Jim Styles - God's Wonderful Plan Of Redemption - Class 2 - God did Redeem His Son

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   See, that’s the great thing about technology today. If I go too fast or if I say it wrong or whatever, you can just check the recordings or look at the PowerPoints again and then we’re all set. It’s great. You can just push, stop and pause and if you don’t like it, you can erase. It’s it’s great the way it all works. All right, so.

2. 0:20

   The game plan right now is to have a look at really finish up part of the first class, and then we’ll look at what God did with his Son and redeeming his own son, Jesus Christ. So we finished off that first class going back to a lot of the Sunday school material that probably many of you have looked at for many years and and read. But it’s good to review those passages to see the whole picture of what God has done and really and appreciate the love of God.

3. 0:42

   So you end up then with the fact that what God considers is he looks at sin over all, not just the personal sins that we commit, but when the Bible refers to sin, that we are no longer slaves of sin. Paul’s treating sin as though it’s like a king, it’s like a master that you can serve, and he’s looking at sin and it’s whole process.

4. 1:04

   So what God did then is that when nobody else could save, God sent forth his Son and sent him to save all of us. So when Paul is, as he points out in Romans 1 and Romans 2, Paul lays out a wonderful case of the fact that no Jew could save themselves, no Gentile could save themselves, that all the earth was held guilty before God.

5. 1:23

   And so he points out in verse 9, what then? Are we better than they? We Jews he’s talking about, are we better than them? No, not at all. For we have previously charged that both Jews and Greeks, they are all under sin, all of us are under this. And, and he sees this sin as the all-encompassing, the root and the ’cause as it is written. And he goes back and shows them from their Old Testament Scriptures.

6. 1:47

   This is what the Bible had said all along. There is none righteous, no, not one. There is none who understands. There is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside. They have all together become unprofitable. There is none who does good, no, not one. And So what God did, brethren and sisters, in His love, His compassion, His kindness, His mercy, when he realized that nobody would ever be able to rise up to be the Redeemer, He sent forth his Son. And that’s what our God did.

7. 2:16

   He intervened in the problem and realized that we needed help or as Isaiah 59 points out, when dealing with all of our transgressions and and and the whole chapter is showing how our natural tendency is to get all hung up in ritualism and what real, you know, real giving our life to God is really all about.

8. 2:35

   But he talks about our transgressions in verse 12 are multiplied before you and our sins testify against us. Our transgressions are with us and As for our iniquities, we know them, but he ends up that section there in verse 16 when he saw that there was no man and wondered that there was no intercessor. Therefore his own arm brought salvation for him and his own, his own righteousness, it sustained him. And so that’s what God did.

9. 2:59

   That’s what our loving heavenly Father did. When there was none who could save us. He sent forth his Son and he sent his son than to deal with as Paul says, he condemned sin, the cause and the effect, the root and the personal transgressions. He condemned them in the flesh of Jesus Christ and what God has done then, brothers and sisters with that act is provided us with the moral power to conquer sin.

10. 3:26

    This is why the cross Paul would say that you know, I decided to know nothing among you but Jesus Christ and him crucified or what he would say is is the power of the cross. This is the power that this event has on our life. So what God? Did then is he decided all right, we need help? None of these people are going to be able to save themselves. 6000 years the angels had worked with men weren’t able to provide a Savior, and so God sent forth His Son. And in John 1 the Word was sent forth and the Word became flesh in verse 14, and it dwelt among us. We beheld His glory.

11. 3:59

    The glory is the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, because Jesus came then, having come from his Father, and now this bias to sin is now being counteracted by a bias to love a Father. And God sent forth his Son and the Word was made flesh. Because now we have one, one of our race who has the potential to actually defeat the devil, to defeat all of sin. The nature itself that that that causes them and the personal transgressions.

12. 4:32

    Or as Hebrews 2 puts it, when Paul’s showing how it was so essential that Jesus Christ come in our nature, that he be one of us who had like the devil in him like we do. In chapter 1 of Hebrews he shows how the angels couldn’t save you. As great as they were, they could not save you because they don’t have this.

13. 4:51

    They don’t share this nature with us, but Jesus Christ did. And inasmuch as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He himself likewise shared in the same that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death. And when he uses that phrase that through death, he’s looking at the whole process of the death of Christ.

