SERMON: Adam Died On The Garden Tree (Good Friday)

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherd's Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon, and we pray that as we declare the Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

And may you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you. Last week, or last Sunday, we watched Jesus step into the garden and take the swords. He didn't hide. He didn't run. Where Adam cowered in fig leaves, the new and better Adam walked toward the torches and said, Whom do you seek?

And they fell at his feet. And this is where we left Jesus on Palm Sunday, standing in the garden before his captors. And I told you last week that he was going to Gethsemane, which means the olive press or the oil press, meant crushing.

That he was the olive, and that by pressing and by crushing him, the oil of salvation would flow to us. Today, we follow him all the way through that crushing. Today is day six in Jesus' week. But before we get there, I need you to see something about this whole week, something that that's hiding underneath it in Exodus 12, that actually frames everything that we're going to look at today and everything that happened on Palm Sunday.

You see, when God gave Israel the Passover instructions, he was very precise about the calendar event on when this was going to happen. It was supposed to happen in the 10th day of the month of Nisan.

They were to select their lambs. They were to bring it, and they were to bring it inside of their own house for four days. And the lamb was to live inside of the home of the people for four full days.

And the father was supposed to examine it and to watch it and to make sure that it was without blemish. And on the 14th day of the month of Nisan at twilight, the father would take the lamb outside of the home, would place his hands on the lamb's head, speak the sins of the family over the lamb, and then slay the lamb.

Now, what is astonishing is that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on the 10th day of Nisan. The crowds brought him inside of the walls, and for four days, the lamb of God stayed in the city, being prepared by the father, watched over by the father, examined by the father to make sure there was no blemish.

So that on the 14th day of Nisan, on the Passover, he would be the one that was slain, and his blood would paint, be painted over the doorpost to welcome us in. And the chief priest interrogated him through the night, and yet he was proven innocent.

No blemish was found. Your entire Palm Sunday, the entry into the city, the inspection of the temple, the cursing, the walking through the city, that was Exodus 12 being played out in a citywide and even cosmic-wide scale.

The lamb was in the house, the clock was already running, and you just didn't know what you were watching, but you were watching the four-day window of the lamb being prepared for slaughter. And then you follow him into the trial, where he was beaten through the night.

He was standing there before Pilate, and Pilate, who has absolutely no idea what he's doing, leads him out before the crowd and says five of the most loaded words in the entire Bible, five words that he had absolutely no clue how deep and how powerful they were.

He said,.

Behold, the man! Edu ha-anthropos, in Greek. Pilate thinks he's presenting a pathetic prisoner to the people. Behold, the man, the weak, the pitiful, the ghastly. Someone so broken that maybe they'll take pity upon him.

But John, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, knew exactly what edu ha-anthropos meant. Because that word anthropos is the same word in the Greek Old Testament that God uses of Adam in Genesis 2.

The man, the human one, the Adam figure on public display. And now the true and better Adam is on public display for the world to see. And on his head, did you see what was on his head? Crown of thorns.

Back in Genesis 3, after the fall, God speaks a curse onto the ground and says, Thorns and thistles that shall grow up out of you. The thorn was not just some kind of a botanical inconvenience or nuisance.

The thorn was a signature that the curse had taken over every square inch of land. Every thorn that ever pierced a hand, every thistle that ever strangled a crop, was a physical reminder pressed into the skin and the flesh of earth that this is what happens when we fall from God.

And now these razor bladed symbols of curses were being pressed into Adam's head. And he wears it. Not merely bearing the curse, but claiming it. Putting it on his head the way that a king puts on a crown.

Taking ownership of every thorn, every thistle, every consequence that the first Adam ever wrought. Behold the man who came to wear what Adam should have wore. Then he was lifted up onto the cross. And he looks down and he sees his mother.

And he speaks to her and he doesn't call her mother. He calls her woman. And for a moment, as we read that, that might sound cold. That might sound sassy.

Woman.

But actually his words are carrying very, very deep symbolic meaning. Go back to Genesis 3 .15. In the wreckage of the fall. In the first breath of hope that God speaks in the ruined world. And I mean that.

The very first breath of future hope that is spoken. The sentence begins with woman. There will be enmity between your seed and the seed of the serpent. That promise of Genesis 3 .15 that she would have a seed who would crush the serpent's head and ends that crushing.

He would bruise his heel. All of it is began with just the simple phrase woman.

