Every time I come out here, I always think it'd be fine to relocate the family down to the Fraser Valley. I love the mountains. I love fresh air. I love rivers.
And I just love the West, period. And every time I leave here, I've got to leave here tomorrow morning at 8.15. And I'll be driving to the airport tonight to check into the hotel so I can catch an early morning flight. But every time I do, I get misty-eyed in those mountains that we see in the background.
Because out east, we don't have mountains. We have speed bumps. Now, they're about that tall. These are here, and so it's always a delight.
It's a delight to be with the Neufelds again. It's a delight to be with you folks. And it's a delight to do a conference. Yesterday, we did a conference on Christianity and Islam and the differences between the two.
And the differences are astounding. We had a record attendance over at Cloverdale Baptist Church. And your technical guru up in the rafters there, Jonathan Hall, you're blessed to have a man with that type of technological capability under your roof, was able to get together a camera crew for us and we live streamed the event. We had people logging in from as far away as Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, various states in the US, Germany, Sweden, Finland and a host of other countries.
Altogether, 241 viewers logged in from around the world into Cloverdale. It was a delight to be able to minister the word. And we almost had a protester and a major altercation in the sanctuary right around 1130, which was, I hope it doesn't become a YouTube media frenzy, but who knows, it might. We could use the publicity.
Anyway,
Scripture Reading: Hebrews 1:1–3
if you have your Bibles with you, if you could open them up to please the New Testament to the book of Hebrews, the book of Hebrews written by the great Old Testament scholar of no name, we don't know who it was written by. We knew he was a man who was profoundly familiar with the Old Testament. But we're gonna read Hebrews chapter one, first three verses. God, God who at various times and in various ways spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets. has in these last days spoken to us by his son, whom he has appointed heir of all things through whom also he made the worlds.
Who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had himself purged our sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. So
Introduction
the question I have for you tonight is, Who is Jesus? Who is he? Not who is he to you, not who is he to me, but who is he, period, end of subject. There are a lot of aberrant ideas out there about who God is, what religion is, what spirituality is.
There's a lot of really weird ideas out there as to who the nature and character of Jesus Christ happens to be. I've heard him referred to as my homie, my homeboy, my ardent lover, and a host of other pejorative adjectives to describe something other than what he truly is. And we at Sola Scriptura Ministries believe in that theology matters, that sound doctrine is vitally important. Because what you believe must influence what you do.
How you view the scriptures, how you view Jesus, how you understand God must translate into the way you order and manner your personal lives. It is vitally important to adhere to non-negotiables. There are boundaries to orthodoxy. There are boundaries that say this is right and this is wrong.
And when you step outside those boundaries, we have every right to call you to account as to be able to say that something is Christian or not Christian, something is biblical or not biblical. This was driven home to me very forcefully in a recent social gathering. We belong to the Cambridge Kitchener Homeschool Association. We've been homeschooling our kids now for 23 years.
We have a 23-year-old daughter who just graduated college. We have a 12-year-old autistic boy going on 13, and a 7-year-old boy who is just every inch all male. This guy is just one tough little dude, I tell you. And every year our homeschool group does a theater night where five or six or seven families get together and they do songs, they do skits, they do plays.
Whatever the group of five or six families choose to do, that's what they get to do. And at the end of the run, we met at one of the members' homes to have a celebratory night, have a fellowship potluck night, and really pat the kids on the back for doing a great job on the stage. And I met one of the gentlemen in the homeschool group who I thought was a Christian. And we got into a discussion, and we exchanged our names.
Who are you? Why are you? What do you do? Who are you?
And all that. And I told them who I was, my name, and what I did. I worked for Solo Scriptural Ministries. I'm the CEO of a Christian conference teaching discernment ministry, where we try to lay out what the bounds of orthodoxy is to the church.
And hopefully, through reformed theology, persuade Christians to test all things against the pages of scripture. He looked at me kind of quizzically. I said, you know about this Jesus guy? And I said, a little bit.
And he goes, well, you know, he never commanded anyone to do anything. And I'm thinking to myself, what church do you go to? And who is your pastor? Because I have most of the pastors in the region plugged into my iPhone.