14. 5:13

    He’s looking at what Peter would say, that when he was reviled, he didn’t revile in return. When he was threatened, he didn’t suffer, but he took the nature that we have, this nature that’s so biased to sin, and he took it up to the cross, nailed it to the tree, and God condemned sin and the body of his Son. God won the victory that day, and Jesus Christ cooperated with it.

15. 5:37

    They destroyed the devil that was in him and because he did that, he is now able to release those who through fear of death were all their lifetimes subject to bondage. That’s why in the Bible it’s presented so much that he did it for us. He did it for his brethren, for his family. He knew it was the only way to redeem us was that one of the race had to take the devil to the tree and nail it to the tree and, and declare the Father right for all the things that he had done.

16. 6:07

    And because he’s done that now he has released us from the power of sin and God can resurrect us from the dead and grant immortality to all those who are in Christ Jesus, who are really in Christ Jesus. And again, not legally, but they they lead a life, a life of living in Christ Jesus.

17. 6:26

    So if you had the job of explaining, it’s always fun to look at concepts like this that if you were going to explain God’s plan of redemption, and now I ask you to explain it to me, but I’m not going to let you use words like sacrifices and offerings and all those common terms that we love to use.

18. 6:45

    When we go to explain about the sacrifice of Christ or God’s plan of redemption, you’re going to explain it. You can’t use the terms of the Law of Moses. You can’t go back to the shadows and describe it with the shadows. I want you to really explain the plan of redemption. Where would you go and how would you do that? Has somebody already done that for us? That’s the first question I want to know, Has somebody already done that?

19. 7:10

    And what happens in our community, brother and sisters, is when we go to explain God’s redemptive plan, we immediately want to talk about sacrifices and offerings, and we want to go to the language of the law. That is our natural tendency, but it’s actually possible to explain it without all of that, because the law was only shadows.

20. 7:31

    It was only shadows of the reality. It wasn’t the reality itself. So when the apostle Paul penned the letter to the Romans, did you realize that he wrote his exposition of the atonement without talking about sacrifices and offerings and the devil? Do you ever notice that he purposely leaves those out? He puts them in, in Hebrews.

21. 7:56

    Oh, sure. He, you know, he destroyed him who had the power of death. That is the devil. He doesn’t mention the devil in Romans because that was too confusing to people. He doesn’t mention sacrifices when he writes the letter to the Romans, and he doesn’t mention offerings. And instead, he gives us a straightforward exposition of what God really did in Christ Jesus. And after you study Romans, then you can go look at Hebrews and find out, well, here’s how he then shows that this fulfilled the Old Testament shadows.

22. 8:27

    But it’s totally backwards to try to do it the other way. And what we end up doing is in our community is we end up trying to force the work that God was doing back into the shadows and misunderstand that. Wait a minute. The shadows were just trying to show different aspects of the real work that God did in His Son.

23. 8:45

    So it’s a great place to go. It’s go to the book of Romans if you want to study the atonement today. That’s Paul’s straightforward exposition on what God really did. In fact, you’ve never noticed when he actually does mention a sacrifice. Where’s the first time he brings up the word sacrifice in the book of Romans, chapter 12, way into chapter 12?

24. 9:05

    And what kind of sacrifice is it? Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. See, Paul got this really good. He understood it so well, and he was able to deal with both Jews and Gentiles and argue on his case in both arenas because he understood it so well.

25. 9:29

    It’s just fun to watch him just just pour out the Scriptures the way he does and explain it in a straightforward way. So when you look at the redemptive plan, what God was really after, if you forget about your your preconceived ideas about sacrifices and offerings for a minute, really the goal was to cleanse the race of sin.

26. 9:48

    That’s God’s goal. He wants to, he’s going to beat sin. He’s going to defeat Amalek in the end, and he’s going to create a community, a family for him which had totally given up on sin. He wants to redeem these children that he has from death. That’s part of his goal, and he’s going to do it by an actual destroying of sin. Somebody is going to actually beat sin and put the devil to death.

27. 10:12

    That’s the goal. He has to have someone declare him right, declare the righteousness of God. So he wants one of our race to voluntarily overcome and destroy sin. This is his game plan that he sets out. This would have to be someone who would completely believe that God is right, His way is right, He’s just, He’s truth. And this person would have to commit totally to accepting the will of God.

28. 10:37

    His will would have to be swallowed up in the will of God, and he’d have to live his whole life that way in obedience to God and always doing the will of his Father. You know, that’s what we’ve got in Christ. I came to do your will, O God. That’s what he did.

