It was a great weekend here at Immanuel with Dr. Rodney Woo and the Color of Church Conference. We were encouraged, challenged, convicted, and refreshed by God as His Word was delivered. A few things that I take away from the weekend are:
1) Multiethnic ministry requires the power of God to accomplish. We cannot manufacture it in our own strength.
2) To paraphrase Rodney Woo, if you begin with God's Word, you can't end up anywhere else but having a multiracial (his word, I prefer "multiethnic") vision.
3) It is not our programs or efforts that will be most effective in winning people to Christ, but our personal relationships with them.
4) The process of building an intentional multiethnic ministry is long and difficult, but worth every bit of sacrifice and effort.
5) Two fundamental areas where change is most crucial are worship and leadership. Two caveats to this are that worship has to be authentic, meaning that we cannot "contrive" diversity in worship until there is some diversity in the congregation; and diversity of leadership is no guarantee that diversity in the congregation will happen. But it won't happen apart from having diverse leadership.
6) Multiethnic ministry can never run on "autopilot." Ministries will regress to monocultural preferences where the multiethnic conviction is not constantly restated and on the front burner.
7) Success cannot be gauged on the response of those we are trying to reach, but on our faithfulness to reach out to them with the gospel.
These principles and many more can be heard in the audio recordings of the sessions, which are available through the following links:
Color of Church Conference Session 1
Color of Church Conference Session 2
Color of Church Sunday Bible Study
Color of Church Sunday Sermon
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Monday, June 07, 2010
Jesus Christ, the Living Stone - 1 Peter 2:4-8
Audio available here or on our podcast on iTunes
We have probably all heard the story of the three little pigs. Each one built a house using different materials. One built a house of straw. The Big Bad Wolf came to visit, saying, “Little pig, little pig, let me in.” But the pig said, “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.” And the Big Bad Wolf said, “Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down.” And of course, he did just that, and enjoyed a nice dinner of pulled pork barbecue. Then the wolf went to the second pig’s house, which had been built out of sticks. This encounter also ended badly for the pig. But when the wolf came to the third pig’s house, which was made of bricks, there was a different outcome. No matter how hard he huffed and puffed, he could not blow the house down. He decided to come down through the chimney, but the third pig had placed a pot of boiling water in the fireplace. The wolf landed in the water, and the third little pig had a feast of boiled wolf for dinner. There have been many morals drawn from the story over the years. One could be that an insatiable appetite for pork may result in premature death. But more evident is this lesson: it pays in the end to be wise and careful in making and executing plans.
Like those little pigs, we are building something. We aren’t all building houses necessarily, but we are all building our lives. Unlike the pigs, we do not have three sets of plans to choose from; only two. There are plans developed by men and plans developed by God. All of us will build our lives according to one or the other sets of blueprints. Now here on the construction site of life, God has placed a piece of building material. Quoting Isaiah 28, Peter says here, “Behold I lay in Zion a choice stone.” And this stone is Jesus Christ. He is described in verse 4 as a “Living Stone.” He is not like the idols of the nations which are carved out of stone. These stones are worshiped, but they are dead. They are like those idols described in Psalm 115:
They have mouths, but they cannot speak;
They have eyes, but they cannot see;
They have ears, but they cannot hear;
They have noses, but they cannot smell;
They have hands, but they cannot feel;
They have feet, but they cannot walk;
They cannot make a sound with their throat
Christ is not a dead stone, but a living one. He is alive, and through His resurrection from the dead, alive forever more. The world is a construction zone, upon which men and women are building their lives. And God has set a stone in the midst of this field. What we do with that stone indicates if we are building with God’s plans or men’s plans.
I. Those who build on the plans of men reject the Living Stone of Christ
The first thing see about this Living Stone of Jesus Christ is that He has been rejected by men. Obviously, this does not mean that He has been rejected by all men, or all human beings, otherwise we would not be here worshiping Him today. But it is true in a general sense that Christ faced overwhelming rejection by multitudes in His own day, and continues to be rejected, sometimes vehemently and violently by many still today. They see this stone that has been set in their construction zone and wonder why in the world it is there, who put it there, and how to get rid of it. It is just in the way of their plans to build their lives on their own terms. They may initially try to ignore the stone that is Jesus Christ. But He can hardly be ignored. That was the source of much frustration for me before I became a believer. Everywhere I turned there was someone talking about Jesus, or there was some church on the corner, or there was someone reading a Bible, or some artwork depicting scenes from the Bible. At least for those of us in the Western World, Jesus Christ is impossible to ignore. There are reminders of Him everywhere. And that gets under the skin of the unbeliever who is trying to ignore the stone that they think is just cluttering up their construction zone. They keep bumping into it.
So then, they may try to remove the stone. This happened in Jesus’ own day. The most ardent rejecters of Christ in His day were the religious leaders of Israel. They got tired of bumping into Him and His teachings and His followers. They were trying to build their own system, and they didn’t need Jesus messing it up. There’s a warning for the contemporary church in those religious leaders. They had built an enormous facility, amassed a huge following, had many programs, and were handling vast amounts of money. But they were rejecting Jesus Christ. God was not in what they were building. So we need to ask ourselves … is God in what we are doing? Or are we so caught up in building our own systems that we have ignored Him altogether? A. W. Tozer once said that if the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95% of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. That is a tragedy. That was the tragedy of the first-century leaders of the Jewish religious system, and it is the tragedy of the Church, especially the church in America and the West today. And when those religious leaders got tired of bumping into Jesus, and they could ignore Him no longer, they sought to remove the stone from the construction zone by having Him killed. And they succeeded, for just under 72 hours. Amazingly, the stone showed up in the field again. Jesus rose from the dead.
Throughout history, there have been people so bold as to think they could remove the stone. They have sought to wipe out all traces of Jesus Christ from the face of the earth. Tyrannical emperors, radical philosophers, and others have had their turn. And none have succeeded. Today, the so-called “New Atheists” are having a go. They are led by people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. This movement was characterized in a 2006 Wired magazine article as condemning “not just belief in God but respect for belief in God.” In their minds, “Religion is not only wrong; it's evil.” In his book Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris writes, “I have set out to destroy the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” And this is mild in comparison to some of the heated rhetoric emerging from this movement. But like every other effort to remove the Living Stone of Christ, time will show that this one will likewise fail.
The Living Stone of Jesus Christ cannot be ignored in the construction zone of life. Neither can He be removed. People try, and think for a moment that they have succeeded, but He keeps showing up. Those who are trying to build their lives and their empires on the blueprints of man keep bumping into Him at every turn. And so the Living Stone of Jesus Christ becomes for them, “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.” The presence of this Stone in their field annoys them because they keep tripping over it. They have in their minds plans for building their own lives their own way, and Christ is not a factor in their planning. They have not only tried to ignore and reject the Living Stone, they do not believe and have actively determined to disobey Him. “They stumble,” Peter says, “because they are disobedient to the Word.” They disobey the Incarnate Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the written Word of God, the Bible, by insisting on building their lives apart from this singular stone. But if they would hear and heed this Word, they would turn to Him and believe and allow their lives to be built according to God’s blueprints rather than their own. But by ignoring Christ, rejecting Christ, disobeying Christ, they stumble on the Living Stone, and great is their fall.
We are told here that there is a predetermined consequence for rejecting Jesus Christ, the Living Stone. The translators of the NASB have inserted the word doom here in the text to indicate the severity of this end. Elsewhere in Scripture, it is spelled out with precision. In Proverbs 14:12, we read, “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” Surely death awaits us all, but the one who dies in rejection of Christ suffers a destiny worse than death. Dying in a state of separation from God leads to eternal separation from God. Jesus said that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish, but have eternal life. Perishing is the end of those who die without Christ, and that perishing will occur in hell. The book of Revelation describes hell as a lake of fire, where the unredeemed will join Satan and his spiritual forces and be tormented day and night, forever and ever. Jesus described it as a place of eternal fire, eternal punishment, where the worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched. Sam Harris, that radical atheist I quoted earlier, seems to understand the severity and the consequences of rejecting Christ better than even some Christians. He said, “If Christianity is correct, and I persist in my unbelief, I should expect to suffer the torments of hell. Worse still, I have persuaded others, and many close to me, to reject the very idea of God. They too will languish in ‘eternal fire’ …. If the basic doctrine of Christianity is correct, I have misused my life in the worst conceivable way.” And while Harris does not believe that the basic doctrine, or any doctrine for that matter, of Christianity is true, at least he understands the implications. And we can pray for him and those like him, who stumble over the Living Stone, will turn from their errors and be saved before it is too late.
All around us are those who are building their lives on the plans of men. They have ignored the Living Stone that is Jesus Christ, they have rejected this Stone, they have disobeyed the Word and thus they stumble. And so it would be for us all because of our sin had God not intervened to show us that there is another way to build our lives.
II. Those who build on the plans of God find the Living Stone of Christ to be the Cornerstone
Out here on the side of the building is a cornerstone. It has the name of the church and the date this building was built inscribed on it. But in all reality, this cornerstone is merely decorative. It doesn’t serve much of a structural purpose. But in ancient times, the cornerstone was the most important part of a structure. The entire building rested, to some degree, upon that stone in such a way that if it were removed, the entire structure would collapse. This stone was the truest cut stone of the building and set the standard for what was true and level in the rest of the building. If the building had a solid and true cornerstone, it would be a well-built building.
Here Peter says that the Living Stone that is Jesus Christ is the Cornerstone of the building that God is constructing. “The stone which the builders rejected, this became the very cornerstone.” And like all good cornerstones, this one is described as “choice and precious,” in the sight of the architect. And the architect is God. God the Father looks upon His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and says of Him, “This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased.” He is a choice and precious stone for the construction of God’s building.
And what is God building? He is building a spiritual house. The Apostle Paul said in Acts 17:24 that God does not dwell in temples made with hands. A woman asked Jesus on one occasion on which mountain is God more rightly worshiped? Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. … But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.” So, God is not confined to a specific structure or geographical location. No building can be built to house Him. This building in which we meet is no more the “house of God” than any other building or location where those who worship Him in Spirit and truth gather. I have gathered with Christians in East Africa under a Baobab tree and with believers in Eastern Europe on board a ship in the middle of the Black Sea, and I assure you that God does not need a house to dwell in. So He is building a “spiritual house,” a habitation for Himself that is not made with brick and mortar, stick or straw. The language is metaphorical. He is building a spiritual house for Himself.
This spiritual house will be the place of a holy priesthood where spiritual sacrifices are offered up. Again, the language is metaphorical. Israel had a literal temple, with literal priests, who offered literal sacrifices. If that is what God wanted, He didn’t need to reinvent it. It was already there. But when Jesus visited that temple and observed its priests and its sacrifices, He pronounced the entire system to be worthless and spiritually dead. God had no more need of that building, and so some years after Peter wrote these words, the Jerusalem temple was destroyed and has never been rebuilt. But God’s work goes on today through a spiritual temple. And God had no more need of that priesthood. He says here that He was establishing a “holy priesthood.” This implies that the former priesthood had become unholy. As we’ve said here many times, the idea of holiness has to do with being set apart for God’s specific use and purposes. The Jewish priesthood was no longer useful to God; it was no longer set apart for His purposes. So He was making a new priesthood that would occupy a spiritual temple. And God had no more need for those old sacrifices. They were past their expiration date. They were given to Israel to point them forward to an ultimate sacrifice that was to come; and it had come in the person of Jesus Christ. His substitutionary death for sinners rendered those offerings obsolete. The new priesthood would not be occupied with killing animals. Those offerings were no longer acceptable to God because the perfect sacrifice had been made once and for all. So the new priesthood would offer spiritual sacrifices that were acceptable to God through Jesus Christ: offerings of worship, intercession, ministry and witness. Worship comes before the throne of God on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice. Intercession is acceptable on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice and actually pleads the blood-bought benefits of Christ’s sacrifice. Ministry that is acceptable to God is that which functions as a conduit of His grace, where the recipients of Christ’s sacrifice not only receive but also extend the benefits of God’s grace in Christ to others in His name. Witness proclaims Christ’s sacrifice to those who have yet to hear, yet to believe upon Him.
