[Sunday School] Christ, the Priest

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Transcript

SPEAKER_07 0:00

Get started. Let me pray. Father, thank you for this morning, and thank you for this time that we have to gather and to study and to learn. Lord, thank you that even as we pray to you, Jesus is at the right hand of the throne praying for us. Lord, help us this morning to consider our great high priest, what it means for him to be our priest, and why we can rest in knowing that he once for all made the ultimate sacrifice. That he both was that sacrifice and he made that sacrifice. And then now he ministers in the better sanctuary with the better blood in order to enact the better promises for us forever. It's in his name that we pray. Amen. Alright, so we have been talking about the Munis Triplex, the threefold office of Christ, is the prophet priest and king. Last week we talked about him as prophet. This week we talked about question 25 of the catechism, which deals with Jesus as our priest. It asks, how does Christ execute the office of priest? And it answers, Christ executes the office of the priest and is once offering up with himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and reconcile us to God and in making continual intercession for us. So we'll talk for a while just today about priesthood in general. We'll talk about the priests and we'll talk about the capital D priests, the priest to end all priests. So, you know, opening question: what is a priest? Kind of weird, all black, white collar.

SPEAKER_08 1:38

Teacher.

SPEAKER_07 1:39

A teacher, alright. How would you define a priest? What's a priest? Yeah, he's the office for the people.

SPEAKER_09 1:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:54

Kind of like a mediator, right? A go-between. Yeah. The priest represents us to God and represents God to us. The basic definition, right? Hebrews 5, 1. Every priest, every high priest chosen from among men, is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. So reflecting on the nature of the priesthood in the Old Testament, a priest is a man called from among men, right? A priest has to be a human being appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God. In that dispensation or in that time, specifically offering gifts and sacrifices for sins. So dealing, tending to the relationship between God and humanity. The priesthood is necessary, right? The universality, we go back even further, in the garden, right? It always comes back to the garden. Original vocation is human beings, prophet, priest, and king. So there was a priestly kind of ministry that Adam and Eve were called to tend to in terms of, you know, mediation looked different without sin in the world, but they were called to tend to the garden temple. They were called to expand the borders of the garden temple out into the world. And thus they had a priestly kind of role as images of God, right? Bearing witness to God by virtue of their very being. They had a priestly vocation. But sin broke everything, right? So sin injects this kind of need for mediation into the priestly office. And you see that initially provided in families. It's like the head of the household was the priest of the household. Adam, Seth, Abraham, Jacob, they all exercise a priestly role in offering up sacrifices on behalf of their family. Really good example of that is Job. Job offering sacrifices pretty much every day, just in case one of his children or someone in his household didn't engage in some unintentional sin, right, so that he could deal with that for them. In the Old Testament, you know, just like with all these offices, you see a sort of institutionalization of the prophetic priestly and kingly offices. In Israel, you see it institutionalized in the tribe of Levi specifically. They came to be responsible for Israel's cultic life or their formally religious life, the life of sacrifice and all that sort of thing. The priests, who were this subset of the line of Levi under Aaron, they were charged with conducting worship. And the Levites were like the support staff who helped maintain the temple. Now that priesthood, it was instituted by God, it was effective for what it was, but it wasn't an ultimate thing. It was a preparatory thing. So there was a kind of limitation in the priesthood by design. And what were some of you know, a multifold or manifold limitation, right? A number of limitations. What were some of those limitations? What were some of those ways in which the priesthood we might say was inadequate? Or it wasn't the ultimate solution to the problem. Yeah. That's one of the aspects of there um there was an endless repetition of sacrifices, right? They had to offer them again and again and again. What else? What's that? They had limited lifespan. Limited lifespan, right? The priests didn't live forever, so that's another inherent limitation. Uh the priest could go for a while, then he had to be replaced. Really?

SPEAKER_08 5:55

They were wicked, they were wicked, fallen people, just and sometimes the wickedness really came out like with uh was it Eli's son, Phinehas and Hophany, who were just hideously wicked. Yeah. And corrupted the exploited the people coming to worship, corrupted it all.

SPEAKER_10 6:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 6:15

And uh that's then God said that Samuel, who probably was a Levi. Samuel. I we don't have Samuel's full genealogy, yeah. But anyhow, Samuel was the last judge.

SPEAKER_06 6:33

Aaron's sons were killed because they kind of went off the beating app on how to burn the incense.

SPEAKER_07 6:40

They offered strange fire. Does anyone find it interesting that the next prohibition after that is the prohibition against drinking alcohol before you go to offer the sacrifices? So they probably got a little got a little tipsy and got a little weird in the sacrifices, whatever that looked like.

