I want to read a few verses from
Selections, Genesis, Shall not the judge
of all the earth do right?
Abraham asked that question, Genesis 18.
Deuteronomy 10, For the Lord your God is
a God of gods, and Lord of lords,
a great God, a mighty and a terrible,
which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward.
Psalm 19, 9.
The judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous all together.
Psalm 92, 15.
To show that the Lord is upright is
my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in
him.
Psalm 97, 1 and 2.
The Lord reigneth.
Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his
throne.
Isaiah 28, 17.
Judgment also will I lay to the line,
and righteousness to the plummet.
Revelation 15, And I heard the angel of
the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord,
which art, and dost and shalt be, because
thou hast judged us.
And I heard another out of the altar
say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and
righteous, are thy judgments.
Let us offer a prayer.
Lord Jesus, we bless thee that thou hast
conquered.
We bless thee that death has no dominion
over thee.
We bless thee that thou art at the
Father's right hand, and all authority is given
unto thee, and all power.
We pray thee exercise both tonight.
We pray not only for our church here
and this company met here, but we pray
for thy work in the city, all of
thy work, O Lord.
Bless every man who declares the truth unselfishly
tonight, with a good motive.
And bless every church where the truth is
declared.
Help, Lord, give us ears that can hear
truth, minds that can grasp it, souls that
can take it in, help in the giving
of it.
Thou, Lord, who didst use a dumb ass
to speak with man's voice, use thy servant
tonight.
Thou, who didst rebuke a backslidden prophet by
the crowing of a cock, O Lord, if
thou canst go to the barnyard and make
servants out of lowly beasts, then we pray
thee be pleased to speak through an unworthy
channel to unworthy hearers.
For, O Lord, we are not worthy, but
we believe in thy goodness and thy grace,
and so we pray thee that both tonight,
both, may operate toward us.
Through Christ our Lord, amen.
Now, I think I have said before about
a dozen times that it is tremendously important
that we know what God is like.
It is tremendously important that we know what
kind of being we are serving.
Ter Stegen said, O God, thou art far
other than men have dreamed and taught, unspoken
in all language, unpictured in all thought.
And Isaac Watts said, Earth from afar hath
heard thy fame, and worms have learned to
lisp thy name.
But, O, the glories of thy mind leave
all our soaring thoughts behind.
And one thing that we can know about
God is that he is a just God.
This is not so pleasant to contemplate, but
it is here that God is a just
God.
And we can put this down as one
of God's attributes, that is, something you can
attribute to God and say, this is the
way God is.
Now, it will be necessary to define justice,
to find out what we mean when we
say God is a just God.
And I begin that definition by telling you
that justice is indistinguishable from righteousness.
If you read some versions, particularly the Catholic
versions, and there are some good Catholic versions,
incidentally, and I could recommend Knox's translation without
qualification, translated by Monsignor Knox, the late Monsignor
Knox.
And often where the word righteousness occurs, the
word justice is in its place because the
two words are indistinguishable.
And the word means uprightness and moral rectitude.
And they are the same, maybe not quite
the same, but so near to being the
same, that translators habitually use one instead of
the other interchangeably.
In Psalm 89, verse 14, it says, Justice
and judgment are the habitation of thy throne.
And in Psalm 97, verse 2, it says,
Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of thy
throne.
So if justice and judgment and righteousness and
judgment are said to be the habitation of
God's throne, then justice and righteousness are seen
to be the same.
Now, what is it to be just?
Well, to be just is to be equitable,
that is, it's to be morally equal.
Over in the book of Ezekiel, in the
18th chapter, it says, God speaking, Yet you
say the way of the Lord is not
equal.
Hear now, O house of Israel, is not
my way equal?
Are not your ways unequal?
They blamed God for unequal ways.
They blamed him for inequality and inequity in
his doings.
Have you ever noticed that the word inequity
and the word inequity are very much alike
in common language?
As we use them, they're very much alike.
And it was, I think, Ruskin that first
called my attention to the fact that they
are alike in reality.
Inequity is inequity.
And whatever is not equal is iniquitous.
Whatever is not morally equal is iniquitous.
Inequity, inequity.
Now, judgment is the application of justice, that
is, moral equity, to a moral situation.
I wonder how dry that sounds.