And God is building this spiritual house with the living stones of those who believe in Christ. Matthew 16:18 has been one of the most controversial verses of Scripture in the history of the Christian Church. There Jesus says to Peter, “I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” The name Peter means “rock,” and therefore many have said that Jesus was telling Peter that He was going to build His church on Peter. The entire history and tradition of the Roman Catholic Church has been built primarily upon this interpretation of the verse. But isn’t it interesting that, if this is what Jesus meant by these words, that Peter doesn’t bring that up here? In fact, what Peter himself teaches here is the exact opposite of that interpretation. Peter understood that when Jesus called him “Peter,” He did not mean that He was going to build His church on the rock of Peter. Rather, Peter understood that Christ was going to build His church on the Rock of Himself. When Jesus told Peter, “Upon this Rock, I will build My church,” He was referring to the Rock that Peter had just spoken of before this. Before saying this to Peter, Peter said to Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” That is the Rock that the Church is built upon. And everyone who comes to recognize Christ as that foundational cornerstone of God’s spiritual house, the church, becomes like Peter, a smaller living stone that is fitted together upon the Living Stone of Christ.
God is constructing His spiritual house with living stones, those who have been made alive in Christ Jesus. We are those who have “come to Him as to a Living Stone” (v4). We are those who have found Him to be choice and precious for the purpose of building our lives, and have therefore believed upon Him (v7). And those who believe in Him, Jesus Christ, the Living Stone, the Cornerstone, will not be disappointed (v6). Those who reject the Cornerstone will be disappointed to find that all that they have built comes to ruins before the throne of God as they are judged with eternal condemnation. Those who believe upon Christ will find that it is not what they have built for themselves that matters, but rather that they have been built up together upon the Cornerstone of Christ for God’s purpose. And they will not be disappointed, for they will find that God has used their lives for His glory, and they have received eternal life in Him.
Shakespeare wrote, “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Peter would prefer to say that all the world is a construction site, and all the men and women are building their lives in it. Some are building according to their own blueprints. Some are being built together according to God’s blueprints. And the difference is found in one solitary Stone. God says, “Behold I lay in Zion a choice stone, a precious cornerstone.” What will you do with that stone? If you build upon the plans of men, you will try to ignore this stone and reject this stone. You will disbelieve and disobey the word concerning this stone. You will be offended that this stone refuses to go away, and ultimately you will stumble over this stone to your own destruction. But those who are being built up according to God’s plans bow before this stone in faith and worship, and find themselves in the hands of the master architect and builder, God Himself, who is building us up together upon the Cornerstone. Jesus Christ is this stone. And it is our response to Him that determines our life here and now, and our destiny for all eternity. In Acts 4:10-12, Peter, the Apostle who wrote the words that occupy our attention today, stood before his persecutors, a crowd of people who were building their lives in defiance of Christ, and made a bold proclamation. He said, “Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead … He is the STONE WHICH WAS REJECTED by you, THE BUILDERS, but WHICH BECAME THE CHIEF CORNER stone. And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”
He who believes in Him will not be disappointed, but will be saved. But for those who disbelieve, the stone which the builders rejected becomes a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, for they stumble because they are disobedient to the word, and to this doom they were also appointed.” So what will you do with this Stone, the Lord Jesus? Will you stumble over Him and fall to destruction? Or will you bow before Him and be built up upon Him as a part of God’s spiritual house and holy priesthood? The choice is yours. What will you do with this stone? What will you do with Jesus?
We have probably all heard the story of the three little pigs. Each one built a house using different materials. One built a house of straw. The Big Bad Wolf came to visit, saying, “Little pig, little pig, let me in.” But the pig said, “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.” And the Big Bad Wolf said, “Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down.” And of course, he did just that, and enjoyed a nice dinner of pulled pork barbecue. Then the wolf went to the second pig’s house, which had been built out of sticks. This encounter also ended badly for the pig. But when the wolf came to the third pig’s house, which was made of bricks, there was a different outcome. No matter how hard he huffed and puffed, he could not blow the house down. He decided to come down through the chimney, but the third pig had placed a pot of boiling water in the fireplace. The wolf landed in the water, and the third little pig had a feast of boiled wolf for dinner. There have been many morals drawn from the story over the years. One could be that an insatiable appetite for pork may result in premature death. But more evident is this lesson: it pays in the end to be wise and careful in making and executing plans.
Like those little pigs, we are building something. We aren’t all building houses necessarily, but we are all building our lives. Unlike the pigs, we do not have three sets of plans to choose from; only two. There are plans developed by men and plans developed by God. All of us will build our lives according to one or the other sets of blueprints. Now here on the construction site of life, God has placed a piece of building material. Quoting Isaiah 28, Peter says here, “Behold I lay in Zion a choice stone.” And this stone is Jesus Christ. He is described in verse 4 as a “Living Stone.” He is not like the idols of the nations which are carved out of stone. These stones are worshiped, but they are dead. They are like those idols described in Psalm 115:
They have mouths, but they cannot speak;
They have eyes, but they cannot see;
They have ears, but they cannot hear;
They have noses, but they cannot smell;
They have hands, but they cannot feel;
They have feet, but they cannot walk;
They cannot make a sound with their throat
Christ is not a dead stone, but a living one. He is alive, and through His resurrection from the dead, alive forever more. The world is a construction zone, upon which men and women are building their lives. And God has set a stone in the midst of this field. What we do with that stone indicates if we are building with God’s plans or men’s plans.
I. Those who build on the plans of men reject the Living Stone of Christ
The first thing see about this Living Stone of Jesus Christ is that He has been rejected by men. Obviously, this does not mean that He has been rejected by all men, or all human beings, otherwise we would not be here worshiping Him today. But it is true in a general sense that Christ faced overwhelming rejection by multitudes in His own day, and continues to be rejected, sometimes vehemently and violently by many still today. They see this stone that has been set in their construction zone and wonder why in the world it is there, who put it there, and how to get rid of it. It is just in the way of their plans to build their lives on their own terms. They may initially try to ignore the stone that is Jesus Christ. But He can hardly be ignored. That was the source of much frustration for me before I became a believer. Everywhere I turned there was someone talking about Jesus, or there was some church on the corner, or there was someone reading a Bible, or some artwork depicting scenes from the Bible. At least for those of us in the Western World, Jesus Christ is impossible to ignore. There are reminders of Him everywhere. And that gets under the skin of the unbeliever who is trying to ignore the stone that they think is just cluttering up their construction zone. They keep bumping into it.
So then, they may try to remove the stone. This happened in Jesus’ own day. The most ardent rejecters of Christ in His day were the religious leaders of Israel. They got tired of bumping into Him and His teachings and His followers. They were trying to build their own system, and they didn’t need Jesus messing it up. There’s a warning for the contemporary church in those religious leaders. They had built an enormous facility, amassed a huge following, had many programs, and were handling vast amounts of money. But they were rejecting Jesus Christ. God was not in what they were building. So we need to ask ourselves … is God in what we are doing? Or are we so caught up in building our own systems that we have ignored Him altogether? A. W. Tozer once said that if the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95% of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. That is a tragedy. That was the tragedy of the first-century leaders of the Jewish religious system, and it is the tragedy of the Church, especially the church in America and the West today. And when those religious leaders got tired of bumping into Jesus, and they could ignore Him no longer, they sought to remove the stone from the construction zone by having Him killed. And they succeeded, for just under 72 hours. Amazingly, the stone showed up in the field again. Jesus rose from the dead.
Throughout history, there have been people so bold as to think they could remove the stone. They have sought to wipe out all traces of Jesus Christ from the face of the earth. Tyrannical emperors, radical philosophers, and others have had their turn. And none have succeeded. Today, the so-called “New Atheists” are having a go. They are led by people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. This movement was characterized in a 2006 Wired magazine article as condemning “not just belief in God but respect for belief in God.” In their minds, “Religion is not only wrong; it's evil.” In his book Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris writes, “I have set out to destroy the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” And this is mild in comparison to some of the heated rhetoric emerging from this movement. But like every other effort to remove the Living Stone of Christ, time will show that this one will likewise fail.
The Living Stone of Jesus Christ cannot be ignored in the construction zone of life. Neither can He be removed. People try, and think for a moment that they have succeeded, but He keeps showing up. Those who are trying to build their lives and their empires on the blueprints of man keep bumping into Him at every turn. And so the Living Stone of Jesus Christ becomes for them, “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.” The presence of this Stone in their field annoys them because they keep tripping over it. They have in their minds plans for building their own lives their own way, and Christ is not a factor in their planning. They have not only tried to ignore and reject the Living Stone, they do not believe and have actively determined to disobey Him. “They stumble,” Peter says, “because they are disobedient to the Word.” They disobey the Incarnate Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the written Word of God, the Bible, by insisting on building their lives apart from this singular stone. But if they would hear and heed this Word, they would turn to Him and believe and allow their lives to be built according to God’s blueprints rather than their own. But by ignoring Christ, rejecting Christ, disobeying Christ, they stumble on the Living Stone, and great is their fall.
We are told here that there is a predetermined consequence for rejecting Jesus Christ, the Living Stone. The translators of the NASB have inserted the word doom here in the text to indicate the severity of this end. Elsewhere in Scripture, it is spelled out with precision. In Proverbs 14:12, we read, “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” Surely death awaits us all, but the one who dies in rejection of Christ suffers a destiny worse than death. Dying in a state of separation from God leads to eternal separation from God. Jesus said that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish, but have eternal life. Perishing is the end of those who die without Christ, and that perishing will occur in hell. The book of Revelation describes hell as a lake of fire, where the unredeemed will join Satan and his spiritual forces and be tormented day and night, forever and ever. Jesus described it as a place of eternal fire, eternal punishment, where the worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched. Sam Harris, that radical atheist I quoted earlier, seems to understand the severity and the consequences of rejecting Christ better than even some Christians. He said, “If Christianity is correct, and I persist in my unbelief, I should expect to suffer the torments of hell. Worse still, I have persuaded others, and many close to me, to reject the very idea of God. They too will languish in ‘eternal fire’ …. If the basic doctrine of Christianity is correct, I have misused my life in the worst conceivable way.” And while Harris does not believe that the basic doctrine, or any doctrine for that matter, of Christianity is true, at least he understands the implications. And we can pray for him and those like him, who stumble over the Living Stone, will turn from their errors and be saved before it is too late.
All around us are those who are building their lives on the plans of men. They have ignored the Living Stone that is Jesus Christ, they have rejected this Stone, they have disobeyed the Word and thus they stumble. And so it would be for us all because of our sin had God not intervened to show us that there is another way to build our lives.
II. Those who build on the plans of God find the Living Stone of Christ to be the Cornerstone
Out here on the side of the building is a cornerstone. It has the name of the church and the date this building was built inscribed on it. But in all reality, this cornerstone is merely decorative. It doesn’t serve much of a structural purpose. But in ancient times, the cornerstone was the most important part of a structure. The entire building rested, to some degree, upon that stone in such a way that if it were removed, the entire structure would collapse. This stone was the truest cut stone of the building and set the standard for what was true and level in the rest of the building. If the building had a solid and true cornerstone, it would be a well-built building.
Here Peter says that the Living Stone that is Jesus Christ is the Cornerstone of the building that God is constructing. “The stone which the builders rejected, this became the very cornerstone.” And like all good cornerstones, this one is described as “choice and precious,” in the sight of the architect. And the architect is God. God the Father looks upon His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and says of Him, “This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased.” He is a choice and precious stone for the construction of God’s building.
And what is God building? He is building a spiritual house. The Apostle Paul said in Acts 17:24 that God does not dwell in temples made with hands. A woman asked Jesus on one occasion on which mountain is God more rightly worshiped? Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. … But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.” So, God is not confined to a specific structure or geographical location. No building can be built to house Him. This building in which we meet is no more the “house of God” than any other building or location where those who worship Him in Spirit and truth gather. I have gathered with Christians in East Africa under a Baobab tree and with believers in Eastern Europe on board a ship in the middle of the Black Sea, and I assure you that God does not need a house to dwell in. So He is building a “spiritual house,” a habitation for Himself that is not made with brick and mortar, stick or straw. The language is metaphorical. He is building a spiritual house for Himself.
