July 2, 2017 PM Service: Our One And Only Mediator by Pastor Josh Sheldon

1 Timothy 2:1-4 and the Church’s Duty to Pray for All People

7, Timothy 2, 5 through 7. Actually, I'll start reading at verse 1 so that we remember the flow of the apostle's thought and how this connects to what has preceded and how what preceded leads to what we're going to look at this afternoon.

So beginning up at verse 1 rather than 5, though 5 through 7, like I said, will be our preaching text. First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God, our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.

For this, I was appointed a preacher and an apostle. I am telling the truth. I am not lying, a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. Let us go to the Lord one more time and ask his blessing upon the preaching and the hearing of God's word.

Heavenly Father, we pray that you would again open our eyes that we may see the wonderful truths of your word. May your word, Lord, be hidden in our heart that we may not sin against you. I pray, Father, that the meditations of my heart, the words of my mouth this afternoon, will be pleasing in your sight, oh Lord, pleasing in your sight and to the good of those who adhere this day as we faithfully look to your word to see what it means and how it applies to us now, Lord, how we should walk in your ways.

I pray you guide us in this by your spirit and for your name's sake. Pray in Jesus' name, amen. So what we have here in these three verses, for there is one God, and then the rest of it about the mediator, which is the man Christ Jesus, if you understand the for, for there is one God, he's explaining something as we've come to learn with the apostle Paul, that word for is a connective, it brings us from what came before and flows into what is now proceeding.

And it makes this connection between the two. We believe this or we practice that or we understand this about God for these reasons. Here we have the reason for the primacy of prayer in the church. And this is what Paul is talking about in those first verses, beginning with verse one, pardon me, and down to verse four.

Why should prayer be the main focus of the church? Why is this good and pleasing in the sight of God, our savior? In these three verses, the apostle Paul explains why it's good for us to pray in regards to those in authority over us, that God in his sovereignty would turn their hearts toward our good and just why is this good and pleasing in his sight that we should pray for this and more than pray that we should even have such a benefit as to be able to live quiet, godly, dignified lives?

Well, the answer is in verse four, partly because God desires all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. The reason for that is where we began just a moment ago. There is but one God, there is only one God, and between this one God and man, there is but one mediator.

And of course, he is the man, Christ Jesus. If it's God's will that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, then it is here made incumbent upon us that the subject of our prayers include all men.

This is good and pleasing in the sight of the Lord. People of all kinds should be within the scope of our prayers. And the reason, again, quite simple, because they are within the scope of God's will, that all men should hear and come to a saving knowledge of the truth.

This doesn't add any extra power to our prayers, to our preaching. It simply is an acknowledgement that unless God saves, no one can be saved. It is an acknowledgement of God's absolute sovereignty in the transaction of salvation.

God would have us to pray for all men. And God will decide what to do with all men. And it's not just any truth that must be prayed for men to come to know. Not just any truth, but the truth, the truth.

As hard a pill as that might be to swallow for many today in the pluralistic society that we live in, this is truth from the fountain of truth. Outside of the knowledge of this truth from this God mediated to us by this mediator, there is no salvation.

It is only by faith in Jesus Christ, who was sent by God the Father, as applied to us by God the Spirit, that salvation can come. The question to the church is simply this. This church, if we do not pray, who shall?

If we don't pray, who will pray? If we alone are the ones with access to God by faith, not just we few dozen here in this place, we Christians, we the wide ubiquitous church. If we will not pray, who will?

Because none other than the true church, whether they're in Nigeria or Alaska, here in Sunnyvale, California, or in Venezuela, if the church will not pray, who will? Only the church has access to God by faith in the one mediator, the man Christ Jesus.

If it is only we who are clothed in Jesus' blood and righteousness who can come to the throne of grace and we do not come, who will? There's one God and there's one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

The Necessity of a Mediator Between God and Man

It's assumed here that a mediator is necessary. And this is clear not only from scripture, but from reason. A mediator is one who settles disputes between parties, one who brings about reconciliation.