29. 10:51

    So he’d finish it then with a blood shedding death that publicly condemned sin and declared God right. That’s what he wants. He wants a public demonstration to show the world that God was right in putting us in condemning this race to death and requiring that we commit to joining Christ in his death to sin.

30. 11:13

    This was the decision that the Father had made, and this is what we cooperate with in our baptism. So his obedient life then was going to show, really tell all of us that this is how God’s children live. This is the way we’re supposed to live as members of his family. And his obedient death was going to condemn and destroy sin. So you have both aspects in the death of Christ. One of them is.

31. 11:34

    Showing us that sin must be put to death. The other one is demonstrating that when he was reviled, he didn’t revile in return. You live a life. This is a life to be lived that’s in obedience to God, and this was all going to be real. This is not shadows. This is not sacrifices and offerings and all of that kind of legalistic stuff under the law.

32. 11:55

    This was going to be a real demonstration of the righteousness of God, and that’s what he was after, a real destroying of the devil. Somebody is really going to do it and his bloodshedding death was required by God for sins, public condemnation. That’s what it was going to do. That’s why there was a bloodshedding death.

33. 12:15

    Sin was going to be destroyed. And we’ll look at that tomorrow morning in the exhortation. See, it isn’t so much the fact that that Christ died and you’ll notice the gospel writers, they never stressed like all the torture that he went through and all the things that go that are go on and his crucifixion.

34. 12:30

    Instead, they don’t look at it from the perspective of the people who looked at him and said he’s a criminal, we should kill him. He deserves to be punished. The Bible doesn’t present him that way. And instead the Bible says look at it from God’s perspective. What God and his Son did is they took the devil to the cross and nailed it up there and crucified sin.

35. 12:52

    That’s what they did. Oh sure, all those other people thought they were treating him like a Sinner. They thought he deserved it. And God says, Oh no, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m destroying sin. And I’m going to save all those people who look up in faith and say that’s what I want too. That’s how simple the atonement really is. Brothers and sisters, He just joined with Christ and a death like his and walk out and a life like his. This is what saves us today.

36. 13:17

    This is what the Christadelphians have understood as a community for all these years. So he declared God right, that God’s sentence on sin, the whole sentence on, on sin, on the root and the cause was just and fair. That’s what declaring the righteousness of God is really all about. And the angels couldn’t do it.

37. 13:36

    So when you look at, well, why did it require a sinless man? Why did it have to be somebody who is sinless? Well, that makes the issue clear. It’s not, you know, when, when God was trying to illustrate the concept so nobody could miss it. It was the body of sin. It was the human nature. It’s the root cause that Christ bore in himself. He had this in him too.

38. 13:57

    That’s what was being condemned and put to death. This is what he did up on the tree. Sure, he, he didn’t deserve to die like that because he had never sinned, but what he did is he said my father’s rights. This is what must happen to this body of sin, this nature that’s so prone to sin and all the things that it wants to do.

39. 14:15

    The whole package of sin is going to die up there in the tree. And to remove sin from God’s children, He had to deal with the root cause so that he can righteously forgive our personal sins. This is how God worked out a plan and otherwise you start looking at how can he, just like for all of us in here and myself, we all sin. We all make so many mistakes and God hates sin. So how can he righteously just look at us and say, I’m not going to hold those sins against you or against you or you or you or anybody in this room?

40. 14:49

    He doesn’t. Just overlook sin. He convinces us to join him in his perspective so that we hate sin like he does. And we joined the work of Christ and we are in him and God. Then I can then righteously forgive your sins. You’ve joined me. You’ve like joined his team and you accept the way he looks at it. And now he can forgive us by his grace through Jesus Christ our Lord.

41. 15:14

    Now you’ll notice when you describe it that way, it’s the there’s nothing about punishment going on in the crucifixion of Christ and and God’s destruction of sin. So often when we describe it, we want to use the words punishment. We want to pull in the words deserve. And we do this. We this is what we do sometimes when we’re explaining this.

42. 15:33

    But you’ll notice when Paul writes about it in Romans 1 to 8, he doesn’t use these words. He doesn’t talk about us deserving punishment. And that this is what Jesus Christ was doing is showing us the punishment that we deserve. You won’t find that in Paul’s exposition, but you’ll find that in the writings in our community.

