Systematic Theology (part 40)

The Word Made Flesh and the Glory of Christ

Well, I would say this morning, so what's our confession? And you don't have to volunteer whatever yours was during the week, but how about this? Our confession does not always have to be about us. In fact, sometimes we need to get away from us, and it's all about Him.

So how about this? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. But all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, and we might in our confession of that, we might, because we have not seen His glory, as John is talking about it here, he's talking about the Mount of Transfiguration.

But His glory has been seen by eyewitnesses. Glory is of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. From His fullness, I have received grace upon grace. Law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God, the only God, that's a great translation by the way, the only God who is at the Father's side. God, He has made Him known to me. Okay? That would be a suitable confession to start a day.

And that's all about Him, it's not about us. I don't know how many of you, I assume that many of you were at the celebration of Pastor Mike's 20th anniversary at BBC last night, it was a great time. I would like to just add this footnote to what was said last night about that.

In 1980 when we came to Bethlehem, there was about 20 people meeting all over the place. We set out and we purposed at that time that the Word of God would be preeminent in the life of this church by expository preaching, by going through books at a time and not with some creative guy trying to think up hot topics to do from time to time and from Sunday to Sunday.

You know, I have an acquaintance that has an acquaintance that was a pastor and after five years at a church, the guy said, I'm all done, I'm leaving. And he said, why? And my friend said, why? And he said, well, because I, you know, I've done it all, I've run out of topics.

I've thought of all the stuff I can do, I'm just going, how is that even possible? Anyway, you get it? And anyway, so then we leave in 1990 about, end up in the mission field in Bolivia with New Tribes Mission.

And then we come back 22 years later and we find your nose is firmly planted in the book. And that is a great personal joy for us to see that that has continued down through all of these years. And that, of course, has been under the stewardship of pastors Ebenroth and Cooley.

The other thing I might mention is this. One of the things, I don't know if they teach you guys this in seminary or not, but one of the things that is often said is, you don't go back to a church that you have pastored.

There's a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that some pastors are very threatened. And if a former pastor shows up on the scene, then things get all kind of nervous. And that has not been the case here at all.

We have not, and I have not come with an agenda to, I can take this church back over. Yeah, that kind of thing. I don't even want to. All right. Okay. You see Mike and Steve running around here like chickens with their heads cut off.

I have no desire to get into that all over again, you know. In any case, it has been our joy to come and be part of this fellowship again, to teach the Word once in a while, and to enjoy all that has happened in the intervening 20 or so years that went on.

And it's just been very, very good. But mostly it has been good to come and see that you are still firmly planted in the book, and I'm not coming Sunday by Sunday to a counseling session, or to a how do you deal with old age session, because you know what, you will.

And if you don't, then you won't. But if you do, you will. Okay, that's the counseling session for this morning. All right. So I thought I would add that footnote. It's our great joy to be here with you.

Confession, the Mindset, and Progressive Sanctification

Okay, let's get right over to Romans this morning, and let's ask the Lord to supervise what is said this morning. Heavenly Father, we're deeply grateful for Your Word. We're deeply grateful for Your Son, the Living Word.

We pray that all of those things about Your Word may come together this morning in what we say, and in what we do, that we pray through the written Word that You would illumine our hearts that we might glorify the Living Word, and thus glorify You, Father.

We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, we looked at Romans chapter 7, and I might say we're going very rapidly. There are months of things to be said here, so we're moving very rapidly. But let's not forget the idea.

The idea here is that we are laying the basis for and looking at how we are going to be proceeding as we grow in Christ with our progressive sanctification. And it is, at least the thesis at this point, that one of the things that needs to be done and that ought to be done is that we will often be confessing the great truths of the Scripture, not confessing how terrible we feel our emotions, not confessing how difficult it is for us to understand all that's going on in the world with our minds, not confessing the confusion of our wills, but confessing the great truths of the Scripture.

And as we confess the great truths of the Scriptures, our minds will be set in the direction of heaven and in the direction of becoming more like Christ. The mindset and we're going to read that here in Romans chapter 8 this morning the mindset is crucial.

And we will not set our minds after the great truths of the Scripture out of our own insides. It's not in us. We would never come up with these things by ourselves, and so we need to have our noses in the books, but we also need to be confessing the great truths of Scripture.

And I presented to you the Romans 10 .10 principle, which is, with the mouth, confession is made unto salvation, unto justification, and, well, what the heart man believes and is justified, with the mouth, confession is made unto justification, sanctification, glorification.

It all needs to be expressed so that our minds are set in the right direction. We looked at chapter 7 last week. Chapter 7 is, of course, the great discussion that the apostle Paul has concerning his inability to do what he wants to do, which finds him ending up crying, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?

