Most People Will Miss The Signs Before Jesus Returns - R.C. Sproul

I do want to turn your attention to 1 Corinthians 15, to a portion of it at least tonight. And I'd like to begin the reading of the text from verse 12.

"Let there be light." Doesn't work when I say it's nice to have this Bible if I could just see it. But Paul writes to the Corinthians. Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there's no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. And we are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that he raised Christ whom he did not raise. If it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. And if in Christ we have hope in this life only, in this life only, we are of all people the most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive, but each in his own order, Christ the first fruits. Then at his coming, those who belong to Christ, and then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and authority and power.

And then, if I can jump down briefly to verse 29. Otherwise, why do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? Why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord. I die every day. And what do I gain if humanly speaking I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, or if the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

Let's pray, shall we? Our Father, we thank you for this apostolic word that carries to us your truth. Your truth that is more certain than life itself. We thank you for its testimony. We thank you for its clarity. And now we pray for the illumination of the same Spirit who inspired this text to carry it now into our hearts and into our minds, that it may pierce our very souls. For we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

The 1st of July, 1965, our son was born. Vesta and I had, and our daughter Sherry had just recently returned from Europe where I'd been pursuing doctoral studies at the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. And one of the main reasons why we interrupted that sojourn was so that Vesta could get the medical attention she needed with the delivery of this baby. And so in the early hours of July the 1st, Vesta delivered our firstborn son. And after I saw him for the first time and comforted my wife after the delivery, I went back to my mother's apartment where we were staying in the interim, rested for a little bit, and then drove downtown Pittsburgh to pick up my mother from her place of employment. And she, of course, was so very excited because I had been the last living male Sproul on our side of the family, and she was hoping that the name would be carried on. You know how mothers are. And so I took her immediately from her work to the hospital that she could see her new grandson. And after we visited the hospital, I took her out for dinner and then back to her apartment. And when we came to the front door of the apartment, there was a package there on the stoop. And she was excited about that because it was the dress that she had ordered to wear for my ordination, which was scheduled about 10 days from that moment. So, we went inside and talked more, and she spent time gushing about the excitement of the newborn baby. And then she said that she was tired. She wanted to go to bed. And I said, "Fine." And so, before she went in her bedroom, she turned to me and she said, "Son, this is the happiest day of my life." Those were the last words that she ever spoke to anyone in this world. She went to bed. Later on, I went to bed, and in the bed next to me, we had our three-year-old daughter. And in the morning, I could hear my daughter screaming for her grandmother to wake up. And I knew something was amiss. And I got out of bed and walked and opened the door to my mother's bedroom. And as soon as I looked at her from the doorway, I knew that she was dead. And I walked over to the bed and I touched her. And her body was ice cold. Rigor mortis had set in. She had obviously been dead for several hours. And in that moment, I had something of an existential epiphany. As I stood by my mother's bed and saw her in death, I thought, "This is absolutely insane. This makes no sense at all." Even though eight or so hours have passed since I last spoke with her, those hours were spent asleep. And you know what sleep is like? You go to sleep at night. You wake up in the morning, and in your mind, it's only been a few moments that have transpired. And I said, "The last time I saw her before I went to sleep, she was a living, breathing, loving human being, filled with joy, and now she is cold and dead." I was shaking my head. I said, "It was just yesterday that I saw the first moments of life of my son, and that the same day my son was born was the last day of my mother's life."

And I thought about that this afternoon when Alistair was talking about how rational is the resurrection, how irrational is death, how death defies everything that we experience in life. And perhaps the oldest question that human beings have raised of all types and stripes and cultures is the question posed by Job: "If a man dies, shall he live again?" Is there anything after our eyelids close in death? And every culture that we've examined has invested some hope that life survives the grave. We hear of the Egyptians who built these massive tombs and pyramids, giving the burial site all kinds of implements that might be used in the next life. We think of the American Indians who dreamed of the happy hunting ground, the Norsemen with their Valhalla, the Greeks with the shadowy underworld of Hades. But wherever we look at human culture, we see this hope for the continuity of life that refuses to be extinguished from the human heart. And so there we are with that hope. But as the Bible says, without Christ, we are really without hope.

And here Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, is addressing this very crisis because there were those in the Corinthian community who wanted a Christianity without resurrection. Like we find in the teachings of scholars like Rudolph Bultmann, who would consign the resurrection to the realm of mythology, and to 19th-century liberalism, which has turned so many of the mainline churches into museums and mausoleums for the death of God. But that problem arose in Corinth in the first century, that there were those stirring up the people saying there is no such thing as resurrection from the dead. And so here, in this letter that Paul writes to the Corinthians, he responds to this skeptical opinion. And he does it in a remarkable way.

Paul was, without question, the most educated Jew in Palestine. He had the equivalent of two PhDs by the time he was 21. And though his education was so heavily Jewish, he understood what most modern scholars don't: the Greeks had no monopoly on logic, but that logic was something that was shared by all humanity, and that the human mind has been created by God with abilities and patterns of thought that are to be rational, not chaotic and logical. I think that many people misunderstand the role of Aristotle here. They somehow think that Aristotle invented logic, when in fact all he did was discover the laws of logic. And I would say to my students, Aristotle no more invented logic than Columbus invented America. He found what was already there.

Now, I make this brief introduction about logic because Paul argues here to the Corinthians in an exceedingly logical manner, using techniques of debate that were common in the ancient world and common to his own style of debate and of argument. One of Paul's favorite techniques was the use of what is called ad hominem argumentation. Ad hominem argumentation literally means arguments to the man. Now, those of you who are students of logic know that there is a persistent logical fallacy that is defined as the ad hominem abusive fallacy. And that means if I can't argue with your reasoning, I'll attack you as a person. And instead of dealing with your arguments, I smear you by throwing mud at you. And of course, we know that even bad people now can offer a sound argument, and their badness does not vitiate the claim to truth that they may make in a given arena. And so the ad hominem argument is a fallacy where you attack the person rather than the argument. Now, sometimes that informal fallacy called ad hominem abusive is abbreviated by people who simply call it the ad hominem argument. That's not good, because there is a legitimate form of ad hominem argumentation. And that's what Paul does here. And it means this: that you hear the argument of your opponent, and for the sake of argument, you step into the shoes of your adversary, and for the sake of argument, you assume their assumptions, you assume their principles, and say, "Okay, if what you are saying is true, let's see where it takes us. Let's take your premise to its logical conclusion." Again, an ancient form of argumentation made famous by Zeno. And that form of argument is called the reductio ad absurdum. And if you don't know a word of Latin, you just heard some. And you could certainly guess what it means. Reductio ad absurdum means to take an argument and reduce it to absurdity.

Am I going too fast? And this is what Paul does here as his method of defending the resurrection. He says, "Okay, some of you are saying there's no such thing as resurrection of the dead." But if there is no resurrection of the dead, what would that mean? What would follow from that premise? Let's take that reasoning and carry it out and see where it leads us. So he said, "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised."

Let me just stop right there. I know my wife would have been happy had I stopped the logic argument five minutes ago. I can't help it. [Laughter] I used to teach logic. Okay? And in the teaching of logic, you have to teach people the laws of immediate inference. And if we could all master those laws and keep breaking those laws, we would have a whole lot more agreement and a whole much greater clarity of understanding of the things of God. It is the number one reason why the Bible is misinterpreted is because the laws of immediate inference are violated. A simple one: if we have a universal affirmative, "all men are mortal," and then say about a particular man, Socrates, that he's mortal. And we see in the first premise a universal affirmative and the second one a particular affirmative. They agree. But if we say, "All men are mortal, but this man is not mortal," then what? Doesn't compute. You can't have a universal affirmative with a particular negative. Nor can you have a universal negative with a particular affirmative. Everybody knows that. [Laughter]

And that's what Paul does here. He says, "Let's take it. If there's no resurrection of the dead," that's a universal negative. "And if there's no resurrection of the dead, then you can't have a particular affirmative. If there's no resurrection of the dead, then manifestly," [clears throat] "Paul is saying, not even Christ has been raised." What could be more simple than that? Okay, he says, "You got that so far? Let's take it to the next step. If Christ has not been raised, then what are the consequences of that?"

Listen to what he's just not playing abstract games with logic and syllogisms. What Paul is saying to the Corinthians in their cynicism and in their skepticism, he said, "Do you people realize what's at stake here? If there is no resurrection and if Christ is still dead, if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain." Paul's saying, "You know, I was ordained to be a preacher. I've spent my whole life preaching in Antioch and Ephesus and Philippi, Corinth, and Athens. And if Christ isn't raised, then all that preaching, every moment that I've ever spent in the pulpit has been a herculean waste of time. It's been a pure exercise in futility. And not only has my preaching been in vain, but your faith is in vain."

