Peace Through the Blood of His Cross

Hey everybody, I'm Pastor Jeff Durbin with Apologia Church. I want to thank you all so much for watching the content right here on Apologia Studios channel.

What you're about to watch is a sermon, a message from Apologia Church's worship service. And again, I want to thank you all so much for watching, for liking, for commenting, for sharing the sermon itself.

We truly believe that it's important for the Christian church to have an engagement in the public square with the

Word of God. So we thank you so much for partnering with us to send this out across the world. I just wanted to say something before you actually watch this, and that is that I'm not your pastor, though I'd love to be,

I am not your pastor. And it's very important as you're watching this, you know that it's

God's design for individual Christians to be part of a local Christian church under the care of qualified, faithful, biblical elders.

And so as much as we love all of you watching these sermons, and we're thankful to God that God uses them to bless you, to encourage you,

I do want to encourage you as a minister of the gospel to get plugged into a local body of believers, particularly

I think important, a reformed church would be best. But we want to encourage you to get plugged into a solid biblical church where you can fellowship, where you can worship, where you can serve, where you can be connected.

That is vitally important and actually a biblical command. And so as much as again, as we love for your participation, your partnership, and we are so thankful to God that He's using these in your lives, we want to encourage you to get plugged into a local church.

You can, though, actually partner with Apologia Church as we proclaim the gospel and provide a defense of the biblical gospel all around the world.

You can do that by going to ApologiaStudios .com. You can partner with us by becoming All Access.

When you do, you help to make all of this possible, and you get all of our TV shows, our aftershows, and Apologia Academy, all of that.

And you're a part of all that God is doing with us in the world to proclaim, herald the gospel of the kingdom.

You can partner with us. And I want to say one last word about that. Do make sure that none of your giving and partnership towards Apologia Church interferes with your giving, your worship, your tithes, your offerings to a local body of believers in your area.

So thank you again so much for watching these and sharing them. God bless you. If you'd like to turn your scriptures with me, please, to Paul's epistle to the church of Colossae, Colossians 1.

We are going to do a deep dive at the beginning, work through one of the most important texts in all of the

New Testament concerning the person of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I will have to be more brief than I would normally be in a text like this because I do want to get to the application today.

Very important in our day, make application to what we are facing within our culture.

I believe that one of the primary problems that the church is facing in Western culture today, especially as we face tremendous stresses and strains, it seems that in many areas that thin veneer of civilization that has held things together has given way.

And I believe that one of the reasons that the church is not responding to these challenges with a strong and consistent voice is because the church has failed to see how her theology must impact how she interfaces with the world.

When we say Jesus Christ is Lord, we seem to have in our minds out there some idea of what that means theologically, but we don't see what that means in 2020, that amazing year that all of history is going to look back at.

We don't see the connection between the two or our theology is such that we don't really believe that a connection exists between the two in the first place, which is a really dangerous position to be in.

And so we need to know if we're going to say Jesus Christ is Lord, when we say the gospel is the answer to what is happening in our world, how can the world take that seriously if we don't understand that who

Jesus is and what He did is absolutely central to our understanding and that it matters to the people around us.

If our faith is just simply some personal thing, if it is just me and the

Lord and I don't know why He's left me here in this world, but that's all there is to it, then we don't have anything to say to the world.

But if Jesus really is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, if He is who Scripture says He is, then that must have an impact upon the message that we pronounce in a day of great trouble and a day of great anxiety and for many people a day of great fear.

Great fear. It's interesting to me that this letter was written to a church that was not going to last long upon the earth.

A great earthquake happened only a few decades after this letter was written to the church there and this city was pretty much wiped off the planet.

And yet the truths written to that church were for all of the church and for all ages.

At the beginning of the book, and you'll notice just very quickly, Colossians and Ephesians are very similar letters.

There are parallel passages between them. That is because Ephesus is the head of the Lycus River Valley.

Paul had spent much time there and he wanted to build a firm church there so the gospel would go out, go up the river valley and would naturally result in the founding of other churches and evangelism.

And that's what happened with the church of Colossae. So there's a lot of parallels and you'll notice in Colossians chapter 4, and I popped by Eric and Summer's house this week and the folks were reading from Ephesians and so I talked to them about this very issue.

So I bet you Clementine's listening very carefully now, aren't you Clementine? That's right, you should be. She's smiling at me.

I had Clementine read Colossians 4 .16 to me and she only missed one word and it's the same word most everybody else would miss too.