43. 15:49

    You won’t find this idea of Christ deserving it because he had our nature, that He deserved to be up there on the tree. And that isn’t in Paul’s exposition at all. And it wasn’t just for us, although the Bible emphasizes that over and over again, that that was the motive of Jesus Christ. His motive was to save us.

44. 16:10

    That’s why he went through it. It probably wasn’t worth it for himself, but he had all of us in mind and he wanted to please his father and he went through it for us. And that’s what the Bible emphasizes as his motive, because that’s what will convince us to do it too. I bet a lot of you over there, especially as younger people, sometimes you start looking at your life and you think, is this really worth it? Is it really worth it for me to go through this just for me? And some of you will end up analyzing that and say, no, it isn’t worth it.

45. 16:41

    But when you’re married to a spouse and you have children and you have an ecclesia and a family that you care about, all of a sudden you realize it’s not just about me. It’s about all those other people that we’ve come to save. And that’s what motivated Christ to go through it. And you’ll see that’s the emphasis all the way through the New Testament. He did it for us because that’s what is the motivating power. This is the power of the cross, and he went through it himself. So what was the purpose then of all those sacrifices? Why did God have people going through this for years, for thousands of years?

46. 17:14

    They went through all those animal sacrifices. What were they supposed to do? Well, they were shadows. That’s what they were. They were shadows predicting a time that was coming, and they were shadows that show different aspects of the atoning work of Jesus Christ. They were shadows that were supposed to teach people about the destruction of the devil of sin was going to be destroyed.

47. 17:37

    But Christ’s death wasn’t simply the best sacrifice, brothers and sisters. That’s not what he was. Oh no. He was the real work. That sacrifice was designed to teach by shadow. That’s really what it was all about. So when you see Jesus Christ up on the pole and you see our New Testament expositors talking about that, teaching us that we must die to sin and live to God, then you go back to the animal sacrifices and realize that when you laid your hands on an animal and you brought your animal to the high priest or to the priest that was there and you picked out an animal that was without blemish, without blemish, that’s not me, that’s Jesus Christ.

48. 18:18

    And you bring your animal to the high priest and the priest and you lay your hands on that animal and you acknowledge the fact that that man is going to die and I’m going to die with him. This is Romans 6. This is what Paul explains in Romans 6, that animal sacrifice was supposed to do. It’s what our baptism does.

49. 18:36

    You identify with him. You are found in Him not having a righteousness of our own, but one that’s based on faith that we commit to die with Christ to sin. And because of that, God brings us into his family and he forgives us of all our mistakes. And this is what God was trying to teach all those years. And instead people turned it into some substitutionary thing while the animal dies instead of me and I’m free to go on and just do what I want.

50. 19:03

    And they always had this substitution stuff. And we don’t want that coming into our community. That’s not part of the truth at all. You won’t ever find a New Testament writer ever using those words about animal sacrifice or the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It was never about substitute or dying instead of you. It was always that He died as an example showing us how to live. That’s how they always explain it. And that’s what God was trying to do with the shadows. But people misunderstood the shadows. So don’t forget the shadows in the law. They really were just shadows.

51. 19:38

    They were not the very image. That’s Paul’s words. They were not the very image and they could never make the worshippers perfect. Why not? Because he says it couldn’t affect your conscience. Your conscience. You go through all those procedures and walk away and think, Oh no, that’s just an animal, doesn’t affect me, has no moral impact on your life.

52. 20:00

    It doesn’t convince you to die to sin, doesn’t convince you to join with Christ when you’re just doing it that way. It could never affect the conscience of the worshippers. He says, but the sacrifice of Christ, oh boy, that better. Affect our consciences, because if that one doesn’t, there’s no hope of God saving us. This was His most powerful motive he could ever give us to change our lives.

53. 20:22

    The sacrifice of his Son, the giving of his Son, of putting sin to death. So the 3D shadows, when you look back at them, you can see how shadows can sometimes help you create an image. But I’ll just show you here, what’s the problem with the law? So you look at a shadow of a tree like that and you try to figure out, all right, what kind of tree is that from the shadow? I’m only going to give you 1 shadow. And you got to guess and see, oh really? That actually came from an oak tree. So then you look at another one and you say, ah, extra clues this time.

54. 20:52

    So by looking at different aspects of the law, what sometimes happened when you did an offering, one kind of offering and then another one. And then there were the feast days, and then there was a day of atonement and then this. And that’s right. And there’s all these different components that God put into the law so that you could see different shadows of the real work that he was aiming at.