I need to call the eldership board. If this guy's a member of the church, we need to examine what his fidelity is to the scriptures. I said, really, Jesus never commanded anything? He goes, yeah, that's right.
He makes no demands. I said, so in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, where he said, he talked about murdery, adultery, and theft, all those things are optional. We can pick and choose what we want to believe and do and live. He goes, all I know is that Jesus makes no demands on us.
So even to tell me, sir, when Jesus says in John 15, 14, you are my friends. If you do whatsoever, I command you. You mean he lied? Was that a joke?
Do we take that seriously or what? He goes, well, Jesus had some good ideas, and these good ideas worked for him and a few of his followers. His life and death were nothing more than expressions of his dedication to a cause which he was ultimately committed to. That was his direct quote.
I said, let me see, I need to make sure I perfectly understand what you're telling me here, sir, tonight. What you're telling me then is that this Jesus Christ who lived 2,000 years ago, who lived a spotless life, who taught a variety of ethical concerns, who commanded his followers to do a variety of things, how do you handle then his crucifixion? Well, what do you mean? So, well, if he was a man who was committed to a good religious cause, and he was so committed that he was willing to die for that cause, how do you handle that?
He said, well, I don't. He said, well, you realize what you've done now, haven't you? He said, no, I don't. He said, what you've done now is put Jesus Christ in the same category as homicide bombers from Iraq, because these are men who are religiously committed, they may have one or two interesting, good, ethical ideas under their belt, but they are so dedicated to their cause that they're willing not only to kill themselves but others in the name of religious commitment.
Is that what you're telling me, sir? And his eyes glazed over and he looked at me and said, well, I don't know whether I can love enough to make sense of all that. For many of us, in our society at large, there are strange ideas of what, who, and what we think Jesus Christ actually is. To some, he's nothing more than a smooth-talking religious salesman.
To some, he's nothing more than a huckster. To some, he is nothing more than a good moral teacher on the same category as a Buddha or a Mahatma Gandhi. He's a wise, ethical man. And unfortunately, I travel to enough churches, have been to enough conferences, have had enough discussions to last me a lifetime of the way even so-called professing Christians view who Jesus is.
They tend to cherry pick the New Testament and find those aspects of Jesus that they like the most, and they begin to apply them to their lives. Not only do they do that with Jesus, but they do that with the entire canon of scripture. I like this passage. I don't like that passage.
I'll have some of that passage and a little bit of this. It's kind of like going to a spiritual smorgasbord or all-you-can-eat buffet and going, well, you know, I think I'll have maybe that much piety, maybe this much sanctity, maybe only that much holiness, but not too much because I've got to catch the NFL on Sunday afternoon. I don't want anything to fear with my NFL on Sunday afternoon. Well.
We don't have an option of picking and choosing who Jesus is, and we don't have an option of picking and choosing what we choose to believe and how we choose to live based on scripture if we call ourselves a committed Christ follower. If you're not a Christ follower here today, you can do whatever you want. If you are committed to Jesus Christ, you need to readjust your priorities and adjust them real quick because he's laid some very stringent commands as to how we are to live and obey him.
God Spoke: Scripture and Revelation
So Hebrews 1.1. says that God who at various times and in various ways spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets. Now, in the past churches I've been involved with, I teach lay hermeneutics, lay homiletics, that's interpretation and preaching to guys who are aspiring teachers through our Sunday school program. And the one thing I teach them is that when you analyze a passage, there's two things you have to identify. Who is the subject?
In other words, who is the passage talking about? And you have to identify the verb or the action word. What is the subject of the passage doing? It says here that God spoke.
Now I want that to sink in for a minute. God spoke. The Bible is God's word. All 66 books of the Old Testament and the New Testament together are one consistent revelation.
While we recognize that there were human beings involved in the authoring of these books, Paul wrote the epistles, Moses wrote the Pentateuch, David wrote a good portion of the Psalms, there were human beings involved in the process. But as they were moved by the spirit of God to transcribe or to put those things down as God worked in their lives, in order to bring about God's revelation. The Bible at no times is simply a book of human beings trying to make sense of the world around them. We're not trying to come to grips with nature.