A mediator must bridge the gap between the two. It's what a mediator does. I was trying to think of illustrations of this and I'm less confident now that I think of presenting this to you, but I have nothing else, so I'll give you what I thought of to try and describe a mediator.

I thought of a referee in sports. They mediate, as it were, the contest between two warring parties. And the teams step out onto the field, if you think of it that way, and they have a dispute. Well, one wants to get the football over the goal line and the other wants that not to happen.

And so the one with great violence is gonna push the football over that direction and the other with equal or greater violence is going to push it back the other way. And who keeps this game going according to the rules?

Who keeps the warring parties as some measure of decorum? Well, the referee, which I would sort of correlate to a mediator. But imagine the difficulty if the teams were from different sports. I mean, could an umpire from baseball do any good on a basketball court?

He couldn't bring the parties together. What would a football referee do at a boxing match? Or a man wearing ice skates like at a hockey match do at a soccer match? He could never bridge the gap between the two because the two are so fundamentally different.

Their goals are so dissimilar and the very natures are so disparate that mediation would be impossible. Every player would complain, this one cannot represent me because he has a football, not a basketball referee.

Or how can you expect me to trust the calls from a boxing referee when we're here to play tennis? Now, the differences I just named, those seem kind of silly because the situations are just impossible.

But the reason they're silly, the reason they're impossible is because the two for which the referee is a mediator are so fundamentally different from each other. They have different goals. They're doing different things.

They wear different gear. They follow different rules. They even train differently and they require different kinds of coordination and strength. But now think of God. And before we think of God, do you get warm in here?

Is the air conditioner off? If somebody could turn it down to 69 or so, it will kick on and I have to admit, I'm getting very warm up here. But think of God. If a football referee cannot mediate a boxing match because they're so different, think of what is between us and our creator and how infinitely greater that distance is.

Far, far, infinitely more than the imaginary referees I put to you would face. The distance between the creator and the created. And to estimate this, you need to measure the lifespan of him, God, who inhabits eternity and then like in that breadth of life, which is infinite, which is eternal, to we whose existence is but a breath.

We're like the flower that shrivels up in the morning as soon as the sun hits it. You need to find the beginning of whom whose origin is of old. You need to mediate between we who are mortal and him whose beginning is never mentioned because he is without beginning or end.

God has for all eternity this chorus of holy, holy, holy, shaking the ramparts of heaven. We find ways to violate that holiness every day. I mean, we could explore the attributes of God, his holiness, his justice, and his love, his moral perfection.

And at each point, if we even approach a realistic or accurate description of him and then assess ourselves against that same attribute, well, we all come up woefully short. Who can mediate? Who can mediate between a God such as our God and mortals such as we are?

What does the prophet say? But your sins have separated you from your God. Jesus himself, even affirming that we men know how to give good gifts to our children, what does he say? You, being evil, know how to give good gifts.

This chasm between man and God is indescribable. I don't want to say it's large. I don't want to correlate to the Grand Canyon or the Marianas Trench or anything like that because that doesn't even scratch the surface.

And so we, who are far more different from God than a soccer team is from a boxing match, infinitely more different, how much more would we need a mediator? So enter Jesus. Enter Jesus, the God-man, as God he is in his very being, all that it is to be God.

All that it means to be God, Jesus is, and always was, and always shall be. He is the eternal God. He's eternal, he's without beginning or end, he's righteous, he lives in perfect harmony with the will of God, he is holy, he exists forever in moral excellence and purity.

All that God is, the man Jesus Christ is. As man, he remained true to all this, yet at the same time became just like we are. He came in the form of sinful flesh. He was tempted, the author of Hebrews says, at all points as we are, yet without sin.

You see, only the man Christ Jesus can come to God on God's own terms because only he is God. We need someone to mediate between us and God. But to be mediating to God, to go to God with entreaties on behalf of another requires all the attributes that are God's, and only Jesus Christ can be that one.