55. 21:11

    And the more clues you get, the better three-dimensional picture you can create about what this really is. And that’s what he had hoped would happen with the law. But the problem was the Jews just took their law and they turned it into something for which they could earn their salvation. So you can see with that.

56. 21:28

    See, some shadows are very clear, maybe as to what you think they are. Other times we need extra help. But the more detail and the more angles you get, the better the three-dimensional picture. And the better you knew the law and tried to figure out what it was doing, the better you could do at understanding the shadows. The problem with the shadows is that when you see one shadow, it can sometimes be very misleading. And we’ve, you know, as a community, we sometimes do this in misunderstanding or misapplying the law. So you look at that shadow up there and you say, I know what that is.

57. 21:59

    And then you find out, oops, wasn’t quite what I thought. And that’s the problem with shadows, and that’s why you have to be very careful that we don’t build our exposition of the atonement from the shadows today when we have Paul’s and Peters and James’s three-dimensional exposition of what this really was designed to mean. So we got to go back and look at what actually happened. So when you start looking at Jesus Christ, for example, in relation to God saving his Son, Jesus Christ didn’t need a sacrifice.

58. 22:34

    Now I’ll say that again, He didn’t need a sacrifice. He was the real work that the shadows were designed to teach. He, He didn’t need a sacrifice. He was the sacrifice. He was the reality that all those animal sacrifices were trying to teach about shadows of the one who would come and put the devil to death, put sin to death, and declare God right.

59. 23:01

    So in the letter to the Hebrews, Paul uses all that language of the law to show the Jews that the law had predicted that better sacrifices were coming, as he says. But in the letter to the Romans, Paul then gives his exposition without even using their language of the law, and he confronts them without using sacrifices and offerings and talks about what God did. God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus. Christ doesn’t use the word sacrifice because sacrifice is a shadow of that reality.

60. 23:36

    And it’s it’s fun to look at those differences because this is how you start to understand the way Paul saw at least as you look at Romans and compare it with Hebrews. Don’t make Jesus fit the law. He was the reality that the whole law was actually based on. So on the cross when we, when we give our expositions of the atonement, we explain God’s plan of redemption and we see Jesus up there on the pole and suffering away and sin being put to death.

61. 24:00

    Christ wasn’t suffering somebody else’s punishment. He wasn’t suffering your punishment. The Bible never says that. No, no New Testament writers ever say that. He was suffering the punishment that you deserve. And yet sometimes you’ll hear people say that, especially in our Christian community today. They like that because then they say, well, because you deserve that punishment and he suffered it for you.

62. 24:21

    He’s your substitute. He took it in place of you. But you won’t find Bible writers talking about it like that. And we don’t want to either. We don’t want to get into things that our Bible expositors don’t use. So he wasn’t suffering somebody else’s punishment. He wasn’t illustrating the punishment that sinners deserve.

63. 24:39

    You won’t find that either. Even though it’s true that yes, we deserve to die, that isn’t why God put him on the cross. God put him there to condemn sin. That’s what he’s there for. Even though it’s true that sinners deserve death, you won’t find Peter, Paul, James, none of them look at Jesus Christ on the pole and say that was teaching us what we deserve. You won’t find that.

64. 25:01

    Go ahead and search your Bible all over the place. It isn’t there because that’s not the lesson God’s trying to establish. You won’t find that He that there are Bible expositors ever say that He deserved the cross because He had human nature? Where does some New Testament writer ever say that? They don’t Because He didn’t deserve it, because He had our nature.

65. 25:21

    It wasn’t about punishment and deserve. It was about a real work of destroying sin. It’s not about punishment, deserve and all those kind of concepts. And he wasn’t going through some kind of ritual or ceremony to save us. There’s nothing ritualistic about this. This was a real condemning of sin, really. God destroyed him that had the power of death.

66. 25:44

    That is the devil. He condemned sin in the body of his Son. That’s what God really did in Christ. And So what Christ shows us is he shows us how to live the righteousness of God in our daily lives. It was all about changing how we live. And God’s given us the motive power to change so that we are no longer slaves of sin, but we become slaves of righteousness. So Christ’s death to sin, when you look at our New Testament writers, look at how they they refer to it, you’ll find it in Hebrews 2 that he destroyed him that had the power of death. That is the devil.

