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Pastor David Mitchell
All right, anyway, we're in Romans 8, 28 through 30. I'm a little bit physically not with it today, so that's good because usually it means the Lord will just totally take over and things will be awesome here in a few minutes when he does.
So, I apologize for that and I'm not sure what's going on with me. I think I'm fine, but I'm just not quite like I usually am when I get up here. I do want us to be praying for Ron. I missed him being here today leading our music and so continue to pray for him.
I think he's going to see a specialist and get his stomach checked out soon. I hope next week we can get that done and Brother Paul, you did a good job though. That's not the problem and Glenda, you always minister to my heart before I get up here.
Bless your heart. Love all you guys. Love all you guys out there too and let me pray and we'll get started here. Father, we thank you for the salvation that you've given us. You have brought us out of darkness into your marvelous light and we can never praise you enough or be overjoyed enough because of that one thing, but we also thank you that you do move the affairs of men in this world.
You control everything in the heavenlies and on earth and let no man question that. May those who do question it be shown the truth of it. We are so thankful that you're in control and that you love us and you've known us before the foundation of the world as your dear children.
Go with us now in this time of study and be our teacher. May your Holy Spirit be in complete control, we ask it in Jesus' name, amen. All right, so we're working our way through Romans chapter 8. We're in verses 28 through 30 and we're really done with the whole chapter, it goes on beyond verse 30.
We've gone all the way to the last verse, but we came back to finish with this little passage and the interesting reason for this is because if you look at just those verses, it sort of encompasses all of time and everything before time began and everything after time is over if that happens, but I kind of think time moves on into the future, but it's different.
It works differently than it works here in a cursed world, but that's a whole other concept, but it encompasses all of it in just those few verses. And so we're talking about predominantly right now this concept of justification.
Now in verse 30, Romans 8 .30, well, we got to go back to verse 29 too. It says, those who he foreknew, and we've already studied this word. We know that everywhere in the Bible, it always is talking about a person, not an issue that God is seeing.
It's not the same as omniscience. So he is knowing his own children is what it means, and he knows us with love and relationship as his own before he made the worlds. Now think about that because the religious world today doesn't preach this anymore.
150 years ago and on back, it did almost every pulpit, but he knew us with love and relationship as his own children before time began. And verse 29 says, those who he foreknew, the same group he also predestinated.
Now don't misunderstand in the English, it sounds like one causes the other or one comes before the other, but in Greek, it doesn't read that way. They both happened before time began, so they just are.
It's not like one cause the other, there's no order of it. God foreknew his own children, predestinated that they would be adopted as his own children all at one time in his mind. It's always there. So that happened before time began.
Then we come into time and we find what we're studying today. I should have popped it up there, but I didn't. But the two things that happened in time, and it's in verse 30, Romans chapter eight, verse 30.
And that is number one, we are called, and that's speaking of the effectual calling. And number two, we are justified. And we're studying justified right now. So we have seen that God, the same group of people to the person, by the way, to the exact number of the persons that he foreknew and predestinated to the number he called and to the same exact number of people that he foreknew and predestinated and then in time called that same number he justified.
And that's what we're studying. Then the next one says he glorified the same number that takes you on out the other end of time into eternity future. Same number of people, same group of people, same group of names of people, and God knows every one of them.
And that is what the scripture teaches. There are many groups of people and denominations who love to eliminate all of that. The great Charles Spurgeon, who lived about 150 years ago, said, you know, if you want to eliminate the doctrine of election from the Bible, you got to take a pen knife and remove hundreds of pages because it is placed into the holy writ as with a pen of iron, he said.
He said to remove it, you would have to not believe in the verbal plenary inspiration of scripture. So you'd have to do damage. Sorry. I don't know if that's going to work. That's what we get at home when we're trying to record things.
Okay. So you'd have to do damage to the belief that Almighty God breathed the scripture and gave it to us to remove that doctrine. It's just, it's all about that. And you know, I won't bring that up, Brother Paul, I'll start to bring something up, but I better not because some of it's personal.
Who knows who hears this, right? Let's just put it this way. There are other beliefs that would astound you that come out of seminaries into the pulpits in this country today. Just you read, like you read what they say and it sounds logical because they're brilliant people, but their presupposition is always false.
And do you know what the presupposition is? That man has free will. Now if you presuppose that, their line of reasoning makes perfect sense. And so really everything we're saying in here, what we're talking about here is this concept of justification.
There are about seven things we need to understand to even understand what it means that God justified us. Now the definition is clear, it means he made us to be righteous or he proclaimed us to be righteous.
He gave us the righteousness of Jesus. And in the Greek it's passive, which means someone bigger than you has to do it to you. So we didn't do that to ourselves. We know what that means, but we have to understand seven things to fully understand justification.
The first one is the depravity of man, that's point number one up there at the top on the left. And the second one is we got to understand grace and that's kind of where we been the last three or so Sundays.
