Now, we are going through a series
of lessons called The Fundamentals of the Grace of God. And that
subject cannot be overemphasized because everything good that
we receive from God comes to us because of grace. There is
no other cause of goodness toward us. God's grace. And, you know,
someone might say, well, salvation's by grace, but other things, no.
Well, salvation encompasses everything. Salvation is just not a part
of our experience. If we are believers in the Lord
Jesus Christ, if we've been chosen by God, redeemed by the blood,
called by the Spirit, if these things are true of us, everything
about our existence is salvation. even before we ever came to understand
it, or even know that God had saved us. Paul speaks of the
grace of God as something that was given to us before the world
began, but has now been revealed to us. And it's revealed not only in
the scriptures, not only through the appearance of Christ, it's
revealed to each of his people as some preacher or a mom or
a dad or whoever, but just someone declares the grace of God to
them in word, and then as we'll start studying either next week
or the next week, depends on how far we get this week, but
this revelation of the grace of God to a sinner is by the
work and power of the Holy Spirit. But it's not like grace began
the day that a person believes. Grace is not the result of faith,
it's the cause of it. So we can say, yes, salvation's
by grace. But for the child of God, everything
about his existence is wrapped up in salvation. Everything God
has brought into his life, everything, you know, Romans 8, 28 says,
we know that all things work together for good to them that
love God, who are the called according to his purpose. And
that's one of those universal alls. God who controls all things,
works all things to bring about the salvation of his people. Now we may not see how every
experience of our life connects to our salvation, our eternal
good, and that's the good that Paul is speaking of in Romans
chapter eight, verse 28. We know that all things work
together for good, and he's talking about the eternal good. But we may not be able to see
the line that connects some of our experiences with our salvation. However, everything that happens
to us happens because God ordained it for our eternal good. I have the parents that I had
because God had determined grace for me before the world began. I was born in Key West, Florida.
I have no idea what that has to do with my salvation, but
it's got something to do with it. I was raised mostly in West Virginia.
Of course, that's almost heaven according to the song, so maybe
I can see the line there. But I spent most of my childhood
in West Virginia. How does that connect to my salvation?
I don't know. I don't need to know because
it's God that's working these things to my eternal good, my
salvation. I'm not the one working them
there. I don't have to figure this out. Now there are some
things which the scriptures point out very clearly that God has
done in bringing about our salvation. And that's actually the things
that we're studying on the fundamentals of the grace of God. But so far we've covered the
subject of the need of grace, which is our sin, and we've looked
at the cause of grace, which is the will of God. And now we're
on the third lesson in this subject, the method of grace, which is
the death of Christ. And within this little subsection,
we've looked at what is the method of grace? It's substitution. The Apostle Peter says, for Christ
has one time for all suffered for sin, the righteous one in
place of the unrighteous, in order to bring us to God. Now
that is how the grace of God was justified. The grace of God comes to us
in keeping with God's holy and righteous nature. The death which
our Lord died, it does commend the love of God. It's a great
demonstration of the love of God. But the love of God is not
what required the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. The righteousness
of God required it. Now God's love motivated him
to be willing to do that very thing. He who spared not his
own son. Imagine that. It's what motivated
Christ. Husbands love your wives as Christ
loved the church and gave himself for her. Love motivated it, but
justice required it. The Lord did not come here and
die on the cross and suffer like he did to get our sympathy, to
make us say, oh, how much he loved us. I guess I need to ask
Jesus in my heart or something like that. That what happened
on Calvary, while there were some who saw the outward expression
of it, there was only one there that day who understood what
was going on behind the scenes. That was not a transaction between
Christ and men. It was a transaction between
our Lord Jesus Christ and God, the judge of all. It is written,
he offered himself without spot to God. Yes, Roman hands drove nails.
Jewish voices cried out for his crucifixion. But that's just
the outward things that was shown to us that later on we might
look back and have some understanding of what was going on there. But
what you see displayed physically in our Lord was going on behind.
He was hung before God as a curse. Cursed is everyone who hangs
on a tree, says the law. And Paul says in Galatians that
Christ was made a curse for us. He redeemed us from the law having
been made a curse for us. But there were spiritual things
going on behind the scenes that you and I couldn't see as the
Lord Jesus Christ poured out his soul as an offering for sin. He was our substitute. He got
what we deserve in order that God might be just in giving us
what he deserves. That's substitution. And this aspect of the grace
of God, the method of it, substitution, it accomplished something. And
that's what we looked at last week. There was five things accomplished,
and that word, and we would look at the scripture, it is finished.
And that word finished means to reach the goal. And it's translated
various ways, to be accomplished, to be done, to be perfected.
