All right, let's open with a
word of prayer. Our gracious Father, thank you
for this morning, and thank you for bringing us together, and
we pray that the lesson that we learn will strengthen our
hearts with grace and make Christ ever more precious to us. And
it's in his name we pray, amen. Now, we're going through a series
on the fundamentals of the grace of God. And we have defined what
grace is, and it's simply favor. And while most religious folk
like to say it's unmerited favor, actually the grace that we receive
was earned by the Lord Jesus Christ, but certainly we didn't
earn it. So unmerited favor is not a bad way to describe it
within the context of our experience of grace. We didn't earn it,
we didn't merit it. And then we saw some of the characteristics
of God that impact an understanding of his grace. We'll never know
everything about God, but we touched on those things which
were most vital to an understanding of his grace. And then we talked
about our sin, which is the need of grace. That's why salvation
must be by grace, because As sinners, we are incapable of
performing for God what would be necessary to earn His favor. And then last week, we looked
at God's will, the source of grace, showing that grace comes
to us not because we ask for it, not because of anything we
have done, but entirely of His own free will. You know, people
ask me, do you believe in free will? And sometimes I say, yeah,
I do. And they're kind of surprised, you know, because I said I believe
in sovereign grace. I said, I believe in free will.
God's got free will. He can do whatever he wants to
do. So, you know, the issue is not whether or not there is such
a thing as free will. It's just who has it. And it's
God. And he is gracious to whom he will be gracious. Now, this
week, we're going to look at Christ, specifically Christ's
death, the method of grace. Now we're going to enter into
an aspect of grace which occupies most of the scripture. Nearly
all of the scripture is devoted to how it is that God can be
just and justify the one who believes in Christ. There's not one part of God's
grace that's more important than another part. You know, we've
spoken of election, and we're going to be speaking of effectual
calling and preservation and all these things. We wouldn't
say that one is more important than another. They are like links
in a chain. If one of them breaks, you lose
the load. You drop the load. Our Lord Jesus Christ is God
in human flesh. Now we're entering into water
too deep for us, but we'll do the best we can. We realize that
there is one God, and yet he expresses himself in three distinct
persons that we're aware of. We generally say Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. But only the Son, only the Word
was made flesh. Every time, or virtually every
time God has spoken, it has been the word that speaks. We know
of a couple of times the father spoke, but all he said was something
about the son. This is my beloved son in whom
I am well pleased. And the spirit of God worked in the
prophets and the apostles to have them say things. But God
the Word, God the Son, is the person of the triune God that
his primary, well let's put it that way, he is our contact with
God. If you wanna put it, I don't know of another way to put it,
but it's always him that we're interacting with. God speaks
to us in the Son. and we come to the Father through
him. So it should not surprise us,
since the Lord Jesus Christ is the one that we are constantly
in contact with in affairs concerning God, that the scripture should
be devoted most to those things that he does in this scheme of
grace. It was not the Father who became
flesh, not the Spirit. It was the Word that became flesh. So this lesson is probably going
to take at least two sessions to get through it, because we
are dealing with the essential message of Christ and Him crucified. That is the method of grace.
I mean, we could just say that and be done. That's the answer.
What's the method of grace? Christ and Him crucified. But there's a lot to that subject. What method did God use in order
to satisfy both his gracious nature and his just nature? There can be no conflict in God.
Now, we have conflicts. We have competing desires. And
we cannot fulfill all our desires because we don't have the power. And sometimes we have desires
that are mutually exclusive. One of the funnier things I've
seen come across Facebook, you know, it shows somebody that
says, you know, I like being fit and I like tacos. And those are competing desires. And if you eat too many tacos,
you're not going to be fit. And probably if you're going
to be as fit as you want to be, you're not going to get as many
tacos as you want. So we have competing interests. God doesn't.
Now we try to imagine because it's the only way we can understand
what God does. But, you know, I've heard people
talk about the council halls of eternity. You know, in which
God says, you know, he sees man's going to fall into sin. He said,
but I will be gracious to him. But then justice rises up and
says, wait, that can't be. You cannot be good to them because
they're sinners, you know. And what they've done is taken
the various aspects of God's nature and put them in competition
with one another. And I understand what they're
doing, and it helps us to understand this. But the fact is, none of
God's nature has ever been in competition with the other. There's
no passage of time with God. He never does change. He has
always been completely content, fulfilled, and satisfied because
There never has come up an issue that didn't already have a resolution.
