I invite your attention this
morning to 1 Corinthians chapter 15. And as you're turning, let
me thank you again for putting on this conference. Your five-star
hospitality, it's a, what is the website, Yelp. Your
Yelp rating is going to go up after I give you five stars.
I appreciate you so much. Being here with you this weekend,
worshiping our Lord together has been a very great blessing
to me. I thank God for you. I titled the message this morning,
How That Christ Died. Paul begins in verse 1, 1 Corinthians
15. Moreover, brethren, I declare
unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also you have
received and wherein you stand, by which also you're saved. If
you keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless you believed
in vain. Now you'll notice Paul says,
I declare unto you the gospel. Not a gospel, but the gospel. There's only one gospel. There's
only one good news. There's only one gospel that
God uses to save sinners. There's just one. Every other
so-called gospel, every other message is a perversion of the
gospel and it will never save a sinner. The gospel, Paul told
us in Romans chapter one, it's the gospel of God. It's God's
gospel and it's concerning his son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. The gospel is all about the Lord
Jesus Christ. who he is, what he's done, why
did he do it, and where he is now, it's all about Christ. It's all declaring his glory,
the glory of his redemptive work for his people. It's the gospel,
and there's no other gospel that will save you. But if you believe
the Christ declared in this gospel, the gospel that you've heard
preached this weekend, God saved you. He's given you faith to
believe Christ. Now Paul goes on, verse three,
he says, for I delivered unto you first of all that which I
also received. How that Christ died for our
sins according to the scripture. Now the gospel is the gospel
of Christ and him crucified. Salvation to sinners can only
come through the death, the substitutionary death, the sacrifice of the Lord
Jesus Christ. The only way dead sinners like
you and me will ever live is if Christ died for us. He died
in our place. And Paul says how that Christ
died. He doesn't just mean that Christ
died stretched out on a cross. It means the manner in which
he died. What did he accomplish when he
died? And why did he do it? Why did
he do it? And Paul tells us that it's according
to the scriptures. Now, the only scriptures that
Paul can be referring to at this time is the Old Testament scriptures. The apostles were still writing
the New Testament scriptures. So Christ died according to the
scriptures, according to the Old Testament scriptures. Any
message that you hear preached that does not match the Old Testament
scriptures is not the gospel. Christ died according to the
scriptures. And this morning, I'd like to
give you four deaths or four sacrifices that we find in the
Old Testament scriptures that tell us how that Christ died. It tells us why that he died
and what did he accomplish when he died. So first, I'd like you
to look at Genesis chapter 3. Christ died to make his people
righteous. Genesis 3 verse 1. Now the serpent. was more subtle
than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he
said unto the woman, yea, hath God said you should not eat of
every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent,
we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the
fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God
has said you should not eat of it, neither shall you touch it
lest you die. And the serpent said unto the
woman, ye shall not surely die, For God doth know that in the
day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be open, and ye shall
be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw
that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the
eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of
the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband
with her, and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were
opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig
leaves together and made themselves aprons." Now in the garden, Adam
was not righteous. Adam was innocent. Righteous
is what you are. If you're righteous, you cannot
sin. Adam was innocent. And he lost his innocence when
he sinned against God. What Adam took that fruit. He
did it with his eyes wide open. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Adam wanted to be God. He didn't want to just know good
and evil. He wanted to make the rules. He wanted to say, be the
one to say what is good and what is evil. Adam took that fruit
with his eyes wide open in rebellion against God. And when Adam make
that fruit, Adam and Eve didn't know good and evil, did they?
They just knew evil. Now they knew that they're naked.
Now, you'll notice when Eve ate the fruit, nothing happened,
did it? Because she was in Adam, just like you and I are in Adam,
our seminal head, as Greg told us about yesterday. But when
Adam ate the fruit, Eve knew she was naked, too. Adam and
Eve died, and you and I died. We became sinners. We sinned
in Adam when Adam took that fruit and ate it. And they knew more
than they were just naked in a bodily sense. Here's their
problem. They knew they're naked before
God. They knew they had no covering. They knew they had no righteousness
before God. So they sewed these fig leaves
together, trying to cover their bodily nakedness. And you know
full well that that's a picture of man's works, isn't it? Man's
works trying to establish our own righteousness, to cover our
sin and our shame before God. Now, they had these aprons on.
It covered their bodily nakedness, but they were still ashamed.
