Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / October 10, 2021 | Church Words - Justification

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October 10, 2021 | Church Words - Justification · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody see the sky this morning?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you didn't, it's above you.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was awesome.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was beautiful.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those times where you are reminded, as we just sang, that we are we're not alone.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's official.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Murder is legal in the state of California.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: That is what Norm McDonald said on SNL's weekend update on October 3rd, 1995, the day that O.J.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson was acquitted of murder.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it uh that case, though it was quite the spectacle and uh had some entertainment value, also conflicted with many people, with their inner sense of justice about what was going on in that particular situation.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And in many other cases like it that we had before that time and since that time, there is a part of us uh that rails against this idea that there is injustice being done in the world.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, how many of you, in a second here, a show of hands, have ever listened to a true crime podcast, watched any show about court or legal proceedings or the police, or just talk with your friends about court cases.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's one of, if you look at um the podcast that Apple has, consistently the most popular ones are like cold case files and stuff like that.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's just this part of us that loves to do it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes sense that that's the case because we would say that we are made in the image of God, uh the Imago Day, the image of God, that when God created man, that part of that creation was that we reflect parts of his character and his attributes.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: And one of those things that we reflect is this internal sense of justice.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: It is a reflection of our creator's perfect judgment.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, when uh next time you're driving down the highway and somebody speeds past you, going like 30 miles per hour faster than you are, and you're already going like six miles, seven miles over speed limit, right?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um and then like five miles down the road you see them pulled over, and there's that little part of you that's just like, yeah, got um, you are reflecting God into the world.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it's also a part, interestingly, of what we would call the the moral argument for God.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: That uh throughout history, throughout all time, across the world, uh that societies, civilizations, small little tiny tribal villages develop their own system and code of conduct, and 95% of the time the same things are in there, even if they weren't communicating to each other.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh nobody likes it when you steal against them.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so this justice, just once more, is something that is ingrained within us.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this morning, our word is going to be talking about God's system of justice.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: We are talking about justification.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: As Doug said during the announcements, justification, it is a legal term that has to do with our standing before God.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in other words, you can also say that right, we have been justified through Christ.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: God sees us as justified, Jesus' death justified for us, our standing before Him.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: But when it comes to God's particular brand of justice, and we have to acknowledge that it is the perfect system of justice, a lot of Christians kind of balk at this idea, particularly of his wrath.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: God's wrath.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem is we can't talk about justification until we appreciate and understand God's wrath.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: We love to talk about his love and his grace and his mercy, and for the last couple weeks, we have been going deep into that.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: The first week in Church Words, we talked about human depravity and how God had rescued us from that.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Last week we discussed the atonement, sort of the particular means that God used to rescue us from our depravity.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: But today we need to talk just a little bit about God's wrath.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're actually gonna set this aside for just a moment because we have to appreciate what's going on.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And there when we go through the Bible, and man, especially in early, some of the early church fathers, early heresies in Christianity, they love to divide the Old Testament from the New Testament because they felt like there were two different gods there.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: That there were two different gods.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: The one that they saw that was, you know, destroying entire towns, where armies were um just devoting uh entire nations almost to destruction, talking about hell.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: We see those things and we go, man, God, how can that be possible that you are such a God of love and also that there is this wrath that just swallows up people or strikes them dead when they touch the Ark of the Covenant?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then we look at the New Testament and we see Jesus, this kind, generous, loving figure who also had wrath, mind you, of the um situation in the temple where he's driving out the tax collectors.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: But we still like to create this false dichotomy between the two.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: We've got to understand that they are connected.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: It is part of our ability as Christians to hold these two truths in concert with each other, that God is also, that by him being perfectly just, the corollary and the reflection to his grace and mercy is his judgment, his wrath.