But if you look at it, it's talking about make sure to read the epistle which is coming from Laodicea.

Now how many of you did your devotions this morning in Laodiceans? No one?

The little one here did. Didn't seem to appreciate it. How can we fulfill

Colossians 4 .16? How can we read the epistle coming from Laodicea? Well, if you did your devotions in Ephesians, you were reading that epistle.

Ephesians, have you ever noticed Ephesians, even though Paul spent three years there, has nothing personal in it at all.

There's no greetings to people. He knew everybody there didn't say anything to them. Why? Because Ephesians was meant to be a circular letter.

It was meant to be a letter that was passed around the rivers in the Lycus River Valley and that would have been the letter coming from Laodicea.

It would have been what we call today Ephesians. And so there's a lot of parallels between Colossians and Ephesians.

Paul wants these churches to be sound churches. He wants them to have a sound foundation.

And so at the beginning he's talking about how he doesn't cease to give thanks for them. His opening prayer,

I would highly, hardly recommend a deep study of beginning in verse 3 of chapter 1 of what it is that we should be praying for ourselves because this is what

Paul prayed for the church. And it's generally not what you get on most Christian television programs.

It generally isn't. It's not about health, wealth, and anything else. It is about depth in the faith, a true knowledge of who

Christ is and who we are in Him. And so you have an introduction of these spiritual understandings, being grounded in the

Lord, walking worthy of the Lord, and everything is pleasing to Him, abounding in good deeds. These are the things that Paul wants.

And then beginning in verse 12, Paul says, giving thanks to the

Father who has qualified us, who has made us able to have a part of the inheritance of the saints in the light.

He's qualified us that we might have a part of the inheritance of the saints in light.

That term to give thanks, eucharisto, for which you get the term eucharist. It's a word that's been stolen from us.

I've said many times before, one of the most beautiful words in the New Testament, giving thanks.

We as Christians give thanks to God. Why? Because notice, He is the one who enabled us.

He is the one who prepared us. He is the one who made it possible for us to have that portion of the inheritance of the saints in light.

Man, sometimes we look at our own fellowship, we don't think of ourselves as the saints in light. But that is what we are destined for.

We get to see some of that now. And it's just a picture of the glory that is going to be ours in the future, that inheritance amongst the holy ones in light.

We are called to be saints. We are saints in Christ. We have His righteousness.

And so we are righteous ones in that sense. His righteousness has been imputed to us.

But we know of a day coming when those saints will surround the throne, those saints in light.

And if you're there, it's because the Father qualified you. The Father is the one who gave to you that ability to be there, to have that inheritance amongst the saints in light.

And then notice the next verse, who delivered us, rescued us. So far, what have we done?

Not much. This is all about what God does. This is all about, we're going to get to our response at the very end.

But like in so much else in the New Testament, it's all about what God's power and God's wisdom has accomplished.

And then as a result, we do these things. Not that we add to anything He's done, but He does all these things in us.

And so He rescued us. Notice Paul now puts himself in with the whole group.

He rescued us from the authority of darkness. So we're the saints in light because we have been rescued from the authority of darkness.

That's how He describes the life before regeneration. Before we come to know resurrection power in Christ, we are under the authority of darkness.

And that certainly is what we see in our world around us. He has rescued us. He has taken us out of the authority of darkness and has transferred us.

It's a term that is used sometimes as transferring of funds and things like that in a secular sense.

But there is a movement. He doesn't leave us under the authority of darkness. He has translated us, transferred us, moved us out of that realm into the kingdom of the

Son of His love. The kingdom of the Son of His love.

We have been transferred into the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

Any person who has received salvation at His hand, who is a saint in light, is very much a part of the kingdom of God.

We are no longer under the authority of darkness. We can stand against that darkness as saints of light because we are citizens of the kingdom of His beloved

Son, the Son of His love. He is our

King. That's not a term we use much in our society. Somewhat to our detriment, because it is so beautifully used when it's described of God.

Because God is the perfect King. And we are in a kingdom, the kingdom of His beloved

Son, in whom we have redemption. Now, very, very quickly,

I am in grave danger today of preaching as long as Jeff.

And the real tough part about that is Jeff doesn't know he's teaching that long because, you know, he's got that little thing, you know.

So he's lost all track of time. I know what time it is. And so I realize that I'm going long.

So it makes it tougher on me. It's easy for him. He doesn't even know what's going on. It's sort of cool. But for me, it's rough.

So I've got to really push it today. I really, really do because I'm in grave danger of taking too many rabbit trails.

