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Well, I know you're not going to care how long I preach. If you came all the way here, there'll be no timers today. By the way, if it gets so bad outside that it's a white-out, I'll let you know, so we can disperse.
Do you have any pet peeves? I have a few pet peeves, and one pet peeve that I have is watching a show on TV about finding the real Jesus. CBS, NBC, ABC, the real Jesus, and yet they never look into the Bible to give us information about the real Jesus.
The only place where truth about Christ is found, they don't use it. I also don't like it when they show Jesus on TV, and he's some kind of Charles Atlas Weekly, 90-pound emaciated Jesus, thin, and you know, I think of Jesus as a carpenter, I don't know what he looked like, but I don't think he was some frail stick-like figure of a man.
I also have a pet peeve that some churches preach an emaciated Jesus, a Jesus that needs his great work at Calvary, plus our faith to accomplish anything. The Jesus who died in our place, on our behalf, in our stead, that needs our good works to make his life, death, and resurrection effective.
A church that somehow preaches Jesus's wonderful work at Calvary, his death, burial, and resurrection, and then somehow needs our worship to make him good or great. When you understand what Jesus is like in the Scriptures, you will worship him, won't you?
And you will say, here I am to bow down, here I am to worship, here I am to proclaim that you are great. I have a pet peeve that some worship services at churches are set up where the one to be worshiped is the one in the pew.
We come to worship ourselves, it's about how I feel, what I think, and I believe, and I know you believe as faithful BBC members, attenders, adherents are just plowing through the snow to get here, that you know it is all about God.
We are recipients of his good pleasure, we are recipients of his kind intention, but it's not about us, it's about him. Listen to what Tozer said decades ago. We have this breezy, self-confident Christian who has little affinity for Christ and his cross.
It is now commonplace in most evangelical churches to offer the people, especially the young people, a maximum of entertainment and a minimum of serious instruction. It is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend the meeting where the only attraction is God.
One can only conclude that God's professed children are bored with him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games, and refreshments. That could have been written yesterday.
And when you see God in the scriptures, you see Christ Jesus high and exalted, we don't need all those other things because we have our all in all, we have Christ Jesus. Kent Hughes, pastor's college church in Wheaton, he said this, more modernly, the unspoken but increasingly common assumption of today's Christendom is that worship is primarily for us, to meet our needs.
Such worship services are entertainment focused and the worshipers are uncommitted spectators who are silently grading the performance. From this perspective, preaching becomes a homiletics of consensus, preaching to felt needs, man's conscious agenda instead of God's.
Such preaching is always topical and never textual. Biblical information is minimized and sermons are short and full of stories. Anything and everything that is suspected of making the marginal attender uncomfortable is removed from the service.
Taken to the nth degree, this philosophy instills a tragic self-centeredness that is everything is judged by how it affects man. And this passage today in Colossians gives you so much focus to who God is at the cross, who Jesus is, what he's done, that it just makes me think this is never about me at worship, it's always about God.
So let's turn our Bibles to Colossians, please, as I want to give you a healthy dose of Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection, what he did at Calvary and you will say, you know, God, I am here today to worship you, to honor you with my words, with my body, with my life, with my money, with everything I've got.
You've bought me with a price and you've done something that's so great. My only response is praise, honor, adoration and thanksgiving. Hopefully today I'll do what Paul did in 1 Corinthians 2, verse 2, I determined to know nothing among you except preach Christ Jesus, right?
To preach Jesus and him crucified, his person and his work. And boy, you'll be like that lady that talked to Charles Spurgeon one time and she said, Mr. Spurgeon, if Jesus Christ does ever save me, he shall never hear the last of it.
And we are people that have received the grace of God, running towards hell, making evil and sin a sport, as it says in the Old Testament. Sometimes not even being able to go to bed in the Old Testament says they would have to sin before they went to bed.
How can you sleep without sinning? And then God changed us, he saved us, he had his son die for us and our response is, we're always going to be thankful the rest of our lives. When I first got here, my very first sermon was in Colossians chapter 1, verse 28.
I'm not going to preach it, but we're going to go into chapter 2, but listen to Colossians 1, 28 and this is for me, the preacher, for the elders, for the leaders at the church, for you even as you evangelize, you live your life.
Here's what Paul did when he went to a church and you see it in Colossians chapter 1, verse 28, we proclaim him. We are in the act of a continual proclamation of here's who Christ is. We proclaim the Messiah.
Paul did it, and the false teachers, it didn't matter what they did, Christians preached Christ. Nothing about human ingenuity, nothing about creativity, not well, you're going to get bored about hearing Jesus all the time.
You've got to market Jesus, you've got to advertise Jesus. No, we proclaim Christ Jesus. And that's the theme of the Christian life, the theme of the church, and the theme of Christian ministry, Jesus Christ the Messiah who died for people like us.
Paul is addressing a church that is under this illusion from the false teachers, that Jesus Christ is good, he might even be God, he should be part of your worship, but Jesus Christ isn't enough. You've got to have Jesus plus something else, and that's the society we live in today, where you can have Jesus as Lord and you can just keep everything else that you've got in your life, but here Paul said, you know, I'm going to preach Jesus Christ, he's good enough, Jesus is supreme, almost like Hebrews, Jesus is supreme in everything.