And today we're introducing a third one is you got to understand propitiation and what that means. But there are seven things. And so this argument that Brother Paul discussed with me that he was dealing with, I think they don't understand any of those seven things very well, but they certainly don't understand the concept of free will and what that means.
The scripture to put it bluntly says this, after the fall, no man has a sovereign will. Free means sovereign. Every man's will is determined, or I should say is influenced by someone or something. So it's not sovereign, therefore it's not free.
It's influenced. The lost world, the Bible says Satan moves them at his will. Now if that's true, and it's in scripture, so you can debate whether you think scripture is true, but if you're like me, you believe God said it, if it's true, you don't have free will.
The lost world doesn't have free will because Satan moves them at his will, which means their mind is influenced. And if you're born again, you understand that the Holy Spirit comes to live in your body and your body becomes the temple of the living God.
Therefore you are influenced, praise God, because the Holy Spirit changes our want to because we were running with the goats. We didn't want Jesus or we would have received him a day before we did, but we didn't want him.
And the Holy Spirit changed our want to. He opened our eyes, really is all he did. He didn't cause us to act against our will like these people say, that's ridiculous, it's ludicrous. All he did was open our eyes and then we acted according to our will because we saw Jesus as who he is for the first time and we wanted him.
And since we wanted him, we received him as our personal Lord and Savior, which is exactly what the Bible says that everyone this side of the cross will have done if they're going to be in heaven, right?
But we did it because we wanted to, but you know what? We didn't want to do it two seconds before we did it. Char, will you check on why I just saw two kids run across there and go out the side door? I doubt that.
If they are, they're doing a good job. They just went this way. So they don't know I've got like glasses where I can see everything back there. All right, so you know that to me, the bottom line on this whole issue of Arminianism versus what they call Calvinism, which is a misnomer because Calvin didn't invent anything.
Augustine believed it 1400 years earlier. He learned it from Paul who learned it from Jesus, it's Christianity. But the whole thing of the argument, you can even debate these seven things we're talking about and say, well, I understand that and they'll come back and say, but you decided to believe, so it's based on you doing something.
That's what they believe, the Arminian, and the whole crux of the matter is they don't understand point number one very well, the depravity of man, and they don't understand that man does not have a free will.
It doesn't mean that man doesn't have a will, he does. It doesn't mean that man's decisions are not important, they are ultimately important. Adam and Eve ate the fruit because they wanted to and God held them responsible for it.
And all of us pay the price for that decision. So you can't tell me that we don't believe decisions are important and that men have a will, but we don't believe that will is not influenced. Let me ask you, was Eve's will influenced before she ate the fruit or did she have a free will and just did what she sovereignly wanted to do with no thought given to her by anyone else?
Yeah, I mean, it's so obvious and it's been that way forever and it's still that way. So that's the issue. Now, we've talked about, OK, if you want to understand justification, you've got to understand the depravity of man.
But number two, you've got to understand what grace means. And there's a lot to do about that. So we've talked about these things. How do you deal with false teachers? In the book of Galatians, it talks about teachers that came in the church and taught something other than grace.
They taught us salvation by faith plus works. And Paul rebuked them and called them foolish. That's Galatians 2, verses 4 through 5, really all the way through down to verse 21 in Galatians. Second thing is what causes people to believe this false doctrine?
Well, in Galatians 3, 1 and 1 Timothy 4, 1, the Bible teaches clearly they've got to be bewitched. And they mean witchcraft. He's talking about witchcraft, doctrines of demons. That's what causes it. All right, I don't know what happened to see.
They popped in late. There it is. The total illogic of salvation by works is discussed in Galatians 3, 13 through 18. And the correct purpose of the law is 22 through 28. It's to lead us to the fact that we need grace.
It's not that you add law to grace. Paul said that's impossible. You can't do it. It defies the definition of both. And then we saw that the law is weak and beggarly, biblical language there, weak and beggarly compared to grace.
And number six, some will never receive that truth, though, because their eyes are not open to it. They just, the natural man, woman, boy or girl won't see it if the Holy Spirit does not reveal it to them.
And that is a doctrine no one loves today. But you remember, those who were foreknown were also predestinated and those who were predestinated were called and those who are called are justified. You have to be called.
You can't just make a decision on your own for Jesus or not. You won't do it. You will make the decision, but it's already made. In John chapter one, it says that, you know, we're condemned already. Because we have not believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, that's how we come into the world, we don't believe in him naturally, so we have to be called.
All right, and then we talked about the passage where it talks about the bond woman and we're commanded in the book of Galatians to cast out the bond woman. The difference between Sarah and Hagar, you can't mix them.
The whole human story seemed cruel when Sarah told Abraham to cast out the bond woman and the baby and just put him out in the desert to die. Now, she didn't use the word die, but she sure implied it when she said put him out there.