67. 26:19

    First John three, He was manifested to take away our sins. First John 3 and 8 For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. In Hebrews 9 and 26, he’s appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. John, one in 29, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And first Peter too, you know, he himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.

68. 26:48

    It’s all this is how our New Testament writers use this It’s all about putting sin to death, that God can forgive our sins and that we lead a different kind of life. That’s what it was about, and now you can see why it was essential that Christ not be an Angel and that he not have some angelic nature, that he not be some foreign God, the God that came down and took on a human body.

69. 27:09

    He had to be. One of us, he had to have weak human nature so he could really die to sin. As Paul says, he died to sin once in Romans 6, in first, in the first, in Second Corinthians 5 and 21, he was made sin for us, you know, passages that we’re familiar with.

70. 27:27

    And in in first Peter two, he bore our sins in his body. Hebrews 9. He was offered to bear the sins of many, but he will come again not to bear sin. And in Romans 8, God condemned. Sin in the flesh. So Christ had to have this weak human nature so that he could win his victory. So when you look at what was going on, how God set out to condemn sin in the flesh, in the body of Jesus Christ, his Son, you got the conflict that develops within Mary because within Christ, because from Mary he gets the physical defilement, he inherits mortality, He inherits this nature that’s so prone to sin.

71. 28:04

    But from God, what he gets, the component that he gets from his Father is he gets a physical potential for perfect obedience. Didn’t mean he had to be perfectly obedient, but he got the potential that none of the rest of the race ever had of becoming the savior of the race. And so morning by morning, the Scriptures say God wakened him. He also had a natural bias in some way to his dad. I think that probably was important and in some way that to help him in his fight against sin. And this is what God did then, as he created in his Son a component, He has a member of our race now who has our nature, who has mortality, who has a bias to sin, a proneness to sin that we feel so that he can feel our temptations. He knows what it’s like to look at something and actually want it or to dream about something and possibly think about having it.

72. 28:58

    And yet at the same time, he inherits from his Father this ability that the Father can develop in him of overcoming sin. And so some people look at that and they say, all right, this does that mean that Jesus had an unfair advantage? He had something that you don’t have. He had the physical potential to develop perfect obedience. Nobody in this room has that.

73. 29:22

    So is that unfair? Well, you know when you look at that really, and you think, all right, Christ had that, I don’t have that. Would you want laid on you the fact that you could never sin? You can never make one mistake. You are, you know. Everybody in the whole room and the whole city and the whole community for thousands of years is counting on you to make it. And you look at that and say, was that an unfair advantage? That was a huge stressor in his life. The pressure was enormous.

74. 29:53

    And so, you know, it’s that’s an important concept to real about realize about Jesus Christ. Sometimes as younger people, we sometimes look at that and say, well, that’s not fair. He had something I didn’t have, but look at what was required of him that is not required of us. And he wasn’t a Superman.

75. 30:10

    That’s another concept I remember as a younger person growing up as a Christadelphian, then a Christadelphian Sunday school with great parents who taught me the truth. But at the same time, I had a natural tendency to think that Jesus Christ easily overcame sin. I used to read the temptation in the in the garden, in the wilderness. And you know, if you know, turning stones into bread, no problem.

76. 30:31

    Bible passage immediately. You know, you shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds in the mouth of God, not next temptation, you know, and that that’s sort of like the way I viewed him like a Superman where just like temptations bounced off of him easily. And it’s not until you’re reading the Psalms.

77. 30:46

    So you see him in the garden that you realize what a struggle it was. And you see that human side of Christ, of what he was going through day by day, learning obedience, by the things that he suffered and he heard for his godly fear, and he’s crying to his Father for help.

78. 31:02

    This whole subject also helps understand why Jesus Christ was baptized. Sometimes our kids ask us that. They wonder like, why was Christ baptized? He didn’t have any sins. Because we say today, you know, why? Why are we getting baptized? So some young person over there decides they want to get baptized. So you’re going to get baptized.

79. 31:19

    Why do you want to be baptized? That’s a common question that they ask at baptizal interviews. So you got to know the answer to that one. So why do you want to be baptized? And you say, well, because I want to be forgiven of my sins. And then you think, well, why was Jesus baptized? He didn’t have any sins to be forgiven of. But when you look at sin, as John Thomas explained it, the whole component of sin, when you look at the root and the ’cause then Christ had no personal sins, so. Was it really?