Because the problem wasn't their bodily nakedness, it's their
spiritual nakedness. That's why when God came walking
in the cool of the day, Adam and Eve were hiding in the bushes. Their fig leaf aprons didn't
take away their shame, didn't take away their sin. They're
still hiding from God because they're spiritually naked. They
have no righteousness. And when Adam sinned, That's
the way you and I became too. Naked, spiritually naked before
God with no righteousness, with nothing that God requires. I
don't have time to preach from the whole picture this morning,
but I want you to look down at verse 21 and we'll see how that
Christ died. Adam and Eve are naked, but now
in verse 21, and Adam also and his wife did the Lord God make
coats of skin and God clothed them. Now the Lord killed this
animal. The Lord God killed this animal.
Many people think it was a lamb. And he took the skin of this
animal to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve. Their fig leaf
aprons didn't cover their nakedness, did it? But the skin of this
animal, the one that God provided, it did. Now here's the picture
of how that Christ died. Like I said a minute ago, when
Adam sinned, all of us sinned. You know why we're born dead
in trespasses and sins? Because we died in Adam. We became
sinners in Adam. And no amount of religious works
will clean us up. No amount of law keeping, no
amount of morality will keep us up, will take away our sin
and make us righteous. Nothing we do can make us accepted
before God. So the father sent his son into
this world as a man. He sent his son into this world
to live as a man under the law, and he kept it perfectly. And
when his hour finally came, remember how many times he said, my hour's
not yet come, my hour's not yet come. Now the hour's come. And Christ our Savior went to
the cross, and the Father slaughtered him. Yes, the Jews and the Romans
did what they did to his body. They did what God determined
before to be done. but it was his soul suffering.
This is what the Savior dreaded the most, his soul suffering
when his father, the son had always been the delight of his
father. And now the father turned his
wrath upon him because he'd been made sin for his people. And
it was the father that thrust the sword of justice into the
heart of his fellow. It was the father that slaughtered
the son. And Christ died, just like this animal died back in
the Garden of Eden, to cover the righteousness, or to cover
the nakedness of his people, and to make them righteous. When
Christ died, he didn't just give us a righteousness, you know,
like my suit coat that I put on, and it covers me up some,
doesn't it? All the ugliness and the filth
of this flesh, it's still there. God doesn't give us a righteousness
to just cover up our sin and our filth and our corruption.
God takes that corruption away and he makes his people righteous
through the death of his son. That's what 2 Corinthians 5.21
is all about. For he, God the Father, made
his son sin for us. Him who knew no sin, that we
might be what? Made righteous. made the very
righteousness of God in Christ. That's how that Christ died.
And the good news for God's people is this. If the Lord Jesus Christ
died for your sin, he's made you righteous. And you can never
be unrighteous again. You can never mess it up because
it's all in him. All right, number two. Christ died to open the way to
God for sinners. Look across the page at Genesis
4, verse 1. Now Adam knew Eve, his wife,
and she conceived and bare Cain and said, I've gotten a man from
the Lord. They were already at him, and Eve were already looking
for this man, this one who would come to redeem them, to crush
the serpent's head, and she thought she'd gotten a man. But it wasn't
him yet. This was Cain. And she again
bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of the
sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. In the process
of time, it came to pass that Cain brought her the fruit of
the ground, an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought
her the firstlings of his flock, and the fat thereof. And the
Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering, but unto Cain and
to his offering, he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and
his countenance fell. Both of these brothers brought
a sacrifice to the Lord. I'm quite confident that their
father Adam had taught them God can only be worshiped through
a sacrifice. And they both brought a sacrifice
to the Lord, but only one of those sacrifices was accepted.
Cain, he brought the crops that he grew from the ground. And he planted them, he watered
them, he weeded them, he did all the things that farmers did.
And when it came time, he harvested those fruits and those vegetables.
And I'm sure they're beautiful. I'm just confident of this. Cain
did not bring a bruised tomato to sacrifice to the Lord. I'm
confident that he didn't. But God would not accept that
sacrifice. And it's obvious why he didn't.
When Adam sinned, God cursed the ground. And what Cain brought
to God as a sacrifice was the fruits and vegetables that grew
from a cursed ground. God's not gonna accept that.
And Cain's fruits and vegetables are pictures of our works. our
works of righteousness. I'm talking about those very,
very best things that we do, that we think will make God more
happy with me than somebody else. And we bring those works to God.
God's not gonna accept that. Because it came from this corrupt,
cursed flesh. God's not gonna accept that sacrifice.
