Now, the best way to understand some paintings
is to stand back from them quite a
little way in order that you might see
them in perspective.
If you stand too close to a great
painting, you'll see only the details and you'll
see them out of proportion, enlarged, and because
of a spoiled and distorted proportion, you will
not see the beauty of the painting.
Maybe you will not even understand the meaning
of the painting at all.
Now, the best way to treat this passage
which I have read is to treat it
like a painting back from which you stand
at considerable distance.
Let's do that this day.
Let's stand back from this passage and not
take every verse or every phrase of it,
but let's stand back and gaze in wandering
faith and see what emerges.
Now, from this, several things emerge, and I
hope that you'll get a hold of it.
I remember a woman wrote me a letter
one time.
I pitied her.
I really did.
I was sorry for her.
She said, Dear Editor, the trouble with your
magazine is your editorials are too heavy.
She said, I am a mother.
I have three or four.
She told me how many.
She knew I don't.
She said, I have so many babies, and
they're all little, and I work all day.
And I fall exhausted at night.
Then I pick up The Lion's Witness, and
I turn to your editorial, and she said,
I don't want to read anything heavy.
It makes me think I want something that
you don't have to think.
She said, Now, just in case you think
that I'm stupid, I'm the daughter of a
Ph.D., a doctor of philosophy.
Of course, she could have taken after a
mother.
But anyhow, she said, I am the daughter
of a Ph.D., but I just want
you to know it's too heavy.
Well, I don't know what you're going to
do with anybody like that, except to remind
them that Jesus said that there's going to
be a day when he's coming, and when
he comes, watch out lest the cares of
this life overwhelm you and you be taken
unaware.
Nobody ought to be so busy that they
can't do a little bit of thinking on
holy things in the course of the day.
And here we have a number of things,
and I hope that the cares of this
life and the busyness of living won't prevent
you from latching hold of this, holding hard
onto it.
One thing I notice from a little distance
as we look at this is the mysterious
relation between blood and life.
Lecture 5 The Meaning of Calvary 2 Now,
that is found in the Old Testament too.
It says here in the seventeenth of Leviticus,
Whatsoever man there be of the house of
Israel, or of the stranger that sojourneth within
you, thy gate, that eateth any manner of
blood, I will even set my face against
that soul that eateth blood, and will cut
him off from among this people.
For the life of the flesh is in
the blood, and I have given it to
you upon the altar to make an atonement
for your souls, for it is the blood
that make an atonement for the soul.
Therefore I said unto the children of Israel,
No soul of you shall eat blood, neither
shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat
blood.
And whatsoever man there be of the children
of Israel, or of the stranger that sojourneth
among you, which hunteth and catcheth any beast
or fowl that may be eaten, he shall
even pour out the blood thereof, and cover
it with dust.
For it is the life of all flesh,
the blood of it is for the life
thereof.
Therefore I said unto the children of Israel,
Ye shall eat the blood of no manner
of flesh, for the life of all flesh
is the blood thereof.
Whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.
Now there we have the Old Testament groundwork
laid for this, and it was carried all
through the life and religion of Israel, that
there was a mysterious relation between blood and
life, so that blood was considered to be
mysterious and sacred, and never eaten in Israel.
Second thing I notice here is the mysterious
relation between death and sin.
We don't know what death is, we're aweed,
we don't know, but we know that it's
not cessation of existence.
You've heard the word annihilation used, haven't you?
Jehovah's Witnesses and Seven-Day Adventists and other
groups teach what they call annihilation.
Now, the word annihilation means, of course, to
beat back out of existence.
There is no such thing in nature as
annihilation, and I don't know why we should
introduce it into the Kingdom of God when
it's not found anywhere.
There is such a thing as calling something
out of nothing in creation.
But there is no such thing known in
the scripture as calling something back into nothing.
God made all that is out of nothing,
but he never made nothing out of anything
that is.
You'll never find anywhere in the Bible where
God reverses the process of creation.
You can think that, but you can't find
it.
You can take a match and strike it.
You don't smoke, so you don't use matches,
but strike one.
You use electricity in your stove, so you
don't use them there.
But get ahold of one and strike it,
and it will burn to ashes.
Then let it cool, and you can pinch
it in your finger and hardly find it
at all.
Wash your finger a bit and everything's gone.
But it hasn't been annihilated.
Several things have happened to that match.
That match, oxygen has mixed with it, and
it's been burnt, to put it simply, and
gone to ashes, and its form has been
changed, but part of it has gone up
in gases, part of it has gone up
in smoke, and part of it is in
the ash, but it's not gone back out
of being.