This spiritual house will be the place of a holy priesthood where spiritual sacrifices are offered up. Again, the language is metaphorical. Israel had a literal temple, with literal priests, who offered literal sacrifices. If that is what God wanted, He didn’t need to reinvent it. It was already there. But when Jesus visited that temple and observed its priests and its sacrifices, He pronounced the entire system to be worthless and spiritually dead. God had no more need of that building, and so some years after Peter wrote these words, the Jerusalem temple was destroyed and has never been rebuilt. But God’s work goes on today through a spiritual temple. And God had no more need of that priesthood. He says here that He was establishing a “holy priesthood.” This implies that the former priesthood had become unholy. As we’ve said here many times, the idea of holiness has to do with being set apart for God’s specific use and purposes. The Jewish priesthood was no longer useful to God; it was no longer set apart for His purposes. So He was making a new priesthood that would occupy a spiritual temple. And God had no more need for those old sacrifices. They were past their expiration date. They were given to Israel to point them forward to an ultimate sacrifice that was to come; and it had come in the person of Jesus Christ. His substitutionary death for sinners rendered those offerings obsolete. The new priesthood would not be occupied with killing animals. Those offerings were no longer acceptable to God because the perfect sacrifice had been made once and for all. So the new priesthood would offer spiritual sacrifices that were acceptable to God through Jesus Christ: offerings of worship, intercession, ministry and witness. Worship comes before the throne of God on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice. Intercession is acceptable on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice and actually pleads the blood-bought benefits of Christ’s sacrifice. Ministry that is acceptable to God is that which functions as a conduit of His grace, where the recipients of Christ’s sacrifice not only receive but also extend the benefits of God’s grace in Christ to others in His name. Witness proclaims Christ’s sacrifice to those who have yet to hear, yet to believe upon Him.
And God is building this spiritual house with the living stones of those who believe in Christ. Matthew 16:18 has been one of the most controversial verses of Scripture in the history of the Christian Church. There Jesus says to Peter, “I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” The name Peter means “rock,” and therefore many have said that Jesus was telling Peter that He was going to build His church on Peter. The entire history and tradition of the Roman Catholic Church has been built primarily upon this interpretation of the verse. But isn’t it interesting that, if this is what Jesus meant by these words, that Peter doesn’t bring that up here? In fact, what Peter himself teaches here is the exact opposite of that interpretation. Peter understood that when Jesus called him “Peter,” He did not mean that He was going to build His church on the rock of Peter. Rather, Peter understood that Christ was going to build His church on the Rock of Himself. When Jesus told Peter, “Upon this Rock, I will build My church,” He was referring to the Rock that Peter had just spoken of before this. Before saying this to Peter, Peter said to Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” That is the Rock that the Church is built upon. And everyone who comes to recognize Christ as that foundational cornerstone of God’s spiritual house, the church, becomes like Peter, a smaller living stone that is fitted together upon the Living Stone of Christ.
God is constructing His spiritual house with living stones, those who have been made alive in Christ Jesus. We are those who have “come to Him as to a Living Stone” (v4). We are those who have found Him to be choice and precious for the purpose of building our lives, and have therefore believed upon Him (v7). And those who believe in Him, Jesus Christ, the Living Stone, the Cornerstone, will not be disappointed (v6). Those who reject the Cornerstone will be disappointed to find that all that they have built comes to ruins before the throne of God as they are judged with eternal condemnation. Those who believe upon Christ will find that it is not what they have built for themselves that matters, but rather that they have been built up together upon the Cornerstone of Christ for God’s purpose. And they will not be disappointed, for they will find that God has used their lives for His glory, and they have received eternal life in Him.
Shakespeare wrote, “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Peter would prefer to say that all the world is a construction site, and all the men and women are building their lives in it. Some are building according to their own blueprints. Some are being built together according to God’s blueprints. And the difference is found in one solitary Stone. God says, “Behold I lay in Zion a choice stone, a precious cornerstone.” What will you do with that stone? If you build upon the plans of men, you will try to ignore this stone and reject this stone. You will disbelieve and disobey the word concerning this stone. You will be offended that this stone refuses to go away, and ultimately you will stumble over this stone to your own destruction. But those who are being built up according to God’s plans bow before this stone in faith and worship, and find themselves in the hands of the master architect and builder, God Himself, who is building us up together upon the Cornerstone. Jesus Christ is this stone. And it is our response to Him that determines our life here and now, and our destiny for all eternity. In Acts 4:10-12, Peter, the Apostle who wrote the words that occupy our attention today, stood before his persecutors, a crowd of people who were building their lives in defiance of Christ, and made a bold proclamation. He said, “Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead … He is the STONE WHICH WAS REJECTED by you, THE BUILDERS, but WHICH BECAME THE CHIEF CORNER stone. And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”
He who believes in Him will not be disappointed, but will be saved. But for those who disbelieve, the stone which the builders rejected becomes a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, for they stumble because they are disobedient to the word, and to this doom they were also appointed.” So what will you do with this Stone, the Lord Jesus? Will you stumble over Him and fall to destruction? Or will you bow before Him and be built up upon Him as a part of God’s spiritual house and holy priesthood? The choice is yours. What will you do with this stone? What will you do with Jesus?
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
The Word Which Was Preached to You - 1 Peter 1:22-2:3
Audio available here (click to stream, right-click to download) or on our iTunes podcast.
When people answer the call to serve God in ministry, they find that suddenly they are the recipients of advice of some kind or another, some good, some bad, some solicited, some unsolicited, from nearly everyone they encounter. In the New Testament, we encounter young man named Timothy who had answered God’s call to pastoral ministry. He had the great privilege of being mentored by none other than the Apostle Paul. Paul knew this young man, and he knew the church that Timothy had gone to serve in Ephesus. And in his second letter to Timothy, Paul warned the young preacher that the days were soon coming when people, even those within the church, are going to become lovers of self and lovers of money; that they will be boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. He says that in the days to come, there will be many who will “not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.” And he even suggests that there were already some like this in the church. Now, what advice do you think the great Apostle might give to the young preacher? How should he deal with these matters? Perhaps he should form a committee. Maybe he should call in a church consultant or schedule a special meeting to address the issues? No, rather, Paul gives him one piece of advice. One simple statement lays out Timothy’s ministerial strategy in the face of all of these adversities. In 2 Timothy 4:2, he tells young Timothy, “Preach the Word.” Three words. Preach the Word. And these words are not merely one man’s opinion. This is God’s inspired truth recorded in sacred scripture to admonish us all of the sufficiency, the authority, and the reliability of God’s Word.
Our passage today causes us to turn our thoughts to the subject of the Bible itself. Peter says in 1:25 that “this is the Word which was preached to you.” At some point along the way in their lives, these men and women and children had come under the preaching and teaching of Scripture. And it had a revolutionary effect on their lives. When we hear the Bible preached, when we read the Bible, or when we study it, we are not just hearing empty words. These words are powerful and effective if we incline ourselves to them. So we must be diligent as readers and as hearers of the Word and never think that we have just opened one of so many other books, or listened to one of so many other talks. This is God’s Word and it accomplishes God’s purposes when we take it in.
I. The Word Which Was Preached To You is God’s Word
In verse 23, Peter speaks of the Word of God, and in verse 25, quoting Isaiah, he refers to the Word of the Lord. And he says that this is the word which was preached to you. It is God’s Word. Now, I must say that not all preaching is the preaching of God’s Word. It is the Scripture, and not the sermon that is God’s Word. In what is called expository preaching, the sermon is thoroughly rooted in the sacred text and the truths of that text are drawn out and explained. So a preacher does not have God’s permission to come to the task of sermon preparation and say, “OK, I want to preach on a certain subject, and here is what I want to say about that subject, so now let me look through the Bible and find verses that support what I want to say.” That is not preaching God’s Word. That is abusing God’s word in order to preach my own words. And every person who attempts to preach or teach or speak in the name of Christ should come to the Bible and allow the text to dictate what we believe and what we will say. It is the text of Scripture, and not my opinions or any other person’s opinions, which God has declared to be His very word. So, in preaching or teaching, our words are only God’s words inasmuch as they accurately proclaim the truth of what is written in this Word, the Bible.
The Lord spoke through Jeremiah to address the prophets of that day by saying,
Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility; They speak a vision of their own imagination, Not from the mouth of the LORD. They keep saying to those who despise Me, “The LORD has said, ‘You will have peace’”; And as for everyone who walks in the stubbornness of his own heart, They say, 'Calamity will not come upon you.' But who has stood in the council of the LORD, That he should see and hear His word? Who has given heed to His word and listened? … I did not send these prophets, But they ran. I did not speak to them, But they prophesied. But if they had stood in My council, Then they would have announced My words to My people, And would have turned them back from their evil way And from the evil of their deeds.” (Jeremiah 23:16-22)
So, according to the Lord Himself, some who claim to speak for God actually do not. Those who do are those who spend time with God, and receive His word clearly, and then announce His word. Therefore, we should never be lazy listeners. We must be discerning, like those Christians at Berea in Acts 17, who are described as being “noble-minded … for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.” When they heard the preached word, they returned to the written word to compare what they had heard with what God had spoken.
The Bible is God’s Word. We are told that twice explicitly in these few verses in First Peter. Therefore, because it comes from God, there are certain things that must be true about it. And Peter elaborates on a number of those things here. First he tells us that God’s Word is true. In verse 22, he says that these Christians have been obedient to the truth. We read in Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man that He should lie.” People lie. It is characteristic of human beings to exaggerate, twist the facts, distort the truth, and even tell bold faced lies. But these things are not true of God. Titus 1:2 says that God never lies. Hebrews 6:18 says that it is impossible for God to lie. God can be trusted because He has never lied, He does not lie, He indeed cannot lie. Therefore, all that God says is true. Since all of Scripture is “inspired by God” or “God-breathed,” as Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16, and “the word of God,” as Peter says here, then Scripture must be truthful just as God is. As David prays in 2 Samuel 7:28, “You are God, and your words are true.”
Not only is God’s Word true, it is also pure. In 2:2, Peter compares the Word of God to pure milk. This idea of purity has to do with something that has not been adulterated or diluted. A chemical can be weakened by diluting it with water or another substance, and it is therefore no longer pure. Two substances can be combined in a mixture, resulting in something altogether different than the pure original substances. But the Bible has not been diluted in any way, and its truth has not been mixed with any error. We do not have to go through and determine which parts are true and which parts are not, because it is truth, without any mixture of error, in its entirety. David writes in Psalm 12:6, “The words of the Lord are pure words.” Therefore, we must be careful in our preaching, in our teaching and speaking of the word, and in our hearing and reading of the word, not to adulterate or dilute God’s truth with erroneous human opinions.
Then Peter also says that God’s Word is living (1:23). The context in which Peter says this has to do with seed. He says that you have been born again as a result of a certain kind of seed. This seed, He says is the living Word of God. I don’t know much about gardening or farming, but I do know that there is such a thing as bad seed. It may be old, dried out, cracked open, or otherwise damaged. If you put that seed into the ground, nothing happens. That seed is essentially dead. It cannot bring forth new life. But when you plant a good seed, a living seed, into the ground and care for it properly, that seed will bring forth new life. Peter is borrowing imagery from the Lord Jesus here, who taught a parable about a man who went out to sow seed. And the seed fell on four different kinds of soil. And some of that seed produced life, and some didn’t; and some sprouted quickly, and just as quickly died; but some of it grew and produced a bountiful harvest. Now here’s the thing – the problem was in the soil, not in the seed. It was the same seed that was sown on all the soils. The seed was good, and when Jesus explained this parable to His disciples, He told them that the seed is the Word of God. It is alive, and it has the ability to produce life in the soil of our lives if we nurture it once it has been sown.
When I was in college, I was a new Christian, but I was struggling to live for Christ. It seemed like every time I came home and attended church, my pastor preached a sermon that was exactly what I needed to hear. I thought someone was tipping the pastor off about my sins! I would return to my dorm room on campus and pick up my Bible, and I would open it up to some point and begin reading, and I would find that the text was exactly what I needed to read. Has that ever happened to you? How do we explain that? The Word of God is living! It is alive and it meets us at our point of need, it deposits itself into the soil of our lives, and it is good seed. Therefore, if it lands in good soil, a life that is willing to allow the seed bear fruit, then the seed will grow and transform us from the inside out.
These are not dead words on dead pages in a dead book! Try it – read any other book, and see if it is able to produce the kind of life within you that the Bible can. It cannot. The Bible is uniquely able to work its way down into the very foundation of your soul to produce new spiritual life in you. The writer of Hebrews said it this way Hebrews 4:12 -- For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. No other book, no other word, has the ability to cut like this one. It is a living and active word that is sharper than the mightiest of swords. The sharpest sword, the sharpest scalpel, can divide the head from the neck, or the muscle from the bone, but the word of God is able to separate the soul and the spirit, the joints and the marrow, and to cut all the way down to the very thoughts and motives of the human heart. It is a living word.