And I like Paul because he practices what he preaches. Listen how he preaches about Christ in Colossians. He calls him the Son of God, he calls him the object of Christian faith, he calls him the Redeemer, the image of God, the Lord of creation, the head of the church, the reconciler of the universe, all in chapter 1.
Chapter 2, Paul calls Jesus Christ the fullness of the Godhead, he has supreme authority over all, he's the essence of the mystery of God, he's the one in whom all God's treasures of wisdom and knowledge lie hidden, he's the standard by which a religious teaching should be measured, he's the conqueror of evil, all in chapter 2.
Does Paul preach Christ? That's just what he preached. You bump into Paul and he just starts talking about Jesus. Sometimes that's my prayer, where I would, especially when I was early in my Christianity, I would say, Lord, when someone talks to me about anything, could I figure out a way with my mind to begin to preach Christ about it?
You just bump me and you know, if you ask me a question, well how's the weather, how are the Red Sox, how are this or that, that I was going to go ahead and twist-o, change-o that conversation and somehow talk about the Bible and Jesus.
Lord, would you give me the opportunity and the boldness to talk about Jesus when someone asks me? By the way, and you already know this, you don't need to feel led to talk to Jesus, God has commanded, talked about Jesus, God has commanded you to do it, and so we just need to pray for faithful obedience.
I just wasn't led to evangelize. Well, he doesn't need to lead you when he's proclaimed to you, you've got this great manifold gift of God and we are to proclaim his excellencies. He's taken us out of darkness, he's placed us in the kingdom of light and go ahead and preach Christ.
I hope your friends think that. If I talk to Bill, he's just going to talk to me about the Bible and Jesus. I talk to John at work, he's going to end up somehow working it all the way around and talking about Christ.
Colossae was a city that was about a hundred miles from Ephesus. Paul went to Ephesus and he preached and somehow, luckily, the gospel got over to Colossae. By chance, by circumstance, somehow there's some people in Colossae that got saved.
But these people had problems and there was false teachers and they were saying Jesus' work at Calvary, not very good, they devalue it, it's not very effective, you need something besides Jesus, maybe some philosophy, maybe some mysticism, maybe some worship of angels, maybe some asceticism, don't touch, don't taste, it's not all about Jesus and the cross.
And you would think that in the providence of God, where would Paul be at a time like this when the church was hurting and they needed instruction? If you were God, where would you place Paul? I'd place Paul on a boat to Ephesus and then on a fast camel donkey to go get to Colossae and in the providence of God, Paul is in jail.
Down in Rome, Kim and I went last year to a couple of different jails where Paul might have been and he's stuck there in jail. So Paul sends Tychicus to answer some of these questions with this theme in Colossians, Jesus is sufficient, Jesus is supreme, Jesus is all you need, you don't need Jesus plus.
And the same goes for us. And it might even have included a hymn that was inspired of God. Look at verse 15 of chapter 1. Paul is going to say, Jesus alone is preeminent, Jesus alone is God, you don't need anyone else.
And so he says, many commentators think this is a recital of an early hymn. And he, verse 15, speaking of Christ, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn, the preeminent of all those who were born, creation.
For by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created by him and for him. It would be a good song to sing, wouldn't it?
Verse 17, he's before all things and in him all things hold together. He's also the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead. All those that have ever been raised from the dead, he's preeminent so that he himself emphatically might come to have first place in everything.
It was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in him and through him to reconcile all things to himself. Having made peace through the blood of his cross, through him I say whether things on earth are things in heaven.
That should just be music to the beloved's ears. Jesus Christ is great. So for the outline today and for the sermon today, I want to give you two reminders about how great Jesus is so that you might praise him and thank him and worship him properly.
Two reminders found in this book that Jesus is all you need and it's taken from Colossians 2, verses 13, 14 and 15. Two things that Jesus did and only Jesus could do for us on our behalf, out of love, not because he looked down the quarters of time and saw us, not because he said they've got some worth so I'll do something for them but because of his grace and only by his grace, he said I'll do this for them for the glory of the Trinity in honor of the Father and then certainly the saints would praise him for what he would do.
Some people think we were worth it and then therefore God died for the worthy ones. You know, God doesn't make junk. Well that's true, God doesn't make junk. God made perfection. And in the counsels of God, Adam fell and turned himself and everyone who would follow him both federally and seminally into junk.
Right? God makes things upright and perfect, Ecclesiastes says. It wasn't God's, God was not the author of sin to make Adam fall and so it's kind of like the shows that you'll watch sometimes, the kind of the extreme makeover type of shows and beauty shows where they'll take someone and they'll transform that woman or that man into some kind of beauty queen.
Hint, hint, they don't pick the really pretty ones to start because they want the transformation to be seen. They pick ones that are a little more on the, let's see, how can I be politically correct, less beautiful side.
I was going to say ugly. They pick less beautiful ones because then through the work of their hands and their own creation and the makeup and everything else, they turn them into beauty queens. It's the same thing with us.
God doesn't pick us because we were worthy. God picked us when we were unworthy and then has made us trophies of his grace. And we'll see two of those great things that he's done today in Colossians chapter 2 verses 13, 14, and 15.
And as I was thinking, instead of preaching Matthew 5, 8, what should I preach today? And if you ever ask that question, what should I give for my Bible study? What should I teach my family? What should I do when I go down to the corner and preach?
What should I talk to my friends about? Well, there's an easy answer. Either the next set of verses from what you've already taught them or how about Jesus, Jesus Christ. And so here are two great things that he's done and your response should be praise and worship.
