Tonight I would like to speak to you
of Christ coming down for the specific purpose
of suffering death on the cross of Calvary
and coming down of his own free will.
This wonderful Savior that we have came down
because of the great love that he had
for mankind.
It was the Father's will and the Son's
will together.
It was the Holy Spirit's will, it was
the Godhead involved completely in the salvation of
man.
And there were three or four thoughts I
had, whether we will cover all of those
thoughts I don't know, but at least we'll
cover some of them.
First he came down from heaven of his
own free will.
Second, he laid aside his ineffable glory of
his own free will.
And thirdly, he walked to the bitter road
to Calvary of his own free will.
And fourthly, he suffered death on the cross
of his own free will.
First of all, he came down from heaven
of his own free will.
I think it's a little hard for us
to conceive of this, you know.
The Son of God coming down from heaven
of his own free will.
It would be a little hard because I
think sometimes it's difficult for us to conceive
of exactly what heaven is like.
And probably had we a good picture of
heaven, such as Paul had, for instance.
Paul had a pretty vivid idea of heaven.
He mentions that in one of his epistles
when he speaks of heaven.
And speaks about himself having been caught up
into heaven itself.
And he speaks of that over in 2
Corinthians 12, and I'll read it to you.
The first to the fourth verses.
So we get some conception of where Christ
came from.
He willingly came down from heaven to suffer
death.
And unless we have a vision of heaven,
of some idea of what heaven's like, we
cannot conceive of what it meant for the
Son of God to leave heaven.
Paul puts it well when he says, It
is not expedient for me, doubtless, to glory.
I will come to visions and revelations of
the Lord.
I knew a man in Christ about 14
years ago.
He's speaking about himself.
Whether in the body I cannot tell, or
whether out of the body I cannot tell.
God knoweth.
Such a one caught up into the third
heaven.
And I knew such a man.
Whether in the body or out of the
body, I cannot tell.
God knoweth.
It was so vivid, it's difficult for him
to really say that he wasn't there bodily.
Whether it was in the spirit or in
the body, he said, I really can't tell.
That's how I felt.
How that he was caught up into paradise
and heard unspeakable words, which it is not
lawful for a man to utter.
He heard such things and he saw such
things that he can't even tell us about.
Tremendous thought to think of.
That Paul, the chosen apostle of God, the
great one to reveal to the Gentiles, the
great and unsearchable riches of Christ, that taken
up into glory, he cannot even speak of
the things which he saw.
How can we conceive of what it meant
for Christ to leave glory and to come
down to earth?
You remember in the gospel where Jesus said,
Father, restore unto me now the glory which
I had with thee from the beginning.
Glory, imagine, to leave it.
If it was you or I, we wouldn't
even think about it.
Just think of, you know, just some simple
thing.
You can go away on a vacation and
you can go to some beautiful place where
you stay, some mountaintop experience, and you know
how you feel?
I wish I never had to leave here.
I dread going back to that place where
I work or where I am in that
neighborhood, that community, because you've been in some
mountaintop experience.
I've known so many people have gone to
good Christian camps and had tremendous fellowship in
the Lord Jesus.
And then when the time, the end of
the vacation period comes, oh, that terrible feeling,
I've got to go back to earth, you
know, down to that level again where I'm
going to hear all of the sin and
all of the things and the business and
all of this going on again.
And then to think of Christ himself coming
down from the glories of heaven, and we
have no idea, conception.
Paul says, I can't even talk to you
about it.
He says, it wouldn't be lawful for me
to utter the things that I was spoken
to about.
We might also well think, couldn't we, of
the other portion where Paul says, I have
not seen nor heard the glories which God
has prepared for them that love him.
So there is a tremendous area here.
He goes on to say, but God has
revealed them unto us by his Spirit.
In other words, he's given us a little
taste by the new birth of the heavenly
presence within our breasts.
It's not the complete thing, you see.
But he's given us this little taste because
he himself has come to abide in us.
