Two Journeys

As we come to Matthew 26:47-56, you heard Tim read it, we come to the tragic and in many ways repulsive account of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas and the forsaking of Jesus by all of his disciples. The arrest of the Son of God by wicked men. And in this account, we're gonna see the sinfulness of the human heart in its darkest colors. But also, by contrast, we're gonna see the glory of Jesus Christ shining radiantly, all the brighter because of the darkness of men. The night that Jesus was born, you know that that night was ripped apart by the appearance of a single angel, and he appeared to the shepherds, and the glory of the Lord shone all around, and it was a light that was visible and they were terrified by that light.

But I say that this night, the night that Jesus was arrested, the night he was put on trial by the Jewish people, there's a different kind of glory that shines. It wasn't a radiant light that shone from his face, but it was a light that we can see by faith. I think we could argue that that was the darkest night in human history. The metaphor of darkness is very important according to the Apostle John; he uses it often in his gospel to speak of the wickedness that there is in the universe.

And that night, in particular, was a dark wicked night. How Jesus at the Last Supper gave a piece of bread to Judas, and in John 13:27, it says, “As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him.” And three verses later, in John 13:30, it says, “As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out. And it was night.” Now, if you know anything about John's Gospel, you know that’s not just a chronological, historical comment. That has a depth to it. It was night as Judas went out to do his evil deed. The darkness is human sinfulness, the wickedness of the human heart. When the alliance between man and Satan reaches its nadir, it's lowest point, Jesus called this a time of darkness.

In Luke's account, in Luke 22:53, he said to his arresters, those that were there to arrest him, to seize him, he said, “Every day I was with you in the temple courts, but you did not lay a hand on me. But this is your hour - when darkness reigns.” Do you hear that statement? “This is your hour when darkness reigns.” And that's why I say, this was the darkest night in human history.

We see the sinfulness of Judas's treachery, his betrayal, culminating in maybe one of the most repulsive moments in all of redemptive history: his kiss of Jesus on the cheek. We see the sinfulness of the chief priests and the elders of the Jewish nation, who should have recognized the time of God coming to them, in the person of Christ, but who instead killed him out of pride and out of greed and jealousy. We see the sinfulness of the Roman soldiers in the crowd who are there to arrest the Prince of Peace with swords and clubs. We see the sinfulness of Peter who through unbelief refused to accept what God was doing through Jesus. He could not get it, and was fighting it. Literally fighting it, right to the end. We see the sinfulness of all the disciples who at the human level should have stuck with Jesus out of loyalty and love for him at His hardest time, but instead out of selfishness, fled to save their lives. This was the darkest night in history when the human race arrested, tried, condemned, mocked, tortured God the Son. 

You know, in the 10 plagues, Moses spoke of a darkness that could be felt, and you can feel that as you read the account from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John of this night. You can feel a darkness.It's a darkness that could be felt, and yet in the center of that, the darkest night in human history, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot conceal it, it cannot quench it, it cannot hold it back. Light wins here in this account, to the glory of God.

Jesus said in John 8:12, “I am the light of the world.” It says in John 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made, without him, nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot conceal it. It has not understood it.” And then 1 John 1:5, “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light and in him, there is no darkness at all.”

And Jesus Christ is the perfect light of God, an absolutely perfect display of “the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being,” Hebrews 1:3. And to see him is to see the Father, as he said earlier that same night in John 14. Remember how Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” And Jesus said, “Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been with you all this time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’”

So, how does this account, how does Jesus put the glory of God on display, on this darkest night? Behold his courage, going willingly to his death at the hands of such evil men. Behold his humility, making himself nothing. And being treated so shamefully, even to the point of death, even death on a cross. Behold his love, laying down his life for his sheep. Behold his authority. If that detachment of angels had come, you would have seen his authority. They would have obeyed him immediately. Behold his submission to the scripture and to his Father's will as revealed in the scripture. Behold his patience in not striking down his enemies though they deserved it, but waiting patiently. Truly his light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot conceal it.

Christ's light, I think, shines all the brighter when human sin is at its darkest, doesn't it? By contrast. Just by seeing all of these people, even the best, even Peter and the other apostles, still sinful, we see Christ's light shining all the brighter.

Just marvel at this fact. Just marvel, at God the Son being arrested. Just think about that. Think about it, as it says in John 18:12, how they tied up his wrist, you picture his hands being put behind his back and it being tied up with some cords. I was just teaching earlier this morning on the Book of Judges. You know how Jesus again and again, says things like, “They repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now one greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the South came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here.” Are you willing to say with me that one greater than Samson was arrested that night? I think so. And Samson, you remember the story in Judges 15, how they bound his wrists and the Philistines came upon him, so enraged and they wanna kill him, remember, and he breaks those things apart like charred flax and struck down a thousand of them with the jawbone of a donkey.

So why didn't Jesus do that? If Jesus is greater than Samson, why didn't he break the bonds and kill all his enemies? Well, because he wasn't willing to do that. “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down freely of my own accord. I have the power, the authority, to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it back up again. This command I received from my Father.” So, Jesus let those ropes bind him, though they couldn't if he had willed not. He let himself be arrested, he let himself be led away and be shamefully treated.

Now, the whole thing begins with this disgusting act of Judas, of Judas bringing this detachment. Look at it in verses 47-50. Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss, which is the darkest act of the night. Look at verse 47 and following, “While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived. With him was a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people. Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them, ‘The one I kiss. - The one I kiss is the man, arrest him.’ Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, ‘Greetings, Rabbi’ and kissed him. Jesus replied, ‘Friend, do what you came to do.’ And then the men stepped forward and seized Jesus and arrested him.”

So the account begins with the words, “While he was still speaking.” So there's a sense of rhythm and flow here. You have to divide it up as you preach, as you study, it talks about rightly dividing the Word of Truth, and so you take pieces and look at them, but this is a flow. It's a narrative, and so one thing leads right into the next, and the last thing we had was Gethsemane. And Jesus makes the most of every opportunity of every moment to pray. He goes right to the wall on prayer, and as soon as he gets done praying one final time, saying, “Not my will but yours be done,” he goes back, he awakens his disciples. He says, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Behold, the hour is near, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us go! Here comes my betrayer!” And while he was saying that, then the account starts tonight.

Now, I think, as you put it together from John's gospel, Jesus went out to meet his captors. I get the picture of Gethsemane being a walled garden and there was a gate of some sort. And so they're ready to come in and arrest him. They're there with torches, they're gonna search for Jesus, they're gonna look for him as though he's hiding under a bush. Of course, it was a full moon, that's the way the lunar calendar worked. And so they're not gonna need to search for him. Jesus goes out, it says very plainly in John 18, “Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and said, ‘Whom are you seeking?’” Who begins, who initiates this whole thing? It's Jesus. So, what was Judas there for? What was his job? He didn't have a job. He was not necessary. Jesus didn't need him. There was no need to be betrayed. He goes out and initiates the whole interaction. “Who are you looking for?” “Jesus of Nazareth,” they answer.

You remember what happened next in John's gospel - if I'm not careful, I might just go preach John right now. But he said, “I AM.” And when he said, “I AM,” God's almighty name, they drew back and fell to the ground. And then Jesus asked them a second time, “Who is it you're seeking?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.” And so, twice he makes them repeat their orders. That's how the whole thing starts. And it very much harmonizes with our account here in Matthew. Jesus said, “Rise, Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!” So who's taking the initiative? Jesus. Where are they going? They're going out of Gethsemane, they're going out to meet this crowd.

And so there's Judas, and here he comes with this entourage, this crowd coming to arrest him, and he's just simply identified, it's amazing the power of understatement here, “Judas, one of the twelve.” Doesn't go into great detail, doesn't demonize him. It just says, simply, he's one of the twelve, and I think in that understatement, it underscores the perfidy, the betrayal, the wickedness. He was just one of the twelve. He was there to betray Jesus. Psalm 41:9, “Even my close friend, whom I trusted, the one who shared my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.”

And with him, verse 47, is “a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people.” So they're ready for a fight. According to John's gospel, it's a spira, a detachment of Roman soldiers, may be as many as 600 strong. If you add a good group of temple police, there could have been as many as a thousand people there to arrest one man. It's really quite amazing because Jesus was the leader of a peaceful discussion group, Bible discussion group in the temple area. I mean, that's it. He didn't have a violent bone at all, and he was a Prince of Peace, and he underscores that, doesn't he?

In verse 55, he says, “Am I leading a rebellion? Is this the nature of what you see in me? Am I leading a rebellion that you've come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day, this is what I did, I sat in the temple courts teaching, and you did not arrest me. So, why are you armed to the teeth?” Very late at night, perhaps, I would think better, we would think of it as very early in the morning. I don't know, one, two, three in the morning. It's very, very early in the morning. Late at night, it's the dead of night. And this mixed multitude is such a metaphorical picture of the world, as they, this rabble, this huge group of people coming there to do this. Those that knew him were unjust, because he was the only sinless man that ever lived. He'd never done anything wrong. They were unjust in seeking to arrest him.

Most of the crowd there was just mindless. They didn't know him. They were just following orders. They were getting a paycheck. And so it is that many of the persecutors in church history are mindless, they don't know Jesus, they don't care about Jesus. They're just following orders and getting a paycheck doing it. And so, in many of the persecuting nations of the world, that kind of thing goes on. People that show up, they just have their orders. They're just mindless, they don't know who he is, they ignore Jesus, the central figure of all of human history, they have no thought about him at all. Mindless.

They're also cowardly coming at night rather than in broad daylight because you know that the chief priests and the elders were afraid of the crowds, for they all held that Jesus was a prophet. And this crowd was blasphemous, simply in arresting, laying hands on God the Son. And then comes the kiss.

Now, what are we to make of this? “Now, the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: ‘The one I kiss, is the man, arrest him.’ And going at once to Jesus, Judas said, ‘Greetings, Rabbi,’ and kissed him.” This is the most repulsive part of this entire affair. It really is disgusting. What do I mean by that? Well, Judas had already received his 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus. The evil signal was in the mind of Judas before he ever got there. “How am I gonna identify him and pick him out? Oh, I have a thought. How about if I kiss him?” I think it was demonic. I think it was Satan-suggested. It's a wicked twist.

Now, a kiss is a sign of a loving relationship, it's a sign of friendship. Now, think about the relationship, especially back then, a slave would perhaps kiss the feet of the master, may be a servant, a house servant kiss the hem of the garment, may be the back of the hand. Somebody closer might have a little more intimacy there, but it would be initiated by the one in charge, by the leader, not by the son or the servant or the friend. Judas just goes boldly up to Jesus - in the Greek, it says “kataphileo,” the “kata” prefix means “repeatedly.” It's an intensifier. He really kissed him a lot, right on the cheek as though they were complete equals.

And also, it's so hypocritical. He is appearing to be a very close and intimate friend with Jesus, but in that act, he's betraying him to death. It really is disgusting. It's the height of hypocrisy here. Because you know that the other, the twelve didn't know what he was out doing, and so maybe he knew that and thought he could just kind of come back in with a group at this point and be welcomed back in. Jesus, in Luke's Gospel, heightens the irony, the hypocrisy of it. He said, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?” He just asks the question. 

But here in our text, in verse 50, he says, “Friend,” and I love this, “Do what you came to do.” Now, I find this interesting because if you couple it with John's gospel, when he took the bread, remember after Satan entered into him, it says in John's gospel, Jesus said to him, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” Now, I'm gonna take it this way. Jesus is a King and he's giving a command, and he does it twice. He does it in John's gospel, “What you are doing, do quickly,” and Satan is in him. And here, the same thing, “Do what you came to do.” Who's in charge here, friends? Who's in charge? Jesus is the King, the sovereign of all the world. It's going exactly according to plan. Jesus reigns, even at this moment, even with this kiss. 

Next comes the faithless fight of Peter. After that will come the cowardly flight. But here is the faithless fight. Verse 51, “With that, one of Jesus' companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear.” Now, it's interesting how Matthew, Mark, and Luke all retain anonymity for this guy. But we know who it is, don't we? You probably could have guessed anyway, but John's gospel tells us directly who it is. It was Peter that did it.  Now, New Testament scholars wonder if at that point, Peter might have been in Roman hands, tried for his life, and these Gospel accounts perhaps sought to protect him from Roman reprisals. That's just a guess. We have no idea, but Matthew, Mark, and Luke don't tell us who it is.

But it was Peter and it really is in some ways the final act of a very sad drama in Peter's life. And what is that, it’s that he just couldn't accept what Jesus was saying about his death. He couldn't, wouldn't accept it. He could not believe that Jesus would die. The first time we see this is in Matthew 16, in Caesarea Philippi, when Peter gives his magnificent testimony, his confession of Jesus, remember that? “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus said, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”

Yeah, but, “From that time on,” it says in the account, “Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed, and then on the third day, be raised to life. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ‘Never, Lord!’ he said. ‘This shall never happen to you!’ Jesus turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You're a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of man.’” Well, that's the first indicator we have that Peter couldn't accept it. And it happens again and again, but this is the culmination of the act.

Now, earlier Peter had boasted, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” And so, I think to prove his loyalty, to prove his words, to make them come true, he draws out his “makhaira” is what it is in the Greek. It's basically like a long fisherman's knife for flaying fish, maybe cutting cheese and bread. That's really what it is. It's not a gladius, the Roman short, strong stabbing sword.

This thing isn't going to last long in a sword fight. But he pulls it out and starts swinging wildly. Alright. I don't think he was any more skillful at soldiering than he was clear in understanding Christ's purpose. So he just starts swinging. Remember how Abishai said to David concerning Saul, who was lying there, he had a spear, he said, “Let me pin him to the ground. I won't strike him twice.” I love that. Isn't that great? Don't you love confident soldiers around you? “I won't strike him twice. I got this one.” Well, Peter wasn't in that class. Alright. There was a need to strike multiple times, with Peter, because all he got was an ear. I don't think he was trying for an ear, but that's all he got.

We don't know who it is from this account, but John gives us full information. Servant's name was Malchus. And isn't it absolutely tragic what Peter is trying to do? Stop the death of the Son of God for the sins of the world. Do you see how horrible that is? How faithless that is? How he would have been signing his own eternal death warrant by so doing, and ours too, all of ours? Because Christ had to die. 

Jesus, it doesn't tell us this in Matthew, but Jesus healed Malchus's ear. Isn't that beautiful? A display of the love that Jesus has for his enemies and his ability to create an ear out of nothing, out of thin air. Isn't that magnificent? A fully formed adult ear. Ponder that. But he does it.

Peter's action was a symbol of misguided faithless mission in Christ's name, and I'm gonna talk more about this in the application section. But the kingdom of God does not advance by the sword, doesn't advance by killing. No, it advances by dying, either metaphorically or even literally. That's how it advances. We'll get to that more at the end.

Here in verses 52-56, and I get goosebumps every time I come to this. This is the most spectacular display of submission to scripture you will ever find anywhere. “‘Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to him. ‘For all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?’ And at that time, Jesus said to the crowd, ‘Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I sat in the temple courts teaching and you did not arrest me. But this has all taken place, that the writings of the prophets might be fulfilled.’ Then the disciples all deserted him and fled.”

So what we have here, if you just look at it grammatically, you'll look at what's happening, we have a single command given to Peter buttressed by three arguments, three reasons. The command is “Put your sword back in its place.” He then gives three reasons. Reason number one, “For all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” Reason number two, “If I were trying to escape death, I wouldn't be using you and your little dagger.” Reason number three, and the ultimate reason, “Scripture commands me to die, and so I must die.” So there's a hierarchical ordering here of his reasons concerning this command.

Now, keep in mind that Jesus intended his twelve to escape that night. He wanted them to get away. If you don't know that, then read John 18, putting that account together, Jesus after his second time, remember how he says, “I AM,” they all fall to the ground. Jesus repeats the question, he says, “Who are you looking for?” They answer again, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus answers again, saying, “I told you that I AM. If you're looking for me, then let these men go.” And then John tells us incredibly well, “This happened,” John 18:9, “This happened so that the Scripture will be fulfilled,” or so that the words he had spoken would be fulfilled, “I have not lost one of those you have given me.”

This is Jesus, the Good Shepherd, filtering out the temptations and attacks on his disciples. They couldn't handle being arrested that night, and it wasn't God's plan for them to be arrested that night. And so, he makes a way of escape, like it says in Corinthians that he does, he opens a door and he wants them to run away. He wants them, all of them to run away. Peter is completely off track here, both in terms of God's eternal plan and Christ dying on the cross, and in terms of his own plan that Christ intended for him to go away. And so, he gives the command, “Put your sword back in its place. Stop.”

Reason number one, “All who draw the sword will die by the sword.” This is actually a pretty famous statement, live by the sword, die by the sword. You hear that a lot. I think that there are different ways to take it, let's take it this way first: Jesus is giving Peter a strong dose of reality by speaking of Peter's death, okay. “The only way, Peter, you're gonna get out of that fight is if I exert supernatural power on your behalf, and I'm not going to do that.” Simply put, “You are outnumbered. Put your sword away.” We'll just take it like that.

I look on it somewhat like a hostage crisis situation in like a major city like Chicago or something like that, and some crazed guy has been holding 50 people hostage, the negotiator gets him out of the door and he's there. And as soon as he stands out there and he's talking and they're still negotiating, maybe he's wearing a long winter coat or something like that, and there is interestingly like 60 or 70 laser dots all over his chest and body and all that. You know what they are? Those are sniper rifle scopes and all that. And if he makes a sudden move into his coat, what do you think is gonna happen to him? I don't think they'll be able to find him. Okay, if there's 600 Roman soldiers, they conquered the world, you've got your fishing knife, put your sword away. Alright.

Deeper, there's a deeper possibility on this statement: it's a general proverb, people who live a life of violence tend to die by violence. And it's in that proverbial way of speaking, it's generally true that if you live a life of violence, you're going to die by violence. It's just generally true. The measure you use is the measure you receive. So it's a warning about gangs, frankly. If you live by the gun, you may die by the gun. It's a warning about that kind of violence and wickedness.

Another angle that is given, and I think it's helpful, is that Peter was acting as a vigilante here. It was unjust that they were arresting Jesus, and it was, but he did the wrong thing with the sense of injustice. He decided to revolt by the sword, and if you do that, you bring government's sword down on you, that's a different sword that may come. If you fight government like this, government's going to fight you. And so you're going to die. So it would be an argument against like in Romans 13:4, “He does not bear the sword,” the governing official, “doesn't bear the sword for nothing.” So, if you try to fight Rome's sword, Rome's sword will kill you. So, even the grossest injustice in history cannot be addressed by taking matters in your own hands in reference to the government, by vigilante action. But now we get to the deeper reasons.

Reason number two: “If I were trying to escape arrest, I wouldn't be using your dagger.” “Do you think I cannot call on my Father and he would at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” Notice again, the language of prayer here, the language of submission, he's always, the Son of God, is always thinking, “I get nothing except what the Father gives me. I speak nothing but what the Father tells me to say. I do nothing but what the Father has told me to do. And if I were gonna get out, I go to the Father and ask him, and I'd ask the father, and he would put at once, put at my disposal,” He says, “More than twelve legions of angels.” Do you see the attitude of submission to the Father here? Even in the Great Commission, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.” Nothing comes to anyone except by God. So I don't get those angels if God the Father doesn't give them.

But then, just bear with me in one of my engineering moments. Will you do that? Just hang in there with me. Alright. A legion is 6,000 soldiers, generally. Jesus spoke of “more than twelve legions,” that's 72,000 heavenly warriors. He said, “More than…” , so let's round up to 75,000. Okay. We saw in the book of Isaiah, one angel took out 185,000 Assyrian troops. Now, I think that was the angel of the Lord, that was Jesus, more on that in a moment. We're gonna do the math that works out to a detachment from heaven, and it is just a detachment because Daniel said a hundred million angels are serving God. This is a very small heavenly detachment. They would be able, just by math, to take out 15 billion people. 600? No problem.

And they would come, with what demeanor would those angels come? They would stand in front of Jesus and be ready instantly to obey anything he commanded. That's what the word says, “That the Father would put at my disposal... “, that's a good translation. “They would be ready to do my will.” Think about the Lord's prayer, may your will be done on earth the same way it's done up in heaven. And we've said before, we did in a parenting seminar, the phrase that “obedience equals all the way, right away, with a happy spirit.” That's what parents should be going for with their kids. That they do, that the kids do everything that's commanded, completely to the standard, and done with a cheerful attitude. Angels do that. So, if the angels come down and Jesus said, “Do you see those soldiers over there? Kill them.” What do you think they would do? “Yes, Lord,” and they'd kill them. And if you don't believe me, then read the Book of Revelation, as angels are pouring out bowls that result in millions and millions, even billions of people dying.

But Jesus was not trying to avoid arrest, and his disciples didn't understand that. Peter didn't understand that. You remember how a Samaritan village in Luke 9 would not accept him? Remember, because he was going to Jerusalem. Do you remember how James and John, the Sons of Thunder, wanted Jesus to call down fire from heaven and burn up that Samaritan village, like Elijah did with those who were trying to arrest him, remember? “Do you want us to call down fire?” And Jesus rebuked them saying, “You don't understand my temper, my spirit.” The Son of Man didn't come into the world to destroy lives, but to save them. John 3:17 says that, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but to save the world.”

Alright. So, we get to the ultimate and highest reason, why? “How then would the scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?” Now, just stand in awe of Jesus' attitude toward the Scripture. Stand in awe. There's not a man, there's not a woman, there's not a child in this sanctuary or anywhere on the face of the earth that has a higher view of Scripture than Jesus Christ. I live my whole sanctification, my whole Christian life to get up to somewhat of Jesus' attitude towards scripture.

This passage, I have used time and again to deal with college students who have taken college Bible classes at secular institutions. Bible as literature classes or religion classes at Duke or Chapel Hill or other institutions, and the effort of the professor is to shred their faith in scripture, and they come shredded to me. And you know what I do? I spend about an hour or two on one topic, Christ's view of scripture. And I say, “We're Christians, right?” I'm speaking to them as a Christian, I'm not talking to the professor, I'm talking to the person who says, “Until that class, I really believed in scripture, but now I'm struggling. Help me.” Alright.

We're Christians, that means we're gonna have the mind of Christ, right? On everything, right. Alright, that includes his view of scripture, right? Right. Let's have Christ's view of scripture. What is Christ's view of scripture? Well, let's start with his temptation in the desert. He refutes all three temptations with, “It is written.” Let's go from that to Nazareth, where he begins his public ministry. There in Nazareth, and he opens a scroll in Isaiah the prophet, where he finds a place where it is written, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” And then he rolls up the scripture and he says, “Today, in your hearing, this scripture is fulfilled.” And how he preaches in the Sermon on the Mount, not the smallest jot or tittle will by any means pass away from the Word of God until everything has been accomplished.

How Jesus - they pick up stones to stone him - and Jesus said that, “I've shown you many good works from the Father, for which of these are you stoning me?” “Not because of any good works, but because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” And Jesus reaches for Psalm 82:6, “Isn't it written in your law, ‘I have said, “You are gods?”’ Now, if he called them gods, to whom the scripture came and the scripture cannot be broken, then why are you attacking the one whom God sent into the world?” Psalm 82:6. Didn't he say to his enemies, “You say you believe in Moses, but Moses wrote about me?” When they came to ask him about divorce, didn't he begin his teaching saying, “Haven't you read that at the beginning... “ Haven't you read? From the cross, three out of his seven statements directly had to do with the fulfillment of the scripture, even quote scripture, from the cross.

But this is the pinnacle for me. This one verse here, “Scripture says I must be crucified. I must have my hands and my feet pierced, my blood must be poured out unto death. I must fulfill all of the typology of the animal sacrifices. I must die in this way. And Peter, if we fight this, if I call on the angels, then the Scripture would be broken, and I would rather die than that the scripture be broken.” And in verse 56, that's what he's thinking. All this has taken place. That the writings of the prophets might be fulfilled.

“Then all the disciples deserted him and fled.” It was sin for them to do it, but Jesus wanted them to do it. It's a mystery, but that's it. And so they deserted him, they left him all alone. This is a direct fulfillment of scripture, “Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered,” Zechariah 13:7.

Now, what applications can we take from this text? Well, the whole purpose of that arrest that night was so that scripture would be fulfilled, but the whole purpose of the scripture is so that sinners like you and me would be saved. That's why the Scripture is given. “I've written these things to you that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” The purpose of this account is to bring you and me to faith in Christ so that our sins will be forgiven. That's the purpose of why he got arrested, so that he could die and our sins be forgiven.

So I'm begging you, don't leave this place unforgiven before God. Don't leave this place unforgiven. Believe in Christ, trust in him. The scripture testified very plainly that he must die. It said in Psalm 22, the same Psalm that begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? They have pierced my hands and my feet.” Preached about that on Easter Sunday. That said how he would die, but it's Isaiah 53, that tells us why he would die. It says very plainly, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

Has the Lord laid on Jesus your iniquity? If you believe in him, you may be sure that happened. You may be sure that the Lord has lifted off of you all of your sins, all of them, past, present, future, all them and laid them on the substitute, and he shed his blood and died. But God didn't leave him in the tomb. On the third day, God raised him from the dead and by his resurrection testified the price has been accepted. You are forgiven. So, come to Christ.

Secondly, as all things in Scripture that we get about Jesus, use this account to worship Jesus, he is the light shining in the dark place. The darkness continues until this present day. Worship him for his courage and willingly going to the cross. Worship him for his humility, in emptying himself and denying himself and accepting even death on a cross. Worship him for his love, that it was for love of the sheep that he died. Worship him for his authority, that all of the angels in heaven do his bidding and obey his word. Worship him for his wisdom in reasoning with Peter and reasoning even with his enemies. He's very reasonable; come now, let us reason together. Worship him for his wisdom. Worship him for his submission in submitting to scripture and to his Father's will, even though it meant his own death, excruciating death on the cross. And worship him for his patience, that he didn't strike down his enemies at that moment.

Also, look at the darkness, study the darkness from this account. See the darkness and wickedness of the human heart and find yourself there. Find yourself in Peter, okay? Flailing around through misunderstanding of God's purpose in the world, doing the wrong thing. Thinking you're serving God when you don't really know what God's doing. Is that ever you? Or is it true that everything you do is exactly what God wants you to do? Find yourself in Peter and say, “Lord, please teach me the lessons of Peter, teach me to study scripture. When Jesus says, ‘I'm going to die on the cross,’ teach me not to be stubborn and rejected. Saturate me in scripture, Lord, help me to know what you're doing in the world so I can be part of it. So I don't draw out my sword and hack wildly and not do the right thing, I don't wanna be like that. And then when the time comes to pray because I'm about to enter into temptation, help me not to fall asleep and be lazy in my prayer life, but help me to pray. As Jesus said, ‘Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.’ Help me to learn the lessons of Peter.”

Should we see ourselves in Judas? No, he was a reprobate. But maybe just in his action. The problem with the action is the disconnect between the action and the heart. There's a kiss, but there's no kiss in the heart, and so it's just going through the motions. The worst fulfillment of Judas is the concept of unregenerate church members, who are outwardly putting on a show, kissing Jesus by coming to church maybe, or doing other things spiritual, but their hearts are far from him and they really hate him and don't love him and don't obey him. We can imitate that though, even as believers, when we do any kind of act of worship or service or anything, but there's a disconnect in the heart. The thing is, and don't stop kissing Jesus, make sure you're kissing him with your heart and not just your lips, that's all. Make sure that your heart lines up with what your body is doing.

Reject the sword as the central or even any tool of the gospel’s advance. The sword does not advance the Kingdom of God. Jesus' kingdom, as he said to Pilate, “is not of this world. If it were,” he said, “My servants would have fought to prevent my arrest from the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is from another place, and it advances by other means.”

Now, the church has misunderstood this many times. I'm thinking of the crusades. Over two centuries, there were nine different crusades led by kings of Christendom, many of whom were descended from the Vikings and who never learned to not trust the sword, and who thought, “We need militarily to go to Jerusalem and conquer the city by shedding the blood of the Saracens, the Muslims that were guarding the city, we need to go shed their blood and conquer that city.” Ralph Winter from the US Center of World Mission called it the most misguided mission in the history of the Christian church. It was completely wrong.

How then does the kingdom advance? Well, John 12:24 gives us the recipe. Jesus said, “Unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains by itself a single seed, but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” Now, the fruit, what does the fruit have inside it? Seeds, right? And so there's a principle, as this fruit grows, you have the ability to lay down your life for Christ. Now, you can lay it down metaphorically by denying yourself and witnessing, evangelizing, doing missions, or you might even be among the select few called on to be a martyr for Jesus in which you'll literally die, as happened in the Roman era and has been happening right up until this present time. And Tertullian said, “The blood of martyrs is seed for the church.” That's how the church advanced, not by hacking and by slicing.

Can I give you a little twisted perspective on the Coexist bumper sticker? Coexist. Alright. You ready for this one? I have a whole new way of looking at that bumper sticker. I look on it as a promise from the Pagans to stop killing Christians. Amen. Hallelujah. Thank you for stopping the murder of Christians all around the world. Do that, take all the proceeds from that and use it to fight the persecution of the church. What do you think? Do you think they'd accept that as an interpretation of their bumper sticker? Not thinking so. I'm thinking they were thinking about the crusades, and it's really a chastisement of the Christians. Fine, we need to take our medicine. But the fact of the matter is, we Christians, we ought to know what Coexist means, 'cause we study the parable of the wheat and the tares, and we know that we get along with non-Christians in this world, and it's only at the end that the two get separated from each other. We're not trying to kill them, we're trying to convert them.

You remember in the movie, The End of the Spear, remember Nate Saint's son? He said, “Dad, are you gonna take a gun when you go meet the Waodani?” He said, “No, son, we're ready for heaven, but they're not. If we kill them, we'll just be sending them to hell.” That's it. It's not by killing. It's by dying. So, next time you see a Coexist bumper sticker, be happy and say, “Praise God.” Maybe the persecution of Christians will abate.

Now, here are the real ones, embrace Christ's attitude towards Scripture. Learn to say every single day, this is the inerrant, the perfect Word of God, every jot and tittle, every word in it is perfect. This is inerrant. No professor at Chapel Hill, no matter how erudite he may sound, no professor at Duke, can do anything to shake my faith in this, and it's still like a candle compared to Jesus' attitude toward the scripture. Jesus said, at the time of his arrest, in effect, “I'd rather die than break scripture.” Are you living like that? Am I? Are we willing to submit the totality of our lives to what scripture says to do?

Have a high view of scripture. All scripture’s God-breathed, but it's also there to teach you so that you can be fully fruitful in your life to teach and correct and rebuke so that you'll be fully fruitful in your life. And stand boldly, this is gonna get worse. The battle in our culture over the Bible is gonna get worse, we need to be willing to stand on this book and say, “Thus says the Lord” on topics, and be strong with it.

And then finally sanctification. The same Greek verb is used here as is used in Romans chapter 6. “Do you think I cannot call on my Father and he would at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” What the angels will say is, “Here I am Lord, I'm ready to serve you.” That's what the Greek word means. Paul uses the same word in Romans chapter 6 for sanctification. The essence of sanctification is this moment. “Do not,” This is Romans 6:13, “Do not offer the parts or your body to sin as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness for sin shall not be your master because you're not under law but under grace.”

It's the same, the word “offer” is “put at my disposal.” So you go like an angel and you say, “I am yours to command, what do you want me to do? Take my life and let it be.” Step by step, that's consecration, that sanctification. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the things we've learned in this account of Jesus' arrest, and pray, O Lord, that you would take these lessons and burn them in our hearts. Help them to be unshakable in our confidence that the word of God is inerrant, it's perfect, and help us even better than that, to be unshakable in our determination to obey its commands. We thank you for this time we've had to study in Jesus name. Amen.

“Take off your shoes, for the ground on which you're standing is holy ground.” Do you remember how God said that to Moses in the account of the burning bush? And I have that sense this morning as we approach Gethsemane. If the burning bush is holy ground, then how much more Gethsemane? We just sang in that song, “View him on the garden, there on the garden ground prostrate your maker lies.” And I'm thinking about that word “view,” and I think that it's only by the preaching of the word and by the ministry of the Spirit, and that illumination, that vision that God alone can give that we can do that. How it says in Galatians, “You foolish Galatians, before your very eyes, Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.”

