October 28, 2008

• Who is Jesus?

  

  Who Is This Jesus?

  Selected Scriptures

  Well, the question is, who is this Jesus Christ?  He is, history will record, the most captivating, the most influential person who ever lived, the most studied, the most examined, the most written about, sung about, discussed person ever.  And even after two thousand years of interest in Jesus Christ, there is no waning in the curiosity of people about Him.  There is, however, confusion and a lot of deception and doubt.

  Now confusion or deception or doubt about Jesus might be just a slight inconvenience to human curiosity.  It just might leave a little gap in our understanding of important people in history except for one very important matter.  Jesus claimed that the whole human race is dead in sin and headed for eternal hell and He is the only Savior, the only Savior.  He is the only one who can produce forgiveness, who can bring true peace, joy in this life, eternal blessing in the life to come.  He is the only one who can take you to heaven.  That takes this individual out of the realm of curiosity and puts Him in the critical category...critical in the sense that it's absolutely essential to deal with His claims.  These are astonishing claims that He made and they demand an honest look at Him because He says our eternal souls are at stake.  Where you spend forever is at issue here and you will live somewhere forever, either in heaven or hell.  He said, "I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to God but by Me," that is either the illusion of a madman, the powerful deception of a clever liar, or the truth and no other options exist. 

  The greatest proof of the supernatural character of the Bible is Christ Himself.  It would be impossible for a person no matter how brilliant and wise, no matter how educated, or even a group of persons, some kind of a committee, to invent Jesus Christ.  It would be impossible to put together all of those elements of the Old Testament that picture Him, that predict Him in detail that He would be born of a virgin, that He would be born in Bethlehem, that He would come out of Egypt as His family had tried to escape and successfully did so from the murderous intent of Herod and when he slaughtered all the babies, all the baby boys.  There are so many details no committee could have ever known. 

  Beyond that, when you see Jesus and He appears in the gospels, and you look at His life, there is no possibility that men could come up with such a person.  When he spoke, people said, "We never heard anybody speak like this."  What He did nobody ever expected Him to do, no other person had ever done it.  There is no human explanation for Jesus, He is not a character of human invention.  The best of men's attempts to invent super heroes don't even come close.  And the Bible presents Jesus in unambiguous and unmistakable terms and the only way you can go look for Jesus and not find Him is if you don't believe what the Bible says.  And if you take it upon yourself not to believe what the Bible says, you have...you have ordained for yourself a pretty significant position in the world, you are a greater authority than Scripture. 

  I ask, "have you ever read it?"  If you're going to stand as the authority on the veracity of Scripture, maybe reading it would be a start.  And then having read it you could do what those Bereans did in the book of Acts, they searched the Scripture to find out what was true.  Or do what Jesus said, He said, "Search the scriptures, they are they that speak of Me."  Look, the Lord's not afraid for you to read the Bible.  If you do it with an open heart and an open mind, you're going to find the truth there because it's the purpose of the Bible to reveal the truth. 

  If you want to know the truth about Jesus, read the record, it's written so that you may know.  God isn't hiding anything.  There isn't any secret knowledge.  This is about revelation, not hidden knowledge. 

  But I just want to take you to two verses, John 8.  And Jesus was in constant dialogue, of course, with the Jewish leaders because He was a Jew.  And He came into the world born into a Jewish family, raised in Israel to very devout Jewish parents.  But He was always in conflict with the religious leaders because they believed you could know God through your own works, through your own self effort, your own religious achievement.  And they believed that their own self-righteousness achieved for them a right standing with God and Jesus continually attacked that and said to them, "You're not righteous before God, you're sinful before God, you need to acknowledge your sin.  You may be religious but you're still sinful.  You still need to repent of your sin and embrace Me as your Savior." They didn't want to do that so there was conflict.

  The conflict is at its high point at the end of chapter 8.  They're having a little bit of a conversation about Abraham because Abraham is their father.  You know, all the Jews came out of the loins of Abraham, the great Abraham.  They all go back to him.  And, of course, Abraham lived long before Jesus.  I mean, Jesus is two thousand years after Abraham.  And in verse 58 Jesus says to these Jews, listen to this, "Truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham came into being," that's the Greek verb there, "Before Abraham came into being, I am."  That is a staggering statement.  I mean, you could not have said anything more disturbing to those Jews than that.  "Before Abraham came into existence, I am."  He doesn't say, "I was."  He says, "I am."  That designates a mode of existence that has no beginning and it has no end and it has no transitions.  There was a historical event, Abraham came into being.  Before that, I am.   By saying that Jesus attributed to Himself eternal existence in the absolute divine sense, and the Jews got it.  Look at verse 59, "They picked up stones to throw at Him."  They were stoning Him because of blasphemy.

  The Jews understood that God was God and there's no other God.  That's built into the fabric of Judaism.  The Lord is one.  There is only one God.  And for Jesus to come along and claim to be God by saying that He before Abraham was in existence is stepping over the line into blasphemy.  With the "I am" there is no before and with the "I am" there is no after.  Psalm 90 verse 2 uses the same language, "Before the mountains were formed, before the earth was created and the world even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God."  The Jews understood that God is eternal...no beginning, no ending.  It's a massive incomprehensible idea, but true, and no man can say, "I am," in the sense that he is eternal without causing people to think he is God.  Jesus made a lot of claims, a lot.  None was more elevated than this, none was more solid than this.  This statement, "I am," harbors within it the most authentic, the most audacious, the most profound claim that Jesus ever made and they only had one choice...He was claiming to be the God who is the Creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the eternal God Himself and for that madness, for that insanity, for that blasphemy, stoning was required.  By the way, they were in the temple area and it was still under construction so there were plenty of stones handy.    There are cults that are confused about whether Jesus claimed to be God.  There are people who say, "Well, He never claimed to be God."  Oh yes He did.  People today might not get it, the Jews got it, it was very clear what He was saying.  And there never would have been a cross if they had had their way.  They would have crushed Him under the stones right on that spot.  But verse 59 says, "He hid Himself and went out of the temple."

  A closer look at this name "I am" reveals not only the obvious idea of being eternal, but there's even more there.  There is the idea of being present.  Verse 11, "Who am I," Moses says to God, "that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?  You're going to tell me I'm going to go in there and rescue the people of Israel that have been in captivity for 400 years and let the Pharaoh let go of them all and march them out to the promised land?  Who am I that I can do that?"  In verse 12 God says, "Certainly I will be with you."  "I am" not only expresses eternality, but it expresses constant presence...I am.   And then down in verse 17 it even adds another element, "So I said I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanite."  "I am" is the eternal one.  "I am" is the ever-present help.  "I am" is the deliverer.  "I am" is the Savior.

  This term, I am, Yahweh, is used 68 hundred times in the Old Testament to identify God.  Jesus knew exactly what He was saying when He called Himself "I am" and so did the Jews.  It is the name by which God represents Himself as eternal, as permanently present, as acting on behalf of His people to rescue them, to deliver them.  In the sixth chapter of Exodus, this name is again enhanced.  God spoke to Moses, verse 2, and said, "I am the Lord and I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as God Almighty, but by My name Lord, Yahweh, I am, I did not make Myself known to them." 

  He says I am the Lord, I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, as El Shaddai, but not as I am.  God did reveal Himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the eternal God.  He revealed Himself to them as the supernatural sovereign God over nature and history, people and events.  He did show Himself as El Shaddai, the Almighty One, and He did use the name "I am" about a hundred times in Genesis.  But Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never really knew Him in the fullness of His "I am."  They knew He was eternal.  They knew He was ever-present.  But the one thing they really didn't know which is the ultimate aspect of "I am" is they didn't know Him as a deliverer.  It wasn't until He brought Israel out of Egypt after the patriarchal period, verse 6, Exodus 6, "Say to the sons of Israel, 'I am the Lord, I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage.  I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments, then I will take you for My people and I will be your God and you shall know that I am the Lord your God.'" Verse 8, "You will know that I am the Lord."  You'll know Me in the fulness of My "I am" when I have delivered you from Egypt.  "I am" is not just the eternal God, "I am" is not just the ever-present help.  "I am" is the Savior, Deliverer, Redeemer.  That is the nature of His ever-present help.  They had early experienced Him as El Shaddai.  Only out of Egypt did they experience Him as the "I am" who delivers His people.

  Go back to John 8.  The Jews understood all of that.  They understood that "I am" was the eternal God.  That "I am" was the ever-present help.  That "I am" is the great sovereign supernatural deliverer, that He brought salvation, that He identified a people, that He established a relationship with that people.  It is as if to say, "I am eternal, and I am present for the purpose of saving you.  I am near in order to save you."  Along comes Jesus and says, "All that you know about God as the I am is true of Me.  I am the eternal transcendent God.  I am the ever-present help who has come to rescue His people from the bondage of sin and to bring them into an eternal relationship with God in which they will enjoy the unimaginable bliss and blessings prepared for them in a place called heaven.  To understand this is to understand the I am.  He cannot fully be understood apart from His redemptive purpose, to rescue people from sin and death and hell and make them His own and take them to heaven.  I am is an awesome name, embracing all of this.  And the Jews understood it that this is God the eternal One, this is God the ever-present help, this is God the Redeemer, the Savior.  And when Jesus said, "Before Abraham came into existence, I am," He could only be understood one way, only one way.  And either He was to be worshiped, or stoned and there was no middle ground.  Don't come to Jesus with some patronizing nonsense that He's a good man, a nice man, a wise man, a loving man, a peacemaking man.  He never gave you that option.  Either fall at His feet, or call Him a blasphemer. 

  He didn't stop with this.  In the sixth chapter, He unfolded some of the realities of what it meant to be "I am."  In John 6 He said, "I am the bread of life.  I am the source of spiritual life."  In John 8 He said, "I am the light of the world who leads the darkened soul into the divine light of truth and salvation."  In the tenth chapter He said, "I am the door of the sheep, I am the way into God's presence."  In the same chapter He said, "I am the Good Shepherd."  In the eleventh chapter He said, "I am the resurrection and the life." And then as I noted, in the fourteenth chapter of John He said, "I am the way, the truth and the life."  Chapter 15 He said, "I am the true vine, the only source of productive life."  Over and over He said, "I am...I am...I am...I am."  Every time He said it He guaranteed His crucifixion.  He wasn't just an irritation to them, He was a blasphemer.  You either fall at His feet and acknowledge Him as God, or you see Him as a blasphemer.  That's a sad choice that the Jewish people made then, and most people in the world continue to make.  If you don't embrace Him as your Lord and Savior, then please acknowledge Him as a blasphemer.  There's nothing in the middle.

  He is who He claimed to be.  And He proved it.  If He was God, He would demonstrate power over the things that only God has power over.  Let's think about some of those for a minute.  Look at the second chapter of Mark's gospel.  Mark, another of the gospel writers, tells a really amazing story in the second chapter.  This is history.  Let me read you the first four verses. 

  When Jesus had come back to Capernaum where He, of course, spent a lot of time ministering, a little town at the north tip of the Sea of Galilee, it was heard that He was at home.  That was sort of the base of His operations when He was in Galilee.  And many were gathered together.  Typically, always drew a crowd.  And there was no longer room even near the door, the place was jammed.  You couldn't even get in.  And He was speaking the Word to them.  And they came bringing Him a paralytic carried by four men and being unable to get to Him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above Him.  And when they had dug an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic was lying. 

  Houses were made out of mud, some combination of mud and sticks and things.  And they had some kind of a roof on top of that, so they took the roof out and they dug through in order to drop their friend down in front of Jesus.  That's pretty good indication of their faith.  You have to dig a pretty big hole in a roof to let a man through.  You have to get over the compunctions that restrain you.  This isn't your house and you don't even know who these people are or worse yet you do know who they are.  You also know you're going to be no small disruption as you dismantle the ceiling above everyone.  You have to calculate where Jesus is so you can lower the man in front of Him.  This is a strong faith.  This is insistent, persistent and this is inventive creative stuff, folks.  They knew that He healed people.  And he healed people with little faith.  He healed people with no faith.  But here are some folks who had pretty strong faith.  They just lower the man.  And they didn't have to say anything, verse 5 says, "Jesus seeing their faith..."  Of course, the demonstration of their faith is obvious.  Can you imagine, Jesus is teaching and all of a sudden it's like rats running around in the attic up there.  And then the dirt starts crumbling and falling.  And Jesus does an amazing thing.  Seeing their faith, He says to the paralytic, "My son, your sins are forgiven." 

  This is stepping over the line again.  "Who do You think You are, God?"  Well verse 6 says, "The scribes were sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, 'Why does this man speak that way?  He is blaspheming.  Who can forgive sins but God alone?'" Jesus just kept treading on their theological sensibilities.  Nobody said anything about sin.  This was a man who was paralyzed but everybody understood the curse in the world, everybody understood that the world is the way it is and sickness is here because of sin.  Oh it doesn't mean that everybody is sick because they commit a sin and it's a direct relationship to that, but sin exists because sin exists.  It's a fallen world.  And I'm sure this man knew well his own sin.  And like a lot of people who got into the presence of Jesus, I'm sure he was probably shaking.  And Jesus just dismissed his sins, just forgave them. 

  On the basis of what?  On the basis of the man's faith.  How did He know he had faith?  Because He knows everything and He knew he had faith in Him not just as a healer but as a Savior.  And He dismissed his sins.  "Your sins are forgiven."