But God did accept the sacrifice of Abel, didn't he? You see,
Abel brought a lamb. He brought a lamb that is a picture
of Christ. Picture of Christ, the lamb of
God, which will come and take away the sin of the world. God
accepted that sacrifice because that's the sacrifice God commanded
for them to bring. Now those two sacrifices picture
the only two ways that men can try to come to God. We can try
to come to God through our works, by our works, and we'll be rejected
every time. we can come to God through the
sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. You see there has to be a sacrifice
and God is the one who provided the sacrifice. He didn't leave
it to us. God provided this. God will only accept what he
provided And God provided the sacrifice. He provided his son
to be the way to God. He's the way to God. Christ is
the way. He's the way of righteousness.
He's the way of peace. He's the way of holiness. He's
the way of forgiveness. He's the way of grace. And the
death of Christ opened the way to God for his people. The death
of Christ was so effectual in taking away the sin of his people
and opening the way to God that the writer to the Hebrews said,
we can come boldly, confident, absolutely, utterly confident
to come before the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy
and find grace to help in time of need. We can be absolutely
confident to come before the throne of grace and know we'll
be accepted. as long as we come through the blood of Christ,
through the person, the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. You're
confident because Christ has opened the way. The writer to
the Hebrews said later on in chapter seven, verse 25, that
he is able to save them to the uttermost that come to God by
him. Those who come to God by Christ
are saved to the uttermost. completely and fully and always
accepted of the Father. Every time I preach, I try to
make a point to tell sinners, you come to Christ. Right now
where you sit, without moving from your seat, in your heart,
you come to Christ. And if you do, you'll be accepted. the father will accept you because
the death of Christ opened the way for sinners to come to God.
All right, thirdly, look at Genesis chapter 22. Christ died as the substitute
for his people so that they would live. Now, you all know quite
well, I'm sure, the story of Abraham and Isaac. God told Abraham
one day, take your son, your only son that you love, You take
him to a place that I'll show you, and you offer him there
as a burnt offering unto me. And Abraham got up early in the
morning, he got the wood, he got the fire, he got his knife,
and Abraham set off walking. He didn't try to reason this
thing out. He didn't try to figure out what God was gonna do. He
didn't talk to Sarah and say, now this is what God told me
to do, what do you think? No, Abraham got up, took Isaac,
and he started walking, going to the place that God had told
him of, fully intending, when he got there, that he would sacrifice
his son. He would slit his throat, drain
the blood out of his body, he would quarter his body, put it
on an altar, and burn it to ash. He fully intended to do that.
Because Abraham believed God. God had promised Abraham, the
Messiah is gonna come through Isaac. And Abraham believed God. He was gonna kill that boy, And
he figured, well, even if I do that, God's going to keep his
promise. God cannot lie. He's gonna keep
his promise. He's still gonna bring the Messiah
through Isaac, even if it means God has to raise him from the
dead. And right at the moment Abraham was ready to plunge that
knife into the heart of his son, the Lord stopped him. Verse 10,
and Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay
his son, And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven,
and said, Abraham, Abraham. And he said, here am I. And he
said, lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything
unto him, for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou
hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me. And Abraham
lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram
caught in the thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took
the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead
of his son. Now that ram is a picture of
our Lord Jesus Christ. He was caught in the thicket
by his horns. I've seen these big horn sheep,
big horn rams, and their power is their horns. I mean, that's
what they lower. They batter one another, you know. Their
power is their horns. That ram was caught in the thicket.
a thorn bush, a thorn thicket by his horns. Our Lord Jesus
Christ was, I won't say caught, but he was constrained to go
to the cross as a substitute for his people. He was constrained
by his power, by his power to save. And that ram died exactly
the way our Lord Jesus Christ died as a substitute for Isaac. Christ died as the substitute
for his people. He took their place. He took
the punishment that they deserve. You remember when our Lord was
telling the Pharisees that Abraham saw my day and was glad? I'm
confident it was this day. Now Abraham believed God. Abraham
believed that God would raise his son from the dead. He believed
God. But you know, this is gonna be
a traumatic experience for that old man. to slay his son. And because the Lord gave him
a substitute, that ram over here, caught in the thicket by his
horns, Abraham did not have to kill his son, and Abraham was
glad. But you know what made Abraham
glad? Abraham saw. God, by faith, gave Abraham,
and I'm sure Isaac too, the faith to see this is how God's gonna
save his people, by becoming a substitute for his people.