And so, going earlier in the account, before your very eyes, I want you to see the Creator of the ends of the earth, Almighty God incarnate in a human body, laying prostrate, as one version of that song puts it, groveling on the ground. And that, dear friends, is holy ground. We could spend eternity, I think, trying to understand all of the themes that there are. And as we approach Gethsemane, we need to realize how badly others have handled that scene, how poorly others have understood or twisted what was happening at Gethsemane.

I remember my first year as a pastor up in Massachusetts, I had to do an ecumenical Good Friday service. That's a time to be afraid, even to be very afraid. An ecumenical Good Friday service. I think I was definitely the only evangelical there. And one of the ministers was up there and that minister combined some psychological analysis that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had done on stages of death and dying, which she had done in 1968, this psychological analysis of various stages that people go through concerning death and dying - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance - and married that together with Gethsemane. I thought I was going to be ill.

Or others of you, perhaps years ago, heard Jesus Christ Superstar, and there's a very moving song, “The Gethsemane Song,” but it's just so wrong doctrinally, as the Christ character, the Jesus character basically sings, “I've changed my mind after all this time,” and that he and his father were on different pages. I'm not gonna read the lyrics, but how wrong-headed they are about Gethsemane, how much they misunderstand what was really happening there. Mormons believe that Jesus did much of his atoning work in Gethsemane, and that's not taught in the Bible either.

So what I desire to do is just go carefully through the text and bring in parallel texts, other places in the gospels, to try to understand the infinite mysteries of Gethsemane. My desire is that we should exalt and magnify and glorify Christ for what he did for us at the cross, and first at Gethsemane. That we would see his excellencies, that we would see his courage, we would see his obedience, we would see his love for the Father and his love for sinners like us. That we would understand more fully and accurately the perfect humanity of Jesus. That we would see his frailty, and his weakness, his mortality. That we would understand his emotions and his temptations. That we would understand the greatness of power of prayer in facing temptation, and the need all of us have to do that.

That we would be motivated more than ever before to trust in Christ's finished work on the cross for our full acceptance before God. And that ultimately we would be motivated to follow his pattern of obedience, to say day after day in countless situations, “Father, not my will, but yours be done.” That we would learn his pattern of obedience. So I can sum it up very, very plainly: My desire is that we would worship and thank Christ for what he did, and that we would learn at a lower level, we would learn to imitate him forever. That's my desire.

Now, let me lay my cards on the table. Let me tell you what I think happened at Gethsemane. So here you're getting the application right away and you're getting the exegesis and the understanding right away, and then there's gonna be a lot of words after this, but we'll just get the simple mini-sermon, and then you can glaze over. No, don't do that. Keep listening. But let's try to understand what happened.

Jesus came to Gethsemane, and there, I believe, his Heavenly Father gave him a fuller, deeper, more profound vision of the cup of his wrath. That's number one. Number two, that experience knocked Jesus to the ground, literally, and overwhelmed him. Thirdly, Jesus in effect asked the Father, not literally in these words, but asked the Father, “Is there any other way to save my sheep than that I drink that cup?” So a question went from Earth up to Heaven, “Father, is there any other way?” Fourthly, the Father answered in effect, “No. Will you still do it?” So that's really the core moment there, Jesus asked the Father, “Is there another way?” The Father says, “No. Will you do it?” Jesus, fifthly, answers back, “Yes, I will do it.” That's the greatest moment in human history right there in terms of courage, obedience and love. None greater. And then sixthly, Jesus prays for strength to see the race through to the end, and the Father gives him the strength he needs. That's what I think happened at Gethsemane.

So let's look at it, and let's start with the facts of Gethsemane. All of Jesus' life, his whole life, Jesus lived under the shadow of the cross. We need to understand that first and foremost, when we get to the idea of a special revelation of the cross given to Jesus. He knew he was going to die on the cross. That was not a surprise to him. He knew even the specifics of it. B.B. Warfield, a theologian and commentator, said this, “The prospect of his suffering” - looking ahead to his suffering - “the prospect of His suffering was a perpetual Gethsemane to him.” So Jesus' whole adult life lived basically in the Garden of Gethsemane. He wasn't in any way surprised there in Gethsemane that he was going to die.

He knew very well that he was going to die, and he knew the specifics of it. At Caesarea Philippi in Matthew 16, it says, “From that time on, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and be betrayed into the hands of the chief priests, elders and teachers of the law, and that he must be condemned by them and handed over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. And on the third day, he would be raised to life.” He was very plain about this, and he said it again and again. In Luke 12:50, he said, “I have a baptism to undergo and I'm like in a straightjacket until it is accomplished.” So all of his life he lived, his adult life, he lived under the shadow of the cross, his whole life.

Michael Card in his song, “Love Crucified Arose,” put it this way, “Long ago, he blessed the earth, born older than the years, and in the stall, a cross he saw through the first of many tears, a life of homeless wandering cast out in sorrow's way, the Shepherd seeking for the lost, his life the price he paid.” And then later in that song, “Throughout your life, you felt the weight of what you'd come to give, to drink for us that crimson cup so that we might really live.” So we need to get this established, Jesus knew throughout his life he would die on the cross, he knew the very specifics of it, he warned his disciples again and again about it, it was hidden from them, they didn't fully understand it, they couldn't accept it, but Jesus certainly knew.

We have evidence in John 12:27 and 28. Jesus there said, “Now, is my heart troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.” And then he lifted up his heart and he said, “Father, glorify your name.” And then the Father answered him, saying, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” So Jesus knew he was going to die. There's no doubt about that.

Now, let's get caught up in terms of the sequence here in Matthew's gospel. In Matthew 26:1-14, Jesus was anointed by Mary at Bethany, prepared, he said, for his burial. In verses 15 and 16, we have the account of Judas agreeing to betray Jesus to the chief priests and scribes for 30 pieces of silver. In verses 17 through 19, we have the account of Jesus arranging for the Passover meal to be held and making preparations for the Passover meal. Then in verses 20-25, while they were eating the Passover meal, Jesus predicted Judas' betrayal. Sometime after that, Judas leaves the room to go betray Jesus, and he is en route, coming back with soldiers even while Jesus is there in Gethsemane. Then in verses 26-30, Jesus institutes the Lord's Supper. And then in verses 31-35, he predicts the disciples' denial and flight.

Now, this is the night, the first night of the Passover Feast, celebrating that incredible symbol of Jesus' own bloody death, how that Passover lamb had been sacrificed and its blood had been painted on the doorposts and the lintels, redemption accomplished and applied. There's a picture of that, how the blood of the Lamb was shed, but then it was applied and then the angel of death passed over, and they did not die. And so Jesus was there to establish the blood of a new covenant, and so that very next day he would shed his blood to establish that new covenant.

So when they had finished the meal, they sang a hymn, and then they went out and crossed the Kidron Valley and they went into the garden of Gethsemane. Look at verse 36, “Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane.”

Now, what is Gethsemane? Well, Gethsemane was a private garden, probably walled in, on the Mount of Olives across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem. It was out of the city, probably owned by some rich benefactor of Jesus who let Jesus and his disciples use it frequently. It was a place of quiet refuge, a place where he could be away from the maddening crush of the city, where he could have some time alone with his disciples and pray. Away at this point from hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who came from all over the Roman world to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread. On the Mount of Olives, it was.

The word Gethsemane itself literally means olive press. It involves some kind of press, some kind of grindstone in which the olives are put in and weight was put on and they ground down and it left a kind of a thick paste with stems and leaves and what was left of the olives, but out of that would come a reddish viscous oil that was very valuable, olive oil. It was really kind of a metaphor, a picture, of the crushing pressure that we see in Gethsemane in Jesus' life spiritually, emotionally, even physically pressing him. But that's what Gethsemane means, it means olive press, the intense pressure that would be on him.

Now, why did Jesus go to Gethsemane? Well, as I said, it was a place of refuge and prayer, a place where he could be alone. It was commonly used by Jesus and his disciples, and therefore Judas, who was in the process of betraying him, knew that he would go there. He knew exactly that he would go there. He knew where to bring the soldiers to arrest Him. Jesus was in a regular pattern here. 

So you could say, “Now, why was Jesus trying to make it easy for Judas?” I remember hearing John MacArthur preach on this and he said Jesus wasn't trying to make it easy for Judas - forever it will not be easy for Judas. But by going there intentionally and knowing that Judas knew the place, it was his way of surrendering easily over to the will of the Father. So to go to Gethsemane was the same as the decision to go to the cross and die.

Now, it's vital for us to keep in mind as we consider and we go on in Matthew's Gospel, as Jesus lays down his life for the sheep, that he is never a victim. He's never in over his head, he's never caught in some political or military vortex that he can't get out of like Whitewater or something like that. He is willingly, gladly, volitionally, laying down his life for the sheep. In John 10:18 he says, “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down freely of my own accord. I have the authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it back up again. This command I received from my Father.” So Jesus is not a victim, ever.

So He goes to Gethsemane, and then he commands his disciples and separates them out. Look at verses 36 and 37. “He said to them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ And then he took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, James and John, along with him.” Jesus wanted all of the twelve to prepare themselves for the trials that were about to befall them, but he separated out his three closest friends, his closest disciples - Peter, James, and John - to be with Him.

The same thing happens regularly, this is a regular rhythm in Jesus' ministry. These were the three that were with him on the Mount of Transfiguration. You remember how he took Peter, James, and John up the Mount of Transfiguration, and he was transformed before them, and his face shone like the sun and his clothes became as white as light, and a cloud, a bright cloud, enveloped them and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” It's amazing as I've meditated on this, these same three, Peter, James and John, who saw Jesus at His most glorious and most powerful in the days of his incarnation, are about to see him at his absolute lowest, His weakest, His most groveling as well.

Now, you might ask, “Why did he pick these three out?” Well, we have to know that Jesus, now ascended to the right hand of God, is able to have equally, through the Spirit, intimate relationship with all of us in the same way with millions of Christians all the time. But in the days of his life on earth, he was limited in space and time, and he could only be intimately connected, I think, with certain numbers. There was just a limitation of access in relationship. And so Jesus poured himself especially into Peter, James and John, and then outward from there, the other of the 12, and then on from there to the rest of the disciples, etcetera. And so these were His closest friends, and let's just speak humanly, he just wanted them with him. He just wanted them there, just to be with his friends, just to have those three friends with him at the hardest hour of his life. 

Jesus, I think, has one desire at this moment, and that is to pray to his Heavenly Father. Though his disciples will fail in their prayers in Gethsemane, Jesus will not fail in his. And we see the intense God-centeredness of Jesus here as he goes to pray.

And he begins to describe, Matthew does, the awesome emotional distress that Jesus is feeling at this point. We can't really even put it into words. It's like a cascade of words and phrases that come. If you put all of the gospels together, it's really quite astonishing. It seems to stretch language to the breaking point, what it is that Jesus was feeling at this particular moment. In verse 37, it just says, “He began to be sorrowful and troubled.” So this is the description given by Matthew, and then we have the description in Jesus' own words. He said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” There's a sense of loneliness and pain that's almost incalculable. He yearns for their friendship, their nearness, he wants them close because he's feeling isolated and alone in some way. He wants them to stay and keep watch with him.

Now, what words does Matthew use to convey his emotions? He says, “He began to be sorrowful." The root word has to do with grief, with a sense of overwhelming grief, it's usually associated with death. And “troubled,” the word “troubled” here refers to a distracted, anxious state, like someone just ringing their hands in anxiety over something about to happen. And then he adds phrase upon phrase, “My soul,” speaking of his humanness, “My soul is overwhelmed.” You can imagine someone standing in front of just huge waves, wave upon wave, like in Hawaii or something like that, just crashing down on Him.

“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow even to the point of death.” It's encompassed all around. You picture, like Samson surrounded by hundreds of Philistines who wanna kill him, and Jesus, you get this feeling of Jesus surrounded by grief and sorrow, and it's crashing in on him, it says “even to the point of death.” Now, this is very insightful at this point. The agony of emotion and pressure is so great that I believe Jesus is physically close to dying. And it's really Luke that gives us a double sense of the physical nature of this agony. It says in Luke 22:43, “An angel appeared from heaven and strengthened him.” It's an incredible thing. Here is Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, he is God, Creator of the ends of the earth, Creator of all things visible and invisible, including that angel, and it's the angel who has to come and strengthen him. Jesus is weaker, lower than the angel at that point. It's the second time an angel had to strengthen him. The first time was when he fasted for 40 days in the desert, an angel came and strengthened him. But here an angel comes to strengthen him. We have a sense of the frailty of Jesus, and the weakness.

And then again in Luke 22:44, the very next verse, it says, “And being in agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like clots of blood,” is what it literally says, “falling to the ground.” Some commentators zero in on the word “like” and they say there wasn't any blood. Friends, there was blood. You're really pitting the word “like” against the word “clots” at that point. And then you have another word “blood,” and so I just think there's blood. And I think his blood pressure was so great, like, “Ahh!” like that, and his face is red and it's just - But we stop, he kept going, and then the blood starts coming out, and it wasn't a small amount, it was large amounts like clotting. And you think about that and just that there was even sweat, but blood, what kind of night was that? Later that same evening, Peter would be standing by a fire warming himself. It was a cold night, but Jesus is drenched in sweat. I don't even know what it would be like to stand there and watch that. Pressure so great that capillaries, blood vessels are bursting, and blood is dripping down off his face. Intense agony.

Hebrews 5 gives us a sense of how close Jesus was to death. Hebrew 5:7, it says, “During the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.” Now, ultimately on the cross, there's indications biologically, medically, that Jesus died of a ruptured heart. You know, when that soldier drove that spear into his side, out came blood and water. So perhaps this is an early stage of that kind of intense pressure that Jesus was under.

So what does he pray? Verse 39, “Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but as you will.’” So you've got his physical position, he's prostrate, he's on the ground, he's on his face, he's totally weak, he's helpless, submissive to the Father, humble and lowly. “View him groveling in the garden. Lo! your maker prostrate lies.” Jesus assumes a physical position, even lower and more humble than that tax collector, you remember, in his parable who beat his breast and would not even look up to heaven, but said, “Be merciful to me, oh God, the sinner.” Jesus is even lower than that. And what is his request?

“Father, if it's possible, make this…”  In Mark 14:36, it says, “Abba Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me.” This is hard for any parent. You think about this, he goes to baby language. “Daddy. Daddy, if it's possible, is there any way to get out of this? Is there any other way? Is there another way for that multitude, greater than anyone could count from every tribe and language and people and nation, is there any other way, Daddy, any other way than that I have to drink that cup?” Jesus himself had said, “With man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.” He says that in Mark, “Abba Father, all things are possible for You.”

Somewhere in here, we must hear the answer back from the Heavenly Father, “No, my Son, there's no other way. No other way.” In a few moments, Jesus is going to be arrested. Peter will try to save him from arrest, you remember. And Jesus said, “How then would the scripture be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way? My hands and my feet must be pierced, my blood must be poured out, I must die as a sacrifice. This is exactly how it has to happen. There's no other way.” So it's based on the Scripture. It's based on the plan of God. It's based on the will of God. “How then would the Scripture be fulfilled?” The answer to the question is written in the blood of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, even millions of animals that have been sacrificed from the beginning of redemptive history, the shedding of blood, and all of the promises that God has spoken to his people throughout the prophets, “No, my Son, there is no other way.”

Now, what is this cup? “Take this cup from me,” he says. Now, in the Psalms, in Psalm 16, the cup represents God's will for your life, handing you something, saying, “This is the cup, this is my purpose for you.” Psalm 16:5, “Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup.” But frequently in other places, it represents God's wrath and judgment. For in Jeremiah 25:15-17, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, said to me,” this is Jeremiah speaking, “‘Take from my hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. And when they drink it, they will stagger and go mad because of the sword I will send among them.’ So I took the cup from the Lord's hand and made all the nations to whom he sent me drink it.” It is clearly the cup of God's wrath poured out on Jesus as our substitute.

We deserved the wrath of God, we deserved to go to hell. And so there's another cup portrayed in Revelation 14. It says there, of the condemned person, “He, too, will drink of the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. He will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the lamb, and the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever. There is no rest day or night for those in hell.” So Jesus is staring, I picture him staring into this cup of God's wrath and is understandably shrinking back from it in horror, in terror. The wrath of God is terrifying. God is a consuming fire. The wrath of God I've pictured as his omnipotence, focused down like a white or blue hot laser beam or lightning strike on his enemies to effect their destruction. That's the wrath of God.

Jesus is staring at this intense white blue hot, pouring out this lightning bolt that just keeps pouring, and He's going to walk into it and be destroyed by it, so he's shrinking back from it. And here we see the submission of Jesus. He basically then answers his Father back, “Yes, I will do it.” The Father is asking, “Will you do it?” And he answers back, “Yet not as I will, but as you will.” This is the centerpiece of this magnificent moment, this the greatest statement any human being has ever made. This is the most courageous act, the greatest act of submission, the most loving act that any human being has ever done. Here is the paradigm of what God wants from you and me for the rest of our lives, though the cup is less than what Jesus drank. More on that in a moment.

At that point, “he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. ‘Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?’ he asked Peter. ‘Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.’” So here we have a clear contrast. We have Jesus pouring out his heart unto his Heavenly Father in prayer. And then we have Peter, James and John, and they're unable to stay awake even for one hour.

He focuses on Peter in particular. Now remember, Peter is the one who just earlier that evening had boasted, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.” Furthermore, Jesus had warned Peter what would happen to him that very night. “This very night before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.” Peter should have been getting ready for that by praying, just as Jesus was getting ready for what he was going to undergo by praying. Jesus' statement is timeless, very famous, much more famous in the KJV, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” A well-known statement.

So Jesus then goes for a second prayer. “He went away a second time and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.’” Then he goes back, verse 43, a second time and he again finds his disciples sleeping because their eyes were heavy. Luke 22:45 tells us why. It says, “When he rose from prayer and went back to his disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow.” So they're just worn out by the events of the evening, it's too much for them, and they just shut down, and they're just asleep. 

“So,” verse 44, “he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time saying the same thing.” What did he pray for at this point? Is he really trying to get the Father to change his mind? No, he's past that now. I believe he is asking the Father to deliver him from death right there, that he would not die in the garden, and then to give him the strength he would need to finish the work that the Father gave him to do, to go ahead and die on the cross right to the end. He had six trials to go through, three religious and three secular trials. He had all of that, then he had to take the cross and carry it up that hill, be nailed to it, suffer on the cross and die. And so he was asking his Father for the strength to finish that race. And Hebrews 5 says,8 “he was heard because of his reverent submission.” God sent an angel to strengthen him so that he would be able to finish that race.

Then in verse 45 through 47, “He returned to the disciples and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and resting? Behold, the hour is near, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us go! Here comes my betrayer!’ And while he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived.” So the opportunity for Jesus to escape has passed. He prays right until Judas comes. There is no longer a chance for him to escape. The only way he can escape now is to use his supernatural power to defeat his enemies by killing them, which he could have done. But from this point on, he has prayed away his last opportunity to run away. And in so doing, he's accepted what the Father wants him to do.

So those are the facts of Gethsemane. What about the mysteries of Gethsemane? First of all, you can't study Christian theology without embracing mystery. It's impossible for us to study the depths of the Word of God and not bump into mystery. So here we come face-to-face with the mystery of the incarnation, the doctrine of Jesus as perfectly God and man at the same time. 100 percent God, 100 percent man. It's a mystery. It's beyond what we can comprehend, perhaps the most profound mystery in the Bible. The only thing that would rival it is the mystery of the Trinity.

How can Jesus be fully God and fully man? Many philosophers and theologians have tried to deny one or the other. Dualists, like the gnostics and Docetists others, tried to say that Jesus wasn't really human, he maybe only seemed to be human, something like that. Gethsemane is a powerful rebuttal to that argument. He is human. He is completely human. He's 100 percent human. We see his weakness here, his frailty, his mortality, his blood. We see his emotional life; his emotional life is on display here, the emotions of Jesus. He fully displays the reality of that title, “man of sorrows and familiar with suffering.”

How then can Christ be both omnipotent deity and yet groveling on the ground so weak, ready to die? And how do we understand his overwhelming fear of death? Many other people have faced death with more apparent courage than this man. Even many Christian martyrs went singing to the stake. Pagans, Roman soldiers, absolutely courageous right to the death. Now, I would say to them, the pagans, I would say to them, they should have measured from Jesus' terror at the wrath of God how terrified they should have been to die, because they were about to experience it and not for three hours, but forever and ever. They should have been terrified to die, but they didn't know. Socrates took his bowl of hemlock without any hesitation and drank it down and died.

Martin Luther said of Christ, “No man ever feared death like this man.” He feared death more than anyone that's ever lived. How do we understand that? How does the infinite Creator of all things visible and invisible need help from an angel? How does he need strengthening from an angel? Clearly the answer to these questions is a mystery, but it shows clearly the humanity of Christ.

Secondly, the mystery of Christ's amazement. The mystery of his amazement. I don't ask you to turn there now, but I would urge you to look in Mark 14:33. In the King James Version, the only version that really does a good job of translating the Greek word, “ekthambeo” is the Greek word, and there in the King James it says, “And taketh with him, Peter and James and John, and began to be,” listen, “sore amazed and to be very heavy.” Sore amazed. Sore means “very” or “extremely” amazed. The Greek word is sometimes used for reactions to Jesus' ministry, like his miracles or the miracles of the apostles, the reaction of the women as they go to the empty tomb and there's an angel and they're astonished at it. It has to do generally with surprise, mingled with fear. That's what the Greek word means.

How then is Jesus amazed? How is he surprised in Gethsemane? What's happening there?

Now, remember at the very beginning of the sermon, I said, no, he knew he was gonna die. He knew exactly how he was gonna die, the circumstances, all of it. So what is amazing to him? Well, I think that the Father in some way, some mysterious way, pulled back the veil from his human understanding to show him the cup of wrath, what it would be like.

And I've likened it, in other places I've talked about this before, to the difference between, let's say a grainy black and white photo of the Grand Canyon taken in 1900 to an IMAX video of a helicopter ride through the Grand Canyon. Any of you ever been to an IMAX? You got that peripheral vision, you've got those big Dolby speakers, this thing pounding in your chest, right? I've been to an IMAX where it was a roller coaster and you felt like you were gonna vomit. And they say if you're feeling like you're gonna vomit, close your eyes, you're not moving. I know you think you're moving, but you're not moving. And so like the helicopter ride through the Grand Canyon, you're going down and you can feel the feeling in the pit of your stomach. It's so real.

I think that's what the Father did to the Son, said, “This is what my wrath is going to be like. This is what it's gonna be like on the cross. Feel it.” And it knocked him to the ground. Blood dripping out of his pores. Why didn't the Father do it earlier? Because you can't live like that. Not even Jesus could live like that. He had to have an angel just to get up off the ground. You can't live like that for years, and so the Father held that full revelation back.

Well then, why did he do it at all? Because he didn't want anyone to say that Jesus got tricked into the cross or deceived. Interestingly, Jeremiah said to God at one point when his ministry was going very badly, Jeremiah said, “You deceived me.” It's a low point for Jeremiah. God said to Jeremiah, “You know, if you speak worthy words, not worthless, I'll let you continue to be my spokesman, alright? I didn't deceive you.” But this is the most important thing there has ever been in history: The cross of Christ. And so that it might not be seen that he was unjust in pouring out wrath on his Son, he showed his Son as fully as he possibly could what it would be like, and then in effect asked him, “Will you do it anyway?” So that, as it says in Romans 3, “He could be just and the justifier of those who have faith in Christ.” Jesus did it of his own free will. He did it knowingly, he did it willingly, he did it courageously and obediently. The Father showed him what it would be like as much as he could and Jesus said, “Yes, I will do it.”

What is the mystery of Jesus' prayer? As Jesus is praying, is Jesus' will different than the Father's? Are they having a battle? The first ever, the first inter-trinitarian argument there's ever been. Is that what's going on here? “Father, I know you want me to die but I don't wanna die.” Is that what's going on? Not at all. The Trinity can never change. Jesus said in John 10:30, “I and the Father are one.” That's not what's going on here either.

Actually, it says in Isaiah 53:10, concerning the will of the Father, it was so much the will of the Son, it says, “Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days,” listen to this, “and the will of the Lord will prosper,” or flourish, “in his hand.” So, I love to look at it, I don't play music, but I wish I did. So I'm always in awe of musical people, you guys are amazing to me. But I picture this, the Father wrote the most beautiful piano concerto ever and Jesus played it flawlessly, played it beautifully. So no, there's no discrepancy between the will of the Father and the will of the Son here. This is infinite mystery. 

What then are the glories of Gethsemane? Well, we see the free will of Jesus put on display. Many speak of free will, Jesus had a perfectly free will, he had no sin nature, no corruption, nothing holding him back, no hesitation from his wickedness and history in sin, he had no sin nature at all. His will was perfectly free, and he used his perfectly free will the way that free will is supposed to be used, saying to the Father, “Not my will, but yours be done.” That's what it's for.

In the glories of Gethsemane, we see Jesus vindicating the justice of God the Father. I hesitate to even utter some of the things commentators say, but they say that the cross was a form of heavenly child abuse. Have you heard that before? The Father beating up on the Son, it is nothing like that at all. The Son willingly gladly drank that cup that the Father handed him.

And, this is very significant theologically, in the obedience of Jesus we find our salvation. This is how sinners like you and I have hope of heaven. This is made very, very plain in Romans 5:19, “For just as through the disobedience of the one man, the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man, the many were made righteous.” It is by Jesus' obedience and going to the cross that we are made righteous.

It says the same thing in Philippians 2:8, “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.” And again, in Hebrews 5:8-9, “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and once made perfect, became the source of eternal salvation to all those who obey him.” So by the obedience of Jesus displayed plainly here in Gethsemane we find our salvation.

We also see perfectly displayed here, the glory of his love, for his Father and for us. Isn't it a perfect display of the love that Jesus has for his Father? For him to love his Father enough to obey him, Jesus said to us, “If you love me, you'll obey me.” In effect, the Father could say that to the Son and the Son would say back, “I do love you, and I'll obey you. No matter what it costs me, that's how much I love you.” And not only that, but look at his horizontal, his love for us, as it flows from his love to his Father and then out to us. “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus,” Hebrews 12:2, “the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of God.” He enjoys giving you eternal life, He enjoys giving you salvation, so for that joy and that love we see displayed in Gethsemane.

And then finally the courage of Jesus, perfect love driving out fear. Many people display courage. In 1957, then-senator John F. Kennedy wrote a book that he won the Pulitzer Prize for, Profiles in Courage. It was eight senators who displayed unusual courage in their lives, which they usually suffered in their lifetime for having such courageous views, Profiles in Courage. Even more, our government gives the Congressional Medal of Honor to people on the battlefield who willingly lay down their life sometimes right to death to save the lives of others, it's the highest award that can be given for courage.

And it does happen, as it says in Romans 5:7, “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man, someone might possibly dare to die.” As he says in John, “Greater love has no one than this that he lay down his life for his friends.” So this has happened, there's displays of courage throughout history, the martyrs show courage, but I say that all of them are as a candle compared to the sun, the raging sun of Jesus' courage in Gethsemane. For him to look in that cup and say, “I'll do it,” that's courage. The greatest courage there's ever been.

So what application can we take from Gethsemane? Well, how about this? Come to Christ. Why should you drink the cup of God's wrath when Jesus is offering to drink it for you? If you're outside of Christ right now, you ought to fear death more than you do. Look at Jesus and how much he shrank back and he wasn't gonna be enduring that forever, just for three hours. You ought to fear hell more than you do, if you're outside of Christ. So I urge you, don't leave this place unregenerate.

Come to Christ, all you have to do is trust in him and believe in him. I've been portraying Christ crucified throughout this whole sermon, it was for the shedding of the blood on the cross that we might have eternal life. Trust in him.

For you who are Christians, can I just say - And in a minute, we're gonna do it - just say thank you to Jesus. Say it every day. We're gonna sing it. Daniel, I said, Daniel, can we finish with “Thank You, Jesus.” Yeah. Alright, let's do that. Thank you, Jesus. We just need it every day, just go to him and close our eyes and just say, “Lord, thank you for doing that. Thank you for saying yes in Gethsemane, and for going to the cross for me and drinking my cup. Thank you.” Let's just worship him.

And rest totally in what Jesus has done for you, there's nothing you can add to it or detract from it. It's a finished work. Now, let's talk for a minute about choice, shall we? America is a nation of choice-aholics, and friends, it's getting worse, I mean, we're surrounded every day by more choices than our great-great-grandparents could have ever even imagined. What do you think your great-great-grandfather would think if he saw the cold cereal aisle at Kroger's? I don't even know how many there are. Are we in the hundreds on cold cereals? I wouldn't be surprised. Definitely dozens, dozens and dozens. And those are just benign choices, like all of your in-flight entertainment choices. Last flight, it was over 50 things I could choose from. I was glazed over, hitting the screen. Not that one, no this one, how about this one? Halfway through, changing, I was glutting and getting drunk on choice.

And then on moral issues, it's getting weird. We've heard it in abortion for years, the choice, if the woman chooses then it's a child. I don't understand that, but we're elevating choice so high. And then the state of Massachusetts ruled that students should have the freedom to choose their gender. Can you believe that? I would think that'd be one thing you had no choice over. It's just straight biology to choose whether you're male or female. God chose that right from the beginning. If you have any confusion... Never mind, at any rate... We don't have a choice in that. But yet to take this idol of choice and lift it up so high, right in God's face.

Jesus shows us here what choice is for, this is what you're supposed to do with it. You have choices to make, you have a choice to make every day. Just learn to say what Jesus said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Just learn to say that day after day. Now, in this church, we talk about this a lot, we have in front of us for the rest of our lives as Christians, two infinite journeys. Internal journey of holiness, external journey of evangelism and missions. I say to you this, you cannot make any progress except that God brings you to a fork in the road of a difficult command and asks you, “Will you drink the cup?”

Now, it's not the same cup that Jesus drank, but you remember how James and John, He asked them, “Can you drink the cup I'm going to drink?” “We can,” they said, not knowing what he was talking about. Jesus said, “You will indeed drink from my cup.” So Jesus set smaller cups, not so bitter in front of us, but they're still hard for us. You will make no progress in the Christian life if you don't learn to deny yourself and take up whatever cup Jesus sets in front of you and drink it. Only by saying, “Not my will, but yours be done” can you grow in holiness. And only by saying, “Not my will, but yours be done,” can the unreached people groups of the world be reached for Christ.

Now I'm gonna finish this sermon by saying this: I have been convicted, I went to a missions conference, I actually spoke even at a missions conference, but God was speaking to me. For the first number of years of my Christian life, I was passionate about unreached people group missions. After I came to the conclusion that we were not called to missions, my ardor for unreached people group missions diminished somewhat, and I'm ashamed of that now. And so I want to pray every day for an unreached people group. I wanna keep unreached people groups in front of this church. I want you folks to give more money than you've ever given before to unreached people group ministry, I'm going to become a somewhat shameless beggar for unreached people group money for missions, and you'll be glad on Judgment Day, I did. If you give. Not so much if you don't. We need to keep the loss, the unreached people groups, in front of us. We need to keep evangelism in front of us, that's not unreached people groups, those are lost people around us every day. We will not reach them unless we learn to say, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Close with me in prayer.

Father, I pray that you would transform this church, make us more passionate for the lost, more passionate for holiness, more passionate for unreached people groups and missions than ever before. Help us to be more passionate, O Lord, at the moment of temptation, that we would deny those fleshly lusts and that we would be holy and pure in your sight. That we will be more passionate, O Lord, to hold the ropes for missionaries that are on the field, counting on us to pray for them and to support them. Oh, God, raise us to another level at First Baptist Church in the internal and external journey. Lord, all of those themes are small compared to this. Thank You, Jesus, thank you for dying for us. Thank you for drinking that cup. In Jesus' name, amen.

Pasto Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Psalm 22:22-31. The main subject of the sermon is how death is a portal to glory.

So Easter morning, 1994, my wife Christy and I were serving the Lord as missionaries in Japan, and we had the privilege of partaking in a sunrise Easter service, which was tough to get up early in the morning. It was still dark, and it was a little bit cold, but there was a special incentive. And as we assembled there for the sunrise service, we came to realize, or we were made to realize by our Japanese brothers and sisters in Christ, to remember this, Japan was the land of the rising sun, and we were among all the Christians on the face of the earth, privileged with the blessing of getting to proclaim the resurrection before any of the other Christians were even awake. All of you folks were still sleeping that morning when we got up early to celebrate in the land of the rising sun, to celebrate the risen Son Jesus Christ. And that was exactly the phrase our brothers and sisters used, and we were rejoicing in that. And so we get to celebrate now, and we're really late in the relay race that the sun has been going from time zone to time zone, reminded that our brothers and sisters in China have already celebrated the resurrection, and so it has spread, and now it comes to us, and now it's our turn. Amen?