But I want you to recognize that if your Bible reads the way that I just translated the text, you can stand outside the

Mormon temple in Salt Lake City like I did many, many years ago and have a Christian guy come up to me and ask me, what does your

Bible say at Colossians 114? And so I told him and he said, oh, you have the bloodless

Bible. Well, okay, what exactly?

I knew where he was going. Because if you have the King James and New King James, it says in whom we have redemption through His blood.

I didn't say through His blood. And if you have the ESV, NASV, NIV, Holman Christian Standard, any translation, a modern translation like those, it doesn't say through His blood.

Why? Well, this is one of those textual variants that goes back to what's called the

Texas Receptus. The King James, New King James has it. The modern translations do not because there are only a few manuscripts in the world that have it.

Very few and very late. All the earliest manuscripts of Colossians do not have through His blood.

Where did it come from? Look over to Ephesians 1 .7. It's a parallel passage. It's using the same language as in Colossians.

I told you the two are very similar to one another. There it says through His blood. And so someone who had memorized

Ephesians 1 .7, probably a scribe later on, maybe five, six, seven hundred years down the road, has memorized

Ephesians 1 .7. He's copying Colossians 1 .14. He runs into the same language and probably not even on purpose goes ahead and writes through His blood because that's how he had it memorized.

Or he may have thought, well, that's what he said in Ephesians. That's what he must have said in Colossians too. In either way, that's where the variant arose, just so you're aware of it in case anyone walks up to you and hits you with the same argument that I dealt with many, many, many years ago.

In whom, that is in the Son of His love, we have redemption.

Not we will someday have redemption. We have redemption. We have been redeemed.

You'd have to be redeemed to be removed from the power of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love.

We have redemption and it is through His blood. That's going to be said later on. It doesn't have to repeat at this point, but it is through His blood.

And redemption is then described in a function called a positively here, the forgiveness of sins.

How do you have redemption? Your sins have been forgiven. What is it that would separate you from God and put you under His wrath?

Your sins. So if you have the forgiveness of those sins, then you have redemption.

You have been redeemed from the powers that held you in captivity. And so having spoken of the

Father, giving thanks to the Father, then the role of the Son, we've been transferred into His kingdom in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of our sins, then beginning at verse 15.

In most modern Greek texts of the New Testament, the language in which the

New Testament is originally written, verses 15 through 20 are put apart in poetic form.

And some of you might have that in your English translations, some of you might not. But this is probably, as Philippians chapter 2 was, a fragment of an early hymn of the church.

If that's the case, just in passing, isn't it amazing the doctrinal content of the first hymnal of the early

Christians? They didn't have fluffy little praise choruses. They had deep theology from the start in their hymnal.

And so verses 15 through 20 are in poetic form.

And they focus us upon who Jesus is. And in these verses, we have a universal perspective given to us.

We have all of God's purpose laid out for us. And all of it is focused in the

Incarnate One, in the one person, Jesus. So what do we have in these verses?

Verse 15, who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation?

Now, honestly, most of you have listened to all sorts of stuff on Apollo J Radio about Jehovah's Witnesses and things like that.

So you know how important this verse is. You know that this is a verse that is abused and misused.

I will not be able to go into as much detail on this, but like I said, there is a tremendous amount of information.

There's a lengthy section on this in my book on the Trinity, if you have that. So I will just be brief in my comments about this.

But we need to understand the background from which this hymn comes. Remember when

Paul said the Corinthians, he said, he quoted the

Shema. The Shema, which we all know, but I have a slight pronunciation issue at the very end.

So you know the Shema. Some of you are sitting there going, I know where it's going. Yeah, I'm ready.

I'm ready. Go ahead. I'm going to beat you to the punch. Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our

God. Yahweh is one. The great statement of monotheism, the fundamental truth of the

Old Testament, that there is one true and eternal God who created all things.

He is called the Lord God in your English translation, Yahweh Elohim in Hebrew, only one

God and Yahweh created all things. Anything that exists anywhere, anywhere at all, he made.

Absolute monotheism, one God, the consistent message of all of Scripture. But then

Paul quotes from that in the Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation, and he expands on it in light of the incarnation of Christ in 1

Corinthians 8. He says, we know there's only one God, the Father, and one

Lord, that was the word Yahweh, one Lord, Jesus, and then describes him as the creator.