80. 31:47

    Just an example to us because that’s the next thing that people then say, well, he did it for us so that we would follow in the steps. And we sometimes fail to realize that look at he was really fighting this battle. He’s fighting this battle and it’s more intense in him than it is in us. He can’t sin once.

81. 32:05

    He can’t give in. And so much was required of him. And so you find that John the Baptist said that I need to be baptized by you and are you coming to me? You know, and this is the one who he said was spoken to by the prophet Isaiah, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight.

82. 32:23

    So what Jesus Christ did when he went down into the waters of baptism is he understood the whole process of the devil and sin. And he went down there as a public testimony to his friends, to the world, to his Father, to the angels in heaven, that he was committed to declare God right for his condemnation of sin, of the root and the cause.

83. 32:47

    And because of that, the Father opened the heavens and was so pleased and said, this is my beloved Son. I mean, this is what he’s been waiting for, for all these years, for 6000 years for someone to declare him right. And Jesus Christ did that. John the Baptist had been crying that all flesh is grass. He was, you know, referring back to Isaiah 40 right there. What shall I cry?

84. 33:10

    All flesh is grass, and it’s loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass Withers, The flower fades because the breath of the Lord blows upon it. Surely the people are grass. The grass Withers, the flower fades, but the Word of God stands forever. So Jesus Christ comes along at that point and says to John, John, we’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do this.

85. 33:30

    Thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness. So he declared that his dad was right for the whole process of how he had condemned sin and all the things that God had done. He was right to condemn sin to death, sinners to death. God was right to require us to put the old man to death.

86. 33:47

    Christ was committed to doing that. And so his declaration in baptism was simply what he would finally do at the cross. We just were looking at that last week when Brother Jim Harper was given his classes up at VIBC, that this was where the process started. He went out there, went down into the water and he declared.

87. 34:06

    God’s right. The old man must die, and that was a commitment then, and it was a commitment that at the end he would do it on the cross, which was why God was so pleased with his condemnation of sin as the acknowledgement of the of the Son that the Father was right. So why we’re baptized, we get baptized and we tell our young people, you’re baptized with the forgiveness of your sins.

88. 34:30

    But what you want to remember is the whole concept of baptism isn’t just about the forgiveness of our sins. It’s about the fact that we are committed to die with Christ to sin. That’s what we’re committing to in baptism. It isn’t just so that we can be forgiven of our sins. It’s so that we will tell our friends, our neighbors, those around us, the angels in heaven, God in Christ himself, that we are making a covenant, a commitment that we are going to put sin to death.

89. 35:00

    That’s what we do. And because of that, God can righteously forgive our sins. That’s what we do. We join with Christ in a death like His and the death like his isn’t his crucifixion on the pole His death that that Paul’s referring to is his death to sin. God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus Christ.

90. 35:23

    It’s not some torturous death that Paul’s referring to. He’s talking about the victory that God and Christ won when they put sin to death. So when you look at Jesus Christ and you try to figure out, well, why was he doing this? Well, he inherited from Mary the bodies that we have mortality and this nature that’s that’s prone to sin.

91. 35:43

    And so God designed a plan of redemption where he would take one of our race, one person, and really save that one person. He would work in that one person’s life and totally defeat sin and then put that person up as the public example of this is what God really wants. This is what God’s children’s do. They defeat sin and and they live lives of righteousness to God and declare God right in everything that he asked. God says, look at this is what we’re going to do and so he sets out to save his son.

92. 36:19

    This is from the angels perspective when when Jesus Christ was born, this was the focal point of 6000 years. We have to save Messiah. He’s got to make it and then the goal would be that the rest of the family be saved in him. So as well as Robert Roberts put it in the law of Moses, when he, when he wrote that, he actually made a comment on this concept about what it means that Christ died for us.

93. 36:42

    And he said there that the statement that he did these things for us has blinded many to the fact that he did them for himself first, for without which he could not have done them for us. For it was by doing them for himself that he did them for us, and he did them for us only in his, as we may become a part of Him in merging our individual, our individualities in Him by taking part in his death.

94. 37:12

    And again, he’s not talking about his torturous death on a cross. He’s talking about taking part in his death to sin. This is how Paul would put it, and putting on his name and sharing his life afterwards. He is, as it were, a center of healthy life in which we must become incorporate before we can be saved.