Well, number one, God through Christ Jesus at Calvary has made us alive. If you look at chapter 2 verse 13, he's made us alive. He has given us life. He's given us victory over sin. I'm using the words from the text so you'll remember them.
He made us alive. If you look at Colossians 2, 13, in the midst of Paul talking about, you don't need anything else. He begins to talk about Jesus Christ and there in the middle of the verse, he made you alive together.
When you study the Bible, you want to look at key verbs, not I N G ending, some kind of gerund or participle or some kind of modifying word. We're looking for the key verbs and this is the key verb. He made us alive together with him.
Now, how many people know any Greek words? This is going to be, you know, you're not supposed to throw out Greek a lot when you preach, but hey, we've got the crowd that wants Greek today. You're here to worship and you want to know what the Greek says.
Part of this word that says he quickened us or he made us alive is the word zoo, Z-O-O. When you go to a zoo, why is it called a zoo? What's the root word zoo? What's Z-O-O-S in Greek mean? Zeus, a god, that was a good guess.
This is kind of turning into a Sunday night service where people just say things out loud, right? Zeus, it means to make alive, life. There's life at the zoo. We have two words for life. One is bios, like biology, the study of life.
There's also zoo, zoology. It's also a word about what's alive. And so then we've got this word where we get the word poem and it's P-O-A-O and it's to make, it's to do. Remember last week with the Good Samaritan, the key was do.
We've got to make and we've got alive. And that's what the word here is, to make alive. He has made us alive. Did you notice here, God makes the initiative. He wasn't waiting for us to respond and he would say, well, they kind of did the right thing, therefore, I'll approach them and I wouldn't want to somehow trample on their will or their freedom or anything else.
This is a message from Paul about the absolute greatness of God's work where he made us alive. And if we were made alive, what must we have been before we were alive? Listen to Wesley, it's so good. You know the hymn.
Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night. Thine eye diffused a quickening ray, a making alive ray. I woke, the dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off, my heart was free.
I rose, went forth and followed thee. He quickened us, he made us alive. This is words that talk about regeneration. When Jesus said you must be born again, that's the exact kind of terminology he's talking about theologically.
Jesus made the dead spiritual ones alive. We were not active, we were passive. We were not the ones who started, we were the ones that responded. Salvation is of the Lord and the Lord alone. Charles Spurgeon said, that must be God's work.
Man may reform himself, but how can man give himself a new heart? How could the exertions of an old heart bring forth a new heart? Can you imagine for a moment a tree with a rotten heart by its own vital energy giving to itself a new young heart?
You cannot suppose such a thing. If the heart were originally right and the defects were only in some branches of the tree, you can conceive of that tree through its vital power of its sap within its heart might rectify the wrong.
And then he goes on to say, but that can't be. The roots are bad, the trunk's bad, the foliage is bad. I never could figure out when I was a kid, I'd hear about the neighbor boy that was older and he would total his car.
My mom said, next-door neighbor, total his car. Man, total it. And then they pulled the car, the tow truck pulled it up and put it in front of the house. I thought, that thing's not totaled, but for the price it would take to make it new, it wasn't worth it.
And this is not a house that just needs a little fixer-upper. This is at the foundation, the house. We are the house in the analogy, and it just doesn't need a home improvement. It just needs to be torn down and built by another.
We don't need mending, we need something new and God regenerates us. It's why Whitfield always preached, you must be born again. They ask him all the time, why do you keep preaching that sermon? Well, he preached every day, so he had to go back to his old stock.
But the other answer was, because you must be born again. Why do you preach you must be born again? Because you must be born again. I read this week, or heard this week, that Whitfield's first sermon when he preached when he was 21 years old, 15 people in the congregation went mad.
Went crazy. Because in those days they realized that there was a hell, they realized where they were gonna go without the forgiveness of God, and they realized for the first time that their soul was in the hand of God and there was nothing they could do to change God, to get God to save them.
They couldn't cooperate with God, they couldn't say, well, my faith in your work at Calvary, God, and my life in you, God, it was all of God, and if God didn't make them alive, they weren't going to be made alive.
Crazy, they would turn. This is a supernatural work, we call this in theology, monergism. This is not a Greek word, it's an English word, but we break it up. Mono, what's mono mean? Alone, or one. What's an erg, e-r-g?
If you have a little meter that measures ergs, what does it measure? Energy. God alone works. When it comes to salvation, we believe in the monergistic, as this passage clearly teaches, God alone works in our life.
He is the one that makes us alive. The other two options are synergism, God and myself, we're co-authors of regeneration, it's kind of, you know, buddy God, he does some and I do some, and the other one is, man alone regenerates himself, and that can't be true, it is a supernatural work.
Think about the images of regeneration elsewhere in scripture, and see how there's something that's done by one to another. How about, you're called a new creation. Does the thing being created somehow help with the creator?
Did the globe, did the earth, did terra firma help with God as he was making it? Wasn't even around. How about this one? New birth. Does the baby somehow help come out of the womb? No, it is, the babies are passive.
The babies are passive in birth and we are passive in regeneration. God does it to us. I mean, the baby's crying everything, but once that process starts, the baby's coming out. Or how about this image used to talk about how God alone works?
We are given a resurrection to life, a good synonym of regeneration. How do you resurrect yourself? If you look earlier in Colossians 2 .13, when you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive together with him.
