Well, good morning. Good to see
everybody here. Join me in your Bibles where
Brother Loren read from this morning in 2 Corinthians 5. The
verse we're going to be launching from is found in verse 21. For He hath made Him to be sin
for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness
of God in Him." We touched on this a little bit in our previous
lesson last week in our Bible class from Luke, in that lesson
called The Unprofitable Servants, and looking at the church as
it It stands for the truth of the Gospel and declares the Gospel
faithfully without expecting any extra or special consideration. The Scripture there in Luke said,
we've just done what was our duty to do. We are unprofitable
servants. We don't deserve any extra credit
for just doing that which was right. And in that light, I wanted to kind of examine a
little bit of what we talked about Christ. We pointed to Christ
who turned out to be the only perfect and profitable servant. He is the perfect servant. from God. And there's many Scriptures
that we looked at last week in Luke that talk about Him. I came
not to be served, but to serve. And to do the things that God
directed Him to do. So in that connection of Him
being the perfect and the profitable servant, in that light, We kind
of wanted to examine this section here in 2 Corinthians where it
said, "...made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that
we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." So we see that
connection where His sinless perfection is necessary and connected
to the imputation of His righteousness to us, and that we might be made
the righteousness of God in Him. And so we wanted to kind of spend
some time on that today and look at that. You know, we examine
this sinless aspect of Christ as He dwelt among us and fulfilled
all the Scriptures and doing for us what we couldn't do for
ourselves. Although, kind of in researching
through this, many in religion in the past and even today maintain
They have a couple of erroneous views. And one of them is that
Christ didn't... it was unnecessary for Him to
die. And we're perfectly capable of coming to God on our own and
just saying, we're sorry. And then He should excuse that.
But they just have that erroneous concept of God and His righteousness
and His holiness and His justice and His eternality. say that he, in a universal way, covered all the sins of everyone
in the whole world, and then it's up to them to accept or
reject and believe that, which turns out to be another form
of work. So with that, you know, it's
important that we kind of look at the very definition of sin. And in Vine's expository dictionary,
it says it's missing the mark. It's a Greek term that you miss
the mark, the mark that's aimed at. And it says it's the most
comprehensive term for moral obliquity. Isn't that a $10 word?
Moral obliquity. Well, some of you may remember
from Mrs. Wells' math class that obliqueness
is a term used in mathematics and geometry. An oblique angle
or an oblique line is a line that takes off from a point.
If you have a line that's true, a line that's right, and an oblique
line takes off from that at a slant. And it just keeps getting further
and further and further and further and further and further and further
away. Kind of reminds you of that starship
in Star Wars. years ago when it first appeared
over your screen in the theater and it just kept getting bigger
and bigger and bigger. Well, that's how wide that oblique
line gets from God. It takes off from the right line
and just gets farther and farther and farther and farther away
from God. Spiritually, this oblique line
kind of pictures the fallen nature of man deviating from that right
line which is the righteousness and the holiness and the justice
of God. And as I mentioned, this sin, this oblique angle and line
just keeps getting us further and further away from God and
His true nature and His true attributes. And we become more
and more involved in our own error and incorrect understanding. So it's important for us to understand
man and really the nature and origin of sin, and to understand
the nature of God as we noted His righteousness, His holiness,
and His justice. And all those things are wrapped
up in His eternal being. We have trouble connecting those
those thoughts all the time that he's an eternal being and everything
that he has, all of his attributes, everything about him is eternal
in nature. And it's not just a linear, well,
from this point on, he is eternal. He always was. always is and
always will be, the past, the present, the future, as we kind
of understand it. But it goes much beyond that. So we have to understand that
a little bit about that part of God. We need to understand
the eternal consequence of sin, and to understand the need for
God's judgment against that sin to be realized, and to understand
the qualifications of one who can both satisfy the requirements,
both eternally and righteously, of God and the needs of man.
We're the sinner that needs the help. We're the ones that have gone off on this oblique line
away from God, missing the mark about Him. When we talk about
missing the mark, we're just missing the mark about God altogether
and everything about Him in our natural condition. I'd like to
turn over to Job 9. We'll read a couple of verses
from Job. Job's an interesting book. Many say that Job comes right
before Psalms in your Bible, but many say that he was a contemporary
of the Genesis Bible book, and maybe a contemporary of Abraham
in that time. So it's really an ancient book,
and he has some true understanding of God. In Job chapter 9, he recognized
that his best efforts could never satisfy the righteousness of
God. In chapter 9, verse 33, he said, if I could clean myself up, if
I could wash myself with snow, if I could clean myself up the
best I can, if I make myself as clean as humanly possible.
