So Lord, again, increase our discernment, open our
understanding, enter us into the divine perspective, for
we confess that we don't know as we
ought to know.
It is knowing and knowing, so we're asking,
my God, for that knowledge into our deeps
that affects and colors our whole soul, and
the way in which we perceive everything and
anything has got to be affected by this
single greatest episode in the history of man,
the crucifixion of your son, and the gospel,
my God, of which it is its heart.
So, again, be our teacher, Lord, you who
bore the pains of it, and communicate to
us, my God, what only you can in
your own way.
We thank you again for the privilege, in
Jesus' name.
Amen.
Well, you see the battery of books and
things that I have here, dip in as
the Lord guides.
I was impressed with this book by a
British theologian, a lady, because she opens up
with the question of the absurdity of the
gospel, that God himself would suffer crucifixion, sending
his son to suffer the most barbaric form
of punishment which men could devise.
So we need to understand that, because in
the very beginning of the book of Romans,
Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel,
implying that there could be grounds for being
ashamed of it, or being embarrassed with what
that message itself is.
Because, especially to the generation then, who had
opportunity to observe crucifixion, if not of Jesus,
of any number of victims that were proliferated
the highways, both in Rome and in any
of their provinces, the unique Roman form of
death for criminals and for slaves in rebellion.
Otherwise, capital punishment was beheading, more appropriate to
the dignity of the criminal.
But for the worst cases, crucifixion, and the
death could linger on for three or four
or more days.
So you watch these people writhing in their
remarkable agony, and only Satan could have conceived
of so ingenious a method for bringing death
to man.
So where does Paul talk about, in Philippians,
that Jesus emptied himself and took upon himself
the form of a man, even a slave,
son of David, of Israel, and suffered death,
even the death of the cross.
The word even is even that death, that
ultimately humiliating and excruciating death is what this
son suffered, and that that's at the heart
of the gospel.
So we need to be sufficiently staggered, or
our proclamation of the gospel will suffer loss.
We've got to be reminded of how foolish
and offensive a message it is from the
very first, and because that brings home the
whole question of why would God allow it?
Why did his son have to suffer it?
What was the enormity called sin that was
so vile that no form of expiation would
satisfy the divine justice of God than this
cruel form of death for his son?
You got the idea?
It's like asking a Jew about the Nazi
Holocaust.
What could we have done?
For what could we have been guilty that
could in any way justify such a judgment
upon us that took six million of our
lives, obliterated European Jewry, and counted in its
victims a million and a half children and
infants?
What could we have done?
What could we have been so guilty as
to justify such an act, such a crucifixion
of the nation Israel?
So the same question could be raised for
the crucifixion of Jesus.
What was the enormity of the sin for
which only his death in such a form
could suffice?
And if we don't ask that question and
come to some sense of it, we do
not know sin as we ought.
And if we do not know sin, we
do not know righteousness.
And if we do not know sin nor
righteousness, we do not know God.
Everything collapses at the very beginning, and we're
condemned to some kind of shallow formula about
are you saved, brother, from which we ourselves
have not been saved sufficiently until we see
the magnitude of what it is which God
is saving us.
The wrath of God.
So let me read a little bit of
her description of this Roman form of execution
as a good point of beginning, and while
I'm reading you can look at this Holy
Ghost masterpiece, I don't know of another painting
like it, that depicts so realistically the suffering.
Where you see pieces of wood, splinter, glass,
whatever it was that was on the end
of that cat and ninetails, talk about cruelty.
Just to be flogged with this instrument, which
was the preparation for the cross of all
of its victims, and then have to carry
the cross on the back that had been
laid bare to the bone by that flagellation
is already excruciating.
We can almost say that the death of
the cross was itself a relief from the
pain that they were bearing from that very
first.
So you see it in this painting, things
sticking out of the flesh, and the tincture,
this depiction is not like the original, no
reprint is, but in the original the skin
almost has the color of a gangrenous hue.
The body is already decomposing, death has set
in, and you look at the face, it's
not like the pictures you see of Jesus
on a cross looking like a ballet dancer.
It's a man with his head down on
his chest, and his mouth is parted, and
his lips are white, and he's a suffering
victim.
And to add to that the verbal abuse,
the taunts and mocks of his own people.