We're not trying to give an explanation for how we understand the way good things happen, the way bad things happen. We're not trying to explain luck and fortune by fabricating a being who we claim to be God after our own image. The writer of Hebrews is very clear here in this book that God And not only in this book, but the entire canon of scripture, it is God, ultimately behind the scenes, authoring what we need to know and how we are to live. It's his authority, his word, although he uses human agents to convey that message.
In the beginning, God spoke. In the beginning, God spoke everything into creation. Everything that we know is because God has first revealed it to us. Ultimately, at the end of the day, final chapter, the Bible is not what human beings think.
It's what God thinks, what he's given us, what we need to live by. It's his word. That's the first thing we've got to settle here. This is God's book.
He's speaking in this passage. Not only did God speak, it says here that he had spoken in times past. At the time of the writing of this particular epistle, the New Testament canon had not been yet fully finished. It was still a work in progress.
God was still revealing to his apostles and to his followers that which they needed to know, and it wouldn't be for another couple hundred years before the canon would be finally formulated into a concise document of 66 books. So when he's talking about times past, he's not talking about the earliest epistles of the New Testament, he's talking about the books of the Old Testament. The Pentateuch, the law, the prophets, the writings, the wisdom literature, all that is part of the times past. The message of God in the Old Testament is one of promise and hope.
It describes the fall in Genesis 3 very clearly. Man was perfect, was in a perfect condition. He was in perfect union fellowship with God. He saw God face to face.
He spoke with God face to face. He got revelation from God face to face. And the man was only given one order, one command. The attorney who was our chairman of Solus Scriptura Ministries is a Queen's Council in Toronto.
And I've been to his office a number of times. And one thing that always astounds me is the law library that high-powered law firms have. The books that come out, their law library extends from here to there, across that wall, and down that wall. That's all law books for the province of Ontario.
And every year, they have a new selection of books that come out that go out to here. That's every year. Adam was given one law, one rule, one thing to do right, and he couldn't get that right. And as a consequence, we are living in a fallen world today.
And so the entire message from Genesis 3 forward is to undo that which was done in Genesis chapter 3, the promise of a Redeemer, a Messiah, one who would undo the curse. One who would finally bring about the salvation of a special people chosen for God. God spoke in times past about a promised Redeemer. The entire chapter 11 of the book of Hebrews, The Hall of Faith.
The Legacy of Champions, where it talks about men in times past who were sawn in two, about Abraham who left the Ur of the Chaldees. There were men in times past who understood this by the Spirit of God. They saw the promise from afar, but recognized they were sojourners, they were pilgrims in a strange land. They had not yet received the promise, but they knew a better day was coming when Genesis 3 would be undone in its entirety.
And yet they pressed on, knowing that it would not be fulfilled in their lifetime, but at some future point in history. Those men all died in faith, not having received the promises, but they saw them from afar. You see, whenever we look at the past in times past, we look at the Old Testament in times past, and now that we are 2,000 years removed from the cross, we look at that event at Calvary 2,000 years ago in times past. We are not really looking at a history lesson.
That's important. While God manifested himself and has operated in history all along, we never look at the past as merely a history lesson. The past explains who we are or why we are today. It also gives us the assurance of that which is to be promised for tomorrow.
When do you celebrate the Lord's table here? Once a month? Okay, once a month you get together to celebrate the Lord's table. In the Lord's table, you have this biblical principle of past, present, and future comes together in one glorious celebration.
Think about what the scriptures say. As often as you gather in my name to eat and drink. What is that? Present activity.
We're doing this right now. Remembering the Lord's death in time's past, past event. For how long? until he comes, future consolation. So when God speaks about times past, in times past, he's giving assurance to the readers of this particular epistle that who you are, why you are, the reason you exist, and your marching orders derived from the past, I have spoken, I have spoken in the past, and what I have done to my redeemed people, my redeemed community, my worshiping community today, is the basis for why you are to live how you are to live today.
