For those of you who've just
joined us, we have been following the footsteps of our Lord Jesus
on that way to the place where He was glorified. We have seen
Him on the cross. We have seen Him utter those
remarkable words. We have seen the Saviour die. at the hands of wicked men. And
now, in the Gospel accounts and throughout the rest of the New
Testament, we see flowing from what the Lord Jesus has done,
the salvation of His people. 1 Peter 3.18 describes it as
thus, you have it on the back of your sheets, some of these
verses. I might start with Psalm 65 verse 4. Blessed, envious,
happy is the man you choose and calls to approach you. That he may dwell in your courts,
we shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, of your
holy temple. We read in Isaiah 45 where God
says, truly you are a God who hide yourself. And yet in the
Lord Jesus and flowing from that eternal covenant that God made
with God before the foundation of the world, there will be a
people who will have God reveal to them and they will be caused
to approach, and they will be blessed. 1 Peter
3.18 says, For Christ suffered once for sins, the just for the
unjust, that he might bring us to God. being put to death in
the flesh but made alive in the spirit. Ephesians 2.13 says,
but now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought
near by the blood of Christ. Today we are going to look that
the story of the centurion, a trophy of grace. He was about as far
off as a man could be. He was far off as a Gentile. You can read about what God says
of the Gentiles, our strangers to the covenant. But now, he
has been brought near. He was a Roman and he was a Roman
centurion, which means that he was in charge of at least 100
men. So he was a hardened, experienced
soldier whose trade in life for many, many years was the death
of people and the glory of Rome. And in the providence of God,
this Roman centurion happened to be in Jerusalem on this particular
day. And he happened to be the centurion
that was chosen to be in charge of the execution of the Lord
Jesus. Let's read his account in the
three gospel narratives. In Matthew 2750. And Jesus cried out again with
a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. Then behold, the veil
of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth
quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened, and
many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.
And coming out of the graves after his resurrection, they
went into the holy city and appeared to many. So when the centurion
and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and
the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying,
Truly, this was the Son of God. And many women followed Jesus
from Galilee, ministering to Him, were there looking on from
afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and
Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee's sons. In Mark's Gospel, Jesus
cried out with a loud voice and breathed his last. Then the veil
of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. So when the
centurion who stood opposite him saw that he cried out like
this and breathed his last, he said, truly this man was the
Son of God. There were also women looking
on from afar, among whom was Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother
of James, Celeste, and Joseph, and Salome, who also followed
him and ministered to him when he was in Galilee, and many other
women who came up with him to Jerusalem. In Luke's account,
so when the centurion saw what happened, he glorified God saying,
certainly this was a righteous man. And the whole crowd came
together to that side, seeing what had been done, beat their
breasts and returned. But all his acquaintances and
the women who followed him from Galilee stood at a distance watching
these things. There are three things that I'd
like us to take note of today. As I said earlier, God's children
are brought near by the blood of Christ. This centurion stood
opposite Him. He stood facing the Lord Jesus. He was in charge of this execution. The three things are recorded
in the Gospel narratives about this man. Firstly, he feared
greatly in Mark 27.54. In Luke 23.47 he glorified God saying, certainly this was a
righteous man. And in Mark 15, 39, and in Matthew's
account, he said, truly this man was the Son of God. The Holy Spirit is promised to
come and take the things of the Lord Jesus and reveal them to
us. He's promised to come powerfully
into the lives of God's children and to show them the things of
our Lord Jesus. To show us who the Lord Jesus
is. You see the gospel is a person
and the Gospel is a declaration of a finished work by a perfectly
satisfied, fulfilled, joyful Saviour. He has now finished
his work. And the result of him finishing
his work, as we saw last week, was to tear that huge veil in
the temple in two. I don't know much about sewing,
but according to the records, it had 82 knots, and I think
it's 82 knots thick. It was a huge veil. It would not fit in this room. And what it did, it powerfully