If anything would drive someone to a fury,
it's to be falsely accused and provoked while
you're suffering for the very benefit of those
who are accusing you.
Come down from the cross and we will
believe you.
They mocked him.
If you be the son of God, it's
almost like Satan's taunt of Jesus after his
baptism in the Jordan.
If you be the son of God, come
down.
Of course he couldn't come down, not physically,
but to come down would have been to
nullify the whole purpose for being nailed.
So I'm not rehearsing this because I have
a maudlin propensity for torture and love to
dwell on the gory details, but we need
to be exercised a little bit.
We need to be jabbed in our deeps
lest we trivialize this as in fact Catholicism
has, and sentimentalize it, which is just as
effective as negating its importance as the actual
disregard that the Jewish community holds this crucifixion.
It is disregarded as non-event, having no
special significance.
It's just the unhappy end of a presumer
suffering some kind of megalomania about himself as
Messiah, who ran afoul of the authorities and
suffered this consequence.
Missing the whole remarkable intent of God to
be revealed through this suffering.
Because Paul says that this is the revelation
of the righteousness of God.
How is that the statement of God's righteousness?
If you don't know that, have not asked
that question, have not probed it, then how
shall you know righteousness at all?
And how shall you know God as righteous?
Unless the cross, the heart of the gospel,
is the most profound revelation of the righteousness
of God.
Otherwise we just have to take it by
faith that it says so.
Here we see the righteousness, if we rightly
interpret this suffering.
And she says, our problem is simply that
we're too used to the Christian story.
It's difficult for us to grasp the absurdity,
indeed the sheer madness, of the gospel about
a crucified Savior, which was proclaimed by the
first Christians in a world where the cross
was the most barbaric form of punishment which
men could devise.
So the first proclamation of the gospel is
to those who know the form and have
seen it, and are being told that this
one whom they're celebrating is the very Son
of God who has suffered this kind of
death.
It's as if God has gone out of
his way to find the most offensive foundation
for faith and salvation that he could conceive.
That no man could ever be saved by
any extension of himself or by any operation
of his own intelligence, because this beggars all
rationality.
This is totally off the wall.
And the only way to understand it and
to receive it is by the gift of
grace, of faith, from faith to faith, or
you cannot.
And in the wonderful book by another German
theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, called The Crucified God, what
a title.
When I saw that book sticking out of
that German bookcase all those years ago while
this pastor's wife was sewing my torn pants,
I'm sitting in my underwear hitting his study
and looking at the bookcase, which I'll always
do when I come to your house also,
because you tell a person by their bookcase
what the absence of the same.
And as I'm gazing over his bookcase, when
my eye came on that title, The Crucified
God, like somebody threw a switch, electric went
through me, and I made a resolve in
that moment, I am not leaving this house
without that book.
I don't care whose body I have to
step over, I am not leaving without that
book, and I didn't leave without that book.
And subsequently I sent him another copy.
That book is such a statement, The Crucified
God, that God would submit to this.
And he quotes in the beginning, he said,
true faith begins where the atheist thinks it
should end.
Because the atheist, if he has any consideration
for God, will always conceive of some lofty
imagining appropriate to the dignity of what deity
should be.
But this has no dignity.
This is infamous, this is contrary to anything
that you think that God should experience himself,
let alone allow his son to experience.
So faith begins where the atheist thinks it
should end.
It's got to be faith.
It can't be rational agreement by any kind
of logic.
It's staggering.
But it's God's wisdom.
The cross is God's wisdom.
And we need to understand why, if we
are to communicate it to others and receive
deeply its significance ourselves.
She says, we may well share this reluctance
to dwell on its horrors, but if we
are to understand the significance of the gospel
as it was proclaimed in the first century,
it's essential that we grasp just what crucifixion
entailed.
And she goes on to explain, it was
reserved for slaves, traitors, and was the most
degrading form of death.
The victim died a lingering and horribly painful
death.
One could therefore inflict the maximum pain on
one's enemies or on the criminals being punished.
And partly was due to the fact that
nailing a man up naked, whether dead or
alive, was the greatest possible indignity to which
one could subject him.
This thing with the loincloth is an artistic
device.
It's not a piece of historically accurate data.
But Gothic artists, Renaissance artists have all followed
the same tradition of always giving Jesus a
loincloth.
