Dvd 09 Crucified With Christ — Art Katz

The Cross as the Central Event of History

And our hearts call upon them for the kingdom of God, that they might be an end-time people of God proclaiming His salvation throughout the earth.

The issue of history, which is the issue of the oceans.

...descending into suffering implies and suggests that there are issues of such depth, of such an immeasurable moral kind, that nothing less nor other than this remarkable suffering and death could requite it.

If it were not for that, we would be left to our own subjectivity, to our own thoughts, to our own moral and ethical measure of what we think righteousness is or right is. God has made a statement, for time and for eternity, the crucifixion of His Son.

And it's an inexhaustible thing to meditate upon, to contemplate, and to fall before. So, the prophetic man, maybe a teacher has another way, more systematic and outlined, but the prophetic man has got to assimilate and in fits and spurts bring forth, you know, for himself as well as for his hearers, an approach and an appropriation of so great a subject.

We've not seen the end of it, and the heck of the matter is, we've not yet had a true beginning in it. The cross has lost its efficacy and has suffered from shabby mistreatment or neglect to become sentimentalized.

The best of evangelical saints can recite the formula, that by it and the blood shed they're saved. And true enough, that's true. And it works and they receive the benefit. But that falls so short of a true appreciation, as well as appropriation, of what God wrought in that single act, for which Jesus coming down was already a statement of the like kind.

It is the central pillar of all reality. It is the pivot around which all things turn. So if it is marred or distorted or misunderstood or failed to be appreciated and apprehended, to that degree we will suffer dislocation.

The world, I think, is profoundly dislocated. It's out of joint, morally, ethically, righteously. Because this central thing has not been rightly appreciated. And by what people most especially has there been a gross neglect and even a rejection of the whole subject but my kinsmen, Israel, the Jew, who look upon the crucifixion of Jesus, if they look upon it at all, as some kind of historic minor mishap of some character who ran afoul of Roman authorities, suffered an unhappy consequence from which he could have been saved if he was not subject to such delusions about himself, this megalomania about being Messiah and King.

So it's a pitiful thing rather than an object to be crunched by. And so my people have suffered the consequence of this terrible setting aside of the single most important event in time and history given of God.

And they will not be restored and cannot take their place and cannot be a nation of priests until they have not only fathomed but apprehended this same act which they have till now renounced. The question is, how will they have opportunity?

How will they consider what is already historically past? There's no way to go back and to apprise and sense something of that reality. It's faded from historic view and any attempt even to depict it like Gibson's film falls short.

So here's what I think. There will be a reenactment. There's a necessity for the reenactment of the cross, not only for Israel but for the world. Because as we read in Isaiah 52, a cryptic, mysterious reference that I think has vibrations for the future where it says, in the last verse of chapter 52, where the statement on the crucified Christ begins, not in 53, but 52 .13, which by the way is the place where the synagogue ceased to quote Isaiah.

You know that there's a haftorah reading, a portion from the prophets read on every Shabbat appropriate to the text from the five books of Moses which needs to be read a single year. The rabbis, the rabbinical councils have determined each reading and the appropriate selection from the prophets to fit that segment from the Torah.

So they come to 52 .12 in Isaiah and the following week they continue with Isaiah 54 and omit this whole most powerful, single, most eloquent, concise, revealing, prophetic picture of a suffering servant who not only suffers a cruel death but is resurrected from it and he shall see the fruit, the progeny, the reward of his sacrifice.

So Judaism has wisely omitted it. And when I shared with my mother, bless her soul who is now in heaven, ten days before her death in her 96th year, calling upon his name, she had never heard it. And when I read to her Isaiah 53, she said, in the New Testament is that found.

I said, I'm not reading to you from the New Testament, I'm reading to you from the Old. I'm reading from the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, Isaiah. She said, I never heard that. And I said, you never will in the synagogue.

I'm going to ask my rabbi why it's omitted. She never did but it would have been a wise move.

The rabbi in all his teaching never speak about them.

That's right. That's why something has got to happen of the profoundest kind to bring present Jewry into a reappraisal and consideration of what we have for generations rejected and swept under the historic carpet.

Or we cannot come into the fulfillment of our own destiny and call as it pertains to the nations. A nation of priests and the light unto the world requires not only the acknowledgement of this text, but its appropriation.