God spoke in various ways in times past. He also used a variety of means, the author goes on to say, in various times and in various ways to the fathers by the prophets. Throughout Hebrew history, God is a creative God. He spoke to his people in very imaginative and very creative and very distinct and different ways during various times in order to convey his message, whatever the message happened to be at the time.
The most powerful voice that spoke was the voice at creation. Let there be light, and there was. Let there be land, and there was. Let there be animals, and there was.
Let there be human beings, and there were. God spoke at the voice of creation. He spoke to Abraham at the order of the Chaldees. Let me go to a land that I will show you, and I will create a great nation.
The number is so large that if you look at the stars in the sky, as vast as those numbers are, so vast will be your descendants. He spoke to Moses at the burning bush in Sinai. He was the pillar of fire at night and the cloud of glory for the Israelite community to march out of Egypt. He was the head of the Lord's army in Joshua.
He was the high and lifted up one in Isaiah's beatific vision. He was the threefold angelic visitor who spoke to Abraham a year before Isaac was born, the promised covenant child would come forth through Abraham. He was the writing in the wall of the Babylonian palace, and he was the voice that spoke through Balaam's donkey at one point. At each stage of Israel's history, God has spoken. in order to convey more and more, give his people a greater picture of what he expects and what is about to happen.
But in the past, God relied merely on fallen creatures, human beings, created, even if it was an angel, it was still a created being that conveyed the message. In the past, relied on human messengers. The writer goes on to say that
The Son as Final Messenger
he has, in these last days, spoken to us by his son, these last days. You don't need to buy books by Hal Lindsay to understand these last days. Because with the advent of Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago, the writer says, we are in these last days. These last days are still continuing.
We are in the end times. We don't know how much longer those end times are gonna be. At some point, everything's going to evaporate and the Lord's going to come back. But we are living in these last days right now.
In the past, God used sons of Adam to convey God's message. And the message was always consistent. While today may not be a bed of roses, there is a Messiah coming. There is a promised deliverer.
A person, a descendant of David whose kingdom will have no end. In the New Testament economy, there's a change. The sons of Adam are replaced. They're no longer the messengers of final revelation.
In these last days, he has spoken to us by his son. It is the son of God, Jesus Christ himself, who is the messenger, the ultimate messenger, the final messenger. You can't get a better messenger, a greater messenger, a more glorious messenger, a more powerful messenger, a more eternal messenger than Jesus Christ himself. The second person of the Godhead is the messenger.
He is the highest expression of God's revelation. You can't get any higher than him. Jesus, the veiled promise of the Old Testament, he now in the flesh becomes the promise fulfilled. Second Samuel 7, the descendant of King David will sit on the throne, his reign will have no end.
He's here. The suffering servant Isaiah, he's here. The one that David wrote about in Psalm 22, that's Jesus. The promise of Genesis 3.16 about the seed of woman who'll crush the serpent's head, that's him, he's here.
You can't get any better or higher or more glorious than Jesus Christ himself. In addition to that, we shouldn't be looking for additional revelation because you can't get better than Jesus. He is the final messenger. The promise has come.
Old Testament is fulfilled. Well, if Jesus is the messenger,
The Message and the Messenger
the question we have to ask then, what is the message? Jesus came with a message of seven effective leadership skills for church pastors. Jesus came with the message of 12 ways to manage your time better. Jesus came with cooking book recipes how you can have seven ways to lose weight in a Christ-like way.
Jesus came with a message that says here's 12 stock tips that every Christian can use to enhance your retirement portfolio. Question. There are a lot of books out there that trumpet these sorts of ideologies, these sort of practical hands-to-ideas. And there's nothing wrong with getting stock tips.
There's nothing wrong with finding good ways to manage your time better. There's nothing wrong with trying to become a better person or a better leader. There's no problem with that. That's what the scriptures are for.
But the question I have for you, was that the message of Jesus? Was that his central message? Well, to put it simply, the message of Jesus is Jesus. That's the message.