Listen to the message of the preacher in Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanity. All is vanity, saith the preacher." He's not talking about vanity in the sense of people who look at themselves in a mirror and in their vain narcissism enjoy their own images. He's not talking about that kind of vanity, pride, hubris. He's talking about labor that is worthless, that is futile. We heard already today of the poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound, full of fury, full of passion, signifying nothing. We've already heard references today to Jean-Paul Sartre. When he was examining the significance and the meaning of human existence, he wrote a little book called *Nausea*. It was his final definitive assessment of the significance of human existence. *Nausea*. He said, because man, in the final analysis, is a useless passion. It's one thing I like about Sartre: he doesn't pull any punches. He says, "What we have here is that it's we're either dealing with full-orb theism or the only rational alternative is absolute nihilism, where in the final analysis, all you have is the nihil, the nothingness." As Nietzsche put it: a useless passion. What a way to describe a human being. See, Sartre understood that people, as every existentialist understood, have *bizorgan*. They have care. They have concern. They have feelings. Things matter to you. When your loved one dies, your heart is broken, and you're torn by grief, and your feelings are so intense that you go to the house of mourning and you weep and you sob because the intensity of your feelings is so great. It's passion. But Sartre said it's a useless passion. A passion that can't change anything. It can't bring back your loved ones. Can't make any sense out of the nonsense and the meaninglessness of human existence. That's the message of the atheistic existentialist, in which our culture has not only been swimming but has been drowning for decades. That in a very real sense, the Apostle Paul here anticipates Sartre and from one perspective agrees with him. "You're right, Jean-Paul. If Christ is not raised, give me that premise, then you're right. We're all nothing but a mass of useless passion." This I appreciate of Sartre. This I appreciate of the Apostle Paul. They had no time for the stupidity of humanism that lives on borrowed capital, that, as Francis Schaeffer once said, "The humanist has both feet firmly planted in mid-air. He's on a roller coaster without brakes. He tells you that your origin is from nothing. You popped into existence fortuitously by chance. You're nothing more than a grown-up germ sitting on one cog of one wheel of a vast cosmic machine that is destined to annihilation. Your origin is meaningless and nothingness, and you are rapidly moving toward the abyss of non-being. So the two poles of your existence," [snorts] "birth and death, is simply an oscillation between nothingness and nothingness. But the humanist wants to exalt the dignity of this grown-up germ between these two poles." You talk about superstition. Talk about nonsense. You know, if you're a grown-up germ, who cares [laughter] where black germs sit or white germs sit on the bus? I'm not going to lose any sleep over the rights of germs. But if we're creatures made in the image of God, then it matters profoundly where we sit on the bus and what our dignity is. You see, the humanist wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants he wants to borrow and extrapolate some of the values from the Christian faith while denying its very foundation. It's crazy. That's why I appreciate Sartre and Nietzsche so much more. Come on, they tell it like it is.

"If there is no resurrection from the dead, your faith is in vain." And not only that, let's not stop there. The apostle says, "We're even found to be misrepresenting God." Instead of calling us Christians, call us Jehovah's false witnesses. Because we've been testifying to the whole world that not only is Jesus raised, but the one who raised him is God. Listen to the careful work of Paul here: "whom he did not raise. If it is true that the dead are not raised." You get it? The dead are not raised. Then God didn't raise Jesus because the dead are not raised. God hasn't raised anybody. Am I going too fast?

"For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And again, if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you're still in your sins." His death was a martyr's death, but it had no atoning value. Because not only was Jesus killed for our justification, he had to be raised for our justification. And if God did not raise him from the dead, if God delivered him into the hands of death, who had no claim over him, and left him there, then it would be clear that his sacrifice was unacceptable to the Father, and that you and I are still in our sins, where we were before we ever met Christ. Lost, hopelessly lost. [Sighs]

That's not all. There's more. "Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished." Your funeral services were hoaxes. Your father who died, your mother who died, your baby who died, your brother who died, your sister who died, your son who died, your daughter who died are gone [clears throat] forever. They have not just fallen asleep to be awakened at the last trump. They have perished. "And if in Christ we have hope in this life only, if we only have Jesus to help us through the struggles and morals and afflictions of this world, then we are of all people," the apostle says, "the most to be pitied." I say to my friends who are unbelievers when we have discussions like this and they manifest hostility and anger towards Christians, I say, "Really, don't be mad at us. Pity us because we are poor, deluded souls who have committed our lives, our money, our time, our hope to an illusion. Pity us." Because we're not only pitiable, we're the most pitiable type of people imaginable.

Later on, he goes on to say, "Why are we in danger every hour?" He says, "I protest. I protest. I die every day." Let me think about this in human terms. What in the world am I doing fighting the wild beasts at Ephesus? Why am I slandered, imprisoned, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked? Cut it out. Don't come into my church and tell me you're a Christian, but you don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus. I protest. The apostle says, "As you've reduced my suffering, my pain, and my ministry to nothingness."

Now, I want to interrupt my own self for just a second here. Because if the only defense for the resurrection of Christ that Paul can offer is how grim life would be without it, then we have no argument at all. We would be vulnerable to the charge that people make that religion is simply a bromide, an opium for the masses, a crutch for people who can't face the stark, harsh reality of human life. And so, in order for us to be able to cope with a meaningless existence, we cling to our myths of religion, our dying and rising gods. And *Alice in Wonderland* is simply a—I mean, Christianity is simply a chapter out of *Alice in Wonderland*. Who walks up to the fork in the road and doesn't know whether to go to the left or to the right? She looks up in the tree, and there's the Cheshire Cat smiling at this girl's dilemma. And she looks up at the cat and she says, "Which way should I go?" And you know what the Cheshire Cat says? "Well, that depends. Where are you headed?" And I'll say, "I don't know." And the Cheshire Cat says, "Then it doesn't matter." It's like Yogi Berra when you come to a fork in the road, take it. [Laughter]

But you see, it's not enough to seek the Christian faith as a painkiller. If Christ is not raised, I'm going to sleep in tomorrow morning. I'm not going to waste another moment of my life preaching and teaching the things of God to people. Nor does Paul stop with the grim realities. He's just simply saying, "I want you to understand what's at stake here. I want to disavow you of any compromise like humanism." But Paul, not for a moment, does he rest his case on this ad hominem argument by which he shows that without resurrection, life itself is reduced to absurdity. He's not saying, "Since the only option to resurrection is grim, we need to embrace the resurrection." No. That's not the apostolic testimony.

What is it? He says, "But now in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep." Back up to the beginning of the chapter where Paul says, "Now I would remind you, brothers, I'm not telling you something new for the first time. I'm giving you a reminder of the gospel I preached to you, which you have received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if indeed you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures."

Let me stop right there for a second. You want the highest proof you can ever imagine of the truth of the resurrection? Wouldn't you like to know that Jesus really came out of that tomb and know it with certainty? How would your life change if you knew absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, that Jesus is alive and not dead? How would that change your life? How, if you could get an answer to that question that was so certain [clears throat] that it came to you from a source that was indisputable, that it was infallible? Well, guess what? We have the testimony of the word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice known to the human enterprise. No laboratory experiment, no logical syllogism, no formal affirmation or material demonstration can possibly exceed in certitude a single affirmation of the infallible word of God. If God walked in this room right now and said, "Listen, now hear this. You can quit arguing with the skeptics and the cynics. Let me just tell you, I raised my son and he's alive." Would that settle it? Would you say, "Well, let me hear some more opinions from somebody else"? That's why Jesus said of the scriptures and said of his Father, "O God, sanctify these people [clears throat] by Thy word, because Your word is truth."

I grew up in a liberal church. They celebrated Easter every year. The minister told us that the meaning of Easter was that we were to face the dawn of each new day with dialectical courage. Another minister on the staff said this: "When you're dead, you're dead. I thought Christianity was about morality." And September the 13th, 1957, I was interrupted on my way to a bar by a football player. Sat me down at a table and started talking to me about Jesus. But he talked to me about Jesus like no human being had ever talked to me about Jesus. I'm thinking, this guy's talking about Jesus like Jesus is alive. And I walked away from that table and I said to myself, "More than anything else I've ever known in my life, I want what that guy has." I went into my closet, into my room. I turned out the lights and I got down on my knees, put my head on my bed, and met the living Christ, which was the defining moment of my entire existence. And I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that I will see him standing on that day.

And Paul says, "First of all, I delivered to you as of first importance what I received: that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. He was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. And that he appeared to Cephas, then to the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 people at one time, most of whom were still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, the brother of Jesus, who didn't believe in Jesus until the resurrection, unto all the apostles. And last of all, as one born untimely, he appeared to me." So what I'm talking to you about is not a hypothesis like Plato's concept of the seed that dies before it comes to life. That Plato mused in his dialogues over the death of his beloved Socrates. He said, "I believe in the resurrection because I saw him, just like Peter saw him, just like James saw him, just like the 12 saw him, just like 500 people saw him. He appeared to me while I was in the midst of my effort to expunge this sect from the face of the earth. He stopped me in my tracks, and as one born out of due time, he came to me, and I saw him."

And then he goes on to spell out the consequences of that: that now that Christ is risen, he's not just risen as an isolated event in human history, but he is risen as the first fruit of all of those who will come after him who are in him. And when he talks about this triumph and this victory over the grave and over death, mocking the grave, "O death, where is your victory? Where is the sting?" It's like we've taken the tail of the scorpion and we've removed the stinger.