I'd just like to get it up out
of, you know, you heard about the man,
the people that are talking about the new
preacher, one commented he could go down deeper
than any man they'd had in a good
long while.
Another one said, stay down longer, too.
And the other one said, he hasn't come
up dry.
And I don't want to go down and
stay under a long time and come up
dry.
If I go down and stay under, I
want to come up at least showing that
I've been there and have a little moisture
on what's left of my hair.
So I want to toss this around a
little bit so that we'll get it and
we won't go home saying it was nice
if we'd known what he was talking about.
Well, judgment is the application of justice to
a moral situation.
Not all situations are moral situations, but there
are some situations that are moral situations.
And whenever justice is applied to a moral
situation, then you have a judgment.
When a man goes into a courtroom, he's
called into the courtroom as what is called
a defendant.
Then there is another man there who's the
plaintiff.
He is accused the defendant of something.
You have those two men in there, and
there is a legally moral, at least a
legal situation there before them.
And now justice has to decide on who's
right.
And when the judge pronounces the judgment, he
is pronouncing on a moral situation if it
is a criminal offense, and a legal situation
if it is simply a common judicial affair,
so that it may be either favorable or
unfavorable.
Every time we use the word judgment, we
imagine that it's unfavorable judgment.
But it's not always so.
Sometimes a court will bring in a favorable
judgment.
The verdict is not guilty.
And sometimes they bring in an opposite one,
depending upon what justice says about the moral
situation.
If the one judged has been inequitable in
his conduct, then he is judged guilty.
If he has been equitable, he is judged
not guilty, and thus it is.
Guilty or not guilty, depending upon whether before
the law you have been equal or unequal,
depending upon whether there is inequity there or
righteousness.
Now, that's what justice is.
It's moral equality.
It's the balance, the scales balanced evenly, so
that there isn't too much here and too
little there and too little here and too
much there, but just right.
Now, justice is something God is.
The Bible says God is righteous and just.
And just and righteous being about the same,
I say.
Justice is something God is, not something that
God has.
I wish we could get a hold of
this, and I wish we could see that
these attributes that I've been preaching about, they're
not something that God has and might be
able to lose, but they're something that God
is.
God is just.
Not only that God has justice as an
attribute, but that God is just.
We sometimes talk very foolishly.
I think that we ought to watch what
we say because the scripture says that we
shall give an account in the last day
for even our idle words.
But we sometimes say, even we preachers say,
justice requires God.
You accept Jesus and justice requires God to
save you.
Justice requires God to take you to heaven.
This is a great error of thinking as
well as speaking.
Justice doesn't require God to do anything.
I'd like to have you remember that.
For if we say justice requires God to
do this or that, we postulate a principle
of justice somewhere to which God has to
conform.
And we say there is there that pillar
of justice, and even God has to bow
to it.
And we put justice out there as a
great up and down perpendicular pillar, and we
say there it is, that tall, shining pillar
of justice, of moral equity, and even God
is compelled to obey it.
And we put it outside of God and
we say God has to bow to it.
Now, my brother, there isn't any such a
principle of justice.
God is just, and because God is just,
then all things must bow to justice, must
bow to God.
But God bows to nobody and no thing.
If there were such a principle in existence
somewhere, who created it, I want to ask
you?
Where did that principle of justice come from
to which God must bow?
And who enforces it?
If God should refuse to bow to a
principle of justice, who would enforce it?
Who would arrest God and bring him before
the bar of judgment?
Who would put handcuffs on the Almighty and
lead him in before a court of inquiry
to see whether he had been just or
not, whether he had conformed to that external
principle we call justice?
Now, that kind of business is completely foolish,
because if there was anybody superior to God,
then that person would be God, and God
wouldn't be God at all, for only a
superior can compel obedience from an inferior, and
God is inferior to none.
God, my friend, acts justly because he is
just.
And the justice of God doesn't compel him
to do anything, because that's just God being
just because he is just.
And there is nothing outside of God which
can make him do anything.
Now, I said this before when speaking about
other attributes, and I would repeat it now,
here a little, there a little, line upon
line, and precept upon precept until you get
hold of it, that there isn't anything outside
of God which can move him.
There are things outside of you that can
move you all right, and there are things
outside of me and all created beings that
can force us, but there's nothing outside of
God that can move him at all.