Isaiah 52–53 and the Suffering Servant

Yet, there's another thing that we read in this verse 15. Well, let's back up from 13 where this begins. My servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled and be very high. So here's the introduction to a servant who at the end of his suffering will earn through it an exaltation.

He will be extolled and be very high. It's the kind of language that is reserved for God. And it's more than that that is bestowed even upon faithful servants. And many were astonished at thee. His visage, his face was so marred more than any man and his form more than the sons of men.

So shall he sprinkle many nations. The king shall shut their mouths at him for that which had not been told them shall they see and that which they had not shall they consider. So here's my suspicion that there was a partial fulfillment of this at the advent of the cross 2 ,000 years ago.

Some modest measure of the communication by which men were astonished and were sprinkled as nations and kings was told them. But the greater majority of kings and nations today stand in ignorance of this remarkable sacrifice.

They have not yet heard that they should consider and it has not been told them what they shall see. So there's a necessity at the conclusion of the age for this cross and its sacrifice to be made manifest for nations and for kings.

And I believe that Israel is fated to perform that demonstration in its own future suffering in a road to Calvary reserved for the nation that it must tread. So we read Isaiah 53 as we will tonight and tomorrow however long it takes us.

We need to read it with a deep reference for describing the sufferings of Jesus as past but also a foreshadowing of something yet future and yet unfulfilled in which we marred more than any man and they shall have no beauty that any should desire them.

I believe that the time of Jacob's trouble and the uprooting of Jews worldwide and being pursued and chafed unto death will very much give them an experience like unto the cross. Not that they volunteered for it or that like Jesus they're experiencing it in their innocence.

The fact is that they're experiencing it as the consequence of their sin. But nevertheless as it takes place through all the nations globally it is a demonstration and a reiteration of that which Jesus had suffered 2 ,000 years before.

And as I hope to show you not only will kings and nations look up and understand that which they had not been told but Israel itself in the midst of that suffering will come to a revelation of suffering suggests of him who came before them to their own discovery of Jesus as the crucified Lamb of God and the suffering servant.

So hold tight. We've got to feel our way through this. And in conversation this afternoon a little informal chitchat a little circle of souls there in the dining room about the necessity for New Zealand's revival.

If New Zealand is to be a wilderness of the nations for Jews in flight not just a segment or the more rustic remote parts of New Zealand but as I suggested some years ago the statement just came out of my mouth completely unpremeditated the whole of New Zealand will be a wilderness of the nations in the midst of the nations.

So if numbers of Jews are to pass through New Zealand and its place of refuge, healing, restoration, revelation the nation itself needs to be saved. The nation itself needs to be in a spiritual condition to receive them and to communicate the kinds of things that interpret their suffering for them that they might rightly understand it and receive its benefit so that mourning and sighing shall flee away and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads as they return to Zion.

It could be that New Zealand has a distinct place in the whole program of God for Israel's redemption and it's sifting through the nations. In other nations it will be a segment, a wilderness of the nations.

In New Zealand, as I heard out of my mouth unpremeditated, the entire nation will be a wilderness which will require a very real revival, a very real spiritual knowledge of God, His ways and we know unhappily how the faith has suffered loss in New Zealand almost having fallen.

It's as if the nation had never heard, never seen. It needs again to be sprinkled. Its kings need to shut their mouths. Its princes need to be instructed in things which they had not rightly heard but have heard and not heard because they've gone to Sunday school and they've been indoctrinated and they've learned a catechism and a little formula for salvation that doesn't really save and they think they know but they don't know as they ought to know.

And that's why I believe the final stroke of God in history is the reiteration of the cross. Not that Jesus Himself will a second time have to pass through His once and for all suffering but the nation that is also called to be the Son of God.

The first use of the word son in scripture was for Israel in Exodus chapter 4. I've called my son out of Egypt. And the servant Psalms and the references to a servant nation are very descriptive of Israel and of Jacob, of Isaiah.

So there's a remarkable parallel and harmony between Israel and Jesus where the rabbis have debated about our Christian interpretation of Isaiah 53 and say no that's not Him, it's us. We are the suffering servant and we're suffering for the nations although it's clear from the text that the one for whom the sufferings are being performed is Israel itself.

All we like sheep have gone astray. All of us turned our own way. It's clear who the we is and who the he is. But nevertheless their greatest rabbis, Akiva and so on, have suggested this interpretation because it is that close where you can almost interpret the historic sufferings of Israel as being some kind of benevolence from God for the nations.