And let me just close with Paul's conclusion that he wrote to the Corinthians when he says, "Therefore." Remember now, when you see that word "therefore," it's again like a syllogism. It's like a logical argument. It presupposes the premises that have come before it. And in light of those premises, now drawing things to its conclusion. "Therefore," he says, "my beloved brethren, inasmuch as Christ has been raised from the dead," what does that mean? What's the logic of that require? Here's what it means: "Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. Your cancer is not in vain. Your grief is not in vain. Your labor, your sweat, and your toil is not in vain." That's what's at stake. That's why at the heart of the Christian faith is that, first in importance, [snorts] that he has risen. It makes all the difference in the world.

Let me just end with this. Can you imagine what it would be like to live this life without the knowledge of the resurrection? Can you imagine that? I told folks last night in another meeting, I said, "You know, my board of directors had a meeting, and they wanted to have a succession plan for when I'm gone because they said, 'After all, you're not going to live forever.'" I said, "Wait a minute." [Laughter] "I am so going to live forever. I'm just changing my address. I'll send one to the post office because now I know that every tear, every pain, every labor counts forever."

Let's pray. Our Father and our God, you have defeated our worst enemy in the person of our greatest friend, your beloved Son, in whom you are well pleased. So pleased that you raised him from the dead. Thank you, Jesus. Amen.

We're going to continue this morning with our study of the Gospel according to St. Luke. We're still in the third chapter, and I will be reading from chapter 3, verses 13-22.

"Now, as the people were in expectation, and all reasoned in their hearts about John, whether he was the Christ or not, John answered, saying to all, 'I indeed baptize you with water, but one mightier than I is coming, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.' And with many other exhortations, he preached to the people. But Herod the tetrarch, being rebuked by him concerning Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, and for all the evil which Herod had done, also added this above all: that he shut John up in prison. When all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also was baptized. And while he prayed, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven which said, 'You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.'"

This perhaps is the briefest account of the baptism of Jesus that we have in the Gospels. But nevertheless, the content of it is of extreme, extreme importance. And so we need to engage our minds in seeking to understand the full significance of it and to receive it into our hearts and souls as the word of God. Let us pray.

Again, our Father, as we seek a fresh understanding of this event in the life of our Lord, we need your help. And we ask that the same Spirit that descended upon him as a dove might come to our aid this morning to illumine this text for us and to bring it to our hearts and to our souls. For we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

In 1929, things were critical theologically in the Northern Presbyterian Church. The theology called liberalism, that had spread through Europe in the 19th century, which was basically and foundationally a theology of unbelief, had infected the mainline denominations in our country. And sadly, even the seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, which historically had been the greatest seminary in American history. And so in 1929, several of the faculty members of that school left to start a new seminary in Philadelphia that would be committed to Orthodox Christianity. And the brain trust that came to establish Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia included such stalwart theologians as Oswald T. Allis and Richard Dick Wilson and Cornelius Van Til and John Woolley, Paul Woolley, and a host of others, were led by J. Gresham Machen, who became the first president of Westminster Theological Seminary. I doubt if there was ever before or since a group of such profound scholars and faithful theologians gathered in one place as these men were in Philadelphia.

Well, in 1937, at the Christmas break, Dr. Machen became ill with an upper respiratory infection. And this, of course, was before the time of the widely used antibiotics such as penicillin were available. And he had been committed to go to North Dakota to give a series of lectures over the Christmas holidays. And his colleagues on the faculty came to him and pleaded with him not to go. They urged him to stay to recover his health because he was so desperately needed for the work there in Philadelphia. But Dr. Machen refused to heed their advice, saying, "I made this commitment to the people of North Dakota, so I'm going." And he made the arduous journey by train and bus and other means of transportation to the small town in North Dakota where he was going to give these lectures. But by the time he got there, his illness became much more serious, and he became literally sick unto death. And as it was the case, he would not be able to return alive to Philadelphia. And so, while he was dying there in North Dakota, he sent a telegram to his friends and colleagues on the faculty at Westminster Seminary. It was a brief telegram, but pregnant in its meaning. He said in the telegram, "Grateful for the perfect active obedience of Christ." That was it. And the sum and substance of his last words to his friends and colleagues: "Again, grateful for the perfect active obedience of Christ."

My guess would be this morning that there would be several, perhaps many, in this congregation today who have never heard of the idea of the perfect active obedience of Christ. And yet, it's an extremely important doctrine in Christian theology. The distinction is made historically between the active obedience of Jesus and the passive obedience of Jesus. The distinction is this: The passive obedience of Jesus refers to his willingness to acquiesce to the Father's mandate that he offer himself as a sacrifice and as an atonement for the sins of his people on the cross. Jesus did not resist his executioners. He told them, "You have no power over me, but I lay down my life for my sheep." He was passive in his reception of the penalty for sin as our sinbearer. And in contrast to that action or activity, which really was an action even though it was a passive action, we have what we call the active obedience of Jesus, which refers to his whole life of living under the law in total subjection to the Father, actively and willingly obeying, saying everything that the Lord God commanded him to do. It was said of him that his meat and his drink was to do the will of the Father, and zeal for his Father's house consumed him.

And so this is directly related to the text we read this morning about the baptism of Jesus. As many people are perplexed with the question, "Why was Jesus baptized at all?" Wasn't the baptism of John the Baptist a baptism for repentance of sin? Wasn't the very ritual itself a cleansing rite in which John the Baptist commanded people to come to be cleansed and to repent of their sins? And Jesus had no sins to repent of. He was the lamb without blemish. He, so far in his life, had already lived a life of perfect active obedience without sin.

Now, if we're perplexed by Jesus submitting to baptism, we have to say that nobody on earth was more perplexed about it than John the Baptist. You know, the people were asking questions among themselves with reference to John. They said, "Is John the Christ? Is he the Messiah that was to come?" And he put those rumors to rest. He said, "No, no, no, no, no. He says, 'There's one coming after me who is mightier than I am. I baptize you with water, but he'll baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire, and he must increase, and I must decrease. I'm not even worthy to loosen the straps on his sandals.'" And so he pointed people towards Jesus. And then that day that Jesus came through the crowd and up to the river and presented himself to John to be baptized, John shaking his head, "What are you doing? I've been announcing to the people that you are the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. I can't baptize you. You should be baptizing me." And so John begins to protest and tries to engage Jesus in theological argument about this procedure. And finally, Jesus cuts him short, cuts the Gordian knot, and he says, "John, look, I don't have all day to engage you in a theological discussion. We can cover these matters later on if you'd like, but suffer it now, John. Just do it. It has to be done. It's necessary, John, to fulfill all righteousness."

Now, Jesus could have, and maybe even did, since we don't get all the dialogue for us, but let me speculate for a second that Jesus could have said to John the Baptist, "John, look, this is just a covenant ritual that we're going on here, and no harm, no foul. You just go ahead and baptize me, and I'll explain it later." He could have said that, or he could have looked John in the eye and said, "John, you need to do this because this is a matter of life and death." Now, we have no record that Jesus ever said that to John. I just made that up. But the concept that I've just made up is completely sound, because whatever else Jesus' baptism was, it was a matter of life and death. Well, how? Why? Well, I think to understand that, we have to understand something about Jesus' role in his earthly ministry as the new Adam, or as Paul calls him sometimes, the second Adam, the one who comes after the first Adam, the father of the human race, who was, we are told, a type of the one who was to come, the greater Adam that would come to bring salvation to the human race.

Let me just briefly read a portion of Paul's teaching on this matter in the fifth chapter of the book of Romans. He also covers the same material in 1 Corinthians 15. But briefly, he writes to the Romans these words: "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned. For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by one man's offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by that grace of the one man Jesus Christ abounded to many." And he goes on to say, "If for by the one man's offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one Jesus Christ."

It was a matter of life and death. Through Adam's offense, original Adam's transgression, the whole world was plunged into ruin, and death came upon the entire human race. And in contrast, by one man's obedience comes life. Now, without the obedience of Jesus, without his perfect active obedience, he would not have done for us what Adam failed so miserably to accomplish.

Now, to understand this, we have to go back to the Old Testament and look at it in the context of covenant. There are covenants all through the Bible. But we have the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham, the covenant with Moses, the new covenant that we have with Jesus in the New Testament. We have covenants all the way through the scriptures. But the first covenant made with human beings was made with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And we call that the covenant of creation. And the word "Adam," Adam, means man. He represented the entire human race. So that when God entered into a covenant with Adam, he was entering into a covenant with every human being that would ever live. And he promised the benefit and the blessing of this covenant of creation of eternal life if Adam obeys the provisions and the stipulations [snorts] of that covenant. But the negative sanction was this: If you disobey the terms of this covenant, you will die. And not only will you die, but "the day in which you eat of that fruit, you will surely die."

Well, you know the story. The serpent came into the garden and came first to Eve with a subtle, crafty, leading question. "Did God say that you're not allowed to eat of any of the trees in the garden?" Well, of course, God didn't say that. And Satan knew perfectly well that God had never said that. But he's subtle. He's crafty. Because what the implication is, he might as well had, because we put any restriction on you, you weren't really free. But initially, Eve fights for the angels and she said, "No, God didn't say that. He gave us this wonderful garden. He said, 'Of all these trees in the garden, we can freely eat. But there's this one tree over here, the knowledge of good and evil. And we're not allowed to touch that one, or we'll die.'" Now, the direct assault. The serpent says, "Oh, no, you won't die. And God knows you won't die. God doesn't want you to touch that tree because he knows that if you eat from that tree, you'll be like him, knowing good and evil." And seeing that the fruit appeared beautiful, Eve ate the fruit from the tree and then encouraged her husband to join her in this rebellion.