And he obeyed his wife and did it, didn't he? Now, God saved him and raised up great nations, but they've been a problem for Israel and for God's people ever since that day. But the casting out of the bond woman was an allegory that proves you cannot mix works with grace for salvation or with faith.
And then the idea that you could mix them does not come from above, the scripture says. So where does it come from? Comes from below, comes from hell, doctrines of demons. All of that is in Galatians chapter four and five.
So cast out the bond woman, the two sons cannot be heirs together. They don't, they can't come together. It's either grace or works. It's not both together. Faith mixed with works for salvation or eternal security is not from above and it's not from the one who called us.
Who is the one who called us? What's his name? The Holy Spirit, right? So the idea that you can add works in with faith to save a person didn't come from the Holy Spirit. So who did it come from? Who did the teaching come from?
Satan. And what is the result of allowing a little bit of false doctrine in the church? Jesus taught a little leaven, leavens the whole lump. It spreads throughout the whole church. You cannot allow it.
All right. Now, Martin Luther was influenced by Romans chapter one, verse 17, especially the last part. As it is written, the just shall live by faith, change his whole life, which changed the whole world.
It brought us from the darkness of the dark ages into the enlightenment period. The Renaissance and the Protestant ethic all came from the fact that God, through the Holy Spirit, showed this to one man.
Now, then after him, many men saw it and they began to make the Bible available in the common language and they were burned at the stake for that. But that's what brought us out of the dark ages is the word of God made available to the common man.
But Martin Luther said this. Even after he understood Romans 117 in the correct manner, finally, and he was born again and brought into the light of Jesus Christ, even after that, for almost 20 years, I still feel the old, clinging dirt of wanting to deal with God that I may contribute something so that he will have to give me his grace in exchange for my holiness.
See, man wants to add something of his own hand to it. Churches are full of it. Denominations are full of it. They want their church group to have some touch on saving people's lives. And God says you don't get any of it, it's all God.
Jesus said to the rich young ruler, if you remember that story, to the people that were there and asked the question, how can these things be? How can any man be saved? Jesus said, well, they can't be.
But he said, nevertheless, with God, all things are possible. So it's all 100 percent of God. And Martin Luther understood it, but it still nagged him because he had been brought up with the belief that you had to do stuff to please God and then God would save you.
And it nagged him for 20 years, even after knowing the truth. And still, I cannot get into my head that I should surrender myself completely to just sheer grace, not grace plus works. Wow. Then finally, God had mercy on me, Luther says, and I began to understand that the righteousness of God is a gift of God by which a righteous man lives, namely faith.
And that sentence, look at this, the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel is in the passive in the Greek, indicating that the merciful God justifies us by faith as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.
It's not something we do. See, the whole modern gospel day, almost any church you walk in today, even the better ones, they'll say, here's what you got to do. You got to believe in Jesus and God will save you.
Well, really, that's not what Martin Luther believed. It is what he believed before he got saved. But after he got saved, it's not what he believed. It's not what John Calvin believed. It's not what Paul taught.
It's not what Jesus taught. Jesus and Paul and Daniel in the Old Testament, all of them, and Isaiah, which we'll look at today, all of them taught that natural man is totally depraved and will not seek God and does not seek God and does not want God.
And that if the Holy Spirit didn't come to a remnant of this fallen race, that the entire race would be lost. And that God in his mercy decided to save a remnant of that race to give as a love gift to his son, Jesus, who loved the earth and who loved humans.
That's what the whole of Bible teaches. Men don't like that it's that way, but it's how it is. So since it is that way, the Holy Spirit has to come to a human being and open their eyes and their ears and their heart to see Jesus for who he really is.
Then they believe. So the belief is an effect, not the cause of their regeneration. The cause of the regeneration is the calling of the Holy Spirit and the regenerating act of the Holy Spirit where he birthed you.
He applied the blood of Jesus to your life personally, and you were saved. Once you were saved, many effects happened. You wanted to get baptized. You want to live for him. You did believe. You wanted to repent, which means change the mind that God's God, not me.
All those things happen. And all these churches bicker over the effects, thinking that they're the cause, but an effect can never be the cause of a cause. Martin Luther saw this, he says, now I felt as though, listen to this, as though I had been reborn altogether and had entered paradise in the same moment the face of the whole of Scripture became apparent to me.
Once a person understands the sovereignty of God and that God and how the plan of salvation works, all of Scripture will fit. But before that, there are certain passages, especially like Romans 9, that we're going to come up to after we finish Romans chapter 8.
Everyone just has to dismiss it because it doesn't fit their theology. But when and it didn't fit Luther's either until until he was saved and he saw this and he saw that God is in control, then it fits.
All right, so today we're going to introduce a third thing that we can understand, understand justification, that is the concept of propitiation. The meaning and cause of it. So let's turn to Romans chapter 3, verse 23 and 24, and let's look at this.