  The Bible says when Jesus forgives your sin, it's removed as far as the east is from the west.  That's infinity.  It's buried in the depths of the deepest sea.  It's blotted out.  It's forgotten by the memory of God.  And they had good theology.  They said, "Whoa, only God can forgive sins."  That's what Jesus did because that's who He was.  They knew exactly what He was claiming.  And either He is God, or He is a blasphemer. 

  Again, they had the right theology about God but made the wrong decision about Jesus.  When He said He was the I am, they had the right theology about I am, but they made the wrong choice about Jesus.  Here they had the right theology about who can forgive sin, but the wrong choice about Jesus.  He was sovereign over sin. 

  Let me take you to another passage, Luke 4.  If Jesus is God, He not only has power over sin, He not only is eternally existent, the ever-present help, and sovereign supernatural deliverer of His people, but if indeed He is God, He has power over demons.  The Bible tells us that demons exist.  They manifest themselves occasionally in very visible and manifest ways in human life.  Most of the time they operate in a clandestine fashion.  But the world has been exposed to Satan and his demons and if in fact Jesus is God, and not just a man, He will exercise power over them.  Luke 4, He came to Capernaum, verse 31, again He came back to where He was located, as kind of a central point in His Galilean ministry.  And was teaching them.  And as always, they were amazed at His teaching.  Amazed at what He said because no one could speak as God could speak and no one had the knowledge that God has, the wisdom that God has, the ability to express truth.  It was always astonishing and with authority.

  There was a man in the synagogue possessed by the spirit of an unclean demon.  And the demon screams out of the man.  Listen to what the demon says, most amazing...now this is fascinating, this is a demon in this man.  The demon in verse 34 says, "Ha, what do we have to do with You, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have You come to destroy us?"  Listen to this, "I know who You are, the Holy One of God."  The demons knew who was the sovereign over them.   I think up to now this is a synagogue guy in a gray flannel suit.  He sits there and demonic activity in his life is clandestine, it's covered up.  But when the demon is confronted by Jesus in Jesus' amazing teaching, the demon goes into a panic, blows his cover and screams through the voice of the man.  And he says, "Is this the time You're going to destroy us?"  Here is a demon who knows that Jesus has ultimate power over them and that they are headed for destruction and he's afraid that that is to happen then.  "I know who You are, the Holy One of God."  And Jesus rebuked him saying, "Be quiet, come out of him.  The demon threw him down and came out of him without doing any harm." 

  There are probably people sitting in the synagogue listening to Jesus and He would be reading the Scripture and then speaking with authority, and some of them would be sitting there saying, "Ah, I don't know if I agree with His interpretation.  I don't know if I agree with the way He's explaining that."  So he just took the opportunity to display His supernatural authority.  Now that would reduce anybody's credibility in questioning His interpretation, wouldn't it?  The demons knew who He was, the Holy One of God.

  That title, "The Holy One of God," is a title for the "I am" used thirty times by Isaiah to describe the I am, the Holy One who is God, the Holy One who is God.  The demons know He is the I am and that powerful...that powerful demon is sent out of that man, a damning captor whose power must be broken if the I am is to save.  And, of course, amazement came on everybody in verse 36 and they said, "What is this?  For with authority and power He commands the unclean spirits and they come out."  Matthew 9:33, Matthew's comment on this incident, "Nothing like this was ever done in Israel."  No.  The I am, the eternal one, the ever-present help, the Redeemer of His people can accomplish salvation because He can forgive sin and because He can overpower the demonic world.  And that includes Satan.  He overpowered Satan in His temptation when Satan took Him to the wilderness after fasting for 40 days and tried to lead Him into temptation, He overpowered him every time.  Jesus could sense toward the end of His life Satan moving in for the kill.  And Jesus said in Luke 22, said to the chief priests and officers of the temple and the elders who had come against Him, He said, "Have come with swords and clubs like you were capturing a robber?  While I was with you every day in the temple you didn't lay hands on Me.  Why you coming like this?"  And then he added this, "But this hour and the power of darkness are yours."  This was Satan's hour.  But when Satan came, he had nothing on Jesus, there was no way he could inflict the slightest wound on the sinless one.  And so, Jesus said I will go to the cross and render powerless the devil through the cross.  If He is to save, He has to be powerful.  He has to be the I am who can overcome sin, demons and Satan.

  Turn to the eleventh chapter of John.  Here is another indication of Jesus great power over death.  He said, you remember, "Destroy this body and in three days I'll raise it up."  And they were just absolutely stunned and thought He must have been talking about the temple and He was going to destroy it.  He was talking of the temple of His body.  But He said, "If you destroy My life, I'll take it back."  This claim also was over the top.  He said, "I lay My life down that I may take it again.  No man takes My life from Me," He said in John 10, "I lay it down on My own initiative.  I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it up again."  And then in John 11, it all summed up in verse 25, "I am the resurrection and the life, I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in Me shall live even if he dies, and every one who lives and believes in Me shall never die."  I'll give you eternal life.  Oh, you'll pass through physical death into eternal life.  Then to prove it, verse 38, He went over to the tomb of Lazarus, verse 39, He said, "Roll the stone away."  Lazarus had been dead for days now, four days and his sister was really worried, she said, "Lord, by this time there will be a stench." The old English version said, "He stinketh."  Four days, no embalming, the Jews never did any embalming.  Jesus said, "Didn't I say to you, if you believe you'll see the glory of God?"  They removed the stone, Jesus raised His voice, He said...looking to heaven, "I thank You, Father, that You heard Me.  I know You hear Me always because of the people standing around I said it that they may believe that You sent Me."  And He having said these things cried out with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out."  He who died, came out bound hand and foot with wrappings.  His face was wrapped around with a cloth.  Jesus said to them, "Untie him, let him go."  He had to tell them that because they were frozen when this wrapped corpse walked out.  "Lazarus, come forth."  Somebody said, "It's a good thing He said Lazarus, if He had just said come forth, every grave on the planet would have yielded up its possession."  That's how much power He had.  So He qualified it, only Lazarus, just you.  You say that's a stretch.  No, John 5 says, "One day He'll raise every person from the dead.  Some to the resurrection of life, and some to the resurrection of damnation.  But He will raise all who have ever lived and died." 

  He is the I am.  He is the source of life.  He is life itself.  I am the life.  If Jesus were God we would expect Him to have power over sin.  We would expect Him to have power over demons.  We would expect Him to have power over Satan.  We would expect Him to have power over death.  And He does.

  He also exhibited power in His words.  And if you study the words of Jesus, as I have for many, many years, studying them intimately, intensely down to the finest points, you just find yourself constantly amazed at what He said.  And the record is accurate.  And I'm like the people in the Bible who are continually amazed at His teaching.  I'm no different than they are.  I can say with the people in John 7:46, "Never did anybody speak like this man."  It was Jesus who said, "Believe Me for My words."  I mean, what He taught is absolutely staggering.  The gospels are the greatest literature ever written, read by more people, quoted by more authors, translated into more languages than anything, set to more music than any other thing that's been said or written.  The words of Jesus are the most pervasive words on the planet and have been since He uttered them.  And their greatness lies in their pure lucid reality.  He deals clearly, definitively, authoritatively, insightfully with the greatest wisdom, with problems that are riddles to us.  His words are always profound and accurate.  His sermons, His parables, His commandments are an inexhaustible mine of knowledge and truth.  Nicodemus had it right, you know, the Jewish man who said, "He's a teacher from God." 

  He taught about God.  He taught about angels.  He taught about men.  He taught about earth.  He taught about heaven.  He taught about hell.  He taught about the past, the present, the future.  And no one ever posed a question that He couldn't answer, and answer in a confounding and profound and yet eminently practical way.  He never faced a problem He couldn't resolve.  He astounded everybody.  He confounded everybody.  No teacher even close. 

  You could look at His power exhibited in His miracles.  That would be another way to see who He is.  He said, "Believe Me, if you don't believe Me for the words, for My works."  And the biblical record is really astonishing.  He controlled nature with no fanfare, with nothing said He turned H2O into wine.  He stopped a storm dead in its tracks.  He controlled fish in the Sea of Galilee, sent them where He wanted them to go.  He multiplied food to feed twenty to twenty-five thousand people and He did it a couple of times.  He walked on water.  When it came time to pay His temple tax, took a fish out of the sea and took the tax money out of its mouth.  He cursed a fig tree and it dried up on the spot.  He spoke to disease and it disappeared.  He healed a leper.  He healed a paralytic.  He healed a woman with a fever.  He healed a nobleman's son with a critical illness.  He healed a withered hand.  He gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb.  He healed ten lepers at once.  He gave an ear back to Malchus when Peter had whacked it off.  He healed a woman with severe bleeding.  His works are just staggering.

  For all intents and purposes, He banished illness from Israel during the time of His ministry.  He healed Jairus' daughter.  He healed the widow's son, He raised him from the dead.  And He raised Lazarus who had been dead for four days.  All these miracles had many witnesses and the Jews never denied any of them, never.  They never denied any of His miracles, they were undeniable.  Let the records stand.  There never has been anybody like Him, no one.  No one even close, He is the master of everything.  He's the master of hungry crowds.  He's the master of the sick.  He's the master of the sinful.  He's the master of demons and Satan.  He's the master of nature.  He's the master of angry Pharisees.  He's the master of clever theologians whom He confounds.  He's the master of a Roman governor.  He's the master of a puppet king.  He's the master of Himself, struggles in the midnight of His passion in the Mount of Olives, fighting sweat, blood and tears and comes forth triumphant and victorious in dedication to His Father's will.  In the terrible agony of the cross He is the master of everything.  All around Him there is fury.  All around Him there is chaos.  He is calm.  He has the mastery of His own heart and mind and tongue and will.  Even there at the cross He pauses to forgive a penitent thief and opens the doors of paradise for him that day.  No one ever lived like Him.  And what He said lays claims on every life.  "I am the way, the truth and the life.  No man comes to the Father but by Me."  The Son of Man, He said, has power to forgive sins.  Whoever shall confess Me before men, him will I confess before My Father who is in heaven.  He said, "Whosoever will lose his life for My sake, the same shall save it."  He said, "I am the light of the world.  I am the bread of life.  I am the resurrection and the life."

  These are the claims that Jesus made.  And as I said, they are not ambiguous.  Let me sum it up this way.  If God became a man, we would expect Him to have a miraculous entrance into this world, wouldn't we?  And He did, born of a virgin.  If God became a man we would expect Him to be sinless and live a holy life, and He did.  Pilate couldn't find a fault in Him.  Satan couldn't find a fault in Him because He was holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.  He was without sin.  If God became a man we would expect that His words would be the clearest, truest, purest, most authoritative ever spoken, and they were.  If God became a man we would expect Him to manifest supernatural power, and He did.  If God became a man we would expect Him to have a universal and permanent influence on the world and He does.  If God became a man we would expect Him to accomplish His purpose, and He has.  So He's God.  And the only other alternative, as I've said, is that He is a blasphemer and should be stoned.  That's the sad decision that was made and is still being made by many people who continue to put Him to an open shame, as the writer of Hebrews says.

  So you can do one of the two.  You can stone Him as a blasphemer, or you can embrace Him as God.  And they all said to Him, at the end of His life, "Are You the Son of God then?"  He said, "Yes, I am."  And they said, "What further need do we have of testimony?  We heard it ourselves from His own mouth.  And they set out to execute Him."

  Why?  Because He said He was the Son of God, making Himself equal with God.  Because He said He is the I am.  Instead of knowing and believing it was true, when they heard it again at His trial, they led Him immediately to Pilate to be executed by the Romans.  And every man and every woman stands at that crossroad.  Who is Jesus Christ?  Blasphemer?  Or God?  Only two options.  Make the wrong one, eternal hell waits.  Make the right one, eternal heaven waits.  Forgiveness of sin available through His death on the cross.  Eternal life available through His resurrection.  The choice you make about Jesus Christ is the only choice...the only choice that matters forever. 

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  The Humility and Exaltation of Christ

  Philippians 2

  "Who although He existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself taking the form of a bondservant and being made in the likeness of men.  And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  Therefore also God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name that the name of Jesus every knee should bow of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."

  "But who do you say I am?"  And on behalf of the apostles, Peter answers, "You're the Christ, the Son of the living God."  That, of course, was the right answer.  And Jesus said to him, "Flesh and blood didn't reveal that to you."  That didn't come from a human source.  "But My Father who is in heaven revealed that to you."  That is the great revelation of Christianity that Jesus is God in human flesh...not just a good man, and not just a prophet, not even a great prophet, not the reincarnation of a prophet, or the resurrection of a prophet like Jeremiah, or even Isaiah, or any other prophet, but that this Jesus Christ is none other than God the Son.  That is to say the eternal God become a man.

  This is the central miracle of Christianity.  This is the defining reality of our faith.  It is about the incarnation.  It is the most grand and the wondrous of all miracles.  It is the theme of the text that I just read to you.  This text is about the descent of God the Son, the second member of the Triune God, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  It is about the descent of God the Son.  And it's a very straightforward portion of Scripture and I want to just walk you through it one phrase at a time, to help you understand the heart and soul of Christian truth.