showed that the Old Covenant had finished. and the new covenant
had been brought in. You cannot go to God through
the old covenant. You cannot go to God through
law keeping and obedience. One of the remarkable things
that the Holy Spirit has chosen not to put in the scriptures,
but is very evident from the Jewish history and from people
like Josephus, is when that huge veil was torn in half, Inside
the Holy of Holies was nothing. The Ark of the Covenant,
that mercy seat with those angels overshadowing that broken law
of God which required blood for satisfaction, had been gone. for nearly 500 years. It was
taken away when the Babylonians destroyed that temple, and it
was never replaced. It was a sign from God that the
Jews' religion, the religion that man had made out of Christianity,
was an empty, shallow religion. which looked good on the outside
to people. The Jews looked moral. They looked zealous for God. They looked as if they were the
genuine article. But when God showed up on the
scene, these men, these seemingly righteous men, plotted and schemed
for three years to kill the Saviour. God exposed their religion as
empty, as just the pretended work of
men. The Gospel comes and exposes
people. That was what the veil meant. It's exposing us right here and
right now. Everything is open about our
lives before God who sees absolutely everything. The veil was torn. The earth
quaked as if the earth itself trembled at the wickedness done
to its creator and its sustainer. And the rocks were torn apart. The most stable and strong things
in this world were torn apart. There was now a cleft in the
rock. just like the rock was split
open for Moses to hide in, so that he was protected from being
destroyed by God. The rock, according to 1 Corinthians
10, is the Lord Jesus, who followed those people through the wilderness.
And the rock was split open like Jesus' body was split open. And rivers, rivers of living
water flowed out. The material world paid homage
to him whom man had rejected. But also the convulsions of nature
are a sign of what is going to happen in the future. The graves were opened. There will come a time when all
of this creation will be shaken again at the word of the Lord
Jesus. And the graves will be opened. And rocky hearts in this new
covenant that we so delightfully want to proclaim here. Rocky
hearts, like the heart of this centurion, like my heart and
your heart, rocky hearts, stony hearts, have to be broken apart
and they have to be removed. We are dead in a grave of our
sins and our trespasses, and we need to be raised to newness
of life. And we need to have new life,
to come out from among the dead, to come out from among the dead
in religion, to worship God outside the camp. And that's, I think,
what the picture of this centurion's transformation is all about. Let's look at the three things
that I mentioned earlier. Firstly, it is said that he feared
greatly. There is a fear that natural
man has. Felix trembled before Paul. But there is a fear, there is
a fear of God that is a blessing of the new covenant. And only
those who have new life, truly fear God. The fear of the Lord
is the beginning of wisdom. Blessed is the man who fears
the Lord. The fear of the Lord is his treasure. He made an everlasting covenant
according to Jeremiah 32 40 I will make an everlasting covenant
with them that I will not turn away from them to do them good
but I will put my fear in their hearts that they shall not depart
from me. There is a fear of God which
is a healthy fear of God. There is amongst men And particularly
amongst people who have been involved in religion, there is
a frightening lack of godly fear where people will cling to their
own notions of righteousness. And what they have been taught,
and what they have learned naturally, and there is no real fear of
God before them. Psalm 25 says, The secret of
the Lord is with those who fear Him, and He will show them His
covenant. Psalm 25 verse 14. The secret of the Lord is with
those who fear Him. and he will show them his covenant. Who is his covenant? The covenant
is the Lord Jesus. This centurion saw something
that day in that man. Think of what he saw with natural
eyes. Just another Jewish rabble rouser. Just another Jew who was stirring
people up in his mind against the sovereignty of Rome over
their world. Just another Jew to be crucified
like the hundreds of others that were crucified. And this man,
now dead, hanging, covered in blood, and the spittle of men,
on a cross, what did the centurion have with natural eyes that caused
him to think anything of this man before him at all? The secret of the Lord is for
those who fear Him, and He will show him His covenant. He showed this man the reality
of who the Lord Jesus is, that he is the Son of God. He showed him those words that
had been the mocking words of men to the Lord Jesus. He showed him that they were
words which were endowed with the most remarkable truth, They
mocked him. He can save others, but himself
he cannot save. Let this Son of God, this Christ,