And as I've said so often, a little
faith may take you to heaven, but a
great faith brings heaven to earth in your
breasts.
And so we've had just a little taste.
The Holy Spirit has revealed some of these
things to us.
But to think of him coming down from
glory itself, oh, how difficult that is to
even conceive of.
Revelation 21, if you turn over there, gives
us a little view of what heaven must
be like.
John speaks here, the revelation of Jesus Christ,
this is, if you read the title of
the book of Revelation, as given to John.
But notice that twenty-first chapter, the first
to the fourth verses, as revealed to John.
And I saw a new heaven and a
new earth, for the first heaven and the
first earth were passed away, and there was
no more sea.
And I, John, saw the holy city, the
new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of
heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her
husband.
You know, it's hard for me to conceive
of a whole land like a bride adorned
for a husband.
Is there anything more beautiful?
The relationship of a bride and a groom
as a bride adorned for her husband.
And possibly in this day, some of the
original conceptions of marriage and some of the
original conceptions of a bride adorned for her
husband are a little difficult to comprehend because
of some of the things we see.
Some of the dresses I see in the
newspapers of so-called brides getting married in
their many, many outfits.
And I think of how the Lord speaks
of his bride in the pure white linen
of the saints.
And I think of the early conceptions of
marriage, which they seem to be trying to
push out now and get rid of.
But those conceptions in which the white indicated
the purity of the girl, the beauty and
the inner beauty was showed forth.
There was a radiance about her.
I think every time we have a wedding
here, I'm conscious of that.
As that girl comes down this aisle, the
beauty, the radiance, there seems to be a
complete change.
And I'm thrilled in my heart when I
see this.
And then I think of him speaking here
of the new Jerusalem adorned as a bride
for her husband and to get that conception
of the beauty and the purity of it
and the loveliness of it in our hearts.
And to remember that Jesus came down from
heaven to save you and me and came
into a world of sin to suffer death
upon a rugged cross, knowing from the counsels
of eternity past that he would suffer and
he would die.
Yet he left heaven's glory.
And as I said, if you or I
were there, I have often felt bad for
Lazarus because Lazarus suffered death the first time
and had the joy of leaving that body
of his.
And he had to die, come back to
life.
He brought back to life by Jesus and
had to die over again.
And I can't think of anything worse than
that.
I often think of how Ed Limbrick tells
me, you know, in that moment when his
heart stopped beating on the table and he
felt like he was descending into a great
maelstrom and a void of blackness and darkness.
And he knew not Christ as his personal
Savior.
And how when they brought him back, the
doctors did to life and the first thing
he heard practically was the gospel of Christ
from Steve's lips when he came to Jesus
and found Christ as his personal Savior.
But he was always conscious of the terrible
blackness in that moment when that heart stopped
before those doctors could, as they said, he
died on the table and they brought him
back to life.
But think of Lazarus, four days dead, and
then bringing him back to life again that
he might die.
Listen, you or I, once we got a
taste of heaven, we'd never want to come
back here, you see.
We'd never want to come back.
And so the Lord Jesus left heaven's glory
and came down to earth.
And so many blessed things when we think
of him.
He chose the time of his birth.
He chose the name he should bear, Jesus,
because he would save his people from their
sins.
In all of these things, he had chosen
himself the way he should die on the
cross because the death of the cross was
a death that was a curse.
And he became a curse for us.
He was made a curse for us, it
tells us in Galatians, because he was nailed
to the tree.
And as far as the Jews were concerned,
there was no worse death than the crucifixion.
And Christ suffered death upon that cross of
Calvary.
He chose the time of his birth.
He chose his mother.
Imagine, he chose every part of it.
He chose the road he should walk to
Calvary.
He chose the loneliness.
He chose his disciples.
Though one should deny him.
He knew that they'd all forsake him.
He chose them all.
And beloved, this should encourage our hearts, because
I'm certain that we see ourselves somewhere amongst
those twelve disciples.
We see the type person we are.