And as Abraham and Isaac watched the body of that ram burn, they
saw Christ, and they were glad. They were glad. And that's why
we have attempted this weekend to preach Christ to you. to get
off on no tangent, to get off on no other subject, but Christ
and him crucified, because if God gives you faith to see him,
you're gonna be glad. I mean, you're gonna be glad. All of our works can never put
away our sin, but God provided a substitute. There's just one
substitute that's able to put away the sin of his people, and
God provided his son. And when it came time for the
sacrifice to be made, unlike Abraham, the father did not draw
the knife back. The father slaughtered his son
as a substitute for his people so that we would live. God, look
at verse 7. Isaac spake unto Abraham his
father. Now Isaac had been taught how the worship of God is to
go through the sacrifice. And he said, my father. And he
said, here am I, my son. And he said, behold the fire
and the wood, but where's the lamb for the burnt offering?
There's got to be a lamb. And Abraham said, my son, God
will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering. So they went,
both of them, together. See, God will only accept what
he provided. So he provided a lamb for himself. a lamb that would satisfy his
holy character, a lamb that would satisfy his inflexible justice,
and the only lamb that would get that job done is God's son. He provided a lamb for himself,
and he provided himself as the lamb. He himself became the lamb,
the lamb of God that would take away the sin of the world. This
is the lamb that God provided himself. to suffer and die, to
satisfy his own holy requirements. God the Son bore all of the wrath
that all of the sin of his people deserve. He drank it dry and
he died as a substitute for his people. All of our sin is against
him. I mean, you think of this, all
of our sin is against him and he's the one that died to pay
our debt. Now, brother, If that's not grace,
I don't know what is. And I tell you the same thing
that John the Baptist said. Behold, the Lamb of God which
taketh away the sin of the world. You look to him and you'll believe
him and you'll have life. All right, here's the fourth
thing. Look at Exodus chapter 12. Christ died to satisfy the justice
of God against the sin of his people. Now again, you know the story
of the Passover, and in giving Moses the instruction for the
Passover, in verse 12, here's what the Lord tells Moses. For I will pass through the land
of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the
land of Egypt, both man and beast, and against all the gods of Egypt,
I will execute judgment. I am the Lord. And the blood
should be to you for a token upon the houses where you are,
And when I see the blood, I will pass over you and the plague
should not be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of
Egypt. This is what the Lord told Moses. I'm coming through
the land of Egypt and I'm gonna execute judgment in every household,
both Israelite and Egypt, in every household, I'm gonna execute
judgment. I'm gonna kill the firstborn
in every house in Egypt that night. You see, sin demands death. Where there's sin, there has
to be death. And in Egypt, that night, the
night of the Passover, there was death in every home. Every
single home in Egypt, there was death that night. Either the
firstborn died or a lamb died in the place of the firstborn.
But either way, there was death in every home in Egypt that night. This is how Christ died. He died
as the Passover lamb. Christ died, actually, at the
time of the Passover. This was the Passover weekend
when he suffered and died. Here's why Christ died. Because
God's justice demanded it. Sin demands death, so Christ
died for the sin of his people. The elect of God's church, the sin of his people. Now just
like this Passover lamb, Christ died for a specific people. The
Lord Jesus Christ did not die to make salvation possible for
all men. Christ did not die and For all
men, now it's up to them to accept him or reject him. And those
that reject him, why, they've wasted the blood of Christ and
they'll be sent to hell. No, sir. No, sir. Christ died
for a specific people. And all of those people shall
be saved. They shall have eternal life.
Just like the Passover lamb in Egypt. That lamb died as a substitute
for a specific person, the firstborn. The firstborn in that household. And there was not a home in Egypt
where the Passover lamb died and his blood was applied to
the doorpost and the firstborn died. Not one. God's not gonna punish two people
for the same sin. Christ died as the sin bearing
substitute for God's elect. And only God's elect and every
last one of them shall be saved. Do you know God's justice demands
it? Since we're sinners and we hear
about God's justice, the first thing that does to all of us
is make us fear, doesn't it? Because we're sinners, we fear
God's justice. We know what we deserve. But
for God's people, God's justice is a very comforting thing. If
Christ died for your sin, God's justice demands you have life. God's justice demands that you
cannot be condemned. Christ died to satisfy the holy
character of God, to enable him to be both just and justifier,
to satisfy God's justice. That's why Christ died and he
got the job done. But you know the story of the
Passover does not end with the death of the Passover lamb, does
it? What do you reckon would happen if the father did, of
a home, did everything that Moses told him to do? He went out and
he selected a lamb. And he set it up in a pen by
itself for 14 days. And every day, the father went
out of that house, he'd look at that lamb, make sure it had
no spot, no blemish, no disease. Every evening he'd come home,
he'd examine that lamb. No spot, no blemish. After 14
days, they're satisfied this lamb has no spot or blemish.