I'm paraphrasing here. He says, in the view of God,
even my own clothes would abhor me. And then he says this really
interesting thing here. He says, because God is not a
man, as I am." God is not a man as
I am, and He cannot be approached or bargained with as a man. And a lot of people look at God
in that way. They try to bring God down to
their level. They try to assign God attributes
of men and how we deal. And we're unreliable there in
our natural, especially in our natural condition. We make deals
all the time, and then when they don't suit us anymore, we say,
And so, it's not valid anymore. Brother Craig covered some of
that in the Bible class this morning about that covenant of
grace and the old covenant, and how Israel broke that covenant,
and decided they didn't need to participate anymore. So, Job,
he said, you know, if I clean myself up the best I can, it's
just not going to be good enough for God. And you know, later
on in chapter 19, he calls it in verse 20. Actually, it's earlier, I guess,
in chapter 19. Yeah, we were in 9.33. Now we're in Job chapter
19. He calls Him, My Redeemer. Isn't
that interesting? He refers to Him as My Redeemer,
My Ransomer, My Purchaser. He said, I could never do it
for myself. If I clean myself up the best I can, it's not good
enough for God. not the slightest bit of ability
to redeem myself. He says, I know my redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And
he says, and after my skin, I like the NET version of this. He says,
after my skin has been destroyed, yet my flesh, I'll see God. So
he understood some eternal principles that are really only revealed
because of the new birth. You don't really have an understanding
of those until the new birth when you realize the seriousness
of sin and the consequences of sin and your own inability to
to resolve that or do anything. So herein kind of lies this fundamental
problem that can only be solved by the new birth. And if we go
back to Genesis, in Adam, the father of us all in humanity,
when he sinned, he was just forever changed. As soon as he sinned
against God, he was not the same as what he was before. His entire
being was altered And right off the bat, he noticed he was naked.
He had no covering. And so he tried to make his own
covering, of course, out of the fig leaves. And we know that
that was not a good idea. Fig leaves are kind of stickery
and scratchy. So if I was going to pick something
to make a covering, probably, I don't know, fig leaf would
be my first choice. He hid from God. His relationship
was changed where instead of being in fellowship with God,
he hid himself from Him because he was afraid. Then he blamed
his wife, the woman you gave me. She gave it to me and I ate. It was her fault. And you know,
we still do that today. And so then the next thing was
he blamed God himself. He says, Well, you were the one
that gave me the woman. So you gave me the woman, she
gave me the fruit, and I did eat and blah, blah, blah. So
this crazy rationalization that he used. And that's how his nature
was after he sinned. Because God said the day that
you eat thereof, you'll die. And he did die spiritually, although
he lived according to the Scripture some 900 years physically. But he was forever changed. And then consequently, He could only pass on to all
of his progeny the very things that he was, himself. He could
only pass on his genes to the next generation, and his genes
now were genes that were impacted by the fall, impacted by sin. So, you know, really, he was
the only person in history, I think Norris pointed this out from
the pulpit before, that he was the only person in history that
actually had a free will that wasn't impacted by sin, and who
exercised it, and as is now always the case, he exercised it in
opposition to God, because God said, don't eat that, and he
says, Yeah, I guess I'll eat it if I want to. And he did. And whatever his motive was,
there's various things that have been stated as what his motive
might have been, but to will is present within him. That's
what Paul said. So, as a result, he became changed
and became something he never had been before, a perpetual
sinner. and his propensity was to sin. He was afraid of God instead
of being in fellowship with Him. When we have fear of something,
we try to avoid it. Whatever it is that makes us
afraid. And then we're usually in opposition
to it. Whatever it is that we have a fear toward. And so those
are just natural things that occur because of sin. And you know all those things
that he did. He hid. He blamed God, he blamed his
wife, he tried to make his own covering. You know, all those
things God overcame. And we always like to point out
that it was God that came to him and not he hit. He tried to avoid God, but God
came to him and took care of the situation the way that he
had ordained from before the foundation of the world. And
now every one of Adam's children now inherit the nature of their
father. Every one of them would have
the propensity to sin, to avoid God, to oppose God. You know,
back to Job in chapter 15, he says, man drinks iniquity like
water. That's a powerful statement about
our nature. We drink iniquity like water.