Only Jesus Christ is that one. How does he mediate before God on our behalf? Well, to God as God, but on behalf of man because he was man, because God in Jesus Christ became flesh. In him, all the fullness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell.

Word, the logos, the man Jesus Christ. God became flesh in him. Only the man Christ Jesus can come to God on God's own terms because only he is God. Only he lived as man on our terms, so in him, in the man Jesus Christ, in the one mediator between God and man, in him and him alone, deity and humanity are perfectly blended, not confused, not separated, but him both equally and fully dwelling together.

That's what we mean when we speak of the God man, the God man Jesus Christ. As Paul reminds us here, he is the man Jesus Christ, the one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. As a son of God, he reigns forever at the Father's right hand.

As a son of man, he touches us all. As the son of God, he knows the Father, and he knows the Father's will perfectly, and all that the Father commands him, he does. As a son of man, he lived with all that we live with, yet without sin, saw all the same things we see, had the same temptation to disobey a parent, or speak rudely to a Pharisee, or to answer back to the nail drivers.

As man, he lived perfectly the way God would have man to live, but as a man. And so he's the one mediator, he's the only mediator. Our Savior, this one who we worship this day, is that one. There's one God and one mediator, the man Christ Jesus, and only God can satisfy what is described here as this necessary mediator.

We need one to mediate between us and God. For these differences are so much greater than these sports scenarios I put together. Well, mediators do something, don't they? Mediators mediate. They reconcile disparate parties.

Christ’s Ransom, Atonement, and Penal Substitution

In the matter of salvation, all this initiative in this reconciliation rests completely with God. It is he who desired to be reconciled to us. It is he who designed salvation from start to finish. It is he who sent the mediator.

So verse six says, Jesus gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. Ransom is the price paid to redeem a slave or a captive. And this adds something, it adds three things really to his role as a mediator.

First, he provided the ransom price to purchase us out of slavery to sin. Because before Christ, before faith, before the Holy Spirit regenerates the soul, who is our master? Who rules over us as a tyrant?

I should say, what is our master? What rules over us? Well, it's sin. The ruling, mastering, coloring characteristic of all of us before God made us alive in Christ. Now here there's a theological point to be made.

We're speaking of the atonement. We're speaking of the cross. We're speaking of the cross where Christ became the sacrificial lamb, upon whom God poured out his wrath at our sin. The point to be made is that the price for our redemption was set by God, not by sin as such, nor by the author of sin, who is the devil.

It was set by God, not our adversary. It was set by God, and so it was to God to whom the ransom was paid. And some people think the devil let us go because his price was paid, and that's completely wrong.

The devil had almost nothing to do with it. It was God who, by the sacrifice of his son, he was the one satisfied. Jesus was our substitute. He was our penal substitute, as we like to put it. So he provided the ransom price, and that's second.

Jesus was the lamb of God who took away the sin of the world. The lambs that foretold of this could only die. They knew nothing of the prophetic word that they were picturing. They were given to be the sacrifice, and they went passively and unknowingly to their demise.

Jesus was given by God, not by man. He wasn't ever really in man's hands, but always in God's. As Peter said at Pentecost, what you did to him, what was God's predetermined plan and purpose. And so Jesus wasn't taken to be our sacrifice.

He wasn't led away to be our sacrifice. He gave himself. We read this earlier in the book of Romans. He gave himself for us. It was in Christ's prayer that we calmly read to you in the morning scriptural reading.

He laid down his life for his friends. And the third thing that this means is that the mediator became the sacrifice. We're the offended party whose God, the Father, demanded a perfect sacrifice, a lamb unblemished by any sin, the only one who could meet that standard was, of course, Jesus, the God-man, the one mediator between us and him.

Now this is a demonstration that's worthy of much love and devotion on our part to him. I mean, think of how many points of the Bible find their basis at the cross where the one mediator also became the one sacrifice.