• 6:12
  unknown: C.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis says it this way: a God who did not regard this sin with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: We cannot even wish for such a God.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: It is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abolished, that the smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath happens to stink.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: When we merely say that we are bad, the wrath of God seems a barbarous doctrine.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, mere corollary from God's goodness.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: What's his point?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: His point is that one of the main reasons that we struggle so much when we come to God's judgment, his, right, as we are saying today, his perfectly good, perfectly right, just judgment.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that he punishes the wicked and vindicates the righteous, that when we come to that and have problems with it, it is a misunderstanding of our position before him, and we are viewing our sin through our own lenses, our own depraved soul, as we talked about a couple weeks ago, rather than viewing it from God's perspective.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you go through the Bible and you see these moments and you see him devote an entire, like Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction, and you're like, man, that seems intense, you need to understand, and I need to understand when I read those parts too, that man, maybe I just don't fully appreciate how much God hates sin in this world, how evil that sin truly is, and how deeply Satan has affected the world that we live in.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I just don't understand that part of it.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because part of God being righteous and his justness is that he is doing what is correct at all times.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: That when he does devote something to destruction, when he does punish the evil and the depravity in the world, that it is an appropriate response.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: You can think of it this way: why do ranchers in the Flint Hills burn their fields?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they do it because that destruction is the appropriate and necessary response to the invasion of invasive species.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: It is one of the only ways to make certain types of grain that grows in the flint hills to make their seeds open up is the heat of the fire.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: It is the best response, and it is done in a measured and controlled way.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a wildfire that we're talking about.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: As you all, I'm sure have been able to see and smell when you are driving through the Flint Hills, the smoke rising and you see fire spreading across the land.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: It looks dark and it looks oppressive, but in reality, what's happening is new life is going to flow from that destruction.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: God's wrath is much the same way.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: He is doing what is appropriate and necessary, he is doing it in the right time and the right location so that growth may happen.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: But he is also a great caretaker of the world that he has created.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so, just like we would look at this situation and say, man, the ranchers know their land best, God knows his creation best.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: But this wrath, though, right, we're just digging deep into it, we're just kind of settling into this because we do need to understand it.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: God's wrath, though, is something that needs to be respected.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: There was a pastor back in the uh 1700s who uh named Jonathan Edwards, who loved to talk about wrath.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he has a really famous sermon called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, wow, that's that's quite the bold statement.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And his whole point was that he wanted his congregation, this is part of the first enlightenment that was going on here in the United States.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: This was happening before the U.S.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: had even written the Declaration of Independence, and he wanted his congregation to understand point blank what it meant to be a rebel in God's kingdom.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Here's an excerpt of his sermon.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: He says, The wrath of God is like great waters that are damned for the present.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: If God should only withdraw his hand from the floodgate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God would rush forth with inconceivable fury, and would come upon you with omnipotent power.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if your strength were ten thousand times greater than it is, yea, ten thousand times greater than the strength of the stoutest, sturdiest devil in hell, it would be nothing to withstand or endure it.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: God's wrath is not something to be trifled with.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: As Christians, it's not something that we should diminish, but it is also something that we can take and understand and say that our faith does not need to be conflicted when we read these parts in the Bible about God's judgment.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Just that it is a natural outflowing of his righteous judgment, that he is taking care of the evil in the world.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: The problem that we have is we are a part of that evil in the world.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so it feels, and it is true, that his wrath is directed towards those of us who have rebelled against him without Christ.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: So before we go into justification, which is our main point this morning, um, I just kind of want to recap with you some important things.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: God's wrath is a direct response to his hatred of sin.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: It is what happens because sin is, as we talked about in the first week, sin is the antithesis of everything that God stands for.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: It is not just making a mistake, it is going against him and his kingdom.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, necessary because of his holiness.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: God would not be holy, he would not be a good God if he did not have wrath against sin.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's, again, that selfish part of us that's like, man, but why's he got to be such a stickler about this one thing?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why does he say that I can't do that?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't really seem to be affecting anybody.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Why what's all this language about punishment for?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Why why can't he just ease up a bit?