And we saw various ways in which that scripture, or excuse me,
that word was used in the New Testament. Well, what was finished? What was perfected? All the Old
Testament scriptures. All that the Father sent him
to do. All that was necessary to release us from the bondage
of sin and death. And here was the amazing things
we noticed. It perfected Christ. Well, Christ didn't need perfecting.
He was already without flaw. Well, it says in the book of
Hebrews that God perfected the Lord Jesus Christ through suffering.
See, He was a perfect man. He was a complete, perfect, flawless
man. But He was not a complete, perfect,
flawless Savior until He suffered for sin. And then here's the next thing,
this is from the book of Hebrews as well, He perfected us, those
of us who are in Him. We are made perfect as pertaining
to conscience. Now this is conscience before
God. Our conscience, you know, that part of us that simply tells
us when we've done something wrong, makes us feel bad, that
still goes on, and it needs to because it helps restrain us.
But we're talking about before God. By His offering, He has
perfected forever those who have been set apart. That's what the
book of Hebrews says. What do I have to do in order
to make myself perfect in the sight of God? Nothing. Really, nothing. Not only is
nothing required, it is absolutely demanded that I not bring something
else. Paul says if he be circumcised,
Christ is of no use to you. Not meaning the actual act of
it would make it, what he meant, he was using it in the context
of those who were demanding circumcision, saying you must be circumcised
to be saved. And so really, you could cross
out the word circumcised and put in an X, and insert in there
anything that men do to somehow enhance or improve upon their
relationship to God. And you could say, if you X,
Christ is of no use to you whatsoever. The only song Christ will sing
is a solo. You try to join in on a duet,
he'll get real quiet and you'll get to sing the whole thing all
by yourself. And that won't sound very good. Now, that's the introduction. We will be continuing this next
week. This is our third lesson on the method of grace. This
deals with the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and answers the
question, how can God be just and justify the guilty? It is
written, and God said this to Moses. Moses said, show me your
glory. And in God's answer to him, among the things that he
said about himself was this. I will by no means clear the
guilty. Now that word translated clear,
that's the King James version of it. I don't even remember
just how it is expressed in the NIV, but it means the same thing
as to justify. I will not declare to be not
guilty the one who is guilty. See, God's not a liar. He's not
going to say we're not guilty unless that's true. And then we have this scripture,
this truth of the scriptures, that we are guilty. Now, it doesn't
take a lot of guilt to put us under the condemnation of, I
will by no means clear the guilty. But we do have a lot of guilt.
We have the guilt of our nature. That's just what we are, sin.
Sin's not just what we do, it's what we are. If it weren't that way, you'd
think at least one person in the however long humanity's been
around, at least one person would have managed to be good, but
nobody has, why? Because the moment we are conceived,
we are conceived in sin. And as we form within our mother's
womb, David says, we're shaping iniquity. And we come forth from
the womb speaking lies. There was never a time when we
were not sinners. Never. All that time has done is made
that sin more and more evident. So we're sin in nature, we sin
by practice, that's obvious. And then here Paul says that
we're sinful and guilty by way of ancestry. It says in Romans
5 verse 12, as sin entered the world by one man and death by
sin. So death passed upon all men
for all sinned." Now some translations put that all have sinned, but
that's not what it says. It is written in a Greek tense
that indicates, at least in nearly all situations, something that
was done at a single point in time. And Paul's reference there
is to the sin of Adam. And what he's saying there is
that sin entered the world by one man, that's Adam. And death
entered the world by that sin. And death passed upon all of
us because all sinned. We were in Adam when he sinned. And therefore his sin is charged
to us as though we were the ones who were in the Garden of Eden
and picked that fruit and ate it. Now, some people don't like that
kind of guilt. They say, well, that's not fair. Why should we
be held responsible for what we didn't do? Well, in the gospel,
you're blessed for what you didn't do, so it's kind of a wash, isn't
it? But it shows us the impossibility of us remedying our case. We can change our behavior somewhat. We can't change our nature, but
some people think we can. But there's one thing we know
we can't change, our ancestry. Well, our Lord's work in answering
all these problems of sin in such a way that God can bless
us and still be the just, holy,
and righteous God that He is, is this substitution. And this
substitution is most often described under one of two terms, atonement
or redemption. The work of the Lord Jesus Christ,
as he bore our sins in his body on the tree, is described in
the Bible, generally speaking, under one of those two words,
atonement or redemption. Now, those two terms are very
similar in their meaning. Both involve a payment. But each
of them approaches sin under a slightly different description. Atonement views sin as that which
is horribly offensive to God. And atonement is a payment that
satisfies the anger that arises from an offense. Whatever payment a person will
receive as a compensation for what's been done against him
is called an atonement. Redemption views our sin as a
debt. and a debt in the Old Testament
law sense of the word, a debt that brings us into bondage. And redemption is the payment
of the debt that necessarily results in us being freed from
our bondage. So you can see both of these
involve payment. But one, the atonement views
sin more as a personal thing, a personal affront against God,
and God's personal offense at our sin must be satisfied by
some kind of payment. And then redemption looks at
it as more or less an accounting thing. Sin is a debt, and Christ
pays that debt. So we're going to look at these
two. Let's look at atonement first. Atonement is seen as a payment
to cover offenses in such a way that the anger or the wrath of
the person who's been offended is appeased. Now in the New Testament, the
Greek word signifies Much the same thing. It's an atonement,
I mean, excuse me, a sacrifice that puts away the anger of someone. A reconciling sacrifice. You know what it is to reconcile?