For God so loved the world that he gave, note the word, he gave, no one took, he gave his only son. He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all. For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

You see, the cross of Calvary, remembered this afternoon in the bread and the wine before us, remind us of the divine love for sinners and the lengths that that love will go for them. At the cross, the love of God for sinners fulfills the law.

There, all the penalties of the law were met and God's fury was drained because of love, and that's why, that's why John can write, we love him because he first loved us. If the love of God for the world sent Jesus to the cross, then that love has to be the paradigm for us all.

We're told in Romans 13, 8, Galatians 5, 14, that love fulfills the law. Those verses speak of a moral, an ethical response to the cross, seen in the way that we treat one another. All this tied to the fact that there's one God and one mediator between man and God, the man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for us all, he gave himself.

The Apostolic Message and the Church’s Witness

Our mediator became our sacrifice. There's a message that needs to be propagated, and it's what he says in the next verse. The faith once delivered for all to the saints, it must be rerouted and brought to a dead and a dying world.

Paul says in this verse exactly what Paul's or God's purpose was in his apostleship. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle, I'm telling the truth, I am not lying, a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

You see, we have no lesser duty than Paul did. You or I do not have Paul's immediate inspiration, the Holy Spirit, but we have the word that the Spirit inspired. You or I may not have Paul's latent talents, but we do have the Spirit of God indwelling us.

I think I could stand all week in a marketplace, and I'd never gain an audience the way Paul did at Athens. I doubt any of us will ever walk into a town, start preaching Christ, and end up being invited to speak at the local intellectual elite gathering.

I mean, it might happen, but it's not likely. But we have a powerful testimony nonetheless, because we preach the same gospel Paul preached. We preach the same gospel Paul preached in the same power of the same Holy Spirit that enlivened him.

We have a powerful testimony ourselves. We have our love and our unity together, which is, to a watching world, something that should be mysterious and wonderful. Like Moses going to examine the sight of a burning bush that was not consumed, so also others might be amazed at such a diverse group as us loving one another, and that for no other reason than we love Jesus Christ.

They might come and observe and then leave convinced that God is truly among this people. Now, this is one way we join the apostles, spreading the message of God's redeeming love. So Paul says in verse seven, for this I was appointed an apostle, to spread the word that there is just one God in his day in the Greco-Roman world.

There are many gods, and it was illegal not to acknowledge the emperor as God. He says, no, there's one God. We call him Yahweh. We call him the God of the Bible, the one who says, I am that I am. And between that God and fallen humanity, there is but one mediator, the one who is God, and so can relate to God as God, and the one who was man, and so relates to man as man.

And he, and he alone, can make this mediation for us. That's our testimony, just as much as it was Paul's, that our mediator is at one time also our sacrifice. That Jesus as man lived a perfect life, and then as man he died for we who did not.

That Jesus, eternally God, though he became flesh, he remained as God, all that God is, and so as God is able to span the gap between sinful men and a holy God. And how do we come to God today? How do we stand before him?

Even this moment by the mediation of Christ Jesus, who is now at the Father's right hand. He's at the Father's right hand because he ascended from earth to heaven after his work was done, and he assigned the continuance of it to the apostles.

Why did he ascend? Because he was resurrected. He was resurrected from the tomb. He died for our sins, but God raised him up on the third day. An article of faith that we hold on to as dearly as our lives, if not more so.

He went to the cross with his body broken, the bread that is before us. He went to the cross and there his life was poured out, the blood, the fruit of the vine, his blood. And after this and the resurrection and the ascension, he ascended to the Father's right hand and there he is.

And haven't we run through this in chapter eight of Romans and before that in other places during the morning preaching, interceding for us at this moment, mediating for us at this moment because there is one God, the God we worship in this house.

And there's one mediator between man and God, the man Christ Jesus who gave himself for us all. It's the God we worship here this day. It's the God we remember in the elements and most particularly the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ when we partake of the table.

Amen. Let us before the table, to prepare ourselves for the table,.