And we recognize that Jesus Christ chose these
simple men, these men who in so many
ways were failures, including Paul himself.
And yet chose these simple men to be
the ones who should surround him, and be
the ones who should be the great preachers
of the gospel in those first days that
it might be disseminated unto all the earth.
And so, this Christ we love chose his
way all the way down.
Name, chose the mother who bore him, the
time of his birth, where he'd be born,
the time of taxation, that it would be
everything predetermined by prophecy, exactly where Christ would
be born and the death he was to
die.
And so, from his very birth, he knew
the death he was to die.
And so, he left heaven of his own
free will.
Turn over to the 18th verse in Revelation
21.
It gives a little more picture of heaven.
You know, it always thrills me.
You know, Paul says when Christ came, he
came that he might break down the wall
of partition between the Jew and the Gentile
and make one new man in Christ Jesus.
And it thrills me, and I'll just mention
this in passing, and then I'll go to
this 18th verse.
But in the 12th and 13th verses, or
12th and 14th verses, in the 12th verse,
it tells us that the wall, great and
high, had 12 gates.
And on those 12 gates were the names
of the 12 tribes of Israel.
And in the 14th verse, it says the
wall of the city had 12 foundations, and
in them the names of the 12 apostles
of the land.
It's thrilling for me to realize that there
will be the 12 tribes of Israel and
the 12 names of the apostles.
And they'll be on the foundations and the
gates and the walls of the great city.
I don't know how many of you ever
go down to, now and then, I drop
down to Lynbrook to have what I call
a very good sandwich.
If you go to the Jewish delicatessen, you
get a very good sandwich.
But on the walls of the Jewish delicatessen
down in Lynbrook are the 12 tribes of
Israel with their shields all the way around.
I was so interested that I asked him,
who painted them?
And I have his name because I thought
I'd love to get the shields of the
12 tribes of Israel, something that really attracted
my eye.
And I asked him, he didn't seem to
know anything about it.
All he knew was he thought it looked
nice.
So it would be a good idea, since
they're kosher, to have the 12 tribes of
Israel on the walls.
But I can't help but think, and when
I, you know, now and then I've said
to Mr. Ackerman or something or one of
the men in the village, do you realize
that in heaven's glory the 12 names of
the 12 tribes of Israel are going to
be beside the 12 names of the apostles
of Jesus Christ?
That's not possible.
And then, of course, I'll say, well, now
let me read what the New Testament says
about those 12 tribes of Israel and the
12 names of the apostles.
And so this day is coming when there
shall be a great myriad in that day
of tribulation who will be preaching the gospel
of Christ.
144,000 out of the 12 tribes of
Israel.
12,000 out of each tribe.
Great evangelists preaching.
And the day will come when Israel, all
Israel, shall be saved in that day.
There will be a day of mighty preaching.
And the entrance into that final great day
of the millennial kingdom when the Jews shall
reign upon this earth.
But so much for that.
Let's go over to heaven itself and to
that 18th verse.
And the building of the wall of it
was of jasper, and the city was pure
gold like unto clear glass.
And the foundations of the wall of the
city were garnished with all manner of precious
stones.
And the first foundation, I won't read all
the stones, but you can notice all the
precious stones are mentioned.
The 12 gates were 12 pearls.
Every several gate was of one pearl.
And the street of the city was pure
gold.
It was like transparent glass.
And I saw no temple therein.
Notice that.
For the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb
are the temple of it.
And the city had no need of sun,
neither of the moon to shine in it.
For the glory of God did lighten it.
And the Lamb is the light thereof.
And then the rest of this here.
The nation shall walk in the light of
it.
The kings of the earth to bring their
glory to it.
And the gates of it shall not be
shut at all, day or night.
And there shall be no night there.
Then over in the 22nd chapter.
He showed me a pure river of water
of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of
the throne of God and of the Lamb.
In the midst of the street of it
and on either side of the river was
there a tree of life which bared 12
manner of fruits and yielded her fruit every
month.