And you can take that as his own body, or you can take it as that corpse that was hung on murderers, the victim of the murder was hung on them, and as it decayed, they carried it around until they finally died from it, too, in one of the Roman forms of execution.

Possible that Paul had that in mind when he cried that out. But at the end of chapter 7, we see, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. He can cut us loose from that. So then I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

And if you leave it there, then we find ourselves only celebrating, if it can be called celebration, the great conflict of the Christian life. When you came to Christ, you signed up for war. You became an enemy of Satan.

When we are outside of Christ, Satan has no problem. You know, he is rejoicing at all that we see in the news these days, that the unregenerates are doing, and the way they are behaving, and what they are saying.

That is all playing right into Satan's plan, but if any of those people come to Christ, they become the enemy. And so we have entered not a time of overwhelming peace and tranquility and so on because we have come to Christ, but we have entered war.

And if you and I are not conflicted with the sin that besets us compared to what God says we are, and we are not at war, then it's possible we do not belong to Him. I don't know how else to say that. If one can sin with impunity, and it's no problem.

If one is not seeking to become more Christ-like, not because some pastor told you you ought to, but because you want to. See, in fact, I heard that just a couple of weeks ago. Our sanctification is this.

It's turning all of the ought-to's into want-to's, and that is the freedom that we have in Christ to do His will. Well, I think chapter 7 really should have ended at this. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ.

You can also hook that back to the first part of chapter 7, where Paul has made the point we are no longer under law. You know, he's already made the point we are no longer slaves to sin. We are slaves to righteousness.

We are no longer under law. You know, that difficult husband that that wife could not please. We are no longer under law, okay? And so the great exclamation is, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Verse 1 of chapter 8 ought to be verse last of chapter 7, in my opinion. In some translations, King James notably, this is added, those who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

I think that's pretty apparently a copy from verse 4, and my guess is it's from a scribe that could not believe it, that there just is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Perhaps a scribe, perhaps a copyist.

You know, the New Testament was copied in the first century by all kinds of people. Not by professional scribes, as in the Old Testament with the Hebrew system of maintaining the Scriptures. So every guy that happened to come somewhere and hear that these guys have that letter from Paul that went to Rome, well, let me write that down.

And so they wrote it down, and some of them are pretty terrible copies, and some of them are really good copies, but the great thing is there are over 5 ,000 minimum fragments and copies of the New Testament.

So it's pretty sure that when we're reading this, we know that we are reading what they were reading in the first century. The New Testament sort of burst on the world by not a very formalized system.

And I think somebody who copied here into verse 1 of Romans 8 could not believe that it could be just so much liberty in Christ that we say there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

And that does not mean judgment. The word commendation here is a stronger word than judgment, as in the great white throne judgment and so on. It is condemnation from any angle, any place, and from God Himself.

Okay? And that is the great freedom of knowing Christ. Well, he goes on, the law of the Spirit of life, Holy Spirit of life, has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. You see how that follows from the story of the lady with the unpleasable husband that we talked about last week.

For God has done. That's a critical phrase, isn't it? For God has done. God has done. God has done. I have some friends who are Arminians, and I have at least one friend who is a former Arminian. Okay.

That was great, Pradeep, last night. That was great. Okay. And the problem with Arminianism, and with our charismatic brethren also, who are Arminians usually, okay, the problem with that is we get off of God has done, God has done, God has done, very quickly.

And we get into how I am doing, how I am doing, how I am doing, very quickly. So Paul writes, God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, He is in the likeness of sinful flesh.

He doesn't come in sinful flesh, for He has no sin. He who knew no sin has become sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God. Okay. So, He comes in the likeness of sinful flesh. And what Pastor Mike is going through in Hebrews now is absolutely outstanding, to draw our attention to the fact that Jesus was in flesh.

He was a person. He was a man. Yes, He was God. He was the God-man, the unique individual of all history. But He came looking like sinful flesh, and for sin, He, God, condemns sin in the flesh. Now watch this, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.

Are those not good words? We read that, we had that little story last week about the lady with the husband that could not be pleased, that is, with us, for the law that cannot be pleased, because we cannot keep the law, okay?

But now, Paul says here to the Romans, the righteous requirements of that law, the righteous requirements of that husband who is unpleasable, I don't know whether his requirements were righteous, but Paul went on, you remember, to say that the law is righteous, the law is holy, the law is right.