Eve.

And now the seed of the woman. The true seed of the woman is hanging on the cross. His lungs are failing. Every word is costing him so much pain. His blood vessels are in trauma. He's delirious at this point from loss of blood.

His tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. Every word he utters is costing him agony. And he looks down at his mother's face and instead of calling her mother. The woman who carried him. The woman who held him when he skinned his knee.

The woman who was there with every little breath. Every little moment when he fell asleep on his pillow when he was a toddler. That woman that every other time in his life he would call mother. He looks at her and he says woman.

Because he's telling her that Genesis 3 .15 is being fulfilled in her hearing. The woman. The promise to her. Her seed has come. Has come. And the one who would crush the serpent is crushing the serpent right in front of her very eyes.

By hanging on the cross. And now watch what John does next. I think John is the most deliberate writer in the New Testament. I think he is one of the most brilliant men, if not arguing with Paul. One of the most brilliant men the ancient world ever produced.

And he's about to show you something that maybe you didn't think about. It's the sixth hour on the day of preparation in the temple courts. Just down the hill from where Jesus is dying. The priests are slaughtering the lambs.

Right then and there at that moment. And the blood is running out of their throats and into channels that are cut into stone. And the smell of the blood was rising up over the city in a way that would have been familiar to the citizens of Jerusalem for 1400 years.

Lambs without blemish. Lambs without spot. Bones unbroken. Blood being applied. And do you know what the blood was applied with? In Exodus and in every other Passover after that. The blood was applied to the doorpost by a branch of hyssop.

And then the soldiers, when Jesus says, I'm thirsty, go and grab a sponge and dip it in the wine and lift it up on a hyssop branch to Jesus. Not because they were being merciful to him. They were fulfilling prophecy.

This true lamb is having his blood painted and the hyssop branch is the one that's supplying him. And then another thing. They get to him and they don't even break his legs. John stops the entire narrative and he says, wait, stop.

Not one of his bones is going to be broken. That's a Passover requirement. In Exodus 12, it says that the Passover lamb, not one of its bones shall be broken. The Passover lamb required that all of its bones would be intact.

No spot, no blemish, no broken bones. So right here on the exact day when all of the Passover lambs are being slaughtered, all of the blood is being shed. All of it's being painted on the doorpost of everyone's heart and everyone's house in celebration of Passover.

The true Passover lamb is being sacrificed with no broken bones, identifying himself with the sacrifice of Israel, because it's through him that we are passed over. It is through him that the angel of death does not grip us and grab us and yank us into hell.

The soldiers had no idea what they were doing. John cast them, not just as men who are making a drink, he cast them as priests on top of an altar who are offering the final sacrifice. And the blood that was painted, you remember in Israel, the blood was painted over your door so that hell would not come in, so that you would be safe.

This blood painted by Christ is painted for you, so that the destroyer does not come and get you, but so that it got him, so that he would bear the awful weight of the curse that you and I deserve, so that he would be the Passover lamb.

When the father spoke the curses of his own family over the lamb, the father knew very clearly that this lamb, that this lamb that my children just slept with for four days in the house, the one that they petted, the one that they played with, this lamb that I'm holding in my hands and it's looking at me with trust, this lamb is the one that I am going to slaughter and it's my fault.

I did this. We forget, it's so easy when you go to the grocery store and you get your sanitized meat and packages to disassociate yourself from the moment of the murder of an animal. These people felt it because they loved their animals.

They named them, they knew them. To hold that animal in the father's hands and to have it killed for his sin and for his children's sin was an emotional moment in Israel. All throughout the people of Israel, they were feeling it and they were experiencing it so that they could live.

Dear brother and sister, the father held his own son in his hands and in order to spare you, he crucified his son. He let the curse that you deserve fall on him so that you may be set free, so that you may be well.

Today is the day we celebrate half of the gospel. Christ died for you. On Sunday, we celebrate the rest that he also rose for you.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you that there was no depth, no bound that you would not go to to rescue your people. The ones whom the father had given you, even being held up naked, publicly displayed as a spectacle to take away the curse and stain of our sin.

Lord, help the heaviness of that and help the depth of that and the pain of that and the weight of that press upon us. Let us go to sleep meditating upon it. And let us also, as people who know the end of the story, wait with eager expectation to celebrate your resurrection.

It's in Jesus name we pray, amen.