But I believe that the future suffering will in fact be what they suggest past sufferings have been. The whole nation will pass through a road to Calvary so that those who have not heard will understand.

And that which they have not seen they will see, literally see. There will be an enactment. And you would have to be utterly dense and lacking in any kind of sensitivity not to see the suffering of the nation who will be marred more than any man and have no beauty should desire them and not think that this is an echo and a picture again of the suffering of the Lamb of God 2 ,000 years before that we had passed by too shallowly and inadequately and are having opportunity now historically by the suffering of Israel to consider what we had not adequately understood nor received.

That might be the key to New Zealand's revival. That in one act simultaneously the suffering of Israel in New Zealand's midst is also the factor by which it comes to a fresh appraisal and reception of the cross which is the key to revival in the deepest sense of the word.

So judgment and restoration come, if I'm not missing the Lord too gravely, in a single act. What is judgment for Israel in its suffering is the revelation of the Lord for the redemption of a nation that has fallen away from this and has reduced it to something less than other than God intends.

So that's my basic thesis. Now how to express that will require a special mercy.

I feel that's a foreshadowing of the time when Jewish people will be...

There's a program in New Zealand where Israelis are hosted through the country.

Oh, I know of that, yeah. That's a good warm-up.

That's a foreshadowing.

Yeah, that is good. I very much endorse that and encourage that. Whether New Zealanders will do it when it comes to the issue of the peril of this and not just a little happy episode with cute Israelis is another question.

And that will be the question in the last days. It would not be too much to say that many now who are sentimentally sympathetic toward Israel will be its first betrayers when Israel betrays their naive and shallow sentimental expectations and hopes.

There's a lot of romanticism about the Jew and about Israel and like a woman scorned will the Christian be whose hopes are not gratified when Israel shall collapse and in that collapse and sifting through the nations exhibit the seemiest side of its character and be totally unpleasant and have no beauty that any should desire them not only because they're marred but because the crisis reveals the truth of their condition.

Because we Jews are deceived about our own selves. We have no concept of sin. We have no awareness of the truth of our condition. We think ourselves morally, culturally, intellectually superior to Gentiles when really in our secret hearts unbeknownst to ourselves we're vicious and loathsome and it's the cross that reveals the truth of the condition.

I don't know how to say it that not the least of the functions that Jesus performed not only in providing the atonement but providing the necessity for it in seeing how far God would go in making such a provision.

How awful must sin be? How great a moral catastrophe and a devastation for mankind. How great an offense against the holiness and righteousness of God that it required this and this stubborn piece of facticity.

Christ crucified who is more than just a self-deceived man but himself the son of God and God so that he is God crucified. The judge himself bearing the judgment is the provision in God's mercy to instruct us about the truth of our condition and the moral condition in the world that only this act can meet.

If it were not for that men would be left to their own subjectivity which will always find them coming out smelling like a rose. We will always justify ourselves. We will never see our sin as sin. It is only an accident, a circumstance.

Every day I pick up the New York Times there's another scandal of corruption at Wall Street. Some CEO, some head of a corporation bilking billions, millions without a blinking of an eyelash. This Graham, what's her name Martha something Stewart went to prison for six months came out smelling like a rose.

Her stocks rose on the market and she's in a happier place now with greater prospect for profit because she had a six-month prison term which was a vacation. And even when these guys are caught and pay penalties running to the many millions which does not begin to touch the billions that they made through their illicit practices they are willing to pay the fine so long as they're not required to acknowledge guilt.

And the best that they can say is they made a mistake. A boo-boo, an error. Everybody's making mistakes but nobody's sinning. So we need to understand the grandeur and magnitude of the cross. Not only in its provision for sin and for righteousness but the revelation of what unrighteousness is and what the moral crisis is at the heart of the world and of man that God knows in his holiness that must be met in reality and in truth and power or else men would be left to their own devices and be in the last analysis their own judge and if they judge anyone they'll judge and condemn him and exonerate themselves which is exactly what my Jewish people have done with God over the Holocaust.

They have him in the box and on the witness stand and he's the one who has failed because how is it that he could not extricate and save us out of this terrible devastation and why did he allow it to come to pass to begin with?

There must be something wrong in the very structure of creed itself that permits that evil so in the last analysis it's God at fault and not the sins of Israel that required that horrible judgment. So if we will not be judged we will find ourselves judging God and when you judge God you put yourself in a place superior to God and that is the very essence and nature of sin itself.