Pastor Cam this morning went over some of the I am statements in his message this morning. Before Abraham was, I am. The one you seek, the Messiah you look for, I am he. He indicted the Pharisees by saying that if you knew who I was, if you really understood your scriptures, you'd know that I am the promised Messiah.
Guys, the era of Old Testament promise is over because the fulfillment is here. I'm in. That was his message. The message and the messenger are identical.
You cannot separate the two. You cannot embrace the messenger and despise his message. Nor can you accept the messenger without understanding who the messenger is. I wish I had a dollar for every conversation I've had with people who look at me and say, you know this Jesus guy?
I like him. Boy, he's nice and servant on the mount. He is loving. He is kind.
He is compassionate. Boy, I really like him. But I can't stand the idea that he is the only way. I reject that entirely.
If you reject the messenger, you reject the message. You cannot have a Christian faith that calls itself even remotely Christian if you have a message void of the messenger. They gotta go together to have a complete gospel. Well, what was that message about Jesus?
Heir of All Things
The writer goes on to say that he has been appointed heir of all things. This is a statement about Christ's preeminence or his first tier status or his number one status in God's economy. Everything that belongs to the father has been granted to the son. In fact, we read that in the opening psalm, Psalm chapter two.
I'll just cut a portion out of it here for you where he says, picking up in verse six, yet I have set my king on my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree the Lord has said to me, you are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance and the ends of the earth for your possession. You shall break them into a rod of iron.
You shall dash them to pieces like a potter's vessel. Also in Psalm 89, I will make my firstborn, speaking of the future redeemer, I will make him my firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth. Colossians 1.16 says, for by him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible. whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. Now get this, all things were created through him and for him.
Everything, this entire created universe, everything belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ. It's his. He is the heir of all things. Then the writer goes on to make
Creator and Sustainer of All Things
two rather extraordinary claims about Jesus. It says that it is by him he also made the worlds. Now we just covered that a moment ago. It echoes John chapter 1 verses 1 through 4 where it says, in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, and the word was God.
And it was the word that brought everything into being. It was that babe in Bethlehem who he will celebrate his manger birth in about 10 or 12 weeks or so. that babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, that Jesus meek and lowly, the one who fled with his parents to Egypt to avoid the persecution by Herod, the one who Simeon and Anna saw that day in Luke chapter two in the temple when Mary brought him for the day eight consecration. It's the one of whom the shepherds venerated in the fields by night. It is one of whom the angels spoke on the eve of his birth. this babe, this child, this helpless, fragile baby of a human being.
It is he whose thumbprint is on these mountains that are right around us. He made the worlds. And he condescended to step into this world. He became flesh and dwelt among us.
He tabernacled with us. He lived a spotless life. He went to the cross, not to prove that he was committed to a cause, but to atone for sin. He made the worlds.
Jesus meek and lowly? I don't think so. You don't make all this by being meek and lowly. You do it because you're the second person of the Godhead who exists eternally, who has eternal power at his beck and call.
This one made the worlds. It also says that he upholds all things by the word of his power.
Upholding All Things by His Power
Jesus is not a watchmaker who simply makes a fob watch, winds it up, and lets it go, lets it wind down. By upholding all things by the word of his power, that means that he is intimately involved with the biomechanics, the chemistry, the quantum physics, the electromagnetics of this particular created order. I mean, it is astounding when you look at creation, just how finely tuned the universe is. Give you an example, we are 93 million miles from the sun.
If we were 2 million miles closer, life would be too hot to exist. Temperature would be too hot for life to exist. If we were 2 million miles further away, temperature too cold for life to exist. The moon is 186,000 miles away from the Earth.
If it was only 10,000 miles closer or 10,000 miles further away, there would be too much of a gravitational pull on the Earth's oceans for the land masses to bear life in any sort of meaningful way. The exact gravitational pull of the Earth itself is such that we have the right balance of gases for a living life to exist. If you change the gravitational pull even 1%, you change the entire balance of the way gases hang in the air. Life can't exist.