And the leaves of the tree were for
the healing of the nation.
And there shall be no more curse.
But the throne of God and of the
Lamb shall be in it.
And his servants shall serve him.
And they shall see his face.
And his name shall be in their foreheads.
And there shall be no night there.
And they need no candle.
Need the light of the sun.
For the Lord God giveth them light.
And they shall reign forever and forever.
And then, beloved, you know the portion where
it tells us there'll be no sickness and
no pain in that place.
And so Christ came from all of this.
He left all of the glory that he
might come down to earth for the specific
purpose of suffering death on the cross of
Calvary.
Then remember that he allayed aside that ineffable
glory which he possessed.
Now he was made in the form of
man.
He was made in the likeness of man,
it says.
When he came into the world, Hebrews 10
.5 says this, Wherefore, when he cometh into
the world, he saith, burnt offerings and a
sacrifice thou wouldst not.
But a body thou hast prepared me.
In the volume of the book, it is
written of me.
I underline that word prepared.
A body thou hast prepared me.
If we look over in Luke, when Jesus
is born, it says the Holy Ghost shall
come upon Mary.
Wherefore, that holy thing which shall be born
of thee shall be called the Son of
God.
A body prepared by God, his own blessed
Son formed in the womb of Mary.
And he left glory, the glory which he
had with God from the beginning and was
made in the likeness of sinful flesh and
for sin.
And he was made a little lower than
the angels, Hebrews says, for the specific suffering
of death.
You know, I have thought of what man
was meant to be.
God never intended man to be what man
is today.
God's intention for man was completely different when
Adam came.
God's intention for man was that he should
rule and that the earth would be completely
subservient to him.
This was his whole divine purpose.
And over in Hebrews 2, it tells us
this very thing.
Hebrews 2, it speaks of that divine purpose.
I'll read it to you, the sixth verse.
What is man that thou art mindful of
him?
Or the Son of man that thou visitest
him?
Now this is speaking of man and not
of Christ.
Remember this.
Thou mad'st man a little lower than the
angels.
It will speak of Christ later being made
lower than the angels.
Thou didst crown man with glory and honor
and didst set him over all the works
of thy hands.
Thou hast put all things in subjection under
his feet.
For in that he put all in subjection
under him, he left nothing that is not
put under him.
But now, this present dispensation, now we see
not yet all things put under him.
But, notice this, now it changes.
But we see Jesus.
The fall came, you see.
And God had put it all under man.
This was his purpose.
The earth was to be his realm.
But we see Jesus, notice now, who was
made a little lower than the angels.
He just spoke about man being made lower
than the angels.
He made Jesus a little lower than the
angels for the suffering of death.
Crowned with glory and honor, that he by
the grace of God should taste death, what?
For every man.
This was his whole divine purpose.
In other words, man came and God, his
intention from the very beginning for Adam was
that the earth might be subject to him.
The animal creation, all of vegetation, everything should
be perfect.
The Edenic existence was to be perfection.
He walked in the garden of God.
And he had fellowship with God.
And this was God's divine purpose.
And God gave him the choice of eating
of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil to be denied to them.
The day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt
surely die.
And then the tree of life.
And if I could put it as simply
as possible, this is all that it meant.
The day that they ate of the tree
of the knowledge of evil, Satan became their
father and they became indwelt by the spirit
of Satan.
How do we know that?
Because the scripture says, you are of Satan
your father.
The devil is your father.
The world, he's the God of this world.
He's the prince of the powers of the
air.
The minute you ate of that tree of
the knowledge of good and evil, you related
yourself and the whole generation after Adam to
Satan, who's the God of this world.
The tree of life then was denied to
mankind because that was that which would associate
him with God forever and ever and ever.
And God was not going to allow natural
man to eat of the tree of life
and live forever in a body that's sinning
and sinning and sinning all the time.
And so he denied to man to eat
of the tree of life.
And so from the very beginning, man, debased,
fell.