Now, you would expect that the moment they put that fruit in their mouth and tasted it, that they would have dropped dead right there. Well, they did drop dead right there spiritually, but not physically. That was postponed. And God tempered his judgment with mercy and grace. Remember the first experience that Adam and Eve had when they ate of the forbidden fruit was they suddenly became aware of their nakedness and they were ashamed and they went and hid themselves. So that when the Lord God came in the cool of the evening and he said, "Adam, where are you?" He discovered that they were hiding from him. "Why are you hiding?" "We're ashamed." "Well, why are you ashamed? Did you eat from the tree?" "Lord, we're naked." "I made you naked. And when I made you naked, you weren't ashamed. You didn't have any guilt. Why all of a sudden do you feel naked? Why do you feel exposed? Why do you want to hide from me?" And so in his first act of redemption, God condescended to fashion clothes for Adam and Eve to cover their nakedness and their shame. And he made a promise to them. Even by the same time he's cursing the serpent, he's promising that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent. And in that promise, what God was saying is that there will come another Adam, a new Adam, who will do what you failed to do, who will bring life rather than death.

Now, in recent years, there's been a movement among professing evangelical Christians to reject the doctrine of the perfect active obedience of Jesus. And I say, why would they want to do that? Well, the reason is they reject the idea of this first covenant that we call the covenant of works. We distinguish between the covenant that God makes with Adam and call that covenant the covenant of works, and then every covenant after that is the covenant of grace. And these enemies of the idea say, "Well, listen, any covenant that God gives to human beings is an act of grace." They don't deserve to be in a covenant relationship with God. Nobody argues that point. But when we distinguish historically between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, we know that God never was required to make any covenants with us at all. We won't argue that point. But those covenants that he did make differ on how the benefits would be received. And in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were on trial. They were on a period of probation. If they obey and keep the faith, they get life. If they disobey, they get death. In other words, if their works are righteous, they live. If their works are evil, they perish.

Well, if there's anyone in this world, I don't know who has labored more in our day in behalf of the reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone than I have. I speak as a fool. But as much as I believe in the doctrine of justification by faith alone, I tell people, "Remember, at the end of the day, there's only one way to be justified in the sight of God, and that's by works." You say, "Well, how can you say that you believe in justification by faith alone and then turn around and say, 'At the end of the day, but have you been drinking? At the end of the day, so that you say, 'Now justification is by works.'" And I'll say, "Because the covenant of works that God gave to Adam and Eve is still in effect. And the only way to satisfy the demands of God is through good works. Nothing less will do. But the reason why the covenant of grace is called the covenant of grace is because now God is saying, 'It's not by your good works that you'll be saved, but by somebody else's good works.'" [Snorts] "You've perished because of the first Adam's bad works. You'll be saved by the perfect righteousness of the new Adam, whose works are without blemish, and which works are given to you if you put your trust in him."

Now, I know that there are people in this room today who still are believing that their good deeds and their trying to live a good life is going to get them into heaven. If you walked into this church building this morning with that belief in your head, let me beg you this morning to leave it here and forget it, because you have no chance. Only

One person who's ever satisfied the law of God, and that's Jesus. And that's why his submission to the baptism of John the Baptist was a matter of life and death. God required it of everyone. And as the new Adam, entering into a corporate solidarity with his people, he submitted to that requirement of the law so that his acts of righteousness may be perfect. What I'm saying is, you're justified by works, but not your own works, but by the works of Jesus. He is our righteousness.

You know, a few weeks ago, I was in another church and from performing a funeral memorial service. And before the service, the pastor was leading me back to his office where I could get ready for the service, and Vesta was with me up to the door. And just as I was ready to go in, she said to me, "I'll be here after a while, darling boy." And the minister did turn around. He said, "Darling boy, was that?" I said, "That's just one of those terms of endearment that Vesta uses for me. Don't we all have terms of endearment for our spouses? I hope so. That's just one of many. I like it, darling boy. I like it when she calls me Robbie Dearheart. I'll not hear the end of this, will I? Or Robin dearest, or sometimes just simply bunny. You know, bunny, bunny, how I love the bunny." [laughter]

But I think her favorite term of endearment, I'm not really sure it's a term of endearment for me, that many of you have never heard or use. She calls me Spot. Not named after the dog and Dick and Jane and see Spot Run and all of that stuff. Now, there are other better reasons for her calling me Spot. She calls me Spot because I use blood thinners, and every time I bump my arm against the wall or my dog scratches me an arm, I bleed like a stuck pig, and I have spots all over my arms. And so, she calls me Spot for that. But that's not the only reason, or even the chief reason. When we go out to eat, she says, "I know this is embarrassing, but would you please put your napkin under your collar like the Godfather in an Italian restaurant?" And then she says lovingly, "Spot, because if I don't put that thing there, I'll come home with spots all over my shirt, all over my tie, 'cause I make a mess of myself, and she has to clean these spots up." So she sees those blemishes. But there's no napkin in the world that can hide the spots on my soul, the blemishes that are there and would be there indelibly, unless the covenant of grace and the righteousness of Jesus, the Lamb without blemish, could remove those spots from my soul and from yours.

And so Jesus went into the water and was baptized by John. And this marked the beginning of his earthly public ministry. The moment where he was anointed and became the Christos, Messiah. When the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him like a dove to empower him for his redemptive mission. And this one who had only known obedience, an act of obedience, a perfect act of obedience in his entire life, heard the voice from heaven. "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." And it is because of the Father's pleasure that we ever escape from the consequences of the sin of Adam, who plunged us into ruin. The new Adam, the second Adam, is the only one who can help you if you have ever sinned. There's no other name under heaven through which men may be saved, the name of Jesus.

Now, I hope you understand what Jay Gresham man was saying to his colleagues with his telegram. "Grateful for the perfect act of obedience of Christ. Grateful." He was restricted by space and obviously by vocabulary. Are you kidding me? Grateful. Deliriously grateful for the perfect act of obedience of Christ. For without it, we perish. [snorts]

Let's pray. Father, how we thank you for the perfect righteousness of Jesus, whose righteousness you have transferred to our account, imputed to us where we don't deserve it, where we cannot earn it. We know that he alone can fulfill the covenant of works for us. Our works are worthy only of being burned with unquenchable fire. The only merit we have of our own before you, O God, is demerit. But by your grace, you give to us the merit of Jesus now and forevermore. Amen.

Tonight, we're going to continue with our study of Paul's epistle to the Romans. And we have been working in chapter 5 in recent weeks. And so we return to that chapter once again, beginning at verse 6 and reading through verse 11. Romans 5:6-11. And ask the congregation to stand for the hearing of the word of God.

"For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die. Yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love toward us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more than having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more have we been reconciled. Having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation."

The word of God for the people of God. Please be seated.

Let's pray again. Our Father, as we give our attention to this portion of Paul's magnum opus, the deepest exposition of salvation we find in your word. We pray that as we contemplate these things this evening that relate to the perfect sacrifice offered for us by your dear Son. We pray that our souls may be lifted up, and that in the contemplation of so great a salvation, we might have tonight a taste of glory. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

We've seen in recent weeks that after Paul set forth for us the doctrine of justification by faith alone, that in this chapter five, he proceeded to set forth the benefits that flow from our justification. That once a person is justified, that there are immediate benefits that accrue through that person, such as we've seen, peace with God, access to his presence, and as we saw the last time, the shutting abroad of the love of God in our hearts that provokes the kind of hope within our souls that makes us able to endure tribulation and through that endurance achieve character and so on. Now, Paul turns his attention to the atonement of Christ and what it has provoked in our salvation. So let's look at it beginning in verse six.

"For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." Now, at this point, Paul discusses discusses the when of our atonement. At what point in history, uh, the redemption of the people of God was accomplished. And he speaks of the when of this accomplishment in two ways. The first time, first point is the when with respect to us. At what point in our personal history did Christ offer himself on the cross? And the first thing that the apostle tells us is that it was when we were still without strength. And let's comment on that before we look at the temporal aspect of the atonement.

But in the first instance, he stresses that Christ dies for the ungodly while they are still in a state of being without strength. One of the cardinal doctrines of biblical Christianity has to do with original sin and its impact on our spiritual strength. This issue has been battled in every generation throughout church history for this reason that virtually every church there is confesses some doctrine of original sin. And I remind you, as we've already seen in Romans, that original sin does not refer to the first sin that was committed by Adam and Eve, but rather to the consequences of that sin by which God visited corruption to the entire race of humanity. All of the progeny of Adam and Eve are born in a state of spiritual death and moral corruption. We are born in sin. And as I say, every church has some doctrine of original sin. But where the debate rages historically is over the degree of that corruption. To what extent have we fallen from our original righteousness? Augustine waged this battle in antiquity against the heretic Pelagius, who denied the fall altogether. But the cardinal point that Augustine taught was that the ravages of sin are so great, they penetrate so deeply within our souls that we are left in a state of spiritual death. And what that spiritual death means is that even we are, even though we are still alive biologically, even though we have faculties that remain intact, we still have a brain. We have a mind. We have affections and we have a will. We have a capacity for making choices, and all of that. But nevertheless, our humanity has been so damaged by the fall that our moral state by nature is one that Augustine described as a state of moral inability.