95. 37:32

    So you can see that as, as Robert Roberts saw it, it’s this concept of doing it for us, for us, for us. As it’s so stressed in the New Testament, it can sometimes lead people down a pathway where they end up thinking, well, God didn’t really need to do it for him, but He did.

96. 37:47

    He was born with our nature. He had mortality. He had a proneness to sin. He needed salvation. Christ needed to be saved from this nature of sin. And so God set up a plan to save his Son and in saving his Son, and the focal point was that he would be saving the rest of the race. And that’s how Jesus Christ saw it. That’s why He went through it for us. I think you’ll see that Christ never lost track of that concept.

97. 38:13

    He never lost focus on the fact that He was going through it for the group, for the good of the group. So that in Luke 18, when the ruler came to him and said, good teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? Immediately his mind goes to the fact that, wait a minute, I’m not good teacher. He says, why do you call me good? No one is good but one that is God don’t end up putting me up there.

98. 38:36

    I’m in this because my father’s going to use me. He’s going to save me so that I can save the rest. He understood he had the devil in him. He had to have the devil in him because the victory had to be won over sin over the root and the cause so that God could condemn sin in the flesh of Jesus Christ.

99. 38:55

    So he declared that God is the only one who is good and don’t end up thinking better of yourself. Later on in the New Testament when people got off the track on this early on, this is what became known as the Antichrist teaching. This is where the original Antichrist stuff came from. In first John 4 John refers to it that beloved don’t believe every spirit but test the spirits whether they are of God because many false prophets have gone out into the world and by this you will know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is. Not of God.

100. 39:32

     This is the spirit of Antichrist of which you have heard. It was coming and is now already in the world because people immediately got off the track on this and thought that Jesus Christ really didn’t come in the flesh. How in the world could a human person ever be sinless? He must have been a God and they immediately came up with this idea that Christ was different than us.

101. 39:53

     He had some pre-existing existence and he had just come down and taken on a body for a while. He didn’t really come in the flesh. And when you go that route, you take away the victory that. Was the great. Victory that God accomplished of condemning sin in the body of Jesus Christ. In Hebrews 9, when the apostle Paul refers to this and looking at the shadows, because he’s building his case now on the shadows of the law and saying, here’s how the law foreshadowed this. Christ came in Hebrews 9 at verse 11 as high priest of the good things to come with the greater and more perfect Tabernacle, not made with His hands, that is not of this creation, and not with the blood of bulls or the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood. He entered the Most Holy once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.

102. 40:41

     And some of your Bibles have those words for us in there, and they really shouldn’t be there. He entered into the holy place, force first for himself to obtain eternal redemption so that he could in turn and incorporate and save all of those who would be saved in him. The Greek there is some of the expositors notices in the middle voice right there indicating that the action has to be applied to the subject.

103. 41:05

     It’s not about us, it’s about the fact that He went in to obtain eternal redemption for Himself so that it could be for all of us. God had to save his Son first so that He could save the rest. Now, in covering this subject that way, this doesn’t eliminate the concept that, as many people have often wondered, well, would God have put Jesus Christ through all of this if it wasn’t for all of us?

104. 41:30

     And the Bible doesn’t comment on that at all. And you can speculate on that for the rest of your life because you know, it’s just, it’s, it’s almost one of those questions that you can ask that it’s almost worthless because what’s the point? What the Bible comments on is. What we really have, we have a race of people who are prone to sin, who are inevitably become sinners, who are born with mortality. God wants to save some, He loves them, and so he has his Son come in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin and condemn sin in the flesh of his Son.

105. 42:03

     And if Bible doesn’t comment on at all on what God would have done with Jesus if it hadn’t been for us. In Hebrews 7, when Paul again is looking at the the shadows of the law, he refers to in verse 27 that who does not need daily as those high priests to OfferUp sacrifices first for his own sins and then for the peoples as they did under the law.

106. 42:25

     Where the high priest would do that, he’d go in and 1st go and offer for his own sins, and then he would go back later and offer for the sins of the people. He says that this he did once for all, once for all when he offered up himself for the law appoints his high priest men who have weaknesses.

107. 42:43

     But the word of the oath which came after the law appoints the Son who has been perfected forever. Psalm 110, that you are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. So he did this once for all. Well, we’ll leave it there now for Class 2. And in Class 3, we come back, we’ll have a look at how God did save Jesus Christ and how that plan of redemption is available for us too.