SPEAKER_08 6:57

Aaron was involved in that golden calf.

SPEAKER_07 7:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 7:01

And I mean he helped out.

SPEAKER_05 7:04

Aaron.

SPEAKER_07 7:05

Well, well, to be fair to Aaron, I mean, he just put the gold in the fire and out came this calf. That's what that's what he said. He was like, Moses, this is crazy.

SPEAKER_06 7:12

I don't know what happened here.

SPEAKER_07 7:16

So yeah, I mean, the priest, the priesthood is limited. Um the priests themselves are limited. You know, their moral limitations on account of their sin show up in all kinds of ways. In the case of Eli's sons, they're uh you know, filthy lucrative, right? They're taking advantage of their office and the privileges it brings. Nadab and Avihu, they don't take it seriously. And so they offer strange fire and they do things, you know, they they treat the priesthood and they treat the sacrifices as a kind of thing like, you know, you can improvise, you can do what seems best to you. It's not that serious, it's not that big a deal. Clearly, it was a big deal. Aaron, you see, that failure of Aaron to, you know, it's a similar kind of failure, right? Or it's like God is sovereign, God determines how he is to be worshipped, when he is to be worshipped. Second and fourth commandments right there. And, you know, whenever the priests try to go their own way or try to improvise or do their own thing, you see problems. So, yeah, we're naming a lot of the inherent sort of, you know, from our perspective as fallen human beings, the old priesthood is problematic. Not because God did something wrong in instituting it or that God's design fell short in some way, but because we make it problematic. Our sin corrupts what God meant for good. And so there's the sense in which we mess up the priesthood, we being human beings, but there's also the sense in which the by design the priesthood was temporary. The priesthood was leading up to something different. And you know, you get an intimation of that as early as Melchizedek. Melchizedek is the priest outside of the priestly system instituted under Moses. And the Psalms pick up on him. It's the Lord has sworn and will not change his mind. You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek, looking to the son of David, looking to the Messiah, looking to the one who would be a priest king who belongs to a better order than the order of Aaron. The promise of the new covenant, right? Jeremiah 31, where God talks about his new covenant, in which he will forgive our sins, he will remember them no more. The removal of sins would require would make it so that there's no longer a need for a sacrifice. That removal of sins, if sin is the kind of thing that's having to constantly be removed or dealt with or atoned for by way of an ongoing sacrifice, then God making a promise in the new covenant where sins would be forgiven, right, in a definitive and final way, would necessitate a definitive and final sacrifice, which would necessitate a definitive and final priesthood. So, you know, last thing I'll mention with the insufficiency or the limitation of the Old Testament priesthood. What about the sacrifices themselves? What is insufficient about the sacrifices made in the Old Testament?

SPEAKER_00 10:19

They were also temporary.

SPEAKER_07 10:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

And they keep doing it.

SPEAKER_07 10:23

Yeah. But think about the nature of them, right?

SPEAKER_08 10:26

They could not change a human being's heart at all.

SPEAKER_07 10:29

Yeah. Or what were they? They were bulls. They were goats. They were animals. Yeah. Uncomprehending beasts. So they were sufficient only to the extent that they pointed to the ultimately sufficient sacrifice. And that was Jesus Himself. Hebrews 10, 4. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

unknown 10:59

Is it possible necessary but not sufficient?

SPEAKER_00 11:01

And that's why it's leading up to that. Like they were necessary. But in in if you're projecting towards the becoming savior, they're not necessary either. Why would they do anything? If they knew that it wasn't forgiving their sense.

SPEAKER_07 11:22

That's why I say necessary first things. Yeah, it's it's necessary because God commanded it. It's sufficient, you know, when you ask the question of sufficiency, you always have to ask sufficient for what? So it's necessary and sufficient for that particular moment in redemptive history. Because this was the next question I'll ask. And, you know, why? Why do you think that that's the case? I'll throw your question back at everybody else. If the sacrificial system was leading somewhere, and it wasn't altogether clear in the old covenant that it was insufficient. I mean, they they knew it was ongoing, repetitive, all that sort of thing, but that's just the way God designed it. And as far as they were concerned, they were to be obedient and continue offering the sacrifices for as long as God wanted them to do that. They uh, you know, maybe they, you know, there are some things that we look at in the Old Testament through the light of Christ to kind of say, like, yeah, it was always leading to this, but that might not have been 100% clear to the Old Testament Jews. So the question we want to ask, uh, why did God design it that way? What do you think he was up to? And putting into place this system that God knew was ultimately insufficient. I did the scare quotes for the recording there.