Nothing has been added to God from eternity,
and nothing has been taken away.
God is imperfect and therefore is incapable of
gain or loss.
God acts justly from within, not in obedience
to an abstract principle of justice, but he
acts like himself toward all creation.
So when God is just, he is not
putting on an act, he is acting like
himself.
When God is just, he is not bowing
to a pillar of justice somewhere, a judge
that sits in a court on the bench,
he is bowing to justice.
But when God acts justly, he is just
acting like God acts, that's all.
He is acting the way God acts.
And God will yet balance the scales.
Now, I believe this with everything inside of
me, that God will yet balance the scales
and condemn the unequal, condemn that which is
unequal and vindicate the just.
For remember, that judgment not only condemns the
unequal and the iniquitous, but vindicates the just
as well.
Now, somebody asks, is there an old Anselm
mass?
Anselm is a man you don't hear much
about.
I have a lot of friends that nobody
scarcely ever talks about.
I don't think anybody ever quoted this man
but me in recent years.
And yet he used to be known as
one of the great theologians, the second Augustine,
one of the greatest minds that ever lived,
one of the greatest Christians.
And he asked this question, he is talking
to God, he said, How dost thou spare
the wicked, O God, if thou art just
and supremely just?
Then he comforts himself a little bit and
he says, We see where the river flows,
but the spring, whence it arises, we see
not.
We see the river of God's mercy flowing
down the centuries, but where it arises, he
says, we know not.
Now to the question, How can a just
God who out of his own nature gives
approval to that which is just and disapproval
to that which is unjust, how can a
God who out of his own nature condemns
the wrong and approves the right, how can
God then justify sin?
Sinner has been iniquitous, we've all been iniquitous,
our lives have been unequal.
Remember when the scripture, when the old man
of God Elijah said, Why hop ye between
two opinions?
And they tell me that that means, Why
hop ye along on two unequal legs?
He was kind of a Luther before his
time and had a salty sense of humor,
and he saw Israel walking on one good
leg and one pegged leg, and the pegged
leg was a bit short.
And there they were, hop, hop, hop, hop.
One day it was God, and the next
day it was Baal, and the next day
it was Jehovah, and the next day it
was Baal.
And he said, Why is it lame?
Why are you lame?
He said, you're iniquitous, you're unequal, your legs
aren't the same length.
Why hop ye along on two unequal legs?
If Jehovah is God serving me, if Baal
is God serving, get both legs the same
length.
Well now, if God demands that we live
like that, and that we be equal, and
the scripture says, none of us has been
equal, that our lives have been iniquitous, then
how does God turn around and pronounce us
just?
How can this just God pronounce us just,
not righteous, when we're neither just nor righteous?
Well, to that question there are two happy
answers, and I am very pleased to bring
them to you.
One is a reason from when we reason
from the being of God as being unitary.
See, God's being isn't composed of numbers of
parts working harmoniously.
I have a watch here, it's quite a
watch really, given to me in the 25th
anniversary of my stay in Chicago, and I
don't know how much it cost, I never
inquired, but it must have been quite a
pile of money really.
I don't think I ever deserved anything as
nice as that.
I don't like wrist watches because I feel
I'm bound, so they gave me this thing,
and now I don't know what to do
with it, they don't make watch pockets anymore,
so I just have to throw it around.
But there it is, and it gets along,
it gets along, by all of its parts
working harmoniously.
They all work harmoniously, and it is up
until recently, and somehow it always stops, it
always stops at five minutes to seven, no
matter what time of day it is, I
always know the time on my watch, five
minutes to seven.
But the parts weren't working harmoniously there, to
be a simple matter, take it down to
Eaton's and have them bend it a bit
here, but as it is now, it isn't
equal.
Now, we think of God as being composed
of an infinite number of precise parts, attributes,
character traits, all working harmoniously together, and as
long as God can get all the parts
of his nature working together, everything is all
right.
Well, once more, we're going to the watch
factory, or we're going to the automobile factory,
to get our illustration.
God has no parts that hum together harmoniously,
there are no wheels in the infinite being
of God that mesh into each other with
perfect precision, because that would mean that God
was composed of parts, and if God had
parts, somebody had to put him together.