But what she's saying is that not only
was the suffering physical, it was also moral.
That the victim who has his hands pinned,
can't cover himself, is exposed to the gaze
and view of anyone totally naked.
For an Orthodox Jew, that would be humiliation
of the ultimate kind.
And so was it for Jesus also.
Why did he have to die that way?
So that you 2,000 years later would
not hide and cover yourself.
That you would be as willing in some
measure to be publicly exposed in your nakedness.
Because if you will not, you'll not receive
the benefit of God's grace and redemptive working
that waits upon the acknowledgement of the truth
of your condition.
But if you cover it and conceal it
because of your pride that doesn't want to
be exposed, you forfeit the benefit of God
who wants to meet you in the truth
of your condition, nakedly.
Maybe we can define church as the willingness
and the ability of God's people to be
exposed and open and naked, not only before
God, but even before each other.
Because we know that we're not going to
be the victim of those who will meanly
use those opportunities to gossip or to take
cheap pleasure or delight in our nakedness.
We can trust one another in covenant relationship,
going back to last night, to be open,
naked, and revealed so that we might receive
prayer, correction, and all of the sanctifying redemptive
work available only in an environment of that
kind.
Where do you find a church like that?
When even the pastors themselves will not come
out.
They just come out to do their thing
as the man of faith and power, and
then when their thing is over, they go
back again into hiding.
And who's more in need of redemption in
truth than these ministers who are chronically lacking
in relational ability and don't want to be
seen in the truth of their condition?
Got that?
So part of our responsibility is to create
an environment conducive to the sanctifying work of
God that only takes place on the ground
of truth.
I can't help talk about nakedness without thinking
about Noah and his drunken condition, and the
great episode in Genesis 9 where Ham, who
saw him exposed, and there's even a hint
that he did more than see him exposed,
but took advantage of his nakedness, whatever that
means.
And some writers even suggest some sneaky kind
of sexual thing of a perverse kind, by
which Ham advantaged himself on a defenseless naked
father now drunk, and then went out to
tell his brothers.
But how did he tell them?
Hey, you don't want to know?
Because there's something in a young son that
likes to be exalted at the cost of
an older father.
Have you ever noticed that?
But Sham, when he heard it, would not
be seduced into joining that kind of disrespect,
but walked backward with a cloak in order
to cover his father's nakedness, and to keep
his own eyes from in any way beholding
it.
And is therefore eternally blessed that Noah says,
blessed be the God of Sham.
Because Sham could not have done this of
his own initiative.
It's not a normal human response.
The normal human response is to relish a
father who's naked and take advantage of it
and say, well he's had his time, now
I'm taking over.
He has shown his disqualification, it's time for
me now to rise and to graduate.
But Sham did not succumb to that temptation,
but covered his father and would not look
upon his nakedness.
So what does that mean for us?
On one side of my mouth I'm saying
the church ought to be a place where
we can afford to be open, transparent, and
real.
And on the next side of my mouth
I'm saying we ought to cover one another.
You know, that's a paradox.
But in the paradoxes is the glory of
the faith.
Just to get at the heart of this,
crucifixion combined the death penalty with excruciating torture
and with total humiliation.
That needs to be factored in.
Not only the physical suffering, the moral suffering
of total humiliation of the nakedness of an
orthodox Jew who is also very God before
the gaze of his people and contempt because
he's dying as a criminal between criminals nakedly.
And that one form of execution reserved for
the vilest of the vile.
Got that idea?
He doesn't die with dignity.
He dies not only in excruciating torture, but
in remarkable humiliation, total humiliation, and that the
flogging that preceded his death sapped the victim's
strength and shortened the time of torture, which
could sometimes last for days.
That's why in the end they often broke
the legs of the victims so they could
stop, they would stop stretching themselves and then
they would asphyxiate as the body fluids drowned
them.
Crucifixion was thus an utterly gruesome business, a
cruel and sadistic form of execution.
It is hardly surprising that the Jewish historian
Josephus described it as the most wretched of
deaths.
In the Roman Empire it was used primarily
to punish slaves.
The threat was used to keep slaves subservient.
No wonder then that Paul recognized that his
proclamation of Christ on the cross was sheer
folly.