For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, being justified freely. Now, here we're talking about justification, but one of the things we need to know to understand how justification works and how God works through justification to justify us is we need to understand what propitiation means, because without it, you would never have had justification.
Justification cannot exist without propitiation. What is it? What is propitiation? Well, it says being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ, whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood.
So there's the word we're studying now. Now, notice verse 24 reviews things we've already discussed about justification. It is free. Now, what's interesting is the word itself means free. Grace means undeserved favor.
It's free, so it's like it's redundant. It's like free, free. It's like you put the word twice in the same breath. Being justified by free, free grace, by free, free, undeserved favor through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, redeemed to mean set free by paying a price.
His price was the blood and his blood is what bought us. It is what ransomed us out of the slave market of sin and from Satan. That was God's plan of salvation. But Jesus is the whom here. Jesus, whom God set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood.
So only if his blood is applied to the individual believer is God propitiated with respect to that believer. Now, think about that a minute. We'll figure out what propitiation means in a second, but just remember this.
Propitiation is something that happens to the father, not to us. He has to be propitiated with regard to me individually or I will spend eternity in hell. So what does it mean and how does it happen? Well, obviously Jesus was set forth to be that propitiation, to be the thing that brought propitiation to the father.
And it obviously has to do with redemption, which has to do with the price that was paid, which has to do with his blood and his blood only. Nothing man can do, only that blood. And that blood had to be applied in two places.
And one is the mercy seat, which actually was a judgment seat. And when the blood was applied, sprinkled on it, it became a mercy seat. So after Jesus died and while his body was still in the grave, one of the things that he did was he went and he preached to the people in Abraham's bosom, the saved, mostly Jewish people, they'd all had to be proselyte Jews.
So we'll just say the saved Jews. And he said, look, I'm about to take my blood and apply it at the judgment seat in heaven, because that's why you hadn't been able to be in heaven. You had to be down here in paradise, but I'm going to take you with me.
And he applied that blood on the justice seat. It became a mercy seat. And all of the saved Jews of the Old Testament were allowed into heaven at that point. They were in a holding place called paradise until then, because the blood had to be applied.
So that blood was applied to the throne at that point. That's some 2000 years ago. Then time goes by and this era comes and you're born. You in this room were born into this world. And Jesus said two things have to happen for you to be saved.
And one is you got to be born, whosoever liveth. And secondly, you have to believe you have to be given the faith of Christ by the Holy Spirit because your faith is worthless. You have to be given the faith of Christ by the Holy Spirit.
So whoever liveth and believeth shall never die, Jesus said. So now we come into time and we are called and we are justified. But how are we justified? How can a holy, just God, totally separate from sin count us as righteous in his presence?
He can't unless he's propitiated. Do you see the importance of this? There is no justification without propitiation. And yet the Bible says Jesus was just and the justifier of those who come to God by him.
So it is just. What made it just? Well, that's what we're going to talk about, whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through the faith in his blood. So the blood had to be applied and then to the to the mercy seat, and then it had to be applied to the individual.
And that's a work of the Holy Spirit. It's a picture in the Old Testament in Exodus where they were instructed to take the hyssop weed and to kill the lamb and to dip the hyssop weed in the blood of the lamb and to take the hyssop weed and scatter it on the lintel and the doorposts.
And then the death angel would pass over that house and they would be saved. The application of the blood is very important. It wasn't enough just to kill the lamb. The blood had to be applied to the household for that household to be saved.
And that is a beautiful picture. The hyssop weed was prevalent. It's all over that part of the world. It just grows naturally everywhere. That is a picture of the omnipresence of the Holy Spirit. And it is a picture of the Holy Spirit, and he is who applies that blood to your life and mine at the calling.
At the moment you were called, he sprinkled you with the blood of Jesus. So now through faith in the blood, which is what another gift the Holy Spirit gives you, according to Ephesians 2, 8, 9, he gives you the gift of faith.
You didn't have it. You didn't work it up like a mental pep rally. Oh, I believe, I believe, I believe. The preachers wanted you to do that. Come down the aisle, let's believe. Just tell me you believe.
You just tell me you believe you'll be part of the church. That's not the plan of salvation. The Holy Spirit has to cause you to believe. He has to cause you to want the shepherd and to know that you're a sheep.
And he has to apply that blood to your life. There are over 33 things the Holy Spirit does at the very second that he saves you. All of that work was required to save you, but you didn't do any of it.
Neither did I. So we're not saved by our works. We're saved by God's work and it's finished work. Who God set forth to be a propitiation through the faith in his blood. So we know it has to do with the blood of Jesus being applied to two places.
First, we have to ask who's the whom there. Well, we know that. We see from verse 24 that it's Jesus. So God made Jesus and his blood to be the propitiation. Okay. So it is Jesus. It is his death. It is his blood.