And it says, all things are not under
subjection to him now.
I made him, I formed him with glory.
I made him in my own image and
in my own likeness made I man.
You know, the evolutionists don't bother me in
the least.
They can have all the evolution they want,
all kinds of species within species and all
of the rest.
It doesn't bother me in the least.
All I say is this.
Man, the Adamic man is out of Adam.
Let them trace all they want to the
primeval ooze and all the way down.
But let us remember, beloved, that man, this
man that's on earth right now is of
Adam.
And in Adam all die.
It's the result of sin.
And God crowned man with honor, as he
says here.
I made him a little lower than the
angels.
I crowned him with glory and honor.
Notice what it says here.
What is man that thou art mindful of
him?
And then God gives the answer.
I did set him over the works of
my hands, put all things in subjection unto
him.
But now we see not those things.
It's almost as though the heartbreak of God
is saying, now we don't see it.
It didn't happen.
Satan deceived and man fell in Adam.
And in Adam all die.
And so it says, but we see Jesus
made a little lower than the angels for
the suffering of death.
That he, notice that, suffering of death.
That he by the grace of God should
taste death for every man.
For it became him for whom are all
things and by whom are all things in
bringing many sons to glory to make the
captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
And so this blessed son of God crucified
on the cross at Calvary came from glory,
came from heaven itself with all of its
beauty, its pristine beauty and came to this
sin-cursed earth at the precise time in
man's history when God ordained he was born
because that was his desire to be born
into this world.
And God so loved the world that he
gave his only begotten son.
But he chose his mother and the place
of his birth and the place of his
death and on the Mount of Transfiguration when
he spoke, remember, to Moses and Elijah and
spoke to them.
It says he spoke to them about his
coming decease in Jerusalem and it should be
accomplished.
And so in that day when he was
transfigured before the disciples and they were ready
to build three churches, that's what they wanted
to do, let's build three temples.
We'll build one for Christ and one for
Moses and one for Elijah.
And at that very moment Jesus was talking
to Moses and Elijah and discussing his coming
decease and his death upon the cross of
Calvary.
Oh, the tremendousness of the Son of God.
He made and formed us in his image
and if man had not fallen this pristine
earth of the Edenic age would yet be
here.
But God in his great foreknowledge saw the
whole panoramic view of mankind and the fall
of Adam and arranged for the coming of
Christ and the sacrifice of the cross of
Christ and his death upon the cross for
your sins and my sins that you and
I might go free and that there might
be a good Friday when we could come
and rejoice that our sins are forgiven.
And oh, when we look at ourselves and
we see how terrible sin is and the
blight it has been on mankind and we
look around the world today and we see
it in the mess it's in.
I can't help but think that sin is
much like it permeates the whole being.
It's much like a drop of oil or
a little smear of oil that you drop
on a piece of paper and if you
watch that bit of oil it keeps spreading
and spreading and spreading until it gets out
to the very edges of the paper and
that's the way it seems sin is in
the human life that it starts so little
sometimes some little thing and it can spread
and become the cancer of our spiritual nature
so that we're involved so much in the
sins of the world.
Not only the sins of the flesh but
the sins that involve us in every area
of life.
Sin spoils our natures.
Sin spoils, beloved, our personalities.
It spoils our dispositions.
It's a cancer to us.
No matter how lovely or no matter how
personable we are, no matter how winsome we
are, no matter how highly we're called of
character, yet sin can take that very winsomeness,
that very beauty, that very good character and
use that.
Satan can use that to bring sin into
the life.
The very winsomeness that seems so wonderful.
Satan himself can drag the soul down into
the deepest sin and we can look down
through the pages of history to find time
after time and we can find how Paul
and Peter and all the rest, some people
have stayed back and say, how could David
ever have done this thing?
How could Peter ever have denied his Savior
and cursed Him?
How could Paul, member of the Sanhedrin, ever
have taken Christians and had them slain in
front of him?