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because he wouldn't be holy and he wouldn't be righteous if he did.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the beautiful things about his character is that we can trust and see and know that when we read, get to the end of the Bible, and we taught and we see that he is going to finally destroy once and for all the powers of sin and darkness, you're like, man, I'm glad that's happening.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the same thing that he's doing now in a certain measure.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Third and finally, is that God's wrath is always appropriate in its action.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: If we have a misunderstanding of why God has destroyed, why he has punished the things he says about sin, then we have a misunderstanding of how God views sin.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're viewing it from our perspective and not his.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, I've got good news and bad news.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Bad news first, I've already said it.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: We are the objects of God's wrath, because we have brought sin into this world and we are sinners.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Romans 5.8 through 9, though, tells us the good news.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: But God proves his own love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: How much more then, since we have now been justified, there we go, by his blood will we be saved through him from wrath.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: This idea here in Romans 5.8 that God proves his own love for us, that Jesus died while we were still sinners, is a huge concept in terms of us being saved by grace and not through works.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: What we're talking about here is just this really plain fact that we were, some other translations of the Bible might say that you were enemies.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was an enemy of God when Jesus died for me, when Jesus died for you.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just that we were sort of like running around like kind of, you know, crazy toddlers that are smearing paint on the walls, okay?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is like we are his enemies the same way that he is seeing anybody who has rebelled against him, we are included in that company.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And in that space, he stepped into it and said, I am going to save you.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: While we were still sinners.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: And though we are sinners now, in a moment, we're going to talk about what being justified means.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's obvious in this passage that there is a change that occurs.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: You say, while we were still sinners, I'm still a sinner, last I checked.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: So what is it about justification that has changed my standing before God?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it has to do being saved by the blood of Christ.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, what we are being saved from is God's wrath, his justified wrath.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get to our main passage for this morning.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Our main passage that's going to help us to more deeply understand what it means to be justified and find justification in God.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Romans 3, 23 through 26.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: You've probably heard that before.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: God presented him as the mercy seat by his blood through faith to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his restraint God passed over the sins previously committed.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: God presented him, Jesus, to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be just and justify the one who has faith in Jesus.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Let's break this down for a second, okay?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's this sort of all-encompassing truth that every single one of us in here have fallen short of God's glory.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: From the best of us to the worst of us, and however you want to define that, we have all fallen short of his standard.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: But it keeps going, that we are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: These two things are inextricably connected together.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Christ's redemption, the atoning work of the cross, resulted in our justification, right?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so this right again is a legal standing.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: When you're seeing this word justified, and later when it says that God was just in what he did and Jesus justified those who believe, we are talking once more about the way that he views us.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it really is helpful, I think, to think of it in almost this like courtroom type setting, where we've got the judge that is immaculate in his judgment being presented a case, and at the end of that case, Jesus is sort of the defense attorney here.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: In the end of that case, God says, you have been justified, you have been set free.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when it comes to the mercy seat, this is so cool, and I've got a slide on that next, but we're gonna skip over that for a moment, because that's gonna connect us back to the Old Testament.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: But after that it says, Because in his restraint, God passed over the sins previously committed.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Jonathan Edwards just had a statement about that.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: He referred to God's wrath as sort of like these flood waters that were hidden behind a dam, and that God was sort of holding back all of this wrath that was being committed, the wrath that was due for all of the sins that were being committed.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that he was ignoring it or endorsing it or allowing it per se, but rather that he was holding back this wrath and it was building up and building up and building up.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so God was using restraint as he passed over those sins previously committed.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: You go back to the Old Testament, as we talked about last week, saying the blood of bulls and goats doesn't do anything to actually forgive people of their sins, but rather it was symbolism for what was coming later.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so what was going on is God says by faith they are trusting in this sacrifice, same thing that we see through Christ.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And by faith I am holding back this wrath because what they are in essence doing is believing in Jesus in the future.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so this wrath is being held back.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: These flood waters are being stayed until the time when Jesus is ready to die.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then upon the cross, upon Calvary, everything gets poured out.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: All of the wrath for mankind, past, present, and future, for the sins of the world is directed at his son on the cross.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus exclaims when he's on Calvary.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what we see there, there's, well, there is some debate about what exactly he's saying, but I believe what he's feeling is not the fact that he has actually been disconnected from God, that he is no longer God himself, but the immense weight of humanity's sin being poured out on his body in that moment.