And why does he begin in Rome, in
the letter to Rome, which by the way
is not only Paul's most extensive and systematic
statement, but his most eloquent.
The language of the book of Romans is
superb and presumes a pretty sophisticated audience.
You just read the very introduction, which we'll
do shortly, Paul's salutation at the beginning, evidently
indicates that the readers are at a level
of erudition and sophistication probably more than any
other of the churches of the ancient world.
And to this church he writes this book,
the most systematic survey of his apostolic understanding
of the faith.
And at the very beginning, he says, I'm
not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
To people who, in Rome, the capital of
the great empire, would likely then be ashamed.
So the apostle has to disarm any disposition
they would have to be embarrassed at their
own message by saying that as the chief
of apostles, I'm not ashamed.
Why?
Because this horrible thing is also the power
of God unto salvation to everyone who believes.
And if you knew the magnitude of sin
in which every human soul abides and the
wrath of God that rests upon every human
soul in sin, the wages of which is
death and eternal separation from God and an
anguish of soul eternally that cannot be described,
then whatever the subject matter, I'm not ashamed
of it because I understand that for which
it saves us.
You got the idea?
If you don't understand the magnitude of sin
and the wrath of God upon sin, who's
angry with the sinner every day, then you
will be ashamed.
You will be offended.
You've got to see the suffering in the
context of what it has come to expiate.
And that's what we have not seen.
And that's why we're reviewing this because the
whole thrust of this school from its beginning
was back to foundations, not just principles of
faith, but the foundation of foundations, the crucified
Christ, the issue of sin, judgment, atonement, without
which you can't even begin to talk about
sanctification or church over the last days, any
of those things until you've come to grips
with the foundation of foundations, which has this
at its beginning in the wisdom of God.
But the horror of it needs to strike
also.
So Paul recognized that the proclamation was folly.
The idea of a dying God was not
without precedent in the ancient world, but a
gospel about a crucified Lord was something quite
different.
The cross was a symbol of weakness, of
total impotence.
The dying Jesus was taunted because he could
not save himself and neither so it seemed
could his God.
The cross signified total humiliation and degradation.
So this is the scandal of the message
of the cross.
And Jesus says to his followers, take up
the cross and follow me.
The scandal of the cross was thus not
simply that Jesus had been put to death
as a criminal, but that the particular death
he had suffered was the most barbaric that
could be devised.
Moreover, this barbaric death had involved the display
of his naked body in public, the final
utter degradation.
Christian artists, not unnaturally, have shrunk from this
aspect of Christ's suffering and have no inhibition
in portraying the blood caused by the crown
of thorns and the spear thrust, but they
have shrunk for portraying the nakedness of Christ
and the modest loincloth which they add to
the body conceals the shame that was an
integral part of crucifixion.
So of what shall we be too proud
if God himself suffered this?
And did he not suffer it to meet
the issue of our pride, that we would
not have a ground to stand on by
which we keep ourselves from public exposure and
the kinds of things that would be humiliation
for us?
If he will suffer that humiliation, to what
degree then we who follow him should also
be willing?
Got the idea?
And the church is phony baloney.
It's an institution.
It's a play thing to the degree that
we will not follow him in that humiliation
and keep ourselves guarded from every angle to
protect ourselves from any loss of our own
dignity.
Here we have to sweat blood and wring
ourselves out to persuade believers to pray when
God has touched something of conviction and they
sit like lumps in their seats and will
not open their mouths, will not break, will
not pray.
Their dignity will not allow it.
And they're making already a private arrangement with
God.
I'll see you about this later and we'll
talk about it in the privacy of my
bedroom.
And there I will confess what you're wanting
me now to confess publicly.
And that private confession, which I will do
at my leisure and invoke you at my
will for my convenience is one to which
you will give yourself.
How disrespectful to God and how much does
it depreciate God as God that we can
make a private transaction appropriate to our dignity
and will not humble ourselves and cry out
and pray in the moment in which he's
present and asks for our response.
Got the idea?
We're proud and unwilling and therefore the church
suffers and is unreal and unable to communicate
to a dying world those redemptive things that
would have been known to us and communicated
by us had we opened ourselves up, opened
ourselves to the work of God in the
kind of thing that threatens our dignity.
We're unwilling to be humbled.
Got the idea?