It's me that cannot keep the law because of what I am that is not right. But here he says, the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh. There's the copy, back to verse 1, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

Now, one of the questions that needs to be answered here is, what is the righteous requirement of the law, and how has it been fulfilled in us? Well, one of the righteous requirements of the law, you remember, now go back to Mount Sinai, Ten Commandments, blazing mountain, frightened Israelites, oh, don't let God talk to us again, you talk to us, but you go up and see them, then you talk to us.

It was a fearful thing when they got those Ten Commandments. But the righteous requirement of the Ten Commandments is this, if you do them all, you will live. If you break one, you will die, okay? So you can keep the law, in fact, we will, in fact, every unregenerate running up and down the street this morning, will keep the law, all right?

He will meet the righteous requirement of the law, and that righteous requirement that he will meet is he will die, and he will have no control over that. You know, in our culture, because of our technology and all the toys we have made that are so neat and all of that, we think we have control of a lot of things.

It's one thing we have no control over. You have no control over the moment of your birth, and you have no control over the moment or the consequences of your death. And so you can intellectualize all you want about why you think maybe the book isn't true, why you think maybe God doesn't exist, why you think that Christianity is a terrible thing to foist upon the world and all of that.

But the moment comes when all your intellect comes to nothing because you have no control over the moment that you die. But when you die, if you are outside of Christ, you will fulfill the righteous requirement of the law in your death.

The other righteous requirement of the law, which is not fulfilled by any of us, is that if you keep it all, you will live. However, the Lord Jesus Christ kept it all. The Lord Jesus Christ demonstrated in His temptation, indeed in His several temptations, that He could not be corrupted and that He would not give in to sin.

And so He kept the righteous requirement of the law that says that if you keep it all, you will live. And then He died a death He did not deserve on our behalf, did He not? And so He suffered the righteous penalty of the law in our place so that it could be said here in verse 4 of Romans chapter 8 that the righteous requirement, two requirements really, the righteous requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us.

Why are they fulfilled in us? They are fulfilled in us because when we have come to Christ and we are in Christ, His experience has become our experience from God's point of view. Let's not forget that the point of view that counts is God's point of view.

Our point of view is very important to us day by day, but our point of view has no real bearing on reality because in the end, we all come to the funeral, all right? And in the end, we will deal with God who is reality.

And so when God who is reality is looking at us and He says, because you are in Christ, His sinless life is credited to your account. His death that He did not deserve is credited to your account. You have imputed righteousness, and all of your sin was imputed to Him.

When all of that is happening, it is that Paul might say here at Romans 8 .4, you've met the righteous requirements of the law in Christ. This business of being in Christ is very interesting. It's really more, we are placed into Christ, but He, we will see, He is placed into us in God the Holy Spirit.

I like to say, when I'm talking about the indwelling Spirit of God, I like to say the indwelling God, the Holy Spirit. And the reason that I like to say that when it can be said with proper English, I like to say that, and it's a cultural thing.

You know, 80 of Americans say they are spiritual. And so when we say Spirit of God, and we are, you know, our culture just crashes in on us every day, all week long. And when we say Spirit of God in this culture, that very often sounds kind of like, you know, like that to people.

So I want to emphasize that what indwells us is God, the Holy Spirit. That's who indwells us. We're going to read that here in Romans chapter 8. But we are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit, but we are said also to be in Christ.

And so there is a coming together of us and the Lord, which is inseparable. I think back to the 17th chapter of John, where the Lord Jesus praying for His disciples first and then for all who would believe in Him because of their testimony, and that's us.

When He prays that prayer in John 17, that shoots down through 2 ,000 years to us. I don't pray only for these, Father, He says. I pray for all who will believe in Me because of their testimony. That's us.

We have believed in Christ because of the testimony of the apostles, have we not? Yes, we have. And so before He gets to that part of the prayer, though, He talks about, it's going to be like this, Father, I in them, I in you, you in them, you in Me.

There's this coming together so that we can say we are in Christ, but He is in us. Christ in you, the hope of glory, Paul blurts out, does he not? You think about that discourse in the Gospels where Jesus said, you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood.

We commemorate that in the communion service, in the celebration of communion. You think about that, that's a picture of what we're talking about. It's like when you and I eat food and drink whatever we drink, it becomes part of us.

It becomes inseparable, and we become inseparable with it. That's what's going on. Jesus was not offering them His arm to have a bite out of on that day or anything like that. He was simply saying that I'm going to be in you, you're going to be in Me, and the two of us will be inseparable.

And that's what's in view here as we talk about living according to God the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, according to God looking at us and saying we are in Christ. And so the righteous requirements of the law are fulfilled in us.

Walking According to the Spirit, Not the Flesh

Okay, we've got to rush on here, or this is going to get to be a series. All right. For those who live according to the flesh, well, let's read the copy here that went back into verse 1. It is fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh.