And then Peter says in addition that the Word of God is both imperishable and enduring. These ideas are similar but not identical. That the word endures means that it has not been destroyed. That it is imperishable means that it cannot be destroyed. And God knows, plenty of people have tried to destroy it. Some of these have been inscribed in the pages of history books, and others have faded from memory altogether, but the Bible still stands.
The imperishable nature of the Bible is here contrasted with perishable human nature. In 1 Peter 1:24-25, you should find the words in all capital letters in most English Bibles. This is a way of indicating that the words are a quotation from the Old Testament, and in this case, it is from Isaiah 40: "ALL FLESH IS LIKE GRASS, AND ALL ITS GLORY LIKE THE FLOWER OF GRASS. THE GRASS WITHERS, AND THE FLOWER FALLS OFF, BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURES FOREVER." Human beings come and go, and in the grand scheme of history, our lifespan is rather short. We are like grass, which quickly withers. Some human beings accomplish great things in their lives, but the glory of these accomplishments is like a flower. It lasts just a little while. But God’s Word does not quickly fade from view; it does not wither or fall; it stands forever. There has never been, and there never will be, a time throughout all eternity that these words are shown to be untrue.
Every now and then, someone will come up with some scientific or archaeological discovery that challenges the teachings of the Bible. But in every case, either the so-called science is found to be faulty, or else unprovable, or in some rare cases, Christians have discovered that their interpretation of Scripture rather than the words of Scripture were in error. More often than not, that which is discovered through the right practice of science, where results are repeatable and provable, or that which is discovered buried in the sands of history, has served to confirm the truthfulness of the Bible and the errors of men rather than vice-versa. And every human effort to stamp out the Word of God has resulted in utter failure.
In 1971, Ravi Zacharias was ministering in Vietnam as the war was going on. He had a young Christian interpreter traveling with him by the name of Hien Pham. Shortly after the Communists took over all of Vietnam, Hien was arrested for aiding and abetting the Americans. While he was in prison, his Communist captors sought to brainwash him into renouncing the Christian faith. Over time, Hien began to weaken. He began to think that maybe the Christians had lied to him; maybe God did not exist. One night, he made up his mind that he would go to sleep and wake up the next day to never pray or consider himself a Christian again. The next morning, Hien was ordered to clean the prison’s latrines. As he emptied all the foul contents, his eyes caught a glimpse of paper that appeared to be written in English. He washed off the paper and stuck in his pocket to read later. That night, he pulled out this piece of paper and began to read it. This is what he read: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Of course Hien was reading from Romans, Chapter 8. The next day, Hien volunteered to clean the latrine, and continued to do so regularly. And every day, Hien would find pages of Scripture soiled by human waste. Apparently someone in the camp was using a Bible as toilet paper. But over time, page by page, Hien reassembled a significant portion of the Bible, and those pages became words of life to him.
Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:18). And here Peter tells us that the word which has been preached to us is God’s Word, therefore it is true, pure, living, imperishable, and enduring.
II. The Word Which Was Preached To You Accomplishes God’s Purposes
We are a fickle people, are we not? For evidence of this we need only see how people react to changes in the weather. When it rains, we complain about getting wet; if it doesn’t rain, we complain about how much we need it. We know that we need the rain, because when it comes, it waters the plant life and restores the water supplies. Rain always accomplishes a purpose when it comes. And God says that His Word is like this. In Isaiah 55, God says, “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, And do not return there without watering the earth And making it bear and sprout, And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater; So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, Without accomplishing what I desire, And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:10-11). When God’s Word goes forth, it accomplishes His divine purposes. And Peter tells us here what those purposes are.
First, when God’s Word is proclaimed, or shared, or taught, or read, it has the ability to produce regeneration. This is the theological term we use to indicate the new birth, as Jesus said in John 3, “You must be born again.” We are all born dead; we are spiritually still-born, dead in our trespasses and sins. If we would be made alive spiritually, we must be born again. In regeneration, we are set free from the death of sin and made alive to God by faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus referred to this as being born “of the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit must regenerate us. We cannot regenerate ourselves. We are spiritually dead and can do no good work to commend ourselves to God. The Spirit must make us alive. And He has sovereignly chosen to do this through the Word of God. Peter says here that we have been born again, not of seed which is perishable, but imperishable, that is through the living and enduring Word of God. As the Word enters our life through reading it or hearing it, the Spirit of God nurtures the seed of the Word to produce faith in us.
In Ezekiel 37, the prophet was taken out to a valley full of dry bones in a vision, and the Lord asked him, “Can these dry bones live?” Ezekiel confessed that he did not know. But God told Ezekiel to do something very strange. The Lord told Ezekiel to preach to the bones. And as he preached the Word of God to those bones, they began to rattle around and assemble themselves together, and they became covered once more with skin, but they were not yet alive. Then the Lord told Ezekiel to prophesy to the wind. In Hebrew this word for wind is ru’ach, the same word translated as spirit. I believe the Lord was commanding His prophet to speak to the Holy Spirit. And as Ezekiel prophesied to the Spirit, the Spirit began to move, a wind began to blow across those dead skeletons, and they became alive.
God has given us the same task He gave to Ezekiel. He has told us to go into all the world and make disciples for Him. But Lord, these are just corpses! They are dead in sin, so how can they be made alive? And the Lord would have us to proclaim His word to those who are dead in sin, and as we do, His Spirit will move and bring them to life as they hear and respond to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul said in Romans 10:17 that faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. So we announce God’s word to the world, and tell them that in Jesus Christ God has become a man, and He has satisfied the righteous demands of God’s Law on our behalf, and He has taken our place in death by taking our sins upon Himself at the cross, and He has conquered sin and death through His resurrection and will save all who trust in Him as Lord and Savior. And as this message goes forth, it is like seed being sown. And the Spirit of God will nurture that seed. There may be some soil issues that prevent growth initially; but the seed is good. So we keep sowing, and we try to cultivate that soil and sow more and more seed into it, and as we do the Spirit brings new life in the divine work of regeneration as people are born again to new life in Christ.
But God’s work is not completed at regeneration. It continues through sanctification, that divine work of the Holy Spirit by which He shapes us and molds us into the image of Jesus Christ. As He sanctifies us, He makes us holy; He makes our lives a reflection of what He has declared us to be: the righteous people of God. And how does the Spirit accomplish sanctification in us? The same way He accomplishes regeneration in us: through the Word of God. Jesus prayed to the Father for His followers in John 17:17: “Sanctify them in the truth; Your Word is truth.” Peter says here that we should crave this Word, long for this word as a newborn baby longs for his mother’s milk. We are spiritual infants and we need the nourishment that God’s Word supplies if we are to grow. So we long for the pure milk of the Word, he says, and by it, we are able to grow in respect to salvation. With every drop of the Word we swallow, we taste the kindness of the Lord and grow more into His likeness.
As we obey the word, we are purifying our souls, he says in 1:22. And as a result of His sanctifying work, we are coming into a more mature and sincere love for God that manifests itself in a love for one another. This love, he says is sincere, fervent, and from the heart. It is not fake. Where the Spirit of God is not at work, it has to be faked; but it can’t be faked for long. But where the Spirit is working His purpose of sanctification by the word, love is growing within us genuinely and sincerely. We begin to put off the things that operate against love; things which Peter mentions here in 2:1 – malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander. The language of putting off has to do with taking off a garment. It is as if the Word and the Spirit have grown us to the point that those characteristics no longer fit. So we must put them off. And as we do, they are replaced with a sincere, fervent, and heartfelt love for the brethren – our fellow believers in Jesus Christ.
And God will continue His work of sanctification in us until it is completed perfectly. That will not happen in this life. He will never be finished with us here and now; but 1 John 3 tells us that we will see Christ face to face one day, and when we do, we will be transformed; we will be like Him for we shall see Him as He is. This is glorification. This is when the transformation of our entire being will be complete and we will stand perfect in glory with Christ for all eternity. Because we have been born, not of perishable seed as all humanity is, but born again of imperishable, eternally enduring seed, we have the assurance of eternal life, which will be lived forever in the presence of Christ and in the likeness of Christ in heaven. Those who have not been born again by this enduring seed will perish eternally. I heard Howard Hendricks say once that there are only two things present today on this planet which will survive eternally: the word of God and the souls of men. Those who have been born again will live forever in heaven; those who have not will exist forever in hell; and the word of God will endure forever. So if we want to invest our lives in something that will matter for eternity, there is nothing better than to spend our lives depositing the Word of God into the souls of men.
This Word which was preached to you, God’s true and pure, living, imperishable and enduring Word, will accomplish His purposes in you to bring you into salvation through the new birth, and to transform you into the likeness of Christ, purifying you from the inside out and creating a sincere love for your fellow Christian, until the day we see Christ face to face.
So then, what shall we do? We must not take such a Word as this for granted! No Peter indicates two responsibilities we have to the Word here. First, in 2:2, we should long for it. We should desire this Word as if it were more important to us than food. And in fact, it is. Jesus said, “MAN SHALL NOT LIVE ON BREAD ALONE, BUT ON EVERY WORD THAT PROCEEDS OUT OF THE MOUTH OF GOD” (Matthew 4:4). This is our milk, it is our meat, it is our bread. We will starve without it. So we need to feast upon it at every opportunity. We do this by reading it, hearing it read and proclaimed, studying it in depth, memorizing it, meditating on it, as often as possible. And secondly, Peter tells us in 1:22 that we must obey this Word. The purpose of spending time in the Bible is not to accumulate more facts. It is to transform our lives, and this is only possible as we obey what we find in the Word. And as we long for the Word and obey the Word, we will find the Spirit of God growing us in our faith and transforming our lives for God’s glory.
Do you have confidence in the Bible as God’s Word? Has it brought you to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? Is it at work in your life shaping you to become more like Christ? Do you long for it? Do you obey it? This is the word which was preached to you.
When people answer the call to serve God in ministry, they find that suddenly they are the recipients of advice of some kind or another, some good, some bad, some solicited, some unsolicited, from nearly everyone they encounter. In the New Testament, we encounter young man named Timothy who had answered God’s call to pastoral ministry. He had the great privilege of being mentored by none other than the Apostle Paul. Paul knew this young man, and he knew the church that Timothy had gone to serve in Ephesus. And in his second letter to Timothy, Paul warned the young preacher that the days were soon coming when people, even those within the church, are going to become lovers of self and lovers of money; that they will be boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. He says that in the days to come, there will be many who will “not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.” And he even suggests that there were already some like this in the church. Now, what advice do you think the great Apostle might give to the young preacher? How should he deal with these matters? Perhaps he should form a committee. Maybe he should call in a church consultant or schedule a special meeting to address the issues? No, rather, Paul gives him one piece of advice. One simple statement lays out Timothy’s ministerial strategy in the face of all of these adversities. In 2 Timothy 4:2, he tells young Timothy, “Preach the Word.” Three words. Preach the Word. And these words are not merely one man’s opinion. This is God’s inspired truth recorded in sacred scripture to admonish us all of the sufficiency, the authority, and the reliability of God’s Word.
Our passage today causes us to turn our thoughts to the subject of the Bible itself. Peter says in 1:25 that “this is the Word which was preached to you.” At some point along the way in their lives, these men and women and children had come under the preaching and teaching of Scripture. And it had a revolutionary effect on their lives. When we hear the Bible preached, when we read the Bible, or when we study it, we are not just hearing empty words. These words are powerful and effective if we incline ourselves to them. So we must be diligent as readers and as hearers of the Word and never think that we have just opened one of so many other books, or listened to one of so many other talks. This is God’s Word and it accomplishes God’s purposes when we take it in.
I. The Word Which Was Preached To You is God’s Word
In verse 23, Peter speaks of the Word of God, and in verse 25, quoting Isaiah, he refers to the Word of the Lord. And he says that this is the word which was preached to you. It is God’s Word. Now, I must say that not all preaching is the preaching of God’s Word. It is the Scripture, and not the sermon that is God’s Word. In what is called expository preaching, the sermon is thoroughly rooted in the sacred text and the truths of that text are drawn out and explained. So a preacher does not have God’s permission to come to the task of sermon preparation and say, “OK, I want to preach on a certain subject, and here is what I want to say about that subject, so now let me look through the Bible and find verses that support what I want to say.” That is not preaching God’s Word. That is abusing God’s word in order to preach my own words. And every person who attempts to preach or teach or speak in the name of Christ should come to the Bible and allow the text to dictate what we believe and what we will say. It is the text of Scripture, and not my opinions or any other person’s opinions, which God has declared to be His very word. So, in preaching or teaching, our words are only God’s words inasmuch as they accurately proclaim the truth of what is written in this Word, the Bible.