Dead men don't cooperate. Dead men don't go arm and arm down the aisle. People get married, the father brings the bride right down here, arm and arm, cooperating as it were. There's nothing you can do.
We're dead in the flesh. We're dead, blinded by Satan. Can't do it. We have to be born by God. John 1 .13 says, those who are born not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but are born by the will of God.
It's God's will who saves, not our wills. We are at enmity with God. We don't seek God. We can't even yell the first word, the first syllable of help. I guess there's only one syllable, but you can't even yell the first sound of the H.
Westminster Confession of Faith says, man by his fall and state of sin has wholly lost all ability to will any spiritual good accompanying salvation. Why is there no discussion in Colossians chapter 2 verse 13 about faith?
Does God believe for you? No. Is faith part of conversion? Yes, but this isn't talking about conversion. This is talking about what God does to us. Conversion is what God does to us and how we respond.
But since this isn't talking about conversion, this is talking about what God does, there's no part of faith here. Remember, faith, by the way, and repentance does not cause your salvation. Faith and repentance are a result of God making you what?
Alive. And if God did that to us, then our praise should increase. Versus God and I, we did it. Versus God, I was the one who needed the makeover and you did that all for me. You made me alive. And so to the Colossian church, why go for anything else when Jesus is sufficient?
Look what he did. Look at part of making us alive. He forgave our sins at the end of verse 13, having forgiven us all our transgressions up to the point where we believed. But after that, you're on your own.
I lived under that system for many years as a Lutheran, where I would lay there at night kind of saying to myself, have I forgotten any of my sins? Because if I have forgotten one of my sins and have not confessed it, then I'm going to bust hell wide open if I die in my sleep.
Forgiven us all our transgressions. Now that word forgiven us is really a cool word, if I can use the word cool this morning. It is the word charisomenos. Here's another Greek word for you. What's the first two syllables of charisomenos?
Charis. He graced us. He gave us divine grace. Sometimes forgive means to just let go, to overlook, to remit, to do some other kind of thing like this. This one that he's graced us. It's all of God's grace.
He didn't say, well, I see something in you. Therefore, I'll favor you. This is demerited favor in action. Divine grace, free gift from the bountiful riches of God. God at Calvary forgave us our sins, both ignorant and high-handed, both original and actual, both past, present, and future, both in thought and deed, both of omission and commission.
And the saints go, no, Paul's saying, we want to just say, I can't believe you forgave us of all those sins. I do a lot of yawning when I'm up here. I don't know why that is. Our sins are out of sight.
Micah 7, 19. Thou will cast all their sins in the depths of the sea. They're out of reach. Micah goes on to say that he will have compassion on us. He will tread our iniquities underfoot. In the new covenant, they're out of mind.
I will forgive their iniquity and their sin I will remember no more. They're also out of existence. Look at verse 14 of Colossians chapter 2. Having canceled, this is all again modifying, he made us alive.
He made us alive and he forgave us. He made us alive by canceling out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us. Who is a God like thee who pardons iniquities, passes over rebellious acts?
What kind of God does this? By the way, if I was God, I wouldn't do this. Would you? If I was God, I wouldn't do these kind of things. This is not necessarily in the sermon. When I preach, by the way, I have all my verses on my notes so I don't have to look through the Bible.
So if you ever see me look through the Bible, something's popped in my mind and I think, oh, I've got to share that because it's so good. And I tell others, if you've got all your notes and you come up into the pulpit without the Bible, but you still preach from the Bible because it's in your notes, it just doesn't look that good.
So bring your Bibles up even if you have your notes. Turn to Isaiah 55 for a minute. Keep your finger on Colossians 2. Isaiah chapter 55, you know these verses and so what we like to do though in Christianity, and I do it too, is I just read a few of the verses that I like and I forget the context.
And so how does God forgive sin? I have a question, why does he even forgive sin? And I'll tell you why he does it, because he's not like us. He is by nature compassionate and forgiving and full of grace.
I by nature like to get revenge and have retribution and you did that to me and so I'm going to do that to you. But God, the God that we serve, the God we worship, isn't like that. And I'm glad, Isaiah 55.
You know the verse in verse 8, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways, excuse me, nor your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Aren't those verses good? When do you use those, by the way? I use them when someone asks me a theological question and I don't know the answer. God's transcendent, God is over us, we can't get our arms around God, how could finite creatures understand the infinite God?
His thoughts aren't like us. We were ready at the elders Q &A last Sunday night to use that verse and Deuteronomy 29 29 when we needed to. But the first word that you see of those verses that I just read should give you a little clue and the first word is what?
Four, it's going to tell us why it's going to be a cause for all this. Why are God's thoughts not our thoughts? What does that have to do with anything? Look back at verse 6, I'll show you the context.
This is a context of God's offer of mercy and the free grace. Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous men his thoughts and let him return to the Lord and he will have compassion on him.
He's not like us and to our God for he will abundantly pardon. God is a God who pardons and has compassion because he's not like us and his thoughts are not like our thoughts and our thoughts are not like his thoughts.
I just love that. By nature he's compassionate and he's a Savior. Okay, back to Colossians chapter 2 and because of that he's going to take care of our sin with emphasis. If you say one thing one way, yes that's emphatic and he's just going to now keep up the way so you know in your mind my sin, if you're a Christian, has been dealt with past present and future for good forever.
