I want to just have a look at
a couple of words in Acts chapter 27, and I want
to just then turn to Psalm 69, and it says, It says that they, in verse 41, were falling into a place where
two seas met. They ran the ship aground, and
the forepart stuck fast and remained unmovable, but the hindpart was
broken with the violence of the waves. And there are so many
pictures of the Lord Jesus Christ in that particular passage of
scripture that we will have to look a little today and maybe,
Lord willing, look again some other time, Lord willing. But
what a remarkable picture. This is the place of safety,
isn't it? If you escape all safe to land, you're going to land
at a particular place on a particular island. And it's a place where
two seas meet. A place where two seas meet. You'll fall into a place where
two seas meet. Our God. Now God speaks of a
meeting. We read in Isaiah chapter 28
that he lays righteousness to the line. Judgment to the line, I beg your
pardon, I mean righteousness to the planet. And they meet. Righteousness and judgment meet
in the Lord Jesus Christ. He's a just God and a savior.
He says in My first John 1.9, that familiar passage, he must
be faithful. He's faithful and just. In Psalm 85.10, if you just turn
to Psalm 85 with me for a minute. I love, I love, verses preceding
this. Let's start at verse 6. Will
thou not revive us again that thy people may rejoice in thee? I need reviving. I need reviving again and again.
And he's going to be the one that brings the reviving, isn't
he? Will thou not revive us again, that thy people might rejoice
in thee? Show us thy mercy, O Lord, and
grant us thy salvation. I will hear what God the Lord
will speak, for he will speak peace unto his people and to
his saints. But let them not turn again to
folly, the folly of man's self-righteous works religion. He says, surely,
verse nine, surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him, that
glory may dwell in our land. And then listen to this verse
about the two seas meeting, the two meet together. Justice and
mercy, he says, mercy and truth are met together. God must be true. He must be
true to his character. And yet, he's merciful. And he can't be merciful without
being true. The glory of the salvation in
the Lord Jesus Christ is that all of the glorious attributes
of God are displayed so beautifully and so fully on the cross of
the Lord Jesus Christ. That's where they meet together.
Righteousness and peace have kissed each other. They've met
together. have kissed each other. There
is no peace with God. There is no peace from God unless
God deals with the righteousness, the righteousness that his character
deserves for his glory to be seen, the righteousness of his
character in dealing with the sins of his people. He's merciful
and gracious, our God. He's merciful, he's long-suffering,
and he's abundant in goodness and truth. We have in the scriptures a glorious
description of God's salvation. The two seas meet. The ship, the front of this ship,
the bow of this great ship of the Lord Jesus Christ is stuck
fast there. And the hind part provides, the
breaking up of it provides, for the people to get a shore. You see, the scriptures are full
of stories and pictures about the difference between law and
grace, between the will of man and the will of God, between
the religion of the flesh of man and the religion of the spirit
of man. And the differences are enormous. The two C's meet, the Lord Jesus
Christ. In the Lord Jesus Christ we have
the glory, the fullness of the deity in a body. And we have
the fullness of humanity in a body. We have the Lord Jesus Christ
being the one who has made sin and
the one who bears that sin and bears it away. I love what Romans
3 says of him. He's just. He's just and he's
the justifier of them who have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
That's why I like us with those thoughts in mind about this place
where the two seas meet, the place where all of God's people
escape safe to land. They escape through a tempestuous
storm that takes away everything of their creature comforts and
leaves them in the hands of God. I'd like us to turn back to Psalm
69. You see, we get to this certain
island and this certain place. It's a certain place of safety. By a sovereign hand of God, by
a sovereign hand of a just and holy God, with nothing in my
hand I bring, when all hope is taken away by the storm, when
you have cast out all the helps, you land safe, you escape safe. when the ship that you're on
is destroyed. It's a picture of the Lord Jesus
Christ, bearing his sins in the body of his people on the tree. And he, he, as our savior on
the cross, was the one who was faithful. Listen to the cries
of our savior. Listen to the cries of our Saviour
that he makes to his God, to his Father, as he bore the sins
of his people. He says, Save me, O God. The waters are come in unto my
soul. His soul was in travail. He says, I sink, verse 2, I sink
in deep mire where there is no standing. I am come into deep
waters where the floods overflow me. The one thing that we must
see here that the Lord Jesus Christ saves sinners, and he
only saves sinners. And only sinners need a savior. All people are by nature self-righteous. And until our self-righteousness
is taken away from us and we're left in the hands of the sovereign,
we will only then be in need of a saviour. And there is only
one place, there's only one place where you will see sin for what
sin really is. And you will see the hard anguish
of what sin really is. For us, we live in sins like
fish live in the sea. Oblivious to it. Oblivious to
the pain of it. Oblivious to the God dishonouring
nature of it. Our Lord Jesus Christ. Just think
about how sin afflicted the soul of the Saviour. Think about what
that ship went through to deliver all of his safe unto land. The waters that come in under
my soul, I sink in the deep mire where there is no standing. I
come into deep waters where the floods overflow me. I am weary
of my crying. My throat is dry. Mine eyes fail
while I wait for my God. This is the conversation between
the Lord Jesus Christ and his Father on the cross. What faithfulness? What faithfulness? Faithful unto
death. Faithful in the storm. Faithful in trusting His Father
to the very end. See, what's the faithfulness
that God requires of you? The faithfulness of the Lord
Jesus Christ is what He requires of you. As Paul said, I am crucified
with Christ, Galatians 2.20. The life I now live in the flesh,
I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and
gave himself for me. He waited for his God on the
cross. Verse four, they that hate me
without a cause, There was no cause of hatred for the Lord
Jesus Christ. There was nothing in him and
nothing about him that would ever have caused our hatred.