He says, but not all men have this knowledge. So we know we live in a day where there are people who do not have the fundamental knowledge that God has revealed of himself, that there is only one true

God. And so the early church doesn't have to stop and explain who is the image of the invisible

God, because Scripture said, remember in the Gospel of John, the

Gospel of John says, no one has seen God at any time. The unique God who is in the bosom of the

Father, he has made him known. John 1 .18. And so, yes,

Isaiah chapter 6, Isaiah saw Jehovah sitting upon his throne. But what do we find out from the

Gospel of John? Who was that in reality? That was the Son. The Son has always been the one who has revealed the

Father to us. That's why Jesus has to be the God -man. If he's not the God -man, then we do not have true knowledge of who the

Father really is. And so here he is said to be the icon. You've seen the icon,

I -C -O -N. You know that in East Orthodox they have icons. That's where the term comes from. He is the icon of God the

Father. That is the representation, a perfect representation, one that reveals perfectly the invisible

God. And he is called the firstborn of all creation. Now, very, very quickly, you need to know the term firstborn does not mean first created.

The firstborn was the one who had preeminence. The firstborn was the one who got the double inheritance.

The firstborn was the one who would inherit everything from the Father. And when firstborn is used in the

Old Testament, it's normally used with things like Israel. Well, Israel was not the first thing God created. It was the nation that had preeminence in God's purposes.

And so what we have here in this creation hymn is a description of the

Son as the one who has preeminence over all of creation.

All of creation. Folks, that doesn't just mean the religious creation, if there is such a thing.

I know that what this text says to the worldly mind is pure absurdity.

We are literally telling the world that the man who walked in a very small portion of the world, no matter how far in Israel Jesus walked.

When I went to Israel a couple of years ago, the thing that stunned me was how small it is.

We are literally saying that that man that walked up and down those dusty roads in a small portion of the backwaters of the

Roman empire has preeminence over all of creation.

And I know that knowing that over the past hundred years, we have come to realize that this creation, this universe is vast on a level that mankind could never have dreamt only a hundred years ago.

We have come to understand that that Milky Way out there is made up of billions of stars.

We're looking at our own galaxy when we look into the Milky Way. And that our star is one of 100 to 150 billion stars in a singular galaxy that is massive in size.

What we didn't know until about 100 years ago is that there are probably 100 to 150 billion galaxies as big as ours.

It is massive. And we are saying the creator of all that walked amongst us.

You people have to be nuts. That's what the world says. That's what the world says.

And yet, and yet the only way to make all of this massive, beautiful creation makes sense is to recognize the personality of the one who created it and upholds it for his own purposes.

Otherwise, it is nothing but a massive waste of a huge amount of energy that will eventually die in what's called the great heat death.

No purpose, no transcendent meaning, no true beauty. That is the only other competing worldview out there when you boil them all down.

He is the one who has preeminence over all of creation. The only way that someone is going to continue to believe that is because their heart and their mind is changed by the power of the working of the creator himself.

Why does he have preeminence over all creation? Verse 16, because in him all things were created.

All things were made. The specific Greek phrase that Paul uses here, if Paul is the originator of this, it may have been pre -Pauline.

If it was, it was certainly apostolic. But the phrase he uses here, he walks a very careful line.

There's a couple different ways of saying everything in Greek. And he doesn't use the everything form that sort of squishes everything together so that you and I are just stardust and don't really mean anything.

He uses a concrete form that brings it all together. Christ created all things, but all things are real.

All things have real existence. It's not just simply the reality, like maybe the force or something like that.

Concrete things, human beings, mountains, planets, stars, they have reality.

They're not just part of a one. In him or by him, all things were created.

And Paul wants to make sure that this gets communicated. And so notice what he says, the things in the heavens and upon the earth, the visible, the invisible, thrones, lordships, principalities, authorities, or powers.

So he's talking about the physical creation, spiritual creation, any aspect that one would want to try to, to put into the idea of being created.

He's saying it all came through him. Him. It all came through him.

All things are through him and created for him.

So yes, there is the instrumental aspect of Christ being the one through whom things are made.

But notice that that phrase and all things are created for him.

He's not just some angel. He's not Michael, the archangel, as Jehovah's witnesses would tell us that is just simply the master maker, but he himself has created.

No, all things are made through him and for him. This is why if you do talk to the

Jehovah's witnesses, you need to be aware. I would be, I would just be completely missing my duty to warn you.

They have mistranslated this text. They will have their new world translation and whenever it says all things in this section, their translation will say all other things.

Now, when they first came out with that translation, it's called the new world translation back in the fifties.

