Well, good morning. Welcome to
our continuing Bible study in the book of Luke. We're in chapter
22. And today we'll be looking at verse 63 through 65.
The title of our message today is Our Substitute. We'll just read these three verses
here, and then we'll get started. In Luke 22-63, there were men
guarding Jesus. They began laughing at Him and
beating Him. They blindfolded Him, and they
said, Prophecy, who hit you? who smote thee," is what it says
in the KJV. And many other things, blasphemously
spake they against him. In our lesson titled Our Substitute
today, you know, all the gospel lessons up to this point, the
Lord has been busy about proclaiming the gospel, the good news, the
gospel of His saving His people from their sins, His almighty
activity, and doing for us what we couldn't do for ourselves.
And it's the same message that's been declared from the foundation
of the world, and you know the result. has been the same, it's been
true from eternity. In the fall, because we became
and are sinners and in our condition is dead in trespasses and sins,
we don't, we do not, we cannot believe either the truth of that
situation that we're sinners, the truth of God or the miracle
of substitution. I had kind of written this a
few days ago, but then Yvonna was making us some supper the
other night, and she had some zucchini, and she had this new
recipe for zucchini fritters. And she was going through the
recipe, and she says, well, I don't have that, and I don't have that,
and I don't have that. And so she was looking up in
her book, well, what can I substitute for this, or what can I substitute
for that? And she says, well, I don't have
that either, so we're just leaving it out. They came out okay, but you know,
scripturally and as far as the gospel is concerned, you can't
leave anything out of the, there's no substitute that you can substitute
for the sacrifice of Christ. There's no substitute that you
can do, and you can't leave anything out and have it still work. It won't come out. She was fresh out of a few things,
and you know, by sin and the fall, we're fresh out of belief. We're fresh out of, we're void
of any righteousness. You know, Isaiah wrote, and we'll
probably be looking at this as we move through Luke, and we're
looking at our substitute and the things that he endured in
our place that were pictures of what we deserve that Christ
fulfilled. Isaiah 53-1 said, Who hath believed
our report? And to whom is the arm of the
Lord revealed? It must be revealed in the new
birth, or it can't be seen, or received, or understood. The
Scriptures are very clear about that. You can't see the Kingdom
of God, you can't enter the Kingdom of God, you can't receive it,
you can't understand it, because it's spiritually discerned. That's
what it tells us in 1 Corinthians 2.14, you can't receive them. We don't believe them, and you
know, in every point thus far that we've shown in our studies,
in our Bible classes, that we've been connecting the Old Testament
gospel prophecies with the record of their being fulfilled, the
record of them being carried out in time according to the
determinate will and purpose of God. And our text today from
Luke 22, 63 is no different. It's the same, just as Christ is the same yesterday,
today, and forever. He's our great and loving substitute. these words that we read that
they blindfolded him and smote him on the cheek. Well, Isaiah
tells us he was smitten of God. Now he used these men to carry
that out just as he uses human means to accomplish a lot of
his purposes. It's as he has determined. They
smote him on the cheek, but Isaiah said he was smitten of God. And
I just thought, you know, in Romans 9.22 says, What if God,
willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured
with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction?
He let those guys smack him in the face. They blindfolded him. And this is just the beginning.
And that's kind of our point today is this is just the beginning
of the physical afflictions that he would be faced with and endure
in our place as our substitute. taking what we deserved, and
not just physically. These things happen to him physically,
but more importantly, they're a picture of the spiritual nature
of things where it's just an exhibit of God's wrath, and it
can only be displayed kind of physically in this manner. And because of our sin nature
and our rejection of God, of the Lord, of the Spirit, we can't
in this nature really understand the magnitude or the seriousness
of sin. And we can't really apply it
personally. We certainly don't see our need
for a substitute, because we say, a substitute for what? I
didn't really do anything that needs to be substituted for.
I didn't really do anything wrong. if I did something wrong, I was
justified. You know, we see that in the
news every day. In the news, well, those people,
I know they set fire to the courthouse and burned ninety-two cop cars
and abused a lot of people and threw
rocks and bottles and stuff, and then they looted 4,000 stores. But they had a right to do that,
because they were mistreated somehow. So they had a They were
justified in doing that, and that's just the nature of man,
to try and minimize sin and to rationalize it as permissible,
or even, as Adam said, well, it wasn't my fault. You gave
me the woman. It's really your fault, God. If you hadn't given me that woman,
I would not have ate that fruit. We can't see or understand that
all sin must meet justice. It's absolute. It's an absolute
fact. There's no omissions. There's
no, well, that didn't count. No human application of redefining
wrongdoing by degrees of seriousness. That's what we do in our human
nature. We say, well, it was only second degree murder. He didn't really plan it out,
but he did it on the spur of the moment, or second-degree
theft, or all those things that we define
as in degrees. We decriminalize
things in our mind. But that's not true with God. Sin is an absolute with Him.