And if somebody put God together, then that
wouldn't be God, because God couldn't be put
together, God is the uncreated, he's the one
who has life in himself, and he looks
no place for anybody to help him or
to put him together.
He was before the world was, and he
would be unimpaired, the same God if the
world should cease to be by a flick
of God's thumb tomorrow morning.
It won't, but if it should be, God
would still be God, no less, no more,
and God hasn't got any parts.
Now, God not having any parts, then God
is one.
When I say that God is one, I
mean more than there's only one God.
When the scripture says, Hear, O Israel, the
Lord thy God is one, O God, it
doesn't mean that there's only one God and
not two.
Certainly that's true, too, but that isn't what
Moses or God had in mind when he
said that through Moses.
What he meant was, the Lord thy God
is one, he's one clear through and not
made up of parts, and so nothing that
the justice of God does forbids him to
exercise his mercy, because it's the same God.
God is merciful and God is also just.
We think of God, and if the average
preacher thought carefully, he'd be silent until he'd
gotten some ideas in his head.
He'd be silent.
I think we'd all have to take a
time off, Brother Gray, because we just talk,
we just open our mouths, and then something
comes out.
We tell sinners, we picture God sitting, presiding
over a court of law and administering laws
that he dislikes and disagrees with, sentencing a
man with tears and apologies to a hell
he doesn't believe in.
We picture the Father angry and full of
justice and the Son tender and full of
mercy, and the two don't agree.
The Father rushes forward with an upraised club
to smite humanity, and the Son leaps in
between and takes the blow and dies on
the cross.
And so God, repentant because his Son died,
forgives us for his Son's sake.
I tell you, you can't get further wrong
than that, brothers and sisters, you just can't
get any further wrong.
And yet, if you took that illustration away,
I think some evangelists would just have to
sit down and think it all out again.
The fact is, the Father and the Son
have never disagreed and can never disagree because
they are one.
And the Father and the Son together believe
the same thing, they have the same will.
Christ laid down his life because he wanted
to, but he laid it down because the
Father wanted him to.
And the Father and the Holy Ghost work
harmoniously because they are of one nature.
They have one thought, one will, one desire,
one everything.
And therefore, never think that Jesus Christ is
rushing in to shield you from the wrath
of God.
Remember, the Son has just as much wrath
as the Father.
And remember, the Son is just as the
Father is just.
And remember, the Spirit of God is just
also.
It's impossible that the persons of the Trinity
should be opposed to each other, one just
and one merciful and another kind and another
unkind.
God is love, and the whole of God
is love.
And God is just, and all of God
is just.
Now, as many a judge sits on a
bench and sentences people under the law that
he doesn't want to, but he didn't make
the law.
He is a servant of the law, and
God is a servant of none.
All of God acts in everything that God
does.
If God has to abrogate justice to take
you to heaven, then God will not take
you to heaven.
If God has to abrogate his holiness to
save a man, he'll never save that man.
How then, how then can it be that
God can be just and yet spare the
wicked?
Because the attributes of God do not clash
with each other.
Anselm's argument is that compassion flows from goodness,
and goodness without justice is not goodness.
When God punishes the wicked, that is just
because it consists with the wicked man's deserts.
But when God spares the wicked, that also
is just because it consists with God's goodness,
so that God never is unjust to save
a man.
God's unitary being, being himself one God, Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost, co-equal and co
-eternal, this permits God to exercise his attributes
as he chooses, as he wills.
So when God wills to show mercy to
a man, he doesn't contradict justice.
Then the second argument, and this is the
one we're familiar with.
If you didn't follow me on the other
one, you just don't pay attention to it,
because it's all right anyhow.
This one I want you to get, for
this is the biblical New Testament argument.
The other one was Anselm's argument, and a
perfectly good one, and a sound one, but
this one a child can get.
Ah, it's because of Christ's passion.
Because of, how dost thou spare the wicked,
O God, if thou art just, supremely just?
Because of Christ's passion.
Christ's priestly offering of his own blood for
us is infinite and almighty and perfect.
That's why I can believe in my salvation,
not because I think that I deserve it,
but because I believe that the passion of
Christ, the death of Christ, the sufferings of
Christ for me were infinite.