It's done. It's gone. I have no Damocles sword waiting for me when I sin. We shouldn't want to sin but if we do it's covered. He's blotted, excuse me, he's canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us.
Notice again the language. He did something for us. We couldn't do it. He had to do it for us. It was done for another. The law was against us and what could we do? All right, I told you I was going to give you a lot of Greek words today so let me give you another one.
Certificate of debt in English is this in Greek. Chirographon. Chirographon. Chirography. If you go to a chiropractor, what does he use to manipulate you? Pardon me? His hands. So chiro is hands. Graph is what?
Writing. He is taking care of the handwriting that was against you. As it were with God's divine hand as he's saying these are the sins I have against you and he's written them in his book. And what has he done?
Because of Christ he has canceled that certificate of his black book with all the sins that you would ever commit. He wrote them all down. He knew about that and he's gotten rid of it. This is just good language for us to understand.
Whatever was against us he's taken it out of the way. God doesn't have to write anything down because he's omniscient. But this would be good for the people of Colossae to understand. Here's a legal debt that I owe and the person who owns that now just says, you know what, I cancel this.
I remit it. They even found back in those days debts with a big X over it. With like a big X that just says canceled. It's paid. And sin is a debt against God. It's forgiven. Canceled against us. And these decrees were after us.
You see the text consisting of decrees that were against us or hostile towards us. The sinner that sins will surely die. Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point he's become guilty of all, James 2.
Galatians 3, cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law to perform them. Here's this weight that we can't carry and Jesus comes and he forgives us our sins and he gets rid of any kind of handwriting that's against us.
Matter of fact, it keeps going. It says he canceled out the certificate of debt. How did he cancel it out? He blotted it out. In the old days, if you were going to write on plant or the hide of an animal, you would use ink, but that ink really didn't permeate down into the hide.
And so it was easily wiped off. And so this is basically saying that certificate of debt that God has against you because of what Christ did. He just took the marker, the eraser, and rubbed that thing right off.
Same kind of language when it says in Exodus 32, blotting me out of thy book. In this case, he doesn't blot us out of his book. He blots out whatever was against us in his book. Wiped it out, erased it, every sin stain, every jot and tittle, all gone.
Here's the credit card debt that you have paid in full. Christ paid it. Remembers our sins no more. When Jews prepare for Rosh Hashanah, which is their new year, they have a 10-day litany of prayers that contains these prayers.
Our Father, our King, blot out our transgressions and make them pass away before thy eyes. Our Father, our King, erase in thy abundant mercies all the records of thy guilt. And at Calvary, that's exactly what Jesus did.
It goes further, though. He removed the document itself. Look at verse 14. He's taken it out of the way. This is all language that's just pile-on language. This is dog-pile language, pig-pile language.
This is above and beyond just so we all know Christ is worthy of worship because he has made us alive, and with his making us alive, he's paid for everything that we owe. He not only erased it, he's taken it out of the way.
This is the same terminology. Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. Exact same kind of language. This is also used in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 of excommunicating a sinful Christian.
You take the sinful Christian, and you put him away. You take him away. And so at Calvary, Jesus takes Christian sins, and what does he do to them? He excommunicates our sins. That's a cool concept. That's why John Newton said, let us love and sing and wonder.
Let us praise the Savior's name. He has hushed the law's loud thunder. He has quenched Mount Sinai's flame. He has washed us in his blood. He has brought us nigh to God. And he goes further, even a more forceful way, having nailed it, do you see in verse 14, to the cross.
He's made us alive, and he forgave our sins. He canceled off the debt. He removed the document, and he nailed our debt to the cross. Forcefully, another metaphor for forgiveness. Matthew 27, you know the verse.
They put above his head the charge against him which read, this is Jesus, King of the Jews. And as God has a charge against us, it's taken out of the way. Christ paid for it. God's not a God of double jeopardy.
My son pays, and you pay too. One man said this, Pilate had placed this placard above Christ, but God the Father placed it on Christ, because Christ bore our sins. And this is what Luther calls the wondrous exchange.
We sing the song that Charlie leads. His righteousness exchanged for our sin. It's gone. Public mockery by Pilate, but blotting away, taking the law out of the way. Well, you know what else has happened though?
Look down at verse 15. This is point number two. If you're timing us today, we're 35 minutes into the sermon, and point two won't take 35 minutes. Okay, it'll take less. Preachers always preach more on the first point.
Just a fact of life. They teach you that in homiletics class. Christ is the victor. Christ has done it all. Christ has made us alive, in other words, by removing our sins, and he should be worshipped.
Secondly, he should be worshipped, and we should be thankful, because Christ vanquished Satan. Christ is the vanquisher over Satan. That's why you should worship him. Look at verse 15. I love this kind of language.
It's all of the triumphant entry of a Roman general back into Rome, as Titus would come back into Rome. This is that kind of language. He disarmed the rulers and authorities. He disarmed Satan and the demon horde.
He disarmed them. This is talking about the bad rulers and authorities. He wouldn't have to disarm the good ones. No more powers to fear. No more bondage. This is all the military metaphor of the triumphant general coming back with all the pictures of what they did, with all the animals that they conquered, with all the slaves that they brought, and the defrocked generals, and everything else.
This is Jesus Christ, like in Ephesians, putting all things in subjection under his feet. And look at what the text says, he disarmed. Now sometimes people think that this disarming means somehow like Satan and demons were all kinds of like leeches on him, some kind of parasitic things.