I couldn't see that.
There must be a reason why every single
morning I'm up around four.
Lord, couldn't you make it six?
I would still have plenty of time for
devotional seeking and preparation and then come to
the class.
Why in this season, especially when a man
needs his rest, am I most deprived so
that by the time the class starts at
10, I'm then really beginning to feel the
effect of the loss of sleep and lay
out all these books not knowing how to
begin but to begin in total weakness not
knowing, which is a humiliation.
Why?
Because how dare we broach this subject except
in the same character and spirit in which
the subject itself takes place.
This is minor.
This is nothing to be a little hungover
for want of rest but is not an
accident.
Got the idea, you guys?
And I believe that the truest and deepest
last days ministries must come out of that
impotence and out of that weakness and not
out of some flamboyant, heady ability of our
own which contradicts the very spirit and the
ethos of the faith as it was given
at the first by a suffering and humiliated
Savior.
This is full of implications for us now
and especially in the last days.
But are you willing to be humiliated?
What happens if you fog up and you
can't think of the next sentence and how
to proceed and your long painful silences and
all of that stuff?
Well, that's a minor note next to what
he suffered.
So his suffering has that implication and when
he says, if any man would follow me,
take up his cross, that's what he's talking
about.
But we are a cross-neglecting and a
cross-rejecting church and it shows pitifully.
The church has got to come to the
Jew in the character and spirit of its
own Messiah.
But how has the church come in the
rare instances in which it has come, if
it has come at all?
Superior.
If you see Gothic churches in Europe, the
portal of those cathedrals show a fallen Jerusalem
with a blindfold on and a broken scepter
and humbled, humiliated and the other side is
the victorious triumphant church.
Triumphalism has been the note of the church
historically toward the Jew.
You really miss it, but now we take
over.
So we're not coming at all in the
spirit of their own God.
And little wonder that they have rejected what
little message we've had to offer.
There have been forced debates throughout the Middle
Ages where leading rabbis were required to debate
erudite priests over the issue of Messianic scripture
and Jews were required to attend.
And if they fell asleep, they were wrapped
on their heads.
There were people who walked around with sticks.
If a Jew faint sleep or fell asleep,
they wrapped them because they wanted to educate
these Jews about the truth.
What made Luther anti-Semitic?
The failure of Jews to see in the
process of Reformation their Messianic faith.
He could understand that they could reject Catholicism,
but they should reject Reformation Protestantism, which for
the Jew was no more impressive than Catholicism.
And he was so angered by that failure
and then his debate with rabbis and the
way in which they misconstrued the Messianic prophecies
and would not see the evident truth of
them that he lashed out with his book
called The Lies of the Jews, which served
four centuries later to equip the Nazi movement
to do what Luther commended.
Burn their synagogues, destroy their Talmud, rob, break,
loot, destroy, expel, because he saw them as
a threat to the Reformation itself.
So we have not come to them as
we ought.
But how do we come to them as
we ought?
How do we come in to this reality,
this mode, this ethos, E-T-H-O
-S?
Because is there anything more offensive than false
humility?
Better that we would not make an attempt
at it, than we should play at it
and miss it, as you must unless your
humility is authentic.
How do you obtain that?
In the school of humiliation, in the church,
in life, in the working of God, in
being found out, in the issues of your
own life and family that you do not
hide and conceal and depict yourself as the
man of faith and power, but the flesh
and blood as of all of God's saints.
So one thing about humility, it cannot be
affected.
You cannot put it on.
You can only have it in the same,
in the measure of your union with the
God who himself is humble by nature, because
you have joined him in the fellowship of
his sufferings and in his humiliation.
You're the continuation, so to speak, of what
he began in his own suffering and death.
This natural man does not want to give
up the ghost and doesn't want to suffer
a crucifixion, death, and burial.
He doesn't mind getting baptized so long as
it's only getting wet, but he has no
intention of remaining buried.
He wants to continue and assert himself in
the natural life, which now will improve by
virtue of being a Christian rather than be
extinguished.
If you're earnest in your walk, you don't
have to look far for the cross.
It will be there.
You don't have to ask, what does it
mean?
You'll know it.
If you're earnest in your walk.
If you're not experiencing a suffering because of
your identification with Christ, if you're not brought
into places of confrontation and dealing, you're shrinking
from the cross.