It said all other things. And Christian scholars raised such a hue and cry that they put brackets around the word other.

And it was like that until about three years ago, they took them back out. They took them back out.

So that person you're talking to, if you start talking to them about this text, they're going to open up their

English new world translation. And it's going to say, he created all other things. Why? Because Jesus is created.

He's Michael, the archangel. He's the first and only thing that Jehovah God created directly by himself.

That's what Jehovah's witnesses believe. Now here's another little factoid to put into your notes.

We know who translated the new world translation. They didn't want to tell us. You won't find the names published anywhere in their literature, but there was a trial in Scotland in the 1950s and the names had to be produced.

There were no scholars involved in the translation of the New World Translation. None. There was one man who had two years of classical

Greek and another who was self -taught in Hebrew. That's it. I once sat down and figured out the number of classes

I have taken, not the ones I've taught, but I have taken. I personally have 17 times the scholarly training in biblical languages as the entire

New World Translation Bible Translation Committee. Wow. And I wouldn't try to translate the whole

Bible, but that's where it came from. It is not a translation. It is a perversion.

It is specifically there fundamentally to change the teachings of scripture. That's what makes it difficult to deal with because the person you're talking to is probably not going to trust you when you tell them that.

So here's the point. They have to say all other things because Jesus is created. It doesn't say all of the things.

And in fact, that would fundamentally undercut Paul's point that Jesus is not some intermediary being.

The greatest enemy of the Christian church from the days of Paul until about the days of Augustine was a movement called

Gnosticism. And the Gnostics taught that Jesus was an intermediary being, one of the eons, one of the ones that had divine power, but there were lots of others like him.

And Paul is warning against this error that is coming. I believe there is a prophetic element found in Colossians and 1

John especially to warn about what is coming and what will be the greatest enemy of the church literally for centuries.

And so no Gnostic could ever confess what has been found in these words up to this point.

All things through him and for him were created and he is before all things, before temporally, before in authority.

And then one of my favorite phrases in all of Scripture, and the all, all things in him, they hold together.

They hold together. Why does it all hold together?

What brings it all together and give it unity? All things are held together in Christ.

We are literally saying that the creation has its order, its meaning, its order, its subsistence in the one who voluntarily gave himself for you and me.

If that's not astonishing, nothing ever will be. If that's not astonishing, nothing ever will be.

All things hold together in him.

There can be no compromise, therefore, my friends, about who he is. When liberalism gives us a

Jesus who is nothing more than a great moral teacher, but not truly the God -man, they eviscerate the

Christian faith and leave us with nothing. When you leave the body of Jesus in the tomb, you eviscerate the

Christian faith and leave us with nothing. Only the

God -man can deliver us out of the power of darkness. Only the

God -man can hold all things together. And that's

Jesus. And he is the head of the body, the church.

He is the head of the body, the church. So we move from all of creation to the fact that he is the head of the body, the church.

And if that doesn't tell you how massively important the church is in God's purpose and plans,

I don't know what will. How can you just simply go, everything holds together in him, and he is the head of the church, the body?

That tells you how central what we are doing here is to God's purposes.

Sometimes we think American Christianity has an incredibly low view of the church in general.

That's just reality. Part of it is our dogged individualism.

Part of it has to do with theological developments over the course of the development of our nation.

But the fact is, there are very high words in sacred

Scripture of this thing called the body, the church. And he is its head, and only he.

He is also the beginning, the arche, the origin, the source.

And then the same term that was used in verse 15, the prototokos, the firstborn from the dead.

So now you have the idea of using this term, which has, so yes, he certainly has preeminence as the first one to be raised from the dead.

His resurrection is what guarantees the resurrection of those who are united with him.

His resurrection is why you can have absolute confidence that if you are in him, you will be resurrected to eternal life as well.

He is the firstborn from the dead. He is the risen Lord. He has conquered death.

No other founder of any religion can say what Jesus can say of himself.

I was once dead, but I am alive forevermore. That's what that empty tomb means.

And that's why if you turn that empty tomb into simply a metaphor, if you spiritualize it, but leave the stone and the body there, you destroy the faith.

You have no Christian faith. He is the firstborn from the dead. I'll never forget if you've ever watched it, we did a debate on a ship with two of the leading skeptics, agnostics, leftist liberals,

John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg. Marcus Borg has since passed away. John Dominic Crossan, brilliant man, brilliant man, but doesn't believe in God.

And we were halfway through the debate before it finally dawned on them what I and Dr.