I'm just saying, I'm feeling there's so much more you dear saints that needs to be probed and understood and God has given us some precious literature of men who have labored and struggled and wrestled with this great event to extract its greater meaning lest it be lost upon us.

One of them is the guy that I've been commending to you P .T. Forsyth he talks about the genius of all philanthropy that is to say all that men will do to make things right and to make nice short of the necessity for a cross a suffering, a shedding of blood and an atonement.

If we could doctor up the world and put on a cosmetic face and make nice that would be our human preference. But he says that nice acts, sentimentality does not reconcile only justice does. It has not the element of sin, righteousness, judgment.

It has not the holy searching, sanctifying love which made the cross of Christ. It has not the ethical note of judgment. Indeed there's no weaker feature in much current, quote, kindness or affection than its impatience of judgment.

Its unwillingness to consent and to be offended by judgment. You'll know that you're a saint when you not only acknowledge that the catastrophes in the world and in history are in the first expression the judgments of God but love his judgments.

Not merely tolerate them as if they are necessary evils because when judgment is in the earth the world will learn righteousness. And when Babylon is judged in Revelation we read of the great celebration that came with that judgment.

Judgment, Righteousness, and the Moral Meaning of the Cross

Judgment is righteousness and the mark of a true saint is one who loves God's judgments. Not only in the abstract not as it affects and afflicts others but even as it comes upon themselves in their own experience in their own family their own relationships their own marriages their own body.

In whatever form it pleases the Lord to employ it we don't debate with him. Let God be true and always. God's judgments are at the heart of his righteousness and his holiness and nothing less than the crucifixion of his son which is to say himself because in all of our afflictions he's afflicted.

It was God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. So can we ever examine this enough? Can we ever brood over this enough? Can we ever wrestle with this enough? Can we ever appropriate this deeply enough?

And only a church that does and will can be to Israel what it must and be able to explain this Isaiah 53 type suffering when it will be required to pass through it and show them that whatever they're experiencing is only a less reflection of what their own Messiah and God had suffered before them he in his innocence and they in their sin.

They involuntarily being compelled to dance he voluntarily. So we're moving toward a great conclusion of the age and is it any accident that it should center in the cross? That's how great that single event is.

So this philanthropy, charity, human kindness that wants to make nice has not the ethical note of judgment. We need to develop a taste for judgment. Not in some malicious sense where you enjoy the devastation but in a moral sense that inwardly you know righteousness requires it.

And it would be a disservice to God to allow the issue of sin and rebellion to pass without this kind of action against it. It would make him casual. It would make him indifferent to righteousness. He would lose his cogency.

He would not be to mankind and to the world. And the whole world then would fall into a Sodom and Gomorrah condition if it had not the knowledge that there's a God who prevails whose creation this is who is in fact righteous and holy.

He's got to defend. He's got to keep his honor, his name his essential character or mankind itself will suffer for the loss of the knowledge of God as God. All of that is involved in the issue of the soft son who had to leave heaven to bear this unbelievable travesty against his body and his life who was marred more than any man.

Devastated, wrecked, pummeled. If we're seeing now Islamic hatred ventilated on just men who happen to be in Iraq who don't have a cotton-picking thing to do with anything political wanting to make a few extra bucks and are kidnapped by them and terrified and terrorized and tortured and beheaded by sawing time so there's an anguish all the way until your head falls off.

You're feeling the excruciating pain of being sawn asunder. This is evil. This is the hatred of the enemy. This is the prince of this world. And what would he do then if he would get his hands on the son of the living God who will yield himself to him in complete defenselessness and innocency and say kingdom is not of this world.

If it were, my servants would fight. But my kingdom is of another kind that requires as its expression my yielding even to this evil in whatever it will perform upon me. And it did. We have an obligation to be familiar with the greatest masterpiece under crucified Christ that the Holy Spirit has ever inspired in painting called the Eisenheim Altar by a man named Gruenwald of what is today Belgium in the 1500s.

He did a work for the church, triptych, three parts. The center part is Jesus crucified. The wings show Mary and John and the back shows the resurrection. When you read Ben Israel, as you ought, you'll read where as a hitchhiker I met a German art teacher and when he heard that I was Jewish he said, Art, you must not leave but you need to go out of your way and see this masterpiece at the museum at Colmar, France on Jesus crucified.