It's a middle voice, and so he disarmed himself. He just kind of shook himself clean of all the things that were attached to him, like Satan and demons. Kind of like if you walk through the woods and you get ticks on yourself, and you just kind of do that tick dance, trying to get the ticks off.
It doesn't work, because they can cling on to you easily. You just got to get rid of it. As one man said, he divested himself at the cross of the evil powers which had struggled with him so strongly. So you just kind of get rid of it.
Or, and I think more importantly, this middle could be very intensive. And so this is not Jesus stripping himself of those, this is Jesus himself stripping the powers of the enemy, and Satan, and all the demons.
He stripped them of their power, and authority, and weapons. So it's of, actually in the Old Testament translation in the Greek, stripping the enemies of war. And so Jesus at Calvary, he made them no longer what they used to be.
Look what he did. He made a public display of them. That's amazing. At Calvary, I thought Jesus was the public display, but no. If we could see with eyes of faith, and now we understand by revelation, he made a public display of them.
When I was 16, I was playing basketball, and somehow somebody came up with the word, face. And so when you would shoot a basket, and you'd shoot over somebody, and you'd say, face. This is in your face, and there's nothing you could do about it.
And so if you really were cool, before you shot, you'd say, face. This is in your face before you shoot, and then when you shoot and make it, then it's extra good. And so I was just the unregenerate, self-focused 16-year-old, and so I entered a tennis tournament about 60 miles south of Nebraska, and my friend Rick Kincaid and I were going to go be in this tennis tournament.
And so we thought we were so cool, we were going to publicly shame other people, and try to intimidate them, that when we showed up, we had matching jerseys, and our jerseys just said on the front, face.
A couple of dopes from Nebraska, you know, we didn't know what we were doing. By the way, I never got to play because our car broke down on the way. Face. We probably would have got faced. And here is the public display.
Satan, you think you've won at Calvary? You think, you know, everything that you've done, you've tried to get Jesus to bypass this, to go around it, and maybe just for a moment, even though intellectually they know Jesus is going to die at Calvary and be raised from the dead, they know He's God, they know He's all-powerful, but just for that moment, you can just imagine the shrieks of glee.
Kind of the only way I can picture it in my mind with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and you have the orcs, or the orcs, however you want to pronounce them, and they just kind of got that kind of sleazy, gross kind of saliva, just kind of, just little tee-hee kind of laughing.
You're all, you're all moviegoers, I can tell. You haven't heard anything I've said all day, but you did get that. And all the demon hordes are just going, ha, ha, ding-dong, the witch is dead. And as those people, after Rome had conquered the other country, would be led in, in handcuffs, or hands bound at least, behind the Roman emperor, and he would display that I have conquered them, and they would walk through the streets of Rome.
First, outside of Rome, and the senate would say, yes, this is actually a triumph, and they'd be allowed to go through the streets of Rome, and you can just imagine the people just, the public shame. They've been conquered, and the people yelling, and the people hitting, and the people spitting.
And so at Calvary, from the human perspective, Jesus dies. From the divine perspective, he disarms Satan and his hordes, and he also makes a public shame out of them. Absolutely amazing. As the POWs were paraded through the street to their shame, here, exposure, public shame, and gaze.
Those soldiers that lived in the country next to us, that posed such a problem, are now bound and gagged, and they walk through the streets, posing no more problem, we're not afraid of them anymore, no more fear, how much more here, as Jesus made a public spectacle of these.
He made a show of them, is what the text says. Absolute victory. But what happens here? I've got a question for you. Do you have a blue hymnal anywhere? We might as well do this. Turn your blue hymnals to 716.
716. Not just at the cross was Jesus making a public shame of them, but after Jesus died on the cross, his spirit was alive, and he went someplace else to make even more of a public shame of them. And the Apostles' Creed, 716, says something.
I'm going to read it, and you tell me if you like it or not. This is an early document, maybe about 50 to 60 years after the last writings of the New Testament were written. The Apostles did not write it.
There's been some additions. But let me just read this. I believe in God. So far, so good? Raise your hand if there's something that I read that you go, whoops! I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and was buried.
So far, so good? He descended into hell. Yeah? If you're going to be honest, you're like, what? Well, there's one more thing. We might as well, this doesn't have to do with anything with the sermon, but we'll keep reading it.
The third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church.
The communion of saints and forgiveness of sins, etc. Resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Catholic just means universal. It does not say they did. Wow! I didn't know that. Well, we've changed, and can it be back to the original one that's found in the back of your hymnal soon?
Like I said, I'm not God, and I have retribution. I have paybacks. Catholic, just a small C, does not mean Roman Catholic. It just means universal church. And we believe there are other Christians outside of this building today, don't we?
There are Christians in India, Christians in Russia, Christians in Papua New Guinea. We believe in God's local bride, yes, and most of the things in the New Testament talk about the local church. But we believe in the universal church as well.
But what about this whole descended into hell deal? Is he like, you know, Joyce Myers, who says he had to go down to hell to be born again? Well, what's that all mean? What's happening there? Why don't we turn to 1 Peter 3, verse 18, and let me just give you a little insight into this.
I believe that Jesus publicly shamed them at Calvary, but he shamed them afterwards, even in a more specific way. As he said, you know, I have won, and I'm the victor. And 1 Peter 3, verse 18, in this book about suffering and submission, gives us a little insight into what happened with Jesus between the time when his body was at Calvary, yet he, being almighty, eternal, undying God, still was alive.