Now, so far as our experience, we learn about the problem. Then
we learn about the resolution. We learn the question. Job said,
how can a man be righteous or justified in God's sight? Now that's a troubling question
for us. It wasn't with God. He, you know, he knew the answer. In fact, in his mind, the answer
was already accomplished even before he made the heavens and
the earth. Grace came to us before time
began. Remember that? Well, grace, favor
cannot be shown unjustly. That means if grace was given
us before time began, so far as God is concerned, there had
been a resolution of the problem. Him showing grace and favor and
His just nature which demands the death of the sinner. Thus
it is written that Jesus Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation
of the world. In order, well the Bible says
that we are guilty, no question about that. And the Bible says
that God will by no means clear. It means the same thing as justify. He will not justify the guilty.
God will not call a man righteous unless he is. He always gives a proper judgment. So if we're guilty and God will
by no means clear the guilty, The only way for God to clear
us is for us to become not guilty. It's that simple. If we come
in the presence of God with the least stain of sin, with the
least amount of guilt chargeable to our account, God will respond
with the full weight of divine wrath against sin. And the proof
of that is the cross. For upon the cross was his only
begotten son, and there was sin on him. And you know, it's not
like God was fooled by what was going on.
He knew that the sins that his son bore, his son had never done. Nonetheless, they were there.
God had laid them on him. The Lord has laid on him the
iniquity of us all. And with this wickedness, this
guilt laid upon him, God would not withhold his hand from punishing
even his own son. That's how just God is. Now, if he won't withhold his
hand from judging his only begotten son when he bore sins that he
himself did not do, what shall happen if we appear before him
with sins that are actually historically ours? So there must be, for God
to have favor on us and God to do good for us, there must be
some way for all of that sin to be absolutely, completely
removed from us, such that no one can make an accusation against
us stick in the court of heaven. Now that's a tall order. You
know why? Most of today's gospels are so
weak, they don't think it's a very
big problem. They don't understand how sinful they are, and they
don't understand how strict God is. And you know, those two truths
play off of each other. The more you see God in his righteousness,
absolute unyielding justice and righteousness, the more you will
be aware of your own sinfulness. And the more you are aware of
your sinfulness and wretchedness, the clearer it becomes to you,
your dreadful state in the presence of God. As the scriptures say, it's a
fearful thing. to fall into the hands of the living God. But
the God that's preached up today, nobody's afraid of Him. And they're
not afraid of Him because they've been told now for generations
that God is doing everything He can to save them. And all they got to do is, you
know, give the go-ahead and it'll be done. They don't fear God because no
God has ever been preached to them that was worthy of fear.
But we're confronted with a big, big problem for which we not
only cannot provide the answer, we can't even come up with what
the answer would be on our own. In fact, even though the answer
is told to us in the scriptures, we don't understand the answer
until God himself reveals it to us. And I mean understand
that in a spiritual and saving way. The doctrines of the scriptures
are not hard to understand intellectually. The gospel's the simplest thing
in the world. But it's impossible for a man to understand it spiritually,
to actually receive it as truth, because it goes entirely against
his nature. It goes against his sense of
his own righteousness. It goes against his sense that
God is not all that tough and hard to get along with. And it
goes against his sense of pride, which tells, because the gospel
tells him there's nothing he can do that will remedy his problem. Well then, what is the method
of grace? If you look at 1 Peter 3, we're gonna look at two scriptures,
and this will show us the method or mechanics of grace. And then next week, we'll be
looking into some more aspects of that. But in 1 Peter 3, verse
18, we read this. For Christ died for sins once
for all. the righteous for the unrighteous
to bring you to God. Now right there, you know, is
essentially our entire theology summed up in one sentence. Christ
died for sins once. The righteous one in the place
of unrighteous ones to bring us to God. God's method of grace is nothing
more or less than this, that he would assume our form and
as one of us, he would suffer the penalty that he himself demanded
from us. He would take our place And we would take his. Now Jesus Christ is said to have
suffered once as the righteous one. There's no way to understand
the method of God's grace until we get some kind of understanding
of the absolute perfection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course,
he's absolutely perfect because he is God. But as a human, he
was perfect. And once again, these are deep
waters, you know. I suppose in some respects it's
no harder to float in deep water than it is to float in shallow
water. But it's certainly hard to get
to the bottom of deeper water. We're not going to get to the
bottom of this. But that one, Jesus of Nazareth,
someone who, so far as his appearance was concerned, like everyone
else. He didn't walk around with a
halo over his head. He didn't even walk around looking
especially magnificent. The scriptures say there is no
beauty, that means majesty, no majesty that we should desire
Him. And yet that one is nothing less
than the God who spoke the worlds into existence. And in his divine nature, there
was no sin. And he took no sin upon himself.