So what is it? What is propitiation? Well, look at 1 John 4 .10. Can you see that from back there? Everybody see it? So you don't have to look it up. You can just see it. Herein is love, not that we love God.
And yet the whole gospel of the modern church is if you'll just decide to love God, he'll save you. You can't do that when you're in darkness. You don't have the equipment to love God. You only have the equipment to love yourself.
And yourself is not God, but you think it is. And repentance means the change of the mind. And what are we changing our mind on? That there is God and we're not him. And the Bible even teaches you can't make yourself repent.
Repentance is from God, the New Testament teaches. The Holy Spirit causes you to change your mind. So all of it's there. It's just people don't like it because people like humanism. People want salvation to be something man does, that man causes.
And man is good enough to cause this to happen. All he has to do is just decide. And it doesn't work that way. It never has, never will. Therefore, this doctrine is not loved. The truth of the true gospel is not loved by men.
It is hated by men everywhere. Here in this love, not that we love God, but that he loved us. Oh, you mean he had to know us before the foundation of the world? The word no, by the way, in Bible language means love.
All right. Adam knew Eve and she bear a child. That's what no means in biblical language, in the originals and in English, the old English. He had to know us with love first and call us to himself like the groom does do for the bride.
He had to woo us to himself and loved us first. And then we loved him. That's all recorded just in a few words there in verse 10. Here in his love, not that we love God, but that he loved us. That totally destroys the modern gospel and brings us back to the old true gospel of the Bible.
There's only one gospel, Paul said, and he sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. It's interesting to ask who the word our is talking about there. Is it every man, woman, boy, and girl in the world, or is it God's children?
And there's a big debate about that. I hear so many people, I'm a four point Calvinist. Well, you're not a Calvinist then. That's a misnomer because the point you want to leave out is the fact that he died only for the elect.
You want to leave that out because it's so harsh, seemingly. But then you never stop to think, well, now, wait a minute. When a person is ransomed, who gets set free? The captive for whom the money was paid is who is set free.
Now, you have to understand if Jesus' blood is the money, if Jesus' blood is the price that's paid, and if he is effectual, if he is God and he pays the price to set you free, then it has to set free everyone for whom it's paid.
And it does. He said this, no man comes to me unless the father draw him, and of them I will lose nothing. So everyone for whom he paid the price is set free and saved and will be in heaven, but not all humans will be.
So apparently that blood, certainly the ransom is not for all humans. It's for God's people that he knew before the foundation of the world. Those who he foreknew, he predestinated. Those who he predestinated, he called, opened their eyes so that they would receive Jesus.
Those he called, he justified by putting the blood on them and seeing them and counting them as righteous as Jesus is. And those he justified, he glorified. That's how salvation works. It's the only way it's ever worked, but there's a lot of lying going on in this world about how it works.
And it's damning. We ought to get a little irritated when people preach false doctrines, not say, oh, my friend, they go to this church or that, and that's just how they believe. No, they need to be corrected.
But you have to pray for the Holy Spirit to give you the right time and the grace to be meek and to not argue with them. But as the scripture says, to instruct them and then to realize you can't change their mind.
Only if God perhaps decides to change their mind, the scripture says in 1 Timothy, will they then have an opportunity? So you can't make them change their mind. So that's not our job, apparently. Our job is to tell them the truth, to instruct them.
And all we have to do to do that is own one of these, a Bible, and know it better than the person you're talking to. That takes a lot of study. Propitiation, let's look at the Greek word itself, elosmos, means to expiate or to atone for.
Now, those two words are not commonly used words in modern English anymore, are they? So we need to define those because they don't help us, do they? If I were to leave you today, send you home and say, well, propitiation means to expiate or to atone for.
And you go home to lunch, you're going, what did we learn today, right? So let's look at them. First of all, expiate, if you look it up in the Old English in Webster's, it means to put an end to something.
Not in the modern usage, but in Old English, such as in 1611, when the King James was written. That word means to put an end to something. All right. Now, atonement in the Old English means reparation for an offense or an injury.
Now, I want you to think about this a minute. Reparation for an offense or an injury, or in the oldest usage in the English language, it means satisfaction. I want you to remember that because we're going to see that in the book of Isaiah in a minute.
Satisfaction, or it can mean reconciliation. So now this gets a little more clear now. What does propitiation means? Well, it is something that has to happen to a person that you've offended. In this case, it's God the Father.
And we offended him, number one, by being born as a human because we were born into a fallen race that had cursed God. No man seeketh him at any time. We've all gone our own way. None seeketh him, not one.
Out of our mouth comes cursing. From our lips, we speak as asps. We're fallen. We're a race that deserves hell completely. And that's what men don't understand. Men and women, they say, Oh, our little babies are just so wonderful.
