The promises of Christ's work of redemption include both His suffering as God's Lamb to take away our sin, and His great reign as Messiah and the restoration of the physical creation.----But the Lord's people often pick and choose what we want to believe.----The two disciples on the road to Emmaus had grasped hold of the glorious reign of Christ, but disregarded the promises of His suffering in our place and for our sins.----Thus, these two disciples were dissatisfied with the redemption Jesus had given them. They had seen the fulfillment of Christ as the dying lamb for us, but they had disregarded it, and counted it as a failure.----Some believers are still dissatisfied with Redemption, still groaning in our bodies with weakness, pain, sorrow, and indwelling sin.----But Christ provided to those disciples the solution to disappointment with the redemption He provided us.----He rebuked them for cherry-picking the promises about Himself, and then He urged them to consider all that the Scriptures had said concerning Him.----The cure for disappointment with our redemption is to look upon Christ, to consider all that the Scriptures say about Him-----We ought to gaze upon Jesus as He is revealed in Scripture, and find all our satisfaction in what He has done for us, and what He has promised He will do one day.----He laid aside His glory, and was incarnate in our flesh. He offered Himself as God's Lamb, and took away our sins upon Himself on the cross. He conquered death at Calvary, and rose from the grave for us.----Our true satisfaction in our redemption wrought by Christ is found in the beauty of the Savior-----One day soon, we will receive the rest of what is promised to us-

The disciples were sad walking along the road to Emmaus. In their words, -We had hoped that it should have been Jesus who would redeem Israel.-----The Lord Jesus gently rebuked them for being -slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had written- about Christ. Shouldn't Christ have suffered, as foretold, and then entered into His glory-----How likely we are to cherry pick what we want to believe- In fact, we generally believe what we like.----Between the two major aspects of prophesies about Messiah, those two disciples ignored the ones they didn't like to entertain, those that described His humiliation and rejection and death as an offering for their sin.----There was a difference in the things promised to Mary and the shepherds, on the one hand, and to Joseph on the other, at the time Jesus was born.----Mary was promised that her Son would be very great, the Son of God, and would rule forever on the throne of David.----The shepherds were told tidings of great joy, that today is born in Bethlehem a Savior Who is Messiah the Lord- They were given a strange sign to identify Jesus by - He would be wrapped in swaddling clothes and found in a manger.----But to Joseph, the promise had been quite different- you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sin.----The angel appealed to Joseph by his broken down family name - the house of David, which had not had a king to reign in 500 years. Yet the angel exhorted Joseph to courage-----But the angel did not promise Joseph that the baby his wife carried would be a king or rule on David's throne.----Rather, Joseph was told that Jesus would save His people from their sin- And Joseph believed him-

False teachers deny that Jesus was punished for the sins of His people and in our place at Calvary.----Thus, they try to decouple Christ's death from the Old Testament sacrifices, denying that Jesus is the fulfillment of them.----But then, these false teachers also try to decouple redemption from the price paid for our sin. In other words, they will assert that Jesus' death -redeemed- us, but that it had nothing to do with satisfying divine justice in our place and for our crimes.----They gnash at Paul's teaching- -Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.-----They teach that Redemption means something other than the price paid to set us free from God's wrath.----They believe that God forgives us without a bloody sacrifice by Jesus in our place.----Their method is to seek out other uses of the term -redemption- to deny its clear meaning in the epistles. For example, God -redeems- His people out of Egypt, and from their enemies.----In the Old Testament, redemption can mean to avenge or to revenge, but the legal usage describes the payment of money to redeem land back to its poor owner which was sold because of debt, or to buy back a poor man from servitude.----In these cases, only a near kinsman has the legal right to redeem his kinfolk, and that right may not be denied. The best example is the story of Boaz redeeming the property of Naomi which had been lost due to poverty.----While it is true that God's almighty power to rescue by a strong arm is a recurring theme in the Old Testament, nevertheless, in Psalm 130, God -redeems- Israel from all his iniquities. In Isaiah 44, God has -redeemed- His people by taking away their sins.