The whole universe, and I could show you dozens and dozens and dozens of examples of the finely tuned manner in which life operates, or the way physics operate on this planet. And it says that he upholds all things by the word of his power, which means he authored it. And he's intimately acquainted with the physics and the chemistry and the biology. And so I've always said to people that the Christian faith never contradicts, there's no conflict between science and scripture.
I mean, science, correctly interpreted, tells us something about the thumbprint of Jesus. Because if he's the one who created everything, he called it into existence, that means he put in the biomechanical laws, which means he upholds all things by the word of his power, which means we know something a little bit more about the one who put it there in the first place. Science has some great insights. They have lousy conclusions.
The conclusions we find are here in scripture. Question. for all you budding theologians. What would happen if the Lord Jesus Christ ever turned his back on the universe for one microsecond? Think about that for a moment.
In 1941, the United States was involved in a research project called the Manhattan Project. And the Manhattan Project was the They were working towards developing the atom bomb, the final solution to end World War II. They understood the mechanics and the physics of nuclear fusion, where you fire a particle, the particle hits a nucleus, splits in two, splits in four, splits in eight, sixteen, so forth. They knew that if they split the atom, it would unleash some horrific power.
What they didn't know was how much power. And once we start this chain reaction, can we actually stop and contain it? Because this could be very well debated. This first atom bomb could very well be the last atom bomb humanity ever drops on itself.
Manhattan Project. Think about that for a moment in light of the crucifixion. The Lord of the universe, by whom all things were created, who upholds all things by the word of his power. was nailed to the cross. He died a criminal's death.
He was buried dead. The crucifixion, the ultimate Manhattan Project, the people who killed him had no idea what they were playing with. Killing the Lord of Glory In his humanity, the second person of the Godhead, and yet the earth kept spinning on its axis, the sun kept rising, the tides kept coming in. Such is the mercy and power of the Lord Jesus Christ that even in death, he did not turn his back on his creation.
The writer goes on to say that
Brightness of Glory, Express Image
this Jesus, who being the brightness of his glory and express image of his nature, the brightness of God's glory. We have an episode in the Old Testament, in the book of Exodus, where the Israelites have left Egypt. They're at the base of Mount Horeb. And Moses climbs up the mountain to have a face-to-face meeting with God where he is going to receive the law and the Ten Commandments.
Do you recall the reaction of the elders and the people of Israel when Moses came off the mountain? What did they tell him? Put a veil on your face because you have been in the presence of God. The sheer radiance of His power and magnitude shines off your face, covered up because we can't stand it.
He is the brightness, Lord Jesus is the brightness of God's glory. That momentary interview that Moses had with the triune God on that mountain in Horeb, All that brightness, all his glory is wrapped up in the Lord Jesus Christ, even in his humanity as he walked planet Earth 2,000 years ago. It says that he is the express image of his nature. And the word image, and here in Hebrews 1 is the word icon, which means exact representation, the exact image, the full, whatever the father is, whatever he is like, whatever his essence and nature happens to be, Jesus Christ has both his glory, and his image.
He is an exact representation of God. To call Christ the icon of God is to call him the exact reproduction or the exact image of God. The writer goes on to say that when he had, it says that Christ came and he had purged our sins. When he had purged our sins, Six little words.
Six little words that we really need about six Sunday nights to explore the full implication of what these six little words happen to mean. When he had purged our sins. It embodies a whole array of doctrinal theological concepts. Well, that was the main mission of Jesus was to purge our sin and provide atonement, but To do that, it encompasses things like the virgin birth and conception.
How does a fallen man of Adam's race redeem people? We've had a whole. a train of Old Testament prophets and leaders who were insufficient in order to carry out the task. The virgin birth of conception explains that. We also know that he had to live a sinless life.
That's carried up in here. We also know that imputation is carried up in the purging of sins because he who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God. There's imputation. How do we acquire a holy righteousness?
Well, we don't get it on our own. It has to come from someplace else. It covers the whole area of justification, the declaration of that which is one who is guilty who is now innocent. It covers regeneration.