  Let's look at verse 5, the end of the verse, "Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God..."  The Bible is written in two languages, two ancient languages.  The Old Testament originally written in Hebrew.  The New Testament originally written in Greek. To get back sort of under the surface of our English vocabulary, we need to consider what the Greek words meant for they are the original words for the New Testament.  The Word existed, He existed, huparcho.  This is a word that was used to express the continuance of a state or condition.  In fact, one could say, if I can stretch your vocabulary a little bit, it was used to express the continuance of an antecedent state, of something that already was and still is and always will be.  It is not the common Greek word for being.  It describes the very essence of a person.  That which is true of a person that can't be changed.  That which a person possesses inalienably and in such a manner that it can never be taken away from him.  To say He existed is to touch His essential nature.  It describes that part of a man, says one writer, which in spite of all the chances and the changes of life and all the circumstances remains the same.  It touches on inalterable nature.  Paul is saying that He existed as to the essential unchangeable nature in the form of God. 

  So when you ask the question: who is Jesus Christ?  The first thing you have to confront is the statement of Scripture that His essential being, His unchanging, unaltering nature is in the form of God.  Now that brings up the issue of what does form mean?  This is also crucial to our understanding, it's the word morphe.  Morph meaning form, even in English, but morphe in the Greek language always signifies, listen, a form which truly and fully expresses the being which underlies it.  That is to say it is a form true to the essential nature.  It is a form true to the essential nature.  And here it is applied to God.  Whatever the morphe of God, whatever the form that God takes, it is a reflection of His deepest being, what He is in Himself.  It is the essential nature and character of God visible, manifest, revealed.

  Let me help you with that a little bit.  Two Greek words for form.  One is morphe, the word used here, and the other is schema from which the English word scheme comes, schematic.  Morphe is the essential form of something, that which is true to its nature and cannot be altered.  Schema is the outward shape that changes.

  I can illustrate it to you by saying the morphe of a man, like me, the morphe is my manhood, my male humanity.  That's the morphe, that's the essential being that is attached to the nature of what I am that has never changed.  I have always been a male human being.  However, the schema has been changing constantly.  I started out as a baby and then I became a child and then I became a boy and then a young man and then a middle aged man.  But I've never stopped being a man.  And God as to His manifest schema may appear as shining light in the garden, known as the Shekinah glory.  He may appear as fire.  He may appear as a cloud.  He may manifest Himself in a number of ways.  God the Son even manifested Himself in the Old Testament as an angel called the angel of the Lord, taking on a visible form.  But in this case, the schema was the schema of a man but the essential form was the unchanging morphe of God.

  The first thing we learn about Jesus Christ, and this is essential to Christian theology, is that Jesus is in the essential form of God.  That is to say He is unalterably God, His essence, His unchangeable being is divine.  He never has been and never will be any other than God.  He didn't become God, He doesn't cease to be God.  His outward schema like mine changed.  He was a fetus in a womb.  He was an infant born.  He was a baby.  He was a child.  He was a youth.  He was a young man.  He was an adult.  His schema changed, His morphe never changed.  Paul is saying here, Christ Jesus exists as to His nature in the unchanging character of God.  He possesses the being and nature of God unalterably.  This is to say unambiguously that He is God.  He has equality with God because He is God.  And so He can say, "I and the Father are one."  Or He can say, "If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father."  He is the Word who created the world in John chapter 1.  He is the Word who was with God.  He is the Word who was and is God.  He is the Word who became flesh, the morphe of God becomes the schema of humanity.  In Hebrews, that wonderful epistle, it tells us about Him with these words, "God after He spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions in many ways," speaking of the Old Testament, "in these last days has spoken to us in His Son whom He appointed heir of all things through whom also He made the world."  And listen, "And His Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His nature."  He is the exact representation of the nature of God.

  Colossians 1:15, "He is the image of the invisible God."  That's where you start when you ask the question...who is Jesus Christ?  The first answer is, He permanently exists as God.  Secondly, if you go back to verse 6, from that glorious presentation of the deity of Christ, the Apostle Paul begins to track the incarnation.  He establishes that He is God as Scripture clearly says in many places.  And now he says, "Even though He is God in true nature and essence, He did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped."  Regard is the word to consider, to think.  Equality with God literally means being equal with God.  And he uses the word isos, exactly equal in number or size or quality.

  Although He exists in the form of God and is therefore exactly equal with God, and so here again you have this second statement essentially reiterating the first point,  He is equal to God, the being equal with God, isos. Jesus is isos with God, He is equal to God.  The language here is so very important.  He, possessing the very nature of God, is isomorph, the same as God, equal to God, but He did not regard that equality with God a thing to be grasped.  And here you begin to see the condescension take place.  Grasped means just that, started out as a word meaning robbery.  The robber runs in, grabs and runs, clutching his stolen treasure.  It came to mean something clung to, something clutched, something held tightly because it starts out with the robber who's hanging tightly to whatever it is that he has stolen.  Jesus in the very being of God in every sense equal with God refuses to cling, refuses to cling to that equality, refuses to cling to the privileges and the rights that go along with that equality, refuses to grasp and clutch those wonderful, heavenly glories.  The incarnation then begins with unselfishness.  It begins with Jesus being willing to let go of the glory that He had with the Father before the world began which is the way He expresses it in His prayer in John 17.  When it's almost over He says, "I want to come back and I want to have the glory I had with You before this all began."  He is unselfish.

  In His unselfishness you come to the third statement, verse 7, "He emptied Himself."  Rather than clinging to His heavenly glory, rather than clinging to His heavenly privileges, He divested Himself of them.  This is a profound statement and it's introduced by a Greek word, the word but, alla, which means not this but this.  The being equal with God did not lead Him to fill Himself up with those privileges, but to empty Himself.  And in the Greek it's Himself to empty...which puts the emphasis on Himself.  The verb "to empty" is kenoo from which we get this great theological term, the kenosis.  We say the incarnation is the kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ.  It's a graphic term.  He emptied Himself of the privileges and the prerogatives and the rights that were His by His divine nature in an act of self-denunciation and a refusal to cling to what rightfully was His.  He refused to hold it to His own advantage but emptied Himself in order to advantage others.

  When it says He emptied Himself, it does not mean that He emptied Himself of His deity.  He didn't say to anybody, "I used to be God, but I'm not anymore."  He did not empty Himself of His deity, He would have ceased to exist.  That is His nature and that is unchanging.  He is and always has been and always will be God.  And since God cannot die and God is eternal, He is eternally God and never less than God.  Even when He was on earth, Matthew 17, Luke 9 records that He took His disciples up to a mountain and on one occasion He pulled back His human flesh and the shining glory, the blazing light of God was manifest.  Peter, James and John were there and they fell over in a coma, traumatized by what they saw.  He put His doxa, doxology, His glory on display.  He never did exchange deity for humanity.  He didn't cease to be God.  Even hanging on the cross in the midst of His suffering, even in the moments when He was under the judgment of God His Father, even when He was bearing the weight of sin and the wrath of God against that sin, He did not for a millisecond cease to be the mighty God Himself hanging on that cross.

  The issue is not that He divested Himself of deity, but that He did not demand His rights as deity.  He set aside His prerogatives, His privileges, His rights.  In John 17 He says He set aside His heavenly glory to come to this sin-stained planet.  In John 5 He says He set aside His independent authority and He acted only according to the will of the Father.  He set aside His prerogatives when He said that I have the right, I have the power, I have the authority to do things which I do not do because of My humiliation.   Because He had willingly humbled Himself, He set aside things that He was entitled to.  For example, He says, "Of the day and the hour when He will come again, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son."  He set aside the prerogative of omniscience on occasion and then other times He knew what was in the heart of man because He was omniscient.  He self-limited His omniscience.  He self-limited His omnipotence, His great power.  If He wanted to, He could have called a legion of angels to rescue Him from the crucifixion, right?  But He didn't do that.  It was not that He ceased to be God, it was that He set aside the prerogatives of deity.  In heaven He was rich, but for our sakes He became poor.  He divested Himself of the riches of heaven.  He divested Himself of the constant company of holy angels and came down where He was constantly beset by demons.  He even came all the way down to endure an unfavorable relationship with the Father when all He had ever known was an eternal and divine love.  That's why He cried, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?"  Yet in all the things that He set aside, He was always God.

  The next statement explains this self-emptying.  It says in verse 6, "He did not regard equality with God something to be grasped, held onto, clutched, He emptied Himself and taking the form of a bondservant."  This is the character of the self-emptying.  It's a kind of service.  It's a kind of slavery.  Paradoxically Christ who is God and never ceases to be God becomes the servant of God.  And He says, "I only came to do what the Father shows Me to do.  I only do what the Father shows Me to do.  What I do the Spirit does through Me."  His kenosis was not a subtraction of His nature but it was a subtraction of His privileges.  He voluntarily became a slave.  See the word "form" there?  Taking the form of a bondservant, or slave, doulos?  Form is morphe again.  He didn't just superficially take on the shape of a slave.  He didn't dress like a slave and act like a slave or a servant.  He became one.  And the only other New Testament use of morphe other than here is in Mark 16:12 where it describes His resurrection body which is His permanent state even now.

  He literally took on the form of man as a part of His essential being so that even after the resurrection He is still the God/Man and He ascended as the God/Man visibly into heaven.  He is now seated at the right hand of God as the God/Man and He will come back the same way and every eye will see Him and He will reign on earth as the God/Man in Jerusalem for a thousand years, and then with His people forever in the new heaven and the new earth and always He will be the Christ that was manifest in the New Testament in human form.  He will have a glorified, resurrected body.  He came as a bondservant to serve the will of God, the purpose of God, to submit to the Father.  And He said in Luke 22:27, "I am among you as one who serves."  And He said in Matthew 20 and Mark 10, "The Son of Man has not come to be served, but to serve and give His life a ransom for many."  And His service was rendered toward God.  He became the bond slave of God, the servant of God.  He came down so far as a servant that if you read John 13 you'll see Him washing the filthy feet of the proud argumentative selfish disciples. 

  He humbled Himself all the way to becoming a servant.  He even said He had nowhere to lay His head.  He had only the clothes on His back.  He divested Himself of heavenly riches.  He was always borrowing.  He had to borrow a place to be born.  He had to borrow a place, He said, to lay His head.  He had to borrow a boat to ride in and preach from.  He had to borrow an animal to ride into the city of Jerusalem.  He had to borrow a room for the Passover.  He had to borrow a tomb to be buried in.  He is of all people who ever lived the one who had the greatest rights but waived them.  He is the heir to David's throne.  He is King of kings and Lord of lords.  But He came to serve His Father and those who were His Father's children by faith.

  And that's not all.  Verse 7 also says, "Emptying Himself, taking on the essential nature of a servant, He was made in the likeness of men."  And the language here again is very important.  "Made in the likeness of men," homoios oimate, it means that He was given the essential attributes of humanity.  He was given the essential attributes of humanity.  He was human in the fullest, truest sense.  I think some people assume that if He indeed was God in human form, He was a few months old lying in His mother's arms as the Creator of the universe and He was looking up at her and thinking, "Boy, Mary, you haven't got a clue who's here."  No.  He thought like a three-month old, and He thought like a six-month old, and He thought like a year old and two year old, and a child.  It wasn't until He was twelve years old that it really fully dawned on Him when He grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man that He was to do His Father's business.  He was truly human in every sense.   And He was at all points along that human chronology tempted like all people are tempted, yet He was without sin.  It says He was born of a woman, born under the Law, subject to the law of God like all other men are, born of a woman like all other men and women are.  Colossians 1:22 says of Him, "He has reconciled you in His fleshly body through death."  A real man in a real body dying as a true substitute for sinners.

  And a wonderful statement is made in Romans 8:3 concerning the humanity of Jesus.  It says, "For what the Law could not do because the Law can't save anybody because nobody can keep it, what the Law could not do weak as it was through the flesh, God did sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh."  He sent His Son in the likeness, not in sinful flesh, but He was made like all the rest of us who indeed possessed sinful flesh, yet He never sinned.  He was holy, harmless, undefiled, He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.

  Who is Jesus Christ?  He is, says the Scripture, the one who is in every sense God but who did not regard equality with God something to cling to but emptied Himself of His privileges, prerogatives and rights.  Took the form of a servant to serve the purposes of His Father and came down to become like men.  But He didn't just come down to be a good example.  He didn't just come down to show us how men ought to live.  Verse 8 takes it further.  "And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross."

  Let me just take that verse apart for a minute.  Again these are all critically important components.  Verse 8 begins, "And being found in appearance as a man," this advances the last point.  Having become man, Christ was then recognized as such by those who saw Him.  In the days of His flesh, as the writer of Hebrews calls it, He was viewed as a man.  As they looked at Him, they saw the appearance of a man.  And that is a reference to His outward schemati(?).  They saw that He appeared as a man.  They couldn't see His deity.  And so He appeared to be nothing more than a man...nothing more than that.  That was the judgment of the world that He was nothing but a man.  That's what He looked like and that's an affirmation of His true humanity.  The fact that they rejected Him as God, that they rejected His claim to deity, the fact that they thought His claims to deity were blasphemous, whenever He said He was God they picked up stones to stone Him, the Jews being so infuriated by a blasphemous claim to be God, indicates that they saw Him as nothing more than a man.  He was in the true morphe of God and in the true morphe of man but to them the God part was invisible.  It wasn't that they couldn't see that He was God by His works, they couldn't know that He was God by His profound words and by the character of His life, it's that they refused to believe that and so they were left with all that they could see with their blinded eyes, and that was His humanity.  He appeared to the world as nothing but a man.