The Lord spoke through Jeremiah to address the prophets of that day by saying,
Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility; They speak a vision of their own imagination, Not from the mouth of the LORD. They keep saying to those who despise Me, “The LORD has said, ‘You will have peace’”; And as for everyone who walks in the stubbornness of his own heart, They say, 'Calamity will not come upon you.' But who has stood in the council of the LORD, That he should see and hear His word? Who has given heed to His word and listened? … I did not send these prophets, But they ran. I did not speak to them, But they prophesied. But if they had stood in My council, Then they would have announced My words to My people, And would have turned them back from their evil way And from the evil of their deeds.” (Jeremiah 23:16-22)
So, according to the Lord Himself, some who claim to speak for God actually do not. Those who do are those who spend time with God, and receive His word clearly, and then announce His word. Therefore, we should never be lazy listeners. We must be discerning, like those Christians at Berea in Acts 17, who are described as being “noble-minded … for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.” When they heard the preached word, they returned to the written word to compare what they had heard with what God had spoken.
The Bible is God’s Word. We are told that twice explicitly in these few verses in First Peter. Therefore, because it comes from God, there are certain things that must be true about it. And Peter elaborates on a number of those things here. First he tells us that God’s Word is true. In verse 22, he says that these Christians have been obedient to the truth. We read in Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man that He should lie.” People lie. It is characteristic of human beings to exaggerate, twist the facts, distort the truth, and even tell bold faced lies. But these things are not true of God. Titus 1:2 says that God never lies. Hebrews 6:18 says that it is impossible for God to lie. God can be trusted because He has never lied, He does not lie, He indeed cannot lie. Therefore, all that God says is true. Since all of Scripture is “inspired by God” or “God-breathed,” as Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16, and “the word of God,” as Peter says here, then Scripture must be truthful just as God is. As David prays in 2 Samuel 7:28, “You are God, and your words are true.”
Not only is God’s Word true, it is also pure. In 2:2, Peter compares the Word of God to pure milk. This idea of purity has to do with something that has not been adulterated or diluted. A chemical can be weakened by diluting it with water or another substance, and it is therefore no longer pure. Two substances can be combined in a mixture, resulting in something altogether different than the pure original substances. But the Bible has not been diluted in any way, and its truth has not been mixed with any error. We do not have to go through and determine which parts are true and which parts are not, because it is truth, without any mixture of error, in its entirety. David writes in Psalm 12:6, “The words of the Lord are pure words.” Therefore, we must be careful in our preaching, in our teaching and speaking of the word, and in our hearing and reading of the word, not to adulterate or dilute God’s truth with erroneous human opinions.
Then Peter also says that God’s Word is living (1:23). The context in which Peter says this has to do with seed. He says that you have been born again as a result of a certain kind of seed. This seed, He says is the living Word of God. I don’t know much about gardening or farming, but I do know that there is such a thing as bad seed. It may be old, dried out, cracked open, or otherwise damaged. If you put that seed into the ground, nothing happens. That seed is essentially dead. It cannot bring forth new life. But when you plant a good seed, a living seed, into the ground and care for it properly, that seed will bring forth new life. Peter is borrowing imagery from the Lord Jesus here, who taught a parable about a man who went out to sow seed. And the seed fell on four different kinds of soil. And some of that seed produced life, and some didn’t; and some sprouted quickly, and just as quickly died; but some of it grew and produced a bountiful harvest. Now here’s the thing – the problem was in the soil, not in the seed. It was the same seed that was sown on all the soils. The seed was good, and when Jesus explained this parable to His disciples, He told them that the seed is the Word of God. It is alive, and it has the ability to produce life in the soil of our lives if we nurture it once it has been sown.
When I was in college, I was a new Christian, but I was struggling to live for Christ. It seemed like every time I came home and attended church, my pastor preached a sermon that was exactly what I needed to hear. I thought someone was tipping the pastor off about my sins! I would return to my dorm room on campus and pick up my Bible, and I would open it up to some point and begin reading, and I would find that the text was exactly what I needed to read. Has that ever happened to you? How do we explain that? The Word of God is living! It is alive and it meets us at our point of need, it deposits itself into the soil of our lives, and it is good seed. Therefore, if it lands in good soil, a life that is willing to allow the seed bear fruit, then the seed will grow and transform us from the inside out.
These are not dead words on dead pages in a dead book! Try it – read any other book, and see if it is able to produce the kind of life within you that the Bible can. It cannot. The Bible is uniquely able to work its way down into the very foundation of your soul to produce new spiritual life in you. The writer of Hebrews said it this way Hebrews 4:12 -- For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. No other book, no other word, has the ability to cut like this one. It is a living and active word that is sharper than the mightiest of swords. The sharpest sword, the sharpest scalpel, can divide the head from the neck, or the muscle from the bone, but the word of God is able to separate the soul and the spirit, the joints and the marrow, and to cut all the way down to the very thoughts and motives of the human heart. It is a living word.
And then Peter says in addition that the Word of God is both imperishable and enduring. These ideas are similar but not identical. That the word endures means that it has not been destroyed. That it is imperishable means that it cannot be destroyed. And God knows, plenty of people have tried to destroy it. Some of these have been inscribed in the pages of history books, and others have faded from memory altogether, but the Bible still stands.
The imperishable nature of the Bible is here contrasted with perishable human nature. In 1 Peter 1:24-25, you should find the words in all capital letters in most English Bibles. This is a way of indicating that the words are a quotation from the Old Testament, and in this case, it is from Isaiah 40: "ALL FLESH IS LIKE GRASS, AND ALL ITS GLORY LIKE THE FLOWER OF GRASS. THE GRASS WITHERS, AND THE FLOWER FALLS OFF, BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURES FOREVER." Human beings come and go, and in the grand scheme of history, our lifespan is rather short. We are like grass, which quickly withers. Some human beings accomplish great things in their lives, but the glory of these accomplishments is like a flower. It lasts just a little while. But God’s Word does not quickly fade from view; it does not wither or fall; it stands forever. There has never been, and there never will be, a time throughout all eternity that these words are shown to be untrue.
Every now and then, someone will come up with some scientific or archaeological discovery that challenges the teachings of the Bible. But in every case, either the so-called science is found to be faulty, or else unprovable, or in some rare cases, Christians have discovered that their interpretation of Scripture rather than the words of Scripture were in error. More often than not, that which is discovered through the right practice of science, where results are repeatable and provable, or that which is discovered buried in the sands of history, has served to confirm the truthfulness of the Bible and the errors of men rather than vice-versa. And every human effort to stamp out the Word of God has resulted in utter failure.
In 1971, Ravi Zacharias was ministering in Vietnam as the war was going on. He had a young Christian interpreter traveling with him by the name of Hien Pham. Shortly after the Communists took over all of Vietnam, Hien was arrested for aiding and abetting the Americans. While he was in prison, his Communist captors sought to brainwash him into renouncing the Christian faith. Over time, Hien began to weaken. He began to think that maybe the Christians had lied to him; maybe God did not exist. One night, he made up his mind that he would go to sleep and wake up the next day to never pray or consider himself a Christian again. The next morning, Hien was ordered to clean the prison’s latrines. As he emptied all the foul contents, his eyes caught a glimpse of paper that appeared to be written in English. He washed off the paper and stuck in his pocket to read later. That night, he pulled out this piece of paper and began to read it. This is what he read: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Of course Hien was reading from Romans, Chapter 8. The next day, Hien volunteered to clean the latrine, and continued to do so regularly. And every day, Hien would find pages of Scripture soiled by human waste. Apparently someone in the camp was using a Bible as toilet paper. But over time, page by page, Hien reassembled a significant portion of the Bible, and those pages became words of life to him.
Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:18). And here Peter tells us that the word which has been preached to us is God’s Word, therefore it is true, pure, living, imperishable, and enduring.
II. The Word Which Was Preached To You Accomplishes God’s Purposes
We are a fickle people, are we not? For evidence of this we need only see how people react to changes in the weather. When it rains, we complain about getting wet; if it doesn’t rain, we complain about how much we need it. We know that we need the rain, because when it comes, it waters the plant life and restores the water supplies. Rain always accomplishes a purpose when it comes. And God says that His Word is like this. In Isaiah 55, God says, “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, And do not return there without watering the earth And making it bear and sprout, And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater; So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, Without accomplishing what I desire, And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:10-11). When God’s Word goes forth, it accomplishes His divine purposes. And Peter tells us here what those purposes are.
First, when God’s Word is proclaimed, or shared, or taught, or read, it has the ability to produce regeneration. This is the theological term we use to indicate the new birth, as Jesus said in John 3, “You must be born again.” We are all born dead; we are spiritually still-born, dead in our trespasses and sins. If we would be made alive spiritually, we must be born again. In regeneration, we are set free from the death of sin and made alive to God by faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus referred to this as being born “of the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit must regenerate us. We cannot regenerate ourselves. We are spiritually dead and can do no good work to commend ourselves to God. The Spirit must make us alive. And He has sovereignly chosen to do this through the Word of God. Peter says here that we have been born again, not of seed which is perishable, but imperishable, that is through the living and enduring Word of God. As the Word enters our life through reading it or hearing it, the Spirit of God nurtures the seed of the Word to produce faith in us.
In Ezekiel 37, the prophet was taken out to a valley full of dry bones in a vision, and the Lord asked him, “Can these dry bones live?” Ezekiel confessed that he did not know. But God told Ezekiel to do something very strange. The Lord told Ezekiel to preach to the bones. And as he preached the Word of God to those bones, they began to rattle around and assemble themselves together, and they became covered once more with skin, but they were not yet alive. Then the Lord told Ezekiel to prophesy to the wind. In Hebrew this word for wind is ru’ach, the same word translated as spirit. I believe the Lord was commanding His prophet to speak to the Holy Spirit. And as Ezekiel prophesied to the Spirit, the Spirit began to move, a wind began to blow across those dead skeletons, and they became alive.
God has given us the same task He gave to Ezekiel. He has told us to go into all the world and make disciples for Him. But Lord, these are just corpses! They are dead in sin, so how can they be made alive? And the Lord would have us to proclaim His word to those who are dead in sin, and as we do, His Spirit will move and bring them to life as they hear and respond to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul said in Romans 10:17 that faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. So we announce God’s word to the world, and tell them that in Jesus Christ God has become a man, and He has satisfied the righteous demands of God’s Law on our behalf, and He has taken our place in death by taking our sins upon Himself at the cross, and He has conquered sin and death through His resurrection and will save all who trust in Him as Lord and Savior. And as this message goes forth, it is like seed being sown. And the Spirit of God will nurture that seed. There may be some soil issues that prevent growth initially; but the seed is good. So we keep sowing, and we try to cultivate that soil and sow more and more seed into it, and as we do the Spirit brings new life in the divine work of regeneration as people are born again to new life in Christ.
But God’s work is not completed at regeneration. It continues through sanctification, that divine work of the Holy Spirit by which He shapes us and molds us into the image of Jesus Christ. As He sanctifies us, He makes us holy; He makes our lives a reflection of what He has declared us to be: the righteous people of God. And how does the Spirit accomplish sanctification in us? The same way He accomplishes regeneration in us: through the Word of God. Jesus prayed to the Father for His followers in John 17:17: “Sanctify them in the truth; Your Word is truth.” Peter says here that we should crave this Word, long for this word as a newborn baby longs for his mother’s milk. We are spiritual infants and we need the nourishment that God’s Word supplies if we are to grow. So we long for the pure milk of the Word, he says, and by it, we are able to grow in respect to salvation. With every drop of the Word we swallow, we taste the kindness of the Lord and grow more into His likeness.
As we obey the word, we are purifying our souls, he says in 1:22. And as a result of His sanctifying work, we are coming into a more mature and sincere love for God that manifests itself in a love for one another. This love, he says is sincere, fervent, and from the heart. It is not fake. Where the Spirit of God is not at work, it has to be faked; but it can’t be faked for long. But where the Spirit is working His purpose of sanctification by the word, love is growing within us genuinely and sincerely. We begin to put off the things that operate against love; things which Peter mentions here in 2:1 – malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander. The language of putting off has to do with taking off a garment. It is as if the Word and the Spirit have grown us to the point that those characteristics no longer fit. So we must put them off. And as we do, they are replaced with a sincere, fervent, and heartfelt love for the brethren – our fellow believers in Jesus Christ.