It's still around somewhere, but they say, they
tell us, that death is annihilation, that the
soul that God created suddenly ceases to be.
They say they use the illustration of a
candle burning or anything burning up.
No such thing in the Bible as annihilation.
There's only such a thing as a change
of form.
A mother holds a baby in her arms,
it's a little, warm, laughing, pleasant, chuckling little
thing, and there it is, it's a baby.
Then two weeks later, she may hold that
same baby in her arms, crying and sobbing
frantically, that it's just died in her arms.
Then they lay it away and bring it
back the next day and lay it in
their little home, as white as marble and
looking like a little angel, but dead.
What's happened to it?
Annihilation?
No.
A change of form is all.
Something has changed radically.
There has been a change in the form
of existence, and in this case, a shocking
and heart-breaking change, but it's only been
the change, that's all.
The soul that was there, the intelligence that
was there, laughing and crying and chuckling and
trying to talk, that little intelligence was not
annihilated any more than that body was annihilated.
They will lay that body away and it
will be rolled around, as the poet said,
in earth's dire, and it will change with
rocks and hills and trees and finally go
back to dust again, but it will not
be annihilated.
It will change its form, but not cease
to be.
So there is a mysterious relation between death
and sin, and we know that there are
two forms of death.
We know there is physical death and we
know there is spiritual death.
This is denied also by the annihilationists.
They say there is no such thing, the
day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
They say that that meant something else, it
didn't mean the man died.
Well, the simple fact is, Adam died the
day he ate, and Eve died the day
she ate.
Because, you see, death isn't annihilation or cessation
of existence, it's a changed relationship and a
different form of existence.
When Satan fell and said, I will arise
and put my throne above the throne of
God, God cast him down and broke him
off from heaven, and he ceased to have
fellowship with the Eternal God who had created
him.
And Satan died, but he didn't cease to
be, he's still around.
And Paul's classic example is, she that liveth
in pleasure is dead while she liveth.
So the death there is a spiritual death,
it's not a physical death.
And there is the woman that was not
annihilated while she lived in pleasure, she was
simply cut off from God and her form
of existence was such that it was not
related to God.
And we know also about death that it's
one of sin's fearful consequences.
In the book of Romans, the fifth chapter,
we're taught this very carefully, that sin came
into the world and death by sin.
The soul that sinneth, it shall die.
That's the Bible.
So there's a mysterious relation between death and
sin.
Then we learn that God's way of dealing
with death and sin is very simple.
God terminates sin in death.
When a man is so bad, we had
in the city of Chicago some, well, he
was all over the Middle West, but he
ended up in Chicago some years back, a
man by the name of John Dillinger.
Well, now John Dillinger was the most wanted
man, the most feared criminal, and you know
about it.
He was a terrible man, and I think
I've passed by the Bejeweled Theater where he
was finally killed by the FBI men, shot
to death when he tried to shoot them.
He was a terrible man, and in the
newspapers, gruesome as they are, had a picture
of John Dillinger.
They used to have him before the courts
or in the hands of police or with
a gun in his hand.
They had him showing all different ways, and
always he had that cynical, sarcastic look on
his face, never frowning, always smiling, that cynical
smile.
He was a sinning man.
But the last picture they showed of him,
he'd stop sinning.
They showed him lying flat with his toes
up, the sheet over him.
He was dead, dead, completely and fully dead.
Sin ends in death.
When men die, they don't sin anymore.
And that is God's way of ending sin,
in death.
And life touched with sin is a forfeited
life, and if it continues, it will die.
The soul that sins shall die.
So to save the forfeited man, blood is
offered.
Blood, which is life.
I say that the way to end sin
is to end the life of the man
who is doing the sinning.
The robber can't rob anymore when he's dead.
The wife-beater can't beat his wife anymore
when he's dead.
The drunkard can't drink anymore when he's dead.
So there must be the death, says the
scriptures.
There must be blood, says the scriptures, because
blood and life have a mysterious relationship, and
sin and death have a mysterious relationship.
And so when blood is poured out, life
is poured out, and sin ends.
And because blood indicates the termination of life,
the acts of sin are pardoned, because the
blood that was poured out was the blood
of Jesus Christ, the blood of infinite value.
Keep that in mind, the blood of infinite
value.
I never like to reduce to the common
market terms anything as sacred as atonement of
the blood of Christ, and I admit I
shrink a little when I hear men talk
about Christ paying our debts.