It's just part of us. You know, Paul in Romans 3 quotes
the psalmist in Psalm 14. He says, there's none righteous,
no, not one. None that understandeth. From their old nature, they've
all missed the mark. There's none that seeketh after
God. They're all gone out of the way. They're all together
become unprofitable. There is none that doeth good,
no, not one." That's a pretty inclusive statement about how
we are in our natural condition of sin. And so with that background,
it's necessary to look at sin in connection with the eternal
Lord God Almighty. So God is eternal, so a sin against
Him is eternal as well, has eternal consequences. And you know, at
the judgment described in Matthew, in Matthew 25, where he separates
out the sheep and the goats, the ones on the left and the
ones on the right. In Matthew 25, 46, he said, these, the ones
on the left, shall go away into everlasting punishment. So even
though a man may have lived as long as 900 years in Adam's day
and in the more modern times, man's days shall be 70 some odd
years, I think it says. But the sin has eternal consequences. They shall go away into everlasting
punishment. Well, everlasting is just another
word for a long, long time. But the righteous into life eternal. So there are these two consequences
that we have. for this sin. And they're really
connected to the eternality of God and how He views things and
how He responds to things and His nature. And man is finite. His days are like grass, and
yet the sin man commits has and requires an eternal consequence. And so, when we go back to Job
here in chapter 9, he was lamenting. He says, I can't clean up myself. I need a daisman. I need a mediator. I'm praying for someone who can
lay a hand on us both." That's what he said. Isn't that an interesting
concept? He said, I need someone that
can lay a hand on us both. Someone that can satisfy the
righteousness and holiness and justice of God and someone that
can simultaneously take care of the needs of man and his sin. So our daisman, he's referred to as the Lamb
slain from the foundation of the world in Revelation 13. Of
course, we can go back and read about God and
saying the penalty, the wages of sin is death. mortality in
this world and eternal death, that separation from God and
eternal punishment as God is eternal. And for man missing
the mark about God and His righteousness, they apply the thoughts and attributes
of man and fundamentally believe that sin can just merely be excused. Why can't God just excuse it?
Why can't He just say, well, that's okay. But that wouldn't be according
to His righteous and holy and justice nature. Sin is totally opposite to Him.
He is the exact opposite of sin. And so we can't just say, okay, He said you're sorry. That's
good enough. That's not the case. I was just reading something
from a theologian from what we'll call a major world religion. He said, it really was unnecessary
for Christ to die. We're quite capable of apologizing
to God and just coming to Him and saying, we're sorry. And
because He's a merciful God, He can exercise His mercy, even
sovereignly. When they miss the mark on that,
they miss the mark that He is sovereign and He will have mercy
on whom He will have mercy. But they miss the mark about
the spiritual understanding that all sin must be and will be punished. There's no sin that's going to
go excused. There's no sin that's going to
go unpunished. Somebody's going to be punished
for that. And so, He does sovereignly administer
mercy, but that mercy is contained and expressed eternally in His
Son. The daysman that we read about in Job. The daisman is
the only one that can lay a hand on us both. And why is that?
Well, the daisman, who by virtue of His eternal nature, as God
and with God, the Scripture tells us, and equally by His virtue
as holy man, the Lord became flesh and dwelt among us. It pleased God to send Him in
the fullness of time. God sent forth His Son, born
of a woman, in the likeness of flesh there. So we have that
aspect of Him, completely God, completely man, completely able
to keep all of God's laws and without sin, He was qualified
to and did offer Himself a ransom for many. He's like that sacrifice
in the Old Testament in Exodus. Everyone had to have a sacrifice. Everyone had to have a lamb.
It had to be a lamb without spot. A lamb without blemish. It had
to be a perfect lamb to picture this sacrifice. And it had to
be slain. And the blood had to be applied.
And we read about that in Exodus there when they left Egypt. So, substituting Himself as the
sacrifice, sacrificing Himself in their place, paying the penalty
for their sin in their place, satisfying the righteousness
of God, His holiness, His justice, and thus He's merciful in viewing
the church only through His Son and His righteousness. There's some that are proposing
that he actually became a sinner. Well, then he would not be the
perfect lamb. He would not be the lamb without spot, without
blemish. And he would have to have a sacrifice for his sins.
That whole process makes no sense and is totally not scriptural
here. There's just so many verses that
talk about that. 7.25 says, He's able to save them
to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth
to make intercession for them. He's that daisman, that mediator,
that ransomer, and the one that talked about in our text verse
from 2 Corinthians 5.21. He made Him. God made Him. to be our bearer of all of our
sins. That's what it says in Isaiah.