That is, they overflowed into infinity, and if
every corpuscle in my body was a sin,
a gross sin, there still would have been
enough in infinite atonement to make up for
all my sins and cancel them out.
And if every human being that has ever
lived in the world or does now live
or ever shall live, if that person should
breathe in sin and breathe out sin continually
from the moment of his birth to the
moment of his death, and all should live
a thousand years, never a white and never
a red corpuscle in the bloodstream of all
the three billion people in the world, were
sins, acts of inequity, deeds of inequity, still
they would be finite.
They could be counted if you had time
to count them.
But the passion of Christ, the suffering and
dying of Jesus and his rising again were
infinite, and you couldn't count them.
The merits and virtues of his passion are
so great that they could never be counted
for the simple reason that he is infinite.
Therefore the infinite blood of the Lamb, the
infinite dying of Jesus, the infinite virtue of
his rising again, the infinite merit of his
place at the right hand of God the
Father, completely covers the sin of the lost
man.
How canst thou spare the wicked, O God,
if thou art completely just?
The answer is because of the efficacy of
the dying and rising of Jesus.
It cancels out our sins and abrogates our
sentence.
How did we get our sentence?
We got our sentence when justice confronted a
moral situation.
Justice looked upon us and saw us crooked,
hopping along on two unequal legs.
They weren't balancing the scales, but they were
out of balance.
Then we blamed God and said, O God,
thou art out of balance.
And God said, You tell me that my
ways are not equal.
I say, Your ways are not equal, O
Israel.
That's how we got our sentence.
We got it when justice of God was
applied to our spiritual and moral state.
And the whole being of God concurred in
that sentence.
So don't think of God as a schizophrenic
with one part of him wanting to save
me and one part of him wanting to
damn me.
Think of the mystery of atonement.
God being good and God being love, wanted
to save me.
And so, because God is also just, he
incarnated himself, the second person of the Trinity,
in the form of a man and went
out to the Calvary.
And in the mystery of atonement, he made
it possible for God to pardon and not
violate his own justice.
For, as the man of God said, when
God spares the wicked, it is just because
it consists with the goodness of God.
And when he sentences the wicked, it is
just because it concurs with the sinner's desserts.
You read the book of Revelation, you may
be a bit astonished.
You know, we're living in a Pollyanna day,
a day of brutality and Pollyannaism.
Pollyannaism is in the pulpits.
Brutality is everywhere else.
Brutality and violence and sadism is everywhere.
So because we have Pollyannaism in the pulpits
so much of the time, we think of
God as being a highly perfumed and beautiful
and rather sad, smiling being who would like
to be good to us and doesn't know
how.
That kind of God and that kind of
a Savior, that kind of Christ, the Christ
of the pale, weak face, is not the
Christ of the Bible.
For I read in the book of Revelation
that when God sentences and hurls Babylon down,
down, down, the justice of God confronting the
iniquity of Babylon and hurling her down, I
read that the creatures in heaven above cry
out and say, True and righteous are thy
judgments, O God.
And remember that the song of the angels
in heaven is the song of God's justice
and judgment and righteousness, and the song of
the redeemed is the song of God's mercy
and love and grace.
The angels know not how to sing of
the grace of God because they've never needed
it, but we poor sinners know how to
sing of the grace of God because we've
needed it desperately bad.
And yet I preach that while we think
them apart, they're one, and there's no confusion
in the heart of God about it.
Somebody asked me, How is it that the
dying of Jesus, how is it that the
death of Jesus can make a mantle for
me and covering for me and can undo
my moral state and can change it?
I don't know that, but I know it
does.
And I know that that iniquitous man who
has all his lifetime hopped along on two
immorally unequal legs and has lived before the
bar of God's justice, as we say, with
all the counts against him and all the
evidence against him and with a verdict, a
verdict of foregone conclusion, guilty.
We know that somewhere in the darkness there
in those hours of suffering and pain and
grief, Jesus Christ did something to change that
moral situation.
He did it.
So now when God looks at me, he
can look at me and see a moral
situation that's the way he wanted it.
We call that justification.
Somebody has said, though it's not etymologically correct,
somebody has said that justify means that God
acts toward me just as if I had
never sinned.
And that's true, though.
Etymologies are often crooked, but that happens to
be right.
God, when he justifies me, acts toward me
just as if I had never sinned.