False teachers deny that Christ was made a curse for us, and was judged by God in our place for our sins laid upon Him.----To that end, they attempt to decouple the Lord Jesus from the Old Testament sacrifices, and deny that those animal offerings were a type and picture of what our Savior did for us at Calvary to take away our sin.----Some claim that God's commandments to sacrifice animals were only an accommodation to the people's desire to continue in their comfortable pagan sacrificial rituals. They claim that such offerings were not necessary for the forgiveness of sin.----They claim that God can forgive sin without a sacrifice or satisfaction of the demands of His divine justice.----But the Old Testament texts clearly set forth the requirement for the offerings in order to obtain forgiveness for the sin of the people.----Furthermore, the Scriptures themselves prove that these were not some pagan rituals, since the very first generation of mankind offered them with God's respect. Abel offered an animal sacrifice, and God accepted it, while rejecting Cain's unbloody sacrifice of farm produce.----Abel trusted in God's mercy to accept his bloody sacrifice, and Hebrews declares this was a proof of Abel's faith in God's promises.----Furthermore, Hebrews contrasts the sacrifice of Jesus for His people, as being better than Abel's animal sacrifice.----These false teachers also claim that Jesus is not qualified to fulfill or complete the Old Testament offerings, since He is of the tribe of Judah, and cannot be an Aaronic priest.----This is a laughable objection, that Hebrews addresses in detail. Jesus offered up Himself, and not animals, which could never take away our sin.

Only by being made a curse for us, can Christ offer up a complete sacrifice to give our guilty consciences peace with God.----No animal sacrifice will do for us. We must have Jesus punished in our place as our substitute and for our crimes, so that we can truly be forgiven for all time by God.----False teachers who deny Christ's substitutionary sacrifice gnash against Paul's declaration that Christ redeemed us by being made a curse for us. They denounce sound Gospel preachers who proclaim this Biblical truth. They despise R. C. Sproul for his strong statements. They deplore Martin Luther for his even stronger statements.----Charles Hadden Spurgeon preached on several occasions about this great Scriptural truth, and the false teachers don't like him either-----Spurgeon was careful to correct some misreadings of Luther's -boisterous- statements, making it clear that Christ was never a sinner, and never made a sinner.----Rather, our Lord Jesus had our crimes imputed to Him at the cross, and was punished for our sins by God as if they were Christ's own sins. Jesus represented His poor, sinful, beloved people in the judgment.----The curse Christ was made was a terror to His holy and perfect nature. The separation from God during the judgment was most horrible to our Savior. He bore the wrath we ought to be received, and thereby redeemed us from the curse of the law.----During His ministry, our Savior made clear the importance of thanksgiving for the blessings He gave to His people. He marveled that of the ten lepers He healed all at once, only one, a Samaritan, came back to worship and praise Him-----We ought to rejoice that Jesus was made a curse for us-

Mankind always tries to minimize the price of our sin, and pare back the extent of the Lord Jesus' death for us.----False teachers claim that God can simply forgive our sins without satisfying the demands of justice.----In other words, God will break His solemn promises regarding the punishment for sin, because He is -all love.-----Thus, these men deny that Jesus was punished by God in our place and for our crimes imputed to Him at the cross.----The Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal this week brought to mind another problem with this truncated view of the death of Jesus.----In Rittenhouse's case, he was either innocent, and justly acquitted, or he was guilty, and defeated justice, in this life at least.----How different we are from Mr. Rittenhouse-----None of us are innocent before God- None of us can be acquitted in our own persons, because of God's justice. Paul makes it clear, that -the whole world is guilty before God.-----On the other hand, none of us, being guilty, will trick God into acquitting us. None of us are going to defeat the justice of God.----How awful it would be if God just let us off, forgave us, without justice being done.----Think of how horrible it would be if Mr. Rittenhouse was actually guilty, but escaped justice by tricking the jury into acquitting him. How could he ever have a clear conscience- All the rest of his life, he'd live with the knowledge of his true guilt.----Yet this is the false teaching of some ministers, who proclaim a forgiveness of sinners without the satisfaction of divine justice.----A sacrifice of Jesus, that does not fully satisfy God's justice at Calvary against our sins, cannot give the guilty conscience peace with God-

Some false teachers deny that Jesus bore our sins and was judged in our place by God.----Two events this past week brought to mind the tendency of people to rely upon half measures which will not work. Two medical incidents in which the treatments turned out to be too little to cure the patients, resulted in the need for drastic, emergency interventions.----But our Lord Jesus finished the work necessary to save His people from their sin. He was -all in- for the death that He died for us. There was no holding back in His suffering to save us.----We tend to be satisfied with -half measures- all too often. We call them -conservative measures-- we are too cheap to do what needs to be done to fix a situation- we keep thinking things are not really that bad- we are in denial about the true problems we face- we are just plain ignorant of the facts- or we are too proud to admit the depth of our sin.----We behave this way in the least of our problems, all the way to the most deadly. Some of us will cut the Christmas wrapping paper too short to try to save paper. Auto mechanics are notorious for trying the cheap repair, which escalates to a much more expensive one.----The first spiritual example of trying to cut short the necessary sacrifice for sin is seen in the example of Cain. Rather than bring an acceptable offering like his brother Abel did, Cain brought of the fruit of his labor as a farmer. God rejected Cain's offering, which made Cain angry. Soon Cain murdered his brother.----Lost men can never adequately grasp the true requirements of God's justice against their sin, so they try to whittle back the price of the offering.----Peter too rejected Christ's death at first-