Jim Ranahan were saying. And so you can listen to it. And they, with, with amazement in their voice,

I think it might've been Dr. Crossan. He goes, so you're saying that you actually think the tomb was empty and something happened to his body?

We're like, yeah, that's what we've been saying all along.

They were so far removed, so far removed from actually believing that we could believe something like that.

That's what's so much of what's called Christianity today is that's where they are. That's where they are.

That's not where we are. There is an empty tomb, my friends. It's empty because he rose from the dead.

He is the firstborn from the dead in order that he might come to have preeminence in all things, in all things.

He is to have preeminence. He is the risen one. He is the conqueror of death.

How much does mankind want to limit that all things? Oh, we only want some religious things, but all things, should we really be thinking about Jesus when we're talking about all things, all of our life, morality, ethics, science?

You can't mean that we should think about Jesus when we think about politics, can you?

Is He to have preeminence in all things? Because it was in Him, and then some of your translations will provide in italics, the

Father. The term's not there, but it's assumed because it just literally says, because in Him was pleased all the fullness to dwell.

Now, stay with me here just for a second, but just really quickly, the term fullness is the Greek term pleroma, pleroma.

And that is the term that the Gnostics are going to use the next hundreds of years in the history of the church to talk about this realm of the eons, the realm of the eons.

All the fullness dwells in Him. There's nothing to be found outside of Him.

You're not looking for some other deity. It all dwells in Him and by means of Him, through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross, through Him, I say, where the things upon earth or the things that are in heaven.

So He must have preeminence in all things. The fullness must dwell in Him because it is through Him that all things are reconciled to the

Father. It is through His work that peace has been made by the blood of His cross.

That is things, whether in the heavens or things, things upon the earth or things in the heavens.

Now, immediately, if you're tracking with me, I said we had to do the deep dive.

The question crosses your mind, if that's so, how can this not result in some form of universalism?

What is universalism? Universalism is the idea that everyone and everything will eventually be saved, put in right relationship to God in the sense of everyone will be part of the saints in light.

There will be no punishment. There will be none who are away from the presence of God for eternity.

Now, we know the same author and, just be warned, you go to that dangerous place called the

Christian bookstore, or these days the Christian part of some online bookstore, and you buy yourself a commentary, you're going to hear, you're going to read, that it's very common for scholars today to say that Paul did not write

Colossians, nor did he write Ephesians, according to these scholars.

They have what's called a limited Pauline corpus. They base this upon a lot of assumption that I think is rather easily refuted, but that's what you're going to run into.

I want you to be aware of that. We reject that kind of argumentation, and therefore the apostle himself did specifically speak of those who would be away from the presence of God in eternity.

So, how can we understand what is being said here? Because it says he has reconciled all things unto himself through him.

Things in heaven, things upon the earth. And we ourselves have been reconciled, even though we were, as verse 21 says, we were aliens, strangers.

We had enmity in our minds and in our doing our evil works, but now he has reconciled in the body of his flesh through his death.

He's reconciled us so that he might present us holy and blameless before him.

So, does that mean universalism is true? Is there a universal reconciliation?

How do we, in a balanced way, understand this text? Well, we need to see what the hymn is actually talking about and see that it's addressing two different aspects at the same time.

And one thing to remember that was fascinating to me is this term to reconcile. The form that is used here is only used in Christian context.

Paul may have come up with it himself to emphasize a certain aspect of this idea of reconciliation.

The concept is found outside of the

New Testament. And one of the uses that fascinated me was

Plutarch. Plutarch, in describing Alexander the Great, said that he reconciled the whole world.

Now, it's obvious that in Ephesians and Colossians, Paul is utilizing the language they would understand.

And they are Greek speaking. They are far outside the land of Israel. And so, he's drawing from a lot of Greek concepts that they would understand linguistically.

And so, when I ran into that usage in Plutarch, it sort of turned a light on for me.

How did Alexander the Great reconcile the entire world? I just happened to have recently finished a lengthy biography of Alexander the

Great. What an amazing man! What an amazing man!

Here is a man who led a relatively small army against the Persian king with 300 ,000 soldiers and defeated them.

He spread Greek culture from Greece all the way to India. None of the

Caesars, no one has ever accomplished what Alexander the

Great accomplished on that level. No one. He died at 33.

Died at 33. An amazing man. An amazingly lost man.

An amazingly evil man in many ways. But undoubtedly one of the greatest leaders that's ever walked the earth.

How did he reconcile the world? By making it all Greek. By putting it all in the proper order.