And all that because of the wonder of
Christ's atonement.
I don't claim to know what that is.
I've read stories, of course, and theological books
on atonement.
Men don't always agree about atonement.
There is a Swedish church I've preached for
their college.
I know them.
I've mingled with them.
They're godly people, and they don't hold on,
they don't hold to the theory of atonement
that most Christians hold to.
And I wonder whether we'll ever know the
theory of atonement properly.
I wonder if we ought not to repent
before God for our across-the-counter theology.
I owed a debt.
Jesus Christ came and slapped down some money
and said, here, I paid it all.
And so I slip that that Jesus gives
me across the counter, and God unwillingly gives
me verdict of not guilty.
So I sing about it, and it's all
sort of silly.
Simple truth is that when the atonement of
Jesus' blood did its work upon me, justice
was on my side, not against me.
As I said, I think last week, we
confess our sins.
He's faithful and just to forgive us our
sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
He didn't say he's merciful and gracious to
forgive us our sins.
He said faithful and just.
Because always remember that justice has to be
satisfied.
And God never raised his hand and said,
here, slide under there.
Here, I'll sweep you under the rug until
the judgment day is over.
We hope nobody will see you.
Never, never does God treat anybody like that.
Heaven would be completely empty and hell crammed
full if in order to get anybody to
heaven and save them from hell, God had
to violate justice.
The justice of his own heart?
Never.
But he doesn't have to.
He can be just and the justifier, then
the deliever.
Oh, I don't know.
I think we ought to sing more about
the blood of the Lamb than we do.
Less about Calvary and more about the blood.
Less about the place where they're putting him
and more about the wonder of what happened
there in the darkness.
No wonder the sun became dark.
He hung there for several hours in the
darkness, God doing a work that man can't
explain and never can know.
That wonderful, lawful work of atonement.
And God, the holy God, without violating his
holiness, God the just God, without violating his
justice, God arranged it so he could look
upon our moral situation and smile and say,
you're justified.
My dear friend, if you ever go to
heaven, that's the way you'll go.
I was reading a sermon by Luther here
lately, just this yesterday.
And Luther was preaching on that text that
says that nobody can come unto me except
the Father draw him.
And he said, now some people think that
they can get to heaven by their works.
He said, one tries it this way, another
tries it that way, but you'll never get
there.
He said the Pope, for instance, he thinks
that if he says Mass and becomes a
Carthusian and does good deeds, he'll go to
heaven.
He said, yes, he will, when a cow
can crawl into a mouse hole.
I thought that was pretty good for the
old German.
When a cow can crawl into the little
hole where the mouse goes, he said, that's
when the Pope can get to heaven on
his good works.
Well, he can't, neither can you, brother.
Neither can you, neither can anybody.
Let's not be too hard on Papa.
He's just a man, you know, just a
man.
And if he got the covering of the
blood, God would see a moral situation that
was just, and he could go to heaven,
too.
I mean, Father John, you know.
Let's remember that we're all sinners and that
we're inequity, inequity, the both.
Our lives have been wrong, all wrong.
Now, I'll close by saying this to you,
that every moral inequity will be judged without
mercy, will be judged unless covered by sufficient
atonement.
And every act of iniquity may be an
act that we call commission.
It may be no act that we call
omission.
It may be a word, or it may
be a thought.
The iniquitous thoughts that go through our heads,
and the iniquitous words that come out of
people's mouths, and the acts that they should
do and don't do, and the acts they
do and should not do, this is our
awful black record.
This is the record.
No one can make sufficient atonement except Jesus
Christ our Lord.
I say that God, every moral being, must
face up to his sins, every moral being.
And in the day of the great judgment,
the great white throne judgment, when God raises
us from men from the dead, human race
from the dead, they will be dealt with
by all the attributes of God.
All of God will concur in everything God
does.
But because justice is part of the nature
of God, and because justice, when it confronts
injustice, must condemn it, God will condemn it.
He will send off to his terrible hell
those who have not taken the covering of
atonement.
I must, I must have the covering of
atonement.
I must have a sufficient atonement of some
sort.
Because my sins have been so many, I
can never undo them, and neither can anybody
ever undo them.
No one can make sufficient atonement but one,
and he made it.
He doesn't repeat it, he made it once.