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sin, the thing which separates us from God more than anything else, the direct opposition to his will, Jesus got all of it.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so Jesus also got all of the wrath that was directed there.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: So God presented Jesus to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time so that he would be just and justify the one who has faith in Jesus.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about another church word here real quick: righteousness.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Righteousness, said a lot in the Bible, but it is the um it is the essence, especially for God, of being morally correct.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: He's always right in his judgments, right?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: These judgments are morally good.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And part of God's righteousness, part of this thing he has to uphold, is I want you to I want to set the situation for you.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: On the one hand, he is this perfect judge that must punish sin, and then on the other hand, he has got his creation, which he dearly loves, and keeps walking into sin.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so in his righteousness, he can't just say, I don't want to do anything about that.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: He has to punish the sin.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: If he doesn't, then he's not a good God, and so he goes and he punishes the sin, but in order to also protect his creation, he sends Jesus to bridge the gap between the two of these things.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: He makes a decision that both upholds his righteousness and displays his grace.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: We see another example of this in Exodus 33.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the Israelites have they're walking through the desert.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: They've been rescued from Egypt, and God says, I so deeply want to be with you, my people, my chosen people, that I have rescued.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Out of slavery and bondage.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: But because you are so sinful, I can't walk with you like I did in the garden.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to send my presence.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: It takes the form of the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of clouds by day, so that you know that I'm with you, but I can't physically be in your presence, because if I did, I would have to kill you.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: He says that in Exodus 33.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: So because of my love, I'm not going to walk with you.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to do what you might want the most.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to take a step back so that you can be preserved.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Know that I am with you, but because I am just, I can't walk with you.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: God says this.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so we also see here this beautiful road that he's walking down.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: From the foundations of the world, we are heading to this point.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: It is the greatest point in all of history was Jesus on the cross.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: But let's go back to one second for what I think is the most interesting part of this passage.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: God presented him as the mercy seat by his blood through faith.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: What is the mercy seat?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: That name might be ringing a little bell for you because we did talk about it briefly last week.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: And depending on which translation you're looking at right now, it might say some different things.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: The CSB, which is what I'm using, says he is the mercy seat.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: The ESV and the NASB say that he is a propitiation, right?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: Whoa, propitiation.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, something that makes a wrong right, right?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Then the NIV has probably the most basic translation of it, but maybe the most easily understood, which he is a sacrifice of atonement.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes to translations, it's like you were moving and you asked some friends to show up, and one of them shows up with like a pickup truck and a trailer, and one of them shows up with their Honda Civic, okay?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: One of them is better suited for the job, but the other one might be a little bit more accessible.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that is what we've got here, and sort of like Russian nesting dolls, God presented Christ, he was a sacrifice of atonement.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: We discussed that last week.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: He was a sacrifice of atonement, but atonement, if you can sort of sort of split hairs with me, important hairs, that that is the method that was used to save us.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Sacrifice of atonement, which is a propitiation for our sins.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: It made right the wrong.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: But all of that is condensed in this idea of the mercy seat, which is the most unwieldy of the terms.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the what is Paul trying to get at here, though, in Romans?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: Why is he using this phrase, the mercy seat?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: This word, it's Hilasterion in Greek, is used only one other time in the New Testament, in Hebrews 9, 5.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: The cherubim of glory, which is a type of angelic being, uh, were above the ark overshadowing the mercy seat.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's language referencing the tabernacle, right?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: In the desert, God gave the instructions to the Israelites.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: The precursor to the temple was the tabernacle.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was a tent, it was in the middle of the Israelite camp.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's where the Ark of the Covenant, which was where God's presence dwelt.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and a part of the construction of the Ark of the Covenant was the mercy seat.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was this part on the top.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And because the tabernacle is supposed to be a copy of what's in heaven, a uh representation of God's heavenly dwelling, uh, the symbolism of the mercy seat is that this is where God dwells.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is his throne, if you will.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: How does he sit there when there are these wings here?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not necessarily the most accurate representation, but I'm not going to draw that.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: So somebody else did.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the mercy seat is what is sitting on top of the Ark of the Covenant.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, last week, right, we said that there was that first goat, it was a sacrifice, and the priest had to physically uh rid the tabernacle of the sins of the Israelites, and one of the things that he sprinkled was the mercy seat, God's throne.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if we can now think back here for a second to this verse, and he is saying that Jesus was the mercy seat for our sins, right?