How does one who is spiritually dead respond to that which is spiritually alive? You need a work of the spirit in order to awaken the human being, a dead corpse, a spiritually dead corpse, to respond to the gospel. All these concepts are embodied in these six little words when he had purged our sins. That's why I say it would take about six Sunday nights to really flesh out everything that's in this particular little section of scripture.
But I want to touch on two things, at least on two things very, very briefly in the time that we have.
Eliminating Old Testament Insufficiency
The first thing is that by purging our sins or providing the means by which our sins could be purged, he eliminated the inefficiency and the insufficiency of the Old Testament law. The book of Hebrews goes to great pains to make that point in earlier chapters. The administration of purging sins in the Old Testament required an entire nation. There was an entire nation of Israel called the Levites who were supposed to be priests.
And they were the ones who had no land, no inheritance, but they were to superintend, to organize, to administrate the entire religious machinery whereby atonement would be made year after year, month after month. The system had been in place approximately 1400 years by the time we come to this portion of scripture, which means there were 1400 days of atonement. High Holy Days, there were 1,400 annual high priests. There were tens of thousands of lesser priests that had come and gone in the meantime.
Tens of thousands of animals had been slaughtered, and millions of gallons of blood had been shed on the various altars in order to appease the wrath of God. And it only did so, as we know, for only a season. There was never a final solution here. It was insufficient because no matter how many animals offered, the slaughter continued year after year after blood year. pointing to a person who would come who would eliminate the system once and for all.
So first of all, when he had purged our sins, it eliminates the entire Old Testament machinery. That's gone. Fulfilled. And
Salvation by Christ's Works Alone
the second thing his work accomplished was that he made salvation by works possible. Now before you start throwing tomatoes, because we are good Reformed Baptists, we believe in that there's no way you can work your way into heaven, but let me just explain what I mean by what he said when I say that his mission made salvation by works possible. Paul in the Book of Romans goes to great pains to show that the law is insufficient to bring about salvation. You can try as you may to fulfill the law, you can't.
And the reason is that the law is spiritual. It is perfect. It is a spiritual law. We are not spiritual.
We are carnal, by definition. We have the Adamic sin. We are fallen human creatures. We are sin-laden beings.
We are born in iniquity. We are, by nature, children of wrath. And therefore, try as we may to fulfill the Old Testament law, our best efforts will always fall short. There is no question.
It can't be done. If human beings could be saved simply by fulfilling all the obligations set out under the law, All you got to do, fill the law perfectly. No mistakes, no oops, I'll take that back, no mulligans, no gimmies, no retries, no redo's, none. The California Highway Patrol did a study a few years ago and they estimate that even the best of drivers, the most diligent of drivers, commits a moving violation every seven blocks.
Now, suppose for a moment that when you bought your brand new GMC from the dealership, it came with a special GPS with a radio-controlled monitor that hooks up to the local RCMP station. And it has the entire British Columbia Highway Traffic Act logged into its data bank. And on block number seven, when you as a diligent Christian driver make your first traffic violation, what happens is that your car automatically shuts off. You can't drive it.
The police are automatically dispatched. They come by Pony Express to pick you up and cart you off to jail and assess your fine. You lose your license not simply for a day, but you lose your license for life. You will never be privileged to drive a car again.
One violation every seven blocks. If we cannot even drive our cars correctly to the full extent of the law, such that we don't commit this violation every seven blocks, how much less than the perfect law of God, where the stakes aren't whether you drive or not, but whether it's life or death, eternal destiny, heaven or hell. So when it comes to fulfilling of the Old Testament law, it's not a question of when, not a question of if, but when. You break the law, you're done, you're toast.
You have the full weight of God on your shoulders. So when I say that he made salvation by works possible, it's not by anything you and I can do. It's by works he has done on our behalf. We call it the finished work of Jesus Christ on behalf of his people.
That's why when a sinner, the glorious realization that a sinner is a sinner before a holy God and understands that the only way of redemption is through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. That is the only way redemption is possible, through his work, not ours. Then it says that
Session at the Father's Right Hand
he sat down at the right hand of the Father. This is a statement of Christ's ultimate exaltation. his statement of preeminence, his first place in the cosmos. If you study the furniture of the Old Testament temple and of the Old Testament tabernacle, you'll notice that there is one piece of furniture that is conspicuously absent. It's not an error of omission.