And we are here to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And we are here to celebrate 2,000 years of gospel advance, Christ going forth. Christ is risen. Death has been defeated. Sin is fully atoned for. The blood has been shed. We shall not be condemned, but we shall be welcomed into Heaven. We will not be cast out. We have been adopted, and we are sons and daughters of the living God. Physical death is no longer to be feared, but now physical death is a portal, a doorway into the presence of eternal joy in the presence of God. It's a day of celebration, a day of victory in Jesus, a day to rejoice and be glad, a day to gather with the people of God and to celebrate, and all of this in anticipation, no matter how great our joy may be today, it is as nothing, it's like the light of a candle, compared to the full light of the sun, when at last we see his face, and we are delivered from all of the things that afflict us in this life, delivered at last, and there where there will be no more death and no more mourning, and there will be no more crying, and there will be no more pain, and we will be free at last, and we will be raised from the dead. 

Death has had enough tyranny. Amen? It's had long enough reign, and for death to be killed by Jesus, that's the centerpiece of the message that we have. "Death [has] reigned," it says in Romans 5:14, "from the time of Adam to the time of Moses." And then a few verses later, it uses the same verb again, "Just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord." Sin and death and Satan, or a tyrannical power with its foot on our necks, the necks of our hopes and joys and energy and future, and Christ has broken that tyrannical reign forever by his resurrection.

I often think for myself on Easter Sunday, and probably every Easter Sunday, I go in my mind to Luke 24, and those two incredibly blessed disciples of Jesus, whoever they were, we don't know, but they had the blessing of walking with the resurrected Christ, unbeknownst to them, walking with the resurrected Christ and having that conversation. And by the time Jesus started breaking open the Scriptures to them and showing how all of this had been predicted, how all of this had been foretold, the death of Christ had been foretold, the shedding of the blood on the cross had been foretold, and his resurrection victory had been foretold centuries before any of it happened, how this stranger on the road was just unfolding these things in there, and later, after they broke bread and their eyes were opened, and they realized who it was, Jesus the resurrected Lord, and he was gone, taken from their sight, and they couldn't see him, he was just gone, they then said these incredible words, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he opened the Scriptures to us?" Oh, may that happen again. I pray that God by his Holy Spirit would make your hearts burn within you, as you see in Psalm 22, the clear prediction of the crucifixion, but we're gonna emphasize even more the resurrection of Christ today, clear in prophecy that all of this was laid out in the mind of God before the foundation of the world.

I'm gonna call your attention to 1 Peter Chapter 1:10-11. You don't have to turn there, but just listen to what the Apostle Peter says, "Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow."

Now, I'm gonna take that as a two-part outline to Psalm 22, a massive two-part outline to Psalm 22, right from Peter talking about the prophets, the sufferings of Christ, in verses 1-21, and the glories that would follow, verses 22-31. Now, my emphasis this morning is on the glories that would follow, but we cannot understand the glories without the suffering. We cannot understand the joy of our salvation without knowing the cost of that salvation.

"We cannot understand the joy of our salvation without knowing the cost of that salvation."

A number of years ago, I had the privilege of going to a very expensive restaurant with my parents. Thank goodness, my father was there to foot the bill because it was one of those fancy restaurants in a major metropolitan area where there are no prices on the menu. Be afraid. Be very afraid. When the prices are not on the menu, they're saying, "If you need to ask, you don't need to be here. Trust us. We'll charge the right amount." Now, I saw that my father had the prices. He blanched a little, but we were there, and so we were gonna go ahead with it. I never knew the cost of that meal. I don't wanna know the cost of that meal 'cause there were something like 12 of us there, and so it was very, very expensive.

Friends, can I tell you right now, we don't know the cost of our salvation, not fully. We don't know what it cost Jesus. We have an idea. We have an idea, but we don't really know, do we, what it cost him to save our souls, and you will not know until you see the glories and the holiness of God, and you see, at last, yourself and how much you needed him to do this, how much you needed him to die for you. That's when you'll understand the cost that was paid for your salvation, cost to someone hidden from you like it was for me that night. That was a feast. I enjoyed that food, but Jesus is spreading a banquet for us. That's very much the language, the image laid for here. There's a banquet being spread for us, a banquet of glorious worship, for all eternity, and he's spreading it, but it has a price, and that price was his sufferings in blood for us, for our sins. 

Without that, we could not sit at table with God. Do you understand that? Without the shedding of his blood, there could be no forgiveness of sins, and without the forgiveness of sins, we would not be "qualified," to use the language of Colossians, to sit at table with God. And so very quickly, in verses 1 through 21, we have delineated for us the sufferings of Christ, and then in verses 22 through 31, the glories that would follow those sufferings. And in the white spaces between verse 21 and Verse 22, we have the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's what we celebrate. It's clearly laid out for us in Psalm 16, "You will not let your Holy One see decay." It was told to us that Christ would not stay in the tomb. He would not decay. It's told directly in Psalm 16. It's not even mentioned here, but it is assumed. Christ is risen, but the death of Christ is very clearly portrayed here. 

It begins with the famous words, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" There Christ, the eternal Son of the living God, was forsaken by his Father. And why? Because He was our sin-bearer. He was our substitute. He stood in our place like a lightning rod. He took the strike of God's wrath for us and carried it safely away from us, but he was abandoned in some mysterious way by his heavenly Father, because the guilt of the sins of all of the elect of the world were laid on him, and he suffered for them.

And then in very clear detail, he lays out in verses 12 through 18 the specifics of his death. He uses language of the animal world, but he's talking about people. Bulls and lions and dogs. These are strong soldiers. These are powerful men who are there for one purpose, and that is to take his life, there to kill him. They're like beasts, ravenous beasts surrounding him. Listen to verse 12, and following, "Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. Roaring lions tearing their prey open, their mouths wide against me." And then he gets into the details of how he's dying, "I am poured out like water." Dehydration. "…All my bones are out of joint," he says. "My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death." And then he gets even more specific. He says, "Dogs have surrounded me; A band of evil men has encircled me." This is Psalm 22:16. This was written 1,000 years before Jesus was born. "They have pierced my hands and my feet."

That's centuries before the Assyrians, those wicked people, even invented crucifixion. What was David thinking about? I don't know. I don't think he knew. He just wrote those words under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Peter says, it was revealed to him. He wasn't serving himself but us. And so the prophecy was given, and I don't think David fully understood what he was writing, but it was for us who now look back on the Christ event, and we know that it was all predicted, the piercing of the hands and the feet by which Jesus would die on the cross. He says, "I can count all my bones; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing." And so he is poured out unto death on the cross. Friends, those are the sufferings of Christ, but then like I said, in the white space between verses 21-22, we have the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and then in verses 22-31, we have the glories that would follow, and we're gonna spend our time there, dear friends. That's where we're gonna spend our time, on the glories that would follow.

And it's not just the glories of the resurrection of Christ, but it's in the spreading of the fruit of that victory around the world for 20 centuries, at least, the spreading of the gospel of Christ, so that people from every tribe and language and people and nation will be invited and will actually come and sit at table and feast with God. Those are the glories that would follow and so that's what we're looking at. Now, I don't deny that this Psalm had some kind of setting, original setting, that David was an actual man. He was a king. He lived a thousand years before Jesus, he in his life and his sufferings in his kingdom, that certain events of his life pre-figured Christ. He was an ancestor of the human side. The human nature of Christ came through David. He was a Son of David, genuinely a human being and a descendant of David, and he suffered attacks, and he cried out to God, and he had deliverance, and that sudden deliverance led to praise of Almighty God. I don't deny all those things, but I deny that the fullness of Psalm 22 is fulfilled in the life of David the King, because it wasn't.

It's not David's glories that are spreading to the ends of the earth. It's not David's victories that we are sitting down to celebrate in the Kingdom of Heaven forever, but it's the Son of David. It's Jesus. And David said of him, called him, "My Lord." As Jesus pointed out, “Why does he call him, ‘My Lord’ when he calls him in Psalm 1:10, ‘My Lord?’” And so it's David's Lord that we're celebrating here today. Christ's deliverance. David's deliverance came, being delivered, so he didn't die. That was his deliverance. His enemies were defeated, and he didn't die in battle. Jesus' deliverance came after he died. God delivered him from death through resurrection, and in that way comes his deliverance in that victory for all time. As was said of Jesus as he was dying on the cross, "He saved others, but he can't save himself." Well, Christ did save others, but in order to save others, he could not save himself. He had to die on the cross. He had to suffer crucifixion. And so, not from the cross, but from the grave, God delivered him, and that's what we're celebrating here today.

And so look at verse 22, at the joyful declaration that Jesus makes to the brothers. When I say "I," I believe the psalmist is speaking for the Messiah. He's speaking in Christ's name, and so this is Jesus saying this to us. "I will declare your name to my brothers; in the congregation I will praise you." And so the messenger here is Jesus. In resurrection glory, in resurrection power, he appears to the brothers, and he proclaims the praises of God. Jesus is the messenger. And what an awesome time that would have been to be in that upper room in Jerusalem, as depicted in John 20 on Resurrection Day, and the doors are all locked for fear of the Jews, and there they all are trembling, wondering about the message that's already come from the women who have been to the tomb. Peter and John had been there and seen the physical evidence, but still they're not sure what's going on. "On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, 'Peace be with you!' After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. [Where his hands were pierced. Where his side was pierced.] And the disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord." 

So Jesus is there to declare God's name to the brothers. That was the first audience. It was the first declaration. Jesus the messenger, and there they were the brothers together. And Jesus declares God's glories in his name to them. The writer to the Hebrews picks up on this and quotes it directly in Hebrews Chapter 2: 10-12. I think, Daniel, this was the text you used, isn't it, brother, when you spoke to our congregation? So sweet. But listen to this, Hebrews 2:10-12 it says, "In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. He says, ‘I will declare your name to my brothers; In the presence of the congregation, I will sing your praises.’" So that's a beautiful text of Jesus singing. I was thinking about that just a moment ago 'cause I knew I was gonna preach on this. I said, "Oh, Lord, by your Spirit, sing again. Sing through me."

But Jesus sang the praises of God. I don't know if he literally sang there in the upper room, but wouldn't that have been something to hear? I imagine he had a perfect pitch. What do you think? A perfect singing voice, but to sing the praises of God. And he appears to his brothers, it says, the sons and daughters of the living God adopted into his family, and he's not ashamed to call them brothers. Not all of his Jewish kinsman received him gladly. You understand that? Not every physical descendant of Abraham could be called a son or a daughter of the living God. It says in John 1:11, it says, "He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him." Those were the Jews. They did not receive him. “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.” If that describes you, then you are one of his brothers or sisters. You're one of the sons or daughters of the living God.

But that's not true of everybody. Not everyone has received Christ. Not everyone has believed in his name. I know on Easter Sunday many come to church who have not received Christ. Many come to church who have not yet believed in his name. If I'm speaking to you, and you're in that condition, oh, I plead with you, don't leave this room still in that condition. You don't need to go anywhere. You don't need to do anything. You just need to hear and listen and believe that Christ is the Son of God, and that he shed his blood for sinners like you, and that you are a sinner, and that you hate that sin, and you wanna turn from that sin and trust in Christ. And if you do, if you believe that God's Son died in your place and that God raised him from the dead, and you confess him as your Lord and call on the name of the Lord, you will be saved. And Jesus will welcome you as a brother or a sister forever.

And it's beautiful in John's gospel, how we have a progression. We were on the outside. We were serving Satan. We were children of the Devil, he uses in John 8, "You are of your father, the Devil." But there's a progression. We're on the outside. We're in the cold. We're in the dark serving Satan, and then at some point then, he calls them servants, and they are servants of his. They are now serving God. But then he goes beyond that in John 15:15, He says, "I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”

But after the resurrection, we go beyond friends. What does he call them? "Go instead to my brothers and tell them ‘[I've risen from the dead.] I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” And it's exactly the same, the same relationship I have with my Father, you will have through me. He is my God, and he is your God through adoption. And so, he is not ashamed to call us brothers. We are adopted. The Spirit of Christ is in our hearts, crying out, "Abba, Father," and by that Spirit, it is testified to us, we're children of God. 

Now, this messenger Jesus comes and proclaims God's name to the brothers. He even sings it to them. He's going to declare God's name to the brothers. He's going to sing the praises of God. Jesus praises the Father in front of them. He praises the compassion of God. Look at verse 24 of the Psalm, how God “…has not despised or disdained the sufferings of the afflicted; he has not hidden his face from him, he has listened to his cry for help." So God is compassionate when you're afflicted, and you need deliverance, and you need help. He's compassionate. Not only is he compassionate, but he's powerful to deliver you from whatever chains are binding you, from whatever is enslaving you. He is powerful to deliver you. Remember how God said to Moses at the burning bush, "I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey… And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go [Moses]. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt."

"God is compassionate when you're afflicted, and you need deliverance, and you need help. He's compassionate. Not only is he compassionate, but he's powerful to deliver you from whatever chains are binding you, from whatever is enslaving you. "

God is compassionate, and God is powerful, and he is able to deliver slaves. But isn't it marvelous that our deliverer is someone greater than Moses? And yet, we needed that because our bond is just something greater than the Jews were experiencing in Egypt. And the power that held us down is far greater than Pharaoh's power. It's the power of Satan. The power of sin. The power of death and hell holding us down, and we needed a powerful deliverer, and so we are sent somebody who's not just a servant in God's house. We are sent someone who is a son over God's house. And He is our deliverer, and he is there to proclaim to us, "How great is our God?" 

You know what's so marvelous? Jesus says, "I have revealed you, Father, to them, and I will go on revealing you." You know how long Jesus is gonna be revealing the Father to us? Forever. Forever, he will be revealing the greatness of God to us. And we will drink in that greatness as Jesus, as Jesus reveals him 'cause he is the radiance of the glory of God. And He's gonna be shining in us, like Moses’ face was shining after that time with God. We will shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father. And so he is going to reveal God forever and ever. And so, in verses 23 through 26, based on this resurrection victory, he commands the Jews to come and feast. He commands the sons of Abraham, the descendants of Jacob, to honor him. Look at Verse 23, "You who fear the Lord, praise Him; all you descendants of Jacob, glorify Him, [Honor Him, Revere Him], and stand in awe of Him, all you descendants of Israel." This is very much Jewish language. You remember how the Apostle Paul said, "To the Jew first, and then to the Gentile." So Jesus’ in the upper room. Everyone in that room was a Jew. Everyone. And he goes to the Jew first, and He proclaims the greatness of God, the resurrection of God, to the descendants of Jacob, the descendants of Israel. 

And he commands them to praise the Lord and to honor the Lord and to revere him. And he commands them, "Come and feast." Look at verses 25-26, it says, "From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly; before those who fear you I will fulfill my vows." verse 26, "The poor will eat and be satisfied…" Now, back in the Old Covenant era, when they were doing animal sacrifice, the worshipper would bring an animal, and the animal's blood would be poured out, and the sacrifice would be burned up to God, and there would be meat left, and that meat would be eaten. And so a lot of times when you fulfill a vow to God, when you fulfill a vow, there is a feast to be had after that. So up to God goes to sacrifice, and then we get to sit and feast. And so that's what's going on here. I'm gonna fulfill my vows, and we're gonna feast. We're going to eat. We're gonna have a banquet. And so again and again we have this feast language in Christ's teachings. He says in Matthew 8:11, "…Many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven." We're gonna sit at table with him. Or in Matthew 22, "The Kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come." The big problem for many Jews, the banquet has been spread, their Messiah has come, he has been raised from the dead, and they're being invited to come and eat, but they don't wanna come. It's a feast of worship of Almighty God. "You who fear the Lord," verse 23, "praise Him; all you descendants of Jacob, glorify Him, stand in awe of Him, all you descendants of Israel." This is the nature of the feast. It's a feast of worship. Praise him. Glorify him. Stand in awe of him. And it's a command. It's not a suggestion. People are commanded to come, but yet many are still refusing to enter the feast. And friends, this is a feast that satisfies. Amen? It's a feast that deeply, richly satisfied. If you sit at Christ's table and you eat, you will never be hungry again. If you drink the water that Christ gives, you will never be thirsty again. He satisfies you. 

No earthly feast can ever satisfy. Look at verse 26, "The poor will eat and be satisfied." You see that? Satisfied. And they who seek the Lord will praise him. And what is the poor? Who are the poor here? The poor? Well, we'll start with this, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." The poor people who know they're poor. They know that they're wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked, and they have no chance to survive Judgment Day. They have no righteousness on their own. They have nothing in their hands that they can offer to God, and they come, and they say, "Oh Lord, I'm a sinner. Will you please save me?" But also, there are a lot of economically poor people in Christ's kingdom. Amen? There are a lot of physically poor people, so James says, "Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world?" Those are just poor people. "To be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom He promised to those who love Him." And so the poor are all types, rich poor and poor poor, are gonna come, and they're going to feast forever. And it's an eternal feast. It says in verse 26, " …your hearts will live forever." So you're gonna feast forever, live forever, sing forever, praise forever, and you'll never grow weary of it.

Now, in verses 27-31, we turn to the Gentiles. That's where we come in. I'm not Jewish, but I've been engrafted into a Jewish olive tree, and I'm kind of an honorary Jew now, kind of an honorary son of Abraham, just like you if you're a child of God. And so we have been grafted in. Salvation comes from the Jews, but it doesn't stop there. It's "..to the Jew first," but that's not the end of the line, "And then to the Gentile." And so 27-31 is the ends of the earth being invited to sit at the banquet table, too. And this was always God's plan. This isn't Plan B. It's not like the Gentiles are an afterthought. It was through Abraham that all peoples on earth would be blessed. It was from the very beginning of the call of Abraham, God intended to do this. But look verse by verse with me, look at verse 27, "All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him…"

Do you see missions here? Do you see the Great Commission, the advance of the gospel? Do you see Gentiles who are so distant from the Jews, to the distant islands like Irian Jaya or in Thailand, or East Asia, in China, Vietnam, even here in the US? You can think how distant North America would have been to the Jews living there in Jesus' time. And all the ends of the earth, they're going to remember and turn to the Lord. Remember, we're continually thinking about Christ, and we keep remembering and turning to the Lord. We hear the gospel. Generally, you don't believe the first time you hear. You generally don't. It could happen, but it's just like, little by little, then it comes. We remember Jesus. He died on the cross. They'll remember in their darkest night that Christ rose from the dead, and they'll believe. And they're gonna turn to the Lord. And the families of nations will bow down before him. They're going to worship Christ. Verse 28, why should they do that? Because "…dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations." It has to do with a kingdom. Jesus is a mighty king. His dominion extends to the distant lands.

He is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and he rules over all things. You know, the essence of the gospel advance is that former rebels lay down their weapons of rebellion, and they submit to the yoke, the kingly yoke of Jesus, and they follow him for the rest of their lives. And He becomes their king and their Lord, and they serve him. And that's what happens when the Kingdom of Heaven advances, when the gospel is preached, and you hear these words, "Come unto Me. Turn to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. Take that stiff rebellious neck of yours and put it under my kingly yoke, and you will have rest for your souls. You've been serving a harder yoke.“ I've already talked about it, the yoke of Satan, the yoke of sin, the yoke of death, and the yoke of Hell. It's a crushing burden that you can't bear, and you've been trying to serve, but it has crushed you. Throw it off and take Jesus' light yoke upon you, the yoke of realizing he's the king and you're not. His will be done, not yours. His law is not your rebellion now. You're gonna follow him, and how beautiful and how sweet is that?

"For dominion belongs to the Lord." You know what that sounds like to me? The Great Commission. "All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of people who learn that all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me." That's the lesson. They go and learn that I'm the king. The Kingdom of God is spreading. Verse 29, "All the rich of the earth will feast and worship." We were talking about poor a minute ago. Hey, anybody can come. As I said, rich-poor can come, and poor-poor can come. But you know, as soon as they come, they're not poor anymore. You know what happens to them? They become heirs of the world. Read about it in Romans 4. Heirs of the world. You're gonna get it all, all the stuff they're fighting over, all this stuff they're scrapping over, you're gonna get it. You're gonna be an heir of the world. "Blessed are the meek," for what do they get? "They will inherit the earth," but not this groaning, dying, corrupted earth, the New Earth, the resurrected Earth. That's what you'll inherit. How magnificent will be that be? And it'll be yours forever. How sweet is that?

And they're gonna come, the rich of the earth will come, and they will feast and worship. Those who go down to the dust will kneel before him, those who cannot keep themselves alive. Any of you able to keep yourself alive? Any of you able to face the ICU unafraid, (without Jesus now) unafraid? And you can face any disease or illness. You know why? “Because medical science has taken us so far, and we're able to.” Can you keep yourself alive? You can't keep yourself alive, but there is someone who can raise you from the dead. There is someone who can raise you up out of the grave. And so look what it says here in verse 29, "…all who go down to the dust will kneel before him---those who cannot keep themselves alive." That's us. We are the mortal. We are the dying ones, and we're going to the grave, but Jesus can raise us up, and you know what He's gonna do? He's gonna raise you up to your knees, and there you will be. I don't mean physically forever, I think we'll be doing some walking in the New Earth, but in your hearts forever, you're gonna be kneeling before him. And you're going to say, "Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God, the Father." Every knee is gonna bow, and you're going to give him the glory and the praise He deserves.

Verse 30, "Posterity will serve him." Future generations will be told about the Lord. That's us. We weren't born when all this happened. We weren't born when Psalm 22 was written. We are the posterity. We are the future generations. And if the Lord tarries, decides to have another 500 years of harvesting? Praise God, more souls to be saved. It's his decision. He can do whatever he wants, but future generations will hear. This story will never die. The Holy Spirit will not let it die. In every generation, the elect are going to come, and they're going to turn to the Lord and believe, in every generation. Notice the certainty of this. Look at verse 30. Not “posterity, we sure hope will serve Him. We're hopeful that future generations will be told about the Lord.” It's not saying that at all. "They will serve Him, and they will be told." The Holy Spirit's gonna guarantee that.

Andy, I'm gonna use that verse on Saturday. What do you think? This coming Saturday, I get to preach in Orlando on the topic of “What About Those Who Have Never Heard the Gospel?” And you know what verse 30 tells me? Let's go out and tell them. Amen? Let's preach the gospel to them. And you know what's gonna happen? Every single one of God's elect is gonna hear that gospel message, all of them are, and they're going to turn, and they're going to believe. Verse 31, "They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn: He has done it!" That's the centerpiece of the gospel message. You know what? Apart from Christ, you are unrighteous. Apart from Christ, you are wicked, and you cannot survive Judgment Day. But in Christ, instantly, by faith alone, the righteousness of Christ will be credited to you, and it will be yours forever, and in that righteousness, you will stand. That perfect obedience of Christ will be credited to you, and you will be instantly a righteousness billionaire. Perfect righteousness, yours. So look at verse 31, "They will proclaim His righteousness," not our righteousness. Christ's righteousness to a people yet unborn because he, Christ, has done it. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for this time to study Psalm 22. We thank you for the triumph that comes from acknowledging these words. We thank you for the sufferings of Christ and for the glories that followed and are following still. We thank you that we have come to faith in Christ. Oh, God, I pray that every Christian here would just stand in awe of Psalm 22 and what you predicted you would do and what you have done. And Lord, I pray that we would embrace missions. I pray that we would be a missionary people. I pray that we'd be a great commission people. I pray that we would sacrifice financially and sacrifice time and energy and ourselves so that the ends of the earth can hear and turn and believe, and help us to go in the confidence of knowing that God will do this. Oh, God, you are great. You are majestic. I pray, oh, Lord, that you would lift up broken-hearted people right now, lift up those laboring in sin. Break the chains. Help them to see that, in Christ, the chains are already broken. Satan has been lying to them as though the chains were still there, and they're not. Oh Lord, give them the freedom to rise and walk in holiness, and Lord, one final prayer for those that are here right now outside of Christ, oh, Lord, call them in now, by your transforming grace. In Jesus' name, I pray. Amen.

Now, for years, I've been watching sporting events, and for years, I've been told by successful athletes what the secret of their success was and that it was, believe in yourself. If you just believe in yourself, you can achieve anything. Now, I wanna add, as I listen to, let's say, Allen Iverson telling me, “Believe in yourself and be lightning quick.” Or if it's David Robinson, he never said it, but “Believe in yourself, and be 7 feet tall,” I get it. Now, I don't think it really works, that if I believe in myself, I can be an Olympic athlete and win a gold medal.

Actually, I'm suspect of the whole philosophy. I wanna challenge it right now in your hearing because it's so much a part of the American myth. It's so much a part of what we think is true. It's so much a part of our educational system now that young people are being told this again and again, and they're just reciting back the things that they've been trained to say, “Believe in yourself.” Ben Franklin said it in 1736, “God helps those who help themselves.”

It's the gospel of self-reliance and it’s part of the American myth. The self-made man that faces the elements, loneliness, disease, hostile people, enemies, to carve out an existence from the wilderness with his own bare hands, with his axe. Daniel Boone carving a road through the Cumberland Gap to settle in the wilderness of Kentucky. Abraham Lincoln in that same area in Kentucky, rising up from a log cabin to be the president of the United States. Booker T. Washington writing his memoirs, calling it Up From Slavery. Immigrants coming in from Ellis Island, passing by the Statue of Liberty, where it says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” And they go into the city, in New York or Chicago or some other place in the inner reaches of the US, and they make a living for themselves and they build a legacy out of their own labor and their own efforts. And so we're told that God helps those that help themselves. God helps those that save themselves.

A poll was done by Barna concerning that phrase, God helps those who help themselves. If they ever come from Barna and ask you that question and ask, “Is it in the Bible?” Please be part of the 19 percent that said no. Seventy-five percent of the teens that were asked that question were told it is the central message of the Bible. Friends, it is not the central message of the Bible. The central message of the Bible is stated in many different times and places, many different ways. But how about this? “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the worst.” Old Testament version would be, “Trust in the Lord with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will direct your paths.” Or as Jesus put it in John 14:1, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.”

Overcoming self-confidence is part of that fight each one of us has with the sin nature, we got it from Adam, as part of our fall in Adam. Amazingly, human beings can be in open rebellion against God, their minds saturated with enmity against God, unable to obey his laws and they can still say, “I'm basically a good person.” Though we are frail and weak, harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd, we can still feel mighty and capable and powerful because of some little tricks we can do in space and time.

Our culture sells us this line again and again: you can do anything you wanna do, be anything you wanna be, if you just believe in yourself. This is the message of self-esteem, of self-confidence, of self-assurance, of self-salvation. It's part of the American myth, and it is a myth because the Bible is diametrically opposed to all of this. The message of the Bible is that we need a savior. We cannot save ourselves. We need a savior, and his name is Jesus Christ. And it's my privilege every week to get up here and tell you that.

And here as we come to this text in Matthew 26:31-35, we have sadly put on full display the overweening confidence of the apostles, particularly Peter. Peter is a main example. The self-confidence of these men is completely misplaced as later events will bear out. They were absolutely certain of their loyalty to Christ, they were certain of their commitment to him. They felt that nothing could come their way that could shake that loyalty, that would shake that commitment. They were certain of it; they were certain that they were willing to die for him. All 11 of them felt the same way. And that same night - within hours of these statements, these assertions - that same night, they all abandoned Jesus and ran for their lives. Just as Jesus said they would do.

Isn't it marvelous that we have a savior that knows us completely, knows exactly what we're going to do and loves us anyway? Isn't that marvelous? I get to preach a savior that knows us so completely and loves us anyway. Jesus said, “Apart from me, you can do nothing.” I don't think we really believe that as we should. It's the centerpiece of my sanctification to grow, to believe that more and more vigorously. Apart from Christ, I can do nothing. We think of ourselves more highly than we should.

And so today we get to look in a mirror, if we do it rightly, you'll look in these verses as in a mirror, and you'll see yourself. You're not gonna blame Peter, you're not gonna blame the 11, you're gonna see yourself. And you get a chance as you look in this text to look at the road ahead for you. But what is facing you from here until the day you die or the day the Lord returns? The Bible tells us it's an arduous, difficult journey, a race you're going to run. It's going to be opposed every step of the way by the world, the flesh, and the devil.

And my question to you is, just like we heard in the song, “How do you know?” That's how they began. I was thinking of those words, How do you know you're going to make it? How do you know you're gonna finish your race? And if your answer has anything basically to do with yourself, you're wrong, you're off. And I wanna heal you of that today. I want you to say “The way I know I'm gonna finish this race is that Christ, the very one who began that work in me, is gonna carry it on to completion. If left to myself, I will fail. Satan is too strong for me. He is able to orchestrate circumstances around me and I will come crashing to the ground, just like these 11 did.” Look in the mirror, look at these verses as in a mirror and find yourself, and then look up from it to Christ and say, “Oh God, save me, save me from myself, wean me off of self-reliance from this text.”

Let's look at it carefully, verse by verse. Look at verse 31, there Christ predicts the sinful flight of the apostles. “Then Jesus told them, ‘This very night, you will all fall away on account of me. For it is written: “I will strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.”’” This very night. What night is it? Well, we're jumping right in the middle here in this sermon, to the context that we've been following along in Matthew's gospel. Matthew 26-28, the crucifixion account and the resurrection account, that's where we're at in Matthew's gospel.

And that was the night of Jesus' arrest. By then, Jesus had been anointed by Mary in Bethany. Judas had already arranged to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. And then we saw Jesus prepare the final Passover through the disciples that were sent on ahead, they prepared that upper room. And he predicted Judas's betrayal, we saw that last time, and he celebrated the last supper with them, instituting body and blood as the permanent reminder of his death for them. “This is my body, this is my blood. The blood of the New Covenant, do this in remembrance of me.” We talked about all of these things last time, and then they sang a hymn and they went out in verse 30.

Now, in between all of that, we have to insert John's gospel and all of the incredible rich instruction that Jesus gives them there in John 14-16, and then the prayer that he does for them in John 17. So that happened before, I think, verse 30 in our Chapter. So he does all of these things, he tells them of the promised Holy Spirit, the counselor who's going to come. And he tells them of the persecution and suffering they're going to go through for his name's sake, that in this world that they would have trouble. And that they would be hated by all people on account of him, and that they would be put out of the synagogues, and that they would be beaten and even be put to death. And those who were doing these things would think they were serving God by doing them.

And he warned them about all of these things, and then he prayed for them beautifully, that none would be lost. Except the one doomed to destruction, he leaves him out of that prayer. But that none of them would be lost, and he prays for those who will receive the gospel through their word, that all of them, all of us, will be one. Just as the Father and the Son is one that we would all be one. All of these things happening, and the teachings and instructions he was giving there in the upper room, but they weren't ready for all of that. They couldn't hear it all. Jesus acknowledged that in John's gospel. In John 16:12, he says, “I have much to say to you, more than you can now bear.” You're not able to absorb all of this and take it all in.

At some point they would be ready for all of these themes, the themes of persecution and suffering, and the coming Holy Spirit and all of those things, but first they had to learn a lesson, a very bitter lesson. He'd warn them about it. He's warning them right here in this text. It's a bitter lesson about themselves, but the words wouldn't be enough, they had to live it out. They had to go through it. And only, especially after Peter, only after Peter went through it, did he see who he really was, did he understand how self-reliant he had been and how much he needed a savior. And so all of that happened, they sing a hymn, and then they go out, go out from Jerusalem.

They're going out to the Mount of Olives. They're going to Gethsemane, the very place where Judas knew where they would go, the place where Jesus would pray, and the place also where he would be arrested. And they would make their way out of the crowded city of Jerusalem, where there would be hundreds of thousands of pilgrims that were there to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Passover.

And they would cross the Kidron Valley, they would go across the Brook Kidron, where all of the blood from the sacrifices, the thousands and thousands of lambs that had been slaughtered that night was being carried down also perhaps by some of the rain water. And it was being carried down there, and so it's like a river of blood they must have literally physically crossed as they crossed the Kidron Brook to go up to Gethsemane. I don't know if they noticed by the light of the full moon, but I'm certain that Jesus must have understood the significance of those lambs that were slaughtered and how they pointed to what was about to happen to him.