How could Paul have stood by Stephen's side
and watched him stoned to death and walked
away cold and indifferent to this man of
God?
Because sin is such a ravening thing and
oh, how careful we have to be.
And this is the sin that Christ came
for.
Christ looks upon us.
He sees us in all of our weakness.
He sees us in all of our supposed
good character.
He sees us with all of our winsome
qualities.
He sees the one that's beautiful.
He sees the one that's handsome.
And if I do say so, there are
those who have deeper trials than others emotionally
in the line of sin.
He sees every single area.
But I want to say this, there has
been no sin that's taken you but that's
common to man.
And God is faithful and will not see
you to be tempted above that you are
able.
In other words, there's nothing that's not common
to man.
If there's some sin that tempts you, if
there's some vile thing, God is saying, remember,
someone else has that sin.
Someone else has that temptation.
You're not alone in that.
And for all of this, the very essence
of sin, may I say this?
If I can give all the enormity of
it when it says Christ was made sin
for us, if I can take it, it's
not your sins, your individual sins.
You're not to think of Christ in this
sense.
You're to see Christ with all the sins
that have ever been committed upon the face
of the earth in all of their heinousness.
Every single one in His body.
And then you'll understand the weight that Christ
bore of man's sin and how He says,
in Adam all will die, but those who
are in Christ, they shall be made alive.
He was made sin for you.
He was made sin for me.
Not your individual sins, but the very essence
of sin in all of its horror, the
most terrible things conceived of, all placed upon
Him.
Then how do we wonder that He said,
Why hast thou forsaken Me when all the
weight of all man's sin was put upon
Him?
And in that terrible moment, God had to
turn away from His own blessed Son as
He suffered death for the sins of the
world.
Oh, beloved, do we really conceive of what
Christ has done?
He came down from glory.
He left heaven's portals.
He came down to earth.
He took upon Himself the form of a
man.
He said He was made in the likeness
of His own brethren.
Imagine, He saw the children before the foundations
of the world.
He saw you in Christ, and He was
made in the form of His brethren.
He said, The brethren were made of flesh
and blood.
Therefore took I part of the same and
became man, the Son of man, made lower
than the angels that He might suffer the
death of the cross.
Did He suffer it for you?
He died for the sins of the world.
There's no sin that you've committed that's not
been put upon Christ's cross if you have
believed.
I care not what it is.
Some have said to me, He never could
forgive me.
I've heard this term time and again.
God will never forgive me.
I've done something God cannot forgive.
Then you do not understand the cross of
Christ.
He was made not your sins.
He was made sin.
How can I express the enormity of it?
Is it possible?
Would it be possible to know what the
enormity of sin is?
He was made sin for us.
He knew no sin that we might be
made the righteousness of God in Him.
He had to be.
Every single sin had to be there that
we might know that we're perfectly cleansed.
No sin was left out.
Suppose there was some sin you could commit.
Sometimes people think of a scarlet sin or
this sin or that sin.
That sin cannot be forgiven.
Then you do not understand the cross of
Christ.
The cross of Christ is sufficient for all
sin.
For Paul says, where sin abounded, grace did
much more abound.
Do you know Him tonight as we come
to the table, beloved?
Do you really know Him?
Let us pray.
Father, we pray that we may comprehend of
what it means when it says Christ was
made sin for us.
That when man came into the world, he
was crowned with glory and honor.
And in the garden, he walked with God.
God put everything under His domain, put everything
subject to Him, and told Him everything was
subject to Him.
And then man fell.
And God said, now all things are not
subject unto Him.
But we see Jesus, He said, made a
little lower than the angels for the suffering
of death that He might taste death for
every man and He might bring us to
God.
For the wages of sin was death, but
the gift of God, eternal life, through Jesus
Christ our Lord.
So Father, we pray tonight that every heart
truly believing on Christ as they come to
this table may rejoice that God loved us
so in all of our sin that He
gave Christ to die for us.
In Jesus' name, Amen.