You have seen to the protection of your
own life in which the issues are avoided.
But if you're earnest, necessarily you will and
must come to the cross as experience.
You don't have to look far to find
it.
You know, just as the sacrament of the
Lord's table has suffered great loss, the sacrament
of baptism has equally suffered loss.
And where is the apostolic exposition of the
meaning of water baptism?
In the book of Romans itself.
The sixth chapter, as Paul goes on, and
I don't know that we're going to go
through every chapter and come to that, but
just now to say that there's a way
that God has provided that we might be
joined with him in his crucifixion, death and
burial, that we might be joined with him
also unto a resurrection to newness of life.
God has provided a sacrament, a means, a
mode by which we can obtain the benefit
of his death because we're not to be
impaled afresh ourselves.
There's one death.
It's the great epical, E-P-O-C
-H-A-L, event in all history, the
crucifixion of God himself.
But we can enter into that reality, receive
the death of it by the means of
baptism.
So there's something available to us.
God's not asking us to impale ourselves, but
he is giving us invitation to identify and
join him in his very death.
But if we negate that and make that
baptism only a religious requirement for getting wet,
then we're as much alive after we come
out of the water as before we went
in.
So when I have occasion, especially to baptize
younger people, I mock and taunt them and
tell them that they're too young to die.
Why are you doing this?
You're foolish.
You have a whole life ahead of you.
You've not even yet begun to live it,
to test your talents and your abilities and
find your way and fortune.
Why are you wanting to bring now that
life into death?
And if they can pass through the test
of my mocking and taunting and still require
it, then when I put them in the
water, I put them into death and burial
and keep them down.
When they come up, they will come up
by faith unto the news of life and
resurrection.
That's why we see so little resurrection reality,
because we've seen so little death reality.
And as John mentioned, it's a daily reenactment.
There's a daily dying and a daily rising
if we're walking in earnestness with the Lord.
So none of that would have any meaning
if this had no meaning.
It only has meaning to the degree that
it meant for him a death of his
natural man, of which he was the epitome
of all that could be hoped for in
humanity.
He was very man and very God.
He was a superb piece of humanity.
What a pity that he had to die.
He could have gone on.
People were ready to make him king then,
but he wouldn't receive it.
He knew he had to pass through death.
He's the resurrection and the life.
If they mourned and wept outside of the
tomb of Lazarus because he was too young
to die, what would they think of the
death of Jesus at only the age of
33?
Why do I regret the passing of Spurgeon
at the age of 57?
Or Oswald Chambers at the age of 38?
Or for that matter, George Gershwin?
Or any of my culture heroes whom I
would have loved to have had a longer
life.
Why does God take them early?
I remember praying for a woman in England.
She said, I've had a headache, God, for
over 30 years.
Please pray for me.
I said, what happened 30 years ago?
My father died.
I said, oh yeah?
And she said, I have never forgiven God
that he took him prematurely.
Who are we to say what is premature
from our earthly vantage point when God is
the giver and taker of life?
I said, you need to ask God's forgiveness
for your arrogant attitude toward him that you
have not forgiven him as if he requires
your forgiveness for something he in his own
sovereignty and wisdom required.
She never thought that.
No one had ever told her like that.
She's been prayed for a thousand times and
she still retained her headache.
She prayed asking God for forgiveness for her
proud assumption that God could be wrong because
she wanted her father so much to live
a longer life.
He was evidently a dear man.
And when she prayed that, I prayed for
her, boom, that headache lifted as if it
had never existed and she'll not experience it
again.
So what am I saying by all that?
The sovereignty of God, the issues of death,
and our own willingness to submit to it.
So you take inventory.
What has your water baptism meant for you?
What did you intend that it should mean?
And what evidence have you seen consistently of
the newness of life and to which you
should have been brought by going down into
death?
And it was not your hang-ups.
I never tire of telling people a baptism
is not to crucify your hang-ups.
It's to crucify your virtues.
It's not to crucify you at your worst
aspect, but your best, because even your best
is not best enough, not good enough.
It's still man, it's still human, all too
human.
It's still shot through with sin and ego,
vanity and pride.
It can never serve God in a priestly
way.