SPEAKER_08 12:40

Okay, well, I my mind goes to Abraham and Isaac as the paradigm or the model, the pattern. God told Isaac to offer up his son, his only son. And when Abraham was about to do that, which doesn't that wrench your heart? I think offering your child, watering your child, and when God felt he was willing to do that, he gave him what's a substitute. And so, in my mind, the entire sacrificial animal system is substitutionary. Yeah, you're substituting this animal for yourself, right?

SPEAKER_06 13:23

It was sufficient because that's what God said to do. So it was sufficient for that time. Without the shedding of blood, there's no forgiveness of sin. Yeah. So, right, it was it was all foreshadowing. Yeah. Um, but it was it was sufficient because that's what God said to do. Um and uh it's it's just so detailed uh what shows his holiness, it shows his perfection.

SPEAKER_10 13:46

It's just hard to reference out because it says in the Bible that it isn't right.

SPEAKER_07 13:51

Right. So it was yeah, it's sufficiency, you know, it's and now we're dealing with the intersection of time and eternity, right? Uh you're in the temple, you're making these sacrifices. As far as you're concerned, you know, uh the sacrifice is the substitute, right? The the life is in the blood, right? And their blood for my blood, their life for my life. And so that is how God is dealing with my sins. And if you're a worshiper in the old covenant and the priest is doing all the stuff and you're receiving the benefits of it, like you're finding the sufficiency in the blood of the animal. But in the fuller light of progressive revelation, in the light of Christ, in the light of Hebrews on the other side of Jesus' sacrifice, saying that the blood of bulls and goats cannot atone for sins, what you realize is that that blood was ultimately pointing to a greater blood. And whatever sufficiency or efficiency might be found in the blood of the animal, it was ultimately in its anticipatory nature. Right? It's in a sense, it's borrowing the sufficient atonement of Christ's blood, right? And pulling it into the past. Yeah, that's a really important part, right? Uh so sacrifices had been offered, you know, since the beginning. When when you know when Genesis talks about these different people, like, you know, Abel and Moses, or sorry, Abel and Abraham, and all these people making sacrifices, it doesn't stop to explain where that came from. Noah, he gets off the ark, the first thing he does is make sacrifices, right? It's it's in the air, it's in the conscience, people in the conscious. People understand that that's a thing that you do. Uh but like thinking about Israel specifically in their own national religious consciousness, I mean, how did the deliverance of Israel start? Yeah, we have the Ten Commandments, but then we have the Tenth Commandment, the death of the firstborn son. And what does God command Moses to command the people of Israel to do?

SPEAKER_06 16:27

Blood and the doorpost.

SPEAKER_07 16:28

Yeah, sacrifice a lamb. And all these instructions about what you're supposed to do with the lamb, how you're supposed to partake of it, how you smear the blood. And it's on the basis of that smeared blood that God passes over his people. The judgment of God passes over his people. So that's that's like at the center of their story. When Israel thinks about who we are as created and as redeemed by Yahweh, he is the one who passed over us, spared us the judgment in order to deliver us from Egypt. So there's a sense in which all of the sacrifices are pointing to that, you know, paradigmatic sacrifice that every household in Israel had to make. Jeff, I saw your hands up back there.

SPEAKER_09 17:19

But ultimately, everybody was saved. Like we hear later in Hebrews, they're saved by faith. That's what atoned for their sins, is their faith in their covenant savior, that new covenant. These types and shadows pointed, ultimately, like you said, to the blood of the Lamb that's going to forgive us sin. But they're also part of these markers of God's covenants. There's blood in these covenants. Yeah. Because God unfolds this covenant, this covenant that breaks through history.

SPEAKER_06 17:58

Yeah. I think sufficiency, then I think it's more of a definition matter for sufficiency. It Christ was the ultimate once and for all sufficient. Right. Right? So I think sufficiency pertains more to the temporal matter of it. You have to continue to continually do it. Right. Yeah. So sufficiency has a temporal nature to it.

SPEAKER_07 18:22

Yeah, I mean, the individual sacrifices were insufficient, right? Because they needed to be repeated. Exactly. But right, at the end of the day, we're kind of wrangling with terms here, right? So it's recognized like so long as you participate in the system and you're going to the temple and having your sins atoned for, like, you're good. And you're you're keeping you're doing what God has told you to do. If you understand things rightly, you're not being saved by the acts of sacrifice. You're actually being saved by faith in the one who provides the sacrifice to deal with your sins. But you're good, right? And then in the light of Christ, that's when there's the great paradigm shift. Because so much of the argument of Hebrews is like, okay, you were good in doing this. This is what we were supposed to do. But now that Jesus is here, God spoke past tense through to our fathers and prophets and various times, various ways, all that. But now, present perfect tense, he has spoken in his son. And he's the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. So if you want to go back to the old way of doing things like all of these Judaizing Christians want you to do, or all these Jews want you to do, then just know that you are rejected what God has provided. God put a bow in that system, and you want to take the bow off, unwrap it, and start doing it all over again.