And they're just good. They're just innately good. I'll tell you what, just don't train one of them and see what happens. Or get a little bit light on your training and see what happens. Right. So, but people want to believe that.
It's just not true. So the fact we were born into this race offended a holy God. But secondly, when we got to a certain age where we knew the difference, and I hate that Jenny has to bear the brunt of this.
My firstborn child is not with us here today. So I'll talk about her because here's Katie. I won't talk about her. She's here. But Jenny was my first child. And I'll never forget the first time it happened, where it occurred to me.
She knows what she's doing. She's sitting in the high chair. And guess where she got to sit? Right next to dad. She's right this close to me every day. And I put the little cuppy thing. And we didn't have all the cool tops back then.
It's just a cup with water in it. And she looked up at me and smiled. And she went, boom, and she knocked it halfway across the table. And I said, no, we will not do that. And I put some water in it and put it back.
And thought, that'll do it because she's a good child. She's good. She's full of goodness. And she looked at me and went, this time she didn't smile. She went, boom, and punted that thing across the table again.
And I tore her up. You want to know what I did? I went like that. Well, she'd never even had that. And she looked at me. I hit her hard enough where it hurt her little hand a little bit. And she looked at me and that bottom lip started quivering.
And she just, it was horrible. She just cried. And I felt so terrible. She had arrived. She knew the difference between right and wrong and did wrong on purpose. So then we offend the Father because we sin, right?
It just starts there and goes on, right? We just sin and we sin and we sin. And we still sin even as Christians. So we're in a standing before salvation. If propitiation had not happened, we would be in a standing before a holy God separate from sinners as sinners.
Separate from sinners means we won't come into his presence without being annihilated and can't and won't. That's the standing every human has when they come into this world, but no one teaches them that anymore.
Oh, you're just wonderful children. You got a little bit of light in everybody. So satanic, Luciferian. I mean, isn't that no wonder that Lucifer means son of the morning. All right. So, so here we have it.
There has to be expiation. There has to be a, this sin problem has to be put to an end, doesn't it? But the only way that can happen is if that's done to the person who was offended or damaged by the sins that happen.
And that happens to be the father. And so we get the idea of atonement, which means reparation for offenses and injuries. So we have injured the father's justice by breaking his law again and again and we have injured him and we have offended him because he's perfectly holy.
And by his nature, he cannot be in the presence of our sin. So there he stands like that. And we stand as sinners. Now, how in the world is the world come up with so many religions that think they're going to just get to God by building a stairway and climbing it by human effort, by works that we do.
And all of our minionism is based on that. Even if you call it Christian, it's works that we do. And it's false because that will not end the injury and the offense to a holy God. It just won't do it.
And in the old English, it means satisfied. So that apparently means that the one who has been injured has to stand as satisfied that payment has been made to remove the injury or else there is no peace.
So propitiation is the one who has been injured by the wrongdoing. He is satisfied that the proper payment has been made for a just and peaceful reconciliation. Does that make sense? The best one English word for propitiation is satisfied with regard to God.
God, the father is satisfied that your sins and mine are gone and they're not on us anymore. How does that happen? Well, there's certainly not anything we can do to make that happen. We just keep piling them on.
Nothing we can do can make that happen. So apparently this is the work of God and God only, the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, each of the Godhead playing their role in causing this to happen. It is in the passive, as Martin Luther said, only one greater than us could do this to us.
We could never save ourselves and propitiation helps us understand justification more than anything else. And we never would have had justification if God the father hadn't been satisfied that the sin debt had been paid.
So the substitutionary death of Jesus in our place on the cross and the Bible saying that all of our sins past, present, future were placed on him when he was on the tree and that when he died, our sins were on him.
They were imputed to him by God the father, as if Jesus had done your very sins and then he died and was buried. But when he rose again, it proved that he was the son of God and God then imputed his righteousness to you and me.
So now when the father sees us, he does not see the sins, any of them, even the ones you haven't done yet. He won't see those either because all he sees is the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ when he looks at you and me.
That's called propitiation. Why? Because it satisfies him. He looks at you and says, innocent. He looks at you and says, innocent. He looks at you and says, you have no sin. Welcome to heaven. Welcome into my presence.
Even brother Bill over here. And those of you I didn't point to, you too. He says innocent because my son took their sins away and they're gone. I don't even see them nor remember them anymore. So God, the father has been satisfied, his holiness, his justice.
Now he can show his mercy, which he could not righteously do. So don't you think it's beautiful when you think about the verse that says Jesus is both just, which means it's right for him to do it, and the justifier of those who believe, isn't that something?
So the just part is the propitiation. The justifier is the fact that he does that. He gives us God's righteousness, but it's just for him to do it because God's been propitiated. You can't have one without the other.
So Jesus' death satisfied the father's justice and holiness, putting an end to our sin and repairing the offense and injury to God's law and God's heart. Isn't that something? So propitiation is big. It could be the one thing that all of the rest sits upon.