Let me just take a moment to remind you again of what that means. The idea of moral inability is this: that we have plunged, we have been plunged so deeply into sin that in and of ourselves, we do not have the moral capacity to incline ourselves in any way to the things of God. If God, in his mercy and his grace, offers to us complete forgiveness and salvation in Jesus Christ, but that that God does not, does nothing to work in our hearts, if he leaves us to ourselves to exercise our wills to take advantage of the offer of the gospel, no one would exercise that option. We simply don't have the moral capacity. We have the valitional power to choose what we want in any circumstances. But sin is so deep that we no longer have any desire for God, or any want for the gospel, or for Christ.

Now, the overwhelming majority report in America today among professing evangelicals is that God offers the gospel to everybody, and that those who exercise their will to receive Jesus, embrace Jesus, to make a decision for Christ, those are the ones who are saved. But in though God does 99%, that 1% that decides our fate for eternity rests in our cooperating, receiving, embracing, choosing Jesus freely. If I believe that, I will tell you tonight, the minute I'm persuaded of that will be the minute you'll see me climb down from this pulpit, leave the church, and sleep in tomorrow morning, because I would have no hope whatsoever that the work of evangelism would ever be successful, that preaching would ever bring any fruit, because it would be like a preacher who preaches resurrection with great eloquence and great power, with great rhetorical skills, in the middle of the cemetery and calls the corpses to come to life. They're not going to come. And unless God the Holy Spirit empowers the word of preaching, unless God the Holy Spirit empowers the outreach of evangelism, no one will ever come to Christ. That's the point that Jesus made in the sixth chapter of John when he said, "No man can come to me unless it is given to him by the Father." And so Paul again is teaching this same principle. He's saying that Christ died for the ungodly while we were still without strength. And the strength that he has in view here is clearly spiritual strength. We have no strength in and of ourselves to affect our own salvation. And so God didn't wait for us to exercise our wills, to incline ourselves to him, to repent of our sins, to make ourselves, uh, in such a state that it would be appropriate for him to provide a sacrifice or an atonement for us. No. While we were still in this state that Paul later in his letter to the Ephesians describes as spiritual death, while we were dead in sin and trespasses, Christ died.

But that's the when with respect to our human condition. The when with respect to history. He says in the next clause, "For when we were still without strength, in due time, Christ died for the ungodly." We read in the Bible every Christmas that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled when Quirinius was governor of Syria. That's an integral part of the Christmas narrative of Luke chapter 2. But what we're getting there in that announcement is that Christ came into this world in real time, in real history. Salvation is an activity that God performs in history. It's not something that happens in the never-never world outside of space and time. It is not some existential thing that takes place away from real history. And that the scriptures tell us that when Christ came, he didn't come by accident, but he came in the fullness of time. He was born on the exact date in the exact place where from the foundation of the world the Father had decreed. And throughout the whole Old Testament, all that we read in the activity of God in ministering to his people, to creating a nation for himself out of Israel, giving them the law, giving them the prophets, ministering to them through their entire sojourn through the pages of the Old Testament. All that time, God was preparing history for that moment that would be so ripe that it was just the time for Christ to come. That is, he came in due time.

Remember the joy that goes to the household when Mama reveals to the rest of the family that she's pregnant. And whenever we hear that from somebody, we immediately say to them, "When's the baby? What do, when's it due?" And the doctor gives a due date, and we circle it on the calendar, and we know that just because the doctor gives a due date that the baby's not necessarily going to come on the date that it's due. Just like when you get bills in the mail and they tell you that they're due by such and such a date, that's no guarantee that you're going to send the money in in time to meet that due date. I'll never forget the birth of our first child, Sherry. The due date came, and I was waiting and ready. Best it was ready. We're going to have our first baby. But she didn't deliver. The day after the due date, I took her for a walk. I said, "Let's get this thing going here. The baby didn't come." A week after the due date, she still hadn't given birth. And at that point, I was thinking, "The whole thing is a hoax. She's never going to have this child." I mean, that was the, that was the hardest seven days of my life. And it went on for three more days before Sherry was born. And then once the birth takes place, you mark that day as birthday. That's the day you celebrate. You forget for the rest of the time, except when you're looking for sermon illustrations about the due date. Who cares about the due date after the real date occurs?

Well, with God, he's never late. When he appoints a day for something that to happen and to take place, it happens that very day. And so Paul tells us that when we were still without strength, in due time, that is in the time that God sovereignly appointed, Christ died for the ungodly. Again, when we read the narratives of the gospels of the death of Christ, the gospel writers tell us of all of the political machinations that were going on behind the scenes. How Caiaphas gave his advice, Pilate has his advice, Herod has his advice, the soldiers conspire, the Sanhedrin gets involved, they pay money to Judas to make sure that all of this takes place. And God sits in the heavens and laughs, as he knew from the foundation of the world that this was the day. And no matter what Judas did, no matter what Caiaphas did, no matter what any of these people did, Hi Jim. That none of these things had anything to do, except in so far as these incidental aspects were also sovereignly decreed by God from all eternity. You see, not only was Jesus due on Good Friday, but Pilate was due. Judas was due. Caiaphas was due. All of these things came together in the concurrence of divine providence that on that specific date Christ would die.

But instantly, as Paul remembers the death of Christ, he always, always when he mentions the death of Christ, speaks of its purpose. Paul does not see the death of Christ as a tragedy in the history of the annals of human affairs. He doesn't see this as the great destruction of an innocent man by a corrupt clergy and corrupt political body in Jerusalem. No, he says there's a reason why he died in due time. There was a purpose of his death. Not simply to demonstrate the love of God or display some kind of moral influence into the universe, but he died for the ungodly.

Now, you at this point may include yourself in that category or not. Uh, it's easy to come to the conclusion that if you are in the category of the ungodly, that Christ therefore died for you. Not so fast. It's true that Christ died for the ungodly. No question about that. Because all of us for whom Christ died are numbered among the ungodly. But again, one of the most volatile controversies that abides in every generation among Christians is the question, did Christ die for all the ungodly? Let me just stop for a moment and ask you, what do you think? Don't answer out loud, please. We'd have a riot in here. I always preach on this when I think that the crowds are getting too big and we need more space in the church. I wouldn't hesitate to answer that question. I don't believe for one moment that Christ died for all the ungodly. I don't believe that. You know why? Because I'm not a universalist. The Bible doesn't teach that everybody goes to heaven. Only believers go to heaven. Only those who belong to Christ. And every believer that has ever been saved was at one time completely ungodly. And so Christ certainly died for the ungodly in the sense that he died for those who came to faith in him. But again, the controversy is, did Christ die for everybody? We know that everybody's ungodly. Christ died for the ungodly. And the conclusion many make is therefore he died for everybody. Well, think about it, dear friends. Two things you have to think about deeply. Did Christ's atonement satisfy the righteousness of God for all the sins of every person? And again, the majority report is Christ died for everybody, died on a cross for everybody, paid the price of sin for everybody. Well, if everybody's sins are paid for, who's in hell? Can Christ die for a person's sin and that person still go to hell? Or is his death not sufficient to satisfy the demands of God's law? Do we have this idea that in order to satisfy the righteousness of God, two things have to happen? Christ has to die, and we have to repent and come to him, because obviously his death wouldn't cover every sin, because the sin of unbelief would be excluded. But if you really believe that Christ died for all the sins of all of the people and his atonement was effective, then you would have to come to the conclusion that he died for everybody equally, and that everybody's in heaven. But the Bible gives precious reason for anybody to believe that, doesn't it? And again, the Bible doesn't teach that Christ died to make salvation possible. Christ died for his sheep. He laid down his life for his sheep. And when he did that, there was never a doubt in heaven that all for whom he died had their sins covered. And all for whom he died would spend eternity in heaven. Remember how Jesus talked about this to his disciples? He says, "All whom the Father has given to me, come to me." And he dies for those whom the Father has given to him.

