideous as they are and awful as they were, were just one part of what Christ bore. Just a little part, though not an insignificant part, of the terrible burden that was placed upon him.
And when you think that the work that He, One man, the Divine man, the man Christ Jesus; look at what His work has done. He alone could do it, and God did not require that anyone else help Him, for no one could. He single handedly has provided an atonement for our sins and for sin. He has propitiated God in that He has relieved God of all of His anger by having born it for sin. He’s provided purification for all the damage and the defilement and the ruin that sin has ever done, anywhere; and that is well beyond just the earth.
In verse twenty-six, it really sums up the scope, the fullness, of the work that He did. The end of verse twenty-six: “He hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.” That’s not just sins only, that is not just wicked deeds; it’s sin, the whole thing, in principal, is done with before God. All that remains now, in a coming time, is for individual sentences, punishments, to be meeted out to those whose names are not in the Lamb’s Book of Life. But He appeared to put away sin, the whole principal, away from before God. I can’t speak about it anymore than that. It’s enormous, and these are just little gleanings from the Word of God to, I hope, enable us to expand in our appreciation of what Christ has done beyond merely our own need. He’s met that need perfectly, forever. But He met need; enormous, enormous need, Divine need, as well, you see. We have some idea of what out needs are, we know something of the character of our own sins. We bow in gratitude for that need having been met. But there was a Divine need also, that would avenge itself of sin, that would have sin done with and put away; and that would have every corner of all creation, every domain cleansed and purified from the ruinous influence of sin. What satisfaction God has in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And a deep appreciation of that will enable us too, in our own personal worship and collectively, I hope, to expand and rise in a deeper enjoyment of the Divine view of the merits and worth of Christ Himself and what He’s done.
Hymn
Prayer