And God will continue His work of sanctification in us until it is completed perfectly. That will not happen in this life. He will never be finished with us here and now; but 1 John 3 tells us that we will see Christ face to face one day, and when we do, we will be transformed; we will be like Him for we shall see Him as He is. This is glorification. This is when the transformation of our entire being will be complete and we will stand perfect in glory with Christ for all eternity. Because we have been born, not of perishable seed as all humanity is, but born again of imperishable, eternally enduring seed, we have the assurance of eternal life, which will be lived forever in the presence of Christ and in the likeness of Christ in heaven. Those who have not been born again by this enduring seed will perish eternally. I heard Howard Hendricks say once that there are only two things present today on this planet which will survive eternally: the word of God and the souls of men. Those who have been born again will live forever in heaven; those who have not will exist forever in hell; and the word of God will endure forever. So if we want to invest our lives in something that will matter for eternity, there is nothing better than to spend our lives depositing the Word of God into the souls of men.
This Word which was preached to you, God’s true and pure, living, imperishable and enduring Word, will accomplish His purposes in you to bring you into salvation through the new birth, and to transform you into the likeness of Christ, purifying you from the inside out and creating a sincere love for your fellow Christian, until the day we see Christ face to face.
So then, what shall we do? We must not take such a Word as this for granted! No Peter indicates two responsibilities we have to the Word here. First, in 2:2, we should long for it. We should desire this Word as if it were more important to us than food. And in fact, it is. Jesus said, “MAN SHALL NOT LIVE ON BREAD ALONE, BUT ON EVERY WORD THAT PROCEEDS OUT OF THE MOUTH OF GOD” (Matthew 4:4). This is our milk, it is our meat, it is our bread. We will starve without it. So we need to feast upon it at every opportunity. We do this by reading it, hearing it read and proclaimed, studying it in depth, memorizing it, meditating on it, as often as possible. And secondly, Peter tells us in 1:22 that we must obey this Word. The purpose of spending time in the Bible is not to accumulate more facts. It is to transform our lives, and this is only possible as we obey what we find in the Word. And as we long for the Word and obey the Word, we will find the Spirit of God growing us in our faith and transforming our lives for God’s glory.
Do you have confidence in the Bible as God’s Word? Has it brought you to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? Is it at work in your life shaping you to become more like Christ? Do you long for it? Do you obey it? This is the word which was preached to you.
Monday, May 24, 2010
The Creed of Christ - 1 Peter 1:20-21
Audio here (click to stream, right-click to download) and on our podcast on iTunes.
This Sunday, all over the world, in many kinds of churches, Christians will stand together and do as they do every Sunday, affirming their faith together in the recitation of the Apostle’s Creed. Baptists are perhaps in the minority because by and large we do not do this. If you were to ask an authority on Baptist doctrine and practice why we do not do it, you will likely hear it said, “We Baptists are not a creedal people.” What we mean by that is that we believe that Scripture alone is the authoritative rule of faith and practice, and therefore humanly composed statements of doctrine should not be used to impose belief upon another’s conscience. Baptists have always defended the rights of people to believe what they want to believe, even the right to be wrong. But if one is going to be called a Christian, then there are certain truths that must be believed and never denied.
Occasionally one may hear someone say, “I have no creed.” The word creed comes from the Latin word credo, which means, “I believe.” Therefore, a person who says, “I have no creed,” is really saying, “I have no beliefs.” There is no one alive who can say that. We all have beliefs, and therefore we all have creeds. Some Christians have said, “I have no creed but Christ.” While that sounds very humble and pious, it is too simplistic. It says, accurately enough, that I believe only in Christ, but it does not say what a person believes about Christ. Muslims believe in Christ, but they believe that He was only a prophet, and that He did not die on the cross. Buddhists believe in Jesus, but they believe that He was only one of many enlightened teachers. Mormons believe in Jesus, but they believe that He was originally the brother of Lucifer, or Satan, and many other strange ideas about Him. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in Jesus, but they believe that He was created as the Archangel Michael and became Michael again following a spiritual, but not physical resurrection. All of these, and many others, believe in Jesus; they believe something about Jesus; but none of these believe what the Bible teaches about Jesus. So, we may say that we have no creed but Christ, but the question is what is our creed of Christ? What do we believe about Him?
In our passage today, Peter says that we are believers in God through Christ. And in these two verses we find a concise yet profound description of what we believe about Christ. Some scholars have suggested that verses 18-21 originally were part of an ancient Christian hymn or creed that Peter has inserted here as a quotation. While that is possible, it is far from certain. Yet the statement here about Christ is so profound and thorough that we can draw from it a creed of sorts as we articulate what we believe about the Lord Jesus Christ. This then is the creed of Christ.
I. We believe in the eternally preexistent Christ. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world.
There’s a humorous story that philosophers tell about the origins of the universe. One ancient philosopher asked another, “If Atlas holds up the world, what holds up Atlas?” The other responds, “Atlas stands on the back of a turtle.” The first philosopher then says, “But what does the turtle stand on?” And the answer is given, “Another turtle.” Not satisfied, the inquisitive philosopher says, “And what does that turtle stand on?” Exasperated, the other finally says, “My dear friend, it’s turtles all the way down!”
When we study the history of the world, we can be tempted to think that it’s just turtles all the way down. Something came before this, and something came before that, until the point where there was nothing at all. But we must come to that point where there was nothing at all. So then the question is, “How did something come from nothing?” And secular science offers no plausible explanation for this. Therefore, in their theories, matter, the stuff of the physical world, must be eternal in some form or another. Turtles all the way down, with there being no point in time when there were no turtles, if you will. The Bible tells a different story. According to Scripture, there was a time when this world, this universe, did not exist, but there has never been a time when there was just nothing. Prior to the physical order coming into existence, God existed. Therefore, the Bible opens with these words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Someone once asked Augustine what God was doing before he made the world, and Augustine quickly quipped that God was preparing hell for the inquisitive. While it may have silenced the questioner, it did not answer the question. What was He doing in eternity past? He was participating in the perfect fellowship and harmony of Himself, as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Triune God we worship always existed as He is revealed in Scripture: One God in Three Persons –God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. As Robert Leighton said so well several centuries ago, “Before there was time or place or any creature, God, the blessed Trinity, was completely happy in Himself.”
So, while we can point to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem as the point in time that Christ came into the world as a man, there was never a time when the Second Person of the Trinity did not exist. John puts it this way in the opening verses of his Gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. … and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1-3, 14). When Jesus prayed to the Father in John 17, He spoke of the glory which He had with the Father before the world was.
There was an occasion, recorded for us in John 8, when Jesus was engaged in a debate with some Jewish leaders, and He said to them, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.” They understandably took exception to this and said, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?” To this, Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I AM.” And the Bible says that they picked up stones to throw at Him (John 8:56-59). Now, why would they do that? Suppose someone said, “I was alive before Henry VIII.” Would you want to kill that person, or would you rather try to persuade that person to receive psychological attention? Stoning was not the prescribed punishment for insanity; it was the prescribed punishment for blasphemy. Those Jews understood that when Jesus said that “before Abraham was born, I AM,” He was making two specific claims. First, He was claiming the divine name, “I AM,” as His own; second, He was claiming the divine nature of eternal existence as His own. In other words, He was claiming to be God, and in their minds this was blasphemy.
Something similar happened later, recorded in John 10. On that occasion, Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” And when He said this, once again, the Jewish people sought to stone Him. Jesus said, “I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?” And the Jews said to Him, "For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God” (John 10:30-33).
These episodes from the life of Christ show us that Jesus claimed to be the eternal God, and that those claims were made clearly enough that those who heard Him knew what He meant and what the implications of His words were. It seems that our options are limited in how we respond to that. Like those who heard Him, we can disagree and affirm that it was right to kill Him for blasphemy; or we can dismiss Him altogether as a man who had lost all touch with reality; or we can believe Him. He is either a liar, a lunatic, or He is Lord. There are no other options. And we believe that He is who said He is. We believe that He is God, the second person of the Trinity, equally and eternally coexistent with God the Father and God the Spirit. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world.
II. We believe in the incarnate Christ. He … has appeared in these last times.
In the middle of World War II, C. S. Lewis was invited to give a series of talks on BBC Radio to encourage and comfort citizens of Britain who lived in daily fear of becoming yet one more European nation occupied by Nazi Germany. Surprisingly, in his talks, Lewis made an explicit case for faith in Jesus Christ and called his listeners to trust in Him. Those talks were later published in book form as Mere Christianity. In one section, Lewis speaks to war-weary Englishmen and says, “Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” The rightful king is Jesus, and He has landed in this enemy-occupied territory in disguise, becoming one of us in the miracle we refer to as the incarnation.
As we have already stated, orthodox Christian faith understands that Christ is fully God. But in the incarnation, He became fully man. He did not stop being God in order to become man. Theologians have often said it this way: “Remaining what He was, He became what He was not.” That is, He continued to be fully God, as He had always been, but became what He had not been before, fully human. He was not half-God and half-man. He is both fully God and fully man.
He appeared, Peter says. This one simple word encapsulates so much truth. Herein is contained His miraculous conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary, His lowly birth in Bethlehem, His humble beginnings, about which Scripture is nearly silent, and His public ministry which began at His baptism and continued with Him traveling about teaching and performing miracles, remaining throughout His life completely without sin. In all of this, God was showing Himself to humanity through the person of Jesus Christ.
The New Testament is filled with narratives and theological descriptions of Christ’s incarnation and earthly ministry. Perhaps nowhere is it stated more eloquently than in Philippians 2:6-7, where Paul writes that “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 bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.” In 1 Timothy 3:16, Paul says He was “revealed in the flesh.” As we have already cited, John 1:14 says that this eternally preexistent Word which was with God and was God in the beginning, “became flesh and dwelt among us.”
In Galatians 4:4, we read, “When the fullness of time came, God sent forth His Son.” Peter says here that it was “in these last times” that Christ appeared. Historians have marked off time by the developments of politics and technology, so that we have “the colonial times,” “the bronze age,” and “the internet age.” But God has marked off time in this way: the coming of Christ into the world is the beginning of “the last times.” Prior to this time, God had spoken to the world, the writer of Hebrews says, “in many portions and in many ways,” but he says that He “in these last days has spoken to us in His Son” (Hebrews 1:1). All that came before Christ pointed forward to Christ. Now that He has appeared, God has spoken the final word. Luther said that these are the last times, “not because soon after … the last day would come, but because after this preaching of the Gospel of Christ, no other shall come, and there will be no better Gospel revealed and explained than that which is now explained and revealed. … No more preaching shall come into the world more glorious and more public than the Gospel; therefore it is the last.”
The New Testament writers use this phrase, “the last times,” and others like it to refer to all that occurs in the world between the incarnation of Christ and His future return. We do not know when that will occur. Jesus said plainly, “of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Mark 13:32). Jesus said, “Be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Luke 12:40). But be sure of this, we are now perhaps closer to the end than to the beginning, and every day is one more day closer. So we must take the person of Jesus Christ seriously, we must take the Gospel to heart personally, and we must take our task to reach the nations sincerely, for the day is drawing near when that will no longer be possible. When Christ appeared, when God became flesh in the incarnate Jesus Christ, we entered the final chapter of history.
We believe in the incarnate Christ, in whom God has come to dwell among us as a man, and who is going to come again at the end of all things.
III. We believe in the suffering and dying Christ. He … has appeared … for the sake of you.
In what sense has Christ appeared for us? In the Nicene Creed, which dates to the 300s AD and is the most widely used creed by Christians of all branches around the world today, we find the following statement, “For us and for our salvation He came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human. For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” Three times in that brief portion of the Creed we read, “for us,” “for our salvation,” “for our sake.” All that Christ endured in His incarnation, His earthly life and ministry, His suffering and death, was for us.
In the verses immediately preceding these, Peter describes how this is so. In verses 18-19, he describes the futile way of life we inherited from our forefathers, which includes the sin nature we were born with and are enslaved to. We are captive under sin until redemption comes. And in Christ, that redemption has come through the shedding of His precious blood. He is the perfect sacrifice for our sin, the lamb unblemished and spotless, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. In Paul’s great passage on the incarnation in Philippians 2 that we referred to earlier, he writes, “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). In Hebrews 12:2, we read, “for the joy set before Him [He] endured the cross, despising the shame.” What was the joy that was set before Him? It was the joy of reconciling sinful human beings to their maker through His death. In His suffering and death, He received in Himself that which our sins deserve. He became our substitute, receiving the wrath of the holy Father God in His own person, that we might be forgiven and made righteous by faith in Him.