Let me just say one more thing about that and ask you to think about it before you rush for the door. When I speak to my friends who struggle with this, I say, "Well, how do you understand the atonement?" And they say, "Well, I believe," and let me just back up here. When I'm on the floor of presbytery and young men are being, uh, examined for ordination, going through what's called the trials of ordination, they're examined on their theology. And every time this question of so-called limited atonement is brought up in an examination, we'll ask the young man, "Do you believe in limited atonement?" That is, that Christ did not die for everybody. The standard answer, I mean, I can predict it before they give it, is that they will say that Christ's death is sufficient for all but efficient only for some. That it is valuable enough to cover the sins of all of the world. In that sense, it's universally sufficient, but it is efficient. That is, it affects salvation only for those who believe. And that's true. I have no quarrel with that. It's just not limited atonement. Every Arminian in the world believes, except those who are universalists, believe that Christ's atonement is sufficient for all and efficient only for believers. Now, the question, and here's where I want you to think. Put your thinking caps on. The question about the scope of the atonement is this: What was God's eternal purpose in designing the death of his Son? From all eternity, God had a plan of salvation. Did he plan to save everybody? If he did plan to save everybody, then manifestly, beloved, if God is God, and if God is sovereign, and that was his eternal plan, then nothing on heaven and earth would defeat that plan, and every human being would be saved. But manifestly, the scriptures teach that not everybody is saved. Now, does there anybody doubt that God has the power and the right to save everybody? If God, in fact, in his eternal plan to save everybody in the world, everybody in the world would be saved. That contrary to some theologians, one who's a friend of mine who keeps saying, uh, I can't believe he says it more than once, but he keeps saying, "God saves as many people as he possibly can." Let me ask you, think about it. God saves as many people as he possibly can. And I say to my friend Norman, "Shame on you. God saves his man. You mean that God can't save the unbeliever?" Well, he really believes that God righteously cannot intervene in the life of one of his creatures and work faith in the heart of that believer. That would somehow violate the sinner's freedom. Well, every sinner in hell would give everything he had and do anything he could to have God intervene in his life and work for him saving faith in his heart. God can do it certainly, and he certainly has the right to do with the clay what he wills. But God has not decreed from all eternity to save everybody. He has decreed from all eternity to do more than make salvation possible. There is, from in scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, a doctrine called the doctrine of election. You may not like the doctrine of election. And I suspect if you don't like it, it's because you don't understand it. Because I don't know how a person could have the affection for Christ in his heart and not rejoice for all eternity at the unspeakable grace of God to include us in this work of salvation and to make certain that we would be saved.

Now, the idea of limited atonement deals with the question of God's design. What God intended. Did God intend to save a remnant of the world, and he sent his Son to die for his sheep, to die for those people, to ensure their salvation? That's what limited atonement means. It means definite atonement. That is, that the atonement of Christ was not just to make things possible, because in that theory, it is theoretically possible that Christ could have died, and he would never see the travail of his soul and be satisfied. If the efficacy of Christ's death depends on you or depends on me, Christ would have no fruit from his death. But while we were without strength, while we were impotent, while we were powerless in our souls to incline ourselves to the things of God, in due time, Christ died for the ungodly.

And if that's the ungodly in general, then let's look just a little bit later in the text. For Paul goes on, "For scarcely, for a righteous man will one die. Yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die." Now, here Paul uses two different words. One is translated righteous. The other is translated good. Paul again, let's read it again. He says, "Scarcely for a righteous man will one die. Yet peradventure, maybe perhaps for a good man, someone would even dare to die." Calvin believed that there was no distinction here between a righteous person and a good person, that basically was a handiotist. Two different words referring to the same thing. Luther, on the other hand, was convinced that Paul was making a distinction. And the theologians who take that tack that Paul is differing between a righteous man and a good man, though a good man would necessarily also have to be a righteous man. The idea here is that righteous is somewhat formal, and a righteous person can be somebody who obeys the law, does what is right, and his behavior provokes a certain measure of respect. And Paul says, "We can respect people that we think are morally upright, but it's rare that anybody's going to die, lay down their lives just because they respect somebody's moral character." But when we talk about a good person, now we're speaking about more than their moral activity, more than their conformity to principles of righteousness, but rather there's an effective idea involved here that a good person is the kind of person that produces a certain love and concern from us. We say, "Oh, he's a good fellow." That means he's a nice guy. He's a kind person. He's the kind of kind person that we would be willing to go the extra mile to reciprocate his affection and his kindness to us. And so Paul is saying it's rare that anybody's going to die for a righteous man. Maybe for somebody they really love, or somebody that they really appreciate, somebody that has rendered certain personal kindnesses to you, you may be inclined, even in your paganess, to jump on a hand grenade for that person. But Paul says, in the case of the atonement, it wasn't that Jesus is dying for righteous people, and he's not dying for good people. He's dying for godless people. And let me, before we continue with this, just say that again. We shouldn't have to spend any time on this, should we? Yeah, we should. Because in the heart of every corrupt human being, even in a person who's partially sanctified, where the work of God is not yet complete, there remains this little buzz that's going on there that persuades us, you know, really, I wasn't that bad. And that, uh, Jesus died for me because I'm kind of a nice fellow, and heaven wouldn't be quite the same without my presence there. I mean, it's rare that we ever come to a full conviction of our helplessness and of our wickedness. All the power of our psychology is at work every minute to suppress full admission of our guilt and of our hopelessness. I mean, when people say to me, "The reason I'm a Christian and my friend isn't is because I because I because I," they say that long enough, I begin to wonder if they're in the kingdom at all, because they certainly have not yet been convinced of their helplessness due to their sin.

But God demonstrates his own love toward us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Notice the shift in language here from the generic ungodly to the specific, for us. For us, while we were in this state of sin. God so set forth his love for us that Christ died for us. Now, what does Paul mean? Does he mean for us men? For us sinners? Again, going back that Christ died for everybody. But again and again and again in Paul's epistles, he speaks of the specific work of grace that Christ does for the believer. And when he talks about us, he's talking about those of us who are in Christ Jesus, for the Christian.

Now, what about the love of God? God demonstrates his own love toward us. There are two things I want to say about this. And right now, the biggest enemy for me is the clock. One of these days, I'm going to bring a hammer up here and I'm going to beat on this thing until time stands still, which that's not going to happen. Two things I want to say about God demonstrating his own love toward us is this. I've mentioned the first idea before to you, but here it comes up again in this context, that we talk about the love of God in more than one way. That theology distinguishes among three distinct types of the love of God. The first aspect of the first type of divine love is that love that we call the love of benevolence. I've told you this before. God's love of benevolence. Let's take the word bane means good or well. We have a benediction. That's a good saying, right? And benevolence, we talk about being volitional creature of all ends has to do with will. And the Bible tells us that God's basic attitude towards the world, towards fallen humanity, is one of goodwill. God is not unkind. God is not mean-spirited. But the basic posture of the creator towards the world is one of goodwill. And that every person in this world experiences in one way or another the goodwill of God. How do we know that? Because they're still alive. That every moment the sinner continues to exist in this world, he can only continue to exist by virtue of the goodwill of God, by God's forbearance, by God's patience with him. And so, in one, in this sense, God loves everybody in the sense that he, his goodwill flows towards everyone.

The second sense of divine love that we've talked about is his beneficence. And just as his benevolence refers to his goodwill, his love of beneficence refers to his good acts. The Bible tells us that God's reign falls on the just and the unjust. So in the sense that all people, repentant or not, believers or not, receive certain kind acts from the hand of God. In that sense, they all experience God's love of beneficence. You've heard me say again and again how distressed I am when I hear ministers preach that God loves you unconditionally. That message is everywhere in our culture today. And what the pagan takes from that is unconditional love means that God loves me no matter what I do or what I don't do. I can depend on the love of God even if I reject Jesus Christ. I can depend on God's love even if I never repent of my sins. That's not the biblical message at all. But when we talk about the unconditional love of God, that love that God has that never fails, we're talking about what's called his love of complacency. Now, even that is a little bit difficult to grasp, because the love of complacency that God has does not mean complacency in the sense in which we use the word complacent in our vocabulary today. When I say so-and-so is complacent, what do we mean? They're smug. They're at ease in Zion. They're resting on their laurels. They've satisfied with with anything they've ever achieved. They have no desire to go beyond where they are. That's what we understand by the term complacency. But when we talk theologically about God's love of complacency, we're talking about God's love that he has, the delight that he takes, first of all, supremely in his Son. That God's love for his Son is without measure, without qualification, that he loves his Son fully and perfectly. But beloved, the love that the Father has for his Son extends beyond his Son to those who belong to his Son. So that only the believer receives God's love of complacency, because of Christ. Not because of anything in us, but because God gives gifts to his Son from all eternity. He loves his Son, and from all eternity he plans to give a portion of humanity to his Son, that his Son might be the firstborn of many brethren. He loves his Son with this love of complacency, and he demonstrates that love of complacency for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Now, the second aspect here is is one that, uh, maybe is too technical to get even, even get into, but I'll just mention it in passing. In German theology, there emerged a debate in the 20th century about the atonement. What some of the theologians were opposed to was the classic doctrine of the atonement as the Son's satisfying the wrath of the Father. In the old creeds, Ira Dei, that God has this anger that needs to be assuaged, that needs to be satisfied, or that God's justice has to be satisfied so that sin is repaid through this satisfaction offered by his Son. And these theologians scoff at any idea of an atonement that provides satisfaction for our sins. They say, "God doesn't need satisfied. His love is enough to redeem the world. God's love is so great that he cancels his own wrath. He sets aside his own righteousness and accepts sinners as they are." Again, this is more like Mr. Rogers' neighborhood than it is the kingdom of God. And the attack on the classical and biblical doctrine of the atonement is what was called theong controversy among the German theologians who said, in this view of satisfaction, you have God at odds with God. That you have God the Father angry at sinners. You have God the Father pouring out wrath upon the ungodly. But God the Son arrives on the scene and rescues poor humanity from the wrath of the Father. And God the Son persuades God the Father to set aside his wrath. And this whole idea posits a conflict internally in the Godhead, among the Trinity. No, no, no, no, no. The biblical view again and again is that though the Son comes and satisfies the righteousness of God, takes the wrath of God upon himself, that he comes because the Father sends him. It's the Father's idea from all eternity, to which the Son gives his total agreement, as well as the Spirit. This is called the covenant of redemption, that from all eternity there is one purpose and one mind in the Godhead, and it is out of the love of God that he sends his Son to take his wrath for us.