  That's still the world's primary judgment on Him.  The world still looks at Him as perhaps a well-intentioned man, a good man, a noble man, a religious man, a peaceful man, or a peace loving man, a man who wanted to help, etc., etc.  Somewhat misguided man.  As the DaVinci Code would put it, "Just a man who fell in love with Mary Magdalene and had a baby."  Another blasphemous idea.  But He did appear as a man.  And that's testimony to His true humanity.  There have been people through the years who said He wasn't ever a man, He was just a floating spirit, came in and out of a body.  Look, they saw Him as a man, fully human.

  But there was more.  "Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself."  He was already humiliated when He was born.  He was already humiliated when He lived as a child and a young man.  He was already humiliated just being on this planet.  He was already humbled when He came down, but He wasn't humbled as far as He was going to be humbled.  He didn't get down here and say, "Look, that's as far as I'm going, I'm here, I'm not going lower than this."  He didn't fight back.  He didn't blast His rejecters and His detractors and His enemies and those who plotted His death.  He didn't fight back.  Even when they took Him into the mock trials, a sequence of trials prior to His crucifixion and they had false witnesses and trumped up lies and false testimony, He never ever responded.  When He was reviled, he reviled not again.  He never said to God, "That's enough humiliation, I'm not taking anymore."  He humbled Himself below taking on the form of a servant, belong being in the likeness of men, below appearing as nothing more than a man.  In verse 8 it says He became obedient to the point of death.  This is something completely foreign to God.  God is life.  He cannot die.  But the depth of this humbling, the depth of this condescension is that He comes all the way down not just to being human, not just to being a servant, but to death.  This was His ultimate "yes" to God.  This was His ultimate act of service.  "God, You want Me to die to pay the penalty for the sins of those who believe?  I will die." 

  This is His lowest hour.  It was not a natural death either.  It was an execution.  It was really a murder.  It was an unjust slaughter of the Son of God.  And it wasn't just death, he says going further, "It was death on a cross."  And we're still going down, folks.  We started down with the phrase, "He didn't regard equality with God a thing to be grasped." We went down when he emptied Himself, down when he became a bondservant, down when He became a man, down when all that could be seen was His humanity, down when He comes to the point of death, and down further because His death is death on a cross.  And that's why the text says, "Even death on a cross."  This is the most shocking feature of Christ's humiliation.  Crucifixion, you see, was the most horrific way to die.  Developed and perfected by the Persians, the Romans had picked up this form of execution.  It was the most painful, the most humiliation and the most cruel form of death imaginable.  A person basically was nailed by hands and feet to a cross, a wooden cross which was then dropped into a socket, ripping and tearing the flesh.  They hung suspended like that, the body slumping and being held basically only by two wounds through the hands.  The feet usually nailed together with one nail against a little block had some leverage to push up so that the victim could breathe, otherwise suffocation would take place.  So against the wounds and the feet, the victim hanging on the cross is pushing up, pushing up trying to catch breath.  The sun is blazing, the mouth is parched, the blood loss through those four great wounds is immense, the blood loss through the crown of thorns adds to the horror.  This is an unthinkable inhuman way to execute people.  And some people would hang like that for several days, depending upon their strength and the configuration of their crucifixion.  Crucifixion was only for the scum, the riff-raff, the non-Roman citizens.  The only way a Roman citizen could be crucified was if they committed a crime against the state.  It was hated by the jews, they despised it because there was one occasion where hundreds of Pharisees were crucified.  And the Romans had filled Israel with crucifixions.  Some historians think there were as many as 30 thousand people crucified around the time of Jesus.  That's how the Romans kept everybody in line.  You step out of line, that's where you end up.  And they lined all the highways with crosses and they stripped the land of trees to make them.  No dignified person would ever be put on a cross, only the rankest of criminals, the lowest of the low, the worst of the worse.

  To put somebody on a cross was unthinkable.  The Jews on occasion did put a body on a cross, but only after it was dead.  If the body was a body of a blasphemer because Deuteronomy says, "Cursed is he that's hanged on a tree," but they would never crucify a living person, too horrific.  It was the ultimate in human degradation.  But Jesus came all the way down to that...all the way down to that.  And He who knew no sin bore the punishment of sin for us and the just one was crucified for us, the unjust.  And He was wounded for our transgressions, as the prophet said, He was bruised for our iniquities.  He died in our place. 

  No one could ever imagine that God would do such a thing.  If we had planned the arrival of God in the world, it wouldn't look like that, would it?  We would want to make sure that He arrived in a palace, not a manger.  We would want to make sure that He was born into wealth, that He was educated in the finest schools, prep schools, universities under the most elite teachers.  We would want to make sure that He was cared for and nurtured and attended to and honored and loved and lifted up and exalted and believed in.  We'd never let Him be born in a stable.  We'd never let a bunch of stinking low-class shepherds around Him.  We'd never let Him come into a family of poverty, a carpenter's son.  We would never let God come down with no earthly goods, no formal education and then surround Him with a rag tagged bunch of no name, nobodies with no worldly qualifications to do anything.  We would never let God be that humiliated.  We'd certainly never let Him be cursed, we'd never let Him be mocked, we'd never let Him be spit on, we'd never let Him be crucified.  But then we'd never be saved.  This is the incarnation.  This is who He is.  This is why He came.

  The story doesn't end in verse 8, by the way.  Verse 9 says this, "Therefore also God highly exalted Him." What a statement.  God highly exalted Him.    What did God do to exalt Him?  Well what did He do three days after He was crucified?  The Father raised Him from the dead, didn't He?  First point of the Father's exaltation was the resurrection.  And by God raising Christ from the dead, God affirmed the validity of His sacrifice.  And He raised Him from the dead to say what Jesus had said on the cross, "It's finished." And then the second thing happened forty days later, He ascended into heaven.  First His resurrection, then His ascension.  And when He reached heaven, He sat down at the right-hand of the Father in His exaltation.  The Bible says that when He went to heaven, He sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high, He took His place on the throne.  He was exalted in His resurrection.  He was exalted in His ascension.  He was exalted in His coronation.  And He's also exalted in His intercession, for He ever lives to intercede for all who come to Him.  God highly exalted Him.

  And then verse 9 says, "God gave Him a name, He bestowed on Him a name which is above every name."  Some people think that's the name Jesus.  That's not it.  The name Jesus is just like the name Joseph.  The name Jesus is just a name.  That's not the name above every name. The name above every name is Lord, sovereign.  And He gave Him a name which is above every name, that name is Lord, and Lord of lords.  He sat Him on the throne, verse 10 says that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow...at the name of Jesus.  The name of Jesus, not Jesus but kurios, Lord.  At the name given to Jesus, the name Lord, every knee bows.  You bow beneath the Lord, which means the Master.  You bow, every knee should bow...every knee will bow...every knee must bow and He means every knee.  Those who are in heaven, angels, cherubim, seraphim, ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands of angelic beings.  And the saints, the glorified saints who are there, every knee in heaven bows.  And on earth, men and women, they don't all bow by choice, some do, most will bow by compulsion.  The day will come when those who refuse to bow to Christ as Lord in life will bow to Him in judgment.  And even those under the earth, demons, damned fallen angels, they bow...they bear His wrath, they feel His fury forever.  Everybody bows eventually. 

  And eventually, verse 11 says, every tongue confesses Jesus Christ is Lord...everybody.  Nobody escapes that.  You do it willingly, or you're forced.  You do it now and you're forgiven and you will gladly bow in heaven.  You reject Him now and you will bow one day at the seat of judgment and feel His wrath forever.  The word "confess" is to acknowledge...to acknowledge.  Every tongue will one day acknowledge Jesus as Lord.  That's who He is.  He is the ruler.  That is the most important confession in the Christian faith.

  You want to be a Christian?  Here's how.  Confess with your mouth, Romans 10:9, Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, which is the affirmation of His lordship.  That is the heart of Christianity.  He came down that He might go up.  All of this, it says, to the glory of God the Father.

  Back to C.S. Lewis for a moment.  He suggests that in a unique way God has sort of written into our lives and the world in which we live this idea of descent and re-ascent, that is most significantly true of our Lord.  He says it's the pattern of all vegetable life.  It must belittle itself into something hard, something small and deathlike, a seed.  It must fall into the ground and thence the new life re-ascends.  It is the pattern of all animal generation.  There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum and in the dark womb a life at first inferior and kind to that of the species which is being produced.  Then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo to the living conscious life.  It is so...he says...in our moral and emotional life.  The first innocent spontaneous desires have to submit to the deathlike process of control and total denial.  But from that there is a re-ascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way.  Death and rebirth, death and rebirth, death and rebirth, go down to go up, it's a principle in life.  Through this bottleneck, he says, through this belittlement the high road is found.

  We live in a world where you go down before you go up.  And certainly the greatest truth in that regard is the condescension, the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ.  The question then is this, Jesus is God, the God/Man who came all the way down to die on the cross to pay the penalty for your sins.  God was so pleased with His sacrifice that He exalted Him to heaven, made Him Lord over all and will cause every person who has ever lived and every angel who ever has been created to bow to Him, either willingly or unwillingly, either in the joy of heaven, or the punishment of hell.  Everyone will confess Jesus as Lord.  You do it now, to your eternal blessing.  Or you do it later, to your eternal cursing.

  Who is Jesus Christ?  The text could not be more clear.  The question then is what will you do with Christ?  That is the question that was asked, you remember the Roman's leader says to the people, "What shall I do then with Jesus?"  That's the question you have to answer, too.  What are you going to do with Him?  You either acknowledge Him as Savior and bow your knee willingly, or you reject Him and one day you will acknowledge Him as judge and bow your knee unwillingly.  Join me in a word of prayer.

  As we, Lord, have contemplated the glory of Christ, the greatness of this Scripture that opens up for us the wonder of the incarnation, it comes right down to our lives.  It's not something at a distance, it's not something obscure, far off, it comes right down to everyone of us because every knee will bow...every knee, in heaven, on earth, under the earth.  Every one every where, every conscious created being will bow to the One who is Lord.  And You will give us, Lord, the opportunity to do so even now, to confess You as Lord and thus to be delivered from judgment, forgiven of sin and given eternal life so that we can enjoy the heaven of which we sung earlier tonight.  We pray, God, that You would be gracious to people tonight who are here who have not bowed their knees, may they willingly confess You as Lord, believing that You died for them and rose from the dead, turning from sin to embrace You and to obey You, even as You obeyed Your Father and humbled Yourself we would do the same.  We pray, God, that You would be gracious to every heart here and that You would produce in them the conviction of sin and the confidence in Christ that leads to faith in His death and resurrection so that no one here will of necessity be forced to bow under the weight of divine wrath and judgment but that all will bow under the offer of grace.  And so we commend this to You in the name of Christ.  Amen.

  ---

  

  The Sufficiency of Christ Alone

  Colossians 2:8-23

   

  Does it seem maybe bizarre, maybe a little strange, if not simplistic, to say that Jesus Christ is the answer and He alone and He is the complete answer and there isn't anything else.  Is it really that clear?  Is it really that simple?  Is it really that straightforward?

  Well that's exactly what the Bible says and that's exactly what Jesus claimed.  I just read a survey that said the vast majority of people in America believe Jesus actually was God, more than three fourths of them.  Well if they believe He was God, then they probably ought to take what He says as true.  And what He said above all other things is that He's the only Savior.  He is the answer and the only answer to the longing of every human heart.  The Bible simply says, "In Him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge."  It's all summed up in Him.  That comes out of Colossians chapter 2.  "In Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." That is a statement that is really bold.  In fact, you might say in today's vernacular, that's over the top.  Come on, all wisdom, all knowledge, all that wisdom and knowledge has to offer is found in Jesus Christ?

  You say, "Well, are we really supposed to accept that?  Isn't that just a religious viewpoint?"  No, that's an authoritative statement in Scripture, that's in verse 3 of Colossians 2.  And verse 4 says, "I say this in order that no one may delude you with a persuasive argument."  Don't let anybody deceive you by trying to convince you that that is in fact not true.  It is in Christ that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found.  Everything that has value is summed up in Him, everything that has to do with meaning in this life and the life to come, everything related to life and death and eternity.  And as we heard tonight again, everything related to joy and peace and fulfillment and putting your soul at rest, everything is found in Him.

  The writer of Hebrews in the New Testament says that, "He made perfect forever those who are set apart to Him."  In the tenth verse of Colossians 2 it is said another way, "In Him you have been made complete."  It's all wrapped up in Him. 

  In college I took that philosophy class and I dug deeply into the foundations of western philosophy in particular and the flow of western philosophy.  It was very helpful to me to sort of be able to sort that out.  Later on I became even more fascinated by it.  Read a very important book in philosophy written by a guy that I think is the most insightful and effective and impactful student of philosophy in its historical setting, a man by the name of Paul Johnson who wrote a book called The Intellectuals.  In that book I looked not only deeply into the thinking of the people who were the architects of western theology but even more deeply into the life of these people and found them, without exception, to be base and immoral to the core and coming up with a kind of philosophy that accommodated their own personal immorality.  So human philosophy from my vantage point didn't offer anything that moved me one inch from my biblical convictions.  In fact, everything it had to offer only solidified me in those convictions.  And I am very content to say that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, all that really matters, all that has value, all that you would call a treasure is truly found in Christ.  And I found that to be true long ago, and it was tested during those days of my education and here I am decades later telling you that it is still absolutely and unequivocally my conviction that I have found completeness in Christ.