And God has determined that sin, all sin, must be paid for, period.
And so it's a misunderstanding of the eternal holy nature of
God, and thus misunderstanding the penalty of sin and an eternal
consequence that leads to more and more misunderstandings. They don't understand God. They
don't understand holiness, His holiness and righteousness. And
they think of God in terms of themselves and not Him being
the absolute, sovereign Creator, Ruler. And so they apply things to God
that are not applicable. And they try to assign to Him
human characteristics and attributes and understandings that don't
apply to Him. Our text in Luke 22-63, it's
really a dividing line between all the declaring of the gospel
from Genesis 1 and 1 on, and the gospel being carried out
according to the determinate will and foreknowledge of God
the Father. He was smitten of God. That was written by Isaiah
centuries before. And it was written because God
determined that that's what would happen. And he foreknew it because
he determined it. Not the other way around. Not
because he just had a really cool crystal ball and was a good
fortune teller. He determined everything. I like that Scripture says, in
Him we move and have our being. If we really take that verse
and look at it in its total, every movement that we make is
by His determinate counsel and will. Everything. In Him we move
and have our being. So everything's being carried
out according to his determinate will and purpose. He foreknew
because he determined, he ordained, what in his sovereign purpose
would end in satisfaction. That's what it tells us if we
go down to the end. Isaiah 53, after he says all those things
that were going to happen to Christ, He was wounded for our
transgressions, He was smitten of God and afflicted, and all
those things that say what He was going to do for His people,
God was going to look at those and be satisfied with that offering
that was pictured in all the Old Testament. That would end
in satisfaction. And that is what he has determined
is the only thing that would end in satisfaction. There's
nothing else that's going to end in satisfaction. He caused
it to be written. He caused it to be preached in
every age, a substitute. And we found that from the beginning. Adam hid. Adam denied sin, denied
that there was really a consequence according to the Word of God,
and then he attempted to provide his own substitute. They sewed
aprons out of fig leaves. He didn't even know how to make
a good substitute. I mean, how long could a fig
leaf last? I mean, you bend over one or
two times, Plus, they're really scratchy. And fig leaves are,
if you were going to have a thing that you were going to pick out
of all the elements on the earth, of all the things, just shows
you how bad the fall is, well, let's pick a fig leaf. Well,
it's kind of big, probably. But it's just not comfy. It doesn't
make a very good covering. And the eyes of them both were
open, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves
together and made themselves aprons, which was unsatisfactory
to God. Sin had not been covered. So unto Adam and also unto his
wife did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothe them." A
picture of what would be satisfactory. In the process of time, we move
on to Genesis 4. In the process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought
the fruit of the ground and offered it to the Lord. Here's a zucchini. It was unsatisfactory to God. A zucchini does not picture what
I've determined that would be satisfactory to me. But unto
Abel, he also brought of the first of his flock, and the fat
thereof as had been shown him. And the Lord had respect to Abel
and his offering. Now his offering was not effectual,
it was a picture. But there was an understanding
there that that was to picture a substitute. and that blood
was going to be shed, and that there was going to be a covering
for sin because of that blood that was shed. And it represented
a picture and understanding that God would provide a substitute. And Norm and I were talking this
morning about Genesis 22, 8, where Abraham said, my son, God
will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering. And he brought
out something that he's going to kind of share in one of his
lessons on further on. But God provided the only thing
that was satisfactory. And in our study of Luke so far
has shown firstly that Christ coming as promised fulfilling
all the law and doing for us what we couldn't do for ourselves,
tempted in all points, yet without sin. Secondly, He demonstrated
without question that He was the Son of God with power. How
many miracles did we talk about and read about in the loop? raising
people from the dead, and that's causing the lame to walk, and
the blind to see, and the deaf to hear, and lepers cleansed,
and all those things that pictured his ability, his power as a son
of God for the purpose of identifying him. Who did sin, this man or
his parents, that he was born blind? Neither this man sinned
nor his parents, but he was this way so that the power of God
might be displayed. It was for a purpose. Thirdly, he declared the gospel
of his substitutionary offering and suffering and death in the
place of his people, those people that God the Father had given
him in eternity in the covenant of grace. Matthew 20, 28 says,
even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister and to give his life, a ransom for many. And that word
for means in the place of. It's an exchange. In our text, now begins the physical
affliction. You know, before, as Christ went
around, He dealt with the unbelievers and the people that the Pharisees
and the religious people in unbelief. They said all kinds of awful
things to him and accused him of everything that you could
think of. You're just a drunkard or charlatan,
an insurrectionist, anything they
could think of to accuse him to distract from the reality
of it. But now that was just verbal,
maybe a little emotional. But now we come to the beginning
of the physical, the actual physical smiting of the Lord, the assault
on the Word and truth of the Word of God. He was bound as
the scriptures said he would be. He was bound and led to the
high priest. As we look at this, and we look
at a couple of the other Gospels that kind of give a little more
detail on what is transpiring, Jesus is kind of in this court
area, and they've got a fire built there, and Peter's kind
of sitting off to the side there, and remember they said, hey,
you're one of them Jesus folks, and he's, nope, nope, I'm not.