There'll always be a self-serving aspect, so
long as that root remains, to which only
one axe can be laid that can kill
it.
It's this cross.
And evidently we've not understood that, and therefore
we've not received its benefit.
Pity.
The issue really begins in the garden, where
Jesus sweated clots of blood.
I'm very fond of saying, and I've said
already in these days, the first blood was
extruded before it was extricated.
But it was the same blood shed later
by the infliction of men.
But its first shedding was extruded by the
agony of Jesus in the garden, wrestling out
the commitment to the Father unto death.
So what began in the garden in the
fall of Adam is rectified by the second
Adam, in faithful obedience to the Father, in
suffering for the first Adam and all the
sons of Adam, that we might have a
newness of life in him.
But it required that agonizing review of what
this cross would mean, and the voluntary willingness
to go upon it.
Because he said, don't you know that I
could have called for legions of soldiers?
I didn't have to suffer this.
But my kingdom is not of this world.
Okay.
So let's go into the book of Romans
now.
We're not doing a detailed study.
I'm not even able to lead in it.
But at your own leisure, we're not going
to begin with chapter one, the salutation, Paul,
a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be
an apostle, set apart for the gospel of
God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets
in the Holy Scriptures, the gospel concerning his
son, which was descended from David according to
the flesh, and declared to be the son
of God with power according to the spirit
of holiness, by resurrection from the dead, even
Jesus Christ, our Lord.
What a mouthful.
What an opening statement.
I wonder if it stupefied the Gentile readers
to receive an epistle like that with such
a salutation and a greeting.
If that's the way he began, what can
be expected as he goes on in the
depth and magnitude of his thought?
But this greeting alone deserves exacting examination, even
to the acknowledgement of itself as a slave,
for the purpose of being set apart for
the gospel of God.
So this great apostle saw the issue of
the gospel as the principal reason for his
being, and that he would be the apostle
to the Gentiles to communicate this message, and
that it had to do with his son
who was descended from David.
You would think that Paul would have been
more politic than that and avoid anything in
reference to what is Jewish in writing to
a Gentile church in Rome, who are already
smarting from the contempt of the synagogue for
themselves as Gentile believers who profess to claim
to have received Israel's Messiah.
The details are enormous.
If you're to appreciate this epistle, that the
church was already in tension and conflict with
Jews who still retained their synagogue Judaism and
treated the church with contempt and disdain as
a bunch of Gentile dum-dums who didn't
understand Hebrew and misconstrued the scriptures and read
it to their advantage to celebrate a criminal
and make him the Messiah and even God.
Can you understand that?
So already they're smarting, because Jews are to
be found in the capital of the greatest
empire, because their commerce, business, trade, culture is
the kind of thing in which we Jews
flourish.
So when he says at the very beginning
that this son of God is also the
son of David, he's like opening a sore
wound and allowing even a wave of resentment
to come from his readers.
But that doesn't even stop him in the
same chapter a few verses later to say
that this gospel is not in the power
of God unto salvation, but it's to the
Jew first and also to the Greek.
So here we have a beautiful picture of
what an apostle is, who does not withhold
the whole counsel of God even though it
will not fall well on the ears of
his auditors.
He's not politic, he's not playing the game,
he's putting out the truth.
They need to hear these things, because as
we'll go on into Romans especially 9 through
11, Paul really lays it on the line
and says, except that they receive mercy through
your mercy, they will perish.
But if God did not hesitate to break
them off from their tree that you might
be grafted in, is he not able to
graft them in again?
And if you do not hold fast in
faith, he'll break you off.
So Paul is already from the very first
chapter establishing themes that the Roman church, which
is to say the church in the world
to this very day, needs profoundly to consider,
but you need to appreciate what it means
to be apostolic.
It's not to withhold the truth because it
may occasion misunderstanding or resentment.
It's not to skirt around it and wait
for a more opportune moment.
Right from the beginning, Paul begins to lay
it out.
This son of God is also the son
of David in the flesh.
He's Jewish.
You need to be reminded because even today
there are Christians for whom that has never
struck home.
They can't conceive that Jesus was a Jew
and of necessity had to be to live
under the law, fulfill the requirements of the
law, to be a covenant faithful son and
fulfill its requirements even in his death.