His body was dead, but his spirit was alive. What did he do for those three days? And I believe he went and made a public shaming proclamation to the demons who were in Tartarus. Let's take a look. 1 Peter 3, verse 18.
For Christ also died for sins once for all. He died one time. He doesn't have to be crucified every week, does he? Every time we get together? No, he died once for all. And to the Jew, boy, that would ring so loudly.
Kim said to Luke this morning, she said, can you imagine, Luke, if your daddy had to go to work and kill animals all day long? Every day, that's what the priest did, kill animals all day, every day. Can you imagine your clothes?
Can you imagine what it would smell like? Can you imagine the flies? All day, every day. And the Jews knew, if you sin, somebody has to die. Something has to die. And so over and over and over, and you read the book of Hebrews, it focuses on this as well.
This is once for all. A .T. Robertson, the great Southern Baptist preacher said, not once upon a time, but once for all. The substitutionary atonement seen right here. The just for the unjust. How many people are just?
Well, that rules out pretty much everybody except Jesus. Jesus, the righteous, just, sinless Jesus, taking the place for sinners. And here is substitutionary atonement condensed down. The just for the unjust.
The just in place of the unjust. Right there, the just for the unjust. Great way to preach the gospel, right from this verse. Why? In order that he might bring us to God. We were far from God. We were Gentiles, especially.
We were removed from God, and you can think of Ephesians 2. And we're far away. We're aliens. We're separated. We have no covenant. We have no words. We have no oracles like the Jews did. We are separated from God, and he brings us to God.
He brings us right to God. Now he tells us what was going on at that time using this little modifier. He says, having been put to death in the flesh. At Calvary, did Jesus' body die? Did Jesus die? His body was dead, right?
They went over to break the legs. Didn't need to break the legs because he died from a lack of blood. No. He said, Father, I commend my spirit to you. Jesus didn't die because of a physical death and he had no blood.
Jesus died because he himself, who is the king of life and death, gave up his own life. But his body was dead. Could his spirit die? Now his spirit may be separated from God the Father for those three hours at Calvary when Jesus said, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And you take the eternity of God's righteous anger against sinners and combine it and compress it to three hours and then have Jesus bear those. The Father with his holiness couldn't look, as it were, and so there was a separation.
If you mean Jesus' spirit was separated from the Father at that particular time, that's fine. But if you mean Jesus died and he ceased to exist as a spirit, that can't be because he's eternal, right? So his body's on that tree and his spirit is alive.
What is his spirit doing? Well, it tells us. That's amazing. He's been put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit. Physical execution but is alive in the spirit. In which, in that particular case, he also went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison.
He went to preach. He made a proclamation. By the word, that word is not, proclamation is not the good news. It just means to herald forth the truth. I think, does anybody here have King James? Does it say, what's it say, Louis?
Verse 19, he went and made preached. So it's not preaching the gospel. He just went to preach. He made a proclamation. What did he say and to whom did he say it? Well, this is amazing. I love studying this.
By the way, here's Luther's view on what this means. Quote, I don't know what Peter means here. There's Luther's view. So this is worth study. It's worth getting into. The best news is, I know he's alive and his spirit's alive so certainly he's going to raise his body soon enough.
He went and made a proclamation. That's amazing. Some people think Jesus was proclaiming the truth to the people in the days of Noah because verse 20 is going to give us some insight into Noah. But I don't think that's it.
I think between Christ's death and his resurrection, he goes to the place where the spirits are and he makes proclamation. And what must that proclamation include? Well, if you repent now, you get to go to heaven.
Or, I'm alive. I've made my people alive and I have dethroned you. I have disarmed you. And you may be alive for a little bit more but one day it's a lake of fire for all of you because that's why I made it.
Well, it gets even more interesting. It gets more complicated. And part of this you're going to have to study on your own. There's good men who believe in different views. But he went and he made proclamation.
We know that. And we know he made it to the spirits who were in prison. What kind of spirits were in prison? Well, the only spirits that I can think of were the spirits that are found in verse 20. Those who were once disobedient.
Which spirits were those? There's a lot of those spirits. When the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah during the destruction of the ark. Those spirits. What was going on with those spirits?
And here we have, and I'm going to have to give you the fast version, that is the topic of every theological questionnaire that we've ever had at our home during around the fireplace, around the fire pit at the old sterling house.
This came up every single Q &A that we had. Who are these spirits? Where did they come from? And I believe because of context, and I believe because of 2 Peter, that the best way to look at this is not try to make it some metaphorical Christ preaching through Noah.
It doesn't say that. It says that Christ made a proclamation to those who were in prison now. What prison must that be? Well, it had to be a prison for people, or spirits rather, who were disobedient during the days of Noah.
What does that point you all to? What passage? Genesis chapter 6, where we most likely had these super spiritual angelic beings that somehow could cloak themselves with flesh like good angels could, cohabitating with women, creating some kind of hybrid offspring that would not need the seed of Messiah to be redeemed.
And then God said, not only are the intentions and thoughts of everyone wicked and evil continually, but also there's this hybrid race that I've got to wipe out. And he took those demons that did that, and he put them in a special place called Tartarus, and now Jesus comes back thousands of years later and proclaims to them, you have lost, you have not done it, I have disarmed you.