And so they were going to Gethsemane. And I don't know if it was while he was on the way or right before they left, or how it happens, but following a chronological order, they sang the hymn and went out and perhaps as they were walking along, or maybe once they got to Gethsemane, but he drops a bombshell on them, and Jesus is just rocking their world. One bomb shell after another. And they're just not ready for all of this. They're not ready to hear it. He just said a moment ago that Judas was going to betray him, and they were all troubled by that, and very sad and began to say, one after the other, “Surely not I Lord,” all that. Now he's very clear about who he means. Maybe they didn't know for sure it was Judas, but now he's very clear when he says these words, “This very night, you will all fall away on account of me,” with no doubt about it. And look at the time frames, it's very specific. This very night, it's going to happen, within hours.

Now, what does it mean they will all fall away? The Greek word is “scandalidzo,” from which we get “scandal” or “scandalized.” Generally, translated in the sense of a stumbling stone, you'll stumble tonight. The literalistic translation has to do with a trapper, a snare with a kind of a bait stick that the prey goes after to get lured in and then trapped. And so that's going to happen to all of you. You're gonna get lured in and you're gonna get trapped. And what was the bait? The bait would be their love for their own lives, their love for themselves, that was the bait. And Satan was going to put a trap around them and he would cause them to flee because they loved their lives in this world.

The root of this scandal was Jesus' suffering and death, something that they just couldn't seem to get their minds around, something they just couldn't seem to accept that Jesus had to die. Peter in particular, just struggled with this. He just couldn't come to grips with it. It began in Matthew's gospel and back in chapter 16 where, in Caesarea Philippi, he has this time with his disciples. And it says, “From that time on, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hand of the elders, chief priest and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed, and on the third day, be raised to life.” He was very clear about this. “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ‘Never, Lord!’ he said, ‘This shall never happen to you!’ Jesus turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You're a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.’”

Well, the apostles all expected, as we've been told time and again - certainly after the triumphal entry, as Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph - they really expected that he would sit on a glorious throne and rule over the whole world, and that they would get to sit at his right and his left on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel, and it was going to be a time of glory and of honor, and prestige, and comfort and luxury, and all. That's what they really thought was going to happen. And so Jesus is scandalizing them with his arrest and his suffering and death, they couldn't understand it. They couldn't understand the need for the suffering servant, the need for the shed blood of Jesus, they didn't understand the atonement.

And so as he was being arrested, they would be scandalized by their shock, and they would revert to their former way of thinking, “Save yourself, you need to save yourself,” and they would run. They would not trust him, they would be left bewildered, they would be back where they started, pondering a way to re-enter their own lives. They left the fishing industry, they left their boats and their nets, and maybe they'd go back to that. It'd be a lot easier for the fishermen than for Matthew, the tax collector. I don't think he's getting that thing again, that was a good setup. And there was definitely some Jew that took his place as a tax collector, and so it'd be really hard for Matthew, but they probably were thinking these kinds of things. And Jesus said, “This very night, you’ll all fall away because of me, you'll be scandalized because of me. I'm going to offend you. Because of what I am saying, because of what I am doing, because of me, you will be offended.”

It's the very same thing that he said in reference to John the Baptist. Remember when John was in prison and he wasn't quite sure he was following the trajectory of Jesus' ministry. It didn't make a lot of sense to him, and he was being broken down in prison, it was hard for him. And so he sent messengers, Matthew 11, he sent messengers to Jesus to ask, “Are you the one who was to come or should we expect someone else?” I mean, do you realize what John's asking there? Someone else means his life, John's life, has been wasted because he pointed to him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He pointed to him, he was the precursor, and now he's arrested and he's gonna die. So he was not the voice of the one calling in the wilderness, he was just reeling through unbelief at that moment.

Jesus then performs a bunch of miracles in front of the messengers, and he said, “Go back and report to John what you see and hear, the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the good news is preached to the poor.” And then he said this, “Blessed are all those who do not fall away on account of me. Don't let anything that I'm doing offend you. Trust me in everything I'm doing. Not just some of what I'm doing, trust everything I'm doing. Don't fall away on account of me.”

But he says to the 11, “This very night, you will all fall away on account of me.” Isn't it amazing how little loyalty and courage they had after watching and being involved in the only perfect ministry there has ever been? That Jesus could not engender more loyalty and more courage than that is just astonishing.

Note again, Jesus' specific and detailed knowledge of the future, as we discussed last time in reference to Judas. Jesus has meticulous, complete, accurate foreknowledge of everything that will happen. John makes it plain concerning this very night when he's arrested in John 18:4, it says, “Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and said, ‘Who is it you're looking for?’” So John makes it very plain, what he wants us to think. Do you not understand Jesus' omniscience? He knew everything that was going to happen to him before it happened.

Well it wasn't just that he knew everything that was going to happen to him, he knew everything that was gonna happen to them. And so he says in John 13:19, “I'm telling you this now, before it happens, so that when it does happen, you will believe that I am.” That’s all it says in the Greek, “you will believe I am.” “You'll believe that I am God, so that when all of the bad things that are about to happen tonight happen, you will believe that I am God.” Says it again, John 14:29, “I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen, you will believe.”

So Jesus is predicting their falling away. So he knows the future, he knows it perfectly. He also knows the past, and by that I mean specifically, he knows prophetic scripture. He knows the Old Testament better than any man that's ever lived, and so he finds an obscure prophecy in Zechariah, that predicts that those things would happen, this very thing would happen. The same book that predicted the 30 pieces of silver, the same book that predicted what would happen to the 30 pieces of silver, we'll get into all that in Matthew 27. But in Zechariah 11 it was all predicted.

The 30 pieces, the throwing to the potter in the house of the Lord, all of that predicted, he then goes ahead two chapters to find this phenomenon, in Zechariah 13:7, we have this prophecy, “‘Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who is close to me!’ declares the Lord almighty, ‘Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered, and I will turn my hand against the little ones.’” At Zechariah 13:7, this prophecy shows that even their falling away, even their running away to save their lives had been predicted by the prophets.

Now, I would say that without Jesus' link here, without his explanation, we wouldn't have found it. We wouldn't have linked it to this event, we wouldn't have found Jesus and his arrest and them running away here, but as William Cowper put it in one of his beautiful hymns, “God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.” So if he tells us it was predicted in Zechariah 13:7, it was, and so it was made plain.

And in the original context, in Zechariah 13, Zechariah is talking about false prophets who are going to turn away from their false prophecy and forsake it, and renounce those false prophecies, but suddenly in Zechariah 13:7, the prophet speaks into this word about the true shepherd of Israel, and he says, “Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.” And it's amazing, the prophecy calls for God's sword to awake against “my shepherd,” “my associate,” or “the one who is close to me.” It's very strong in the original language. It really points to the deity of Christ. The shepherd of God's sheep is one who's very close to Almighty God. Made me think of Philippians 2:6, “Jesus who being in very nature, God did not think it robbery,” KJV gives us, “did not think it robbery to be equal with God.” It wasn't 'cause he was equal with God and is. He says in John 10:30, “I and the Father are one,” and so strike the shepherd, the associate, the one who's close to me, and the sheep are gonna be scattered.

But it's also clearly a prediction of the atoning work of Jesus on the cross. Jesus would be struck by the wrath of God. And so I meditated on this and I thought, it's amazing. Jesus is our good shepherd. When you take the shepherd away, the sheep have no protection. We are at the mercy of the wolves and they have no mercy, and that's why the sheep are scattered, we're in danger. So that's the effect. That's why it happened. That's why they ran away, because their shepherd was gone - How much do we need Jesus! But then conversely, isn't it marvelous that it's as Jesus is being struck, that he provides the shelter for us, so that we are protected! It's in the striking we get our protection. So I wanna say the final story is strike the shepherd and the sheep will be gathered. Amen. Hallelujah. So they're scattered for a while, but then the Lord is gonna gather them by the Holy Spirit and bring them back. So it's kind of depressing this text, but it has a happy ending. They're going to run, they're gonna get scattered, and Jesus is going to bring them all back. We'll talk about that at the end.

I haven't forgotten verse 32, but let's go on to verse 33. I'll do verse 32 at the end. But look at verse 33, Peter displays a sinful self-reliance. He replies, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.” I don't know if this is true, but I'm gonna go ahead and say it, anyway. This may be the worst statement ever made in scripture by a true follower of Christ. If there are others, fine, find them and we'll talk about it. But it's up there. It's in the top five. This is horrible. It's horrible at many levels. 

Let's do the worst part of it at all. First of all, Peter's statement is arrogant, over against Jesus himself. In effect, is he not saying, “Jesus, you're wrong. You're wrong.” Now, Peter's bold to do this, I've noted it several times in the pulpit here, and I'll just say it briefly, four times Peter says “Never” to the Lord. Four times. I've already quoted one in Matthew 16 about his death. “Never Lord!” he said, “this shall never happen to you.” What I love about each of these four times, God gets the final word, every time. Jesus gets the final word. So Peter is just wrong. He rebukes him in Matthew 16.

Here in our text, he says it twice. He says it here, and then he says it again, “Even if I have to die with you, I never will disown you.” So he says it twice. He says it at the foot washing, remember that one? “Lord, are you gonna wash my feet?” Jesus says, “You don't understand, later you will,” and he proceeds. He said, “Never, Lord. You will never wash my feet.” I love the fact that a minute later, he's washing Peter's feet. Isn't that wonderful? Thank God that Jesus wins every argument he has with us.

But even after the resurrection, even after the giving of the Holy Spirit, he's still doing it, still fighting that fleshly tendency to challenge God and to disagree with God. That's when, in Acts 10, the Lord is getting him ready to go preach the gospel to a Gentile, to Cornelius, remember that, and he shows him a sheet full of animals that up to that time had been unclean for him as a Jew, but now God has made clean, because Jesus has declared all foods clean. He says, “Arise Peter, kill and eat.” And he said, “Never, Lord, I've never eaten anything impure or unclean.” And then the voice comes from heaven a second time, “Peter, do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This is his tendency.

In effect, what is Peter saying to Jesus? “Jesus, you know a lot of things. You're really good at those miracles, I don't know how you do it, it's amazing, and you're right about so many things, but you're wrong about me. You're wrong about me.” The root issue here is definitely pride. “You don't know me very well.” And yet, isn't this true? Psalm 139, “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise ... before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely, O Lord.” He has searched us and he knows us.

Secondly, Peter's statement is arrogant compared to his friends, the other apostles. Do you see it? But what is he saying here compared to them? “I am the greatest of all the apostles. I am the first, the chief, the most courageous, the most loyal, and even if all fall away on account of you, I know I never will.” Very arrogant, and it's the kind of jockeying that you see these guys doing all the time, arguing among themselves as to which of them is the greatest. If you were one of the 11 and you heard Peter say that, wouldn't that cause a rise out of you? Say, “Now wait a minute, Peter. Wait a minute. I think I might actually be the last to cave in.” And so there was that kind of bickering, that kind of arguing that goes on, that jockeying for position.

But friends, what about this, what about Philippians 2:3, “Do nothing out of selfishness or vain conceit, but in humility, consider others better than yourselves.” Do you see that kind of humility in this statement here by Peter? I don't. Is he considering others better than himself?

So the root issue here is the whole theme of the sermon, I believe, and that's pride and self-reliance. Pride and self-reliance. He underestimates the incredible trial that he's about to face, he doesn't understand how strong the prince of this world who is coming is. He said, “The prince of this world is coming, and he has nothing on me.” Jesus said that. But he's coming. And he is going to sift them all like wheat, Luke tells us. He's going to test them.

So he greatly underestimates the trial that's coming, but even worse, he greatly overestimates his ability to meet any trial that comes. It's like, “I got this one. I can handle this night, and I am not running, and I am not going to forsake you.” He's relying on himself. “I will be up to the task.” We'll talk more about self-reliance at the end of the message.

In verse 34, Christ predicts Peter's threefold denial. He says, “I tell you the truth, this very night before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.” This is a very specific prophecy, it goes even beyond this very night. It's before the rooster crows. The Jews divided the evening into four parts; by this time two of those parts are done. Evening was from six to nine. Midnight from nine until 12. The cock crow could happen anywhere from 12 until three. And morning from three to six. By the time they arrived in Gethsemane, I think it's well after midnight. It's been a full night, the Passover lamb can't be slaughtered until Twilight. And so, they've had all of these things, the eating, all of the teaching, everything they had, so I think it's late, really late, or early, depending on how you looked at it, the next day.

And so Jesus is predicting that they're going to fall away within a couple of hours. Within a couple of hours. That Peter is gonna deny him three times, within a couple of hours. And yet, do you not see the grace of God in all of this? It is by this prediction, the specificity of it, that God is going to draw Peter back from the dark extremities of unbelief and of turning away, and he's gonna draw him back away, back into the light of a healthy walk with Christ. You remember what happens? He denies him, denies him, denies him, and he even calls down curses on himself, and then the rooster crows and then he remembers. He remembers the words that the Lord had spoken, and he goes away from that very tempting and tough situation, and he goes alone, and he weeps bitterly, and that's the road back. That's the road back. 

Do you realize what Jesus said Peter would do? “You will disown me. You'll disown me. You'll deny that you even know me.” Talk about taking an axe in your hands and chopping down the tree you're sitting on, if you could even do that. Imagine that. Do you realize the significance of that knowing that happens between the soul and Christ? Do you realize that that is the essence of eternal life? In John 17:3, “Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” What is Peter saying? “I don't know Jesus.” According to John 17:3, he's saying, “I don't have eternal life, I'm dead.”

Conversely, do you realize how significant it will be on Judgment Day for Jesus to know you?  “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evil doers.’” Says it several times. In Luke 13, “You will stand outside, knocking on the door and saying, ‘Sir sir, open the door.’ But he will answer, ‘I don't know you or where you come from.’” That's in a parable. “I don't know you.”

Luke 12:9, “He who disowns me before men will himself be disowned before the angels of God.” 2 Timothy 2:12, “If we disown him, he will also disown us.” Thanks be to God he didn't disown Peter, amen. He disowned him three times. He said, “I don't even know him. Never heard of him. I'm not his disciple.”

And he's very specific about the rooster crowing and about the number of times, three times, and that specificity, again, displays Christ's omniscience, and the prediction underscores Christ's grace and love, because he's going to go as a good shepherd and he's gonna bring this sinner back in. He's gonna restore him, he's going to redeem him, he's going to renew him, he's going to give him a ministry that he doesn't deserve, and he's going to bolster him up and strengthen him in his two weak areas, his self-reliance and his fear of death.

And he's gonna cure both of those, so that he will be a mighty minister of the gospel for Jesus Christ. He's gonna cure both of them. And so in John 21, when he restores him and he says, “Do you love me?” He says, “I love you,” three times. He restores him, and then he says, “I tell you the truth, in the past, when you were younger, you dressed yourself and you went wherever you wanted to go, but in the future, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you and take you where you do not wanna go.” And then John tells us that this is the way Peter would glorify God by death. And so he would lose his self-reliance and he would lose his fear of death, but he had some very bitter learning to go through first.

And then in verse 35, Peter and the other apostles, deep in their sinful self-reliance, they go even deeper here. I would have stopped after the first statement, wouldn't you? Maybe, I don't know. See, I think I was just arrogant there. I probably would have said it five more times, so I don't know. But it's so stunning, it's not enough, this one encounter, he's gonna go even deeper. “I see you're getting real specific with the prophecy here Lord, but you're still wrong. Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” And all the other disciples said the same. This is amazing, arrogance. “Lord, you are so wrong about me.”

Now, here we see the total reliance on self, that's gonna translate into the sin of prayerlessness in a moment in Gethsemane. They're not gonna pray. You know why? Because they don't need to pray, because they've got this one, they're fine, they're underestimating what's coming their way, and they're not ready for it. If they were not so self-reliant, they would pray. The mark of your self-reliance and mine is prayerlessness. That's how you know. How do I know that I'm self-reliant, it is prayerlessness. Whatever you don't pray about, that's what you're relying on yourself to do. I'm convinced of that. So I see big pockets of self-reliance in my life.

Isn't it interesting that Peter also goes to the issue of death, and he says, “Even if I have to die.” I think that's the very thing he was afraid of. That's what made him deny Jesus. He was afraid of torture and death. He was afraid of torture and death. So when the servant girl challenges him at the entrance of the high priest's house, he's gonna shrink back and say, “No, no, I don't know him,” and then it's gonna get worse and worse, and Jesus had called on his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will find it. What good would it be for a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”

The heroes in the book of Revelation, we're told about them, in Revelation 12:11, “They overcame Satan by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, that they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” But Peter does love his life so much as to shrink from death, so do the other of the 11, and it's completely understandable. I'm not slamming on Peter here. It is the most natural thing in the world to preserve yourself, to seek survival. It is completely natural. All animals do it, all people too. You try to survive, try to live for another day. Get out of it, get your foot out of the net and get out of there, so you don't die. It's the most natural thing in the world.

It is supernatural to face death joyfully because you believe in an invisible heaven that's going to come. That's supernatural, that comes only by faith, and that's a supernatural work of God's grace. And that's what makes Peter's self-reliance so bad. Only God can make us supernaturally confident in the face of our own death. It is only by faith that we can face the visible reality of our death with the invisible reality of the heaven that will follow it. Self-reliance looks ahead to the trial and looks inward to the resource and says, “I can do it.” But faith looks ahead to the trial and looks upward to God and says, “Only by your help and your strength can I do this.” Through prayer, you say, “God, grant me strength. I can't face this trial alone. You've gotta help me.”

Well, let's go back to verse 32. Jesus predicts the cure. Amen. Jesus predicts the cure. The final word will be grace, the final word will be triumph and victory, not defeat for these 11. Then Jesus told them in verse 31, “This very night, you will all fall away on account of me. For it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’” Verse 32,  “But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”

I'm going to die, but I'm going to rise again. And then I'm going to see you again. This isn't gonna be our last night, it's a bad night, but this isn't our last time together, you will meet me in Galilee and we will be together and you'll see me in my resurrection glory, and we'll go on from there. And I'm not gonna fire you, I could, but I'm not gonna fire you and find some people who will be more loyal and more courageous and more faith-filled, I don't know where I'd find them, 'cause we're all the same. No, I'm gonna work with you and I'm going to restore you, I'm not gonna abandon you, I'm going to renew you, and even better, I'm gonna give you the power of the Holy Spirit, and by the power of the Spirit, you're gonna overcome your self-reliance and you're gonna overcome your fear of death. And you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. And when they arrest you, don't worry about what to say, because at that time it will be given you what to say, because it's not gonna be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.

And you will lose your fear - and so he did, in Acts chapter 4, there's Peter arrested for the healing of a lame man, and he and John are brought in, and then Peter filled with the Holy Spirit, said this, “Rulers and elders of the people,” those were his arrestors, his inquisitors, his executioners, he's not afraid of them at all. “Rulers and elders of the people, if we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a cripple and are asked how he was healed, then know this, you and all the people of Israel, it is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. He is the stone you builders rejected, which has become the capstone. Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” He's lost his self-reliance, and he's lost his fear of death. And why? Because the Holy Spirit was poured out on him.

And so it would be for all of them. All of them would be martyred. Church history tells us one story after another, you can look it up, what tradition says. Some hideous deaths awaited them, but they were not afraid, they continued to testify to the resurrection of Christ. All except John, who went in exile in Patmos. They lost their fear of death, and they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. And so, this story has a happy ending. Praise God.

What applications can we take from it? First of all, the most significant form of self-reliance you have, has to do with judgment day, your own death, judgment day and heaven and hell. May I plead with you on the basis of the gospel to stop trusting in yourself and flee to Christ? May I plead with you to look to Christ alone? Do not begin to say, “I'm not a sinner.” You know you are. The law of God stands against you. All of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There is not one of us righteous, not one of us can stand on our own righteousness before the judgment seat of a holy God who sees everything we've ever done, and survive. And so we must have a savior. So turn away from self-reliance and trust in Christ. He is the Son of God, his blood was shed on the cross for sinners like you and me. And as we've already said, God raised him from the dead on the third day, and that atonement has been accepted.

If you've already come to Christ, you're a Christian, face the weight of the question I asked you earlier. How do you know you're going to finish this race? Is it because it's going to be easy? It's not. The world, the flesh and the devil will oppose you every step of the way, and you know it. How then do you know you're going to finish? There is still a part of you that says, “Because I …” There's still a part of you. You may not say it at the time of confessional, you know where I say, “How do you know?” “Jesus saved me.” 

You know the right answers, but we don't live them like we should. All of us struggle with self-reliance. How do I know that? Because one of the greatest apostles, greatest men that ever lived was the Apostle Paul, and he struggled with it, badly. And as a matter of fact, the only thing that would get him to turn away was to be in trial so severe that he thought he was going to die. That's the only thing that can wean us off our self-reliance.

2 Corinthians 1:8-9, “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the trials we faced in Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed in our hearts, we felt the sentence of death. But this happened so that we might no longer rely on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead.” There's so much in there. What that teaches me is that even the apostle, a mature man of God, was still somewhat self-reliant. And only the pressure of extreme trial caused him to rely fully on God who raises the dead.

So what are those things you think you can handle and don't need to pray about? What would you include in that? Parts of your job, your work life, financial life, academic life, relationships, marriage, parenting, single life, sexual purity? You got that one? Are you able to handle that one on your own? How about anxiety? You can handle anxiety. “I got anxiety licked, I'm good at anxiety.” Well, you're good at anxiety, you're not good at beating it, but we can be anxious.

Alright, what is it? Circle with a red pen those areas of your life that you don't think you need to pray about. It's like, “Oh, I know the right answer. That's nothing, I know I need to... “ Alright, what do you actually pray about and what do you not pray about? And I would contend those things you actually don't pray about, there's a good indication you're probably relying on yourself. Forsake that. Learn to pray about everything. Learn to ask God for help in everything. Encourage one another in your fellowship with another, look to God, trust in God, let's trust in him for all things.

Finally, I want to point you up into the heavenly realms, and I wanna tell you something that's going on right now to help you, and it's mentioned in the parallel account. Go in your Bibles, hope I get the quote right this time, Luke 22:31-32. I wanna finish by pointing to this one. It's the same story, but it was told with a little more detail in Luke's gospel. Jesus predicting Peter's falling away. Luke 22:31-32. There Jesus says this to Peter, “Simon, Simon, Satan has demanded to sift you as wheat.” The you there is plural. So he's gonna sift all of you. “But I have prayed for you, Simon,” the you there is singular, “I've prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

This is an incredibly vital glimpse into the heavenly realms to the priestly prayer ministry of Jesus for you. He is at the right hand of God, Hebrews 7:25, and is interceding for you right now. And it tells us who he's talking to, we know, he's talking to the Father. He's talking to the Father, but it tells us the topic of the conversation. “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith” - Simon's faith is the topic of that conversation. “Father, I'm praying right now for Simon's faith.” What is the end of that prayer? What is the end result? “That it won't fail. That it won't fail.”

Let me ask you a question, without Jesus' priestly ministry for you, do you think your faith would fail? Can your faith survive the siege warfare of the devil as he hurls the world at you, and as your flesh unlocks the gate of the walled fortress to let the enemy in, can you survive all of that without Jesus' intercessory prayer for you? I tell you, you can't. So therefore, he's praying for you continually, that your faith won't fail. And guess what? It won't. It won't. Why? Because the God who gave it to you will sustain it every moment of your lives until the day you die. And the Son who died, who shed his blood to buy you that faith, is praying that you'll keep having it until the day you die, and then you will. You will.

So what I would urge you to do is, first, just know that's going on all the time. He is interceding for you, that your faith won't fail. Don't trust in yourself, rely on him and join him in his intercessory prayer ministry for yourself. Say, “Oh Lord, please, sustain my faith, don't let my faith fail, let me keep believing in you, let me... “ And then extend it outward and join in a kind of a priestly ministry for each other. Let's pray for each other. Pray for so and so that his faith won't fail. Her faith won't fail. They're going through a medical trial, I'm praying that their faith won't fail. They're going through medical trials, I'm praying, Oh God, that their faith won't fail. That's the focal point of your prayer. And away with self-reliance. Amen? Away with self-salvation. Away with all of that. And look to the savior, the one who saves us.

Let's close in prayer. Father, we thank you for the lesson that we've had. It's been painful, it's a painful lesson, to look in the mirror and find in Peter and the 11, such self-reliance, to find in them attitudes that we deplore in ourselves, but they're there, of self-reliance. Forgive us for our self-reliance. Forgive us for our prayerlessness. Forgive us for thinking we can do this or do that or do the other on our own. Apart from you, Lord, we can do nothing. Strengthen in us a sense of total dependence on Christ, and to realize that only through that high priestly praying ministry will our faith not fail. And God is sovereign, the one who gave us the faith to begin with will sustain it until the day we die and don't need it anymore, because faith will be sight. We thank you for these things and pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

 What an awesome scripture this is.  Back in 1950, Winston Churchill wrote a history of World War II called The Hinge of Fate. He was one of the major players as the Prime Minister of England.  Doesn't that just draw you in? Don't you want to read a book like that, especially by Churchill?   I'm not a believer in fate, another word for that would be luck. I don't believe in a universe that's out of control, that no one has any idea where it's going, and that there's no great pilot to it. I believe in a history that has a meaning, it has an alpha, and it has an omega, and every letter in between has a purpose. We're at the hinge of history as we come to Matthew 26:17-30. What do I mean by that? For centuries before this night that we're studying, God had drawn His people, His chosen people, the Jews, into a pattern of life that was under the heading of the Old Covenant. The Laws of Moses and the Old Covenant, and all of their celebrations and their religious festivals were commanded by the Old Covenant.

And I say to you, that as Jesus gathered there that night with His disciples to celebrate one more time the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, that was the last time in history that God was pleased to accept that Passover lamb, that physical lamb and its bloodshed. No more, for the rest of history, would God accept animal blood. You've been with me on the journey through the Book of Hebrews, you know what I'm talking about, I'll go back into some of those scriptures again to remind you. But that was it, that night, when that lamb was killed, and its blood was shed, and Jesus drew together to celebrate in the old pattern and with the Old Covenant stipulations one last time. He stood at the hinge of history. He spoke words that just bring chills to me as I contemplate it.  He points to a New Covenant in his blood, his blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins, and in that I stand and proclaim the Word of God to you today, in the forgiveness of the New Covenant and the shed blood of Jesus.

We're at the hinge of history as we look at the transition from the Old Covenant to the New. For centuries, the Jews used the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the twin festivals, to look back at the Exodus of the Jews from bondage, from slavery in Egypt, under Moses. They look back at that great exodus, and they remember the mighty things that God had done. But I believe that that Exodus itself, in space and time, that actual event in history, and the religious observances that followed in the Law of Moses, the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, were all just types and symbols of a far greater exodus, a far greater salvation and deliverance that Jesus would work eventually. They were looking back, but those by faith perhaps understood they were looking ahead to a Savior yet to come.

For us, we look back at both events. We look back at the first Exodus and all that was celebrated at that time, how God led the Jews out of bondage, out of slavery through Moses, passing through the Red Sea. How before in the tenth plague, the angel of death passed over all of the houses where that unblemished lamb, its blood had been shed and hyssop branches were dipped into the bowl and the blood was painted and applied on the door posts and the lintels of the Jewish homes. The Angel of Death saw that blood and passed over. The clear implication is that any first born in that house, if there had been no blood, would have died and died justly under the wrath of God. Instead, the Jewish first born were delivered, but yet there was not a home among the Egyptians that there was not wailing.  From Pharaoh who sat on the throne down to the lowest handmaid, everyone lost someone. There was grief and there was wailing that night. The Jews then passed through the Red Sea, and they were delivered. We can look back on those events, but we look back to a far greater exodus, a far greater deliverance, and that is the one worked by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the one who is greater than Moses. Moses was a servant in all God's house, but Jesus is a son over God's house, He is our Savior, He is our deliverer. We look back at that, and we do it every time we celebrate the Lord's supper, and so we stand at the hinge of history.

We're going to go through this passage and not make a lot of comments.  We're just going to try to understand the text and what it says. Then for the second half of the sermon, I'm going to draw out lessons and applications from these rich verses.  Let's begin in verses 17-19, looking at the preparations for the Passover. The text says, "On the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, 'Where do you want us to make preparations for you to eat the Passover?'" He replied, "Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, 'The teacher says, my appointed time is near, I'm going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.'" So, the disciples did as Jesus had directed them and prepared the Passover.

Now we come to the Feast of Unleavened Bread again, and the celebration of Passover. How did they relate to one another? Really, they were two festivals in one, both pointing back, as I said, to the same time in redemptive history. The Feast of Unleavened Bread involved the eating of bread made without yeast.  It represented bread eaten in haste, not the kind of bread you eat for pleasure or comfort. Yeast makes pastries rise, makes fluffy bread rise. Unleavened bread isn't for pleasure, just for nourishment, and it was eaten in haste because they had a journey to travel. They were leaving where they'd been living for centuries, and they were moving on to a promised land. It’s a bread symbolic of our status in this world as aliens and strangers, this bread eaten in haste. Not bread eaten for pleasure or for taste, but rather bread eaten to sustain us on our journey as we make our pilgrimage to heaven. This feast would last eight days.

On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread was the sacrifice of the Passover lamb. The lamb would be slaughtered, according to the law of Moses, a lamb without blemish or defect. At that time, Jerusalem would have been filled with people. Josephus gives us an indication that perhaps there were as many as two million people, pilgrims that had come from all over the Roman world to celebrate these twin festivals of Unleavened Bread and the Passover. The feast that they were celebrating had elaborate rituals which involved many elements, all of which needed preparation. After sunset on the first day of the feast, the household would gather together in a home to eat the Passover lamb, which by then would have been sacrificed and roasted with bitter herbs. The head of the household would begin the meal with a prayer of thanksgiving for the feast and for the wine, praying over the first of four cups of wine.  A preliminary course of greens and bitter herbs was generally followed by a young boy in the house who would ask the questions of that night, laid out in the book of Deuteronomy, questions about the meaning of all of this. "What is the meaning of all this?" Then the head of the household would explain the symbolism and recount the history of the exodus. Then the people would sing the first part of the Hallel, perhaps Psalm 113, and then the second cup of wine would introduce the main course, the Passover lamb, followed by third cup, the cup of blessing, accompanied by another prayer of thanksgiving, and then all the participants would sing the rest of the Hallel, probably Psalm 114, and probably drank the fourth cup of wine at that point. Thus, you can see the preparations for all of this would have been extensive. There would have been a lot of details that they would have to look after to be sure everything was ready. 

Therefore, Jesus gives directions for the disciples to make preparations. He explained to them very plainly in Luke 22, how much he desired to have this meal with them.  That moves me, and it melts me. Luke 22:15-16, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you that I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God." He wanted to sit at table with them, they were his friends, and He yearned to have that time together with them. In John 17:24 it pointed to a far greater desire that Jesus has, of which that is just merely the symbol, and how He prays in John 17, "Father, I yearn, I desire that those whom you have given me be with me where I am, and see my glory, the glory because you love me from the foundation of the Earth.” That's the deeper desire. Jesus yearns to be with us forever. He yearns to not just sit at the table with us once on one particular evening, but forever and to have fellowship. The disciples initiate the question, "Where should we go to make preparations?" But Jesus, He's already way ahead of them, you will never get ahead of God and your service to God.  He's already ahead of you, we're going to talk more about that at the end of the sermon, but He's way ahead of the disciples on preparations for the Passover. He is the God who goes ahead of us, as He says in John 14, "Do not let your hearts be troubled, Trust in God, trust also in me. In my father's house are many rooms. If it were not so I would have told you, for I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me so that you also may be where I am." He is the God who goes ahead and prepares things, so Jesus replied in verse 18, "Go into the city to a certain man and tell him the teacher says, 'My appointed time is near, I'm going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.'"  A particular man has been selected as the host for the Last Supper. What an awesome responsibility that is, what an incredible role to play in redemptive history. A certain man, that's all we're told here in Matthew. We're also told Jesus' poignant statement, "My appointed time is near.” there's a time that was set out, it was appointed, it was part of God's eternal timetable, and that time has come. Eternity steps into time with Jesus, and that moment has come. Four times in John's Gospel He says, "My time has not yet come." Four different times, He says, "My time has not yet come." Well, now the time has come, He says here in the text, "My appointed time is near," and so the hour has come.  Luke gives us more details about this. Now, you may be fretting, you may be practically minded, you say, "A certain man? There's two million people in the city. How are we going to know where to go? Many, many pilgrims are renting rooms and preparing and getting ready." He's got it covered. Be anxious for nothing.  The Lord knows exactly what he's doing. 