Our hatred and our rebellion with him is completely and utterly
unjustified. And people might say, well, I
don't hate God. Well, if you've never hated him,
you'll never know his love and you'll never know his mercy.
I forget who it was. I think it might have been Scott
Richardson says that God never sends to hell an honest person. They are made honest before him.
I remember being on a plane from San Francisco across to New York
several years ago, and I sat next to a girl whose husband
was a missionary on the streets of New York, and she'd been over
in California visiting her family. We had a five-hour flight ahead
of us. And she sat down, and somehow she figured out that
I was And she said, her opening words to me, I just love God. I can't give an American accent.
She said, I just love God. I said, well, let's talk about
it. And within five minutes, she said to me, I don't know
anything about him at all. I'm not sure about who he is,
and I'm not sure about anything of my love for him. And I thought,
at least now we can have the next five hours and have an honest
conversation. And we talked, we talked the
rest of that trip about the Lord Jesus Christ. And she was so
excited about the things that she saw in the scriptures that
she rang her husband and she talked to her husband as we got
off the plane and said, he must come down to the baggage place
and meet this fellow. He did come down angry, angry. He didn't want to talk to me
or have a bar of me or anything that I said to his wife and all
that trip. You're scarcely saved. Salvation
is a remarkable thing. You hate him. They hate him without
a cause. That man, like so many other
missionaries I've met, when they are confronted with the reality
of who the true and living God is in the pictures of the Lord
Jesus Christ, in the words of God about his son, in the words
of God about men, they find him offensive. They find him offensive. They hated me without a cause.
They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs on my
head. They that would destroy me be my enemies wrongfully. There is no cause, and your enmity
against God is wrongful and mighty. Listen to this Gospel promise.
Having been hated without a cause, having had enemies wrongfully
against him, and having them mighty, he says, then I restored
that which I took not away. What do we take away in our sin
and rebellion in the garden? When we sinned with our father
Adam and we sinned in our father Adam, what do we lose sight of? The first thing we did, wasn't
it, was we hid from God. We lost fellowship with God,
and the Lord Jesus Christ restored that which we took not away.
The first thing we do in our hiding from Him is to make fiddlies
of our own righteousness, to make some covering for our sin,
instead of having Him as our perfect covering, our perfect
standing before Him. He didn't take away, but he restored
that righteousness. He restored a better righteousness
than Adam ever had. He restored that that he took
not away. We took away the character of
God, didn't we, from our understanding. We denied the goodness of God.
Satan said to Eve and to Adam, he's withholding some good from
you. He's not being good and he's not being righteous to you.
He restored that. He restored the character of
God that he took not away. He restored that. We have no
will to follow God and we have no desire to love God. He restores
that that he took not away. He restores his people to the
very presence of God that he took not away. As he says in Psalm 110 verse
3, he says, thy people will be willing on the day of his power.
On the day of his power, he makes us willing. We don't have to
contrive with people to get them to become Christians. We don't
have to do anything to try and make them look like they're Christians.
God will work in the hearts of his people. God works in the
hearts of his people. And what did he do in that restoration? What did he have to do? Look
at verse five with me. He says, O God, thou knowest
my foolishness, and my sins are not hid from thee. If you go down to verse seven,
he says, because for thy sake I have borne reproach, shame
hath covered my face. This ship, the Lord Jesus Christ,
is going to deliver all of his people safe. They're going to
escape safe to land, escape safe to a certain island, because
the Lord Jesus Christ bore their sins in his own body on the tree.