I believe he did, but it's just a
little bit physical.
I don't quite like to think of God
redeeming us as I might redeem a cow
or a horse down here when the horse
show is on.
There's something holier and higher and sweeter and
more beautiful than that, and yet it's fear,
all right.
Did God through Jesus Christ's blood redeem mankind
back?
And the scripture teaches us that the sacrifices
of bulls and goats, the pouring out of
blood of bulls and goats, they were ceremonial
and efficacious on earth.
But it teaches us that Christ's death was
efficacious actually.
If I'm using an expression there that's not
familiar to the young people, let me say
to you that efficacious just means that it
works, that's all.
If it works, it's efficacious.
You get in in the morning and start
your car to go off to school or
to work, and you press down or turn
the little key, and there's a discouraged, feeble
humming sound, and the engine doesn't start, it
means your battery is not efficacious, it doesn't
work.
Or something else in there is wrong.
But if it hums off the way it
does in the radio ads and goes singing
along, you'll know that your battery and everything
in there, spark plugs and timer and distributor,
have all been efficacious.
That's all it means it works.
And so when we say the blood of
Jesus Christ is efficacious, we mean that it
is effective, that it works.
And while it was on earth it was
efficacious for a time, temporarily, ceremonially on the
earth.
But the scripture explains that the blood of
a bull or a goat or a pigeon
offered on an altar in Jerusalem was only
temporary, just for the time, efficacious only for
the fellowship of physical Israel.
But that when Jesus Christ went to the
cross and gave his blood and poured it
out and terminated his life there, that it
was efficacious actually.
And that it works not only among the
people of Israel while they lived on earth,
but it works forever and forever.
He hath obtained eternal redemption for us.
So Christ's death was efficacious actually, not in
symbol but in fact.
And the blood of Christ establishes that a
holy life was terminated, brought to an end.
The blood was poured out and the blood
and the life were one.
And when the blood was poured out, the
life was terminated.
And because this was vicarious.
Now there's another word I suppose we ought
to explain for any tired mothers that have
had a hard time of it.
We ought to explain that vicarious means one
for another, you know.
Vicarious.
Suppose this man over here gets a, I
don't know, he won't of course, but suppose
he would get a notice from Ottawa saying
that in 1958 you didn't pay your income
tax.
Well now I know that he'd break out
in sweat because I've gotten one or two
little things on the matter of two dollars
and I never like it.
You know I made a mistake in adding
or something.
And I never like to get any bills
or any notifications.
They're so gentle and so terrible.
Well suppose he got a letter like that
from Ottawa, no stamp on it, went free.
And he found he owed a thousand dollars
to Ottawa for income tax that year.
Well sir, that would be something for a
preacher to get.
You admit that, all right.
It'd be something for a preacher to get.
But now supposing that I have with all
of my money, suppose that I walked up
and said to him and called him by
the affectionate title, name I call him Bob,
I'd say, Bob I'll take care of that,
I haven't, the bigger family is yours, and
I got a thousand, I'll let you have.
And I'd hand it to him and say,
now you don't owe it, it's yours, send
it in.
And he'd send it in, that would be
vicarious.
That would be one doing it for another.
That would be paying another's debt.
That would be standing in the middle and
taking the responsibility.
Well I think I can think of a
better illustration than that.
Talk about a thousand dollars is unrealistic.
So we'll tell about the way they did,
and I suppose they've done it in many
countries, but I happen to know they did
it during the Civil War.
A man named John Wilkins got a little
notice from the government, and the notice said,
dear Mr. Wilkins, your neighbors and friends have
decided that you are to honor them by
serving in United States Army.
Oh I got one once, it's so loving,
you know, and signed Uncle Sam.
And he had a family and he didn't
want to go, so he knew a neighbor
who had a hired man, and the hired
man was single and bummed around and didn't
have any responsibilities, and his name was Bill.
So he goes to Bill and says, Bill,
I have been drafted.
You know, that's what that is, after you
get under all the flowers and verbiage, that
you're drafted.
Your friends and neighbors have decided that you
are to have the honor of serving them,
and that means you're drafted.
Well, he goes and says, Bill, I've been
drafted and I have 12 children, and my
wife isn't strong, and I feel I just
can't go.
Could you go for me?
Oh sure, he'd say, I might as well
be serving in the Army somewhere else, so
he'd go.
They allowed that then.
During the two wars that followed, they didn't
allow it.
Everybody was for himself.