  The Apostle Paul writing in the book of Ephesians put it another way.  He said, "You are blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies," that is that come from God, "in Christ."  You have a lot of superlatives when you talk about what comes in Christ.  The Apostle Paul again in Philippians chapter 3, and by the way, he was an educated man.  Not only was he educated in Jewish theology, but he was educated in philosophy as well.  And he says this in Philippians 3, "I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish."  And he used a very gross word, one of the most gross words in the Greek language to describe all human knowledge and all false religion.  He had in school and educated not only in Judaism as a Pharisee, he was...he was educated to the max in Judaism but he was also educated in the Gentile world where he had been raised.  And he understood it all and he said it was all rubbish.  Everything he ever knew could be set aside and counted loss compared to Christ.  These are really monumental statements.

  All the answers you need for time and eternity are in Christ.  All the answers for your soul, all the answers for your sin, all the answers for your hope for the life to come, they're all in Christ and only in Christ.  There is no other authority in the Bible, there is no other Savior than Jesus Christ and you will find everything you could ever desire or need in Him.  That's why, again going back to Colossians 2 and verse 10, "In Him you have been made complete."  You have been made complete.

  We often think today that Christ is a part of our lives.  He's maybe an important part but not all.  We need Christ plus philosophy...we need Christ plus psychology...we need Christ plus ritual...Christ plus ceremony...Christ plus some miraculous experience or Christ plus some mystical intuition...or Christ plus some bodily self-denial or immolation.  We need to do something to hurt ourselves in order to gain merit with God, or we need to do something to transcend this world to have some kind of mystical experience to really know God, or something like that.  Or somehow we need to have an angelic visitation, or somehow we need to live a life of conformity to certain ceremony and certain ritual.  But the Bible says it's all in Christ and it's all in knowing Christ. 

  This whole epistle focuses on Him because if you go back to chapter 1 verse 13 it says, "He delivered us from the domain of darkness," that is, God did, "and transferred us into the Kingdom of His beloved Son."  Everybody lives in a kingdom.  Everybody has a king.  There are two possible kingdoms, two possible kings.  You can live under king Satan, or King God.  You can live in the kingdom of darkness, or you can live in the Kingdom of light.  You can live in the kingdom of evil, or the kingdom of righteousness.  God by His grace delivers us from the kingdom of darkness, the domain of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son.  And when you come into the knowledge of Christ and He becomes your King, that's how you enter His Kingdom and immediately the Bible says you have redemption, you are bought back from judgment.  You are bought back from punishment.  You are bought back from hell because Christ paid the price.  You have the forgiveness of sins, all the sins you have ever or would ever commit are forgiven because their penalty was paid by the death of Christ.  Everything comes down to Christ, everything.  It was through Him that sinners are reconciled to God.  It was through Him that we are transformed and converted and regenerated and born again.  Everything comes through Him.

  Now let's look at chapter 2 for a minute, and I just want to show you a few things that Paul directly speaks to, the tend to clutter this simplicity in Christ.  Paul wrote, you remember, to the Corinthians and He said, "I'm worried about you.  I...I'm very concerned about you," because false teachers were coming in and confusing them. And he says this, 2 Corinthians 11:3, "I'm afraid that in the same way that the serpent in the garden deceived Eve by his cleverness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity that belongs to Christ."  We're talking about something that is pure and simple, Christ is everything.  And apart from Him there are no answers either for time or eternity.

  There are four points that Paul wants to make in chapter 2 of Colossians that assault the simplicity of Christ and the sufficiency of Christ.  Four of them, philosophy, legalism, mysticism and asceticism. 

  Let's talk first about philosophy.  Verse 8, Colossians 2, in this context of saying that in Christ are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, that you're complete in Him, that He is the one who is the image of the invisible God, as chapter 1 verse 15 says, He is the one by whom all things were created, He is the one who is the supreme authority, He is the one who is before all things and holds all things together.  He is the one in whom all the fullness of the Father dwells, He is the one and He alone who reconciles all things to Himself, who made peace by the blood of His cross, He is the everything.  In response to that Paul says in verse 8, "See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world rather than according to Christ."  Don't let anybody distract you from Christ.  Don't let anybody take you captive and pull you away from the single commitment to Christ.

  Verse 9, "For in Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form and in Him you've been made complete."  This refers to whatever systems men invent, whatever ideologies, philosophies, psychologies, theories, religions.  Cults and isms and chisms abound all over everywhere.  Everybody's got his own little hip-pocket idea of God and truth and Christ and how the Bible fits in, etc., etc., etc.  Philosophers, authors, playwrights, novelists, academicians, movie producers, talk show hosts, psychologists, sociologists, religious leaders ad infinitum, ad nauseum have their opinions about everything.  There is this endless verbosity, isn't there, streaming across our radios and our screens and in the literature that we read from books all the way to newspapers and everybody has his view of life and everybody has his view of morality.  And no matter what view you espouse and you put it in the column in the newspaper, there's going to be a stack of letters to the editor and you're going to have at least 15 people spinning their own thing in response to yours.  No wonder people find it difficult to know where to land, to know what to believe in a world with so many opinions.  And, of course, we now live in a post-modern world which means that there really is no truth, no true truth, no absolute truth.  Everybody comes up with his own idea of what truth is and you've got your truth and you've got your truth...that's great, I'm so glad you have your truth and I'm so glad I have my truth.  And it's just everywhere.  And so, Paul says, "Look, see to it that no one takes you captive.

  It's a rare word, sulagogeo, it means to carry you off like plunder.  Sula is the word booty, treasure; ogo is to carry away, don't let anybody haul you off, take you captive.  It was used in later Greek writings, it's rare around the biblical times, but it was used in later Greek writings to refer to kidnaping, or plundering a house, or seducing a maid, or taking people captive in a war.  Don't let anybody kidnap your mind, kidnap your soul, seduce or plunder you by philosophy, the study of wisdom, human reason.  Don't let anybody move you away from Christ by viewpoints, world views, values, morality, principles that come from human wisdom.  He says this philosophy is empty deception.  You could read it this way, "See to it that no one seduces you, plunders you, robs your soul through human wisdom, even empty deceit."  Philosophy is empty deceit.  It is an empty lie.  It is a delusion because it sounds good, it attracts the mind, it seduces the mind, it has certain properties of rationality, but it has no spiritual value at all.  Why?  Because verse 8 says it is according to the tradition of men.  It's human.  If you want to know divine truth, if you want to know supernatural truth, don't go to a human source.  It's that simple.  Because all you're going to get out of a human source is human wisdom.  And human wisdom does not transcend time and space.  It is just inadequate human thinking and, 1 Corinthians 2:14 says, the natural man understands not the things of God.  How can he know them?  They're spiritual.  They're not in his dimensions. 

  It's amazing how often people will say, "Well, I think this about God, and I think that about God."  Well just why would I believe what you think about God is authoritative?  How did you, by the way, get out of your time/space environment to say that about God and think that you actually knew the truth?  We're talking about transcendent God, we're talking about a God who is outside our world.  I'm going to have to have information about God that He Himself has delivered.  We live in a box, time/space box.  We bang around in here and we draw all kinds of conclusions.  But nobody ever gets out and God is on the outside.  The only way we will ever know God is not that some of us can crawl through a hole somewhere and say, "Oh, you know, there He is," it's not going to happen.  The only way we could ever know is if God invaded the box from the outside, and He did.  And He gave us a revelation in Scripture, and then He gave us a revelation in human flesh, Jesus Christ.  And that's God bursting into our world.

  What are you going to find out of philosophy?  I've often said this about philosophy, philosophy is the search for the truth but you never find it.  If they ever found it, class would be over.  So you get a degree for looking.  It's inadequate.  You can't get there from here.  It is...he says further... "According to the elementary principles of the world."  It's earthbound.  It's just this system talking to itself.  It's not transcendent.  It's not from the outside.  Rudiments means ABCs, it's baby talk.  It's amazing to think about that.  But you talk about a philosopher and usually you're talking about the elite minds of any age, or any society, those who are the philosophers are usually considered to be the great brain trust, you know, the people who are off the chart on the IQ test, the geniuses who think in levels of complexity that stagger most of us.  But the truth is, no matter how intelligent they are, no matter how capable they are of processing information and retaining it in their heads and sorting it through and drawing conclusions, they may stagger us with that, they're still in the box and it's nothing but the ABCs of the world.  In a sense, it's baby talk, the kind of thing you hear the mumbling, stumbling baby talk of one who hasn't the capability to make any connection with the rational world.  They think they're advanced, they're not.  They're primitive.  They're not advanced, it's just the opposite, they're retarded when it comes to truth.  Human wisdom may be an exhibition of brain power but it has no ability to grasp the truth which is beyond human capability.  And so what happens is, it's proud about its baby talk and it is truthfully nothing more than the infantile musings of poverty-stricken minds.  You can't know the truth about eternity, you can't know the truth about origins, you can't know the truth about consummation of the ages, you can't know the truth about heaven and hell, you can't know the truth about the world of God unless God comes and tells you...and that's what this is, a supernatural book.

  He came not only in the truth written, but in the truth incarnate in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Philosophy does not advance man, it goes the other way.  It regresses him, it keeps him ever increasingly infantile.  So beware of philosophy.

  There's a second issue here and if you would drop down to verse 16, I'll talk about this one for a minute.  Here's another thing that intrudes into this simplicity of knowing Christ, "Let no one act as your judge in regard to food or drink, or in respect to a festival or a new moon, or a Sabbath day, things which are a mere shadow of what is to come but the substance belongs to Christ."  You're complete in Christ.  In Him all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found.  He is the substance and all that mentioned in verse 16 is just the shadow.

  What he's talking about here is external religion.  What he's talking here about is ceremony, ritual.  And, I mean, it's characteristic of religion that it has its rituals.  It was a characteristic of Judaism which Paul is primarily addressing.  You see, they wanted to sit in judgment on people as to what they ate.  Were they kosher or not in their diet?  And did they observe the appropriate festival?  And did they...did they maintain the Sabbath day?  And then those special new moon Sabbaths?  That was their big issue.  Ritual, did they bow down?  Did they genuflect?  Did they participate in the mass?  Did they light the candles?  Did they say their beads?  Did they go through whatever ritual they needed to go through?  Did they have fastings?  Did they go through ceremonial washings?  Did they participate in rites and duties and behaviors that are intended somehow mechanically to convey some kind of divine connection?  Paul says, "Don't get led astray by that.  Don't think for a minute that some external activity, some external event in which you participate is necessary."  The Jews were even saying that, and some of them claimed to be Christians in the time of the New Testament, that look, if you're a Christian, God's not going to accept you even though you believe in His Son unless you're circumcised.  And they were making issues out of being circumcised, as verse 11 in this passage mentions.  They were saying, "Well, God's not going to accept you unless you've been circumcised." And Paul in other places says, "Forget circumcision, that had a place in the past, that was a picture, that was a shadow.  Sabbath had a place, it was showing you something to come.  Dietary laws had a place, they separated you from the nations around you to protect you from the intrusion of their false religious systems.  All that God gave you had a place of protecting, preserving you and depicting the reality to come but the reality is here, Christ is here, set the shadow aside, the substance is here, you don't need the ritual."

  When you say to someone who says, "Well what does it mean to be a Christian?  Does it mean that  I need to go to this event and that event?  Is that how I guarantee my place in heaven?  Do I need to do these rituals and say these prayers and recite these things and light these candles, etc., etc., whatever the rituals are?"  Paul says no.  You'll want, as you heard in testimony tonight, you'll want to be with God's people, you'll want to be with the body of Christ, the church, you'll want to worship the Lord because you're going to love Him, you're going to love His people, You're going to love His Word, you'll want to do all that.  But no external activity contributes anything to you that somehow Christ hasn't done.  When you give your life to Christ, that's it.  That's the full package.  And you come like today because your heart brings you because you want to sing and you want to fellowship and you want to rejoice and you want to share and you want to enjoy the ministry that goes on because you love the things that Christ has given you.  There are always those legalistic people who say, "Well Christ isn't all, you have to do this and you have to do that, and you have to do the other or you're not going to make it  True spirituality is based on externals."  He says in verse 16, "Don't let anybody act in judgment on you on that stuff.  It's Christ and only Christ.

  And there's a third issue here, down in verse 18, very interesting, mysticism.  This historically, and even today, we don't have time to develop all of it, but historically and even today is always played into religion.  You know, mysticism and religion kind of go together and there is this idea that when you're religious...people talk about it today, "I'm very spiritual."  You hear people say that?  "I'm very spiritual, I really work on my spiritual side."  Who knows what they're talking about?  But they're generally talking about some kind of mystical thing.  And by mysticism you mean the idea that somehow you can connect with God through some elevation of your mind, some intuitive experience, some feeling, some longing somehow lifts you up and you connect.  Somehow there's a higher spiritual experience, you know.  Some people think they can stand on the shore and look at the ocean and touch God.  No.  You can say there is God because look...but you're not going to have an experience with God there.  Some people think that when they see beauty or feel the breeze or get in the woods, they're feeling God.  No, they're just feeling the breeze.

  He says in verse 18, "Let no one keep defrauding you..."  See, people want to attack the truth, the simplicity in Christ.  They want to attack it with philosophy.  They want to attack it with legalism.  Now they want to attack it with mysticism.  "Let no one defraud, steal your prize by delighting in self-abasement."  And this is one of the ways in which mysticism works, self-abasement.  These are people who think that somehow if they just take a vow of poverty, you know, strip themselves of everything, "I'm not going to be married, and I'm going to own nothing and I'm going to go into a cave and contemplate my navel for the rest of my life.  I will some how by this self-abasement rise to a higher level of spirituality."  There are people who go around their whole life with little needles and things in their shoes and rocks, some of them wear belts that have tacks on the inside just to irritate their flesh and cause it to bleed cause somehow they think that this is going to induce some transcendental connection to God. 