Look what he says in verse 5. He says, My foolishness. Your
rebellion against God is foolishness. It's irrational and it's foolishness. It bears no resemblance of anything
that would be considered wisdom in any way, shape or form. But
listen to what he says about sins. He says, my sins, my sins
are not hid from thee. Throughout the scriptures, the
Lord Jesus Christ who was made sin and bears that
sin before the justice and the holiness of God. We quote that
verse in 2 Corinthians 5, 21 often. For God, for he hath made
him, for God hath made him, sin for us, who knew no sin. We are not saying for one moment
that the Lord Jesus Christ ever sinned in any way, shape or form,
but God the Father said he made him sin for us, who knew no sin,
that we might be made the righteousness of God. We are made by a creative
sovereign act, that first made is. And the second one is to
be made and to be sustained. by a hand of God. We are made
the very righteousness of God. People familiar with those verses
in Isaiah 53, let's just turn there quickly and look at them.
I want us to see that when the Lord Jesus Christ was made sin,
it wasn't some pasted on sin. And when the Lord Jesus Christ
bore those sins in his own body on a tree, God was being just. People say, well, God punished
an innocent man. God will never punish an innocent
man. When the sins of all of God's
people were laid on him, when he was lifted up from the ground
and according to the law of God was put under the curse, the
curse of a broken law, all of the sins of all of God's people
were his and he owned them as his own. He owned them as his
own. This is the ship, heaven, my
brothers and sisters, this is a ship. that we sail in. We sail across this stormy seas
of this world. Let's begin at the first one. Who hath believed our report,
and to whom is the arm of the Lord? Who's going to believe?
Who's going to believe what we say about the Lord Jesus Christ?
The answer's there in the word, isn't it? In that word. To whom
the arm of the Lord is revealed. When the power of the Lord reveals
it, we'll see. We'll believe the report. We'll
believe the record that God has given of his son. For he shall
grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of dry
ground. He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him there
is no beauty that we should desire him. It's exactly what Psalm
69 was saying. He is despised and rejected of
men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. We hid, as it were,
our faces from him. He was despised, and we esteemed
him not. Are you in the we? Are you in
the wee? I was in the wee. I remember
it with shame and horror. Surely, first of all. and carried our sorrows, yet
we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace
was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. We, all we like
sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord hath laid on him
the iniquity of us all. You see, Psalm 69 has the Lord
Jesus Christ praying and pleading with his Father on Calvary. was
a father who put made him sin and it was a part father who
put him to grief. I realize I 53 go down to verse 10 yet it pleased
the Lord to bruise him. That word is to crush him. And he had put him to grief when
thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin. It was the sole anguish of the
Lord Jesus Christ which was far, far, far more heavy upon him
than the physical pain of all of what happened. That people
take some ghoulish delight in weird ways. and you shall make
his soul an offering to him. He shall see his seed, and he
shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper
in his hand. He shall see the travail of his
soul. God the Father saw the travail
of his soul. God the Son saw the travail of
his soul. God the Holy Spirit wrote of
the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied. Shall be
satisfied. What was the word of the Lord
Jesus Christ on this cross? It is finished. God is satisfied. Sins have gone away. Justice
is satisfied. The justice of God is satisfied. By his knowledge shall my righteous
servant justify many. You know what that word justified
means, doesn't it, don't you? It means before the court of
God, and that's the only court that matters, to be a justified
person is to be before the court of God having absolutely no sin
whatsoever. It's not just as if I have never
sinned. That's not going to do me any
good because I do all the time. To be justified is in the court
of God because of his holiness and his justice is that you have
no sin. Why? At the end of verse 11,
he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore will I divide him a
portion with the great, and he shall before the four with the
strong, because he has poured out his soul unto death. And he was numbered with the
transgressors, and he bore the sin of many, and he made intercession
for the transgressors. Let's go back to Psalm 69. He speaks of those sins and listen
to what he says. Listen to his prayer for believers
in Psalm 69 verse 6. He bore all that shame, didn't
he? We have no reason to be ashamed
of anything he's done, such is the glory of his work. Wait,
wait, brothers and sisters, wait. Let not those that seek thee
be confounded. There will be no confusion. There
will be no shame. There will be no shame in you
having all of your trust and all of your faith in this dear
and precious Savior. And he prays to his father on
the cross. He prays to his father. He says, because for thy sake
I have borne reproach and shame hath covered my face. The only
reason he was saying that shame covers his face was because he