And they've got these people that have been given custody
of Jesus, and they've got time to kill, so they're just abusing
Him to kind of kill time. Because the head guys, The chief
priests and the elders, they're all in a little room off to the
side as we often find in religion when they want to get rid of
somebody. They have their little secret meeting off to the side
and say, we have to do something with this guy. And they said,
well, he hasn't really done anything bad. Well, we have to get some
liars then. We need to send out and see if
we can find some false witnesses that will testify against him
and accuse him of something so that we can stone him or have
him put to death. So these guys that have him now,
they're mocking him. They put a blindfold on him and
smacked him and said, hey, prophecy, who was it that smacked you? And he just kept quiet. He knew who it was. But it wasn't
for the purpose of saying, OK, I know it was the centurion or
this Jewish fellow that hit me. Who hath believed our report?
They mocked him in unbelief. which that's all that boils down
to. They didn't believe, so they
mocked him. In spite of all that they witnessed,
just not three paragraphs ago, he put the ear back on a guy
that got almost cleaved with a sword. They got knocked to
the ground when he said, I am. You'd think that they would say,
hmm. Maybe we ought to reconsider
what we're doing here." But no, no, they were so intensely convinced in their
unbelief and in their lost state that they could do whatever they
wanted to, so they mocked him and smacked him. And just as in all through time,
it meant nothing to a heart in its natural condition of being
dead in sin, desperately wicked and deceitful. It just doesn't.
They can see all the miracles, as we saw all the way from the
beginning of the Bible all the way through the Exodus, and all
the things that were shown to them, and going into the Promised
Land, and all the people that were raised from the dead and
healed of leprosy and all those things that were shown in God's
power in the Old Testament, to the unregenerated just meant
nothing. They had to be given a heart
to believe. And Ephesians says, we believe according to the working
of His mighty power. And if that mighty power is not
exercised on us, then we just won't and we can't. Our text
says, the men held Jesus. They mocked Him and smote Him,
blindfolded Him, struck Him in the face and said, Prophecy,
who is it that smote thee? Well, you know, Job, they say
Job's one of the oldest books in the Bible. And just because
it comes after Psalms in the Bible, it's not a chronological
order, but it's maybe much, much older than that. But Job wrote
in chapter 16, verse 9, "...he teareth me in his wrath, who
hateth me. He gnasheth upon me with his
teeth. Mine enemies sharpen his eyes
upon me. They have gaped upon me with
their mouth, They have smitten me upon the cheek reproachfully. They've gathered themselves together
against me." What prophetic words did Job write, and how we see
that coming together. The agony. Think of Christ, the
agony. He was He caused all this to
be written in Job and in Isaiah, in Psalm. Boy, when we get into
Psalm 22, it just takes you through that episode on the cross, and
it gives you just step-by-step graphic detail of the agony that
He endured as our substitute. So this is really just the beginning.
This is like preliminary stuff. But imagine not just the physical
aspect of being abused by these men that he was so far above,
that he endured with much long-suffering because he was accomplishing
what it said in the Gospel, that he would lay down his life for
ransom for many. Imagine the agony of being punished
by one whom you loved eternally. He said, what's the greatest
commandment? Thou shalt love the Lord God
with all thy heart and all thy mind. He's the only one that
could do that. And imagine him taking this from
the one that he loved with all his heart and all his soul and
all his might, smiting him. He was smitten of God and afflicted. It's just beyond our comprehension. We just can't really get our
arms around the immensity of that. Micah chapter 5. In Micah chapter 5, it talks
about some of this. And when we get down to verse
5, it says something just incredibly important. In Micah 5, it says,
Now gather thyself in troops, O daughter of troops. He hath
laid siege against us. They shall smite the judge of
Israel with a rod upon the cheek. But thou, Bethlehem of Pharaoh,
though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of
thee shall he come forth unto me, that is to be ruler in Israel,
whose goings forth have been from old, from everlasting. Therefore will he give them up
until the time that she which travaileth have brought forth.