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: We are making this beautiful Old Testament, New Testament connection.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: We are making these steel cable connections between the two.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: That what Paul is showing us is that what was happening back then was a type or a foreshadowing of what was to come, that Christ was ultimately going to then shed his blood at the throne of grace, on God's throne, so that we could be forgiven of our sins.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of the how and why of us being justified.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: And importantly, it had been decided from way before any of us were ever born, way before mankind was even created.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: An early church father named Clement of Rome, who was around in 96 A.D., it's really quick, kind of interesting.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Some people think that in Philippians 4, 3, Paul mentions a Clement that is his uh co-u-co-worker in the faith of the gospel, and uh some people would believe that's Clement of Rome.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: He was a bishop after Peter in the Roman church, so he would have known that passage that we were looking at very well.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that was a letter written to the church at Rome, and uh, depending on history, he's the second, third, or fourth bishop after Peter.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: But anyhow, he says, and we too, being called by his will in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom or understanding or godliness or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart, but by that faith through which from the beginning Almighty God has justified all men, to whom be glory for ever and ever.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: What a beautiful statement in the early church here, right?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is sort of undercutting all of the movement in the hundreds of years after that in Catholicism towards works righteousness.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: He is saying we have been justified by that faith through which was done at the beginning.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: That God, way before any of us, had said, I see this problem coming down the road.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: I am just, they are unjust, and we have got to find a solution for that.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: And until that happens, their faith that it is coming will be counted as righteousness to them.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: And after that moment in time, after the cross, their faith that it happened will be counted as righteousness to them.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: But how should justification feel?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a legal term, yeah.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: You can think of a courtroom, yes.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: It is how God views you now because Jesus is a mediator of the new covenant in heaven, or in other words, even when you sin today, he is covering your sins.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: But how should that feel to be seen by God?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Romans 5 1 says, Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if you understand what we've been talking about and appreciate this wrath of God and what it means to be considered his enemy, then hearing that you are now at peace with him is a really, really profound statement that is being made.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: That God, trustworthy in his pursuits, just in his responses, has taken that wrath, poured it all out on Jesus, and even though we still sin, he has peace with his creation.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: There should be some sense of security, some sense of belonging, of appreciation, of comfort, of knowing that you are at peace with God.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: The way the Bible describes this is that Jesus, even right now, at this moment, is in heaven, alive, having been resurrected and defeating death, defeated death, that when we sin, he's still up there every single time saying, My death was sufficient for their sin.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: What they just did, I covered on the cross, and we can have peace with them because I have died for them and they have accepted me.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like even now that's happening.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's not like a 2,000-year-ago thing.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's like in heaven, as we speak, God is covering the sins of the whole world and at peace with them.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's this beautiful reality.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: And as we've sort of moved through this process here over the last couple of weeks of establishing our depravity, why Jesus had to die, now are sort of standing before God.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: We've come to this place, and you might think this phrase is anticlimactic, but it is the most beautiful representation of God's love that could ever be presented to the world.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: That he is at peace with something that should be experiencing his wrath.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: So our question this morning hopefully hits kind of close to home.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that is, do you have peace with God?
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: If, to use sort of an old Baptist maxim, if today was your last day and you went to go and stand before God, would you be comfortable with that?
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: Are you ready to see him?
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because how you feel about the answer to that question tells you everything you need to know about whether or not you feel like you are at peace with God in your soul.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: First and foremost, there are layers to this.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: First and foremost is are you at peace with him in terms of just being justified by Christ?
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: Have you accepted the gift of Jesus that makes it so that you are no longer an object of his wrath, but Jesus was your substitutionary atonement, and he took that.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: He took your place on the cross.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have just that peace with God?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are some people who are so angered by God's wrath.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: As Bertrand Russell said, a famous atheist, he said, This is the one flaw I see in Christ.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: The one reason I can't accept him is that he approved of God's wrath.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: Are you so angry with God that you are unable to come to peace with him?