Several years ago, at the Christian Booksellers Convention, 6,000 people in the audience, I've told you this. I was giving the keynote address, and as I was thinking about what I would speak on, I thought, "I want to speak on the urgency of the gospel to people who are absolutely convinced that they are every day being faithful to the gospel." And I had to steer my ship between two, uh, issues. I didn't want to speak above the intelligence of those gathered, but nor did I want to dumb it down to such a degree that I would be insulting their intelligence. And so I spoke on the subject, "Saved From What?" And I went back to the rudimentary concept of salvation. And I said to this gathering, "What does it mean to be saved biblically?" And if we look at that concept of salvation in the Bible, we see that the most rudimentary meaning of salvation is to be rescued from some calamity. If you are restored from sickness, you're saved from the effects of that illness. If you experience victory in battle, you're saved from the ignominy of defeat. And that's the way the word sozo is used in the New Testament, for example, that anytime a person experiences rescue from catastrophe, they experience salvation. And yet, with all these lesser applications of the word salvation, there is this grand doctrine of salvation in the Bible that speaks of salvation in the ultimate sense, in which we are rescued from the supreme danger and peril, where we are rescued from the worst of all possible catastrophes. And what is that salvation? But that what the New Testament calls being saved from wrath. [clears throat] That's what the church doesn't believe anymore. They see the church believes in a God who has no wrath. But remember back in Romans 1 when we started this study, and Paul introduced the gospel, and we thought that he would just go ahead and unpack the gospel. But instead, the first thing he does after he announces the revelation of that righteousness of God that is by faith, he then plunges into a different revelation, the revelation of the wrath of God, that is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and all unrighteousness of men. He spends a whole chapter giving us the background for salvation. If there's no wrath in God, there's no need for the gospel. Folks, if there's no wrath in God, there's no need for Christ. I hear people all the time who aren't Christians say to me, "You know, that's fine for you, but I don't need Jesus." I said, "There's nothing on this world, in heaven and earth, then you need more than Jesus." But as long as people are not concerned about the wrath of God, they feel no need to come to Jesus. But if God is real, so is his wrath. And the biblical view of salvation is rescue from wrath. So I said to those folks, I said, "You want to know what you're saved from?" In one word, you're saved from God. This is gasp. And to this day, when I'm at that convention, people come up to me and say, "You never thought of that in my whole life until that message." And I said, "You talk about being a fundamentalist. There's nothing more fundamental than that. That it is God who saves people from God, because his wrath is stored up against the day of wrath, as Paul has said. And he most certainly will demonstrate that. But he has demonstrated his love towards us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more than having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him."

Now, I could rush ahead and finish the next couple verses, but I'm not going to do it. I'll wait till next week, God willing. There is a continuity here throughout the epistle. And if I don't cover everything that I read tonight, there's no law that says we can't postpone that until next week. But, uh, you know, I knew that. I knew coming there was no way I was going to have enough time to cover all those verses. But, uh, with that, let's pray.

Father, we don't even want to think for a minute about your wrath. Thoughts of nuclear war are too horrible for us to put our mind to. And yet we know the manifestation of your wrath is far more dreadful than any weapon creatures can invent or use. What are we to say to the love that you have for us, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us to save us from your wrath? How can we understand that he took in himself the full measure of your wrath that we deserve? Father, how can we ever think of his death without thinking of that wrath that he bore innocently, that we may not bear it, bear it in our guilt and in our sin? Father, we can't begin to plumb the depths and the riches of that love of complacency that you have demonstrated to us who are neither righteous nor good. And yet you sent your Son while we were without strength to die for us. Thank you for that. Amen.

This morning, we continue now with our study of the gospel according to St. Luke. And we are now beginning chapter 6. And I will be reading verses 1-5.

"Now it happened on the second Sabbath after the first that he went through the grain fields, and his disciples plucked the heads of grain and ate them, rubbing them in their hands. And some of the Pharisees said to them, 'Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?' But Jesus answering them said, 'Have you not even read this? What David did when he was hungry? He and those who were with him, how he went into the house of God, and took and ate of the showbread, and also gave some to those with him, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat.' And he said to them, 'The Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath.'"

This brief passage is one that is pregnant with theological significance and for our understanding of the person of Christ. The record comes to us through the supervision and inspiration of God the Holy Spirit. Let us receive it for the full weight of authority that it carries. Let us pray.

And now, O Lord, again we ask for the presence of your Spirit of truth to illumine these things for our understanding, that in our growth of understanding of Jesus, we might come to love him more purely and to follow him more closely. For we ask these things in his name. Amen.

Once again, Luke tells us of a conflict that arises between Jesus and the Pharisees. And this time again, it occurs on a Sabbath day. We read the somewhat innocuous report that Jesus was walking through one of the grain fields with his disciples, and they plucked the heads of grain and ate them, rubbing them in their hands. Now, what kind of grain this was is a question. Many believe that it was that these were ears of corn, and that the disciples plucked a few ears of corn from this corn field. And to get the kernels loose from the ear, they rubbed the corn cobs in their hands to free the kernels so that they could eat them. They didn't have the opportunity to cook them and smear them with butter and salt the way we do in our culture. But in any case, while the disciples were busy picking corn, the Pharisees were busy picking nits, which was their custom. And they began to nitpick this action that Jesus and his disciples were involved in.

Now, keep this in mind that according to the Deuteronomic law of the Old Testament, it was indeed permissible for passers-by to go into a corn field or a grain field and help themselves to the basic necessities that were available there. Of course, sojourners were not allowed to come in and harvest the whole crop and steal it from the farmer, but this was part of the broader principles of gleaning and the like that were set forth in the Old Testament. So, by no means was Jesus and his disciples breaking the law of God. But we remember that the Pharisees were not content for the law of God to stand by itself. But they had to add all kinds of details to their interpretation of what was permitted and what was allowed in terms of Sabbathkeeping. And they added literally over a thousand specifications in their extreme casy to their traditions in defining, according to their understanding, what could or not be done on the Sabbath day. And according to their traditions, Jesus had violated the Sabbath in terms of the prohibition against unnecessary labor on the Sabbath day. For by picking an ear of corn, Jesus and his disciples were guilty of harvesting. And by rubbing the corn together, they were guilty of threshing on the Sabbath day. And so there the Pharisees were shaking their finger once again in the face of Jesus's. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're not allowed to do this. You know, it's a wonder that Jesus, being God incarnate, didn't at this point have enough and just unleash the full power of his deity on these rascals. But in any case, he patiently answered their objection and reminded them of Old Testament history by calling attention to the account in the book of 1 Samuel of an event that took place in the life of David and his comrades, that when they were very hungry and had no food available to them, they went into the tabernacle and into the holy place where the temple of showbread was, not into the holy of holies, but there this showbread that was on the altar as part of the ceremonies of Old Testament worship. David, realizing this was the only food nearby that would be available for him and for his comrades. He went in and took the bread from the altar and fed himself and his soldiers with it. And Jesus obviously shows his approval for what David and his men had done in the Old Testament, because Jesus is enunciating the principle that no ceremony outweighs the fundamental needs of human life. David and his men were not involved in an act of vandalism or just in a frivolous way helping themselves to the food that was in the altar, but they were eating because they had genuine hunger and were enabled to use this food that was available to them and still be working in the honor of God. And so what Jesus does simply is rebukes the Pharisees for their failure to understand what David had done in the Old Testament and for their failure to be concerned about the needs of Jesus and his disciples with respect to the elementary matters of food. However, this passage is so much more about what Jesus and his disciples did and how he answered the criticism of the Pharisees for what they did. Because in this narrative and

On this event, Jesus makes a pronouncement that is overwhelming in its importance for us and for our understanding of him. He said to the Pharisees, "The Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath."

Now, we could spend the next six months exploring the depths and the riches of this one statement that Jesus makes on this occasion to the Pharisees. And I'm going to divide it into two parts. The first part is where Jesus calls himself once again the son of man. We've heard him do this before. We remember when he announced the forgiveness of sins for the paralytic. The Pharisees were all over him for that. And Jesus said on that occasion, "I do this that you may know the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins."

Now, in previous years, we've looked at the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John. And so, this designation for Jesus, Son of Man, is not strange or unusual to us if we've been here for any length of time or if we've studied the scriptures to any degree. But at the risk of boring you, I'd like to go back and rehearse some of the significance of the use of this title for Jesus.

Just in this last week, I had two occasions to think about it. On one, I've received a letter, a lengthy letter from a man who was severely chastising me for teaching people the terrible heresy of the Trinity and of the deity of Christ. And he was saying that the Bible doesn't teach the deity of Christ and nowhere does the New Testament affirm the deity of Christ and and so on. And he went through all of his arguments for his Unitarianism. But in any case, I did respond once and then when he came back, I let it go the second time, which I usually do.