was really bearing their sins. If you suffer for someone else's
sins, you could very well feel self-righteous about it, and
you wouldn't feel shame. Even if you suffer wrongly, you
wouldn't feel shame. Why did he feel shame? It says
there, doesn't it, in verse five, my sins, my sins. This is where the two great seas
meet, don't they? The true great seas of the justice
and the holiness and the truth of God meet with love and grace
and mercy. And they meet in the Lord Jesus
Christ. And the bow of that great ship is stuck fast. At that point,
on that particular land, and everyone in him is delivered
safe. Escaped. They've escaped the tempest,
haven't they? The sins, the wrath of God and
all their sins fell on him and it fell on them. And the justice
of God says, enough. It's finished. And their sins
are gone. They're gone forever. And God
can't remember them. Why can't he remember them? because
they don't exist. God who creates everything out
of nothing can take something and turn it into nothing, but
not at the expense of his justice and his character in any way
whatsoever. Verse 9, just to read a couple
more verses and we'll close. For zeal of thine house has eaten
me up. His first act, his first public
act in Jerusalem was to go down there and take a whip of cords
and drive all the money changers out of that temple. Exactly what
Abraham had to do when the sacrifice was made in Genesis 15, the covenant
was cut. You've got to keep the strange
birds, the unclean birds off the sacrifice. He was making
sure that temple was going to be a house of prayer for all
nations. And at the end of his ministry,
what did he do? He went to that temple and he cleansed it again.
Zeal, and they said, zeal for thine house has eaten me up,
and the reproaches of them that reproach me, thee, have fallen
on thee. All of our reproaches are God. All of the times we've reproached
him, they've fallen on he. When I wept and chastened my
soul with fasting, That was to my reproach. They that sit at
the gate speak against me, and I was the song of the drunkards.
But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O Lord, in an acceptable
time, O God, in the multitude of thy mercy. Hear me in the
truth of thy salvation. Deliver me. Mercy and truth met
together, we read it in Psalm 85, 10. Deliver me out of the
mire, let me not sink. Let me be delivered from them
that hate me and out of the deep waters. Let not the water flood
overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, nor let the
pit shut her mouth upon me. Hear me. O God, for thy lovingkindness
is good, turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender
mercies, and hide not thy face from my servant, for I am in
trouble. Hear me speedily, draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem
it. Deliver me because of thine enemies. Deliver me. Thou hast known my reproach,
and my shame, and my dishonor. My adversaries are all before
thee. Reproach has broken my heart. In Gethsemane's case, when he
looked into the cup that the father had given him and he saw
all the sins of all the people, and he knew that he was going
to drink that cup till there wasn't a skerrick left in it
the next day. Reproach broke his heart. And
blood, on that cold night, blood poured from his brow and from
his body as great drops. Great drops. I am full of heaviness. I looked for some to take pity
and there was none. He did this work all by himself,
brothers and sisters. He did it all by himself. And
for comforters I found none. I found none. They gave me also
gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.
This is exactly what happened on the cross of Calvary. Let's
close our time together this morning with verse 32 of Psalm
69. The humble shall see this, if
ye have been humbled by his mighty hand. If you've been humbled
by your sin, if you've been humbled by your inadequacy, if you've
been humbled by your meeting with Him, your encounter with
Him as He really is, the humble shall see this and be glad, and
your heart shall live that seek God. They all escaped, safe to land. The ship was broken up and they
all escaped. The Lord Jesus Christ shed his
precious blood and his body was broken and they all escaped safe. They all escaped safe. May we be found escaping ones. May we be found safe in him. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father,
we do. We do stand in awe of the Lord
Jesus Christ of Nazarene. Our Father, only by your Spirit's
work of mercy and grace in our hearts can we understand something
of what your dear and precious Son suffered as he carried our
sins and he carried them away to Calvary and he carried them
away under your justice. Oh, our Father, what precious
blood was shed that we might all escape safe to land. What precious salvation. What
precious salvation we have in the land that was slain from
the foundation of the world. And may we, like John, just declare
again to this world Behold the Lamb that takes away the sin
of the world. Heavenly Father, we pray that
in your mercy you might put us in that ship and you might cause
us, in the midst of the storms of this world, to know that no
matter what happens, that we are more than conquerors and
there is no separation and there is no condemnation for those
who are in Christ Jesus. Make him precious to us and cause
us, Heavenly Father, as you walk out into this world again, into the trials and the tempestuous
storms that we know are coming, that we have a ship that rides
above the storms, and we have a Savior who can say to the storms Bless your words to the hearts
of your people and cause your Son to be precious, our Father.