This idea of reconciliation is placing in the right relationship.

And so, for those who are in Christ, for those who are in Him, in His death, burial, and resurrection, for those who by faith and repentance bow the knee to Him, reconciliation for them is bringing them into the proper relationship to God in the forgiveness of their sins and hence having that inheritance amongst the saints in light.

But because that one who died upon the cross was who He was, then

His death had cosmic implications. The one who died upon the cross was the one who made all things.

That's what he just said. All things soonest again. They hold together in Him. So His death has universal consequences.

And so even in the judgment of those who remain in rebellion and are justly judged, in light of His own self -giving, in light of the fact that God has demonstrated

His purpose in creation, that He has given Himself upon the cross of Calvary, then the judgment that will be meted out in justice against every rebellious sinner will fit within that entire overarching purpose that has always been the intention of the triune

God from creation itself. There will be no loose ends. There will be no things left over here.

What does Ephesians 1 say? How does Ephesians 1 summarize this same concept?

That God is summing up all things in Christ. And what is

Christ's role at the judgment? Why is it that Christ can be the perfect judge?

Because He's the God -man. He lived amongst us.

He lived a perfect life amongst us. He was tempted as we were tempted.

And yet as the God -man, He did not sin. He is the perfect one to judge.

And when He says to those at His left hand, depart from Me, for I never knew you, that's not a thread that has been left untied up.

That's not some untidy side thing. That is a part of the demonstration of the justice and judgment of God.

And it is all a part of what the triune God was accomplishing. But for those who are in Christ, even though we were enemies at enmity in our mind and our evil works,

He has reconciled us in the body of His flesh through death.

That's why you have to be... This might help somebody, so let me just take a second to show you.

I had a wonderful professor many years ago at Grand Canyon College when

I was a student there. Dr. D .C. Martin. I've told you about him before, but we always have visitors and stuff.

Dr. D .C. Martin. And one of the things he communicated to us is it is not enough to know about Jesus.

See, he was worried because he had a bunch of Baptist preacher boys in his classes, and they knew about Jesus.

They could tell you the stories about Jesus, but this is what he would do.

Knowing about Jesus is not enough. You need to be in Jesus.

In Him. Vital union with Christ.

If you're not in Him, think about the picture of the coming wrath of God. It's like you have all of humanity standing upon a seashore, and there is a massive tsunami coming.

And in your mind, think about the fact that right in the middle, there is one man, the God -man.

And when that huge wave hits, he's going to be the only one left.

So where is the only safe place to be? It's not next to him. It's not in front of him. It's not behind him.

It is in Him. In union with Him. There must be that vital faith relationship with Christ.

All the knowledge about Him will not do you any good unless you are in Him.

And I say this to all of you, to all of us in this church. Don't sit in the pews of a church where God's Word is being spoken and preached and explained over and over again and think that's enough.

Look at what Scripture says. Scripture warns you. Ask yourself the question, am

I in this one? Do I have reconciliation?

Have I been reconciled in the body of His flesh through death?

Because only those are the ones that He will present.

Present you holy, blameless, without reproach before Him.

Those are the only ones. And then after all this discussion of what

God does in Christ, then you have the sober warning.

Don't think that just by hearing this and understanding, if indeed you stand fast in the faith, firm and unmovable, not being shaken from the hope of the

Gospel which you have heard, which is being proclaimed in all the creation under heaven of which

I, Paul, have been made, a minister, a servant.

Oh, the importance of warning us. Do not become senseless and dead.

Do not become apathetic. Do not be moved away from the hope of the

Gospel which you heard. This world is hitting you with everything right now.

Everything that would make you hopeless. But the great hope that we have for the world is the hope of the

Gospel. Do not be moved away from that Gospel, the hope of the

Gospel which you have heard. Now, I'm getting close to the

Jeff range here, so let me get focused. So I have to keep him awake. Of course, he may not even be.

There he is. Hey, how are you doing, Jeff? You do know I love you, right, brother? And I know you're armed.

That's okay. All right. What does this have to do with us today?

Why look at this now when the foundations that mankind builds are shaken?

The Christian has a foundation that cannot be shaken and cannot be done away with.

One of the reasons I love teaching church history is because we are reminded by that history that empires and kingdoms and cultures have arisen, flourished, thought they would last forever, and are now footnote in the annals of history.

We can go and we can visit these places. And we can see the great ruins.