come down from the cross. He had heard the accusations
at the trial. And all of a sudden, all of these
things came together with God's providential earthquake, with
God's darkening of the sky. And now this man who was trained
in two things in particular. One was to show no pity, and
particularly to show no pity to rebel Jews. And the other
one was to show no fear, no matter what the circumstances. He was
a Roman centurion. All the superpower of Rome stood
behind him. And yet now this man feared and
feared greatly. It's part of what God does in
new covenant blessings of his people. He causes us to see God
as holy. He causes us to see ourselves
as we really are. That there are things of God
in this world which are bigger than us and beyond us. over which we have no power or
control whatsoever. God was at work and God works
powerfully. The second thing that this man
did is that he glorified God. He, of all people there, that
day glorified God. The Lord Jesus talked about this
hour that is coming, that the Son of Man should be glorified. One prayer prior to the upper
room was, Father, glorify your name. And then a voice came from
heaven, I have glorified it. and I will glorify it again."
He glorified God, declaring this man, this dead man, to be righteous. Certainly this was a righteous
man. He glorified God, declaring the
Lord Jesus to be what His enemies had accused Him of and what they
had killed Him for. See, the charge was, are you
the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus' answer is, I am. He takes upon Himself, as is
His right, the name of God alone. And the accusation and the reason
he's hanging there is that their accusation was that this was
blasphemy and they all condemned him to be deserving of death. He glorified God, declaring that
this man had suffered unjustly. Truly this man was the Son of
God. The charges against him were true in the court of God
and false in the courts of men. He glorified God, declaring that
heaven had honoured its son at his death, as the rock split
and the earth quaked." He glorified God by saying, this is a righteous
man. Therefore, everyone else, including
him, involved in this sham trial and wicked execution was an unrighteous
man. We don't glorify God by declaring
how righteous we are. We glorify God by acknowledging
what God says about us, that we aren't righteous. There is
nothing righteous about our thoughts, our words and our deeds. We are deserving from God what
the Lord Jesus had just suffered. He was righteous and we aren't
righteous. And when God reveals that to
us, there is a transformation in people. No longer do they
want to brag about the things that they have done. They are
much more willing, by God's grace, to declare themselves unrighteous
and to declare God righteous in what he said about us. See,
the centurion had been a party to the mocking, to the scourging. And as I said earlier, he was
a hardened man. All of us are born with hearts
of stone. And then we are hardened by life's
circumstances. And none more so than soldiers
in the Roman army. that Christ's words, Christ's
actions, Christ's death had been used by God to move and remove
this heart of stone. It should give us great hope
We live in a world of stony-hearted, self-righteous people, but there
is no heart and spirit too big, too bold, too strong when the
power of God is present. We have experienced it ourselves. have we not? As God moved in
our lives, and we can say the words, Jesus is a righteous man. We can say the words, he is the
son of God. But they are no more meaningful
in our lives than they were to the Jews. And then all of a sudden, the
entrance of His words brings light. And there is a new birth. So the salvation of sinners requires
three R's, doesn't it? It requires redemption. Sins
must be put away, and put away by another, the Lord Jesus. It
requires regeneration. We must be born again. It's not an optional extra on
the way to heaven. It is an essential entry. We must be born again. we must be resurrected. We must be given new life. And one day, that new life will
be a sign of an eternal life. That's what the opening of the
graves and the resurrection of these saints typified. That from
the death of the Lord Jesus, from that covenant, that eternal
covenant in his blood being enacted, things necessarily flow in the
lives of his people. We see this man glorifying God. We see Gentiles, this man and
those with him, being softened. And yet we see the Jews being
hardened. There's just one word about where
the Jews went. that day in Luke 23, 48. They
beat their breasts. And what did they do? They returned. What did they return to? They
returned to the religion of the Jews to the religion of man. They returned to Jerusalem. And this man glorified God outside
the camp. He was caused to fear. He was
caused to glorify God. He was caused to confess. Truly, this man was the Son of
God. Certainly, he was a righteous
man. The Lord Jesus came from heaven,
according to Philippians 5, 2 verses 5 to 11. Remarkable journey of
our Lord Jesus. He was there in the form of God.