He didn’t have to do this. Think about all that Jesus suffered. He suffered scorn, rejection, mockery, brutality, and death, even the most torturous form of death humanity has ever known, that of crucifixion. Jesus said, “No one has taken [my life] away from Me, but I lay it down on my own initiative. I have authority to lay it down.” So we do not need to see Jesus as a helpless victim of all that took place leading up to and including His death. He did not have to do it. But He did it, why? He did it for us. He said in Luke 19:10 that He had come “to seek and to save that which was lost.” We are the lost; lost in our sins. Christ came to save us. How did He do this? He said in Mark 10:45 that He had come to give His live “as a ransom for many.” Taking our place in death, He paid the penalty that our sins deserve, as our substitute, with His blood, His very life, being poured out for us, for our sake, for our salvation.
We believe in the suffering and dying Christ.
IV. We believe in the risen and exalted Christ. God … raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory.
I am a huge sports fan, most people know that. I am huge, and I am a sports fan. I love watching games, I love attending games. I was at a Baltimore Orioles game many years ago, they were playing the Detroit Tigers. Now, the Baltimore Orioles, you understand, are not good. Not now, not then. And, the Tigers were winning by a lot of runs. So, in about the seventh inning, people started filing out of Camden Yard, but we decided to stay. By the ninth inning, you could count the people on one hand in our section; it was us, and a couple of drunk guys in front of us. There were two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and it looked like the Orioles were a pitch away from losing badly. But things turned around. One run at a time the Orioles came back and tied it, and finally knocked in the winning run. What few of us were left there in the stadium were jumping up and down celebrating, and the drunk guy in front of me, who was now also shirtless, turned around to give me a big hug, and I was just praying that a picture of that embrace didn’t show up on the front page of the Baltimore Sun the next day.
What’s the point? Sometimes when things look like they are over, they aren’t really over. When Jesus died on the cross, it looked like it was over didn’t it? Now, He had said repeatedly that He would die and that He would rise from the dead, but no one really took it to heart. When His body was stretched out on that cross, bloody and broken, no one was saying, “Just wait, it’s not over yet, He’s going to come back.” Everyone thought it was all over. But it wasn’t. Human language is insufficient to describe the miracle that took place next. Peter gives it just a few words: “God … raised Him from the dead.” It wasn’t some spiritual, ethereal, disembodied resurrection that some have claimed – it was physical; it was bodily. He was raised with flesh and bones, He ate, people touched Him, He was physically risen from the dead. The tomb was empty and Christ presented Himself alive, Acts 1:3 says, “by many convincing proofs.”
Because Christ is risen from the dead, our sin, its penalty and its punishment have not only been satisfied, but have been conquered. Peter said in verse 3 of this chapter that the resurrection of Jesus makes it possible for us to be born again. In Romans 4:25, Paul says that He was raised for our justification, meaning that we can be made righteous before God because Christ is risen. And because Christ is risen, we have the promise repeated throughout the New Testament that we who believe in Him by faith will rise from death just as He did. Life will go on beyond the grave, and though for a season, it may be in a mysterious, disembodied form, as Paul talks about being “absent from the body,” but “present with the Lord,” it will culminate in the resurrection of our own bodies from the grave, transformed and glorified just as His was.
Jesus was not raised from death in the same way that some others were raised from death. Take Lazarus for example. He died, and Jesus raised him from the dead. Then guess what happened later? He died again. But Jesus was raised from death forever. For forty days, He appeared among His disciples, and then ascended into heaven. Peter says here that God “gave Him glory.” The glory that Jesus had before the world began, He returned to receive in heaven once again. And the writers of the New Testament tell us that He is alive in heaven today, seated at the right hand of the Father in the fulfillment of prophecy and in exalted glory. The writer of Hebrews compares Jesus to the priests of Israel in Hebrews 10, and he says there, “Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.” The priest of the Old Testament’s job was never done. Every day, he stood there by the altar offering sacrifice after sacrifice, which could cover sin, but couldn’t take it away forever. But this is what He says about Christ in comparison: “but He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, SAT DOWN AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD” (Hebrews 10:11-14). The work of redemption, the work of atonement for sin, the work of the salvation of humanity was done, forever done in this one perfect sacrifice, and as a result, our High Priest Jesus could sit down. He sat down in the place of glory and honor, at the right hand of the Father. From there, He has poured out His Spirit upon His people; from there He intercedes for His people before the Father as our High Priest, pleading His nail-scarred wounds for our justification. And from there, He will rise to meet us when we pass from this life into eternal life. As Stephen was being stoned to death in Acts 7, the Bible says that he was filled with the Holy Spirit, and he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Stephen said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” And as he died, he cried out to the exalted Christ, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” (Acts 7:55-59).
We believe in the risen and exalted Christ.
This is our creed of Christ. We believe in the eternally preexistent Christ. We believe in the incarnate Christ. We believe in the suffering and dying Christ. And we believe in the risen and exalted Christ. Through Him, Peter says here, we are believers in God. It is vain to believe in God in any other way. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” We have no other means of access to God, in faith, in worship, in prayer, or in eternal salvation but through this Christ in whom we believe. So, as Peter says, our faith and our hope are in God – this God who is Triune, the Father and the Son and the Spirit; this God who incarnated Himself in the person of Jesus; this God who accomplished our redemption through the suffering and death of Christ; this God who has raised the Lord Jesus from death and exalted Him and given Him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10-11). This is our creed. I hope that it is your creed. It is the only creed we have. Do you believe it?
G. A. Studdert Kennedy, Anglican priest and chaplain during World War I, once said the following:
“If our creed is only a form, that may be our fault, not the creed's. You can bet on this--You don't really believe your creed until you want to say it standing at spiritual attention with the roll of drums in your ears, the light of love dazzling your eyes, and all the music of a splendid world crashing out a prelude to its truth. If your creed is dull, it is dead, or you are dead, and either one or the other of you must be made alive again. Either you must change your creed, or your creed must change you. That is the problem that faces us--are we to change the Christian creed, or is the Christian creed to change us? I'm betting on the creed every time.”
If Christ is our creed, and these are the divinely revealed truths about Him, then we can never change it. Rather, we must believe it, and believing it, we must allow this creed to change us as Christ works in us for His glory. We invite you today to examine your creed, your beliefs, particularly those about Christ. What do you believe? Do you believe He is fully God and fully man? Do you believe that He suffered and died for you and for your salvation? Do you believe that He is risen from the dead and exalted in glory? Do you believe He is coming again? This is what the Bible teaches about Him. If you believe this, I would challenge you to recommit yourself freshly to Him today to walk with Him, and live for Him, and allow Him to use your life completely for His glory. If you do not believe this, or if you have never believed this before today, I challenge you to consider these claims, and give your life to Jesus as your Lord and Savior even this day.
This Sunday, all over the world, in many kinds of churches, Christians will stand together and do as they do every Sunday, affirming their faith together in the recitation of the Apostle’s Creed. Baptists are perhaps in the minority because by and large we do not do this. If you were to ask an authority on Baptist doctrine and practice why we do not do it, you will likely hear it said, “We Baptists are not a creedal people.” What we mean by that is that we believe that Scripture alone is the authoritative rule of faith and practice, and therefore humanly composed statements of doctrine should not be used to impose belief upon another’s conscience. Baptists have always defended the rights of people to believe what they want to believe, even the right to be wrong. But if one is going to be called a Christian, then there are certain truths that must be believed and never denied.
Occasionally one may hear someone say, “I have no creed.” The word creed comes from the Latin word credo, which means, “I believe.” Therefore, a person who says, “I have no creed,” is really saying, “I have no beliefs.” There is no one alive who can say that. We all have beliefs, and therefore we all have creeds. Some Christians have said, “I have no creed but Christ.” While that sounds very humble and pious, it is too simplistic. It says, accurately enough, that I believe only in Christ, but it does not say what a person believes about Christ. Muslims believe in Christ, but they believe that He was only a prophet, and that He did not die on the cross. Buddhists believe in Jesus, but they believe that He was only one of many enlightened teachers. Mormons believe in Jesus, but they believe that He was originally the brother of Lucifer, or Satan, and many other strange ideas about Him. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in Jesus, but they believe that He was created as the Archangel Michael and became Michael again following a spiritual, but not physical resurrection. All of these, and many others, believe in Jesus; they believe something about Jesus; but none of these believe what the Bible teaches about Jesus. So, we may say that we have no creed but Christ, but the question is what is our creed of Christ? What do we believe about Him?
In our passage today, Peter says that we are believers in God through Christ. And in these two verses we find a concise yet profound description of what we believe about Christ. Some scholars have suggested that verses 18-21 originally were part of an ancient Christian hymn or creed that Peter has inserted here as a quotation. While that is possible, it is far from certain. Yet the statement here about Christ is so profound and thorough that we can draw from it a creed of sorts as we articulate what we believe about the Lord Jesus Christ. This then is the creed of Christ.
I. We believe in the eternally preexistent Christ. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world.
There’s a humorous story that philosophers tell about the origins of the universe. One ancient philosopher asked another, “If Atlas holds up the world, what holds up Atlas?” The other responds, “Atlas stands on the back of a turtle.” The first philosopher then says, “But what does the turtle stand on?” And the answer is given, “Another turtle.” Not satisfied, the inquisitive philosopher says, “And what does that turtle stand on?” Exasperated, the other finally says, “My dear friend, it’s turtles all the way down!”
When we study the history of the world, we can be tempted to think that it’s just turtles all the way down. Something came before this, and something came before that, until the point where there was nothing at all. But we must come to that point where there was nothing at all. So then the question is, “How did something come from nothing?” And secular science offers no plausible explanation for this. Therefore, in their theories, matter, the stuff of the physical world, must be eternal in some form or another. Turtles all the way down, with there being no point in time when there were no turtles, if you will. The Bible tells a different story. According to Scripture, there was a time when this world, this universe, did not exist, but there has never been a time when there was just nothing. Prior to the physical order coming into existence, God existed. Therefore, the Bible opens with these words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Someone once asked Augustine what God was doing before he made the world, and Augustine quickly quipped that God was preparing hell for the inquisitive. While it may have silenced the questioner, it did not answer the question. What was He doing in eternity past? He was participating in the perfect fellowship and harmony of Himself, as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Triune God we worship always existed as He is revealed in Scripture: One God in Three Persons –God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. As Robert Leighton said so well several centuries ago, “Before there was time or place or any creature, God, the blessed Trinity, was completely happy in Himself.”
So, while we can point to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem as the point in time that Christ came into the world as a man, there was never a time when the Second Person of the Trinity did not exist. John puts it this way in the opening verses of his Gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. … and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1-3, 14). When Jesus prayed to the Father in John 17, He spoke of the glory which He had with the Father before the world was.
There was an occasion, recorded for us in John 8, when Jesus was engaged in a debate with some Jewish leaders, and He said to them, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.” They understandably took exception to this and said, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?” To this, Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I AM.” And the Bible says that they picked up stones to throw at Him (John 8:56-59). Now, why would they do that? Suppose someone said, “I was alive before Henry VIII.” Would you want to kill that person, or would you rather try to persuade that person to receive psychological attention? Stoning was not the prescribed punishment for insanity; it was the prescribed punishment for blasphemy. Those Jews understood that when Jesus said that “before Abraham was born, I AM,” He was making two specific claims. First, He was claiming the divine name, “I AM,” as His own; second, He was claiming the divine nature of eternal existence as His own. In other words, He was claiming to be God, and in their minds this was blasphemy.
Something similar happened later, recorded in John 10. On that occasion, Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” And when He said this, once again, the Jewish people sought to stone Him. Jesus said, “I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?” And the Jews said to Him, "For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God” (John 10:30-33).
These episodes from the life of Christ show us that Jesus claimed to be the eternal God, and that those claims were made clearly enough that those who heard Him knew what He meant and what the implications of His words were. It seems that our options are limited in how we respond to that. Like those who heard Him, we can disagree and affirm that it was right to kill Him for blasphemy; or we can dismiss Him altogether as a man who had lost all touch with reality; or we can believe Him. He is either a liar, a lunatic, or He is Lord. There are no other options. And we believe that He is who said He is. We believe that He is God, the second person of the Trinity, equally and eternally coexistent with God the Father and God the Spirit. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world.