Our poor blind friends think that every Sunday,
when they pronounce certain Latin words, saying, this
is my body, that Christ dies again, and
they boast about the fact in a humble
way that Christ dies every time the Mass
is offered.
Oh, no.
They call that perpetual sacrifice.
No, no.
That's not what the Bible teaches.
The Bible teaches one sacrifice with perpetual efficacy.
Jesus died only once, not a dozen times,
not a hundred times.
Think how many times Christ would have to
die every day, every Sunday, round the world.
Every time the Mass was held and the
bread was blessed and became the body of
Christ, he died again.
And every time the wine became the blood
of Christ, he bled again.
No, no.
He is not dying in heaven, he's living
in heaven, alive forevermore, and he's our Lord.
And because he's our Lord, he can dispense
mercy, mercy that satisfies justice and righteousness.
And he can save us because he is
God.
So your soul tonight, your soul pleads, hides
you in the blood, your soul pleads it.
You don't dare take things for granted.
There's a casualness about your Christianity here that
bothers me, a casualness.
You smile and joke and it's casual.
My brother and sister, you ought not to
be casual about anything that Satan isn't casual
about, neither is God.
I want to see seriousness here.
I want to see gravity.
I don't mind humor, as you well know,
but when I'm talking about my soul and
my soul's relation to God, I don't want
anything but gravity and seriousness.
I can't be around long.
Heard a 39-year-old man pray tonight.
He said, Lord, you know we don't have
much time.
If he doesn't have much time, what about
some of you?
None of us has much time.
Time is a relative thing and passing swift
away and not coming back.
Your soul pleads, hide you in the blood,
hide you under atonement.
I must have atonement.
I must.
Isn't it a question of my pleasing the
Lord and coming forward with a big smile
and saying, I'll vote on Jesus' side.
I'll be a Christian.
No, no.
He doesn't need you, but oh, how you
need him.
How you need him.
For when the holy eyes of God look
upon your life, those eyes see inequity and
God pronounces iniquity.
But when you cover yourself with atoning blood
by faith, you believe on the Lord who
has risen in those same righteous, just eyes
of God.
See you justified because somebody cared enough to
interpose, so to speak, and you're covered by
precious blood.
We must take this seriously, my brother and
sister, we must.
Time is rolling along.
Men are dying of heart attacks.
Women are dying of cancer.
Children are dropping over and tragedies and troubles
are everywhere.
And we can't take things for granted.
Where are you tonight?
How is it with you tonight?
Do you know tonight that the Lord Christ
is your Lord and Savior now?
You know it.
You know that if you should, as the
poet said, all that live must die passing
through nature to eternity.
And if you should be one to pass
tonight, you know that the eyes of God
looking upon you would see equity there by
the blood of the Lamb or inequity without
the blood of the Lamb.
Which is it?
You ought to know.
It's most important that you do know.
I pray that you might, if you're here
and you're not covered by that precious blood.
When there's an accident out there on the
highway, one of the first questions asked is,
are you covered?
One of the questions I want to ask
you tonight is, are you covered?
By the mercy of God, I am.
Are you?
If you're not, then you're in a place
where everybody wishes you were.
You're in a place where you have only
friends.
You're in a church where everybody believes in
this.
And we together hope and trust that you
will come and that you will trust in
Christ the Lord and believe by the mystery
and wonder of his atonement.
God can look upon your moral situation and
pronounce you justified.
Oh God, we pray this hour that I
will speak thy words.
Be merciful to us, oh God, according to
thy lovingkindness, according to the multitude of thy
tender mercies brought out our iniquities.
For against thee, the only have we sinned
and done these evils in my sight.
Thou mightest be justified when thou speakest and
clear when thou judgest.
Lord God, thou knowest we were conceived in
sin and born in iniquity, but we thank
thee.
Thou didst remember us made in thine image.
Thou didst remember the tattered, broken, polluted fragments
of what once had been and send thy
son to die and rise and live and
plead for us.
We're glad tonight.
We have hope and faith tonight.
If we're not trembling tonight, we're satisfied.
Because he died and because his dying was
so infinitely efficacious, whoever will may come and
drink of the water of life freely.
And whoever comes, thou will in no wise
cast out.
Christ our Lord.
We're going to sing while we stand.