You get more details in Luke 22, 7-13, “Then came the day of unleavened bread in which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed." That first day of the feast, Jesus sent Peter and John saying, "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover." "Where do you want us to prepare for it?" They asked. He replied, "As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you, follow him to the house that he enters and say to the owner of the house, 'The teacher asks, where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' He will show you a large upper room, all furnished. Make preparations there." They left and found things just as Jesus had told them, so they prepared the Passover. Now this, friends, is just weird.  I want to try to make it come alive to you. Suppose someone told you, "Drive to Raleigh, and as you're driving around the inner Beltline, as you come to exit 10B, you'll take that ramp. As you go down, you'll see a blue pick-up truck driving by, follow it." That would scare me actually, if I saw that happening, wouldn't it? "Just drive and follow him, he'll lead you right where you need to go." Is history really that choreographed? Is it really that orchestrated, friends? It's more choreographed and more orchestrated than that. This is the God who holds atoms together by the power of His sovereign will. He has tremendous attention to detail. He is meticulous. He knew that there would be several million people and they needed to know where to go, "Follow the guy with the jar of water." More on that later. The Passover lamb was sacrificed at that point. It is the perfect picture of Christ now reaching its fulfillment, by the shed blood of the Passover lamb. The firstborn of Israel was delivered from death by the angel of the Lord, and for centuries the Jews had commemorated that deliverance by slaughtering one lamb after another. One lamb after another, a river of blood.

The annual repetition of those sacrifices taught a very poignant lesson. Hebrews makes it very plain what that lesson is. In Hebrews 10:1-4, "The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming, not the realities themselves." For this reason, it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For then the worshiper would have felt cleansed for his sins and would no longer have felt guilty for sin. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins, so the endless repetition taught this final lesson of the animal sacrificial system. Remember, all sin deserves a death penalty. The death penalty can be paid by a substitute, but the substitute never has been and never will be an animal. It's all symbolic. It points toward those beautiful words John the Baptist said, when he pointed to Jesus as he began his public ministry to Israel, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." Hebrews 10:14 says, "By one sacrifice, Christ has made perfect forever those who are being made holy."

We see the obedience of the disciples, but far greater the obedience of Christ. The disciples did everything that the Lord told them to do, praise God for that.  But more importantly, Jesus did everything the Father told him to do.  It is by his obedience I find my salvation, His perfect submission to the law of Moses, how He was born of a woman, born in the fullness of time, born under the law, to redeem those under the law. You see? He stepped into time under the law of Moses, and He stayed in that right to the end of His life. He perfectly obeyed the laws of God, and that perfect righteousness to God's holy law is now my righteousness, and yours too, if you believe in Christ. It is in that obedience I stand now, and none other. Jesus is obedient. It says in Philippians 2, "Even to death on a cross", that's how obedient He was, right to the end. Do you not see the courage in Jesus in even going to Jerusalem, the courage in going to be the Passover Lamb? He knew full well what it meant, "Until it finds its fulfillment in my Father's Kingdom." He knew that none of his sheep would make it into his father's kingdom if He didn't shed his blood for them. 

Now, in verses 20-25 we come to the prediction of the betrayer. When evening came, Jesus was reclining at the table with the twelve, and while they were eating, He said, "I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me." They were very sad and began to say to Him, one after the other, "Surely, not I Lord." Jesus replied, "The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me. The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him, but woe to the man who betrays the Son of Man. It would be better for him if he had not been born." Then Judas, the one who would betray him, said, "Surely not I, Rabbi." Jesus answered, "Yes, it is you." The Passover Feast is going on, this intimate fellowship Jesus is having with those he loved the most, this last time he's having with them that He said He yearned for. Jewish law said that Passover could not begin until the lamb was sacrificed, and that at twilight. So now it's evening and they're reclining at table, a scene of peace, a scene of fellowship, a scene of togetherness before the storm of anguish and wrath and blood and death is going to come the next day.

They are together having this time, and Jesus unfolds his mind and his heart now to His disciples, and He pours it out and lets them know what He's feeling.  Jesus has deep sorrow over this betrayal, it's not recorded here in Matthew, but it's very real. It is recorded for us in John 13:21, "After He said this, Jesus was troubled in spirit and said, 'I tell you the truth, one of you is going to betray me.'" This betrayal bothers Jesus, He is filled with grief over betrayal by Judas. Jesus was called “a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering,” and here He was deeply distressed, troubled in spirit over the betrayal by Judas. Verse 23, I think, focuses on the intimacy of the fellowship, "The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me."  The issue here in Matthew, I think, is not so much of identifying who it is as it is with the sop, that piece of bread that's handed in John's Gospel to Judas. When he took it, Satan entered into him.  But here I don't think it's a matter of identification at that point, I think He's saying, “The one I shared this kind of intimacy with, the one I shared this kind of friendship with is going to turn me over to my death. He's going to sell me, so that I would die. Someone here sitting at this meal with me is going to betray me.” The sharing of a meal shows intimacy, a kind of friendship together. Psalm 41:9 predicted this pain of Jesus, "Even my close friend whom I trusted, he who shared my bread has lifted up his heel against me." 

Betrayal can only be done by a close friend. Betrayal can't be done in the absence of an existing relationship, but please understand, there is no surprise here now. Don't misunderstand. Jesus isn't surprised by this betrayal. He's known all along it was going to happen. He knew it before the foundation of the world. He certainly knew it much earlier in the Gospel accounts. In John chapter 6, He talks about eating my flesh and drinking my blood and saying that many of Jesus' followers went away and no longer followed him. Jesus turns to the twelve and said, "What about you? You don't want to go away, too, do you?" Peter says, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." Jesus answers with the doctrine of election, "Have I not chosen you, the twelve? And one of you is a devil." This a very important statement. It is not one of you will become a devil later, one of you is a devil now. Judas never believed in Jesus. He never loved him. It wasn't a transformation that came over him. Jesus knew who he was. As a matter of fact, in all the Gospel accounts, whenever Judas is introduced, he is immediately tagged the one who would betray him, and that, I think just is a symbol of how it was never a surprise to Jesus from the very beginning.

Judas has astonishing wickedness here, and the disciples all respond with humility and deep concern. They're very sad and begin to say to him, one after the other, "Surely not I, Lord?" Deeply moved, deeply troubled about it, Judas doesn't join at that moment, but he waits a moment later and asks about himself. Then Judas, the one who would betray him, "Surely not I, Rabbi," he says. Jesus answered, "Yes, it is you." None of the other eleven had marked him out as the betrayer. After Judas did take that sop, that piece of bread, and Satan entered into him, Jesus then gives them a sovereign command. "What you are about to do, do quickly." So, Judas goes out. At that moment, the other eleven thought he was going to buy more supplies for the feast. The depth of the hypocrisy, how much the actor can act, how much they can look good on the outside, but inside full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In verse 24, we come to the mystery of all mysteries, really in Scripture, the mystery of divine sovereignty and human responsibility, especially as it comes down to the reprobate, the one who will, in the end, be lost, the one who, in the end, will be condemned. Verse 24, "The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to the man who betrays the Son of Man, it would be better for him if he had not been born."

We'll get into that more fully later. In verses 26-30, we have The Last Supper, the blood of the covenant, focused on while they were eating. “Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, gave it to his disciples saying, ‘Take and eat, this is my body,’ then He took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you; I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father's Kingdom.’” In verse 30, “When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.” Here we have at last the Old Covenant in its final act, its final moment. Why do I say that? Because I say that the moment Jesus said it is finished, and when the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, the Old Covenant was done forever. It has been supplanted by a better covenant, a superior covenant by which we stand in God's sight.

They are fulfilling the ritual, the Passover Lamb has been slaughtered, the symbolism looks back, but now Jesus supplants it. He takes it over. He takes the bread, He gives thanks, He breaks it and gives it to them with these amazing words, "Take and eat, this is my body." Now, the feast, the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, was instituted for symbolic and spiritual reasons, Jesus takes those symbolic and spiritual reasons over and points to a new covenant, a new reality, the lessons of our Exodus now. The lessons of our salvation are going to be fulfilled in his physical body, very physical here. You could touch it, you could break it, you could hear it broken, you can maybe smell a little more once it was broken, you could chew it, you could swallow, it's very physical here. 

Then he does the same thing with the cup. He took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them saying, "Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." With these words, Jesus inaugurates the symbolism of the New Covenant, which we have celebrated ever since in the Lord's supper. This New Covenant is about to be fulfilled in his blood, the blood of the covenant here, symbolic language they would have understood from the sacrificial system, which across this hinge of history is now rendered obsolete, obsolete forever. They would have understood the symbolism, but now he's identified a new blood, and therefore, a new covenant. That's the logic that the author of Hebrews gives us. Because of this, we must have a new covenant, because the old covenant could not have sustained these truths, so He identifies it very powerful here in Matthew, “my blood of the covenant.”  It's focused on him, “this is my blood of the covenant.”

The centerpiece of the New Covenant, and this is the great good news of the Gospel, is the forgiveness of sins, that our sins may be forgiven, that we may stand before God forgiven, holy, and blameless in his sight. It is for that that the blood was shed. "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out," He says, “for many, for the forgiveness of sins." It's not focused anymore on just the Jews. The barrier, the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile has been removed forever, and there is now one new man, and that one new man is a Christian or a believer in Jesus, not Jew or Gentile any longer now, but follower of Christ, from both the Jews and the Gentiles.  Jesus' blood is shed not just for the Jews, but for many, for people from every tribe and language and people and nation all over the world.

He shed his blood for all of the Elect, and God knew who they were, knew them by name, each of them from the tribes of the world. This is the significance of the body and blood of Jesus. This is precisely why the son of God became man. This is why He took on a body that we celebrate at Christmas time. This is the purpose, the end result of the incarnation, his body and his blood, given for us for the forgiveness of sins. Then He speaks of a future fulfillment in verse 29, "I tell you; I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father's kingdom." Oh, the sweet word here is that word “anew.” There's a new reality coming, a new heaven, a new earth, a New Jerusalem, a New Covenant, we ourselves made new. If anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation.  Jesus is going to feast with us, He's actually going to sit down and eat with us. Isn't that mysterious? He's going to have a body, a resurrection body after his death, after his blood is shed, He's going to have a body, and so will we. We will sit at the table, and we will feast with him forever in his father's kingdom.  Many will come from the East and the West and will take their places at that feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. We don't have these words in Matthew, but we have it in Luke, how this was established as a timeless memorial until He should come back. Luke 22:19, "He took bread and gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." It was a clear command given. The apostle Paul picks up on it in 1 Corinthians 11, so we have the ordinance of the Last Supper, and we do it consistently in healthy church life as a memorial to him, a Spirit-saturated reality-filled memorial. We don't believe in transubstantiation, we don't believe the actual body and blood of Jesus are there, but the physicality of it reminds us of his actual death on the cross, needfulness for our forgiveness, and that someday we will live with him forever in heaven.

That's the text. Now, let's look at some applications. Can there be any better application from this text or any text than this: Come to Christ, repent and believe, for the forgiveness of your sins. It was for this that He came, it was for this that He died, that sinners like you and me should find forgiveness. I'm not speaking in the abstract now; I'm speaking very practically. Why are you here right now? How did you get here? Did someone invite you? Did you just walk in? Are you a member? Do you know for certain that your sins are forgiven? Do you know that you are a sinner? Do you know that the law stands against you, that you will not be able to survive judgment day? The same meticulous God I spoke about a moment ago, in brief and I'll speak more in a moment, He sees everything you've ever done, every careless word you've ever spoken. Are you ready to face the one who has eyes of blazing fire? Are you ready to face him? Do you know that your sins are forgiven? If you don't, then I would urge you, while there's time, flee to Christ, trust in him. You just have to believe in him, you don't have to do anything, you don't even have to make a physical pilgrimage anymore, you just have to believe. Trust in him for the forgiveness of your sins and understand the lesson of the physicality of this, of Christ's physical body. Colossians 1:22 says, "But now God has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in a sight without blemish and free from accusation." By Christ's physical body. You are reconciled to God and made friends with him. Understand then the lesson of the blood. The wages of sin is death. Our sin deserved death penalty. Hebrews 9:22, "Without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness." Hebrews 10:4, it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Romans 3:25, "God presented him as a propitiation, a sacrifice of atonement, turning away his wrath through faith in his blood."   Ephesians 1:7, "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins." Blood, blood, blood, and blood. Four blood verses. It is by the blood of Jesus that we are forgiven.  Trust in that, and in that alone. This is the Gospel, this is Jesus, the Son of God nailed to the cross for sinners like you. This is the essence of the statement, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." Flee to Christ.

Secondly, worship Christ as He is revealed here in this text. Worship him. I believe that God crafted the whole Gospel for one central overriding reason, and that is the praise of his glory. That we should be for the praise of his glory. What does that mean? It means study his attributes as He reveals them and give him honor and praise for them. I want you to see that the Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After He had provided purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. How is the Son the radiance of God's glory? Do you not see the love of God shining forth in Jesus here? Do you not see the courage of Jesus, do you not see his compassion for us and his mercy? Do you not see the justice of God and that the cross cannot be averted, He can't avoid it? Do you not see the sovereign wisdom of God in the old covenant, the new covenant and redemptive history, and the hinge, the hinge of history here and the turning of it, and the fact that the blood of bulls and goats had to roll the play, but not the role of actual forgiveness, and now it's been fulfilled in Jesus and how now we can understand all this?  Worship him, worship him like they do in heaven. Worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom, and strength, and glory and honor and praise. They stand around the throne, it says in Revelation 5, four living creatures and twenty-four elders. They have a harp and golden bowls full of incense and they are singing a new song, “You're worthy to take the scroll and open its seals because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” Worship him. 

Thirdly, stand in awe of God's preparations and do your part. What do I mean by that? This text shows the extensive preparations made for the Passover. Passover itself was extensive preparations made for Jesus' death. God is a preparing God. As I was thinking about this application, I was thinking about those little work projects that children do, like at Lowe's or Home Depot or whatever, where they lay out everything needed, the little hammer and the little pegs and the little... And you get to make a... I don't know bird feeder or something like that, you know what I'm saying, it's all there.  You got a little dollop, Elmer's glue, a little packet of glue and everything. It's all laid out for you to do your work. I'm not minimizing, I'm not, not at all. It says in Ephesians 2:10, "For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to walk in them.” He's going ahead of you getting your work projects ready. He's already there, the room is all set up, you have a job to do, do it and by you doing whatever good works God has ordained for you to do, the kingdom advances. People are saved. Other Christians are strengthened in their faith. You use your spiritual gifts. Do you have a ministry? Are you using your spiritual gifts? This church needs every member to have a ministry. This church needs you to use your spiritual gifts, do your part, but as you do your part know that Christ has already gone ahead of you. He's prepared you for the works and the work is for you.

Fourthly, stand in awe of God's exhaustive foreknowledge.  Recent theologians, like Clark Pinnock and Greg Byrd have questioned God's exhaustive foreknowledge. What do I mean by that? Does God really know everything that's going to happen down to the detail ahead of time? Answer, yes, he does. Absolutely, he does. They question this, I think, because of their overwhelming commitment to their perspective on human free will. They say that if a human being is truly to have free will, God cannot know ahead of time what that person will do. He can guess, he knows your habits, but he's just a guesser still in the end.  According to them then nothing is foreordained, or else people cannot have free will and cannot be held responsible for their decisions. The extreme version of this view is called Open Theism. They're leading proponents of it. Pinnock says God just simply limits himself and thus cannot know the future. If he didn't limit himself, he could, but he chooses to limit himself and not know the future. Greg Boyd says that God knows aspects of the future that can be known, including some apparently free will decisions. His is more nuanced, more complex, but he's still saying God ultimately cannot know those many decisions. There are many parts of the future he does not know. That's what “open” means. It's open, it hasn't been written yet. We'll get to that in a moment.  Life is free flowing but good things will come. Really, really good things. I think of this view as the ultimate, you know how if life hands you lemons, you make lemonade, God is the ultimate of that. Life is constantly handing God lemons and he's just excellent at making lemonade. That's their view. And God is able to take all of the bad lemons we hand him and he's able to navigate through and get good things done.  Is that the God of the Bible?  It's beyond me to wrangle in detail with these two men and all that. The Bible does teach the exhaustive foreknowledge of God over human free will decisions. How in the world did Jesus know there would be a specific guy carrying a jug of water at that particular moment? There are millions of people in the city, but Jesus made identification so that the two disciples going to make preparations would know who to follow. He's not just showing off, but He's helping them. But suppose the guy decides to carry a basket of figs or instead a jar of wine, or suppose he trips and falls, and it breaks or something like that, then the identification is gone, they won't know who to... If this was a woman picking up and carrying it, they won't follow her because he said a man with a jar of water. The open theist would say that's the kind of thing God can't know, but Jesus apparently knew it, and He knew it certain enough to give directions based on it.

This becomes even more telling in the case of Judas' betrayal, as a vital spiritual decision that must be free on Judas' part. “Jesus didn't really know whether Judas would betray him,” but clearly Jesus did know ahead of time that Judas would betray him and said that it had been written in Scripture in the Book of God's sovereign plan, Psalm 139:16, "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."  Jesus said plainly, while they're eating, "I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me," not some of you might betray me, or three of you will betray me, or any of that. He knew very well, not only that it would happen, but who would do it. In verse 24, "Then the Son of Man will go just as it is written about him." What does that mean, “written”? I think there are two books here, two books, there's God's book in heaven, and that's exhaustive down to the atomic level, and then there's Scripture's book of prophecy, which just gives us hints about the heavenly book.  Psalm 139 says, "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." What book is that? The heavenly book. There's a book of eternal life in which the disciples are told, "Do not rejoice that the demons are subject to you and your name. But I'll tell you rejoice in this, that your names are written in heaven." That heavenly book is God's exhaustive detailed plan. So, in the small things such as the carrying of a water jar and in large things, the betrayal of the Son of God for 30 pieces of silver, everything is exhaustively known ahead of time. Jesus tells it to them ahead of time, so that [John 14], "When it does happen, you will believe and not be disturbed, but you know I predicted it plainly." 

Fifth, we come to the hardest piece of meat that I've ever preached from this pulpit and probably ever will preach. Scripture divides roughly into milk and meat. Milk is easy, simple concepts to understand doctrinally, and meat are those things that are harder. I don't doubt for a moment that not all of you will be able to follow me where I'm about to go, maybe you'll be able to follow later.  But I'm willing to ask some questions here about Judas that bring us to uncomfortable places, and I think it is to the glory of God to go there. My fifth emphasis has to do with the mystery of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Let's talk about Judas, and let's do the best we can to understand the mystery of the relationship between divine sovereignty and human responsibility. At the root of the debate between those who focus primarily on human free will, commonly called Arminians, and those who generally emphasize God's sovereignty in human salvation, commonly called Calvinists, is the problem of evil. How do we understand the problem of evil? If God is so good and all powerful, why then is there evil in the universe? 

The classic Arminian answer to this question runs like this, “God created the world good and only desires good things. Secondly, because God allows people free will and God never interferes with free will, to some degree, God's hands are bound by our free will decisions. Evil happens in God's universe, but it's not his fault because people are just using their free will and God will not interfere with those decisions.”  Why not? Because if God ordains something and brings it to pass by his sovereign power, they argue that man is not responsible, that's how they argue. There is no way they say that a human decision can be ordained by God, and then for God to hold a human responsible for that decision. If God decrees that man do something and a man does that thing that God decreed, then the man is off the hook, so they argue. Not so much “the devil made me do it”, but really, you're saying God made me do it, so how can you hold me responsible for that? Since that would make God in their view the direct author of evil, this cannot be.  God cannot hold people responsible for decisions that He has decreed. Therefore, God didn't decree them ahead of time. That's how the argument works. Now, look at verse 24. What do you do with verse 24? Talk about a monkey wrench thrown right into the gears of all of that. Jesus said, in verse 23, "The one who dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me, the Son of Man will go just as it is written about him, but woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man. It would be better for him if he had not been born." So, both are taught here, the Son of Man will go, as it is written about him. So, it's written, and it is done. It's not just God predicting, it's God decreeing, you see. It's not just predicting; the writing is God's. The Son of Man will go according to the plan, the sovereign will of God, but woe to the man by whom He goes. How do you put those two together in this scheme I just laid out? They don't fit. “It would be better for him if he had not been born.”

Let me ask one question. If it would have been better for Judas not to have been born, then why was he born? Think about it. You may say I'd rather not think about it, but I'm asking you to think about it. In Psalm 139 and verse 13, it says, "For you created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother's womb." Did God knit Judas together in his mother's womb? Would we want to go so weird theologically, it's amazing the lengths people will go to avoid this, that say, "Oh, God knits the good people together, but he doesn't knit the bad people together." There's no scriptural evidence of that at all. God knits people together. He's the knitter. He knit you together, He created you, He created your inmost being. Let's go back then to Judas. What was God thinking when he was knitting Judas together?  Open theists will say he was hoping for the best. “I sure hope you don't do what I think you're probably going to do. It doesn't make any sense to me.” While He was giving Judas a brain and hands and fingernails and a liver and a circulatory system and all that, while He was doing that, was He not mindful of Matthew 26:24, which hadn't even been spoken or written yet, but He knew was coming?  “Woe to this one that I'm knitting together, woe to this one that I'm knitting together.” It's hard to figure this out, but we don't find refuge in false doctrines, that's not where we find the refuge. God knew exactly what Judas would do, and He knit him together.  Romans 9:22-23 says that God knits together in the wombs of their mothers, not just the one person, Judas, but all the people that end up in hell, He knits them together in their mother's wombs, knowing full well what's going to happen with them. He knows exactly what's going to happen. Paul goes even beyond where I've gone up to this point. It says, "What if God choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of wrath prepared for destruction? What if He did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of mercy, whom He prepared in advance for glory, even us, whom He also called, not only from the Jews, but also from the Gentiles?”

 So, God gives them for the benefit of the objects of his mercy. That's the logic here. The answer is, God knit him together in his mother's womb, not because it would be better for Judas—it wasn't better for Judas— but it was better for God and his glory, and it was better for us, the Elect, that He did it. I know it's hard, but this is what the scripture teaches. God did it to teach us what we deserved, we, the Elect, we who have been chosen contrary to what we deserve. We, who are sinners, every bit as much as Judas and Hitler and all the others. You say, "Well, I wouldn't do something like that." Are you so sure you wouldn't do those things? We know the evil in our hearts. We didn't deserve to be chosen, we didn't deserve to be saved, it's by grace alone that we're going to get in heaven.  His will is thoroughly perfected on that doctrine and to God alone will be the glory for our salvation, “from Alpha to Omega, to God alone be the glory.”

We're not settling for bad theology here. We're going to say that when it comes to Judas and Herod and Pontius Pilate and Annas and Caiaphas, and all of them, not just Judas, as Peter said, "Jesus was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge." God's set purpose and foreknowledge, and “You, with the help of wicked men, put him to death.” They're wicked and they'll be judged for their wickedness. Judas was wicked and he was judged for his wickedness, but it was ordained by God, that's as far as I can go. I don't know how to put it any closer, anything beyond that. He is not the author of evil, because God doesn't tempt anyone to do sin ever, but each one is tempted when by his own desire, he is dragged away and enticed.

Sixthly, we should hate the hypocrisy of betrayal. Do you see the sadness and the weeping in Jesus concerning Judas, not in Matthew, but in Luke or in John? He's troubled in spirit by this. This perhaps is the greatest mystery of all of this issue. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, He weeps over these vessels of wrath. It's difficult for me to understand that He's the one that ordained it, and yet He weeps over the decisions they've made, and we should hate it and weep it, too, and not betray as Judas did. 

Finally, embrace the Lord's Supper in spirit and truth, though I’ve not the time now to preach a whole sermon on the Lord's Supper. As a congregation, let's come into the Lord's Supper expectantly. Let's embrace that when we obey his command, “Do this in remembrance of me,” that we will be richly fully blessed, not by transubstantiation and thinking we're actually eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus, but by recognizing that in space and time, 2000 years ago, his body was broken and his blood shed for us, so that we might have forgiveness. Then as you actually hold that bread and drink that cup, you understand that your physical body will someday, if we're not the last generation to die, the Lord will raise you up physically and someday you will drink and eat anew with Jesus and the father's kingdom.

Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the richness of your word, for the power of it. Lord, I pray that these meditations on your sovereignty and our responsibility would heighten our sense of humility at how much you work contrary to our nature to save us and would give us a tremendous boldness in witnessing and evangelism to know that you have power to take this Gospel to the elect and they will hear. God take these words and press them now into our hearts, we pray in Jesus' name.

When the apostle John was in exile on the island of Patmos, the Lord Jesus appeared to him, and at one point, said to him, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, I am the beginning and the end, I am the first and the last." There are many ways to understand those words, but I'm going to apply them to the issue of history, the unfolding of events in human history.  As we come to Matthew 26 through 28, we come to a narrative section of the Gospel of Matthew, in which the history of the greatest events that has ever happened on this Earth are unfolded for us. We have the steps that Jesus Christ took toward the cross, toward his death on the cross, as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. We have that laid out for us in detail, and also his burial and his glorious resurrection on the third day. As I've said before that there is no religion on the face of the Earth for which history is so important as Christianity. We rely on the facts recorded in this story to be true. The apostle Paul said if they're not true, we're all wasting our time as Christians. But thanks be to God, they are true.

Christ was crucified according to the scriptures. He was buried, and on the third day, He was raised to life, according to the scriptures. When the text says, in 1 Corinthians 15, “according to the scriptures”, what that means is that God had planned this whole thing out before the foundation of the world.  Daniel said, quoting from 2 Timothy, "This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,” before the world began, but now it has been revealed and made known by the ministry of the gospel. We have this history laid out for us. We come to the final steps in Matthew's Gospel, this glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ as He took the fateful steps to the cross. I believe the cross of Jesus Christ is the center of all of human history. Some people have denied that history has any significance at all, those same people deny that life has any significance at all. Some people think, in the words of Shakespeare, that “history is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” But that is not true. 

It's not a tale told by an idiot; it does signify something. It signifies the glory of God in the salvation of sinners like you and me from every tribe and language and people and nation. That's what this story is about, that God may get glory by sinners being saved. The cross is right at the center of that. History has a purpose; it has a direction. There's an Alpha and there is an Omega, and Jesus is both the Alpha and the Omega and every letter in between. There's an unfolding story here, and the cross is at the center. As one hymn writer put it, "In the cross of Christ I glory, towering over the wrecks of time. All the light of sacred story gathers round its head sublime." Everything focuses on the cross. In the Western world, we divide history in halves, BC, before Christ, and AD, in the year of our Lord. And the cross is right at the center of that. The cross is at the center of human history. It's why the Son of God came to Earth. It says in Matthew 20: 28, "The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

The cross, the work of Jesus Christ on the cross is prefigured throughout history. In Romans chapter 1:2, "Paul is an apostle of the gospel.” The gospel, He promised beforehand in the holy scriptures."  God prefigured this, He predicted it, He gave it for us so that we would know what it meant when Jesus Christ came. For instance, in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the tree, and they realized, their eyes were opened, they realized they were naked, and they felt ashamed. They hid from one another, and they hid from God. Then God slayed an animal, it's blood was shed, and He covered Adam and Eve. That dead animal was a picture of the cross of Christ.

So also, was Abel, a sacrifice of the firstborn from the flock, acceptable to God, is a picture of Christ's saving work. So also, was Noah's Ark floating safely above the floods of the wrath of God, a safe haven, a refuge, the only one on the planet, the only place you could be, if the breath of life was in your nostrils, the only place you could be and be safe was in Noah's Ark. It’s a picture of the salvation that God has worked for us in Christ. So also, that ram in the thicket caught by its horns on Mount Moriah, when God had commanded Abraham to take his son, his only son, Isaac, whom he loved, and to offer him as a burnt offering to God, and the angel of the Lord stopped him, and then there was that ram that died in the place of his son.

The exodus of Egypt was a picture of the saving work of Christ. As the people of God were in bondage, they were in slavery, they could not rescue themselves, and God by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm delivered them through Moses. It was a picture of the saving work of Christ on the cross, and in that time, in that era, the Passover lamb that was slaughtered and its blood was painted on the door posts, in the lintel, and the angel of the Lord saw that blood and passed over and would not bring the death that the inhabitants of that house deserved, because he saw the blood. The Passover lamb, a picture of the saving work of Christ. Every animal sacrifice that was ever offered in the Levitical era was a picture of the saving work of Christ. The substitutionary atoning work of Christ. As we come to Matthew 26 through 28, we're ascending step-by-step gradually to the cross, and we're coming to the centerpiece of all of human history, the saving work of Jesus Christ for sinners on the cross and at the empty tomb.

The apostle Paul in his ministry made this commitment. He said in 1 Corinthians 2: 2, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Now we know that he taught many things, even details of theology, but when he was saying that he was saying that the cross of Christ, Christ crucified is the center of his theology, and he could never preach without proclaiming Christ and him crucified. As he says in another place, in Galatians 6:14, "May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world." Let's make that our central boast. The central boast of my life is the cross of Jesus Christ, of Christ crucified. In Matthew 26, we see step-by-step now, preparation for the cross. We're going to talk about preparations and predictions that were made in the Old Testament era, in the lavish worship that this woman Mary does in preparing him for burial, and in the betrayal of Judas for 30 pieces of silver.

In subsequent weeks, we're going to see the Last Supper, we're going to see Gethsemane, the arrest and trial of Jesus, we're going to see Peter's denial, three-fold denial, we're going to see the crucifixion and the burial of Jesus, and then gloriously his resurrection and the great commission at the end of Matthew's gospel, that's where we're heading. Where have we been? As you look at Matthew 26:1, it says, "When Jesus had finished saying these things, he said to his disciples,” so I think there's just a flow from Matthew 24 and 25, right into chapter 26:1. Jesus had been teaching them many things about the end of the world, about the second coming of Christ, about the destruction of the temple.  Jesus left in Matthew 23, crying out, "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who killed the prophets and stoned those sent to you, how often I've longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling. Behold, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"  Then He walked out, the glory of Israel, walked out of the temple of God, and it departed. The disciples came and said, "Look at these magnificent stones," speaking of the temple and of the city of Jerusalem, and Jesus said, "Do you see all these stones? I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another, everyone will be thrown down." The disciples were distressed by this and came to him in private and said, "When will this happen and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?"  Matthew 24 and 25 is the answer to that question. 

I'm very tempted to go ahead and just preach them again, but we're going to go ahead into 26 now, but Jesus said be ready, the end is going to come at a time you're not aware of like a thief in the night, you need to be ready. He told them how they could be ready and at the very end, the story of the sheep and the goats. It's just an analogy, but about the Second Coming and judgment that's going to come.  When the Son of Man comes, when Jesus comes, He will come in his Father's glory and all the holy angels will be with him. He will sit on his throne in heavenly glory, and all the nations will be gathered before him. He will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and He's going to put the sheep in his right and the goats in his left. he's gonna say to the sheep in his right, "Come you who are blessed by my Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world." And He's going to say to those on his left, "Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."  Now the question comes on what basis is that division made? What is the basis of the separation between the sheep and the goats? What's the difference? That's what Matthew 26 through 28 answers. It's because Jesus shed his blood on the cross for those people called sheep, that's why they are qualified for the inheritance of heaven, not because of anything that they have done, but because of the mercy of God. 

When Jesus had finished saying all these things, He said to his disciples, “As you know, the Passover is two days away, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.” We come now to the preparations made for the Passover, and then for the death of the true Passover lamb, who is Jesus. The cross was predestined before the foundation of the world. It was prepared and predestined. God wasn't making this up as he went along. Everything had been laid out, everything had been planned, as John himself saw in the island of Patmos. He calls Jesus the lamb that was slain before the creation of the world. What a mysterious expression that is, but Jesus, in some sense, was slain from the creation of the world [Revelation 13:8].  Peter puts it the same way in 1 Peter 1 when he says, “You were redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect,” pointing to the Passover lamb. “He was chosen before the creation of the world but was revealed in these last times for your sake.”  Jesus was chosen out as our substitutionary lamb before the world began. By this plan then all human actors, all of Jesus' enemies, including Judas and Caiaphas and Herod and Pontius Pilate and the chief priests, all of the enemies of Christ are operating on a divine plan laid out before the foundation of the world. Peter preached this very plainly in his Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:23. He says, “Jesus was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge, and you with the help of wicked men have put Him to death nailing Him to the cross.” This is the plan of God. The church prayed the same thing in Acts chapter 4:27-28, “Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant, Jesus. They did what your power and will had predestined should happen.”  So, everything, not just the cross itself, but the details of what led up to the cross were predestined, laid out in the plan of God before the foundation of the world, and now being acted out in space and time, being acted out in history by people who didn't know necessarily that they were acting on the plans of God. I don't think any of them, even Jesus' friends understood it, but certainly not Jesus' enemies. 