SPEAKER_03 19:50

Is that all those sacrifices were commanded, they were still symbolic in nature. Yeah. But they learned nature for nature. Right. Which is where we are now. Right.

SPEAKER_07 20:07

Yeah, yeah. And that's important when we get back to the insufficiency of like the nature of the sacrifice, the animals themselves. Right. At the end of the day, you think about it, it's like if if if we have a human problem, why is it that why do we think that the bulls and goats could ultimately solve our human problem?

SPEAKER_08 20:26

Exactly. And they started to use the sacrifices to try to manipulate God. Yeah. And God got so sick of it. I am so sick of your sacrifices. I own all the cattle on a thousand hills. And why do you think you can try to manipulate me by a sacrifice? Right. So even that God corrupted.

SPEAKER_07 20:49

Right, right. Yeah. And that was that's that comes out so much in the prophets, like Isaiah, Amos, especially, David in Psalm 51, where Israel had gotten to this place where they could live however they wanted to live, and it was bad. I mean, ignoring God's commands, taking advantage of people in the most heinous kind of ways. And they thought that they could just keep offering the sacrifices, and it's cool. It's like if we you know we dress up real nice, we come to church on Sunday, we say all the right things, and we do all the stuff we're supposed to do, and uh then we go out on Monday and we live like absolute hell. We spend the whole week that way. But Sunday, you know.

SPEAKER_09 21:38

We don't do our sacrifices on Sunday.

SPEAKER_07 21:41

Yeah. Yeah. So that's what Israel was up to. And that's you know, all of the times that God and the prophets say that he hates our sack their sacrifices or detests them and all that sort of thing. It's because of that. It's not because the sacrifices in themselves are wrong. God sacrificed or commanded them. It's because Israel's made an absolute hash of them of trying to use them to manipulate God or to put on a show. And if that's it, right? If if if that's what you're doing, then you have reason to doubt whether you are indeed saved by faith, like Jeff Jeff talked about. Because if you were, you wouldn't use the sacrifices in that kind of way. Yeah, right. So the the the old covenant, right, this old system cued us up in all kinds of ways. It cultivated in God's people a sort of priestly consciousness, occultic consciousness in terms of needing sacrifice in order to deal with the relationship between God and his people, needing a priest to mediate between us and him, all these kinds of things. And that sets us up, right? These are all types and shadows that set us up for the revelation of the substance in Jesus in the New Testament. The catechism question talks about, you know, he executes the office of a priest in his once offering up of himself. That's the big thing, right? That's we have this ongoing thing, but now we have this thing that happened once and it is the exclamation point on the priestly office. Hebrews 10, 11 through 14, every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. So why is that good news? Why is that good news?

SPEAKER_08 23:57

My mother loved that verse so much she wrote it all the time what sacrifice he perfect past tense those who are being sanctified perfect ongoing. Yeah it just you can see the the uh you can see the the majesty and beauty of the Lord's ever mentioned for us.

SPEAKER_07 24:26

Yeah and in that in that Hebrews verse you really get what Luther talked about how we are simileusis at pecator we are at once just righteous and simple we're sinners and saints at the same time. So through the single sacrifice of Christ we have been perfected right the salvation has been accomplished and yet we are being sanctified. So that past present future tense kind of progress or process where God is progressively conforming us to the image of Christ He's making us better and better right until that day when finally the work is done and we go into glory completely glorified holy in God's presence.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

I think the first time around when I first started coming here we were going to shorter catechism you said something that just hit home with me about the you know you are sanctified you are being sanctified and you will be sanctified like it's it's you are and it's a continuing process. Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_07 25:33

So the work is done right when Jesus said it is finished he meant it. The work of redemption was accomplished by Christ on the cross. You know in the the ongoing mediation of our high priest is not one in which he is having to continually reaccomplish our salvation. And I grew up Roman Catholic so my conception of a priestly ministry was you know you go in a box with the guy on the other side of the screen and you tell him everything you've done wrong and then he fixes you up spiritually. And then you know you hope you stay good long enough so that you know if you just happen to die that afternoon, like you're still good and you get to go to the right place. Which is messed up and not quite fair to Roman what Roman Catholics believe. But I mean that's kind of what I was led to believe in I didn't have great answers for that. There was always this priest who stood between me and Jesus. He stood between me and Jesus in the confessional booth he stood between me and Jesus in the catechism class he stood between me and Jesus in the weekly mass where it would be a it's not quite fair to say it's a re-crucifixion of Christ every week but again it's pretty close. But there really is that sort of understanding where my redemption has to be accomplished again and again and again.