There are some false teachers who deny that Jesus was punished by God on the cross for the sins of His people, laid upon Him.----They do not appreciate Paul's teaching that God made Jesus to be sin for us.----But for them, the number one most despised text is Paul's teaching in Galatians 3-13- -Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.-----Paul lays down the truth that nobody can be justified by keeping the law, but rather, that the just live by faith. The law is not of faith, but blesses only those who keep it.----Thus, justification by law keeping or by faith are mutually exclusive.----So what does God do to rescue His people who are under His curse for law breaking-----Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law- That means that He has made a full satisfaction for the just demands of the broken law against us.----Jesus paid the demands of God's justice against sinners. He paid off the judgment we should have been cursed with.----But how did Jesus redeem us- Paul exclaims that it was by Him being made a curse in our place, -for us.-----Thus, Paul teaches, yet again, that Christ substituted Himself in our place to redeem us. He paid off our judgment, setting us free from it forever.----Paul reminds us that the law itself declared that anyone judged by hanging upon a tree, as Jesus was at Calvary, is cursed of God.----Thus, Jesus' crucifixion portrayed God's curse and the wrath He was under when He died to save us. What the cross openly displayed, the Lord Jesus was suffering under God's wrath in our place.----It was no mere technical designation, but rather the tangible physical sign of the reality of Christ accursed by God.

Scripture tells us that God has imputed our sins to Jesus, and He died in our place to redeem us. At the same time, the righteousness of Christ has been imputed to His people who trust in Him.----In the past week, testimony has been heard in open court for the first time of torture and barbarous mistreatment of a prisoner held by the United States. Some people try to justify those crimes by claiming they are -evil people getting what they deserve.-----Sinful mankind will often defiantly assert the righteousness of returning evil for evil, ignoring the Bible's judgment of such wickedness.----So there is more to be taught regarding the meaning of true righteousness, and what believers have received from Christ.----2 Corinthians 5-21 states- -God has made Christ to be sin for us, Christ Who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Christ.-----But notice the truth that is left unstated- we had no righteousness-----Righteousness is perfect obedience to God. That's why just one sin forever destroys righteousness.----Righteousness is not like money or some fluid that is dispensed and collected in discrete quantifies.----Rather, it is perfect obedience. It is like the vase that is smashed, or like Humpty Dumpty that, when he was broken, nobody could ever put him back together again.----James makes this argument- that breaking just one part of the law, means the whole law is broken.----Paul in Romans 3 describes how nobody can be justified by the law, for, on the contrary, by the law is our knowledge of sin.----Poetically, the prophet Isaiah lamented that all our supposed righteousness is like filthy rags, and we do fade as a leaf, and none can find God.

All mankind has sinned against God, and therefore is subject to the curse of God's just wrath. He will judge with justice, and the wages of sin is death.----But Jesus was offered as our substitute, as a sin or guilt offering unto God, whereby He satisfied divine justice in our place on the cross. Jesus is the propitiation by His blood for our crimes, and laying hold unto Christ's work by faith, God justifies poor sinners-----But it seems that many false teachers have sought to sanitize Christ's death at Calvary, to make it a pro-forma death that is only technical, and not actually a bloody sacrifice that exhausts God's wrath against our sin.----The redemption of sinners by Christ is no mere payoff of a financial judgment for us. It involves guilt and shame and wrath poured out against Jesus by God for our sins.----Our own death penalty judgments have been muted to the point that now, they are little more than euthanizing a pet dog or cat.----However, Christ's death for us was the wrath and judgment of God against our sin, and Jesus was treated as guilty in our place on the cross.----False teachers today deny that our sins were laid on Jesus and punished by God in His body. They deny the imputation of our crimes to Him. No matter how clearly the Bible teaches these things, false teachers have tendentious arguments arrayed against them.----The second most despised text for these false teachers is 2 Corinthians 5-21 - -God has made Jesus, Who Himself knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Christ.-----Here is that glorious doctrine of double imputation - our sins for Christ's righteousness- Our sins laid on Jesus-