So this is the obligation of the apostle
to set forth this remarkable statement and doctrine
of a gospel concerning his son who is
descended from David according to the flesh and
was declared to be the son of God
with power according to the spirit of holiness
by resurrection of the dead, Jesus Christ.
So you dwell on that, but we want
to go directly to 16 and 17 that
sets the whole theme of the book of
Romans about the gospel as the power of
God unto salvation to everyone who has faith,
to the Jew first and also to the
Greek, for in it the righteousness of God
is revealed through faith for faith or by
faith to faith as it is written, the
one who is righteous will live by faith.
What do you make of that?
It raises the question that we need to
consider and have been considering in the first
week of the school.
How is the righteousness of God revealed?
By faith in the gospel for in it
the righteousness of God is revealed through faith.
Anybody have a glimmer?
If the righteousness of God is not revealed
through the gospel, how then will it be
revealed?
And how is the gospel the most acute
and profound statement of that righteousness?
The gospel is the story and the account
of the sending of God's son to die
and that through his death and the shedding
of blood in that death, an efficacy is
released for the atonement of sin.
An atonement is obtained, an atonement with God
because his ear is not heavy that it
cannot hear nor his arm weak that it
cannot save, but your sins have separated you
from God.
The gospel is God's provision to end that
separation and effect a reconciliation of lost mankind
with God through the expiation or the shedding
of blood performed by his son as perfect
man and God because no lesser sacrifice would
have sufficed for which all previous sacrifice was
an anticipation but could not be the once
and for all sacrifice performed by very God
himself that the God of righteousness who is
rightly angry at sin because he's holy himself
had to pay the price necessary that justice
required to expiate it or else he would
not have been a righteous God.
You know how Jews talk today?
We don't need blood.
We ask God forgiveness, we get it.
You ask and you get.
This blood business is unnecessary out of the
construction of their own minds presuming upon God
that merely to ask for forgiveness is to
obtain it without anything needful to expiate it.
They can say that because they have no
real consciousness of the exceeding sinfulness of sin
that requires more than little glib God forgive
me and then you go on with your
business.
Sin is of such a thing and that's
why we're going into this.
We need to understand sin.
Why is God angry with the sinner every
day?
Why is the wrath of God justified?
Why is the righteous God offended?
What is sin?
That this was required to expiate it and
not just forgive me and then go on.
Got the idea?
We have no message for the Jew until
we ourselves have understood and received that seeing
the magnitude of our own sin.
Maybe that's why David had to commit both
adultery and murder.
That if the sweet singer of Israel and
the king of Israel, the author of Psalms
could fall into so hideous a condition, which
of us is except and not capable of
that very conduct.
Why are not our sins like his ever
before us?
Do we have to commit it to prove
that we share the same nature with David?
That if a David could fall, we also
not only can but have?
This is what is in my craw.
This is the thing that's in a man
that needs to be worked out and expressed
and understood and received.
Or else how shall we praise God?
What kind of worship are we capable if
we have not deeply received this benevolence?
If we're only shallowly saved, we'll only shallowly
praise, we'll only shallowly worship.
And that in fact is the truth of
our present condition.
And we'll only shallowly witness it's righteous of
God to give himself for the sins of
the world because no other provision would have
been sufficient.
That's righteous of God to do.
And how was it done?
Through suffering, through sacrifice.
That's righteous.
So we're wanting a definition of righteousness.
Any aspect of holding this to the light
reveals it.
Jesus revealed righteousness in the bearing of the
cross voluntarily.
That's the righteousness of God.
Or else we're stuck with abstract definitions that
do not suffice.
This is the depiction of righteousness.
This saves us from abstract mental contemplations.
This is righteousness.
What was done on that cross is righteousness.
It's the righteousness of God that will not
let sin pass without an appropriate recompense.
Or else how would he be righteous if
he looks the other way?
As if sin is not a factor and
he can take it or leave it and
humors you and so that you can go
on in it again if you choose.
He's got to express his righteous indignation at
what sin is because sin, as we will
read in the last analysis, is a direct
affront to God, is a willful conduct on
the part of man against God in attitude
and in conduct.
It's full of disrespect and contempt.
God says thou shalt not and nevertheless we
do.
How can God ignore that and still retain
his own godliness and be an object for
the worship and the consideration of mankind to
save it from itself?