SPEAKER_08 27:08

Any legalistic any tradition that has legalism mixed in with it is going to be that whether it's Catholic whether it's Mennonite I have the same experience and I was raised Mennonite of did I sin did I sin I'm toast if I don't publicly confess and make it right I am toast well I'm thinking how can I possibly love God with all my heart soul and mind continuously every single second of every 24 hours as a fallen creature. There's just no way. So Lord I'm already toast and then I realized that God was doing the saving and the sanctifying I just plump back in Jesus and he'll figure me out.

SPEAKER_05 27:55

Yeah Luther said love him I hate him that's what Luther said love him I hate him because of that you can't love God.

SPEAKER_08 28:09

You cannot love God like he needs to be loved. So I'm thinking one day I'll look at you and I will love you like you're supposed to be loved but I am still in this present and I still have got all this carnal stuff and you know fleshly stuff worries and you know all kinds of stuff going on and less worried obedience.

SPEAKER_07 28:32

Yeah. Well it looking at the single sacrifice of Christ and the sufficiency the all-sufficiency of that sacrifice completely removes me from the salvation equation. Maybe that's not the best way to say it but in terms of accomplishing my salvation it removes me from that because if you come any sort of legalistic system whether it's a Roman Catholic mode an Armenian mode a Jewish mode a Muslim mode right where it's the idea is that God makes the rules I keep the rules God blesses me. Okay who's saving me I'm saving me. And I gotta keep making the sacrifice whatever that looks like walking the type. Yeah I gotta walk the type of and I gotta and that's gonna lead you to a place of either pride or despair pride when you think you got it all covered despair when you get honest with yourself and realize you got none of it covered and so you know Jesus being the one who does the work Jesus being the one who makes the sacrifice and all sacrifices He does it all. Jesus paid it all to him I am sin had left a crimson saint who washed it white as snow. And then there it is right and what does that make me want to do it makes me want to work. It makes me want to work hard. It makes me want to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. Why? For it is God who works within me both to will and to do his good pleasure. No longer working for salvation but working from salvation. Not in a right way right so the single sacrifice right the accomplishment of redemption uh the catechism question talks about you know what that accomplishment looks like. He once offers up himself as a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice. You know this idea of satisfaction that God's justice is a thing that needs to be satisfied. Genesis 2 16 through 17 when God commands Adam not to eat of the tree of every tree in the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in that day you eat of it, you shall surely die. This great injustice perpetrated in the garden as the prototypical injustice from which all the other ones flow. Romans 5, right? Sin and death enter the world because of the one man's disobedience then Romans 6 23 the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. So because of sin we incur a legal debt we spent several weeks talking about sin so we don't need to rehash all that but if we have a legal debt then God's law needs to be satisfied God's justice needs to be satisfied and we need to be atoned for our sins need to be atoned for remember Isaiah 6 where Isaiah is this great throne room vision where he's whisked into the presence of God and the angels are singing holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty and he's just undone in the presence of God. Woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips and I come from a people of unclean lips right I am cooked I am toast in the presence of God's white hot holy light. But what happens right before Isaiah can be sent out on the mission that God has for him a mission to go and reach the people of Israel the angel has to take a burning tong or a burning altar sorry a burning coal from the altar with tongs and touch it to Isaiah's lips and say your sins are atoned for. So we need, alright, that's that in order for us to be reconciled to God, in order for us to have a relationship with God and for us to be useful to God and to the other people around us, our sins need to be atoned for. And that's what he provided for in that old covenant system. And that whole rigmarole of priests and sacrifices and all of that and it's pinnacle once a year on the Day of Atonement. You read about it in Leviticus 16 and Leviticus 17 where you have to offer a bull for the priest and you have to offer goats for the people one for a sin offering and the other as a safe the scapegoat and they put all the sins on the goat and they send it out. Well it's so it's uh when we think about atonement there are kind of two important things we have to think about propitiation and expiation big words I know propitiation means the satisfaction of God's justice right it's it's a positive concept in that you know we sacrifice this goat because blood for blood life for life right that he is incurring the legal sanction for sin. So you know that that satisfies God's wrath. But there's also the wiping of the slate clean or the sending away of the sin, the casting our sins as far as the east is from the west that's expiation. That's what you get with the scapegoat. So God doesn't just deal positively with our sin, but he also negatively removes it from us. So that he so the the the sin is dealt with and God will remember it no more. He will no longer deal with us on the basis of our sins. He will deal with us on the basis of his forgiveness just as if we had never sinned. So that's what's happening on the Day of Atonement, right? And that's the thing that gets picked up in the new in the New Testament when Paul describes Jesus as our atonement in Romans 3 as our place of propitiation. He draws directly on the language from Leviticus 16 and 17 to describe Jesus as essentially the fulfillment of what was going on in the Day of Atonement. 2 Corinthians 521 for our sake he made him to be sin or another good translation to be a sin offering who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Hebrews 9 11 through 12 When Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent, not made with hands, that is not of this creation, he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. So what that's envisioning is the day of atonement where you have the high priest and the high priest has to enter into the Holy of Holies with the blood in order to do the sprinkling and the things to accomplish atonement. Again that was a thing that had to be repeated every year. And he had to atone for his own sins before he could go in there. And tradition says they would have to tie a rope around them in case he screwed up and dropped dead and they had to drop him and drag him out of there because nobody else could go in behind him. Alright so that's that's the ritual that's the rigor role that's that's every single year. But Jesus is the high priest to end all high priests he goes into the Holy of Holies with an even better blood to offer not the blood of bulls and goats but his own blood. And so that's you know that's the fulfillment that's the culmination of that old Day of Atonement system. And so that's that's kind of what it's getting at when it talks about the satisfaction of divine justice. God provided Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice to satisfy divine justice. And it's really important to think of that because God did not overlook sin.