  There are those who get involved in worshiping angels.  The Essenes did this.  They were one of the sects of Judaism in the day of the New Testament.  Roman Catholicism has been involved in that.  And there are many...Roman Catholicism has a whole section in their theology on the veneration of angels.  Somehow you can transcend this life and touch the throne of God by connecting with angels.  I remember listening to the testimony of one Charismatic woman who said that their plane was wobbling coming into Chicago one night, which anybody who flies into Chicago has experienced.  And she looked out the window and there was a big angel holding up one wing.  Personally I only drink the 7 Up, you know.  And so this makes her somehow transcendent.  This is a woman who's got a mystical experience.  This is someone...look, I've flown a lot of times, I've never seen a big angel holding up anything.  You know, this is a very intimidating thing for just us poor people who are counting on nothing but Christ.  And then there are those people, not just angels, but verse 18 says, "Who take a stand on visions, on things they've seen, secret revelations."  I had a woman say to me one time, "I don't really care what the Bible says, I know what Jesus told me."  Boy, that's a bizarre statement.  You don't care what the Bible says, you...you know what Jesus told you?  That's very intimidating to those of us to whom He's never said anything.  Jesus never said a word to me in my whole life, never heard Him.  God's never said a word to me.  The only time God ever speaks to me is in His Word, the Scripture.  Doesn't God lead you?  Sure.  But I don't have any...I don't have any way to know that.  I don't have a red light on my head that when God's prompting me it goes around.  It's Me...and yet you have a whole movement of people today who take their stand on their so-called visions, their so-called secret revelations, their trips to heaven, their visions of God, their encounters with Jesus, encounters with angels.  Paul says, "You know what?  That defrauds you."  That's strong language.  Stay away from that, that will rob your spiritual life and your reward.  Why?  Because it will cause you to trust in something that cannot be true and you will then give to that a greater authority than you give to this.  And you've been defrauded.

  Evangelicalism is filled with people being defrauded by false visions.  Also he says in verse 18, "You become inflated without cause in your fleshly mind."  You get proud.  I think in some ways, and I'm not trying to pick on people, but I watch these televangelists and I think if there's anything about them that is hard for me to accept, it is their pride.  It's just over the top sense of importance, self-importance.  I mean, you must think you're pretty important if God talks to you just about every day.  Gives you visions, revelations, sends angels to do all these things.  The problem is, you see, verse 19, "These people do not hold fast to the head."  Who's the head?  Christ.  He's the head.  Back in verse 18 chapter 1, "He's the head of the body of the church.  He's the beginning.  He's the one."  All of a sudden Christ isn't the issue anymore, you are with all your visions and all your mystical experiences.  You cannot exalt Christ and you at the same time, it doesn't work. 

  Watch for those who want to corrupt the simplicity of Christ with human philosophy and wisdom and psychology and all that.  Watch those who want to corrupt the simplicity that's in Christ with legalism and rules and rituals and external ceremonies and quote/unquote sacraments that somehow are necessary in their minds to connect you to God.  Watch those who want to exalt mystical supposed supernatural experiences that are nothing more than the imaginations of their own mind, designed in many cases to manipulate people into thinking they are some great ones from God and thereby making them, in many cases, wealthy.

  There's one other one, asceticism.  That's a word you don't hear used much.  Asceticism.  This takes me back to something I said earlier.  Go down to verse 20.  "If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, if you..."  Let me tell you what happened when you come to Christ.  You die to this world.  You do.  I mean, it's over.  You're out of this world, it's behind you, it's in your past and you now live in a new world, the Kingdom of god, the Kingdom of God's dear Son, the realm of salvation, the forgiveness of sins, you're complete in Him, you have all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.  So, if that's true, why as if you were still living in the world do you submit yourself to decrees such as "do not handle, do not taste, do not touch?" What is this?  This is asceticism.  This is back to the monk in the cave.  This is back to the people who take an extreme view.  You have people today, Rastifarians  would be one group who don't wash their hair.  That is some kind of transcendental religious conviction that takes them to another spiritual level.  That's not new.  Did you know in the Middle Ages there were holy vermin?  Yeah, that's right.  Holy vermin, how did you get that?  You never bathed your whole life and you had vermin and they decided it was holy vermin.  Why would you go back to that kind of stuff?  Why would you go back to some level of ridiculous self-denial?  This is just verse 22, he says, "Destined to perish," and it's just more of the commandments and teachings of men. 

  Now verse 23 tells you why people do this.  "They have the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion."  You see some times flagellating themselves and it has the appearance of wisdom and self-made religion and humility.  It has the appearance, he says actually in verse 23, severe treatment of the body and they're oh so religious, severely treating the body, flagellating the body, having holy vermin.  You can even read in church history about men who had themselves castrated in order to eliminate lust and they paraded themselves as eunuchs for God.  And the truth of the matter is, that was severe treatment of the body, but look at the end of verse 23, it has no value against fleshly indulgence.  It is worthless.

  Asceticism is worthless.  Anything you do to your body is worthless in terms of spiritual benefit, other than submitting your body in obedience to the truth of God.  And you can only do that if Christ is alive and you've been transformed.  Everything you ever need is in Christ.  And don't you allow yourself to be corrupted by the thought you can have Christ but you have to also have human wisdom, you have Christ but...you need more, He's not enough, you have Christ but you need to keep all the external rules.  I lived a portion of my life under that and it just kills your love for Christ.  Oh you have Christ, that's good, but oh if you only had Christ plus transcendental experiences and if you only spoke in a heavenly language, and if you only had visions, and if you only interacted with angels.  Oh you have Christ, but are you inflicting pain on yourself?  Are you abasing yourself?  Are you shaving your head?  Living in some self-denial?  Paul says you don't need any of it, all you need is Christ and Christ alone.  All is in Him, complete transformation, complete forgiveness, complete victory and you can't do anything to add to Christ.

  Now to close, look at verse 11.  "In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ."  You know what circumcision was, and what it is.  Among the Jews it was symbolic, it indicated that they needed to be cleansed.  They needed to be cleansed.  There was wickedness in their very nature.  And you might think, well that's such strange operation for God to choose, why did He choose that?  Because it pointed to the wretchedness of man at the most dramatic in the most dramatic way.  If you want to understand that we're sinners, how would you understand that?  Well you say we can listen to what you say and we know you're going to manifest sin when you speak.  We can watch what you do and you're going to sin when you do things. 

  You can pretty well guard your mouth, right?, if you want to.   You can hang around somebody a long time and maybe they would guard their tongue and you really wouldn't know how sinful they were.  You can hang around somebody and if you were there and they knew you were there, they might not conduct their lives in a sinful way.  But if you really want to know how sinful we are as human beings, then you only have to see one thing and that is what kind of children do we produce?  Sinners, and sinners, and sinners and sinners, and sinners and sinners.  The most profound illustration of human sinfulness is in what it reproduces, and that is what the whole point was in circumcision.  God was simply saying you need a cleansing at the very basic root of human nature.  And the actual physical surgery was only a symbol of what God knew you needed in your heart.  You need a profound cleansing at the very core of your nature.  And that's what Paul is saying.  We receive that when we come to Christ, a real circumcision, the removal of, this is wonderful, the body of the flesh, the removal of that condemning power of the flesh.  Also, when we come to Christ we are buried, verse 12 says, with Him in baptism.  This isn't talking about water, water symbolizes that.  But we're buried with Him literally in His death.  We die with Him on the cross and we rise with Him, it says.  This is a complete transformation.  When you come to Christ, there is a deep cleansing and that's why you heard these people in the testimony saying, "I used to be like this and I used to be like this and this is what I did and this is what I wanted, and this is what I desired, and now all of that is changed."  Why?  Because there's been a real cleansing and there's been a real death of the old life and they have risen through their faith in Jesus Christ.  It's as if they died on the cross with Him and their sins were all punished and they rose from the grave with Him to new life.  And verse 13 explains it another way, you used to be dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, but He made you alive and He's forgiven all your transgressions.  This is it, you come to Christ, takes you through the grave.  The old dies, you rise in new life, all the past is gone, all your sins are forgiven and you have a new righteous desire.

  Verse 14 adds, "He canceled the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us which was hostile to us and took it out of the way, nailing it to the cross."  You know, when they nailed a criminal to the cross, they would put the crime on the cross.  On the top of the cross they would put the crime and so everybody would know why he was executed.  And when they nailed Jesus on the cross, Paul says, they wrote your sins up there and then canceled it because the penalty was paid.  Satan has no more any power over you either.  Verse 15, "Because Christ disarmed the rulers and authorities," meaning the demonic powers, "triumphing over them." 

  You come to Christ, you receive the forgiveness of sins.  You come to Christ, you receive a new nature, a new disposition, a new heart that loves righteousness.  You come to Christ and you die to the past and you rise to new life.  You come to Christ and you're delivered from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His dear Son.  You come to Christ and you literally come to the truth that transcends, the truth you'll never find anywhere except in the Word of God and even this truth you'll never understand until the Spirit of God takes up residence and becomes your teacher, and then you know the deep things of God.  It's all in Christ.  All truth, all wisdom, all knowledge, all understanding, all peace, all joy, all value, all fulfillment, all satisfaction, all purpose, all deliverance, all strength, all comfort, and all eternal hope is in Christ.  To have Him is to have everything.  Not to have Him is to have nothing.

  ---

  

  The Authenticity of the Risen Savior

  Matthew 28:11-13

  In the tenth chapter of Romans and verse 9, there's a very important statement there.  The Bible says this, "If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved." That's a very definitive statement.  Saved from what?  Saved from divine judgment.  Saved from eternal hell.  Saved from punishment.  Saved from your sin.  Saved from guilt.  How is one saved from that?  If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead you shall be saved.

  One of the things that must be believed in order for a person to be delivered from sin and death and judgment and hell is the resurrection of Christ.  And so I want to talk about that and I want you to look at the end of the gospel of Matthew.  Matthew is the first gospel in the New Testament, the first record in the order of the New Testament, record of the life and ministry of Jesus.  And, of course, Matthew culminates his gospel with the history of our Lord's resurrection.

  There was a scientist many years ago in Canada by the name of G.B. Hardy who was searching for the true religion.  And he said, "I really have only two questions.  One, has anybody ever cheated death?  And two, did he make a way for me to follow?  Those are my only two questions."  And he went on a search and he found that Buddha's tomb was occupied.  And so was Mohammed's and so was every other religious leader who ever lived.  But Jesus' tomb has been empty since three days after He was crucified.  This was a profound discovery, that this Jesus who claimed to be God validated that claim by rising from the dead.  That answered the first question.  And the second question, did He make a way for me to do it as well was answered by the words of Jesus who Himself said, "Because I live, you shall live also."  His resurrection then becomes the guarantee of our resurrection.  His resurrection is not only the proof that He is God but it is the prototype of our own resurrection.

  You cannot accept the Jesus of the Bible and not accept His resurrection.  And if you acknowledge that He rose from the dead by His own divine power, then He stands alone as absolutely unique, for no one has ever been able to raise himself from the dead.  We look for the reality of life after death.  That's not foreign to us.  Even Solomon said in articulating human wisdom in Ecclesiastes 3:11, "God has set eternity in their heart."  Part of being human is feeling the pull of eternity.  Part of being human is having built into you reason, an understanding of cause and effect which takes you back to the original cause which has to be God.  Part of being human is having moral law written in your heart.  Part of being human is having a conscience that excuses or accuses you when you do what is good or what is evil.  And part of being human is feeling the tug of immortality.  And that's why Hardy asks the question.  What happens after I die?  Whether you're talking about American Indians who used to bury the pony with the warrior who died so that he would have a horse to ride at the happy hunting ground, or the Greeks who were buried with a silver coin in their mouth so they could pay the fare across the mystic river.  Or the Pharaohs who were buried in the pyramids with a solar boat so they could sail through the future life.  Eternity is written in the human heart.  It's just not acceptable to us, to most of us, that we are protoplasm waiting to become manure and make the flowers grow at the cemetery.  There is something in us that reaches out to immortality and is planted there by God.  And to put it simply, you will live forever.  You will live forever somewhere.  The question is whether you have an eternal life with God or an eternal death in punishment away from Him, a deathlike existence.

  And in order to be sure that you have eternal life, the Bible says you must confess Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead.  You must believe that Jesus died as a sacrifice for sin and rose from the dead.  Now there are certainly many people who are skeptical about the resurrection and they want to deny the resurrection.  It's particularly a quasi scholarly thing to do.  To come up with the idea, if you're a professor at some university or if you're a research person or sort of self-styled scholar, even a recognized scholar, it's...it's sort of popular, it sort of goes with that territory to be skeptical of the Bible, about everything in the Bible, for that matter, to be skeptical about Jesus' virgin birth, to be skeptical about His deity, to be skeptical about His miracles, to be skeptical about His death and certainly to be skeptical about His resurrection.  But the Bible gives the record of His resurrection.  And it also gives the record that there were many people who saw Him after He was raised, over 500 people.  In fact, 500 saw Him at one time and that's a historical record laid down for us not once but several times in the gospels and reiterated through the rest of the New Testament, affirming the reality of that by the testimony of others. 