Two people fall out with each other. They're mad at each other
because of what at least one of them did. Now an atonement
would be whatever is necessary to give the offended one in order
that the person, the one who's been offended, would no longer
be offended. And the two would be back in
a good relationship with one another. Now we've offended God. Our sin, while in some ways it
can be described as a transgression of the law, Remember that the law is not
external to God. You know, if you go out here
and go flying north of Rock Valley there on whatever the name of
that road is, and you crank it up to about 75 miles an hour,
and then all at once you see the lights come on, and you get
pulled over, and the officer gives you a ticket. Now, he's
giving you a ticket because you broke the law, but he's not offended
by that. You didn't break His law, it's
somebody else's law. It's a law that's external to
us, and external to the one who's writing us the ticket. But when
we sin, we're not just sinning against the law, we're sinning
against God. If I go out and punch somebody
in the nose, you might say, that wasn't right, somebody call the
police. If I punch you in the nose, then
you understand what sin is to God. It's a direct insult to
who he is. It's a high-handed rebellion
against his very nature, and he takes it very personally. And he responds to sin in unimaginable
anger and wrath. Now atonement, the word in the
Old Testament translated atonement, its essential meaning is covering,
a covering. So far as I know, the first place,
at least the root word is used, is in the story of the ark. Now
the Hebrew word is, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it right, but
it looks like coffer. But do you remember when God
was telling Noah how to build the ark? He said, make it out
of, in most English translations say, gopher wood. It's coffer
wood. And then it says, and I'm remembering
this in the King James, because most of my memorization as a
kid was in the King James, but he told Noah, pitch it within
and without with pitch. That word, coffer. So what is
he saying? That ark is a big picture of
atonement. Because that wood and the pitch
made from heating that kind of wood and rendering the sap out
of it to make and seal it all up, that covered Noah and his
sin when God's judgment came in. And then on the day of atonement,
when the high priest would go into the most holy place, One
time each year. Now, tradition says that that
golden lid on top there, they always call it the mercy seat.
I was raising that because that's what the King James says. But
I know in the NIV it says atonement cover. Now, what was in that chest? One of the things was a copy
of the law. The Ark of the Covenant, that covenant was in there. But
the high priest would go and pour the blood out upon that
chest and it was covered. In this case, looking at it from
that perspective, the law is covered. But the point is, is
there's a barrier between the law and the sinner, a covering. The word was actually even used
for walled cities, a barrier between the enemy and the people
inside. In fact, the city we read of
in the New Testament, Capernaum, that caper part, that's from
the Hebrew word, and it means the city of Nahum. And so the atonement is that
which comes between us and God. to hide our sin from him and
hide his wrath from us. One reason, I guess, that it's
so easy for us to commit sin, aside from the fact it's our
very nature to do that, but the reason we do it so carelessly
is because we don't have any real conception of how our sin
affects God. We figure, well, if it doesn't
hurt anybody, if nobody finds out, well, God found out, and
it hurts him. And he says, in telling us not
to seek vengeance for wrongs done to us. Here was his response.