Then the remnant of his brethren shall return unto the children
of Israel, and he shall stand and feed in the strength of the
Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God, and they
shall abide. For now shall he be great unto
the ends of the earth. Imagine that. It's kind of a
contradiction, really not a contradiction, but something that we can't really
fully grasp of Him submitting to being smitten and yet being
strengthened all at the same time. And He says in verse 5,
and this man shall be the peace. This man shall be the peace,
the substitute. This man shall be the peace when
the Assyrians shall come into our land, when he shall tread
in our palaces. Then shall we raise against him
seven shepherds and eight principled men. This man shall be the peace.
You know, he's a substitute, enduring for
us what we deserve, the substitute that imputes to us his own righteousness
by grace, And so we find that substitution,
salvation by substitutionary grace then is the inverse of
the proposition of man. Because we find that man, from
the very beginning, is always trying to substitute his own
works of righteousness in the place of what God has determined
is satisfactory. So salvation by grace, the inverse
of the proposition of man, God providing a substitute in grace,
not man providing works as a substitute for the substitute. In Isaiah
29, he says, surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as a potter's
clay. For shall the work say of him
that made it, he made me not? Or shall the thing say of him
that framed it, he had no understanding? Trying to substitute our understanding
and our concept of what consists of righteousness, it's
turning things upside down. It'll never work. Our text declares the beginning
of what the Lord declared at the Lord's Supper. He said, this
is my body, which is given for you. Now while in Jesus' custody and
waiting his trial, his examination by the high priest, because remember
the sheep had to be taken to the high priest. They had to
put that sheep aside for two weeks and make sure that it didn't
have anything wrong with it. And when they were satisfied
that it was without blemish and without spot, wasn't sick or
blind or halt or maimed, All those things that we found that
they decided, hey, we can fob this off on the priest and sell
the good sheep at the market, because we can't sell this defective
one. But he fulfilled all that. He was bound. He was brought
to the high priest. And while he's awaiting this
examination, they're seeking these false witnesses that it
talks about in Matthew 26, 59. They sought false witnesses against
Jesus to put him to death. A sentence that God had already
determined to be carried out, in which they, by the determinate
counsel and foreknowledge of God, were carrying out. And again, he foreknew because
he determined, and that's what it tells us in Acts 2.23, him
being delivered by or according to the determinate counsel and
foreknowledge of God, you have taken him by wicked hands and
crucified and slain. He determined it, and he foreknew
it because he determined it. They had already decided the
outcome in their minds. They were not an impartial jury. They were not there to weigh
evidence of the truth. They had already decided, it
tells us in John chapter 11, Verse 47, Then gathered the chief
priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? For this
man does many miracles, and if we let him us alone, all men
will believe on him. That shows you how warped their
mind was. And the Romans shall come and
take away both our place and nation. And one of them named
Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them,
You know nothing at all, nor consider it, that it is expedient
for us that one man should die for the people, that the whole
nation perish not. You know, they were looking at
it from purely a physical standpoint, saying, hey, if we get rid of
this insurrectionist, the Romans will be satisfied. We can go
on in our religiosity and continue unabated and unhindered. But
we've got to get rid of this troublemaker guy first. He didn't
really understand what he said. And that's what it tells us in
verse 51 of John 11. This bake he not of himself,
but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should
die for that nation and not for that nation only, but also he
should gather together in one the children of God that were
scattered abroad. And from that day forward, they
took counsel together for to put him to death. So they'd already
determined according to the determinate
counsel of God, what should take place. And in their devious minds,
they were working out all these things, and everything played
into their hands just as God determined. Judas came to them
and said, hey, I can deliver this guy just as the Scripture
said. And the chief priests and all
the council sought for witnesses against Jesus to put him to death,
but they found none. For many bear false witness against
him, but their witnesses agreed not together." Isn't that just
a picture of man's interpretation of the Gospel,
too. All these ones bearing false
witness against Christ and His substitutionary death for us,
for His people. But even their witnesses don't
agree together. This one says, well, we believe
this, and another one says, well, we believe that. It all boils
down to their own self trying to implement some sort of self-righteousness. But their various schemes are
as many as there are denominations of what is called Christianity
in the world. But they don't agree together.
There's only one truth. There's only one substitute. There's only one gospel. And
if somebody comes with another gospel that's not another gospel,
he says, you ought to avoid them. So we'll stop there. And our final word is be free
in the substitute.