II. We believe in the incarnate Christ. He … has appeared in these last times.
In the middle of World War II, C. S. Lewis was invited to give a series of talks on BBC Radio to encourage and comfort citizens of Britain who lived in daily fear of becoming yet one more European nation occupied by Nazi Germany. Surprisingly, in his talks, Lewis made an explicit case for faith in Jesus Christ and called his listeners to trust in Him. Those talks were later published in book form as Mere Christianity. In one section, Lewis speaks to war-weary Englishmen and says, “Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” The rightful king is Jesus, and He has landed in this enemy-occupied territory in disguise, becoming one of us in the miracle we refer to as the incarnation.
As we have already stated, orthodox Christian faith understands that Christ is fully God. But in the incarnation, He became fully man. He did not stop being God in order to become man. Theologians have often said it this way: “Remaining what He was, He became what He was not.” That is, He continued to be fully God, as He had always been, but became what He had not been before, fully human. He was not half-God and half-man. He is both fully God and fully man.
He appeared, Peter says. This one simple word encapsulates so much truth. Herein is contained His miraculous conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary, His lowly birth in Bethlehem, His humble beginnings, about which Scripture is nearly silent, and His public ministry which began at His baptism and continued with Him traveling about teaching and performing miracles, remaining throughout His life completely without sin. In all of this, God was showing Himself to humanity through the person of Jesus Christ.
The New Testament is filled with narratives and theological descriptions of Christ’s incarnation and earthly ministry. Perhaps nowhere is it stated more eloquently than in Philippians 2:6-7, where Paul writes that “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 bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.” In 1 Timothy 3:16, Paul says He was “revealed in the flesh.” As we have already cited, John 1:14 says that this eternally preexistent Word which was with God and was God in the beginning, “became flesh and dwelt among us.”
In Galatians 4:4, we read, “When the fullness of time came, God sent forth His Son.” Peter says here that it was “in these last times” that Christ appeared. Historians have marked off time by the developments of politics and technology, so that we have “the colonial times,” “the bronze age,” and “the internet age.” But God has marked off time in this way: the coming of Christ into the world is the beginning of “the last times.” Prior to this time, God had spoken to the world, the writer of Hebrews says, “in many portions and in many ways,” but he says that He “in these last days has spoken to us in His Son” (Hebrews 1:1). All that came before Christ pointed forward to Christ. Now that He has appeared, God has spoken the final word. Luther said that these are the last times, “not because soon after … the last day would come, but because after this preaching of the Gospel of Christ, no other shall come, and there will be no better Gospel revealed and explained than that which is now explained and revealed. … No more preaching shall come into the world more glorious and more public than the Gospel; therefore it is the last.”
The New Testament writers use this phrase, “the last times,” and others like it to refer to all that occurs in the world between the incarnation of Christ and His future return. We do not know when that will occur. Jesus said plainly, “of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Mark 13:32). Jesus said, “Be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Luke 12:40). But be sure of this, we are now perhaps closer to the end than to the beginning, and every day is one more day closer. So we must take the person of Jesus Christ seriously, we must take the Gospel to heart personally, and we must take our task to reach the nations sincerely, for the day is drawing near when that will no longer be possible. When Christ appeared, when God became flesh in the incarnate Jesus Christ, we entered the final chapter of history.
We believe in the incarnate Christ, in whom God has come to dwell among us as a man, and who is going to come again at the end of all things.
III. We believe in the suffering and dying Christ. He … has appeared … for the sake of you.
In what sense has Christ appeared for us? In the Nicene Creed, which dates to the 300s AD and is the most widely used creed by Christians of all branches around the world today, we find the following statement, “For us and for our salvation He came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human. For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” Three times in that brief portion of the Creed we read, “for us,” “for our salvation,” “for our sake.” All that Christ endured in His incarnation, His earthly life and ministry, His suffering and death, was for us.
In the verses immediately preceding these, Peter describes how this is so. In verses 18-19, he describes the futile way of life we inherited from our forefathers, which includes the sin nature we were born with and are enslaved to. We are captive under sin until redemption comes. And in Christ, that redemption has come through the shedding of His precious blood. He is the perfect sacrifice for our sin, the lamb unblemished and spotless, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. In Paul’s great passage on the incarnation in Philippians 2 that we referred to earlier, he writes, “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). In Hebrews 12:2, we read, “for the joy set before Him [He] endured the cross, despising the shame.” What was the joy that was set before Him? It was the joy of reconciling sinful human beings to their maker through His death. In His suffering and death, He received in Himself that which our sins deserve. He became our substitute, receiving the wrath of the holy Father God in His own person, that we might be forgiven and made righteous by faith in Him.
He didn’t have to do this. Think about all that Jesus suffered. He suffered scorn, rejection, mockery, brutality, and death, even the most torturous form of death humanity has ever known, that of crucifixion. Jesus said, “No one has taken [my life] away from Me, but I lay it down on my own initiative. I have authority to lay it down.” So we do not need to see Jesus as a helpless victim of all that took place leading up to and including His death. He did not have to do it. But He did it, why? He did it for us. He said in Luke 19:10 that He had come “to seek and to save that which was lost.” We are the lost; lost in our sins. Christ came to save us. How did He do this? He said in Mark 10:45 that He had come to give His live “as a ransom for many.” Taking our place in death, He paid the penalty that our sins deserve, as our substitute, with His blood, His very life, being poured out for us, for our sake, for our salvation.
We believe in the suffering and dying Christ.
IV. We believe in the risen and exalted Christ. God … raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory.
I am a huge sports fan, most people know that. I am huge, and I am a sports fan. I love watching games, I love attending games. I was at a Baltimore Orioles game many years ago, they were playing the Detroit Tigers. Now, the Baltimore Orioles, you understand, are not good. Not now, not then. And, the Tigers were winning by a lot of runs. So, in about the seventh inning, people started filing out of Camden Yard, but we decided to stay. By the ninth inning, you could count the people on one hand in our section; it was us, and a couple of drunk guys in front of us. There were two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and it looked like the Orioles were a pitch away from losing badly. But things turned around. One run at a time the Orioles came back and tied it, and finally knocked in the winning run. What few of us were left there in the stadium were jumping up and down celebrating, and the drunk guy in front of me, who was now also shirtless, turned around to give me a big hug, and I was just praying that a picture of that embrace didn’t show up on the front page of the Baltimore Sun the next day.
What’s the point? Sometimes when things look like they are over, they aren’t really over. When Jesus died on the cross, it looked like it was over didn’t it? Now, He had said repeatedly that He would die and that He would rise from the dead, but no one really took it to heart. When His body was stretched out on that cross, bloody and broken, no one was saying, “Just wait, it’s not over yet, He’s going to come back.” Everyone thought it was all over. But it wasn’t. Human language is insufficient to describe the miracle that took place next. Peter gives it just a few words: “God … raised Him from the dead.” It wasn’t some spiritual, ethereal, disembodied resurrection that some have claimed – it was physical; it was bodily. He was raised with flesh and bones, He ate, people touched Him, He was physically risen from the dead. The tomb was empty and Christ presented Himself alive, Acts 1:3 says, “by many convincing proofs.”
Because Christ is risen from the dead, our sin, its penalty and its punishment have not only been satisfied, but have been conquered. Peter said in verse 3 of this chapter that the resurrection of Jesus makes it possible for us to be born again. In Romans 4:25, Paul says that He was raised for our justification, meaning that we can be made righteous before God because Christ is risen. And because Christ is risen, we have the promise repeated throughout the New Testament that we who believe in Him by faith will rise from death just as He did. Life will go on beyond the grave, and though for a season, it may be in a mysterious, disembodied form, as Paul talks about being “absent from the body,” but “present with the Lord,” it will culminate in the resurrection of our own bodies from the grave, transformed and glorified just as His was.
Jesus was not raised from death in the same way that some others were raised from death. Take Lazarus for example. He died, and Jesus raised him from the dead. Then guess what happened later? He died again. But Jesus was raised from death forever. For forty days, He appeared among His disciples, and then ascended into heaven. Peter says here that God “gave Him glory.” The glory that Jesus had before the world began, He returned to receive in heaven once again. And the writers of the New Testament tell us that He is alive in heaven today, seated at the right hand of the Father in the fulfillment of prophecy and in exalted glory. The writer of Hebrews compares Jesus to the priests of Israel in Hebrews 10, and he says there, “Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.” The priest of the Old Testament’s job was never done. Every day, he stood there by the altar offering sacrifice after sacrifice, which could cover sin, but couldn’t take it away forever. But this is what He says about Christ in comparison: “but He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, SAT DOWN AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD” (Hebrews 10:11-14). The work of redemption, the work of atonement for sin, the work of the salvation of humanity was done, forever done in this one perfect sacrifice, and as a result, our High Priest Jesus could sit down. He sat down in the place of glory and honor, at the right hand of the Father. From there, He has poured out His Spirit upon His people; from there He intercedes for His people before the Father as our High Priest, pleading His nail-scarred wounds for our justification. And from there, He will rise to meet us when we pass from this life into eternal life. As Stephen was being stoned to death in Acts 7, the Bible says that he was filled with the Holy Spirit, and he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Stephen said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” And as he died, he cried out to the exalted Christ, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” (Acts 7:55-59).
We believe in the risen and exalted Christ.
This is our creed of Christ. We believe in the eternally preexistent Christ. We believe in the incarnate Christ. We believe in the suffering and dying Christ. And we believe in the risen and exalted Christ. Through Him, Peter says here, we are believers in God. It is vain to believe in God in any other way. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” We have no other means of access to God, in faith, in worship, in prayer, or in eternal salvation but through this Christ in whom we believe. So, as Peter says, our faith and our hope are in God – this God who is Triune, the Father and the Son and the Spirit; this God who incarnated Himself in the person of Jesus; this God who accomplished our redemption through the suffering and death of Christ; this God who has raised the Lord Jesus from death and exalted Him and given Him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10-11). This is our creed. I hope that it is your creed. It is the only creed we have. Do you believe it?
G. A. Studdert Kennedy, Anglican priest and chaplain during World War I, once said the following:
“If our creed is only a form, that may be our fault, not the creed's. You can bet on this--You don't really believe your creed until you want to say it standing at spiritual attention with the roll of drums in your ears, the light of love dazzling your eyes, and all the music of a splendid world crashing out a prelude to its truth. If your creed is dull, it is dead, or you are dead, and either one or the other of you must be made alive again. Either you must change your creed, or your creed must change you. That is the problem that faces us--are we to change the Christian creed, or is the Christian creed to change us? I'm betting on the creed every time.”
If Christ is our creed, and these are the divinely revealed truths about Him, then we can never change it. Rather, we must believe it, and believing it, we must allow this creed to change us as Christ works in us for His glory. We invite you today to examine your creed, your beliefs, particularly those about Christ. What do you believe? Do you believe He is fully God and fully man? Do you believe that He suffered and died for you and for your salvation? Do you believe that He is risen from the dead and exalted in glory? Do you believe He is coming again? This is what the Bible teaches about Him. If you believe this, I would challenge you to recommit yourself freshly to Him today to walk with Him, and live for Him, and allow Him to use your life completely for His glory. If you do not believe this, or if you have never believed this before today, I challenge you to consider these claims, and give your life to Jesus as your Lord and Savior even this day.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
The Color of Church Conference
The Color of Church Conference The Color of Church conference will be held June 26 at Immanuel Baptist Church in Greensboro.
Rodney Woo, author of The Color of Church, is the featured speaker. Woo is half Anglo-American and half Chinese. He grew up in a predominately black neighborhood with black friends, attended a predominately black school and married Sasha, a Latino.
Woo's book establishes a biblical foundation for multicultural ministry and details the current landscape of multicultural ministry. His book also tells the story of how Wilcrest Baptist Church, which he has pastored for 18 years in Houston, Texas, became a multicultural congregation.
When Woo came to Wilcrest the church averaged 200 people on Sunday mornings and was 98 percent Anglo. Woo began teaching the congregation what it means to serve the nations. Now, the congregation of more than 450 is less than half Anglo and 44 different countries are represented.
Woo recently announced he is resigning as pastor of Wilcrest and is headed to Singapore to pastor International Baptist Church. Singapore is about 43 percent Buddhist and 15 percent Christian.
Ken Tan, multicultural team leader for the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, invites all North Carolina Baptists to attend the conference and learn biblical principles for multicultural ministry, as well as ideas for working toward a more multicultural outreach. "The conference will help create a healthy awareness about the multicultural challenges we face in North Carolina and will help us learn how to respond to these challenges," he said.
Registration is $25. For more information call (800) 395-5102 ext. 5641. To register click here.
Note, registration includes a copy of the book and lunch.
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