But in any case, also at a weekly Bible study of some men that we had this week, this question of the significance of this title, son of man, arose. And so we looked at it there as well. And to remind you that if we count up the times in which Jesus is described in the New Testament by this title or that title and we look at the numerical frequency, we see that far and away the number one title that is ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament is the title Christ or Christos. It's used so often that we sometimes think that Christ is Jesus' last name. Jesus Christ. No, that is Jesus is his name. Christ is his title, which is the New Testament equivalent to the Old Testament word for Messiah. So when the New Testament talks about Jesus Christ, it means Jesus Messiah, Jesus the anointed one. That's the number one title that is ascribed to Jesus.

The second most frequently given title to Jesus in the New Testament is the title Lord, which is extremely significant because of the way in which it is expressed in the New Testament by use of the term kyrios. The use of the title Lord for Jesus corresponds to the Old Testament title Adonai that is given exclusively to God as his supreme title. When the Bible says, "Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth." What the Hebrew is saying is, "Oh Yahweh," that's his name, "our Adonai," that's his supreme title, "How majestic is your name." So that the highest title that is given to God in the Old Testament in terms of the Greek translation of the Hebrew is the title Lord.

And we recall Paul's writing to the Philippians saying, "Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, took his equality with God, not as something to be tenaciously grasped or held on to, but he emptied himself, entered into his humiliation, took upon himself the form of a servant, became obedient even unto death." And you know how Paul goes on to say, "Wherefore hath God highly exalted him and given him the name that is above every name." The Father gives to the Son the name that is the highest name that can be given to anyone. Then Paul says, "So at the name of Jesus, every knee would bow and confess that he is Lord to the glory of God the Father." The name that is above every name is not the name Jesus. It's that title Lord, Adonai, kyrios. That's the title that is given to Jesus. That's the second most frequent title ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament.

In third place in terms of numerical frequency is the title son of man. Now, what's strange, extraordinary about this, I don't have my one book that I use for this occasion at home. I think my son has it. But in any case, I believe that the numbers are correct that this title, Son of Man, occurs in the New Testament for Jesus 92 times. And that only gets it to third place in terms of frequency. But the extraordinary thing is that of those 92 references to Jesus as the Son of Man, 89 of them are from the lips of Jesus himself. And what does that tell you? That tells you that in terms of numerical frequency for what Jesus calls himself, son of man is number one.

Well, what does it mean? Well, we know that the Bible calls Jesus son of God and son of man. We know that the church's confession is such that we believe that Christ is fully man and fully God, truly man and truly God. That he has a divine nature and a human nature. And so we are tempted to look at these titles in this manner and to think, oh well, son of God, that must refer to his deity and son of man must refer to his humanity. Well, that's a vast oversimplification because although the title son of God does have some reference to it to Jesus' deity being the only begotten of the Father, nevertheless, the title also refers to his human work of obedience. Because to be called a son of God biblically is to be describing one who is obedient to God. "You are the son of whom you obey," Jesus said. So the son of God title doesn't refer exclusively to deity. It also incorporates an element of his humanity. And in the same manner, the title son of man, though it has an element of reference to his humanity, the dominant reference to that title is to his deity.

Let's take just a moment to go back to the Old Testament to Daniel chapter 7 where we read Daniel's vision of the Ancient of Days beginning in verse 9 where he writes, "I watched until thrones were put in place and the Ancient of Days," that's the title for God the Father, "was seated. His garment was white as snow. The hair of his head was like pure wool. His throne was a fiery flame. Its wheels a burning fire. And a fiery stream issued and came forth from before him. And a thousand thousands ministered to him. 10,000 times 10,000 stood before him. The court was seated and the books were opened." And then he goes on to say in verse 13, "I was watching in the night visions and behold one like the Son of Man coming with clouds of heaven and he came to the Ancient of Days and they brought him near before him. Then to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away and his kingdom the one which shall not be destroyed."

Now, a lot of people think that this reference to the Son of Man refers to Jesus' second coming at the end of the age. I don't think so. If we look at the book of Revelation, we see that the Son of Man there appears in heaven as he ascends into heaven on the Shekinah cloud of glory. And when he returns to heaven from which he came originally, the chorus in heaven begins to sing, "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive honor and glory and dominion and power." And at the ascension, Jesus is elevated to the right hand of God. He goes to his investiture. He goes to his coronation. And he is seated at the right hand of the Father as the King of the Kings and as the Lord of the Lords.

Now, during his earthly ministry, he made the observation, "No one ascends into heaven except he who has descended from heaven." No one ascends into heaven except he who has descended from heaven. So when Jesus speaks of ascending into heaven, he's not merely talking about going up there. Enoch went up to heaven and other people go to heaven when they die. So what does Jesus mean when he says no one ascends into heaven? Well, here the word to ascend has specific reference to his going up to a particular place for a particular reason. He's going again to his coronation. And the only one who ascends to be seated at the right hand of God is the one who first came down here from the presence of God. As Jesus prays in his high priestly prayer in John, "Lord, restore to me the glory I had with you from the foundation of the world."

So the title son of man, the way Jesus is using it, referring to himself, he's saying to the Pharisees, "I'm doing these things that you may know the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath." The Son of Man is one who comes from heaven who carries the full measure of his deity with him and with that deity, the full authority that is associated with him. And so then we see the second part of the statement, that you might know the Son of Man, this heavenly being, this divine being, is the Lord of the Sabbath.

What Jesus never uttered words more startling to the ears of the Pharisees when he said that to them. We ask ourselves, when was the Sabbath day established? We know that it was part of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Sinai. And some people think that the sanctity of the Sabbath was established with the covenant that God made with his people through Moses as the mediator there on Sinai in the Ten Commandments. No, no, no, no, no. Though the Sabbath is part of the Ten Commandments, it's not established at Sinai. It's not instituted at Sinai. It's instituted in creation. The Sabbath is a creation ordinance established by God in his original work where he worked for six days creating all that there was and on the seventh day he rested and he hallowed it. He sanctified it. The Sabbath was sanctified in creation. And the only one who had the authority to hallow the Sabbath day in the work of creation were not the birds of the air or the fish of the sea or the creatures that God made in his own image. Only the Creator had the authority to institute and consecrate the Sabbath day. So do you get the inference? Only the Creator can be Lord of the Sabbath day. And here is the Lord of the Sabbath day, the one who made all things, now in his incarnation, is being challenged by these Pharisees for his behavior on the Sabbath day. And he's saying to them, "What? You're telling me what I can do on the Sabbath day? Who do you think made the Sabbath day?" He didn't say it quite that way. That's the way I would have said it, but he didn't say it that way. But that's the, that is the import of what Jesus is saying to them. And you see now why they couldn't wait to kill him as a blasphemer. Jesus is saying, "I decide what is lawful and what is not lawful on the Sabbath day."

You know, another controversy that rages throughout Christendom and didn't end centuries ago is the question of which day is the proper day in which Christians come together to worship. We know that the original Sabbath in Israel was established on the seventh day of the week. And now Christians almost universally worship God in solemn assembly on the first day of the week rather than on the seventh day of the week. The Sabbath cycle is still maintained, one and seventh, because that's what Sabbath means. But now it's the first day rather than the seventh day. Why? Because the Lord of the Sabbath was resurrected on the first day of the week. And in his resurrection, proved the ultimate intent and purpose of the original Sabbath day by which God provides for his people a time of rest, pointing forward to the future time when his people would enter into their rest by resurrection. And now the Lord of the Sabbath is raised on the first day of the week. And so the early church came together to worship, to celebrate the sacraments, and to hear the word of God on the Lord's Day, on the Lord of the Sabbath's Day, which is now the first day of the week.

All these things and so much more are contained in this title, son of man. And this claim by our Lord that he, as the Son of Man, is the Lord of the Sabbath. This is a clear declaration of the deity of Christ, that the one who went into the grain field to feed himself and his friends is the one who has come down from heaven and the only one who ever ascended to heaven to be installed at the right hand of the Father as the King of the Kings and the Lord of the Lords. It is this Son of Man that we serve and worship on his day.

Let's pray. Father and our God, we thank you for this marvelous declaration of our Lord. We pray that as we understand it more deeply, that our image of Jesus and his importance will be greatly enlarged and our hearts will be filled with a desire to worship him and to serve him as our King, as our Redeemer, and as our Lord. For we ask it in his name. Amen.

You don't have to remember. You don't have to stay close. As long as you're somewhere out there, that's enough for me. I don't need to hold you near me. Don't need promises to keep. Just the thought that you are breathing. Somewhere in this world I see. Even if I'm not beside you. Even if you never know. There's a quiet kind of comfort just in knowing you still glow. I don't need forever. I just need you to exist. You don't have to stay with me. You don't have to feel the same. Just as long as you're still out there, calling softly through my days. You don't have to look my way. You don't have to be my home. It's enough to know you're living in a world I'm not alone. I won't chase you through the distance. Won't disturb your chosen life. I'll just keep you in my silence like a star that shines at night. Through the dark and through the blue, I still think of you. You don't have to stay with me. You don't have to feel the same. Just as long as you're still out there, calling softly through my days. You don't have to look my way. You don't have to be my home. It's enough to know you're living in a world I'm not alone. I don't need to be your light. I don't need to cross your mind. All I need is just the truth that you're somewhere still alive. You don't have to stay with me. You don't have to feel the same. Just as long as you're still out there, calling softly through my days. You don't have to look my way. You don't have to be my home. It's enough to know you're living. In a world I'm not alone.