The father slit the throat of that lamb, caught his blood in
the basin. He roasted that lamb with fire. He took it in, and
they ate that lamb that night with the bitter herbs, and its
body roast with fire. And they all sat down. They ate
it with their shoes on their feet, their staff in their hand.
What would have happened? The firstborn would have died.
If that firstborn is going to live, the blood must be applied
to the door. If you and I would live, the
blood of Christ must be applied to our hearts. That's the new
birth. When the blood of Christ is applied
to our hearts, we're born again and we believe Christ. You who believe, why do you believe? Are you just smarter than somebody
else? When you read the scriptures, do you see something that somebody
else doesn't see? Is it just because, you know,
you haven't been in the right place at the right time, and
you hear this doctrine of substitution, and you think, well, that makes
sense. I believe it. Is that why you believe Christ?
No. No. God caused you to be born again,
and you believe because the blood of Christ has been applied. And
God gives that faith. He gives that life through what
we're doing this weekend. That's why this weekend has been
so important. God gives faith through the preaching
of God's word. Faith cometh by hearing and hearing
by the word of God. Now, in conclusion, let me tell
you this. I love the Old Testament pictures
of Christ. I mean, I love them. I love preaching
from them. I love reading them. and think
about it, they're such a blessing to me. But you can only take
a picture so far. And the real thing is always
better than the picture. Christ died, he did die, just
like these four sacrifices that we looked at, but you know, he's
better than the picture. He's so much better than the
picture, because Christ did something that no ram, no bullock, no sheep,
no turtle dove, no offering that made to God ever did. He rose
again. Look back in our text, 1 Corinthians
15. 1 Corinthians 15 verse four. And that he was buried and he
rose again the third day according to the scriptures. See, the resurrection
of Christ is so vitally important. We'd have no good news to preach
to sinners if it were not for the resurrection of Christ. Christ's
resurrection means his sacrifice was successful. All the sin of
God's elect was transferred to our Lord Jesus Christ, and by
his death, he put it away so that it does not exist anymore.
Now, Frank, how do you know that? Because the father raised him
from the dead. See, sin demands death, doesn't it? Where there's
sin, there must be death. But where there is no sin, there
can't be death. Christ put all the sin of his
people away. Now, he actually died. Remember after he gave up the
ghost and Joseph of Arimathea went and he begged the body of
Jesus from Pilate. Pilate was amazed he's already
dead. He was already dead because they couldn't kill him. He gave
up the ghost. He gave up the ghost because
the sacrifice was complete. The price had been paid and he
gave up the ghost and they took a dead body down from that tree
and laid him in Joseph's tomb. And three days later, he arose
from the dead. He walked out of that place by
his own power, and many of the disciples saw him. And later
on, they threatened him, said, now, don't say that Jesus arose
from the dead. If you continue to say Jesus
arose from the dead, we're going to kill you. And not one of them
recanted. They'd rather be martyred than
deny that Jesus arose from the dead. Now, why was that so important? Because the resurrection of Christ
is proof he justified his people. He was delivered for our offenses. And he was raised again for our
justification. He was raised again that his
death truly justified all of his people. And since Christ
arose from the dead, he justified his people. If Christ suffered
and died for you, he's risen again and you're justified. cannot be condemned. The Father
himself cannot condemn you because Christ justified you. And just
like Christ's death was according to Old Testament scriptures,
his resurrection was too. Remember, they asked the Lord
for a sign and he called them a wicked and adulterous generation
seeking after a sign. Drew, I don't need a sign. His
word, that's all I need, his word. But he told them, As Jonah
was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so the
son of man shall be three days and three nights in the heart
of the earth. And after three days, he's coming out of there
because salvation has been accomplished. Now that's the gospel of our
salvation and everyone who believes it. They're completely and utterly
saved. saved from our sin by God, by
the doing and dying of our Lord Jesus Christ, and they'll never
leave it. They'll never leave it. They'll
never believe anything else. If God's given me faith in Christ, why would I ever want to believe
something else? Brother Henry used to call that being children
of a lesser God. Oh, I pray. It is my heart's
desire that the Lord give you and me faith to believe this
Christ. He suffered and died according
to the scriptures, and he was raised again the third day according
to the scriptures. God, give us faith in him. I pray the Lord bless you tonight.
Thank you for your time and attention.