  What are the explanations if we're going to deny the resurrection?  If we're going to say Jesus didn't really rise, how do we explain it away?  Well through the years several theories have been offered, and I'll just throw them out because I want you to see how people who reject the resurrection think.   First is called the swoon theory.  That says Christ never died, he just went into a semi-coma.  He was just down deep in some kind of sleep because of all of the suffering that had occurred on the cross and they assumed that He was dead, and so they put Him in the tomb and, you know, when they wrapped Him and put the spices that they typically did in the wrapping, it was the reviving effect of the spices, the coolness of the tomb and He woke up and he showed up and His disciples had assumed that He had risen from the dead.  Is there any possibility that that could be true?  Well, it might help you to know that it was invented in 1600 so it took 1600 years to think that one up, a man by the name of Venterini(?).  And before 1600 all early records were emphatic about the fact that He died.  And everybody knew the Roman proficiency at killing people, at crucifying people at the tens of thousands and at knowing whether someone was dead.  And the record says that when they came by they knew He was already dead so they ran a spear into His chest and out came blood and water, indicating the severing of the pericardium around the heart.  He was dead.

  If He was only in a semicoma, then you have to conclude that He successfully survived a really an unbelievable beating, lashing prior to the cross.  He survived crucifixion.  He survived the spear rammed into Him.  He survived being handled like a corpse would be handled with not particularly good care.  He survived being entombed with about, I suppose as much as 75 pounds of spices wrapped around His body, including His head.  He survived in that condition three days with no food or water, woke up without medical help, having lost most of His blood.  And then moved the stone away, chased off the Romans who were guarding His tomb and convinced everybody that He was God.  And by the way, when He was done with that He walked seven miles to Emmaus on feet that had been shredded by nails.  Give me a break.  It's ridiculous.

  There is also the "no burial" theory.  He wasn't there because He was never put there.  The reason when they went to the tomb they didn't find Him is He was never put there.  They took Him off a cross and they threw Him in Gehenna which is the city dump where they threw criminals, the corpses of criminals.  He wasn't there on Sunday because He hadn't been put there on Friday. 

  That theory doesn't work.  Why did the leaders want the tomb sealed if nobody was in it?  That doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?  And why did they ask the Romans to guard it if it was empty?  And then why did they invent the story that the body was stolen, why didn't they go to the dump and produce it?

  A third theory is called the hallucination theory, that He never really did come out of the tomb.  All the people who thought they saw Him were hallucinating.  They thought they saw Jesus because they wanted to see Him so badly that they actually actualized Him in some kind of mental image that they thought was reality. 

  That theory doesn't work for too many reasons to go over.  The tomb was empty.  That's not a hallucination.  For all the disciples who wanted to see Him alive so badly that they might have hallucinated Him into some kind of semi-reality, there were the Romans who had no interest in His being alive, and they knew He wasn't there.  And how could the church be built on hallucinations?  How could 500 people have the same hallucination at the same moment, when 500 saw Him at the same moment in Galilee?  And since they didn't expect Him to rise from the dead, they were sad and unbelieving and bemoaning that He was gone, how could they in any sense be pathologically prepared to hallucinate or to sort of mentally actualize a supposed resurrection?

  Well, you say what about a mass hallucination?  Don't they happen?  There have been some mass hallucinations like Fatima but that was something Satan would do, or demons would do.  And certainly Satan and demons would never give the resurrection of Christ sort of hallucinating false representation.  And, of course, we have to ask the question again, where's the body?  If it's only a hallucination, what happened to the body?

  Another view is called the telepathy theory.  This says there was no physical resurrection but God sent back telepathic mental images to the disciples so they would think that He was alive. This wasn't their own wish and sort of actualized hallucination, this was God. 

  That doesn't fly because that makes God a deceiver, doesn't it?  That makes God in some kind of a trickster.  It founds the Christian gospel on deceit.  If God says you have to believe He was raised from the dead in order to be saved, and He wasn't raised from the dead at all, but God simply tricked you into thinking He was, then God is Satan.  It makes liars out of all the disciples, all those who claimed to touch Him, all those who claimed to have held Him, to seen Him and heard Him and talked with Him and eaten with Him and walked with Him.  And if it was telepathic, it must have been a telepathic video because it ran for more than seven miles on the way to Emmaus.  And then that telepathic image sat down and ate.  That's a stretch.

  Furthermore, the disciples on the road to Emmaus with whom Jesus after He rose was walking didn't recognize Him.  Maybe God wasn't able to get the picture into focus.  And again you have to ask the question, where was the body?  If it was a hallucination why wasn't the body still in the grave?

  There's another theory that's been popular through the years called the seance theory.  A medium, conjurer of spirits, somebody who is a contact person with evil spirits, conjured up the spirit of the dead Jesus by occult power.  That doesn't work either because it doesn't answer the question where was the body and why is the tomb empty and how could they touch Him and talk with Him and walk with Him and eat with Him over a prolonged period?

  There's another theory called the mistaken identity theory.  Someone impersonated Jesus.  Whoever impersonated Jesus must have crucified himself because when Jesus met with the disciples He said, "Look, see the nail prints in My hand, see the spear thrust in My side."  It's a pretty high price to generate scars like that to make a false impression.  And then how do you explain that this person who is pretending to be Jesus walked through a wall?  Or miraculously created breakfast by the side of the Sea of Galilee?  Or appeared and vanished?  And how do you explain that this person impersonating Jesus ascended into heaven while everybody was watching?  Cause that's what Jesus did.  And the disciples had been with Jesus twenty-four seven for three years, they knew who He was.  They couldn't be fooled by an imposter and after all, where was the body again?  And why was the tomb empty?

  It's amazing the extent to which people will go to fabricate ridiculous explanations to explain away the one thing that if they would believe that would save them from eternal judgment.  Renan, the French atheist, really was bent on destroying the resurrection.  He said it was based on the testimony of one eccentric delirious frightened woman named Mary Magdalene who had seven demons and was hysterical to the point of insanity.  Oh, of course, there's no evidence of that whatsoever, that was just his own evil heart spewing out his attitude toward Jesus.  Today I was reading a CNN report where of all places there's a play going on at St. Andrews University in Scotland where Scottish reformation started called "Corpus Christi" written by an American that depicts Jesus as a drunken, foul-mouthed homosexual.  You can come up with any kind of concoction you want if you're going to reject the true Christ.  But all the evidence is going to militate against that.  There is enough evidence in the Bible to believe the truth, that's why it's there.  It's written so that we might believe that He is the Christ, that He died, that He rose again.  The evidence is all in.  If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then why didn't the authorities produce the body?  They could have stopped the church in its track.  They could have stopped all apostolic preaching.  They could have ended all discussion.

  Some skeptics and some critics understand this, one named G.D. Yarnold wrote a book called Risen Indeed and he suggested that the body of Jesus evaporated into gases in three days.  There's no evidence for that.  Of course it's ludicrous.  But he understands the problem.  If Jesus didn't rise, then how do you explain an empty tomb and no body?

  The most common theory and the one that is held up most often in critical circles is the theft theory.  That the body of Jesus was stolen to falsify the resurrection.  The disciples came. They somehow got pass the Roman guard, the seal, rolled the stone away, stole the body.  Well some have actually said the Jews did it to make sure He didn't rise from the dead.  Well, then why would they secure it in the tomb and put the Roman guard there if they were intending to steal it?  That's ridiculous.  Somebody else has suggested the Romans did it.  They had absolutely no reason to do it, not believing in Jesus or in resurrection and being on guard there.  That leaves the only logical possibility that the disciples stole it and even if they could have, would they have?  Would they have stolen the body?

  Let's look at the end of Matthew and chapter 28.  This is really an amazing portion of Scripture.  Verse 11, this is after the resurrection, okay?  "Now while they were on their way, behold, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened.  And when they had assembled with the elders and counseled together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers." What's that called?  Bribery.  "And they said, 'You are to say His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.'" This is the fabrication of the lie that proves the resurrection is true.  And verse 14, "If this should come to the governor's ears, we will win him over and keep you out of trouble.  And they took the money and did as they had been instructed.  And this story was widely spread among the Jews and is to this day and even to this day."  There are many who are still saying the disciples stole the body.

  Go back to verse 11.  The guard, the Roman guard, not just one person but the guard which is the plural sense here, reported to the chief priests, the Jewish leaders, the religious leaders of Israel, what had happened.  And what had happened was the resurrection.  Now this is a problem for them.  They've been trying to eliminate Jesus for a long time.  Mass murder was employed to try to kill Him when He was a child in the massacre that Herod brought against all the male children under two in the vicinity of Bethlehem.  They...they finally captured Him through the betrayal of Judas, they used injustice to sentence Him to death.  They used blackmail of Pilate to get him to execute Him.   They tried to use force to keep His body in the tomb.  And so desperate are they to eliminate Jesus that even when He rises from the dead and they've been told that's what happened, they will use bribery to silence the truth of His resurrection and to perpetrate a lie.

  Let's go back in the chapter to the first verse and kind of get the picture here.  "After the Sabbath, Saturday, began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Sunday.  Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave where Jesus had been since Friday and behold a severe earthquake had occurred for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, came and rolled the stone away and sat on it.  And his appearance was as lightning and his garment as white as snow...and look at this...and the guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men."  This is a very traumatic experience...an earthquake, an angel, stone rolls away and the guards were the ones who went into comatose shock.

  Now from there we jump to verse 11.  "While they were on their way," who's that?  The women on their way to tell the disciples that Jesus was alive.  You remember verse 5, the angel answered and said to the women, "Do not be afraid, I know you're looking for Jesus who's been crucified, He's not here for He has risen just as He said, come see the place where He was lying and go quickly and tell His disciples He's risen from the dead."  Verse 8, "They departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy and ran to report it to His disciples.  And behold, Jesus met them and greeted them and they came up and took hold of His feet and worshiped Him."

  "Now, while they were on their way, behold some of the guard came into the city."  Not all the guard, I think probably some of them stayed at the tomb.  By now the stone is away, the earthquake has settled down.  They're coming out of their sort of instantaneous coma that they were thrust into by the blazing glory of this angel.  By now they have checked the tomb.  They have checked the grave and like everybody else who checked it, they have found grave clothes lying in their place but no Jesus.  They don't know what to do about this.  So some of them are sent, dispatched to go to the chief priests to tell them what happened.

  Go back to chapter 27 for a minute and verse 62.  On the next day, which is the one after the preparation, the chief priests and Pharisees gather together with Pilate.  This is after Christ has been buried.  And now the chief priests and the Pharisees get together with Pilate and they say, "Sir, we remember that when He was still alive, that deceiver said after three days I'm going to rise again.  Therefore, give orders for the grave to be made secure until the third day lest the disciples come and steal Him away and say to the people He's risen from the dead.  And the last deception will be worse than the first.  Pilate said to them, 'You have a guard.  I'll give you some soldiers, go make it as secure as you know how.'  And they went and made the grave secure and along with the guard they set a seal on the stone."

  This Roman guard was given to the chief priests and the Pharisees by Pilate, delegated really from Pilate to the authority of the Jewish leaders.  Believe me, Pilate wanted no more to do with Jesus.  If there was going to be anymore trouble with this Jesus, Pilate's wanted to do anything he could to mitigate it, even turning over some Romans to the Jewish leaders to use as a guard to make sure the disciples did not come and steal His body.  You know, since they were under the Jewish authority, when the earthquake came and the angel appeared and they all went down into a coma, when the time came when they finally came back to their senses, when they checked the tomb and nobody was there, they knew where they had to go and to whom they had to report because they had been delegated of the Jewish authority, the official leaders of Israel, the Sanhedrin, they needed to know what happened.  And so it says in verse 11, "They were on their way into the city while the women were on their way to tell the apostles, they came into the city, reported to the chief priests all that had happened."  What did they say?  "Well, we were out there and there was this tremendous earthquake, unbelievable earthquake, everything was shaken all over the place and then there was this blazing glorious angelic being and the stone was rolled away and the seal was broken and, you know, we don't remember what happened after that for who knows how long.  We do know this, the body is gone."  

  And their worst fear had come true, these Jewish leaders.  Interestingly enough, the Jewish leaders become the recipients of the first news of the resurrection of Jesus.  He said it, He said, "Destroy this body and in three days I'll raise it again."  I don't think the disciples had even yet heard since the women were still on their way.  And the story of the Romans was a truthful report.  They showed to the chief priests everything that happened.  There are a couple of comments in the fourth chapter of Acts.  In the fourth chapter of Acts, Peter is preaching and you know all about that.  And if you go down to verse...well, let's see, Acts 4:10...

  Peter filled with the Holy Spirit says, "Let it be known to you, all of you, all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead."  Here's Peter preaching the resurrection very soon after.  "By this name this man stands here before you in good health."  Of course he's talking about that healing.  Back in verse 2 it says, "Being greatly disturbed," that is the leaders because they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead, so they laid hands on them and threw them in jail.  They came right out preaching the resurrection, preaching the resurrection. 

  Now go down to verse 16.  He ordered them to go outside and the council began to confer with one another and this is what they said, "What shall we do with these men for the fact that a noteworthy miracle has taken place through them is apparent to all who live in Jerusalem and we cannot deny it?  But in order that it may not spread any further, we've got to stop them from speaking."  It's really amazing, isn't it?  They never deny the miracle.  They just want to stop it from spreading.  And, you know what?  That's exactly what goes on today with skeptics and critics, they can't deny it.  There's no way to deny it.  They can't come up with a reasonable explanation.  They cannot undo the testimony of multiple eyewitnesses on different occasions.  There's really no way to deny it, but they...they hate it, they resent it, they just want to stop it from being proclaimed.