SPEAKER_06 36:18

God did not suspend his divine justice he satisfied so why let's think about that for just a minute why is it better that he satisfied divine justice as opposed to suspend it if you suspend it he's no longer just right our our God is just and if if you suspend it then there's unjust right there is no justice and then so then he's no longer just suspended it doesn't matter right right and then right but mercy um yeah wipes that away right uh justice and I think R.C. School says justice or unjustice using mercy.

SPEAKER_07 37:05

Yeah um but it's either way is justice dissatisfying well think of all the stories we've seen in the news of you know some repeat offender murdering someone like the the girl on the subway and the Caroline one of the Carolinas if I remember right and it turns out that the man who killed her had been convicted like 23 times or something like that and they just keep turning them loose. Suspended yeah right exactly so that's what suspended justice looks like right so suspended justice is no justice. And then you can't depend on it anymore. Is the universe fundamentally just uh the does the moral arc of the universe bend toward what is right? As Christians we want to say yes yes it does. Who defines what is right uh so God doesn't just set aside his justice and say that yeah I'm perfectly just holy righteous all of that except when I choose not to be because then he's arbitrary and then we wonder all these great injustices we see in the world the Hitler's the Pol Pots the King Jones and the Putin's all of that we see all that in the world what hope do we have that God will ultimately deal with that? Because God is fundamentally just and if he were to suspend his justice we wouldn't have that hope.

SPEAKER_08 38:29

Isn't there a little bit of an allusion to the scapegoat in the last chapter of Hebrews where he talks about Christ was crucified outside the camp and we go outside the camp I'm not sure the words there.

SPEAKER_07 38:45

Yeah there's something funky going on there that I don't remember.

SPEAKER_09 38:48

I preached on it but I don't remember you forget my sermons I forget my sermons today Jeff ultimately he's the last Adam he's got to satisfy the injustice of the garden and the wrath that's incurred from that covenant of works. Yeah and that covenantful the covenant of redemption that's what his job is to be the mediator and to satisfy all the things that Adam did wrong yeah so that he would have a new federal head for him.

SPEAKER_07 39:23

Yeah he keeps the law in our place for our sake he also undergoes the sanction of law breaking in our for our sake and in our place.