But in the Civil War they did, and
you could go vicariously.
That is, you went for another.
Well, now all that will work out all
right, supposing that everybody came home well.
But suppose that this fellow Bill is down
there somewhere, and the Tennessee minute man draws
a bead on him, shoves the cud over
to the other side of his cheek to
get comfortable, and puts a bullet through his
head.
Well, now the man back home, what did
they call him, Mr. Wilkins?
He's still alive.
But Bill lies buried in Tennessee's red mud.
One has died for the other, that's vicarious.
And that's at the very foundation of the
Christian faith, that the one who was innocent
died for the one who was guilty.
And that he came to me and said,
I didn't go to him, I wouldn't have
thought of it, but he came to me
and said, I'll die for you.
And so he died for me, and his
life was terminated in the pouring out of
his blood, nor that mine might be saved.
That's the teaching of the Bible.
Don't you ever let anybody take that out
of your mind.
Don't let anybody edit that or water it
down, or try to make it more acceptable
to philosophy or art.
Let it stand in its naked and awful
and wonderful beauty.
Christ died, and in dying he died vicariously.
And therefore the justice of God is satisfied.
God holds nothing against anybody anymore who believes
in Jesus Christ.
And the power of death is broken for
all who identify themselves with Christ.
It says he is the mediator of a
new covenant.
Now, since we're doing a little defining, I
don't know how you like this defining business.
Sometimes people won't come back after a man
does a little defining, but if you don't
define, nobody will know what we mean.
So it's just a question of half a
dozen to one and six to the other.
But let's look at the word mediator.
What does that mean?
Well, that word mediate, if you've studied Latin,
you know what it means.
It means to come in between.
A mediator is somebody, you hear it if
there is a strike on, say at the
Royal York, and there is a union here
and a Royal York here, somebody comes in
between who hasn't any axe to grind on
either side.
That's the theory.
And he is a mediator between the two,
and he tries to bring together the Royal
York and the union.
Or it might be John L.
Lewis and the government down across the line,
whichever it is.
It's an attempt to get reconciliation by coming
in between.
That's where we get our word immediate, meaning
nothing in between.
Mediate means something in between.
And a mediator is one who stands in
between.
So Christ is the mediator.
Now, the New Testament, the word New Testament,
of course, applies to a book.
But it applies to the book because it
contains the New Testament.
And a testament is a will, a contract
which is made.
And the contract is a will, and the
contract guarantees a number of things.
It guarantees reconciliation, that's the first thing.
We are reconciled to God.
My God has reconciled his pardoning voice.
I hear he owns me for his child.
I need no longer fear.
It guarantees pardon, it guarantees reinstatement in the
household of God.
Do you remember in the Old Testament when
David and his son, one of his sons,
I've forgotten, dad and I, I hear somebody,
they had a little trouble, David and his
son.
But the father forgave the son, but he
never invited him to his house again.
He forgave him, but never invited him to
come home.
Now, that kind of pardon wouldn't be worth
anything at all.
When the prodigal son left and went away,
he believed his father pardoned him back there,
but decided to go back and test it.
He said, I'll go back and see, I'll
go back and throw myself on my father's
mercy and I'll say I'm no good father,
just make me a servant.
He went back and his father ran to
meeting, threw his arms around his neck and
said, kill the fatted cat, let's have roast
beef and mashed potatoes and gravy, and let's
have a meal.
He said, make it the biggest thing you've
got.
And the boy stood there, didn't know first
how to take it.
Then he turned and said, get him a
new robe, get a ring for his finger,
clean him up and let's celebrate.
You know what he did to the older
brother, he came and insulted him about it.
He said, he's getting more attention than I
ever got in my life and I never
did anything but stay around the house and
slave.
He said, look at this fellow, this rascal
of a brother of mine.
Quite natural.
That's the way brothers talk about each other,
and especially brothers like that.
But what happened here, the father took the
young son to his heart.
He didn't say, I'll forgive you, boy, but
sleet in the barn.
He took him in.
Now, reconciliation is followed immediately by reconciliation.
When God pardons a sinner because of a
life laid down, he immediately receives that sinner
to his bosom and calls him, my child,
and he gives him the spirit of the
son, saying, my father.
And so there's fellowship there between the father
and the son.
Now, this is secured by the blood of
the New Testament.
How God bestows a fabulous legacy through the
death of the tested.
Now, I notice here, looking at it from
a distance, I notice that a will to
be effective has to, the man who makes
the will has to die.