He laid on Him the iniquity of us all. You know, you could each
have a 10-pound bag of flour in your lap that would say that
represents your sin. And you could come up here and
lay that on Me. And I could have all these 10-pound bags of flour
waiting Me down. But I wouldn't become flour.
in that analogy. But I would take all those and
carry them, and then I would dispose of them the way Christ
disposed of all of our sins on the cross. He was the only one,
the sinless one who was capable, who only was qualified. Again,
we get back to the eternal part of the equation where there has
to be an eternal righteousness because God is eternal. And that
was imputed to all those whom the Father gave Him to redeem,
to ransom. And they, the church, are presented
to God without spot or wrinkle, without sin. What a wonderful
thing that we have that's called imputation, we call that. Our
sins are charged to His account. And His righteousness is charged
to our account. And so when God looks at us through
His Son, all He sees is the righteousness of His Son shining through. And He doesn't see our sin. There's
just so many Scriptures that says, I'll remember your sin
no more. They're separated from you as
far as the east is from the west, and cast in the deepest part
of the sea, and all those things that tell us how completely effectual
was this imputation of His righteousness to us. and how completely effectual
was His taking all of our sins on Him and paying for them and
thus satisfying God. Isn't that what it says in Isaiah
53, 11, I believe it is? He shall see the travail of His
soul and paying for those sins, hanging there on the cross, suffering
the wrath of God, he shall see the travail of his soul and be
satisfied. For my righteous servant shall
justify many." That's what that Scripture says. So, you know,
there's many pictures of that in the Bible. The good Samaritan
that stopped and helped when no one else would. And he took
him to the inn and said, whatever bill he rings up, charge that
to my account. I'll pay it. And if he needs
anything else, I'll take care of that too. And Paul said when
he wrote in Philemon, the book of Philemon, he was writing this
letter about this servant named Onesimus. And apparently, he
had kind of got crossways with his master. And Paul said, if
he hath wronged thee or oweth thee aught, put that on my account. I will pay. I, Paul, have written
it with my own hand. I will repay it. And that's a godly principle
of imputation. And John says, he writes to his
little children in 1 John 2 verse 1, he says, My little children,
these things I write unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man
sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the
righteous. If we say we have no sin, we just make him a liar. He says, I don't want you to
sin, but when you do sin, we have an advocate. We have a mediator. We have a daisman. We have one
that was sinless and was able to make himself an offering that
was satisfying God and that took care of our sins. And all our
sins, past, present, future, that we committed or will commit,
He's paid for them for the church. And the new birth reveals this
to the church. But it's just something that
only comes through the new birth. Jesus said to Nicodemus, unless
a man is born again, he can't see the Kingdom of God. That
verse has just become clearer to me every day, that if you
don't have the new birth, You're just not going to see any of
this. You're not going to see anything about yourself. You're
not going to see anything about sin. You're going to miss the
mark about God. You're going to try to attribute
to Him the characteristics and attributes of man. He's not a
man as I am, Job said, that I can approach unto Him and cut a deal. It's not going to happen. I can't
trade, oh God, if you save me, I'll never do this again. Or
if you save me, I promise I'll go and do this and such and all
those things that people try to wangle a deal or ones that
say, I don't really need you because I've kept all these from
my youth up. I've done everything. I'm not
really even a sinner. And if I have sinned, I've done
enough good stuff that in the balance, they work out. And you know, it's good to do
good stuff. It's good to do good works because
it's the right thing to do. But they're not... they're not
capable of cutting any ice with God in the way of salvation. Because He has supplied the only
thing that satisfies His righteousness, His holiness, and His justice.
And that's the sinless Son offering Himself a ransom for many. And
so when we're born again, our old nature is really revealed
to us in how we were, and we see ourselves and our sin as
never before. And then we see our new nature
as it is and as it will be. And then the sin that we still
have to deal with, Paul says, who's going to rescue me from
this body of death? All the things I don't want to
do, I end up doing. And things I want to do, I don't
do. He said the spirit struggles
against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit. You don't
really see that unless you're born again. that Old Testament showed what
was necessary for God to pass over them in judgment, and that
was the Lamb slain, that picture of the Lamb. You know, death
was going to happen, and it was either going to happen to the
substitute, or it was going to happen to them. And that's the
only two options that there really are regarding sin. It's either
going to be you or a substitute. And 1 Peter 1.18 says, "...for
as much as you know that you were not redeemed with corruptible
things as silver and gold, and from your vain conversation received
by the traditions from your fathers." All those things that Job says,
God is not a man as I am that He can be approached and bargained
with or paid off. He says, you are not redeemed
by those things but with the precious blood of Christ as a
lamb without blemish and without spot. He fulfilled that Old Testament
requirement, that picture that said you shall take a lamb from
the flock and you'll watch it two weeks. It has to be without
spot. It has to be without blemish.