That is, he took no sinful nature upon himself when he took human
nature upon himself. He was made in the likeness of
sinful flesh, but he wasn't sinful flesh. And in the book of Galatians,
it tells us that he was born of a woman. So that shows us
he is a true human being. He's not some mirage. He's not,
you know, like the spirit, excuse me, the angels, which are spirits.
They can take on some kind of form if need be to do something
they're going to do, but that's not their natural form. Well,
that's not what our Lord did. He did not simply assume a form
so that he looked human, but really wasn't human. He was actually
literally human. He began as a single cell within
his mother's womb and it began to divide and then the cells
began to differentiate into the different organs that make up
human nature. And he was born as a little helpless baby. And he went through all the stages
of humanity to full adulthood. And in all that time, not once
did he ever think, desire, or do a sinful thing. You know, as soon as I become
conscious in the mornings and start, you know, the mental processes
start working, the knowledge of sin is right there. We wake up, excuse me, we wake
up and our minds are already tracking in directions they shouldn't
go. Soon we'll begin desiring things
we shouldn't desire. And if the opportunity arises,
we'll begin doing things we shouldn't do. Jesus Christ never did. Now that's an easy thing to say,
but to some degree, we really have no idea what that means.
We've never been in our experience without sin. Can you imagine
what it was like for him to live here? To be entirely clean and walk
through the cesspool that we have made of things? You know, when, uh, folks go around, homeless people,
you know, in these homeless camps, and they often live in a rather
filthy way. And, you know, those that go
among them to help them, you know, they are they've got to
have a certain level of ability to deal with the fact that these
folks, if nothing, you know, one of the things they really
need right away is a bath, you know, or something like that.
And they walk around and, well, like when I was in India, you
know, and we would go through these villages and there's just
trash out. Now all the people are all cleaned up and look nice
and everything, but there's trash by the road, and there's hogs
rooting around in it, and dogs running around. And you think,
boy, I wouldn't want to live in those conditions. Imagine
Christ, the spotless, perfect, pure Son of God, living in this
wretched, filthy cesspool of our existence, rubbing shoulders
with the vial all the time. And that's what his life was
like. We get around others, well, it's just human nature. We bunch
up, and if we're left to ourselves, we'll become more sinful in groups
than we would be by ourselves, so far as our conduct is concerned.
We tempt one another to sin. And I don't mean that we knowingly
do that and we go out with the intention of making people sin.
I'm sure some people have done that. I just mean that our sinful
natures, as it were, correspond to one another. And if God doesn't
restrain us, we will begin to multiply sinfulness. But our
Lord came into this world. and never once did the sinfulness
of those around him tempt him, make him desire to sin. He was one who by his nature
and by his works got God's stamp of approval as a righteous man. God said, this is my beloved
son in whom I am well pleased and if If the Lord Jesus Christ
had had anything wrong with him, God would not have been pleased
with him. That one died the just in the
place, or the righteous one in the place of the unrighteous. And by this method, suffering
in himself the penalty for sin, We who are sinners by nature,
by practice, by desire, by thought, we were brought near. In fact, we brought right to
God in a peaceable and enjoyable relationship. When it says we
brought to God, everybody's eventually gonna be brought to God, but
what he means is we are brought to God in a reconciled relationship. However, and now you can turn
back to 2 Corinthians chapter five. 2 Corinthians chapter five. How is it if Jesus Christ was
the righteous one and had no sin, how could God
put him to death? Remember, God is just. He will
not clear the guilty nor will he condemn the innocent. So Christ simply trading places
with us wouldn't get the job done. There has to be a transaction
made with regard to our sin. Christ dying, well God never
would have put him to death if there had not been sin on him.
So we read this and it says here, it says in verse 18, all this, the
new creation it's speaking of, all this is from God who reconciled
us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. I like that word reconciliation.
He gave the ministry of the gospel is calling people, that is the
ministry of preaching the gospel, is to call people to quit fighting
against God, to reconcile to God, to enter into a peaceable
relationship with God. And so he says, and here's the
ministry of reconciliation. Verse 19, that God was reconciling
the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against
them. Now, if you ever feel your sins,
and I know you do, no amount of gospel preaching
in this life is going to make us ever feel not guilty. Our natural conscience is there,
but when we feel the weight of our sins and we begin to think
that these sins are going to bring us into condemnation, remember
this, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not
counting men's sins against them, not charging their sins to them. There's wonderful peace in that.