We can walk into the Colosseum and know that the Caesars, who likewise walked into that place, stood there thinking, look at the beauty of what

I have created. This will last forever. And now it's a tourist trap.

It is so easy for us to connect the kingdom of God with the kingdom of man.

It is so easy for us to see those two things as identical. The kingdom of God cannot be destroyed.

God is going to accomplish His purposes in Christ. He is the

King of kings. He is the Lord of lords. He who sits in the heavens laughs when mankind thinks that He can erase and eradicate the record of what

God has done in Christ Jesus. He laughs. It will not happen. But, as Augustine knew, as the

Roman Empire was crumbling around Augustine, he wrote one of the most famous books of all of history,

The City of God. And he had to remind people, because Christians were going, look, the

Roman Empire, it's collapsing. And look, the Roman Empire has just now become

Christian, so they thought. And so they had made the connection, Roman Empire, kingdom of God.

So if the barbarians are coming in and Rome gets sacked and the kingdom of God must be collapsing, and so the promises are void.

And Augustine had to remind people, the city of God cannot be sacked by barbarians.

The kingdom of God cannot be destroyed by vandals or looters.

God has promised to Jesus, we sing the words, right?

An inheritance of nations. There have been so many times in the history of the church when things looked absolutely done.

Done. The barbarians are coming. Rome's falling. A thousand years later, almost to the years, it was about 900 years later, the

Black Death marched across Europe. And in many cities, three out of four people were dead.

Pretty easy at that point to go, yep, this is it. All the promises have failed.

And yet, here we sit. And what God has called us to is faithfulness to His purpose.

That means in our day, we have to think much. What message must we deliver to a culture, to a nation specifically where we are, where the foundations are crumbling?

What used to unite us is gone. Should we really be surprised for how many decades have we been laughing at God's ways?

Profaning marriage, profaning the marriage bed, profaning offspring.

For how long have we been doing this? God will not be mocked. We can't sit here and go, oh, well,

God owes us something. No, He owes us nothing at all. But we have a message to a people.

Darwin's religion gives absolutely no hope in a day like this.

None. We have the opportunity. As all of the distracting stuff goes away, we have the opportunity to be saints in light.

We have the opportunity to say, you want to know who you are? You are not what your skin color makes you.

You are not what the result of identity politics is. You are not just one part of a group and you just have to go with the group.

You are made in the image of God and your maker rose from the dead and he demands your repentance and faith and to those who bow the knee.

Eternal life now and in the future, forgiveness of your sins and the ability to have a unity and oneness with other believers that nothing in Darwin's world can ever begin to offer.

Are we ready to start telling the world that message? As everything around them crumbles, are we willing to shine the bright light that comes from the empty tomb and say, here, come out of the darkness.

There's great darkness. Come out of the darkness. Let us introduce you to the one who made you, the one who created you, the one who sustains you.

Come out of the darkness into the kingdom of his beloved son. We must know who

Christ is to present him to the world today. We have to have the foundation.

When someone says, why should I believe in this Christ? Because every breath of your mouth and beat of your heart is coming from his hand.

How can that be? Because he's holding it all together. That's why you have the laws of physics.

That's why we can think and reason together. He makes sense of it all. You're trying to break it all down.

Jesus builds it all up. What a message that we have at this time, but we have to believe it first.

We have to believe it. We have to understand it. We have to make application of it.

And so may God by his spirit burn into our hearts, the conviction that we have been called to be servants of the

God, man, the one by whom all things were made and all things hold together.

That's why he has absolute authority. That's why we would say, well,

Christ's law tells us this. Well, why should I worry about that? Because he made you.

That's why. That's why it's not a matter of what we'll take a vote.

Your vote doesn't matter. He's your maker. He's your creator.

That is what Paul wrote to the Colossians. That's what we believe. May God write his truth upon our hearts.

Let's pray together. Our gracious heavenly father, as we have opened your word, we have been reminded that in your wisdom, you have given us these beautiful words that we might serve

Christ and we might serve him in this day. We didn't see this day coming

Lord. When we celebrated the birth of Christ, only a matter of months ago, we had no idea what would be coming our direction.

And yet here we are and Lord, we ask that you would make us to understand that we are, we have that inheritance amongst the saints and light, and we've been transferred out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of his beloved son.

And therefore, may we be ambassadors that know how to understand the times and the seasons and be used by you to proclaim there is no king but Jesus.

Flee from the darkness, come to the light. May that be our message. May we speak it with boldness.

May you give us understanding. May you bless it as that message goes forth. We pray in Christ's name.