It has to be perfect. In Malachi, God takes issue with,
as He was mentioning about the old nation of Israel and how
they corrupted things. In Malachi, He says, you're not
bringing Me. the lamb without blemish and
without spot anymore. You're bringing me the lame and
the blind and the halt and the maimed, the stuff you couldn't
sell in the marketplace. You said, well, let's take it
over and sacrifice it to God. he won't know the difference. And they think that way because
they missed the mark about him. So you can read about that in
the book of Malachi. He says, why don't you take one
of those offerings to the governor and see if he'll take it? Probably
not. So in 1 Peter 3.18, Christ hath
also once suffered for sins that just for the unjust, that he might
bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened
by the Spirit. The just says that he had no
sin. And the unjust says that we had
sin that needed to be dealt with. And we needed that just person,
the daysman, the perfect servant, to take care of that for us.
the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being
put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit." Brother
Craig covered that in the Bible class, raised for our justification. And as fully God and fully man,
the sinless daisman is able to lay a hand on us both. What a
picture of that. ability for him to satisfy God
and to satisfy the needs of man in his sin. Hebrews 4.15 says,
We have not a high priest which can't be touched with the feeling
of our infirmities. He came and dwelt with us and
was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. occurred to him to sin. It wasn't
his nature. He wouldn't sin. He's not like
man that his propensity is to sin. And then you always have
to kind of struggle with that. But it never happened with him. He was always perfect and without
sin and eternal in that regard. You know, Judas said... People
recognize this and it's recorded for us in the Bible. Judas said,
I betrayed the innocent blood. Pilate declared, I find no fault
in this man. I am innocent of the blood of
this just man, he called him. And the thief on the cross, one
of them said, you know, we're getting what we deserve because
we are guilty of the crimes for which we've been charged, but
this man has done nothing amiss." And then he called him Lord. So, you know, only the daisman, the
one who holy and holy, holy as in completely and holy as in
God, eternally God with us, who was without sin and thus qualified
to reconcile the children of God by offering himself a propitiation
for our sins. And that imputation, you remember
from the Old Testament where they took the goat and they symbolically
laid their hands on him and transferred their sin onto the goat. And
the one they released into the wilderness and the other one
was slain. That picture, that imputation. You know, God the Father laid
on him the sinless One, the iniquities of us all. And by His suffering
and death in our stead, He completely satisfied that eternal need,
that eternal righteousness, that eternal holiness and justice
of God. And we read that from verse 11
of Isaiah 53, By his knowledge shall my righteous
servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities."
And so, as a consequence, for those whose iniquities Christ
bore to the cross." In Romans 8, chapter 1, it says, "...there
is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus,
who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." Those
who walk not after trying to, of their own self, develop
their own righteousness, redemption work through approaching
God with good works and keeping the law and deeds and just saying,
well, why can't I just say I'm just sorry? You know, that will
happen. After the new birth, you'll look
at your own ways that were not good and loathe yourself, is
what it'll say. And you'll say, God, I'm just... from the heart, I'm sorry, not
the, well, yeah, I did that, but I'm sorry. We say that with carelessness now, we just say,
oh, I know I ran into your car in the parking lot, I'm sorry.
I got insurance, so. I'm sorry, I'm not really sorry.
It's annoyance to me, it's an inconvenience, I say I'm sorry just so you don't
yell at me anymore. Who shall lay anything to the
charge of God as elect, it says in Romans 8.33? It's God that
justifies. Who is He that condemneth? It's
Christ that died, yea, rather, is risen again, who is even at
the right hand of God, who maketh intercession for us. The sinless,
perfect servant. 1 John, we'll close with this verse
from 1 John 3, verse 5. He says, And you know, he was
manifested to take away our sin, and in him is no sin. He was the perfect servant, the
perfect daisman, the one who could lay his hand on us both.
So we'll close with that.