  Do you remember when they were crucifying Jesus back in Matthew 27 the chief priests were mocking Him?  The elders and scribes, the Sanhedrin, the same people were mocking Him.  And this is what they said, "Let Him come down from the cross and we will believe in Him."  He did better than that, He endured the cross, died there and came out of the grave and they still didn't believe in Him.  He did something greater than come off the cross, He came out of the grave.  And that news panicked them.  They should have fallen on their faces, embraced the truth that He was God the Messiah, seen Him as their Lord, declared their faith in His resurrection, repented of their sin and false religion and been delivered from sin and death and judgment.  But they weren't interested in that.  And it's always that way with skeptics, it's always that way with critics, it's always that way with the hard-hearted.  So all they wanted to do was stop the spread of the story, get rid of it.  And so in verse 12, the guard reports in verse 11, the chief priests in verse 12 call a council, the assembly with the elders counsel together.  Matthew uses this phrase, "assembled with the elders," as a technical term to discuss the meeting of the Sanhedrin, 70 men, the elders of Israel who had the leadership responsibilities.  They had a formal meeting, it would be like a senate meeting.  And they took formal council.  This same phrase about counseled together is used three other places in Matthew to refer to the passing of a resolution in this body.  This is a formal constitution of the ruling body of Israel and they've got a problem on their hands.  The body is gone, the tomb is open, a supernatural earthquake has occurred, a supernatural angel has appeared.  The Romans were literally knocked into coma by the shock of the event.  Grave clothes are visible lying exactly where they were indicating that nobody took Him out of there.  He passed through the grave clothes and left them right where they were.  They know that.

  So they get together and establish a resolution and their resolution is...we're going to create a lie.  We're going to perpetrate a lie.  And they really have to do a couple of things.  One, they have to bribe the soldiers.  So, verse 12 says, "They gave a large sum of money to the soldiers," argurea in the Greek, silver, it's actually silver.  Judas they had bought for 30 pieces of silver.  They weren't finished trying to buy off Jesus or sell Him off cheap. 

  There could be as many as a couple dozen men in the guard and there might have been ten or twelve men who came back to report, we don't know, maybe less than that.  But there were a lot of men to buy off here so the sum might have been much more than the 30 pieces they give to Judas.  But they're glad frankly to pay any price for this lie.  So they bribe the soldiers to lie.

  Secondly, they tell the soldiers to spread the lie.  In verse 13 they said, "You are to say His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep."   That is so ridiculous.  How would you know they stole Him if you were asleep?  It's ludicrous from its very outset.  We know what happened because we were asleep.  But this was the only thing that made sense.  Forget the hallucination.  Forget the seance.  Forget all those other ridiculous theories that make no sense because they can't explain the empty tomb and where the body is.  At least this explains the empty tomb where the body is.  The disciples stole it.  Forget the imposter theory, the telepathic theory, the no burial theory, the swoon theory.  They knew this was the only thing that made any sense.  And so the soldiers become preachers of the anti-resurrection gospel.  They've got nothing at stake.  They're crass, tough men.  They could care less about Jesus.  All they want is money.  They're glad to accommodate.  But, of course, this is ridiculous. 

  They shouldn't have been sleeping, by the way.  They knew that.  And I don't think they were.  I mean, the Roman watch was two to three hours max.  Three hours, basically four watches through the night of three hours cover the twelve hours if there was that much darkness.  So sometimes it would go down to two hours.  Whoever was on watch, and there would be more than one, it would be a few, they would all have to fall asleep in a very short watch of just two or three hours at the most.  They didn't fall asleep.  And I'll tell you another reason they didn't fall asleep, not only because they had short watch, because if you fell asleep and lost your prisoner, what happened?  You lost your life, that was Roman military law.  That was a capital crime in the Roman military.  If you lost your prisoner, you paid with your life.  This is no small issue to them.  We're going to go out and we're going to say, now let's get this right, you've given us all this money and we're going to say that the body was stolen while we were asleep.  That's a risky position because the death penalty was prescribed for soldiers that failed in their duty and lost their prisoners.  

  So in verse 14, the Jewish leaders say this, "If this should come to the governor's ears, we'll win him over and keep you out of trouble."  The plot thickens, right?  Pilate was really the commander of the Roman troops.  It was Pilate that commissioned these men and handed them over to Jewish authority.  And they say we will persuade him, is what it says, or we will satisfy him, we will secure you, we will remove your anxiety.  We'll keep you out of trouble.  If it looks like a court marshal and a death, we'll come to your rescue.

  So they bribed the soldiers with the money.  They promise a protection.  They told them to go spread the lie everywhere.  And verse 15, "They took the money and did as they had been instructed," and here, friends, are the first preachers that came from the resurrection, Roman soldiers.  And they said, "He didn't rise.  The disciples stole His body while we were sleeping," that's it.  They did as they were told, as they were taught, didasko.  And it was effective.   "This story was widely spread among the Jews and is to this day."  Matthew's writing 30 years later, it was still the conventional wisdom.  It's still the best critical theory today among liberals and deniers of the Bible.  They knew the truth, they knew it, the Romans knew it, the Jews knew it, they knew it, they never denied any of His miracles.  They knew that the miracles were spreading all over everywhere.  They never denied that, but they hated the truth, they produced a lie, published a lie to save their own hides.  And the Romans joined in for money.

  So non-believers become the first proclaimers of the anti-resurrection.  And since that time the world has always been full of those people who for money will lie about Jesus, right?  Pick up Newsweek magazine, read the article on the birth of Jesus written by a man who for money will propagate the lies about Jesus, including His birth and life and death and resurrection and Second Coming.  It all gets attacked in that article.  And it became the common view 25, 30 years later, as late as Justin Martyr who lived I think about 115 on to about 160 something in that second century.  Justin Martyr says, "You Jews selected men, sent them into all the world proclaiming that a certain atheistic and lawless sect had arisen from one Jesus, a Galilean deceiver whom we crucified, but His disciples stole Him at night from the tomb and deceived men by saying that He's risen from the dead and ascended into heaven.  That absurd and blasphemous medieval Jewish legend became so popular it was known as Toldath Jesu(??)."  It found its way not only into the comments of Justin Martyr speaking to the Jew Triphon(?)  but it becomes a medieval legend and here it is in modern liberal theology today.  The lie still abounds about this. 

  You know, from the standpoint of the life of Jesus it is the last insult against Him.  There were insults against Him from the start of His life and certainly all through His ministry.  This is the last insult, the apostasy of Israel is final.  They lied even about His birth.  Do you remember what they said?  They said to Jesus one day, they said, "We're not born of fornication."  That's an old one, isn't it?  People say that today, that's the DaVinci Code.  Jesus had a relationship with Mary Magdalene and they had a child.  Or it's the old story of Mary getting pregnant by a soldier named Pantera and Jesus being an illegitimate child.  That starts with the Jews at the time of Jesus who said, "At least we weren't born of fornication," denying the virgin birth.  They denied the beginning and they denied the end.  They lied about the start and they lied about the finish.  The Bible makes it clear that He was born to a virgin.  And all the evidence indicates that that is indeed the case. 

  But if He is God virgin born, then they have to accept the fact that what He says about them is true.  And they won't accept that, so they lie about His virgin birth, even though the facts are clear.  They lie about His resurrection even though the facts are clear.  It's all about loving sin, it's all about hating righteousness.  It has nothing to do with the evidence.  I mean, if you just look at the resurrection of Jesus Christ, an empty tomb, grave clothes sitting there, an earthquake, stone moved, Roman soldiers in coma, immediately there are at least ten appearances of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, to another woman, to Peter, to two on the road, to twelve on the following Sunday evening, to the twelve again eight days later, to seven of them by the sea in Galilee, to five hundred in Galilee, then to James, to eleven of them minus Judas on the Mount of Olives from which He ascends into heaven.  They knew He was alive.  And that's why, listen, they would go out and preach the resurrection and die for it.  You can't turn people into martyrs for a lie.  If they had stolen His body, why would they go die?  Why would they preach a risen Christ that they knew was a deception and die for that?  They were unanimous in their affirmation that He was alive, unanimous in their proclamation that He was alive, unanimous in their willingness to die for that truth.  Their faith was so confident and so strong, it was absolutely unwavering.  They set themselves against the very authorities that had killed Jesus and they knew that they would receive the same.  They boldly confronted the same leaders from whom they once had run in fear.  When Jesus was taken prisoner, those apostles scattered in fear.  Now they run right back to confront those same leaders with a resurrection proclamation.  And it's so extensive and so constant that the leaders say, "You have filled Jerusalem with this teaching." And thousands of people believed, three thousand on Pentecost, thousands more and thousands more.  And in a matter of weeks there must be 25 thousand believers.

  By what power then do you turn cowardly, simple, poor, illiterate preachers into world changers?  Not by a lie, not by a deception.  They were not eloquent.  They were not educated.  They were not brilliant.  They were not oratorical.  They were not masters of argument and logic.  They were not magicians.  They were not charlatans and clever con men highly skilled.  They were not particularly persuasive or clever.  The power of their life that has changed the world up to this very day, and will continue to do it, was the reality that Jesus Christ was alive.  It's the only explanation.  They believed in the resurrection and they preached it.  They had every opportunity to satisfy themselves as to the truth of it.  They saw Him.  The ate with Him.  They touched Him.  They met with Him.  They could examine all the evidence.  They could touch His hands, and His side, and His feet, and they did.  That's why Acts begins, "Jesus appeared to them with many infallible proofs," infallible proofs.  They were absolutely convinced and they gave their lives for it.  And the Holy Spirit inspired them to write the record of the New Testament which is convincing to all those who are open to it.  And we would give our lives for the same fact that Jesus Christ lives.  The Jews couldn't deny the resurrection.  No way.  All they could do was lie.

  You say, "Well, couldn't it have been the truth that the disciples stole the body?"  Look, you don't bribe people with money to tell the truth.  They were already coming with the truth.  They came and told the Jewish leaders the truth.  They had to buy them off and bribe them to lie.  So the lie becomes the greatest proof of the truth.  They knew that the only way they could explain an empty tomb was that the disciples came and stole the body.  And so that's the lie they came up with.  But there's no way those disciples scattered and cowardly and fearful and having a hard time believing and morose and despondent about losing Jesus Christ as they are obviously indicating in the trip to Emmaus when they're moaning that He's gone.  No way they would have been transformed into powerful preachers who would die for the truth of the resurrection if in fact the resurrection didn't really happen and they didn't have ample evidence.  It's ludicrous to believe that the guards were asleep, all of them, and could still report exactly what happened.  It's ludicrous to believe that they would have to be paid to tell the truth.  The whole explanation is self-condemned and what you're left with is Jesus rose from the dead.  And if He rose from the dead, He has power over death.  If He has power over death, He has life in Himself, He's the source of life.  If He's the source of life, He's God who gives life.  If He's God then what He says is true and what He says is salvation is only through Him.

  Simon Greenleaf, the Harvard professor of Law wrote this, "All the Christianity asks of men is that they would be consistent with themselves.  That they would treat its evidences as they treat the evidence of other things.  And that they would try to judge its witnesses as they deal with their fellow men when testifying to human affairs and actions in human tribunals.  The result would be an undoubting conviction of their integrity, ability and truth."  Simon Greenleaf says...Just apply the same laws to the testimonies of those who saw the risen Christ that you would apply in any court case, stack up the witnesses, the eyewitnesses, in excess of 500 on numerous different occasions at least ten, all affirming the same thing, all eyewitness accounts, all having seen, heard and touched the risen Christ and just treat their witnesses with the same integrity that you would treat any other witnesses in a human court and the evidence is overwhelming.

  The Lord Jesus rose from the dead.  That means that He is God.  But it also means this, that He had accomplished on the cross the work that God sent Him to do.  God the Father sent God the Son to do a work on the cross.  What was it?  To bear our sin, to die in our place, to be punished on our behalf, to...to be, as it were, a sacrifice for our sins.  And when near death He said, "It is finished."  He had bore our sin.  He had died our death.  He had taken our place, received the judgment of God on behalf of all who would ever believe.  And because He did it so perfectly, and because He accomplished exactly what God wanted Him to accomplish, He arose.  And when He arose, the Bible says He went into heaven and took His place at the right hand of God and is forever exalted and given a name above every name which is the name Lord.  And you must confess Jesus as Lord, the one who paid for your sins, the one who rose from the dead and therefore has offered a fitting sacrifice which satisfies God.  God being satisfied with Him lifts Him to heaven, seats Him on His throne where He reigns as King of kings and Lord of lords forever.  There is no salvation in any other than Jesus Christ.  You must confess that He is indeed Lord as God has named Him Lord for what He has done. 

  And you must believe in His resurrection or you cannot be saved.  This is God's word to us.  This is God's plan.  Salvation awaits all who confess Jesus as Lord and believe in their hearts that God has raised Him from the dead.  To deny the resurrection is to deny His deity.  It is to deny the sufficiency of His sacrifice.  It is to make Him a liar, the apostles a liar, the scriptures a liar.  To believe in the resurrection is to affirm the Bible is true, Jesus is God, He did rise, the gospel message is the truth.  And it is and it alone saves. 

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