Let's look at Isaiah for a minute in Isaiah 53, one of the most beautiful parts of the whole Bible. Whichever part I'm on is the one part I would say I had to have if I was on the desert island with only a little bit of the Bible, and today I'm on Isaiah 53.
So that's what I would want. If you ever need to witness to a Jewish friend, use this. He won't believe your New Testament anyway. I still use the New Testament anyway with them because the Bible says it's God's word.
I know it'll have an effect, so I use it, but I love to use this because even they have to admit this is God's word, right? So look what it says. Let's see if we see propitiation here in the Old Testament.
Isaiah 53, one, who has believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? That implies not everyone. Would you agree? Do you, you do understand if you don't believe the report, you can't be saved.
The report's the gospel. The report is God saying, here's how I save people. That's the report. Who's believed it? Not everybody. Even in the New Testament says not all men have faith. Well, that's an understatement, isn't it?
Who's believed our report? To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? So let me ask you this. I mean, you take any one scripture, it's enough to preach for hours, for me anyway. What do you think that part means?
What does the arm of the Lord have to do with salvation? Apparently it's the arm of God that does the saving, not the arm of humans. Do you see that? So salvation is of God, not of man. Man receives the benefit.
He doesn't cause it. Man sees the effects. He doesn't cause it. God causes it. And now we can go to verse two. For he, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, shall grow up before him. That's the father. So Jesus Christ, the son of God will grow up before the father as a tender plant, as a root.
We know Jesus is the root of Jesse, right? As a root out of the dry ground. He has no form nor comeliness. What does that tell you? Because of the depravity of man, no man thinks Jesus is beautiful. There's none that seeketh him, not one.
Why? You don't think he's beautiful. He's not who you're looking for. Not as a natural man, woman, boy, or girl. He's not who you're looking for. He's not a superhero like you're taught to look for by Hollywood.
The Jews didn't like him because he didn't come on a white horse to destroy the Romans. He's not what they were looking for. So how does the modern gospel built on us making the decision to receive Jesus?
You don't want him. Why would you receive him? You see how putrefied that gospel is? Pray this little prayer after me. Well, you can pray it all you want to, but you can't mean it without the calling of the Holy Spirit.
You can't mean it without the Holy Spirit opening your eyes and saying, Hey, he is there. He is look at him. You can't. And yet how many times have you ever heard the word call used with reference to people coming down the aisle nowadays and receiving the gospel?
Well, you don't hear him talking about the calling. I've told this story once, I think maybe twice in this church, but I finally remember reading this. And I even think that I remember my grandfather telling me about when he saw Gypsy Smith come into Corsicana, Texas and preach under a tent.
He was a world renowned evangelist who got called to preach when D .L. Moody's song leader and D .L. Moody put their hands on his head when he's a little boy and said, God caused this young man to be mighty.
And that young man grew up to be Gypsy Smith and stormed the world with the gospel preached right here in Corsicana. And, you know, it didn't happen where they came down and said, all right, come down.
I'll repeat this little prayer after me and you'll be saved. You know what he did? People would be down there crying at the altar and they'd tap him on the shoulder and say, look, you stay here. You stay here at this altar all week because until you sense the Holy Spirit calling you, you cannot be saved.
Now that's different, isn't it? Think about that. Can you, would you tell a person that? What have we been trained to tell people? Well, look, pray this prayer. Dear Jesus, come in my heart and save me.
Amen. Right? God wants all people to be saved. Just be safe. That's what we've been taught to tell people. That's not what they used to tell them. They would say, look, you need to pray. God calls you.
You need to pray that the Holy Spirit will hear you and come to you and reveal Christ to you. Let me know if he does. I'll be back tomorrow night and see. You know, all week, two weeks would go by like that.
Boy, that's different. For he will grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of the dry ground. He has no form nor comeliness. No one wants him. And when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we would desire him.
You can't get saved with humanism. You can't get saved with the natural flesh. We don't desire him. You can't receive someone you don't desire. You can't love someone you don't love. He is despised and rejected of men.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is called the depravity of man. I've had people come to me at tradeway meetings at the break after I just say some little something about God's in control. And they'll say, well, depravity doesn't mean that.
Every man and woman has a chance to accept Jesus if they choose to. It doesn't mean that. Like there's like 50 verses they've never read in their life to say something like that, but I don't have time.
I usually say, look, we can't discuss in five minutes. Come to lunch with me. And then we'll share some at lunch. That's what we would do. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid as it were our faces from him. What did Adam and Eve do? Where are you? God said, they're hiding in the garden. See, that's the natural man. He's not seeking God. He's running from God. The modern gospel said he needs to seek God, but he won't.
He's despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid our faces from him. He was despised and we esteemed him not. There's the truth of where we have to start. We have to start to understand John 3, 16 by understanding Genesis chapter one, two, and three in Isaiah 53 first.