So I had seen pictures before. Jesus on a cross looked like a ballet dancer. So what was this? But I went and the book records the shock looking at this masterpiece. I didn't know if I was looking at a man or I was looking at an animal.

It was so twisted that the body was so drawn out and stretched and the jaw was open in death. The lips were white. There was a clear look of anguish, of suffering. The face had fallen. They were in the flesh.

Things impaled from the flagellations and the body was already turning green from gangrene. It was a horror to look upon. We need to contemplate that horror. We must not beautify it. And Goethe, the German poet, who felt he was a humanist, that the cross is too good, too coarse.

It needs to be beautified with roses. And for his influence, we can understand the betrayal of the faith in Germany that made it a candidate for Nazism. The loss of the cross was the loss of the faith and opened the door to spirits that not only devastated the nation, devastated the world, and took six million Jewish lives.

So we dare not tamper with the cross. We dare not soften it or remove its splinters or make it less than what in fact it was. It's a horror. It's the enemy. It's evil. Having an unrestricted opportunity to ventilate its deepest hatred against God upon God.

Imagine what it would do to the church if it had opportunity to do anything that in any way is related to God. Even the Jewish people, even in their unbelief and apostasy, are hated by these powers because they are, even in their unbelieving condition, the people of God.

And that explains the suffering that will fall upon Israel and is already beginning to take place. In parts of the world where till now they've known uninterrupted assurance, comfort, and security. France, England, modern Germany, United States even, are about to experience a measure of troubling and graffiti and swastikas and overturned gravestones and kids beaten in the street and store windows smashed and other minor acts that before it's over will be the crucifixion of the Jewish people at the end of the age.

I just have to read you this. Very few, even Christians, of those who love the people and would not see them wronged love in such a way as implies courage to tell their clients to their face of the things in them which are more fatal to their progress than all disabilities.

It's a false love that holds back and withholds a necessary knowledge that would save people from the consequence of the disabilities. You want to be nice and not offend and not hurt. This sentimentality, this deference to men is another instance of the degree from which we have shunned the cross and are unwilling to walk in its light and in its power in our own relationships.

Discipline, Chastening, and True Love

And not the least of the casualties are our own children. My own boys, my own sons are suffering the consequence of having been spoiled and what's the word? Placated. Not confronted about truth and issues of their life and their growth.

So when they come to a place of maturity they're incapable of being husbands and are easily angered if things go wrong that will not accommodate them because they've not been told the truth about themselves.

The deadly effects of parental weakness in this way have long formed a moral commonplace. In fact, if you're not an indulgent parent you'll find yourself in jail. In some countries if you spank you're earning a jail sentence.

So indulgence is verified and made official in societies in this world. To be a parent who disciplines, who rebukes who chastens is to find yourself in jail. And even if they were not that threat how many of us will judge will chastise which is the deepest statement of love.

It was God's deepest statement of love to chastise us for our sin by letting it fall upon Jesus. The wrath of God against sin, against immorality against unrighteousness, against unholiness had to come as judgment.

It had to be expressed or God would not be God. His own moral character would have been compromised. He had to stand for righteousness by exercising judgment and wrath against sin. But instead of allowing it to come upon us, he allowed it to come upon him.

The judge himself became the judged. But he did not withhold the chastening against his own son. Which is the deepest act of love and I believe that many of our young people today who are in rebellion are expressing through the rebellion a cry for an expression of love that has never come in judgment and chastening.

Though they don't understand it, they organically know that they have not been adequately loved, though they've been spoiled and indulged. A father who loves his son chastens him. All of that is the issue of the cross and our failure to see that and understand that in the character of God toward his own son is reflected in our inability to perform it with our own and that the whole of society rests on an indulgent soft and easy character in which the moral condition is collapsing.

Because righteousness has not been upheld in judgment. So this act of Jesus on the cross is intended for the redemption of all mankind to the uttermost ends of the earth. From shore to shore, from one corner to the other, the world will in the last analysis pay homage, bow its knee, confess with its tongue that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Universal Atonement and the Final Revelation of God

This atonement was universal. It was for all mankind and the once and for all act that alone could perform it in which most of mankind is presently ignorant or indifferent. And even in the church that supposedly has this as its central doctrine, there is not a sufficiently deep understanding, respect, or appropriation.

If we let it slip and sentimentalize it and just allow it to constitute a doctrinal position, a catechism, what can we expect of the world? We went for pizza in Auckland at a late hour and we stumbled into a shop that was called Hell.