If you are in Christ this morning, if you have trusted Christ as your Savior, you do not walk according to the flesh. You say, well, boy, it sure feels like I walk according to the flesh often. But this is a declaration of how it is.

We live now according to the flesh. When Paul blurts out, I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me, and the life I live in the flesh, meaning the physical life that I live here, the life I live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.

Those are all statements of fact. It's not statements of experience. And that's what is so easy for us to fall into. How am I doing? And then we get in the corner, we contemplate our navels. Oh, I don't think I'm doing so well.

And here's where our Arminian friends and brethren have great difficulty. Oh, I don't think I'm doing so well. Maybe I've lost my salvation. Okay? Why? Because they're looking at their experience. They're not looking at the statement of Scripture, which says that we don't walk according to the flesh.

We walk according to the Spirit. The life I live in the flesh, I now live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. Okay. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh.

There's that mindset thing. The question is, what's our mindset? I can tell you something about your mindset this morning, even if you haven't thought about it. The fact that you're here this morning says something about your mindset.

The fact that you're not packing up the golf clubs to get out on the golf course and hit a... I guess you have to use orange golf balls this time of year. But anyway, you get out on the golf course and there you are.

That says something about your mindset. And those who have their minds set on the flesh, they're thinking of all the things that can be done on a Sunday to get away from the routine of the week. But our minds are set by the Spirit and on the Spirit and according to the Spirit.

And that's what finds us here. And by the way, if you've walked in here this morning and you thought, man, here I go to church again. I really hate this. Okay. Well, guess what? We need to talk afterwards because we may need to consider just exactly why it is you came to Christ.

Sounds like your mind is not set according to the Spirit when you say things like that. On the other hand, it could be just an ought to that will become a want to. But I'm going to assume that we are living according to the Spirit.

And so here we are, all right? For to set the mind on the flesh is death. If your mind is set on the flesh and we pay attention to the things of the flesh, it is the description of an unregenerate person and the end of that is death.

But to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God. For it does not submit to God's law. This is talking about unregenerate people. This is not talking about Christians that are not doing so well in a given week or day or moment or whatever it is in looking like Christ.

This is talking about unregenerate people. The mind set on the flesh is hostile to God. For it does not submit to God's law. All of these people that talk about how spiritual they are in the United States, 80 percent talk about how spiritual they are.

Those minds are hostile to God. You know why? Because it's their own spirituality. It's the whatever they think they're doing to be spiritual. It's because they have waves of, I don't know what, sweeping over them and they take that to be spirituality, all right?

But that is hostility to God. So you can shake your fist in God's face. You'd be like one of the spear-throwing evangelical atheists. How do you like that for a moronic term, an oxymoronic term, an evangelical atheist?

But we have atheists on the horizon now that really want to sell that story and that good news in their view that there is no God, okay? They shake their fist in God's face. But there are a lot of people just living their lives ignoring God, treating Him as if He does not exist, who are in effect shaking their fist in God's face.

They have their minds set on the flesh, and that is hostility toward God. For it does not submit to God's law, no, it's my law, not God's law, my law, indeed it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

Now, let's go back to chapter 7 for a minute, you know, rewind. Paul said, I am of flesh. He's talking about how difficult it is for him to live without the conflict of sin in his life, okay? And he blurts out, I am of flesh.

That's different than being in flesh, in the flesh, all right? People that are unregenerate are in the flesh, and they cannot please God. People who are regenerate but are saying with the apostle Paul, so I find another law in my members, waging war against the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death, that is the testimony of a believer.

And what goes on day by day in a fallen world for believers that are seeking and have their mindset on becoming more like Christ, that's being of the flesh. That's the problem of being of the flesh, that's the problem we all have.

We are all of the flesh. But those who are in the flesh cannot please God. They are unregenerate people. I say that, I think at one time, we bought a Volkswagen 100 years ago, actually it was a great little Volkswagen, it's a Volkswagen diesel rabbit, thing got 40-something miles to the gallon, I don't think they can do that now because they've run into the EPA.

But anyway, back then, it did that. And we were talking to the guy about that car, it was a used car, I don't buy news cars, those of you that have lots of money, you can take the hit for the first year, okay, then I will come down the road and we'll talk about the car, we'll talk about the car then.

Anyway, so we got talking to this salesman and found out he was a believer, it was great, okay. And I said, well, how is it working here in a car dealership as a believer? He said, well, you know, it's okay, you just got to realize you're working with a bunch of unregenerates.