All of that was written before John 3, 16. In fact, if you want to understand John 3, 16, read verse 17, 18, 19 too. Because they talk about the depravity of man right after the verse in the same context, you have to take everything in context, surely Jesus has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.
That is the substitutionary death. He died in our place. Yet we still esteemed him to be a loser. That's what that means. As they watched him on the cross, they said, look, if you're who you say you are, just command it and come down from there.
Didn't they? Then they spit on him and say, well, and then, then they would, the Romans would beat him and say, tell, tell us which man just hit you. So we esteemed him stricken and smitten of God and afflicted as if God hates him too.
Otherwise why would God treat him this way? That's how man understands things. That's how man looks at things. But God says, here's the truth of the matter. He was wounded for our sins. Both because of them and in the place of them.
That's what four means. Four can mean because of something. It can also mean in the place of something. And it means both. He was wounded because we sinned and God needed to save us because he knew us before the foundation of the world.
And he was wounded in the place of us. He died in our place because God knew us and needed to save us and sent Jesus to die in our place. So he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our sins, our iniquities.
The chastisement of us to be able to have peace with God had to be on him. And with his stripes, our soul is healed, not our body. That verse is used out of context all the time to try to teach that God, God will always heal us.
He won't always heal us. We can always ask him to though. And many times he does heal us and he can always heal us. All right. Now it does deal with the body though. We know that from the New Testament, I believe in the book of Mark.
It does, the stripes, the death on the cross does heal the human body at the time of the millennial kingdom. Once God, Jesus comes back and he ends in the battle of Armageddon, he ends all the lost, the goats are put on the left hand, the sheep are on the right hand, and we're ushered into the millennial kingdom, guess what?
There are human beings that will still be alive on the earth because God saved a remnant. Without the remnant, you'd have no humans. The entire race would have been lost and that's what Lucifer wanted.
But because God saved some, there will be a remnant of humans that are saved alive through that entire seven years and go alive into the millennial kingdom. And they will live to be a thousand years old.
And if they died at the age of a hundred, they'd say it's like a baby died. So it's going to heal their physical body too, but not right this minute. It's not promised for this era, but it certainly will be.
So it does include both, certainly at the second coming. But we know that he died to heal our soul and to save our soul. All we like sheep have gone astray. That's the depravity of man. We have turned every one of us his own way.
That's the depravity of man. But the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us. That's Jesus Christ. And that is the substitutionary death. He died for us. He died in our place. He died with our sins on his body because God laid our sins on him.
For he was cut off out of the land of the living for, or in the place of, the transgression of my people. Does that say he died for every man, woman, boy, and girl? Or does that say he died for God's people?
You see the difference? The world wants to teach a four point Calvinism, if any, but the Bible teaches all, everything Calvin taught is not true, obviously. He's a human, but the five points, if you understand them in the context that he understood them, they're right, they're biblical.
Augustine taught them 1400 years before he came to this earth, before Calvin ever lived. So you got to understand who he died for, for the transgression of my people. He was stricken. The father says the Holy spirit says he, we, he shall see.
Now look at this. The father will see the travail of Jesus's soul and be satisfied. Do you see that word satisfied? That's propitiation. When the father saw him die in our place for our sins, the father said, okay.
Paid in full. The debt has been fake paid. Therefore now, Jesus, you are just to justify sinners. If they're mine, if I give them to you and send my Holy spirit to wake them up, then you can justify them.
Because if I don't send my Holy spirit to wake them up, they're going to hate you. And when they come before me at the great white throne judgment, I say, what'd you do with my son? They're going to say, I didn't do anything with him.
And I'm going to say, depart from me. I never, what knew you whom he foreknew those he predestinated whom he predestinated those he called and those he called those he justified made as if they had never sinned and those he justified those he glorified, but you can't have any of that without propitiation.
So let's stand and have prayer together. Father, we thank you so much for your word and how clear it really is. And we ask you to remove any false teaching we've had in our hearts and minds that would clutter it up and cause it to be confusing.
Just help us to start with a clean slate and come to the scriptures and let them speak as they are written in full context. And in the context of the whole of the Bible and may your Holy spirit be our interpreter and our teacher and Lord, may you use this church and other local churches that are right with you to be the pillar of the truth around this world until you come back, because you promised us that you would protect your word until the last generation.
And we know you will. Lord be with our children and prepare them into these days of tribulation that it may be upon us already and give them strength and great testimonies and wisdom and us as well, as we lead them and Lord go with us into our time of fellowship now and bless the food we're about to have in Jesus name.
Amen. All right. If you're here today in the physical church, we invite you to stay for lunch. We always have enough for everyone. We do this every Sunday. And, um, if you're with us, we hadn't figured out how to do that online yet, but maybe we'll figure it out.
Bless you all though. We'll see all of you in just a few moments.