And they were celebrating it. And every pizza has a demonic name and a combination of the things that make it vile. So that which is vile is celebrated as good. Darkness is celebrated as light. There's a whole reversal of values and the world is spiraling downward because the single central act of God has suffered neglect or indifference or actual outright rejection and needs again to be brought to the consideration of the world.

For many who have not heard have not yet been told. And those who have to whom it has been suggested have not understood. It needs not academic lecture. What it needs in the last analysis is a reenactment.

And the people fated to perform it is Israel. Why? They are my witness nation. And what greater witness to me can Israel be than to reiterate the cross of its own Messiah and God. Not willingly, reluctantly, but actually later on they'll appreciate what they have been required to pass through and to experience because all the world will receive the benefit.

They will see in this people passing through the nations a people chastised, marred, broken, having no beauty that any should desire them. And if that doesn't kindle an interest in the Messiah whom that reenactment suggests, there's no hope for them.

It's God's last statement. And if that statement is fused, then the final act is the day of the Lord's wrath and His judgment in which men will be without hope. Think on the mercy of God. Think on the love of God who is not willing that any should perish.

And knows that the contemporary world has lost its sense of God if it has ever indeed known it. That His great act has in 2 ,000 years been reduced to a non-act. It has been made a non-event. It has been sentimentalized and shallowly been mishandled and mistreated so that it has lost its cogency, its power, and its meaning.

What can He do then at the end of the age that He would not that any should perish? While there are yet kings and princes who have not believed and nations who are still in total unbelief and have gone after false gods.

But give them one more statement of the central revelation of God as God as it was profoundly performed by Jesus at the cross. For the revelation of Jesus at the cross is the revelation of God as God.

Nothing more reveals God than the suffering servant. Because God didn't just take upon that form of Himself for the purpose of the cross. He is ever and always before and presently a servant. Our God is a serving God.

Servanthood is the nature of God. Jesus depicted that. The cross reveals the righteousness of God in what had to be performed over the issue of righteousness through judgment. So it shows God in His character.

It shows the mercy of God because He didn't allow the wrath and judgment to fall upon the sinful mankind but upon Himself. It shows the love of God for He so loved the world that He gave His begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

The cross of Christ reveals God as God as no other event in history has or can. That's why it needs to be reenacted as one last opportunity to persuade the world and to save it. That the praises of God might go forth from the one ends of the earth to the other and that every knee shall and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

God has not yet received that tribute. And the expenditure of His Son was so great that He deserves the fullest return of that investment. It's not enough that there just should be a remnant church in the world that believes.

The magnitude of God's sacrifice, the cost to Himself morally requires a return much greater than a remnant. It requires that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

And that's exactly how Paul in Philippians sums up the wisdom of God in a Jesus who emptied Himself, who being in the form of God thought it not right to be equal to Him, made Himself of no reputation, took upon Him the form of a servant, which was in fact what He is in character, and was made in the likeness of men.

Only the power of God could form that and do that. And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Even the word even shows how far God would go allowing His Son to be the propitiation for sin by the cruelest form of execution that mankind had ever devised.

It had to wait for a Roman empire in all of its cruelty, and it was cruel, to form a capital punishment of a kind that mankind had not conceived until that time. And that was the way that Jesus was to be brought to His death.

Even having humbled Himself, lowered Himself to suffer death, but even the death of the cross. Wherefore, because of that, God also hath highly exalted Him. Did we just read that in Isaiah 52? There's someone, a servant, who's extolled and exalted and made very high, but that same one has a face and a visage that is hardly recognizable as human.

The same one who's beaten to a pulp is the same one who's extolled and exalted and made very high. Because he was so abased, because into the paroxysms of death and cruelty and suffering, God hath exalted Him and extolled Him and made Him very high and given Him a name above every name, both in heaven and earth.

The Father has acceded to the Son and given Him a dignity and an exaltation almost greater than Himself. That to this name, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess of things in heaven, things in the earth, things under the earth, that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is to the glory of God the Father.

Well, what a revelation of the Father. He certainly is not a jealous deity. He certainly is not an egoist who says, OK, son, you've done well, but keep your place. Remember who's senior here. Father comes before Son.

And always remember that however faithful and dutiful you've been in obeying the requirement, you need to be reminded that I am the Father and the foremost aspect of deity by own mystery of the Godhead.