You say, I've never heard of that. You heard of it now? Lots of good people believe that view. I just didn't make it up or anything. You could go with Luther's view. I don't know what Peter's means there, but Jesus made a proclamation.
He made a proclamation between his death and his resurrection. He made a proclamation to spirits who were in prison, and he made a proclamation to those spirits in prison who were disobedient. Who were those spirits who were disobedient in the days of Noah?
And you only have one option in Genesis chapter 6, I believe. And to their eternal shame, Jesus proclaims victory. One man said, this new race indeed threatened the seed through which the promised Messiah would come.
They're not human, so how can Jesus die in our place, die in their place, if they're not human? You say, well, angels can't take on bodies. They're not given to marriage or anything like that. They're like these angelic beings.
Remember, when angels show up on earth, how do they show up? Often, but only as male human beings. They eat, they do other things. It doesn't matter. You say, well, I don't get it. I don't believe it.
What does it matter? Only thing I'm preaching here is Jesus Christ is forgiven sins, and he should be worshipped. And he's also publicly disgraced Satan and all the enemies, and he's made a public shame of them.
Where you want that shame to be, it doesn't matter. Going back to Colossians chapter 2, let's just wrap it up. He triumphed over them through him. Colossians 2 .15. He disarmed them. He made a public display.
And just like a good Southern Baptist preacher, he's got three points about Satan. Disarmed, public display, and triumphed over. Three things. They also teach at Southern Baptist Seminary that if you have a weak point, you do what?
Shout. That's right. Hit the pulpit. Yawn. Having triumphed over them through him. It's still the same thing. Jesus is a victor over sin. He makes us alive. And secondly, he's a vanquisher over Satan.
Disarmed, public display, and triumphed over them. And here's that leading to triumph kind of language where the victorious Roman general would come in. Only used in 2 Corinthians chapter 2, besides this passage.
Thanks be to God who always leads us in his triumph in Christ. Same kind of language. And Paul is telling the Church of Colossae, you think you're helpless victims? You think these false teachers are here and there's nothing you can do about it?
And you're just at their mercy? And they're telling you Jesus isn't sufficient? You need philosophy? You need asceticism? You need the ABCs of early wisdom? You need a bunch of angels? You need a bunch of visions?
You need all these other things? And you're sitting there going, well, what are we going to do? How are we going to combat these evil forces? And Paul is saying, Jesus has made you alive. And Jesus has conquered all their origins.
And Satan may be still alive, but he's only doing God's bidding. He's been destroyed at the cross. One man said, they stripped Christ naked, held him up to public contempt, and celebrated a triumph over him.
On the cross, God was stripping them naked, was holding them up to public contempt, and leading them in his own triumphal procession in Christ, the crucified Messiah. And Romans 16 says, and the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.
So what should this cause us to do? It should cause us to realize why we're Christians. We're not Christians because we could have a happy, healthy, whole life. We're not Christians because we want wholeness in our life.
We're Christians because we are the recipients of God's divine mercy and his grace. And we should desire to worship him. We shouldn't be forced to worship. We should have comfort knowing that we can't lose our salvation.
We did not gain our salvation. How could we lose what we didn't gain? If you believe in monergism, then you can't lose your salvation. If you believe in synergism, you've got a faulty view of grace, and you could lose your salvation.
If it's only by the grace of God, then we're safe and secure. Grace is a unilateral act. It is not bilateral. I could put it to you this way. If God loved you when you were sinful and an unbeliever, how will God love you now when you're a son or a daughter?
He'll love you perfectly. And this is the kind of religion, this is the kind of relationship with God that we can die with. John Knox, Scottish reformer, he's dying, he can't speak. A servant came and said, you know, you're suffering, you're hurting, and do you still believe the gospel that you preach?
If you do, raise your hand one time. John Knox? Three times on his death. Krishna Paul said, Jesus for the body takes, thy guilt assumes, thy fetters break, discharging all thy dreadful debt, and cast thou then such love forget.
Jesus is our victor, Jesus is our vanquisher, and we are Christians because of what God has done to us, and our response is worship and thanksgiving. I don't know about you, but I'm glad I came out on a snowy day to be reminded that Jesus is our king and forgiving God.
Let's pray. Lord, thank you for our day today. Thank you that we could come and hear the word. And Lord, thank you that it's not my word that you do supernatural things through the proclamation of the gospel through weak and sinful men.
May you be praised for that, whether it is the Apostle Paul preaching, John Knox, J. Gresham Machen, whoever it might be. For us, even as a church, evangelizing, that you use your word and it doesn't come back void.
And oh, what a God that you are, that you show compassion on us. Mercy, because you are a God by nature that saves and who loves. Lord, thank you for loving us. Thank you that love isn't just a feeling.
It was an action where you gave the greatest love gift you could ever give, and that was for Jesus Christ to come and die on our behalf. Lord, I pray that you'd stir us this week, not because we want to be better or do more or somehow in our own power become more thankful.
But Lord, would you bless your word, and would you create fruit of that word in our hearts by your spirit's power that you on the inside would make us thankful and appreciative and wanting to use our entire lives to serve you, that we would consider ourselves expendable by your great power on the inside, that you would enlighten our minds to know that whether we live here, overseas, whether we have much or we have little, we want to live all for your glory because you are not only the victor but the vanquisher.
In Jesus' name, amen.