SPEAKER_08 39:34

It's not the goat it not the scapegoat it's um Hebrews 13 verse 11 the high priest carries the blood of the animals into the most holy place as a sin offering but the bodies are burnt outside the camp. So that's it's referring to the practice of burning the sacrificial animal carcasses outside the camp. That says so Jesus was crucified also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood let us then go to him outside the camp bearing the disgrace he bore. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 40:13

Yeah I'm not sure what that means exactly but it's well I think it has to do with the the fact that Jesus subjected himself to the same treatment that the sacrificial animals experience for our for our sake. And so it's saying let's go and meet him there. Especially in the context of the church that's being persecuted that you know you've resisted but not yet to the point of shedding blood sort of intimating that keep on keeping on in the faith and you might shed some blood so let's go out and meet Jesus where he shed his blood for us and know that we're in good company. I think that's what that's getting at. So the satisfaction of divine justice right that's kind of the next moment in the catechism answer uh we can think of that as like the objective satisfaction of requirements but there's also a subjective piece because it goes on to talk about you satisfied divine justice and reconciled us to God. Reconciliation, you know, it's an accounting term but it's brought into the realm of the personal and the covenantal so it's not just talking about God wiping the slave clean and taking away the grounds of our of our uh or the guilt of our sin right and the condemnation of it it's talking about God actually re-entering into fellowship with us. God inviting us back into relationship. Kind of a picture I've used this before it's like imagine you're in the courtroom and you're standing before before the bar or before the bench or whatever and the judge the judge looks at you and says not guilty right not guilty you're free to go that's the satisfaction of divine justice we could say but then he takes off his robes he steps down out of the bench he puts his arm around your shoulder and says now come on over to my house for dinner that's the reconciliation piece. You have aggrieved me my justice, God says you have sinned against me, you have brought upon yourself all of these condemnations and sanctions and all these sorts of things I forgive you of that you're free to go but more than that you're free to come. Come into my house sit at my table be my son be my daughter enjoy your inheritance inheritance that yeah the inheritance 2 Corinthians 5 16 through 21 From now on therefore we regard no one according to the flesh even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh we regard him thus no longer. Therefore if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation the old has passed away behold the new has come. All this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself not counting their transgressions against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ God making his appeal through us we implore you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God for our sake he made him to be sinned who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. And that was my dad's favorite verse don't we got my mend all his business well it's it's the vertical meets the horizontal so we we have been reconciled to God through Christ. He's brought us into the family and he's also given us a message of reconciliation so that we go out and we proclaim the objective reality of what God has done in Christ and we also compel people People to grab hold of the subjective reality that follows from that. So we are made one with him, and we're inviting others to be made one with him as well. And in the process, we become one with each other.

SPEAKER_06 44:14

So where's our joy? Why are we not joyful? I know it's because we're human. Why are we not joyful? There's no condemnation. You know, when you meditate on the joyful, you're joyful. I'm joyful. I'm joyful.

SPEAKER_04 44:27

I guess that's joy, joy, joy deep down in my heart. Well, if the devil doesn't like it, he can sit on a tack. But you know, when you look at Ephesians 2, you know, children of wrath.

SPEAKER_06 44:39

I'm sorry, what? What was that word? Wrath. And then but God. But God made rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us. Even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ. By grace should have been saved, and raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. So that in our grace he might show his immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us. Thank you, good night.

SPEAKER_08 45:12

As a child raised in a very strong Armenian tradition, it took me decades. I'm talking decades to get over the legal fiction. People I heard talking, oh, we don't believe in a legal fiction, meaning justification. And I really had to spend lots of time in prayer scripture and kind of reprogramming my default settings to, wait a minute, it's not just like a human judge, because a human judge does the first. I mean, that was an okay illustration, Kenny. I'm not faulting you for that. But a human judge that you're not guilty of the person has never changed. It's still the same person standing there. And I had to go to 2 Corinthians, where the not guilty that God speaks over us is as powerful as when he said, let there be light. It has extreme spiritual power in it to completely transform us. That's when this Arminian child could start to accept justification as God's creative act, not just declaring us not guilty, but a powerful explosion of his power into a human life.

SPEAKER_03 46:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 46:34

That says we're not guilty, but those starts, begins, it's like I could not, the justification and sanctification for me have to stay together. You can't say, oh I'm going to be justified, but I'm not going to do that sanctification stuff.

SPEAKER_07 46:49

Yeah, it's yeah, it's impossible. It's what Calvin called the duplex grapia, the twofold gift. That you're united with Christ, you are justified and sanctified. Same time. You can't have one without the other. And this was the great bone of contention between the Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church. Because the Roman Catholic Church is a justification is a legal fiction. God says you're not guilty, but then you're still pretty guilty, right? And nothing in you changes. And the Protestants are like, no, no, no, no, no. We're not saying that at all. What you're saying, Roman Catholic Church, is that me being justified is a constitutional change in which I have to continue to act just in order to be finally justified before the throne of God's justice. What we as Protestants are saying is that that declaration of justification is a once-for-all act where God says not guilty, not because of anything in us, but because of everything in Christ. And the reason it's not a legal fiction is because along with that comes the new heart and the sanctification. Along with that comes an actual transformation, right? We are sanctified and we are being sanctified and we will be sanctified. That goes hand in hand with it. Alright. Last thing to talk about is the continual intercession of Christ. It's kind of where we start with the prayer. He makes the single sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices to satisfy divine justice, to reconcile us to God, and now he makes continual intercession for us. Jesus prays for us. People like me to pray for them, and they think that my prayers have some extra juice. That's not really how it works. But if it did work that way.