What we need to keep in mind then is the events of this story of Matthew 26 and 27. The events of Christ's arrest and his suffering and his crucifixion are not some tragic accident, some twist of fate, some strange, bad luck that happened to a really good man who was trying to help people and got trapped or caught in a maelstrom of politics and jealousy and petty plots that were over his head, that he couldn't control, so that people would say, even at that time, "He saved others, but he can't save himself." Don't you believe it. He could have saved himself at any time.  Jesus made this very, very plain in John 10:18, "No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down freely of my own accord. I have the authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it back up again, this command I received from my Father." This is a transaction, Jesus is saying, between my father and I, and no one has the power to kill me if I didn't give them that power. He could have stopped it at any time.

Matthew, I think especially, gives us a lot of Jesus' own statements at this time, which Mark and Luke don't as much, they just unfold the history. Matthew says Jesus predicted it and he speaks the words through Jesus. “When Jesus had finished saying all these things, He said to his disciples the Passover is two days away and the son of man will be handed over to be crucified.” Mark and Luke just say the Passover is two days away, and Jesus was about to be handed over to be crucified, but Jesus speaks the words in Matthew's Gospel.

Jesus' power to predict the future proves his deity. He's been predicting this thing again and again in the Gospel of Matthew, and this is the fourth and final prediction in the gospel of Matthew of these very events. It began back in Caesarea Philippi, remember when he asked the disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” and got the answers. “But what about you?”, and Peter gave that incredible testimony, “You are the Christ, son of the living God.” [Matthew 16:21] For the first time in Matthew's Gospel, it says, from then on, from that time on, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law and that He must be killed, and on the third day be raised to life. So again, and again, He warns them. John's Gospel tells us a little more clearly why He did this ahead of time. In John 14:29, Jesus said, “I’ve told you now before it happens, so that when it happens, you may believe that I am.” It's what it says in the Greek. Usually, they add the words, “I am he” or “I am the one I claim to be”, but it's just “I am”.  “So that you may believe that I am God, I predicted all of this ahead of time, including my own arrest. So, when it's happening, do not think of me as weak and a victim caught in events that I can't control. I am laying down my life for you.” This was no accident, and the timing of it was no accident. Was it an accident that Jesus died at the same time that the Passover was being celebrated? It's no accident at all, the timing of this was perfect, the Passover was a beautiful picture of what Jesus seeking to accomplish on the cross, which is very hard for us to understand. How could a dead Jewish man 2000 years ago benefit me at all? The animal sacrificial system, the death of the animal, the animal sacrifice points to it, the lessons of substitution, of the shedding of blood, of the substitutionary victim who dies and whose blood then averts the wrath of God. There's a clear picture of that in the night of the tenth plague when the angel of death passed over when he saw the blood.

John the Baptist pointed at Jesus and said, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world."  Jesus was precisely that. The fulfillment of all of this. Notice the timing. Isn't it marvelous how God's timing is perfect, and the timing of Jesus' enemies is all wrong? They got it all wrong.  They are orchestrating Jesus' arrest, secretly by some tricky means, right? But what do they say right here in this text? Not during the feast, they said, or there may be a riot among the people. When did it happen? During the feast. How is that? Because they're not in charge, they're not in control. God wanted it during the feast to fulfill the imagery of the feast.

It's just as it said in Luke 22: 22, "The Son of Man will go just as it was decreed." He's going to go exactly when it was decreed and how it was decreed, and there's nothing that man can do about it. The Jewish leaders would love to have squirreled him away in some quiet little holding cell until all of the throngs of pilgrims were gone, and then they could dispose of him without having to deal with popular opinion. Look at how the enemies are plotting his demise, verses 3 through 5, "Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and they plotted to arrest Jesus in some sly way and kill Him, but not during the feast they said or there may be a riot among the people." Caiaphas, one of the most evil man in history, the high priest, a puppet really under his father-in-law, Annas and under the Romans ultimately.  Jesus was a threat to them. They were jealous of him, they were jealous of his hold over the people, jealous of his strange ability to perform miracles. The attributed these miracles to Beelzebub. But they were mostly concerned about their position in the religious machinery there in Jerusalem, which was very lucrative for them, as they were making lots of money off the animal sacrificial system, a whole machinery which was bringing them tons of money, and Jesus was overturning benches and scattering pigeons and throwing coins out of the temple and messing up their whole operation, and so they wanted him dead. But not during the feast, they said, or there may be a riot. The feast would have been the worst time for them as far as they were concerned to kill him. They were very afraid of the people. Isn't it beautiful? It says in Proverbs 19: 21, “Many are the plans of a man's heart, but it's the Lord's purpose that prevails.” And so, it is in this case.  

Secondly, we see the preparation through a woman's love and faith, her sacrificial act of faith and love. Look at verses 6 and 7, the act is described for us. While Jesus was in Bethany, in the home of a man known as Simon the leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as He was reclining at the table. All four of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, have an anointing story. In Luke's gospel, it happens earlier and it's different, it's a sinful woman there who's known for her sinful life, and she anoints Jesus' feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. But the other accounts in Matthew, Mark and John, all happened later. It seems that it's the same as what happened in John, that this is actually Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who's doing this anointing. She's a godly woman. We know the story about Martha and Mary and Lazarus, mostly from John's Gospel.

The location is given as the home of Simon the leper in Bethany, east of Jerusalem, just a couple miles away, and this woman is, she's not identified in Matthew's gospel, but we feel fairly certain that it was Mary, Lazarus and Martha's sister. She breaks this alabaster jar, you could picture a very slender necked, alabaster jar, which itself would have been very, very costly, filled with this incredibly expensive perfume, this liquid, which could be poured out. She broke the neck of this alabaster jar and just pours it on his head. It comes flowing down his hair, this overwhelmingly lavish gift. I know it's sometimes called an ointment, but I picture an ointment as a little bit thicker. It wouldn't come running down, I think it was a liquid, more like a perfume, maybe thick liquid.  When she does this, it says that the whole house was filled with the aroma of this expensive gift. It seemed to waft from Jesus and moved until every room in the house was filled with this aroma.

It was an overwhelmingly extravagant offering. Judas who knew how to price things, he was good at money, he valued it at about a year's wage —300 denarii. Denari is a day's wage, so that's about a year's worth of wages for a laborer. In our time it'd be... I don't know, $30,000 to $50,000 poured out on Jesus' head, down on the ground. When the disciples saw this, it says they were indignant. All of them were, it wasn't just Judas, they were indignant.  This waste they asked, “This perfume could have been sold at a very high price, and the money given to the poor.”  John goes more into Judas' heart, to find out exactly what's going on in Judas' mind at this moment, John 12:5-6, says, “Why wasn't this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year's wages.” It seems like Judas was the spokesman at that point for all of their thoughts. But John goes on in John 12:6, Judas did not say this because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief. As keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it. So that was Judas' motive, but really all of the disciples, it seems were thinking the same thing.

Isn't it amazing how off the twelve were in the last hours of Jesus' life? I mean, really, how messed up they were, how off-message they were. It's really a very shameful record of their behavior there on the last night. They're completely out of step here sharing Judas' mentality. We'll talk more about that, but it gets worse. They spent time that very night arguing about which of them was the greatest, which I think led to Jesus washing their feet. Judas, he's one of the twelve, he's about to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Peter arrogantly boasted that even if all of the other eleven fell away, he never would. He's better than all of them. They failed to watch and pray in Gethsemane as Jesus told them to do several times, but just kept falling asleep. Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, one of the most disgusting acts in human history. All the rest of them, once Jesus is betrayed, deserted him and fled. Peter denied him three times before the rooster crowed. All in all, it was a very shameful display, and these were the chosen ones, these were the ones that Christ chose to build his church upon at the human level. This is a display to me of depravity and of our need for a savior. We wouldn't think for a moment, just as, also in the case of Adam, that we would have done any better than Adam did in the garden, or that they would have done that night. We need a savior. We are broken sinners; we cannot save ourselves. And this is after watching Jesus for three years and listening to him teach for three years, this is who they were.

Now, the woman is defended by Jesus. Look at Verses 10 - 12, Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She's done a beautiful thing for me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial.”  I don't think there's anything wrong with asking the question, “What would Jesus do?” But the more you read the Gospel accounts, the more surprising a figure Jesus turns out to be. So sometimes you're not sure what he would do, so I think it's good for us to study and try to answer the question, but would you have predicted... Especially after the sheep and the goats thing, that Jesus would have defended the pouring out of a year's worth of wages on his head. Down it went all over the floor, I wouldn't have predicted that. I think that the apostles were all thinking the same thing - that Jesus was off at this moment.

But instead, he rebuked the disciples, “Why are you bothering this woman? Stop bothering her.” And he defended her actions, “She has done a beautiful thing for me.” The Greek word here for “beautiful” means morally pure, it's a sense of moral purity here, a sense of the beauty of its goodness. Then He quotes Deuteronomy 15:11, “There will always be poor people in the land, therefore, I command you to be open-handed and generous towards your brothers, toward the poor and needy in your land.” Mark adds an interesting phrase at this moment [Mark 14:7], “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want.” We'll get back to that phrase later in the sermon, that phrase haunts me every day. Do I want to help the poor today? Jesus said, I can help them any time I want. We'll get back to that. Basically, though, for the rest of your lives, you'll be surrounded by poor and needy people, but you will not always have me, He said. 

Then He gives the real significance, she was preparing Jesus' body for burial. This was a shocking reminder of that which they all seemed to be forgetting, Jesus was about to die. I don't think any of them really fully got it, except this woman.  Now, this is Mary, who I think was a very contemplative person, who sat at Jesus' feet and pondered deeply Jesus' teachings and took them to heart and believed that what He said was true. “Oh, you're about to die.” Maybe it's because she had no ambitions for sitting at the right hand and left hand in the kingdom, and all that, her mind wasn't twisted by delusions of grandeur in the coming kingdom, and so she was able to just listen to what He said and said to herself, “I know he's about to die,” and so she lavishes this to prepare him for burial. Then Jesus says an incredible thing. Look at Verse 13, He says, “I tell you truth, wherever this Gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.” Isn't that marvelous. Jesus' death would not end this movement. There is a story to tell the nations, and that story, not might be told, but it most certainly will be told, throughout the world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come [ Matthew 24:14].

But riding along with the proclamation of the gospel, comes this additional story It's not at the center of the gospel, it's not the Gospel, but it's a detail, and Jesus made her a promise in effect saying; it would be told as a memorial to her. That prophecy is being fulfilled right now. This is a long way away from Jerusalem. Many thousands of nautical miles, many 2000 years, and we're still telling the story, Jesus had it right. We are honoring what she did. Now we need to understand this act properly, we need to understand its uniqueness, and also its pattern for us. There is a uniqueness to what she did that can never be repeated again. It's a unique moment in redemptive history, Jesus' own words say it. The poor you'll always have with you, but you're never going to have this moment again. This is a significant moment right here, “You're not going to have me like this again. She's preparing me for burial, you will never need to prepare me for burial again, I will die, but I'll die just once for all time, and I will be buried, but I'll never be buried again. This is a once for all this evening here.” She seemed to recognize that, and so it's utterly unique what she did, completely unique, and yet, and yet, it's a pattern for all of us of lavish worship focused on Jesus. We have that jar broken and spilled out, which comes right from this account.  Jesus said, “This is a unique moment, it will never again be repeated”, and she seemed to recognize that.

What is so beautiful about that? Her action was based on faith, she believed Jesus' words, she believed that he would die, she heard and believed, and so her actions were based on faith in the Word of God. Secondly, it was loving, it was a display of her love for Jesus, it was poured out of a heart of love of affection for Him. Thirdly, it was lavishly sacrificial, it was costly. The true measure of love is sacrifice; how much love is willing to give. She was willing to give all that she had and poured it out on Him, it reflects the generosity of God the Father in pouring out His Son for us. This lavish gift by God the Father drew forth from her a lavish gift back, and that's a perfect picture of worship. I think that's what worship is. God moves first, He loves us. We move second, we love because He first loved us, and that's worship. And then fourth, it recognized the supremacy of Christ over all. Yes, it's right to serve the poor and needy, it's right and good, but we were created for worship and Christ is the center of worship, and so this Christ-centeredness in her mind was appropriate even above ministry to the poor and needy. It's more important to minister directly to Christ and to worship Him than even giving to the poor and needy and preaching the gospel. Anything that we do vertically toward Christ is superior to anything we do horizontally, but we know from the sheep and the goats, they are intimately connected together. We don't have Jesus with us anymore, but every time we minister to one of his children in his name we're ministering to Him, and so in the end it becomes vertical as well. 

Finally, we see preparation through a disciple’s treacherous betrayal in verses 14-16, “Then one of the twelve, the one called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priest and asked, ‘What are you willing to give me?’” Just ponder that for a moment, in light of what we just talked about, “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” They counted out for him 30 silver coins, and from then on, Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over. Do you not see the shocking contrast between Mary and Judas? Mary is all about what she can give. How can I pour myself out? Including money, year's wages. Judas was all about, what can I get. What I think happened in all of the accounts, the ordering is the same, we have the anointing of Jesus, and then immediately Judas goes and trades Jesus in for 30 pieces of silver. I think what happened is he saw that the game was up, the franchise was about to go down and began losing a bunch of money, and so he thought it's time to sell the stock while I can. That's about what happened. All he cared about was money, he had no love for Jesus, he had no faith in Christ, and so it was about money, and it seemed like if we're going to be throwing out a year's worth of wages on the ground, I'm out of here. He goes and trades him in. Satan, according to Luke 22, entered Judas, and it was because of that. Look at this disgusting price, 30 pieces of silver, a direct prophecy from Zechariah 11, where the prophet there says, “If you think it best give me my wages, but if not, then keep them.” So, they paid out 30 pieces of silver, and then the Lord said to him, “Throw them to the potter, that handsome price at which they valued me.” That's what it says in Zechariah 11. Prophecy —

30 pieces, temple, thrown, potter. Those are four details. We'll get to that in due time, but not today. They measured out 30 pieces of silver. Here's my question, what would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? I sometimes picture Judas in hell, seeing the 30 pieces of silver, may be in a 6x5 matrix, 30 silver coins there while he's in anguish. I don't think it was just this one action, but still. What would it profit a man to gain the whole world? It wouldn't, but he did it for 30 pieces of silver. We should not minimize the pain of the betrayal to Jesus, we'll get into that more later, but it says in Psalm 41, “Even my close friend with whom I trusted, who shared my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.” Judas agreed to basically be the eyes and ears and the liaison for Jesus' enemies and hand Him over at a suitable time.

What application can we take from these 16 verses? First and foremost, dear friends, come to Christ, come to faith in Christ, believe in Him. Christ is the Passover sacrifice; his blood was shed on the cross for sinners like you and me. Do not think for a moment, “I’m better than the disciples, I am better than Judas, those aren't the thoughts to have here, instead, you should say, “I need a Savior like that, I'm a sinner, I've broken God's laws, I've lied, I've sinned, I've dishonored my parents. I have not loved God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. I have not loved my neighbors as myself, I am not ready to face God on Judgment Day, I don't want to go to hell. Oh, save me, save me, Jesus, save me.” If you say that, He will save you. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Just call on the name of Jesus, say, “I want heaven and not hell, I want forgiveness and not condemnation,” He will save you.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the wisdom of God and the power of God. Believe in that. If you've already come to faith in Christ, will you not marvel with me at the elaborate detail of the plan of God, how it was planned before the foundation of the world, how Christ was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the Earth, and how Jesus' enemies did what God had willed ahead of time should happen. Rest in that. Be confident in that. This world is not spinning out of control, God is sovereign on his throne. He has orchestrated even the smallest details of human history. Thirdly, imitate Mary's life of devotion, her life of devotion to Christ. We have said and we must acknowledge the utter uniqueness in redemptive history, never again will there be any need to anoint Jesus' head to prepare him for burial.  Having died, He never dies again, death no longer has mastery over him. He has risen, hallelujah. There's no need for that. But still, Mary's generosity is a paradigm example of how we should be living our lives, start with faith, read in the scripture and find out what God doing in the world. What does He want you to do? In Mary's case, it was, “Oh, Jesus is about to die.”  That's not our case, that's not what's about to happen, Jesus is coming again, and we're supposed to look ahead to the day of God and speed it's coming, that's got to be through our witness, our testimony, the good deeds that we do to serve Christ. So, start with faith. Secondly, love. You're reading in the Scripture and Let the Holy Spirit pour out the love of God into your hearts. First and foremost, for Jesus, allow the Spirit to move affection for Jesus in you. We sin when we don't love Jesus enough, we sin when our affection for Christ is insufficient, and we go to idols instead.

Say, “Lord, I want to love you more, my love for you is imperfect, It's too small. Would you please increase my love for you? Give me the kind of love that Mary displayed when she poured out that year's worth of wages on your head.” Thirdly, sacrificial, make your life a sacrifice. Make your faith in Christ cost you something. Make it costly. Start with your body. He's not looking for a year's worth of wages and a perfume to be poured out. Start with your body. Present your body as a living sacrifice. The Apostle Paul did. Didn't he say at the end of his life, even if I am being poured out like a drink offering, then be poured out.  Say, “God, I want to spend myself for you and for your glory. Then Christ exalting, saturate your mind in the greatness of Christ and focus on him that everything you do may be for his glory. I want to finish with one application concerning ministry of the poor and needy. Remember how I said, there's that haunting phrase in Mark 14:7, The poor, you'll always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. Any time you want. Do you want to? Do you want to? And if you don't, then repent. That's where I'm at, that's what Mark 14:7 does to me. If I don't want to help the poor and needy, then I need to repent, and so make my life a poured-out fragrant offering to God for the poor and needy.

The ultimate poverty in the world is spiritual poverty. “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven,” so let's start with those who are poor because they don't know Christ, they're lost. Does that matter to you? Are you concerned about it? Please forgive me my scientific side here, thinking about the principle of diffusion. What is diffusion? Well, when that jar was broken, it started happening, and it just kind of wafted up out of the bottle and just started to spread, and when it was poured out, it just really started to spread at that point, and every room in the house was filled with that fragrance— diffusion. Jesus actually talks about the same thing in another sense in the text. He says, “Wherever this Gospel is preached throughout the world,” that's a different kind of diffusion, isn't it? “You'll receive power, and the Holy Spirit comes on you and you'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth”— diffusion. What's in the bottle?  What's in you so that when the cap gets broken off, what comes wafting out? Take a minute, if you would, and look at 1 Corinthians:14-16. 1 Corinthians 2:14-16, “Thanks be to God who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ, and through us, spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him. For we are to God, the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved, and among those who are perishing, to the one the smell of death, and to the other, the fragrance of life.” Who is equal to such a task? This is where it starts. Jesus said in Matthew 12:35, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. Out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks.” So, when your top is broken off, you know what I'm getting at, and what's inside you wafts out, is it worth listening to? Is it the knowledge of Christ? As that wafts out, are you for some people, the stench of death, so that they're persecuting you because they just can't stand that smell because they can smell their own condemnation. To others, are you the aroma of life because they can just feel the love of God through Christ in your life? If not, then make sure that the good stuff's getting poured in the bottle. Fill your hearts with scripture, take away the idols of this world, the worldliness and all that, and say, “Oh God, fill me with the word, fill me with the Gospel, fill me with the knowledge of Christ, so that when the top of the bottle is broken off what wafts out is worth smelling.”

Close with me in prayer, please. Father, we thank you for the beauty of the Gospel, we thank you for the beauty of what Mary did, and Lord, help us to imitate it, but ultimately the center of this text is Christ's death, burial, and resurrection. Thank you for Him, and may we trust in him and in Him alone for the forgiveness of our sins. In Jesus name, Amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 39:1-8. The main subject of the sermon is the tragic end of short-sighted faith.

One of my favorite passages describing the ministry of Jesus Christ, the person and work of Christ, quotation from Isaiah employed by Matthew in Matthew 12:20, "A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, until he leads justice to victory." For years I have cherished that verse, having read a sermon that Richard Sibbes, a Puritan, spoke on that bruised reed and smoldering flax, 1631. He says that this text, Matthew 12, portrays the gentleness and tenderness and skill of Jesus in dealing with sinners, broken sinners like us, in bringing about his final outcome in each one of us. The text says that we are pictured as sinners like bruised reeds. You could picture just grass kinda bent over and hanging by slender green threads by a marsh where you feel like the slightest bump would finish the tearing, and it would be severed and would fall. Christ has the power and the skill and tenderness and gentleness to bind up the bruised reed and heal it completely. But in a similar way, we have this smoldering flax, picture of a frail ember flickering, smoldering, putting off both fire and smoke, about to go out, not a roaring fire of piety and zeal, love for God, not a bonfire of commitment and holiness and purity, power, but rather a smoldering flax emitting both some evidence of God's grace and some evidence of indwelling sin all the time.

Christians are a mixture at all times, both grace and corruption evident in our lives, yearnings for God and yearnings for sin. A mixture of both good works and bad. Moments of great victory soon followed by episodes of shameful pride or cowardly retreat. Paul puts it quite plainly, explaining it theologically in Galatians 5:17, "For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is contrary to the flesh; these are at enmity or are opposed to one another, so that you do not do what you want." That's a description of the Christian life, the smoldering flax.

Sibbes gives evidence of this smoldering in a variety of passages of Scripture. The disciples cry out, "Lord, save us; we perish!” Here you have the smoke of unbelief, and yet the light of faith stirred them up to pray to Christ. The father of the demon-possessed boy cries out, "Lord, I believe." There is the light. But he also says, "Help my unbelief." There is the evidence of the smolder of unbelief. "O wretched man that I am!" says the Apostle Paul in Romans 7. There is the smolder, the smoke of indwelling sin. “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” But then comes, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord," and there's the light of grace. And Christ will not extinguish this smoldering flax. Why not? Well, because the spark comes from heaven. He lit the spark in us. It was he that began the work of grace in our hearts. It's kindled by his own spirit, and that work of grace, that fire of grace inside us tends toward his own glory. Therefore, he cherishes it and he will not let it go out.

So we see how Christ bears with the corruption in Thomas, doubting Thomas, "Unless I put my finger in the nail marks and my hand in the side, I will not believe." But then you see the work of grace, when he falls down in front of Jesus and says, "My Lord and my God," and he's going to bear with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, who are so depressed and discouraged on Resurrection Sunday. “We had hoped that he was going to be the one.” There is the smolder of unbelief. But by the time they get done, their hearts are burning within them, zeal for the glory of God and for his kingdom. Peter denied him, but he denied not Peter but continued to work in his life. "If you will, you can make me clean," said one leper, there is the smolder and there is the spark of grace all at once. Or another one said, "If you can do anything, help my son." Jesus deals with both ifs very tenderly. “If you are willing.” “I'm willing. Be clean.” “If you can.” “If you can? All things are possible to him who believes.” Aren't you glad that he doesn't extinguish the smoldering flax of your faith? Aren't you glad that he has the skill to nurse it into a roaring fire, and that he is gentle in dealing with us?

Now we come to Hezekiah and Hezekiah's faith is a smoldering flax. You see noxious smoke and you see also evidence of grace. Hezekiah is mighty through faith to purge Israel's religion of its high places—he finally gets rid of them. That's the light, the fire of grace. But he's weak and he flickers always in the same area, and that's politics, the security of the kingdom of the realm. He trusts to political alliances. That's the smolder going on in his life. He stumbles again and again, and not trusting the Lord alone to save Judah from its enemies. He walks with the Lord in piety and godliness concerning the laws of Moses. That's the fire, that's grace. But he smolders and flickers concerning Egypt. Despite Isaiah's constant warnings, he sends out emissaries with gold and silver to hire their horses, their chariots, to come and fight for Judah. That's the smolder, the smoke.

He is strong in faith to break with the king of Assyria and serve him no longer and send him no more tribute. By faith he did that, but when the king of Assyria invades him, he sends all the gold and silver in the kingdom to buy him off, and he says, "I've sinned, please forgive me." He says that to the king of Assyria. There is the smolder. His faith is on display in Isaiah 37 when he spreads out that letter from Sennacherib king of Assyria and humbles himself and asks for God to deliver them. You see his faith on display there. You see a mingled faith with smolder in Isaiah 38 as he gets sick, and he cries like a baby, and he says, "Remember all the good things I've done for you, God." And he says, "Like a lion, you stopped me down; like a lion you broke my bones." He looks on God a bit as an enemy there, but yet he turns to God at that weakness, at that time of weakness and he prays. He says, "Oh Lord, come to my aid."

Now, when we come to Isaiah 39, we come to the final chapter in the book of Isaiah on Hezekiah's mixed pilgrimage. After all the mighty things that God has done for him in the account, we have, I think, a rather sad end. Hezekiah's pride and short-sightedness are on display; they are exposed here. Again, we have a smoldering flax. Emissaries, envoys come from Babylon, and so they're coming right at him in his weak area, the area of politics, the area of the future of his kingdom of Judah. I believe that they are seeking an alliance with Judah, that they can join together with Judah against a common foe, Assyria. Hezekiah, I think, reverts to the same old pattern: he trusts in politics and in alliances rather than in the living God alone. He is filled with pride in this account, and in the parallel accounts in 2 Chronicle, 2 Kings, boastfully displaying silver and gold, a military strength and failing to give glory to God for all that God has done for him. It seems to me that he's going back to trusting in the arm of man, in the arm of Babylon again, rather than in the arm of God alone.

And when Isaiah rebukes him with a rather shocking prophecy of where they're heading, where the future is going, where they're going in the future, Hezekiah responds, in my opinion, with a stunningly short-sighted and selfish answer, showing a lack of concern for the future generations of Judah and even of his own family. Hezekiah is an example then of a smoldering flax and is inconsistent, but still grace-filled life with God. And to me, this is just some of the great evidence of the truthfulness of Scripture, that even its great heroes are displayed honestly in their smoldering faith. Aren't you encouraged by this?  We're not rooting for Peter to fail, but we're so glad in one sense that he did. Amen? Because when you look at that, you say, "Thanks be to God—there's a place for someone like me. And you're not going to cast me off, but you're going to restore me and you're gonna work with me and you're patient with me, 'cause boy, do I see a lot of smolder in my life. Praise be to God, I also see the spark of light and grace in my life too. Thanks be to God for that.”

Now, as we come to Isaiah 39, we come in some way to a gateway, a bit of a hinge to the rest of the book of Isaiah. We have a doorway, Isaiah 39 gives us a doorway into Isaiah 40-66, those chapters. The first half, so to speak, the first section of Isaiah 1-39, predominantly has been God and Assyria, God and Assyria. The second portion is going to be predominantly God and Babylon, or God and the exile to Babylon and the restoration from that exile. So we're at a hinge.

Now, you may ask, why then is this your last sermon in Isaiah for a while (which it is)? It's just been my regular pattern to preach in a book for a while to have a sense of when that while has come to an end, and to go to other works. You said the same thing when I finished in Matthew the last time, and we're going back to Matthew, so rejoice. Alright? And we'll go back to Isaiah 40 in good time, if the Lord allows us time. I think Isaiah 40 is one of the greatest chapters in the Bible. Someone said to me, "We're leaving at Christmas Eve, and we don't get Christmas." It's like, alright, well just be excited and pray that God will extend my life and yours, and we'll have a chance in the future to hear some sermons on Isaiah 40, but which I could probably preach an incredible number, almost as bad as Hebrews 11, but maybe not quite as bad as that. So, we're gonna be turning to Matthew 26-28 next week, and we're gonna be taking that journey with Christ to the cross, into the empty tomb and to the Great Commission. So I'm excited about that.

Now, as we come to Isaiah 39, we come to questions of chronology and archaeology and order, and I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this, but let me just give you some background. We have mentioned in the text, Merodach-Baladan son of Baladan king of Babylon, who is that? Well, he was a Chaldean or Babylonian. Babylon was a city down the end of the Fertile Crescent, away from Assyria and part at this point of the Assyrian empire. Like Judah and like all these other small kingdoms, they hated and feared Assyria. When Sargon died, and Sennacherib, his son took over, Merodach-Baladan son of Baladan king of Babylon led a rebellion, a revolt against a serious power. Now his father, Sargon had defeated him a decade and a half before it and had put him to flight, Merodach-Baladan. But now he's back, and he was challenging Assyria. And Assyria defeated Merodach-Baladan, and the Babylonians in battle, and kept Babylon under its heel for another while.

Meanwhile, this man, Merodach-Baladan fled to Elam, some region of Elam, and he continued in some sense to carry on some agitation against the Assyrian Empire. Now, I don't wanna get into issues of chronology here. I have about two pages of it. Forget it. We don't have time. Let me just say, I accept the order in the Bible. I think that first, you have the Assyrian invasion, the defeat of Assyria by the angel of the Lord, then Hezekiah's sickness, his restoration, and then this visit from Babylon. The reason I say that is the same in 2 Chronicle, 2 Kings in Isaiah, that's the order given. Some scholars want to reverse the order, it has to do with the 15 years, the extension of King Hezekiah's life, and when they think Hezekiah died and all that. But let's just trust the order here, and I think it's actually helpful to do it.

And what I think is happening in 2 King, 2 Chronicles, and now here in Isaiah 39, as these envoys have been sent from this man, Merodach-Baladan, a rival subject king to the Assyrians, to try to make some kinda political alliance against Assyria. Now you may say, “Assyria was defeated.” Well, no, they lost 185,000 troops, but they're not finished, and they were gonna go on for a few decades longer. And so, they're still a threat, they're greatly weakened, but still a threat. So I think the envoys have been sent here saying, "Hey, in effect, we have a common enemy, let's join forces."

So now we begin at verse 1-2 with the Babylonian envoys and Hezekiah's foolish pride. Verse 1-2, “At that time Merodach-Baladan son of Baladan king of Babylon sent Hezekiah letters and a gift, because he had heard of his illness and recovery. Hezekiah received the envoys gladly and showed them what was in his storehouses—the silver, the gold, the spices, the fine oil, his entire armory everything found among his treasures. There was nothing in his palace or in all his kingdom that Hezekiah did not show them.”

So here we have a glimpse, a snapshot now of Hezekiah's wealth and power and prestige. Remember that Assyria was a terrible enemy, greatly hated by their subject peoples. And so, many smaller kings wanted to throw off Assyria's power. When Assyria lost 185,000 troops outside the walls of Jerusalem, many smaller peoples rejoiced greatly in that, celebrated and were elated at the defeat at that point of Assyria. In these smaller realms, it says in 2 Chronicles 32:23, “Many brought offerings to Jerusalem for the LORD and valuable gifts for Hezekiah king of Judah. From then on Hezekiah was highly regarded by all the nations.” So, in the wake of this incredible defeat of Assyria, Hezekiah has become rich and powerful and popular. Danger, danger, but that's what's gone on here.

Now, we must imagine that the Assyrians left behind huge amounts of booty from all of the smaller kingdoms that they had been conquering one after the other. Remember I said that Hezekiah more or less was dealt with last, so they've already taken all kinds of material possessions from these smaller kingdoms, and they brought them with them in their invasion of Judah, and now they're all dead and they left them behind. So who gets them, but the Jews? Who gets them, but Judah and Hezekiah? And now he's rich again. And so, it says in 2 Chronicles 32:27-29, “Hezekiah had very great riches and honors.” As a matter of fact, it probably is beneficial for you to just put your finger here and go over to 2 Chronicles 32 and look with me, because there's a parallel account here. Look at them both, or you can just listen, but 2 Chronicles 32:27-29, it says, "Hezekiah had very great riches and honor, and he made treasuries for his silver and gold and for his precious stones, spices, shields, all kinds of valuables. He also made buildings to store the harvest of grain, new wine and oil. He made stalls for various kinds of cattle and pens for his flocks. He built villages and acquired great numbers of flocks and herds, for God had given him very great riches." So, he's become very wealthy, he's become highly esteemed, he's very popular with these surrounding nations, and he builds bigger barns, so to speak, big storehouses for all the stuff that God has given him now.