We can't escape the fact that we sin, can we? That's true,
it's just so. But here it says that God is
not gonna charge us with our sin. But still, that leaves God doing
something unjust. He can't simply ignore our sin. He can't simply say, I'm just
gonna let it go. That would violate God's nature. So Paul goes on
and he says, he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors
as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore
you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. So gospel preachers go
out, now they just don't, they don't just go out there and go
be reconciled to God, be reconciled to God. That's just the exhortation
that comes after the explanation of how this could come to pass.
But we are called on to be reconciled to God. And the call comes to
us. Notice it's not God. Paul's not
praying God be reconciled to them. We are called to be reconciled
to God. Why? We're the problem. We're
the ones that's got to change. We're the ones who have created
the enmity. And this enmity not only exists
in the things we've done that have stirred up God's righteous
vengeance, it's our hatred of God and his ways. We should be reconciled, be brought
into a peaceable relationship with God. And then he explains
how this can be done without violating God's nature. God made
him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might
become the righteousness of God. Now, this verse has created I
said the verse doesn't create controversy. People's misunderstanding
of it creates controversy. Jesus Christ did not become a
sin. He didn't become anything in
the sense of his essence being changed. The word there that
says God made him to be sin for us is a word normally associated
with changing the form or function. In fact, it can mean nothing
more than calling somebody something. It says in the book of 1 John
that those who say they have not sinned will make God to be
a liar if they don't believe God. They make Him to be a liar.
The same word is right here. We know God doesn't become a
liar just because they don't believe in Him, but that's what
they're making Him out to be. And also, the words to be, there's
really nothing in the Greek language to back them up. Now, it's not
altogether unfit to put them in there, but really all it says, God made
him who had no sin a sin. Well, Jesus Christ is a human
being. You can't make human beings become
sin any more than you can make any human being become beauty
or virtue. What does Paul mean here? Well,
some think that he means that sin was so closely associated
with him, you could simply call him sin. And I can understand
that. The problem is that would not
satisfy the problem. Just making him sin is not gonna
cause us to become, and by the way, the word there is a different
word, which means to be changed into, to become something, that
we become the righteousness of God in him. Paul, of course he's writing
in Greek, but we also understand he's by nature a Jew. I mean,
that was his birth, that was his upbringing. You go through
the Old Testament, and you'll read about sin offerings. Out
of all the times that the Bible and the Old Testament refers
to sin offerings, I can't remember, there's very few that the word
offering is really there. It just says, you know, for sin,
you shall bring this, that, and the other, it is a sin. what the goat is a sin or the
lamb is a sin no it's a sin offering and that's I believe what Paul
means right here he made Christ to be a sin offering and if you
go to the book of Isaiah 53 it says he shall make his soul and
in the King James it says an offering for sin I believe you'll
find there the word offering is in italics, which means the
translators put it in there, but they're letting you know
the word offering is not really there in the Hebrew. But the
context lets you know that's exactly what is meant. Christ
wasn't made into a sin, he was made into a sin offering. In
order that we might become the righteousness of God in him,
it requires that he bear our sins, that our sins be charged
to him. It said back here that he wasn't
gonna charge our sins to us, well he's gotta charge them to
somebody. So he charges them to Christ. And it's right for
God to do that, that it's just and righteous for him to do that,
because Christ was willing for it to happen. You can't charge
a debt to someone that they didn't make unless they willingly take
it on. And Christ did. But it can't simply be that he
takes our sin. He also has to suffer for that
sin. And bearing sin and suffering
for sin that is bearing the sins of others and then suffering
for that sin is the very definition of a sin offering. And the result of it is this,
we become the righteousness of God in him. While our sin being
charged to his account made no change in his person, only his
condition, but not his person. He didn't become evil. He didn't
get an evil nature. It was a legal transaction by
which our sins, he was made responsible for them. And as a responsible
one, he did the responsible thing and paid for them. But that,
while it never worked a change in his person, it sure works
a change in God's people. Because the time will come when
we will be changed from what we are. which is essentially
sinful, and we will be transformed into that which is essentially
righteous. That's the method of grace. Christ swapped places with us,
but it was done justly because our sin was removed from us and
charged to him. And it was perfectly acceptable
for God to do that because Christ gave his consent. And thus, we're
not guilty. Not in heaven's court. And someday
we'll not only be not guilty as a matter of legal declaration
and substitution, we will be made by nature not guilty. All right.