I'm going, okay, that's a way to say it, I guess. Well, that's what we're living in the midst of, and they cannot please God because they are in the flesh, we are of the flesh, we're still walking around in these bodies, we still are carrying around this body of death, we still have flesh which is crucified, okay, Galatians 5 .24 says, those who belong to Christ, doesn't it, those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh, all right, I'm looking at the clock, I don't really have time to look at the grammar that's involved there, but the idea is they crucified the flesh.

When did you crucify the flesh? You crucified the flesh when you confessed Jesus as Lord and believed in your heart that God has raised him from the dead. You say, I did? I crucified the flesh at that point?

Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him by baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

At that point, we became of flesh, not in the flesh. And there's a huge difference in those things, yes, we signed up for war, yes, we signed up for frustration, yes, we are not as Christ-like as we want to be, and we will not be until we stand in his presence and see him as he is, nevertheless, we are not in the flesh, we walk according to the Spirit, we have our minds set on the things of the Spirit, not on the things of the flesh.

We have those things. We're not working on having those things, we have those things, because we are in Christ, and he in the person of God the Holy Spirit is in us. You, verse 9, if you think I'm all wet here and I ought to be really talking like an Arminian, well, probably this isn't the place for you to be.

But anyway, if you get to verse 9, if you get to verse 9, we see that as Paul talks to these Romans, he is saying basically what I'm saying, you, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you.

Now right away, our Charismatic brethren and our Arminian brethren say, see, if the Spirit of God, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Well, now maybe today the Spirit of God is not dwelling in you.

Well, I don't think I feel the Spirit of God dwelling in me. And don't you see it says, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Well, here you've got to get the ifs right, all right? I talked about this briefly in another, wherever we were in all of this, okay?

There are three cases of if, basically, in English and in Greek, all right? There's the iffy if. In Kentucky they say, I'll see you next week, the Lord will, and if the creek don't rise. Now that comes from the time, that comes from the time when the haulers of Kentucky were accessible by the creek, which ran pretty shallow most of the time, and people drove their cars up the creek and walked up the creek and everything else.

In fact, where our house was, Long Fork of Jennings Creek in Kentucky, they didn't have a paved road in there until late in the 60s at all. And so the kids walked out in the creek to go to school and all of that.

Well, guess what? That creek can become, is shallow enough to walk in a lot of the time, but if you have a good rain, it can become deep enough to carry your house away if it's down too close to the creek bed.

So, see you next week, Lord willing, and if the creek don't rise, well, that's the iffy if, you know? We don't know if the creek's going to rise or not next week. You have two outcomes. Creek might rise, creek might not rise.

If you apply iffy if to this, then you might become Arminian, all right? If in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Then there's kind of the middle if, and the middle if goes like this. Yeah, there's two outcomes, okay, of the question, but it's pretty sure that one of the outcomes is going to happen.

For example, if I say to you, if you'll hand me my coat, I'll get out of your house, okay? Well, it's possible that you may look at me with a look of hostility and say, you can stay in my house, but this coat is so cool that you're not getting it, all right?

But we know that in most cases, you're going to be looking at me and going, I'd like you to get out of my house, so if you'll hand me my coat, I'll leave. That's that kind of if. The outcome is kind of understood.

It's not certain, but it's understood. And then there's the if that is found here, and it is the if that presupposes, the grammarians I think would say the apodosis, what follows, okay, presupposes that this is true, okay?

So what's being said is, if in fact, now the translators say you can't translate epsilon iota, I, if, can't translate that since. And the reason is, it can also be applied to hypothetical situations, all right?

But this is not a hypothetical situation. And so they say, when you read translator's notes, they say, so you never would translate this since. But I'll think of it as since, you know why? Because what follows, the Spirit of God dwells in you, God the Holy Spirit dwells in you, it is assumed that that is true.

That's the third case of if. And so it is assumed that that is true here. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of God does not belong to Him. So I guess I can read the other way around, don't I? Can't I?

Don't I? Can't I? I don't know. Okay. Anyone who has the Spirit of Christ does belong to Him. And we do have the Spirit of Christ when we have confessed Jesus as Lord, believed in our hearts that God has raised Him from the dead, and owned Him as our Savior.

So I will read, since there's no translators here, I presume, I will read, since, in fact, the Spirit of God dwells in you, it is assumed to be true. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him.

But, since, I'm going to say it, Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. Now, I assume you all have an ESV translation in front of you, okay?

And you'll notice that it says, verse 10, if the Spirit, if Christ is in you, it's assumed Christ is in them, all right? Although the body is dead because of sin, the body is dead because of sin, if the Lord doesn't come, if the Lord doesn't come, we're all going to the funeral, ours, all right?