SPEAKER_10 48:42

You have the god phone.

SPEAKER_07 48:44

Yeah, right. I do have the God phone in my office. It's red. Yeah. I'm not even kidding. Someone got that for me after I mentioned that in one of the Hebrew sermons. But you know, if anyone's prayers are going to have more juice than anyone else, uh, they're going to be Jesus. Right? So Jesus is praying for you constantly.

SPEAKER_08 49:05

John 17 is still going on.

SPEAKER_07 49:08

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I just think of that. You know, what was it like for Jesus to pray for Peter? Remember that? Yeah. Even though you sifted. Yeah. Luke 22. Satan asks that he might have you so that he would sift you like weed. But I have prayed for you. And notice how Jesus praying for him does not prevent him from falling. He says, I've prayed for you, and I have it here. No, I don't have it here. Yeah, yeah. I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. So we tend to think that if Jesus was praying for us and if his prayers were really efficacious, then we wouldn't face the hard things in life. We wouldn't fall on our faces. We wouldn't fail in all the ways we fail. But with Peter, Jesus praying for him wasn't, hey, I'm going to keep you from the bad things. It was, I'm going to prepare you to get up from the good thing. And so if we're in the midst of bad things, you know, whatever that might look like, that is not a counterexample. That doesn't disprove that Jesus is praying for us. It ought to give us hope and comfort to know that there will be another side to the bad things. And Jesus is enabling us to get through them and to emerge on the other side looking more like him, more sanctified. So, with the couple minutes we have left, what difference does that make for you? That Jesus is praying for you now in all of us.

SPEAKER_06 50:52

If you understand, you know, when Sarah was diagnosed with cancer and we all know how serious that was, my prayer was that I can get every bit of fruit out of the trial. That I can get some turbo sanctification, right? And it can bring a greater intimacy with our Lord. And so I think with it's a mindset, at least for me, that when those trials and tribulations come, our God is sovereign. You know, praise you, Lord. Allow it to continue to transform me the image of your son. And when you play that long game, you have that mindset like, hey, this is good. This is good. This is working together for good, it keeps you from that despair. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:38

So good, but sometimes it's so large to see. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 51:54

Yeah. Yeah, it can be impossible to see sometimes because we don't have the benefit of omniscience. We don't have the perspective of eternity. But he does. So sometimes when we're just when we're in the valley, when everything is dark and awful, we can know. And we can remind ourselves, and we can remind each other that even in that place, Jesus is laser-eyed on you and where you are. And he's praying for you constantly. I mean, it's I you know, that's that's a question, right? When you're suffering in life and you wonder sometimes, does anybody see? Does anybody care? People say nice things, they offer encouragement, they send me a meal and stuff like that, but nobody really gets it, right? Nobody knows the pain I'm in, nobody's walking through this particular valley with me. I feel like I'm all alone. You're not. Your high priest sees you better than you see yourself. And he knows your situation better than you ever could. And he is praying for you. It's hard to find more encouraging things than that. Alright, let's pray. Father, thank you for our great high priest. We have forfeited any right we might have claimed to a relationship with you. We have broken that relationship by our sin. We have alienated ourselves in every conceivable way. And yet you so loved us that you provided a way of reconciliation. You dealt with the sanction of our sin. You wiped away the stain of it. You gave us Jesus to die in our place for our sake and to rise to life so that we might rise with him. Lord, thank you for this great grace that brings us back home to you. And thank you for the calling that you have given us to engage in this priestly ministry so that we might invite others to come home to you. Lord, help us and encourage us, especially when we're in the valley, to know that we do not just have the prayers of saints, but we have the prayers of Jesus Himself, who is with us in the valley, who will never leave us, who will never forsake us, and will empower us so that when the day comes and we stand, when we are able to return to our brothers and sisters, whatever that looks like, we might strengthen them. We might comfort them with the comfort that we have received from you. And we might pray for them too, as you are praying for us. I pray all this in Jesus' name as we look forward to worshiping Him together in spirit and truth. Amen. Thank you. All right.

SPEAKER_10 55:00

Thank you all.