He said, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay. He takes vengeance against all
sin. The world thinks that God is
kind of a softy. And that explains the very soft
gospels that they preach. They perceive him to be that
big, gray-bearded granddaddy who sees no wrong in his grandchildren
and just dismisses their sin. God is not like that. And the
proof of it is this. When his own beloved son hung
upon the cross, bearing sins that he himself did not do, God
still visited on him the full weight of divine wrath against
those sins. Now, if he wouldn't hold back
from his own son when he was bearing sins that he himself
did not commit, what shall he do with us if we come before
him bearing sin that we ourselves did commit? God's not gonna weigh our good
deeds against our bad deeds. It wouldn't help us anyway. We
don't have any good deeds. All of them are sin. One sin, one speck of guilt,
and God says, I won't justify. But here's the thing. He said,
I've cast your sins behind my back. I like that image because
if God has put our sins behind his back, Well, as we're facing
God, we can see our sins, but he can't. Just think of that. I mean, you
know, the Bible uses imagery, and I realize that it's not going
to—I mean, God's a spirit. We can't see him. Never will
be able to see him that way. But just imagine that, because
that's the kind of visual metaphor he's setting up. We're standing
before Him. We know what we are. But He has
cast our sins behind His back and there He sits on His throne
and we can see our sins back there. You see your sins? I sure
see mine. And we probably think, oh, what's
He going to do to me because of it? He can't see them so He
doesn't do anything about them. The last time He saw my sin was
about 2,000 years ago when it was laid to the charge of His
Son and when He saw it there. everything he could do in answer
to sin, he did to his son in my behalf. And God has never
seen no sins since then. Even though we know better, we
kind of rank our sins as some worse than others, and there's
particular sins probably that bring us down in grief more than
others. I remember one night laying on my bed, horribly troubled
by sin. thinking for sure that God was
going to do something in response to it. And I began to pray. And I was
very worried, that heavy sense of bondage that comes from the
sense of guilt before God. And as I was sitting there wondering,
what God might do in response to my sin, it's as though he
spoke, and of course what he does, he just brought to my mind
some scriptures. But he said, Joe, if I wanted
to destroy you, I had ample justification for that before you were born. But it is written, if thou, O
Lord, should mark iniquity, who could stand? I'm not marking
your iniquity. Paul said this, blessed is the man whose sins
are covered, whose sin the Lord will not charge to him. And he
calls that the message of reconciliation, atonement. I've been told, and
I can't tell you for sure if it's true, But that word was
invented, I believe, by Wycliffe, possibly Tyndall, but one of
those early Bible translators, because there was no English
word to express the meaning of it. And it is literally the words,
at one meant, put together. He made us at one. He reconciled
us. He covered our sins. Now, I remember
one time when One of the fellows that was in our fellowship at
churches, he was trying to make a difference
between, in the Old Testament sins were atoned for, just covered
up. It wasn't until Christ came that they were put away. Sometimes you just wonder, where
are you getting this? Because he said anything that's
covered could be uncovered. And I thought, that depends altogether
on what it is that covered it. What the blood of Christ covered
will never, ever be uncovered. That's why it is written regarding
the new covenant, which is the gospel. One of its features is, I will forgive their sins, and
their iniquities, I will remember no more." That word remember,
it can mean I'll bring it to mind, I won't ever bring it up
again. You ever had one of those people that, you know, you do
something kind of mean to them and you feel bad, so you go and
apologize, they say, I forgive you. And then later down the
road, you might do something similar, and I go, well, this
is the second time they remembered. I remember thinking this one
time, and musing on this concept, thinking of my sins, how many
times, I go, Lord, I've done it again. And it occurred to
me, if I really said that, he would say to me, did what again?
Now, I don't want to make this sound casual. That's reality
of it. I realize that God who's omniscient,
it's not like he forgets the thing happened, but he said he'd
never bring it up again. So you can't do anything again
to him. Because from his viewpoint, you've
never done anything wrong. The blood of Christ has covered
your sin, and nothing in heaven, earth, or hell can uncover it. Legalists want to try and uncover
it. The greatest legalist of all,
Satan, says he's the accuser of the brethren, and how did
they overcome him? By the blood of the Lamb. It covered their sin, and not
even the devil can bring it up in God's presence. Now what does
that mean? And we're gonna see this applies
to redemption as well. If Christ made atonement for
my sin, I'm atoned. I came into this world with the
same nature as the children of wrath, But I didn't have the
same destiny, because my destiny has never been wrath. My destiny
has been always to be adopted into God's family, given an inheritance,
and being conformed to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's
been my destiny since before the world began. And Jesus Christ came in order
to justify God in giving this sinner good things. And if Jesus Christ paid the
debt, not next week, if Jesus Christ made the sacrifice that
put away God's wrath, And he's called the lamb slain from the
foundation of the world. So in God's viewpoint, this was
done before the world ever came into existence. That means that
in time and space, God has never been angry with me. He has never
sought to destroy me. And I can be sure of this. When
I stand before him, he's not going to bring up my
sin. If Christ died for me, my sin's gone. It's behind God's
back, and He sees no sin in me, and the same is true for you.
Well, we'll quit with that.