As long as he's alive, it's no good.
I remember that in the city of Chicago,
an old medical doctor called me into his
house.
It wasn't a house, really, it was a
palace and really an art gallery, because he
collected art from all over the world, great
statues from Rome and all the rest.
And he said, now, I don't like the
United States government, and I don't like their
way of taking away your money.
And he said, if I give it away,
nobody will have to pay tax on it.
So he said, I want to give away
to some certain worthy institutions, Moody Bible Institute
and the Alliance Church and other places, I
want to give away.
And he named a large sum of money.
He said, now, it's going to be given
on these terms.
It's going to be given on the terms
that when I die, your church gets so
much money, and it was, I won't say
how much, but it was up there.
And he said, now, the pastor gets one
-third of that, or else the will is
in doubt.
He said, you'll get one-third if you're
still there, or your successor, that's the way
it read, Dr. A.
W.
Closer, or his successor.
He signed it, called a few of us
down to the Continental National Bank, took us
down to one of the vaults, locked the
doors and made a speech, told us what
he was going to do, and then said,
I thought maybe you'd like to handle some
money.
So he turned $70,000 in cash loose
on us and went around the circle, and
he picked it up and held it, set
it down, and I had $70,000 at
one time.
It was just mine, just a little while.
It never belongs to anybody but a little
while, but that's another story.
And we all went around and signed for
the thing.
And then he just kept right on living,
you know.
He kept right on living.
And I used to kind of get impatient,
and one day I said to the Lord,
Now, Lord, I've been thinking about this old
man.
And I said, I'm sure you're not going
to let me have any of that money,
because I've been worried about why he had
such longevity.
And I said, I'm sure that as a
discipline to your child, I'll never get a
dime.
So when I left Chicago, he was still
living.
And right after I left Chicago, he died,
and the will became effective.
And my successor, who had only been there
a few months, picked up the big check.
Now, God's good to me.
If I hadn't thought of it, I'd have
gotten it.
But the very fact that I was carnal
enough to think of it, the Lord knew
I didn't deserve it, so he didn't give
it to me.
That's right.
But the covenant, as long as the Lord
Jesus lived and until he died, that covenant
couldn't be effective.
The will wasn't in effect until somebody died,
and then when our Lord died, it became
instantly effective.
There was pardon, reinstatement and eternal life, those,
I say, those are the marvelous and fabulous
legacies left to his people at the death
of the testator.
But here is an odd thing.
No man ever died in order to make
his will valid, and then came back to
act as the, what do you call it,
executive?
Never.
Nobody ever did that.
When a man died, somebody else has to
act.
I made a will.
My son told me what to say, he's
a lawyer, told me what to say, and
then he forgot about it.
So I made the will and then sent
it to him.
And he said, Say, that was a beautiful
piece of work you did there.
He said, I didn't know you knew how
to write in such legal terms.
And I said, Well, I just wrote down
what you told me.
Have you forgot?
He had.
But it was nicely done.
He did it.
And the will says that he is to
be the executive.
But I won't go back and say, Just
a minute here, Bud.
We call him Bud, though he's got some
other names.
Just a minute, Bud.
I didn't mean this, I meant this.
No, no.
I'll be over there holding the lily.
And he will handle it.
He is the executor.
Now, here is where Jesus Christ did everything
upside down and backwards, gloriously made fools of
everything and everybody in order to save anybody
that would.
He did it just backwards, wonderfully.
Nobody ever did this before.
So he died to release the terms of
the will to all of his people, and
rose again to administer it.
Isn't that beautiful?
He didn't turn this over to the angel
Gabriel.
He said, I'll be back, I'll do it.
I'll rise again the third day, and he
did.
So Christ lives to carry out all the
terms of his will to his people.
Brethren, I don't know how you like this,
but I think this is utterly wonderful.
I don't think it's good preaching, but I
think it is preaching about something utterly wonderful.
I believe we Christians ought to stick to
this and see to it that nobody can
ever get us to change our naota, or
to change our mind about our thing.
All the liberals and the ecumenists and all
the rest in all the wide world couldn't
get me to change my mind about this,
because this is my hope for this world
and the next.
And it's your hope, and it's their hope
if they only knew it.
So thank God for the New Testament blood,
and for the New Testament Lord who shed
that blood vicariously for his people, and who
now lives to administer the terms of the
will, giving pardon and reconciliation and reinstatement and
eternal life and immortality to all that he
has named in the will.
And he's named in the will, whosoever believeth
on him.
Amen.