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: That is a heavy burden.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've got to tell you.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing that you are a rebel in his kingdom, that's a heavy weight to bear around.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also eternally doomed.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's not another avenue out of this.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: His wrath is all-encompassing because it has to be, because he is holy.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so being eternally doomed is a natural progression of his wrath meeting your sin and his justified response to it.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's obviously retired now, he's in the Hall of Fame, but Barry Sanders, the old uh Detroit Lions running back, uh, used to make his opposing teammates really, really angry because every single time they hit him, he would pop right back up and say, Good hit.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: You would hear in during his Hall of Fame speech or some of the videos that have been made about him, they would say, It made me so mad that this guy that I just, you know, thought I knocked the lights out of, popped right back up, didn't slow down, and said, Hey, that was a good one.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Best luck next play.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's some of us that we've received this gift of grace, and it almost angers us that God has done it.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's part of our pride, inward pride that we don't think that we need the peace that He's offering.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we really couldn't be more wrong about that.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that is honestly the first level is have we accepted the peace that God is offering through the cross so that we have been forgiven of our sins and that we can now be justified in his sight.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: We are set free because Jesus has paid the penalty of our sin.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the next level, it runs a bit deeper, and I think Romans being written to Christians, right?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: People who are in the Church of Rome, who are also experiencing mass persecution for their faith, I think there's a deeper level of Christian peace that we are supposed to find, that sort of peace that the Bible says surpasses all understanding.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: The peace of having a unified and beautiful relationship with God.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: And for some of you, it and frankly for me sometimes, I have this problem, whether it's because of a parental figure or a friend or a life circumstance where somebody was so harsh to you in authority that you have a problem accepting that the one who is in ultimate authority over you is being kind to you and being loving to you, that it's almost more comfortable for you to accept that Old Testament God because it sort of makes sense and jives with your inner shame and guilt rather than this New Testament Jesus that is showing love and generosity to those who have made mistakes.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: Reminder, they're the same God.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's not a difference between the two.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: They are both aspects of his holy character.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: But those who know Christ, we experience the love of Jesus.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: That is the relationship with God that we're supposed to have now.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Something that I like to say for individuals who are struggling with that and a frequent use of my own personal devotional time is I like to go back through the Gospels.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I like to just focus rather than trying to just gather information, I like to just focus on the way that Jesus treated people who had no right to be treated as well as they were by him.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: If we just think of God as a wrathful being, then we get to the woman at the well and we see that Jesus wasn't even addressing her sin.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Do you have the water of life?
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then later on, when she wants to go and tell more people about it, he says, Well, yeah, I know the whole thing.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're living with somebody who isn't even your husband right now.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: You don't even actually have a husband, you've had a whole lot of them.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus gets to it.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't excuse the sin, he doesn't approve of it, but his focus is on having a relationship with her and making sure that she understands the water of life.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: This peace that we're supposed to have with God is supposed to overcome all of our doubts.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: It is supposed to overcome all of our grievances, it is supposed to overcome all of our misperceptions and weird ideas about God.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: It is supposed to be the thing which is defined by our relationship with Him.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: He initiated peace, and we have accepted that treaty, and then we carry that forward.
• 38:18
  unknown: Man.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: And most of all, in those moments where we feel like that God, which is righteously judging sin is coming out against us, we can have a measured response to it.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are not people just said in the New Testament or just said in the Old Testament, we can say, I know my sin is not good.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: I know the Holy Spirit is convicting me of what I've done, but I also know that I've been justified with Christ.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the words that I'm saying to myself right now, filled with shame and guilt, are not the same words that God is speaking to me.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: He is speaking words of love and comfort because he died for my sins.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: So ultimately, we should have peace with Christ.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: God loved you because he is righteous, he knew that wrath was coming for you and for me.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because he loves us, he sent Jesus as an atonement for our sins.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus atoned for our sins, we have been justified.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: And because we are justified, we now have peace with God.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: That peace with God that will never go away, because Jesus' death and resurrection will cover us for a lifetime and frankly for an eternity.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a beautiful thing.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go ahead and pray.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, thank you for Christ.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you that you have justified us, that we are seen as righteous in your eyes, that you have peace with us.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: God, I I we've seen your wrath.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen your judgment.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: We've read about it and heard about it.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: God, we know that you hate sin, but yet your wrath is reasonable.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: We just don't understand our sin.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, please help us to dig deeper into that.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: To appreciate what it means to have put Jesus on the cross by our own sin, but then also to accept the peace that came from it.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: God, these things are hard to hold in balance with each other.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: By the power of your Spirit, would you help us to do that?
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: Would you help us to both understand conviction and understand peace at the same time?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, we desire to have a relationship with you that is full and bright and filled with all the good things that you have for us in this life.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to be held back by our sin any longer.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: God, we want to feel that peace that you have.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: Father, we thank you for Christ.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you that from the foundation of the world you made a decision before we were even here to ask for it that you would die for us.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: And God, that we are the beneficiaries of that today.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: We praise you, and it's in your glorious name.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great week.