He was God. He did not consider it robbery
to be equal to God, but made himself of no reputation, taking
on the form of a bondservant and coming in the likeness of
men, being found in appearance as a man. He humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the
cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted
him and given him the name which is above every name. The name which is above every
name is Jehovah. That at the name of Jesus, every
knee should bow, of those in heaven and those on earth and
those under the earth, that every tongue should confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord. to the glory of God the Father. He declared Him to be the Son
of God. In the Scriptures, that's a declaration
that He is God, the Eternal Son, the Second Person of the Trinity,
equal with the Father and the Spirit in every way. We believers
are sons by adoption. Jesus Christ is the son of God
by his very nature. It is a declaration that Jesus
is God in human flesh. He is the creator of all things. the Sustainer of all things.
He is the Ruler of all things. He is the Disposer of all things. He is, in His Person, the Revealer
of God. And that's what the Jews understood
Him to be saying about Himself. You, being a mere man, make yourself
God. And he made no effort to hide
the fact from his enemies that he truly was God. Who can forgive sins but God
alone? He's God alone who can forgive
sins. He is Lord of the Sabbath. The
demonic spirits declared him to be the son of God. And at his trial, they asked
him, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed? And he declares
himself to be God, a God that comes with power. Even in the mockery the centurion
heard, He was declared to be God, Christ,
this King of Israel. Let him come down from the cross
now. In this Centurion's Confession,
we see the New Covenant. The New Covenant, which is the
covenant that saves all of God's people. It's the promise that
the Lord Jesus will save all that the Father has given Him. And they will come. They will
come. They will be taught of God. They
will meet God and they will meet themselves. And they will come. All that the Father has given
me will come to me, and all who come He will never cast out. Salvation is coming to the Lord
Jesus. Salvation is looking to the Lord
Jesus. looking and looking. Salvation
is the Lord Jesus coming with power into the lives of His people,
strengthened by His glorious power, qualified to be partakers
of the inheritance of the saints in light. delivered like this
centurion from the kingdom of darkness, a kingdom that hardens
men's hearts, delivered into the kingdom of light, into the
kingdom of the Son of His love, redeemed, forgiven, and reconciled. And I wondered why these women
were there. They are named, aren't they? This man gave a confession before
these people. And it was a comfort to these
women who represent those of Christ's bride. who stood as
witnesses and watched. And after all of the mockery
and all of that cruelty of man, and all of the vengeance of Satan
and wicked man had been poured out on the Lord Jesus, they stood
there as witnesses and saw all of these things. And then they
heard They heard this man make this wonderful confession. Certainly
this is a righteous man. The promises of what would happen
as a result of the death of the Lord Jesus were fulfilled before
their very eyes. Maybe, just maybe, in three days
time, a more remarkable promise and a more remarkable fulfillment
than all their dreams could ever wish for would be fulfilled before
their very eyes. Maybe before our eyes God will
come and he'll cause there to be great fear He will cause His
Son to be glorified and He will cause His Son to be confessed
before the people of this world. Jesus Christ is God the Son. He has finished His work and
its results are flowing They flowed that day and they flowed
for this past 2,000 years and they will flow in the salvation
of all of His people until the last of His redeemed is safely
converted and brought home to glory. And then we'll all join,
we'll all join that choir in heaven. And we will happily and
joyfully confess and sing that this man truly is the Son of
God.