Hezekiah has two weak spots, pride and self-reliance, especially politically. So he has pride after his victory, as we're gonna see later, and pride during his illness, and you see that as he is very proud of what he's achieved and doesn't think that God's dealing with him fairly. And so, it says in 2 Chronicles 32:24-25, "In those days, Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. He prayed to the Lord, who answered him and gave him a miraculous sign. But Hezekiah’s heart was proud and he did not respond to the kindness shown him; therefore the Lord's wrath was on him and on Judah and Jerusalem." Pride, pride led him to forget what God had done for him and to take more credit for it than he should have. Self-reliance led him to look for future security, to maybe an alliance with Babylon or his own political scheming and all of that, and not to look to the Lord, to God alone. Now remember that God had said in Isaiah 37, "I will deliver this city from the hand of the king of Assyria. I will protect this city for your sake and for the sake of David my servant." He said, "I'm gonna protect you. So you don't need to make any more alliances. Stop trusting in politics. Stop trusting in political alliances. Trust in the Lord, trust in me."

And so as a result of this, God decides to test and expose Hezekiah's heart. It's a very sobering moment here for us. Look, if you're in 2 Chronicles 32, look at verse 31, if not just listen. The envoys from Babylon came as a test for Hezekiah. God was testing him. And so in 2 Chronicles 32:31, it says, "But when envoys were sent by the rulers of Babylon to ask him about the miraculous sign that had occurred in the land." It just brings chills me to say this phrase, "God left him to test him and to know everything that was in his heart." You can just circle that and meditate on it, "God left him to test him and to know everything that was in his heart." God was seeking to expose the thoughts of Hezekiah's heart, to press on him, to put pressure on him, and push those thoughts to the surface so that he could see them and know that they were there.

Now, what motivated the Babylonians to come? Well, it says in 2 Chronicles 32:31, they had heard about the miraculous sign in the land. Now that had to do is you remember with the shadow, remember on the stairway of Ahaz, how it was the normal thing for it to go down, and so Hezekiah asked for it to go backward, and so it could be that there was in some way some mysterious celestial portend, something in the heavens. And the Babylonians, the Chaldeans were really big on stars and all that kind of thing, and they were interested in it. So there was that, but then there was the angle of the political alliance against Assyria as well. So in the text it says they're interested in the miraculous sign, they wanted to ask about it, but also I think there's this politics as well.

So the envoys come and Hezekiah takes them on a prideful tour. “Come and see. Have I got some things to show you.” He receives these ambassadors, these envoys with great joy and pride. He's impressed by the fact that they've come from a distant land. He says it to Isaiah, “They've come from a distant land.” He is filled with a sense of his own importance that his fame has reached so far that they've heard of him that far away, and so he takes these important visitors on this extensive tour of his capital city and in his newly liberated land, shows them everything, all his wealth his treasures, military weaponry, but there's no mention that he witnessed to them of the greatness of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He didn't speak to these envoys about the God who did it all. He didn't it seems give glory to God as this tour was going on. These pagan diplomats are not given, it seems to me, the theology behind all of what happened here. The zeal of God for his own glory, his holiness, his omnipotence, his wisdom.

Now, you remember the Queen of Sheba came from the south to visit Solomon, and when he gave her a similar tour, it says her breath was taken away, but this is what she said, 1 Kings 10:9, "Praise be to the Lord your God, who has delighted in you and placed you on the throne of Israel. Because of the Lord's eternal love for Israel, he has made you king, to maintain justice and righteousness." The Queen of Sheba gives glory to God for everything that Solomon showed her. Now, it could be she had a predisposition to believe it or already knew some things. Or Solomon witnessed to her. But in any rate, these envoys don't seem to have given glory to God, because it didn't seem Hezekiah gave glory to God.

So it's time for Isaiah to come into the picture. Remember I said that God left him to test him. I think part of that was Isaiah stayed away. Stayed away. Just let him do what he was gonna. Just let him do what he's gonna do. Just go ahead and do it. Whatever you're gonna do, just do it. So he stayed away. God left him. Now Isaiah comes back into the picture, verse 3-4, and he interrogates Hezekiah, "Then Isaiah the prophet went to King Hezekiah and asked, 'What did those men say, and where did they come from?' 'From a distant land,' Hezekiah replied. ‘They came to me from Babylon.’ The prophet asked, ‘What did they see in your palace?’ ‘Well, they saw everything in my palace,’ Hezekiah said. ‘There is nothing among my treasures that I did not show them.’"

So Isaiah comes to confront this prideful King. I get the picture of Hezekiah full of himself going home to his palace contended and happy, and there's Isaiah waiting for him. I get that picture, I don't know if that's how it happened but, you know, and I have the feeling that Hezekiah must have groaned a little bit, "Oh, hi. How are you?" And this prophet, the very one who had predicted the downfall of Assyria, the very one who had predicted his own healing and had actually, seems to have been, an agent of the healing ministering that poultice of figs, this very one has now come with a different mission now, different mission. How tough it is to be prophet of God. You go and you say what God tells you to say. Sometimes it's a happy message, sometimes it's not. This was not a happy mission here.

And so Isaiah begins the interrogation. Two questions: "What did those men say, and where did they come from?" Begins to probe. He inserts himself into the level of high geopolitics. He's invading and speaking into that. Can I tell you God's word fits anywhere? God can speak into any situation he wants, because he is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and so he comes, he says, "I have some things to say," but he doesn't say them he just asks. Notice Hezekiah's selective answer. Isaiah asked two questions, Hezekiah answers one. "What did those men say, and where do they come from?" "Oh, they came from Babylon, from a distant land." Well, it's a true answer, but it's not the whole answer. “What did you talk about?” I'm guessing they talked about alliances, I'm guessing they talked about military strength and power, that's what I think they probably talked about, but Hezekiah didn't mention that because he knew exactly where Isaiah stood on all that.

So Isaiah asked a second question, “‘What did they see in your palace?’ ‘Well, they saw everything in my palace,’ Hezekiah said. ‘There's nothing among my treasures that I did not show them.’” That's a full answer and an honest one. No point in lying to the prophet, dear friends. He already knows, so you might as well tell him the truth. And I think this is one of those chilling moments, those chilling moments, when Isaiah looks at you and says, "Hear now the word of the LORD Almighty." Goosebumps, you know? “What are you gonna say to me?” "Hear now the word of the LORD Almighty: The time will surely come when everything in your palace and all that your fathers have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the LORD. And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon."

Now, Isaiah sees far. He's already uttered the prophecy of the fall of Babylon, he's already spoken it twice, Isaiah 13, he said, "Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the glory of the Babylonian’s pride will be thrown down like Sodom and Gomorrah," that's Isaiah 13. He says it again in Isaiah 21, "Look, here comes a man in a chariot with a team of horses. And he gives back the answer, 'Babylon has fallen, has fallen! All the images of its gods lie shattered on the ground!’ O my people," he says, "crushed on the threshing floor, I tell you what I have heard from the LORD Almighty, from the God of Israel." So already Isaiah 13, Isaiah 21, we already have the end of the story on Babylon. They're going to get destroyed, completely destroyed. Isaiah see's far.

But here, the prophecy gets enhanced. Before that happens, before Babylon gets crushed to the ground never to rise again, never to be rebuilt. Before that happens, Judah will go into exile in Babylon. Now, that's new, we hadn't heard that one. Now, this would not happen for another 115 years, but what are 115 years between God and the prophet, and between the prophet and the people? They're nothing. God knows what's gonna happen millennia down the road, and so he knows very clearly what's going to happen, and he gives Hezekiah some devastating details. That tour, all of those shiny, nice things, the precious oils and all that, the spices, all that, the gold and silver—that's all going away, all of it, it's all going away. It's going to Babylon, and then the stark statement, “Nothing will be left.” But then it gets even worse. “Let's talk about your descendants, let's talk about your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Let's talk about that. Some of your own flesh and blood," he says. "Some of your own descendants . . . who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.”

Now, apparently at the time of his illness, Hezekiah had no heir. It seems that he had no heir. In the extension of his life, 15 years in that time, he would have a son, Manasseh. We'll talk more about him in a moment, but it seems that God was going to give him an heir, but here there's a dreadful prophecy about the future of all of that. “He's gonna give you a son, but beyond that, your descendants they are going to become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.” Now, a eunuch was a male castrated, so he wouldn't be sexually active among the emperor's harem, so he could be trusted around the women, and they frequently became palace advisors, counselors, administrators. To be a eunuch clearly was to be excluded from the lineage of the Messiah ‘cause you couldn't procreate and to be excluded from the assembly of the Lord, according to Deuteronomy 23:1. So this is a devastating prediction. How then can we understand Hezekiah's reaction?

Look at verse 8, “‘The word of the LORD you have spoken is good,’ Hezekiah replied. For he thought, ‘There will be peace and security in my lifetime.’" Now, when Isaiah predicted the fall of Babylon in Isaiah 21, this was his reaction to the future. He said in Isaiah 21:3-4, "At this my body is racked with pain, pangs seize me, like those of a woman in labor; I'm staggered by what I hear, I'm bewildered by what I see. My heart falters, fear makes me tremble; the twilight I longed for has become a terror to me." And then later, as we've already said, "O my people, crushed on the threshing floor, I tell you what I've heard from the LORD Almighty." That was Isaiah's reaction. Again, Hezekiah's thoughts are exposed. “For he thought, ‘There’ll be peace and security in my lifetime.’”

So that's the end of the explanation, what applications? What applications? Well, first, do not trust in heroes, do not trust in people like Hezekiah, they're going to let you down. There's really in the end, only one true hero in Scripture, and that's Jesus. Jesus is the only true hero. Put your hope in Jesus Christ and him alone. He is the true Son of David. He is the true one who cares about his posterity, and he had a spiritual posterity, sons and daughters, who he is going to win into the family of God, and they would extend for generations, even millennia. And so it says in Psalm 22:30-31, speaking of Christ, “Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn—for he has done it.” Does Jesus care about posterity? You better believe he cares about posterity. He cares about generations yet unborn. He cares enough to die for them, to shed his blood for them, so that we might have eternal life.

Put your trust in Jesus, put your trust in Christ. Every human being is gonna let you down, and you're gonna let every other human being down. Don't just put it out there, it's you too. We are sinners. We need a savior, and Jesus is the Savior. Put your trust in Christ, crucified, his blood shed, Christ risen, so that we may live in newness of life, trust in Christ and him alone. I don't know what brought you here today. I don't know if you come here because you're a member, you come every week, I don't know if you're here as a first-time visitor, I don't know if you are saved, all of you. I don't know, I always assume that not all of you are. But if you're here in an unsaved state, I urge you to flee to Christ today. You don't know when your dying day is, you don't know how much longer you have to live. Trust in Christ and him alone. And if you're hearing this and you are saved, take this message right now that I'm saying this part of the sermon and bring it out to some lost person this week and urge them to repent and come to faith.

Secondly, God searches hearts to expose our hidden sins. Providentially, he bring circumstances into your life, he brings things about in your life and presses on you so that these things come to the surface, 2 Chronicles 32:31, "God left him to test him and know everything that was in his heart." God does that to you too. Now, what do I mean by God left him? I think what it means is that God, in some way, experientially pulls back, and you're kind of on your own, and then the circumstances come, and when you're on your own, what you do floats to the surface, and God says, "Just do what you do." He's also told us that when he leaves us alone, we do nothing but sin. For he said in John 15, "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit," for "Apart from me, you can do nothing." So when God leaves you, you will sin, and so God pulls back and allows circumstances to press things up in your heart so that you can see them. So it says in Revelation 2:23, "Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds."

God reaches down into your hearts and searches your hearts. Proverbs 20:5, "The purposes of a man's heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out." Even better, the Holy Spirit draws them out, right? God draws out your deep waters, and he shows you basically, you know what I think is going on in the Highway of Holiness, sanctification? God takes you by the hand into the basement of your heart and takes you on a tour of who you really are, and he shows you how much you needed Jesus every day of your lives. And so God leaves us to test us. The Christian doesn't fight this. Christian just says, Psalm 139, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and show me my anxious thoughts and my evil ways. Bring them to the surface and get them out of me 'cause I'm sick of them. Search me, O God. And bring these things into my life."

Thirdly, man is tremendously susceptible to pride. Doesn't it almost nauseate you that Hezekiah could have been proud of the deliverance from Assyria? What did he do? What great thing did Hezekiah do? OK, I'll tell you what he did, he put on sack cloth and he went in the temple and he cried in front of God and pleaded with him to save him. That's what he did. Alright, alright, well, what great thing did he do to get healed? Well, at least he was sick. Friends, do you not see how ugly pride is? It's just ugly. And all these nations are exalting Hezekiah, it says in 2 Chronicles 32:23, "He was exalted in the sight of all nations from that time onward." He should have said something like this, Psalm 115:1, "Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness." He should have said something like that. So can I just train you and urge you and myself too, learn to say, “Not to me, but to God be the glory. If you see anything good in my life, if you're getting any benefit from my life then not to me, but to God's name, be the glory.” We are so prideful and so fight pride. Say in your heart, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.” I don't deserve to boast about anything. Or listen to this, 1 Corinthians 4:7, "Who makes you different than anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, then why do you boast as though you did not?"

Fourthly, notice how God has crafted human salvation to destroy pride at every turn in the road. Do you not see it? How God has crafted the salvation that just destroys pride? It started before the foundation of the world, when God chose people not based on anything he saw in them whatsoever. "Before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God's purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls—she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger,’" Romans 9:11-12. What is God's purpose in election? At least this, to destroy your pride. Step by step then “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are.” Why, why did you do that? “So that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus.” Total depravity strips us of our pride. To be told, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless.” If that doesn't humble you, my friends, nothing will.

The atoning work of Christ, the fact that he worked salvation by his own self—there was no one who could work it—and he worked it himself for his own praise and glory by himself. “There was no one with me on the cross,” he would say. The resurrection of Christ strips us of pride. We couldn't have raised Jesus from the dead, He was raised by the spirit of holiness by the will of his Father. Salvation by grace through faith strips you of pride. “For . . . by grace are you saved, through faith—and this not of yourselves, it is a gift of God.” Why? “So that no one can boast.” Justification by faith alone strips you of pride, because you're not able to boast in anything. Say, "Well, at least I had faith." Friends, that's like boasting about your good eye sight while looking at the Rocky Mountains. It's like, "Wow, my eye sight is awesome. Do you see how incredible eye sight I have? I have awesome eye sight, don't I?" It's like, "What are you? Nuts? Do you not see these mountains and how majestic they are?" Faith is the eyesight of the soul. What is there to boast in? All it is is that God opened up an avenue by which he's pouring blessing into your life, that's all, and there's nothing to boast about when it comes to faith. Sanctification humbles you. Doesn't it? And are you being humbled by sanctification right now as you're wrestling with the deeds of the flesh? Are you humbled by all that? Are you humbled by the Highway of Holiness? I don't think I need to belabor this one at all. And glorification by God's sovereign grace humbles us, because the very thing you were trying for decades to achieve, he does in a moment, in an instant, and you're instantly perfect, and then he raises the body from the grave and gives you a perfect resurrection body. To God be the glory for all of it, dear friends. Salvation by grace humbles us.

Fifthly, be warned about flattery and seeking to impress the world. Don't get swept along when people notice you and start commending you for all the good things you do, for your successes in life, and all of that. Don't get sucked in by it, like Hezekiah did. Don't get sucked in, don't get impressed when people from a distant country hear about you. We have some very talented, intelligent, skillful people in this congregation. Humble yourselves before God. Give him the glory for everything you've ever done.

Sixthly and finally, the dangers of fathers lacking a multi-generational vision for their children. Do you not see it? Do you not see what happened here? “Who cares? At least there will be peace and security in my lifetime. That's all that really matters to me. As long as I'm comfortable, as long as I'm saved, as long as my life is fruitful and good, I'm fine.” Now, I don't think very many fathers and churches would dare to say those words, but are they living them out? Are they living out, “Who cares as long as there's peace and security in my lifetime?” Multi-generational vision, Psalm 78, we're supposed to declare the great works of God so that our children can hear them, so that they can tell them to their children, and then to a generation yet unborn, multi-generational vision, caring about what your great grandchildren will do.

Now, let's talk about the facts of this case. In the few years, the 15 years that were extended, God gave to Hezekiah a son, his name was Manasseh. He was the worst king Judah ever had, the worst king Judah ever had. His father took down the high places at last. Manasseh put them back. Could it be Hezekiah never told him why he took the high places down? I don't know, I don't know what Hezekiah did parenting Manasseh. I don't know. But the facts are these. He had no son. Now, he has a son, Manasseh. He says, "There will be peace and security in my lifetime. Your generations in the future are gonna become eunuchs," he doesn't seem to care, and then Manasseh becomes the worst king Judah ever had. Those are the facts. It looks like he didn't do a good job as a father. Now it is not automatically the case. He may have done a phenomenal job as a father. He may have repented based on this and said, “I need to get serious about my generations in the future,” but we have no record of that, but we do have a record of this thought pattern he has, so at least we can be warned of such a thought pattern. Manasseh committed the sins that 2 Kings 24 said, "God was unwilling to forgive,” therefore they went into Babylon. Isn't it incredible? Manasseh was the one who did it in the end.

God cares about future generations, and so I guess I would urge you fathers to ask, "Are you loving your great-great-grandchildren?" And you're saying, "Well, how do I do that?" Pour yourselves out and pour the gospel into your children and your grandchildren, and it may be you'll have a chance to see your great grandchildren. Take those moments seriously. Have your family devotions. Love your wives as Christ loved the church. Disciple your children. Talk about the word of God when you sit at home, and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Don't be lazy about it, don't be negligent about it, don't be mediocre about it, be hot on fire for Jesus. Love the great-grandchildren that God may give you if he tarries.

Now, as we come to the Lord's Supper, I think as I look at these applications, I think there's plenty for me to be reflective of. And one of the things, the beauties of the Lord's supper is that we have a chance to reflect, and we are to reflect on our own lives, we're to look and see if there's any sin in us, to see if there's anything we need to repent from. And so as you're preparing your hearts for the Lord's Supper, I'd like to urge you to consider if there are any things that God wants that's laying on your heart to repent from, that you repent from it. If there are any broken relationships, resolve to make them right. Do all of this meditation though in light of the shed blood of Christ, sufficient to cleanse you of sin. You are welcome to participate if you have come to faith in Christ and you have testified to that by water baptism, we'd like to welcome you. If you have not, then wait, come to faith in Christ, testify to it by water baptism, and then join us in our next Lord's Supper. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for this message, the scripture from Isaiah 39, and we pray that now as we turn our attention and our hearts to the Lord's Supper, that you would prepare us and that you would send forth your Spirit in light of your promise, and that you would be very powerfully active in this place now causing us to remember the death and the resurrection and the coming kingdom of Jesus Christ, in your name we pray, amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on 38:1-22. The main subject of the sermon is God's purpose in sickness and restoration of health.

Someday, maybe soon for some of you, maybe a little bit further distant for others, you are going to be in a bed of pain, or you're gonna be sitting in a chair alongside a loved one who's in a bed of pain, and as you go through that experience, your faith is going to be assaulted by the Devil. He's gonna try to convince you that God no longer loves you because he's not listening to your prayers for healing. My purpose today is to strengthen you for that fight. I wanna get you ready so that your faith may actually flourish in that time, because it's not just possible, but it's absolutely certain that if the Lord doesn't return in our lifetime, we are going to die. And it's going to be some disease or some injury that's going to take us out of this world, that's a guarantee, if we're not that mysterious final generation. And I believe the Lord means for his faith-filled people to face death unafraid with courage and with boldness, and I think it's only the ministry or the word that can get you ready for that time, and I wanna give that to you today, I wanna give you what you'll need to fight that good fight of faith, now, through the word of God, through Isaiah 38.

In some way, the events of Isaiah 38 are less dramatic, less spectacular than the events of Isaiah 37, the slaughter of 185,000 Assyrian troops, but I guarantee you're gonna fight this battle. You're not necessarily gonna fight that one, but you'll fight this one, and you'll either fight it alongside the bed of a loved one or you're gonna fight it yourself, and when you're laying there in that bed and you're feeling sensations you've never felt before, and you wonder if your time is drawing near and you feel that pain in your body, and perhaps at that particular moment, you're alone, loved ones have gone home to rest or whatever, and the room is darkened and you hear the sound of the machines that are doing their work to keep you alive, and you're just there with your thoughts. Oh, that your thoughts at that time would glorify God. Oh, that you would realize, it is for you that Christ came and he came to save you, body, soul and spirit, to save you completely. I wanna give you the strength that you need.

The Puritans call the sabbath the market day for the soul. So they picture your soul like a hungry person that needs food and nourishment in order to live. That's fine, but today, it's more the arsenal day for the soul, okay? I want to equip you with weapons, I wanna equip you with what you will need to fight the good fight of faith when Satan comes after you in that darkened hospital room and tries to tell you that God doesn't love you, and that God has abandoned you, and that you are forsaken because of this pain and because the healing hasn't come yet. I guarantee you, the healing will come. I guarantee it, based on the resurrected body of Jesus, I guarantee you that some day you'll be in a perfect body. You may have to go through physical death in order to get there, but I guarantee you, as James 5 said, “The Lord will raise him up.”

And so we come in this chapter to the sick room of Hezekiah king of Judah, and here we see a mighty king, courageous, faithful to God, reduced in some condition to that of a quivering baby, facing the wall, crying and praying. Here we see the devastation of disease, a silent invisible internal enemy, not like the Assyrians outside the walls, but some kind of disease inside his body destroying life from within, but here also we see the almighty power of God in healing Hezekiah displaying his power over every disease and sickness that there is. Here we are led to ask the deepest questions of life: God's goodness in our pain and suffering, his purpose in it. Why does he allow it? Why even perhaps does he bring it? Is he really powerful enough to heal it, and if so, why doesn't he heal it every time?

Here we have the opportunity once again to lift our eyes from the history of the Bible to our own personal condition, and our own personal situation, our own personal questions, our own personal suffering, our personal fears and torments, the limits of our own personal faith, our own personal sins and how they accuse us at those times, and ultimately we are led to ask, “What must I do to be saved?” So ultimately, I believe all roads in the Bible lead to the cross and empty tomb of Jesus Christ. So ultimately, Isaiah 38 is going to bring us to Christ the healer, the savior of the world.

Now, in Adam, we are told, scripturally, all sinned, and in Adam all die. Thus it's told to us in Romans 5:12, “Just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.” We sinned in Adam and then we die in Adam, 1 Corinthians 15:22, “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”  Sickness and injury, pain and suffering are part of the Adamic curse, the curse we have in Adam. So in this chapter, we come face-to-face with the issue of sickness and by extension injury, the problem of illness, of disease, of pain and suffering. Now, we live in a world of injury and disease, of pain and suffering, we know that, and you know it more and more as you get older and older. When you're younger, you're not so aware of it, but as you get older and older and you make many many trips to the hospital to visit loved ones or for your own sake, you will know, and you do know that this is a world of pain and injury, and sorrow and suffering.

And sickness and pain assault every category of persons on the face of the earth. High and mighty alike like King Hezekiah, down to the lowest of the low, down to orphans in poor countries, sickness and disease and pain hits the body. Now the body was made, it was crafted for the glory of God. It says in Psalm 139:14, “I will praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” Our bodies are fearfully and wonderfully made, marvelously made, but there is no part of the body, there is no bodily organ, there is no bodily system or function that is immune to disease and pain and suffering. None are exempted, every part of the body is subject to its own set of diseases and injuries, and it's astonishing the variety and misery of sicknesses and injuries worldwide. The World Health Organization categorized in 2007, 12,420 possible diagnoses, 12,420 in the International Classification of Diseases, the ICD. Talking to Walter Lee this morning, he said, there are more now. They keep adding to them all the time. Oh, please stop! Twelve thousand is enough, don't you think? But several more thousand have been added.

Now I know they mean well, they really do. They really want to diagnose these things so that they can be healed, but I tell you there's only one healing to all 12,420, and that's the shed blood of Christ, the resurrected body of Christ, that's it. And Jesus alone can heal from all of these, but in the International Classification of Diseases, there are 17 major categories such as infectious and parasitic diseases like malaria; neoplasms, I didn't know that word, but that's tumors that grow, new tissues that grow like a cancerous tumor, possibly Hezekiah had something like that; diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs like leukemia; diseases of the immune system, like AIDS; diseases of the nervous system, and sense organs like MS or migraine headaches or blindness; injuries and poisoning, all different kinds of diagnoses.

So our sin-cursed planet is a seething cauldron of disease and injury and pain and torment, and it's hard to even imagine the ears of the Lord as these cries for healing go up to him. It says in James, “The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.” Well, the same is true of the cries of those suffering this kind of pain. God hears it, he hears it all, said to Hezekiah, “I have seen your tears, and I've heard your prayer. I hear you. I know that you're suffering.” It staggers my imagination to think of all that God is listening to at every moment, and Christ is, as I said, the only cure. Isaiah 53:5, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” The physical healing of both the body and the soul are part of the atonement of Christ. They're both included.

Christ in his time on earth, healed every disease and sickness imaginable among the people, but he beautifully in Matthew 9:6-7, linked his healing of the body to the forgiveness of sins, that he also has the power to do, the healing of the soul. He linked the two together. You remember the paralyzed man. They made an opening in the roof and lowered him down, and Jesus looked at that man in his paralysis, and without having healed his body, he solved his real problem, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.” We cannot measure the value of those words spoken by Jesus the savior. Of course, the people who heard him say it were offended, "Only God has the power to forgive sins. Who is this man who speaks like this? This blasphemy!" Jesus knew their thoughts and said, "Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say to the paralyzed man, ‘Rise and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins…he said to the paralyzed man, ‘Rise and walk.’ And the man got up and went home.” And so Jesus linked the two, the physical healing of the body, the forgiveness of the soul, of the sins, linked together, and they are both included in the work of Christ. So that's by way of introduction.

Let's look at Hezekiah's own condition, and we begin in verses 1-3 with Hezekiah's misery and his prayer. Isaiah 38:1, “In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death.” It seems to have been, as I said, some kind of boil or disease, producing an outbreak on the skin, maybe a tumor, don't know for sure. Verse 21 speaks of a boil of some sort. In any case, it was a very serious condition, and Hezekiah was, it says, at the point of death. Now, it may be that he sought from Isaiah a prognosis, a prediction. “Where is this heading? Where am I going? Am I going to be healed or not?” It doesn't say that he did, but Isaiah son of Amoz, the prophet, came and gave it to him anyway. He said to him, "This is what the Lord says: Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover." Well, this was the very news that Hezekiah was fearing, this is what he was afraid of, and as soon as he heard it, he was filled with grief, but consider, I would urge you, carefully the words that Isaiah said, "Put your house in order because you're going to die." Those words have pressed on my heart, that and verse 17, I think are the two takeaways for me. Verse 17, “Surely it was for my benefit that I suffered this affliction.” I think theologically, these are the two great takeaways from Isaiah 38.

"Put your house in order because you are going to die." What does that mean to you? What do those words mean to you? And I'll hit it again at the end of the sermon, but I'll just say it now. You're going to die, so get ready for it. Let it not come to you as some surprise or some shock. Don't think I never thought this would happen to me. Don't be surprised when pain and suffering come on you. It's going to happen. It is appointed unto each one of us to die, and after that to face judgment. I'm not pitting Hebrews 9:27 against 1 Corinthians 15, which says, “Lo, I tell you a mystery, we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” I'm aware of that verse, but if the Lord does not return in our lifetime, you will die, and so this is the prophetic word to you. You may feel very healthy right now, you may be young in the prime of your life. I'm telling you, if we are not the final generation, you will die. An injury or a disease will take you out, and so these words speak right to my heart, “Put your house in order.”

What does that mean? Well, to Hezekiah, it meant, get everything ready in your house, give orders to your house. The Hebrew word is strong in terms of give charge to your house, set it in order, put it in a good arrangement. For a king, especially, this meant choose a successor and get him ready. The problem was, there's no biblical indication that Hezekiah had a son at this point, so I don't know how he would have heard that. For any person, it means making sure that there's no unfinished business in your life, no unconfessed sins toward God, there's no unforgiveness or broken relationships horizontally, there's no broken promises. Nothing left undone. Put your house in order. Bring order out of chaos. This is the work of life. Do the works while you can, while you have strength to do them. Put your house in order; you don't have much time left. You may think you have decades left, you may, but even decades will pass like a mist in the morning. So put your house in order, you're going to die.

Well, Hezekiah, having heard this word, he turns his face to the wall and he's filled with grief and misery. Look at verses 2-3, “He turned of his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord, ‘Remember, O Lord, how I've walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.’ And Hezekiah wept bitterly.” He doesn't accept this word from Isaiah, doesn't accept it. He reacts with great misery and sorrow as though there could possibly be no joy beyond death. The turning of the face to the wall and the weeping bitterly is not a good sign. Wicked king Ahab, King of Samaria, did the same thing when Naboth refused to sell him his vineyard, as you remember, and then there was the ungodly son of David, Amnon, who was filled with lust for his half-sister Tamar, and did the same thing, turned his face to the wall and cried and moaned. Hezekiah is doing the same thing here, lying on his bed, sulking, face to the wall, not accepting, struggling, but he is essentially different than these other two ungodly ones. He turns his face to the wall, yes, but he prays. He prays to God. It's the best thing that he could have done.

Now, the basis of his prayer, a bit shallow. How would you summarize it? “Remember God, how good I am. And all the good things that I've done.” Friends, can I just urge you, don't do that if it's you that's on the sick bed. Don't turn and say, "Remember how awesome I've been in your service, and don't you want that awesomeness to continue?" That's really not the point. Hezekiah had been faithful, he had walked with the Lord in whole-hearted devotion, the Scripture testifies to that. He'd been faithful in religious revival, getting rid of the high placesc, hallenging the King of Assyria, he was a man of faith, and the Scripture testifies to that, but the more faith you know, the more you know, you don't pray like this. Amen? Because you're just aware, as David said, "My sins are more numerous than the hairs of my head." And you just know that you have a sense of that sinfulness, that corruption, and that's not gonna be the basis of your prayer at that time.

And Hezekiah... I think, I sense here, I don't know for sure, but I sense a sense of injustice here. Do you sense that? "God, this is how you treat your servants?" As someone said, "If this is how God treats his friends, no wonder he has so few of them." Well, that's disrespectful. God only treats his friends, those who have been reconciled to him through faith in Christ, with lavish grace and blessing, even through sickness and even through death, still grace and blessing, lavish. But there's a sense of, "This isn't fair, God. This isn't what I expected when I serve you. I've served you well, and this is how you're treating me?" What a contrast, I think, with the apostle Paul in Philippians 1, and I wanna commend to you the apostle Paul's attitude in Philippians 1:20-24 as the best attitude you can possibly have toward life and death. There is no better attitude than this. The goal of your sanctification in this area, where we're heading toward in this sermon is to get to this point where you can say these things. Paul's wrestling with his own future, doesn't know if he's going to be executed for Christ or not, doesn't know. Wrestling with that. And this is what he says, "I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death." So Paul's number one goal is this: “I want Christ exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. Now, if I'm to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I'm torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it's more necessary for you that I remain in the body.” Convinced of this, he said, “I know that I will remain.” So friends, that's it. I am eager and excited to keep on living, so I can serve God's people to the glory of God. But I'm even more eager and excited to die, 'cause then I get to go be with Jesus. If you can get to that point where you could actually in a very healthy way, be torn between the two, then you have arrived at health in this area. Head toward that. Pray toward that. Point toward that.

Now, in verses 4-8, God makes a promise of healing, and we see its fulfillment in verses 21-22 at the end of the chapter. “Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah,” verse 4-5, “‘Go and tell Hezekiah, “This is what the Lord, the God of your father David, says: I have heard your prayer, seen your tears; I will add fifteen years to your life. And I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city.” So the word of the Lord comes to Hezekiah through Isaiah. This is a regular pattern in these chapters. Isaiah is God's official mouthpiece, and God speaks to Hezekiah through the prophet. It was God who spoke through Isaiah the warning of the sickness, and now he speaks the opposite word, a word of blessing and healing.

Now, God makes a promise to Hezekiah, sears him as a matter of fact. He identifies himself as “the Lord, the God of your father David.” God says he has heard Hezekiah's prayer and seen his tears. In Psalm 56:8, it seems that God collects our tears in a bottle. He always remembers them, he knows when we are weeping, he understands our pain, he is there, he's compassionate. I really believe, by the way, this was the point of Jesus's great sorrow, right before he raised Lazarus from the dead. It's his compassion for the sufferer. Martha and Mary at that time and throughout thousands of years ahead of history, all the times that his providence, his will would bring sorrow and sadness and grief and pain to his own people, he is compassionate with that, he weeps with those who weep, he feels it. He said, “I have heard your prayer, I've seen your tears.”