That in the temple in the Holy of Holies, except for the mercy seat, there is no chair for the high priest to sit down. Symbolically telling the covenant community that the finished work, that the work is to continue year after year after year, even something as the trappings. But Jesus, as the perfect high priest, says here that when he had purged our sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Father. One sacrifice, one event, once for all, never to be equaled, never to be exceeded, never to be duplicated.
So when Jesus cried out, it is finished, it is because he had purged our sins once for all. Well, what the law could not do, Jesus did in one spectacular, blazing moment of history. Well,
Four Meanings of the Session
there are four things signified by this statement. He sat down at the right hand of the father. First, that it is a sign of ultimate honor to sit at the right hand of the monarch. In ancient worlds, the right hand, the right seat of the monarch was a place that was only relegated to one person, one person alone.
That is somebody who is at high estimation on a par with the king. And that seat is reserved for the Lord Jesus Christ himself. When you think about that, that also brings into light one of the reasons why the disciples were chided. When they talked about, when we get to the kingdom of heaven, who will sit at your right hand and who at your left hand?
Well, Christ's left hand, who's at the left hand? Father. Who's at the right hand? Not quite sure yet.
I suspect it's probably the Holy Spirit. When he sat down, it is a sign of authority. Monarchs rule from the seated position. Peter 3.22, he's at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven after angels and authorities and powers have been subjugated to him.
When the ruler rules, the ruler sits. It also indicates that when he sat down, he sat down to rest. Hebrews 10.12 indicates that his work was now complete and could finally rest from his work of redemption. It also indicates that when he sat down, he sits down to intercede for us.
Romans 8.34, he's at the right hand of the father, making intercession for all who belong to him. So
Application: Prophet, Priest, and King
let's go back to the original question that opened the message tonight. Who is Jesus? Who is he? Well, to summarize, he is a prophet.
He is the final spokesman from God. There are no others. And there is no further prophetic ministry. By that, I mean that there is no future foretelling, there is no future emissaries, messengers that tell us that God is coming.
There is no further revelation beyond Jesus Christ. There is, however, the prophetic ministry of the church, which says that, thus say of the Lord, that continues on. It's our job as salt and light to bring light to a dying world, and that part of the prophetic ministry is still there. But as far as new messengers giving new revelation, telling us about what God's latest update to his will is, that's done.
He's it. He is a priest. He has atoned for our sins and now currently intercedes on our behalf. And he is king.
He created us. He controls the universe. He sustains all things. And he rules from his father's right hand.
And as some day, Revelation says, that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. I want to conclude with this. Where did you go? Where did you go?
I'm still getting used to iPads. Someone has said that Jesus Christ came from the bosom of the father to the bosom of a woman. He put on humanity that we might put on divinity. He became son of man that we might become sons of God.
He was born contrary to the laws of nature, lived in poverty, was reared in obscurity, and only once crossed the boundaries of the land in which he was born, and that in his childhood. He had no wealth or influence. He had neither training nor education in the world's schools. His relatives were inconspicuous and uninfluential.
In infancy, he startled a king. In boyhood, he puzzled the learned doctors. In manhood, he ruled the course of nature. He walked upon the billows and hushed the sea to sleep.
He healed the multitudes without medicine and made no charge for services. He never wrote a book, and yet all the libraries of the world could not hold the books about him. He never wrote a song, yet he has furnished the theme for more songs and all songwriters together. He never founded a college, yet all the schools together cannot boast of as many students as he has.
He never practiced medicine, and yet he has healed more broken hearts than all the doctors that have healed broken bodies. This Jesus Christ is the star of astronomy, the rock of geology, the lion and the lamb of zoology, the harmonizer of all discord, and the healer of all diseases. Throughout history, great men have come and gone, yet he lives on. Herod could not kill him, Satan could not seduce him, death could not destroy him, and the grave could not hold him.
That is who we worship. Amen? I think the final hymn is Mighty Fortress.