And then he makes some astonishing promises to Hezekiah, “I will add fifteen years to your life. And I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city.” Now, the first one's just interesting me because of its specificity. Suppose he had said, “I will add to your life. Praise God, you're gonna be healed, I'll add your life,” but he doesn't say that. “I will add fifteen years.” Now he has an unusual blessing that we usually don't get. I'm not sure we'd want it. Do you wanna know how many more years you have left? I don't. I'm just happy to leave that to God. Amen. “You have four more days. Use it well.” Oh, oh, don't tell me that. “You'll be paralyzed.” Better not to know. You know how I know it's better not to know, because you don't know, and so God is good. But it's just unusual, he says, “I'm gonna add 15 years to your life.”

And he says, “I'm gonna defend the this city from the king of Assyria.” Now, some people think that statement proves that the events of this chapter actually precede the events of chapters 36-37. A lot of scholars think that, but I don't think it's necessary. I think that the king of Assyria was still a threat even after he lost 185,000. You could think he was gonna go back, raise another army and come back five years later, and he says, "Well, whether he does or he doesn't, it doesn't matter because I'm gonna defend this city from the king of Assyria." So I take it in just the order it's written, 36, then 37, then 38, 39.

So what was God's sign concerning the healing? Actually, that's the very thing Hezekiah had asked, “What will be the sign that I will go up to the temple of the Lord?” He wants a sign that he will be healed. Now in 2 Kings 20, where the same thing is covered, there's a little more information there, and apparently Isaiah and Hezekiah go back and forth. Say, "What shall I do?" "Tell you what, let's look at the shadow on the stairway of King Ahaz. Let's look at the shadow on that." "Okay, should I make it go ahead or should I make it go back?" So they go back and forth, and Hezekiah says, “Well, it's no big thing for it to go ahead, that's the way it usually goes. Make it go back 10 steps.” Very interesting, I think it's like a sundial, and if you're sitting there in the room, you could see as the day progressed as the sunlight went across. Maybe you have a room like this in your house and it just moves across and more and more of the room gets in shadow as the sun progresses, and it's like a sundial, it's like a timekeeper, and in effect, “Just make it go backward, make time go backward.”

Now, you would not believe all of the speculation on this, there is on the internet. On and on they go. Christian astronomers at NASA have worked on this one. I just find it interesting as an engineer, it's like, “These are the missing hours that we had over the 5,000 years of history. We found the 24 hours, so why were you just looking for 24 hours, it has to do with significant figures and engineering, you just don't... We weren't missing just 24 hours, but we found it here in Isaiah 38.” Friends, look, I'm not saying God isn't able to make the earth revolve backward for a while or stand still or turn upside down and back again. God can do all of those things. One person said, “It's like the shekinah glory of God, and a moving star at the time of the birth of Jesus, that stopped over the house of Jesus, a moving star. And so there was a localized shed of light and darkness that God did just for Hezekiah.” Look, I think you can believe that too, and not think that God couldn't have stopped the earth or made it go backwards. Let's move on, shall we? In any case, there was a sign that came and Hezekiah was convinced that he would be healed.

Now, the question for me is not so much what happened with the shadow. The question is, how do you reconcile this statement with God's earlier statement, “Put your house in order because you are going to die; you will not recover”; and how do we harmonize that statement with, “I have heard your prayer”; and how then does the sovereign plan of God fit together with human responsibility and influence? How do we harmonize this with like, “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Did you add 15 years to the book? How do we work this out? Well, friends, everything was known by God, ordained by God before one of them came to be. As we've said before, has it ever occurred to you that nothing has ever occurred to God? Things don't pop into God's mind. “Oh, yeah. Now you've prayed. Okay, well, in that case, etcetera.” It doesn't work like that. Everything was known by God before the foundation of the world, and I don't think he added anything to his book. He already knew that Hezekiah would weep and pray, what then?

The real problem is, how do you harmonize with the statement, “Out your house in order because you're going to die; you will not recover”?  What do you do with that? Well, I think the best I can make of it is this, God never tells us the whole truth, it's just that everything he says is the truth. And so what he left off was, “Put your house in order because you're going to die; you will not recover… [Unless you pray to me, and if you pray, I'll answer the prayer and I'll extend it as far as you're concerned, 15 more years.]” It's the best I can make of it. If you want to tell me that God changed his mind, you're going to have other problems. If you're gonna tell me that God learned something new when Hezekiah prayed, you're going to have other problems. This is the best I can harmonize.

But at any rate, God healed him. How did He heal him? Well verse 21 implies a certain procedure, like a medical procedure, he said, "Prepare a poultice of figs and apply it to the boil, and he will recover." Now, God doesn't need the poultice, he doesn't need the figs, he doesn't need medicine, he doesn't need anything, but God frequently does use intermediate means like prayer, like tears, like the preaching of the gospel by missionaries, like medicine and medical skills by doctors. He can use them to achieve his ends. Like, for example, spit and mud wiped on a man born blind's eyes so that he then could see. God used that for some reason, and so he uses in the same way, some kind of poultice of figs smeared on the boil and he was healed. But we know that ultimately, it was the Lord who healed him.

Now, the rest of the chapter is a psalm of praise that Hezekiah wrote concerning all of these things. Verses 9-20, Hezekiah's thoughtful praise. He looks back on his suffering and looks back on God's power with new eyes, he's gone through this experience now, and he's thinking about it and reflecting back, and he writes a poem basically saying where he's been and what he's learned.

First, he recounts his bitterness concerning this whole thing, the bitterness he felt at the time, verses 10-14, “I said, ‘In the prime of my life must I go through the gates of death and be robbed of the rest of my years?...I will not again [look or] see the Lord, the Lord, in the land of the living; no longer will I look on mankind, or be with those who now dwell in this world. Like a shepherd's tent my house has been pulled down and taken from me. Like a weaver I have rolled up my life, and he has cut me off from the loom; day and night you made an end of me. I waited patiently till dawn, but like a lion, he broke all my bones; day and night you made an end of me. I cried like a swift or thrush, I moaned like a morning dove. My eyes grew weak as I looked to the heavens. I am troubled; O Lord, come to my aid!’” So in these verses, Hezekiah bitterly feels that God is robbing him or taking from him the best of his years, he's stealing time from him. One of the hardest lessons of life is to understand that your days, your hours, your years are in the hand of God, that “in him you live and move and have your being,” Acts 17. Like God, like Daniel said to Belteshazzar, “You did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways.” Like James teaches us to say, in James 4:15, “You ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord's will, I will live.’” My life is in his hands, and he doesn't owe me another minute, he doesn't owe me another year. God can't rob something that already belonged to him and you belong to him, and he has the power and the right to do anything he wants with your days and with your body, because they belong to him.

Now, his deepest pain here is that he will not again see the Lord in the land of the living, and there's a bitterness aspect of this. “God is doing this to me. Has God become my enemy?” “Like a shepherd's tent my house has been pulled down and taken from me. Like a weaver, I've rolled up my life, and he has cut me off on the loom; day and night you made an end of me. I waited patiently till dawn, but like a lion he broke all my bones; day and night you made an end of me.” Verse 15, “He himself has done this.” “It is God who's doing this. In effect, God, you are killing me. Does that mean you don't love me? Is that what this means?”

Now, some people will tell us that God never does this kind of thing to anybody ever, the health and wealth people, the prosperity gospel people that tell you that God only means for you to be healthy and prosperous, and that God just would not do this to your body, ever. But that is false, it's not biblical, and it will rob you of genuine spiritual comfort when it's going on, you need to see God's hand in it and understand it. God does this. Everyone who dies, it's God that takes them out. Do you understand that? Everyone who dies. In Psalm 104, “When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.” Psalm 90:3, “You turn men back to dust, saying, ‘Return to dust, O sons of men.’” Isaiah 40:24, “No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown, no sooner do they take root in the ground, than he blows on them and they wither, and the whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.” God kills everyone that dies, he does. He could easily sustain their life, no matter how severe their injuries or their illnesses. He could easily heal them, it would be no problem for him to do it, and not only that, he is providentially in control of the circumstances that bring it about. This is something God does, and Hezekiah was right in all this. “You are doing this to me, God.” Maybe he was wrong in what it meant, but he was right, that God was doing it.

Now, for the wicked, it's an expression of God's wrath every day when he takes them out of this world. For the righteous, however, it's a display of his grace and mercy. None of those that God has taken out of the world would want a return trip. Amen. All of the righteous ones who are up in heaven praising God, free from death, mourning, crying and pain do not wanna come back. And so it says in Psalm 116, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” It is not hostile. He's not angry. He is loving you and caring for you.

Hezekiah cries out in grief in agony, cries “[verse 14] like a swift or thrush,” he moaned “like a mourning dove. My eyes grew weak as I looked toward the heavens. I'm troubled; O Lord, come to my aid!” He cries out to God, he's moaning, he's in pain, but now comes the lesson, verses 15-17, “I will walk humbly all my years because of this anguish of my soul.” That's NIV. ESV and other translations have it a bit differently, but I think in the whole context, I really think the NIV has it right. “I will walk quietly for the rest of my life because I went through this bitterness,” I think is what he's getting at, “I'm gonna quiet myself because of what's happened here.” Verse 16, “Lord, by such things men live; and my spirit finds life in them too. You restored me to health and let me live.” And now here's the key, the second key, verse 17, “Surely it was for my benefit that I suffered such anguish. In your love you kept me from the pit of destruction; you have put all my sins behind your back.”

Hezekiah was humbled by all this, do you see it? Do you see how humbled he is by this process? His disease, his sickness, his pain humbled him. Anguish of soul produced humility of life. “By such things,” he says, “[godly] men live,” and Hezekiah says he's more alive now than ever before. “Surely it was for my benefit that I suffered this anguish. I learned God's grace to a sinner like me.” At the beginning, he's saying, “Remember my whole-hearted devotion.” At the end, he's saying, “Surely…you put all of my sins behind your back.” He wasn't talking like that at the beginning; he was talking like that at the end.

Now, the ultimate problem he gets with in verses 18-19. “How can we praise you if we're dead? The dead don't praise you.” He says, “The grave cannot praise you, death cannot sing your praise; those who go down to the pit cannot hope for your faithfulness. The living, the living—they praise you, as I'm doing today; fathers tell their children about your faithfulness.” This is a bit strange because in effect, Hezekiah is saying, “Don't you know that dead people can't praise you?” You know what I think Jesus would say to him at this particular one moment? “Hezekiah, you're absolutely right. But you don't understand where Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are right now.” You remember the Sadducees who denied the resurrection? What did they say? “Death is all there is. When you die, that's it. It's over.” Jesus said, “No, it's not. Haven't you read in the burning bush where he said,   He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” So Jesus would say, “Hezekiah, you're right, but they're alive. They don't have a body right now, but they're praising God. And so he is right now the God of the living Abraham, and the God of the living Isaac, and the God of the living Jacob. And he means for them to have bodies, they just don't have them yet, they're waiting.” And so the end result, people will spend eternity praising God. Verse 20, “The Lord will save me, and we will sing with stringed instruments all the days of our lives in the temple of the Lord.” Amen and hallelujah.

So what lessons can we take from the sick bed? First, come to the cross, dear friends, come to the cross. Pain is a messenger that takes you either to despair or to the cross, that's where it's gonna bring you. It's gonna bring you to despair, or it's gonna bring you to the cross of Christ. Pain always tells you something is wrong, and therefore it's a gift of God, and you know what the big thing that's wrong? We're not in heaven yet, that's a big thing that's wrong, and God wants us to be in heaven, and so let pain, physical pain bring you to the cross of Christ, where Jesus suffered physical pain and death in our place. He died on the cross, and his blood was shed for sinners like us. How is it that God put Hezekiah's sins behind his back? How is it? By what justice does he take our sins and throw them in the depths of the sea to remember them no more? By the blood of Jesus, by the shed blood of Christ, trust in him. Trust in him. God has power through Christ to forgive sins.

Secondly, “Put your house in order, because you're going to die.” So what do I mean by that? Well, it's appointed to you to die, and after that, to face judgment. Get ready for it. Get ready for it. Sickness and death is a shot across the bow saying, “The next one's coming right for you. Get ready for it; it's coming.” But what does it mean then to put your house in order? Well first of all, know that death is inevitable. Secondly, do what I just said a moment ago. Flee to Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and trust in him that all your sins may be forgiven. But then go beyond that. Look at your relationships. Are your relationships in order? Any broken relationships, any unforgiveness? Look at your holiness. Are there any sins that God wants you to be putting to death and you're procrastinating, thinking, “I'm gonna have time to do it. I'll do it in two or three years. I can't deal with it right now.” Put your house in order. Put your house in order.

I look at it this way, a few years ago, my kids were collecting state quarters, you guys know what I'm talking about? State coins, and they got a cardboard display thing, for free, with 50 slots in it, you know, and they were collecting them and they were going after these states and they were looking for specific states, and I came to find out that those quarters I thought were mine really weren't, they belonged to them. So if it's a state they're missing, it was confiscated, pretty much. Well, I think that God has a set of good works for us to do, and he says in Revelation 3:2 to the church at Sardis, he says, “I have not found your deeds complete in my sight. I don't have the full set yet. So do those good works [Ephesians 2:10] that I have ordained for you to do. Go do them. And don't put it off, don't put it off like you're gonna have time to do it. Get the full set of your good works, get them done.”

People talk about a bucket list. You know what I'm talking about, a bucket list? You know what's on the bucket list? A bunch of exciting, self-pleasing things that people wanna do. Skydiving, bungee. I'll tell you what, if I knew I was gonna live 15 more years, if God gave me that prophetic word, I might be a little more daring. I don't know, maybe that's not the thing, but I know I got 13 more years ago. I am indestructible. Well, no, I don't think that's what we should have on our bucket list. You know what I'm saying? Not bungee jumping and skydiving. How about internal journey holiness, dear friends?  How about not being an irritable, selfish, impatient person anymore, put those sins to death. Now, okay. How about being generous to the poor and needy and ministering to those in the urban setting. If God lays that on your heart, do it now, don't wait. You wanna be more evangelistic? Be it now, don't wait. Put your house in order. You're gonna die. Get your good works done, get involved in missions. You've been meaning to, you've been meaning to. Don't mean to anymore; do it.

Trust in Christ during illness. Yours and others, focus on Jesus, set your heart fully on Jesus, look to him. Say to yourself, “Jesus is able to heal this disease.” Don't focus on the disease, it does not matter what disease it is, which of the 12,420 diagnoses, it doesn't matter. He's got them all covered. He can heal them all. Or 17,000, Walter Lee, wherever you are... 18,000, He can heal them all. Tell yourself that. Remind yourself, it says right in the gospel of Mark, “He has done all things well.” There's nothing he cannot do, and he is the same yesterday and today and forever. He is just as capable of healing you now as he was then. Trust in that, focus on it.

And then secondly, pray for healing. Having focused on that, pray for it, ask him for healing in faith. “If any of you is sick?” James 5, “He should call the elders of the church to anoint him with oil and pray over him. The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he'll be forgiven.” But sometimes God doesn't heal, he doesn't will healing this side of the grave. Actually, sometimes he may mean this particular malady to take you out of this world. It could be his will. Trust him. Paul had a thorn in the flesh that God did not remove. I can't believe that some prosperity gospel, or health and wealth people tell us, “Paul didn't have enough faith.” Oh my goodness! And you think you will have enough? “I'm better than Paul when it comes to faith.” Do you see how useless that teaching is, how useless, and it's actually got a poisoned barb because in the midst of your suffering, you're now told you also have a spiritual problem, you don't have enough faith. How comforting is that? It's just not true.

So pray for healing and understand it may not come and suffer well by learning Hezekiah's lesson, be in training now for lesser illnesses and lesser pains, suffer well, so you can die well. Suffer well, so you can die well. John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress, said this, I'm putting it in more modern language. He said this, “You only get one chance to die. If after you've died, you have not died well, you will not get a chance to come back and do it better. Now, you can die poorly and still go to heaven. Amen. But don't do that. Prepare to die well, suffer well and die well, and you do that now by understanding God's goodness in your affliction, his kindness to you. He is training you and preparing you and shaping you through that illness.”

Sixth, set your hope fully on the next world. We are aliens and strangers here, we're passing through. This is not our final home, and disease and sickness and death are ways that you can know that. This is not our final home. We're aliens and strangers. So therefore, “set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Christ is revealed,” 1 Peter 1:13. And at that point, “he will,” Revelation 21:4, “wipe every tear from your eyes and there'll be no more death, mourning, crying and pain.”

And finally, embrace again wholeheartedly, the doctrine of the bodily resurrection from the dead. You are going to have a resurrection body, and it's described in 1 Corinthians 15:42 by contrast with your present body, “So will it be with the resurrection from the dead. The body that is sown it is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” These contrasts tell us what you're going to get. No longer perishable, but imperishable. You will die in a measure of dishonor, there's no avoiding it. Bedpans and changing of tubes, and the pain and the suffering and all of that stuff, it's dishonorable and ugly, and so also the actual corruption that the morticians deal with and all that. It's sown in dishonor, but it's gonna be raised in glory, friends. Your body is gonna be glorious. It's gonna be radiant. You're gonna shine like the sun in the kingdom of your Father. And it's sown in weakness. When you can barely move your right arm or your left arm, you can't get up like you used to do and go like you used to go, and you're just weak. Yes, but you'll be raised in power, and fatigue and weakness will be no part of your future experience. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the lesson that we've had today concerning sickness and injury and illness, and Father, I pray that you would give us power and strength and grace to believe these words and be ready to suffer well and die well, and also if it's not us, if we're doing it alongside loved one, a husband or a wife, even a son or daughter, or a parent, a mother or father, brother or sister in Christ, Lord, help us to be filled with faith and to give faith and to give hope to the suffering person. O Lord, fill us especially with an understanding of the value of the shed blood of Christ and his resurrection victory. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 37:1-38. The main subject of the sermon is a lesson from a miraculous slaughter.

Many, many times, as I consider the ministry of the pulpit, I think about what it is that I'm trying to achieve as I stand here and preach. I think I really zero in on one thing: my desire is to preach for faith. I want you to believe. I want you to be able to see what you cannot see with your physical eyes, to see with your hearts, that the eyes of your hearts would be enlightened, and you would know what there is in the invisible spiritual realms around us, and only Scripture can do that. Scripture gives birth to faith, and Scripture also feeds faith and nourishes and sustains it, so that's what I feel like I'm called to do. And so I think often about those passages of Scripture that give me a glimpse of Christ on his throne, like Revelation 4, where he, on the island of Patmos, heard a voice, and he saw a door standing open in heaven, and the voice said, "Come up here," and he went up and immediately he saw a throne in heaven with Someone seated on it. I feel if I could get that throne in some way established in your minds and hearts by the proclamation of the word, then I will have done what I think the Lord's calling me to do today.

I also think about the Scripture that says, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And I think we should fear a God like this, dear friends, I think we should fear a God who can send out the angel of the Lord and kill 185,000 troops just like that. We should fear him, and through faith in the gospel, as John Newton put it, "Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and by grace, my fears were relieved.” I would love to have those fears relieved by a clear faith in Christ, crucified and resurrected, so I'm just laying all my cards on the table here for you. This is what I want you to do. I tend to see Isaiah 36-37, what's going on there in not just historical terms, what was happening back then, I think it's all completely accurate history. It's not a mere metaphor, a fable, or a myth, or any of that, it absolutely happened, but I think there are definitely spiritual principles for us, so I tend to see representation. I feel that Sennacherib, the king of Assyria and his tens of thousands of troops coming up right to the walls like a mighty flood to sweep them all the way, that represents Satan and my sins and the wickedness that would sweep me away and kill me and destroy me forever and ever, my enemies. And Hezekiah represents the believer, not righteous in and of himself, but trusting in the Lord knowing he has no claim, no just claim on God to do anything, but humbly beseeching God for salvation, for deliverance. I find myself in that, not just him, but that small remnant of Jews that was left huddled within the walls of Jerusalem, and then I see the angel of the Lord going out and destroying all of the enemies. And dear friends, that is Christ, my hero, my savior, my king, who has gone out before me to save me from eternal death. That's how I see it. Now, if you wanna call that allegorical, whatever you wanna do with that, that's just what I think is going on. I think it actually happened in space and time, I think that those things are all true, but I think there are some timeless spiritual lessons that we should draw from this incredible chapter.

So let's go back into the history, 'cause I think it's so beautiful that in the Bible so rich and full of history, and we are not theological liberals who say it never really happened, but it's teaching us spiritual lessons. We don't do that. We say both, we get it all. We say, “I do don't know the history actually happened, and it has spiritual lessons, and so these things actually happened.” Ours is a wonder-working God. He is a miracle-working God. Amen. He can do mighty things in space and time, he can astounded us and stupefy us by what he can do. Along with that, they'll come these spiritual lessons.

Now, the history. We're dealing with the mighty empire of the Assyrians, Sargon had died, his son Sennacherib took his throne. At that point, a number of the puppet kings, the smaller kings who were paying tribute to the Assyrians, decided to challenge the son to see if he was determined to hold on to his kingdom. It is a good opportunity to break away, so they thought. So they tested Sennacherib, and it seems like Hezekiah, king of Judah, was one of them. And in the book of Chronicles, in 2 Chronicles, it gives us an indication that he was doing this by faith, out of service to God, by his faith in God, he had the courage to break with Assyria and not do what his faithless, his godless father Ahaz had done, making an alliance with Assyria and finding protection in that.

Well, to put it mildly, Sennacherib and the Assyrians didn't take it kindly, and they really did mean to hold on to their empire, not only that, but they had the power to do so, and so they begin taking on these smaller kings and defeating them one after the other, which is just what the Assyrians do, it's what they did. And so they're just destroying one city after another, they're winning back allegiance from one small king after another, and it seems to me that they saved Hezekiah for last, which indicates that there was perhaps a ring leader sort of thing, and they're gonna make an example of him. Dear friends, who got made an example of here? Isn't that marvelous? But they wanted to make an example of Hezekiah, perhaps. And so the invaded Judah, as Isaiah the prophet had said they would do.

And he makes it very plain, they were getting invaded because of their wickedness and their sin. They deserved to die, and it would do well for you to remember that you do too. The wages of sin is death. And we deserve to die. There's no difference, ultimately, in one sense, between us and the Assyrians who were slaughtered. We deserve to die, and many of those Jews did in fact die under the just wrath of God, Sennacherib killed them. And so he took over 46 cities and towns and villages in Judah, he sent a detachment of soldiers under the Rabshakeh, the field commander in Isaiah 36, just a portion of his army to intimidate the remnant of Jews and Hezekiah that were huddled within the walls of Jerusalem.

Now, Jerusalem was a tough citadel to take, it was not gonna be easy to do. And so to save himself the trouble of fighting and siege warfare and all that, he thought to intimidate Hezekiah through this field commander and Isaiah 36 speaks of that. In verse 18-20, the field commander speaks these words of blasphemy, Isaiah 36, "Do not let Hezekiah mislead you when he says, ‘The Lord will deliver us.’ Has the god of any nation ever delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Have they rescued Samaria from my hand? Who of all the gods of these countries has been able to save his land from me? How then can the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand?" And so with many words of arrogance and blasphemy and psychological warfare and intimidation, the field commander intimidated and blustered to the men who were sitting on the walls and to Hezekiah seeking to get them to come out. Chapter 36.

Thirty-seven is the response to these events. In verses 1-4, we see Hezekiah’s humility as he responds in sackcloth seeking answers, he sends some messengers, Eliakim, Shebna and they go to Isaiah the prophet, they're wearing sackcloth, everyone's humbled. And Hezekiah seeks just prayer, he just wants prayer from Isaiah. “Tell Isaiah to pray for the remnant that still survives.” But God gives what Hezekiah did not ask for at that point—he gives a prophetic answer, and God's first judgment, word of judgment against Assyria at this point, "Fear not, the blasphemer will die." Look at verses 5-7, “When Hezekiah's officials came to Isaiah, Isaiah said to them, ‘Tell your master, “This is what the Lord says: Do not be afraid of what you have heard—these words with which the underlings of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. Listen! I'm going to put a spirit in him so that when he hears a certain report, he will return to his own country, and there I will have him cut down with the sword.”’" So fear not, the blasphemer will die. Well, of course, that doesn't do you much good if you're also gonna be killed first, but it is the beginning of God's answer, “Fear not.” He's going to give a more thorough answer later in the chapter.

At this point, some events start to overtake us. Egypt marches out to fight as they were paid to do, and Assyria went off and went out to fight them, as they were definitely going to do, and Assyria won easily. And so Tirhakah, the cushite king of Egypt was defeated and ran away, just as Isaiah had said in chapters 30-31, “Egypt's help will bring you no refuge; they will be actually to your shame, and you will regret all the money you spent to hire those soldiers.” But as all that's going on, the king of Assyria sends apparently a letter with more blasphemy and more intimidation, more bluster, the same type of message. And you have that in verses 8-13, beginning at verse 10, "Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the God you depend on deceive you, when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be handed over to the king of Assyria.’ Surely you've heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries, destroying them completely. And will you be delivered? Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my forefathers, deliver them—the gods of Gozan, Haran, Rezeph and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of Sepharvaim, or of Hena or Ivvah?”

So this letter comes and Hezekiah in versus 14-20 spreads out the letter before the Lord. He goes to the temple, still wearing sackcloth, I'm sure, and he prays to the Lord, spreads out this issue, spreads out this letter, and the whole thing, just spreads it out before God in prayer, and he prays, verse 16, "Oh Lord Almighty, God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. Give ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; listen to all the words, Sennacherib has sent to insult the living God. ‘It is true, O Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste all these peoples and their lands, they have thrown their gods into the fire and destroy them, for they were not gods, but only wood and stone fashioned by human hands. Now, O Lord, our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all kingdoms on earth may know that you alone, O Lord, are God.’" And so that's the prayer of this godly man, Hezekiah.

We talked about it last week, I'm not gonna go into details, but the verdict comes down from the king of the universe, as I pointed out last week, first it's words, then it's actions. And that's how it is with us. God first promises to deliver us, and then he does so, and what we are feeding on now, every day, we believers, is words, that's what we have, we have words. And so we feed on these words every day, and they are not idle words for us, these words are our life and we feed on them, and so God says what he's going to do, and then he does it, and so this is the verdict coming down, and you heard Rick read these words, these verses, so I'm not going to go through them again, but you can see how the Lord gives the verdict. As it comes down, “the virgin daughter of Zion of Jerusalem tosses her head as you flee,” and so there's this sense of mocking. I think often in 1 Corinthians 15, where we will get to mock death and we'll get to say, "Where, O death is your sting now? Where, O grave is your triumph? Look at me now—I'm alive! And the grave has been thrown into the lake of fire, so death is dead and I live.” So isn't that beautiful? There's a sense of victory, and you see in what Rick read and what the king of Assyria said, you see the attitude of blasphemy and arrogance as he claims God-like characteristics, the ability to ascend to the heavens and to send down into the depths and to do all these mighty things, this arrogant man. But God in the middle of it said, "Haven't you heard that I have planned everything you did? I am the great author, and I am the orchestrator, I am the director of human history. There is nothing you have done that I did not ordain for you to do. So I ordained it, I ordained that you'd turn cities into piles of rubble.”

Now, you may say, Why would God do that? Well, because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and the wages of sin is death. And the people who were killed in those invasions deserved to die. And God was using Assyria to kill 'em. The Assyrians deserve to die too, and God will use some other people to kill them. And this is how history goes, but God is orchestrating all of that. And God says, "I know where you stay and when you come and go and how you rage against me." And he issues this verdict against him, "I am going to put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I am going to make you return by the way that you came, and I'm going to raise up, for you, Hezekiah, a remnant that's gonna grow up and flourish and come alive again, and you will feed on the fruit of the land," and he says, "The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this."

And then he gives in a final way, his verdict, verses 33-35, "Therefore, this is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria: ‘He will not enter the city or shoot an arrow here; he will not come before it with shield or build a siege ramp against it. By the way that he came he will return. He will not enter this city…. I will defend this city and save it, for my sake and for the sake of David my servant!" And then he does it, he sends out the angel of the Lord. And in one night, the angel of the Lord kills 185,000 Assyrian troops. And then though the text doesn't say it, history tells us, 20 years later, he kills Sennacherib too. Twenty years later, and he does it by his own sons while he's worshipping his false god.

Now, there's no end to the lessons that could come out of this chapter, but I've lifted up 10 and there really are 10 this time, dear friends. There really are. So if you wanna get an eleventh out of it, there are more than this, but these are the 10 we're going to look at. So first, central lesson, not only of Isaiah 37, but of the entire Bible. God's glory is uppermost in his own affections. The most important thing to God is his own glory. The most important thing to God is his own name, his own reputation. He does everything for his own glory. And this is incredibly important for us idolatrous people to learn. We are forever exchanging the glory of God for images and for idols and worshipping and serving the creature rather than the Creator. And we Christians are in the process of being completely healed of that, and this sermon is part of your healing and mine, so that we learn to stop being idolaters and become as God-centered in our hearts as God is in his. God does everything for his own glory. His glory is uppermost in his own affections.

In 1900 when Harvard University was finishing a building called Emerson Hall that was going to house their philosophy department, they were soliciting inquiries about what caption should be inscribed across the door, and one professor of philosophy suggested something from the Greek philosopher Protagoras, "Man is the measure of all things." But Harvard President Eliot wisely chose this instead, "What is man that you are mindful of him?" And that's what's over those Harvard students as they walk in there, there's Psalm 8. We are used to seeing everything from a man-centered perspective, in which man gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and God gets smaller and smaller. That is what secularization is all about. A secular society and the process of secularization is the process by which God is minimized. But the Scripture is exactly the opposite. "O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together." And so, human sinners are used to kind of reversing Psalm 8, in effect saying, "What is God that we should be mindful of him?" But God's glory is uppermost in his own affections, and he does everything for his own glory.

And what do I mean by that? What do I mean by his glory? God's glory is the radiant display of his own attributes, his own nature, the bright, shining display of who God is, God put on display in his perfection. So I think of the attributes, the characteristics of God. And Jonathan Edwards wrote a dissertation on the end, the purpose for which God created the world. Why did God make it? And I would extend beyond that to say, why does God also orchestrate human history in that world? They're the same thing. God created the world and he orchestrates human history, says Edwards, so that his own glories, his glory may be put on display. God created it to make a theater for his own glory. He wrote a play so that we could understand his attributes and his nature, that play is human history, and he wrote those lines and the actors and all of it on it, all of it, created and sustained by God for one purpose: a display of his glory.

Edward says this, "If the world had not been created, then these attributes never would have had any exercise. The power of God, which is a sufficiency in him to produce great effects." Do you not see that in this chapter, the power of God, a sufficiency to produce a great effect? Well, if there hadn't been a world, then we wouldn't ever have been able to see this power of God to produce great effects, and that power “must forever lie dormant and useless as to any effect. The divine wisdom and prudence would have had no exercise in any wise contrivance or any prudent proceeding or disposal of things; for there would have been no objects of contrivance or disposal. The same might be observed of God's justice and goodness and truth. Now, God would have known that he possessed these attributes,” but he wouldn't have been able to put them on display, and if those attributes are excellent, then the display of them is excellent, and therefore it was excellent for God to make a world. And it was excellent for him at certain points in history to put himself on display, and that's what he's doing in this chapter.

So God raises up great monsters, great sea monsters, and cuts them to pieces with the sword of his mouth, like Leviathan. He raises up monsters out of the sea, Daniel 7, one beast after another, one beast, and then he sitting on a throne of fire rules over those beasts for his own glory. Daniel 7, and Assyria was a beast, and God is able to put the bit in the mouth of the beast and do whatever he wants with it, and so God's glory is uppermost in his own affections, and he raises up kings like the king of Assyria like Sennacherib, or like Pharaoh, and he hardens Pharaoh's heart. He said, "You know by now I could have wiped you off the face of the earth. I want you to know that I have that power to do that. By now, I could have wiped you from the face of the earth, but I raised you up, Pharaoh, you individual human being, I raised you up, seated you on your throne over Egypt for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth."

So we must realize, the greatest force there is in the universe is this God's zeal for his own glory. It is the greatest force in the universe. I say to you, brothers and sisters in Christ, it should be the greatest force in your life too, it should be the central motivating factor of your own days. Every day, may God be put on display in my life. May my words and my actions put God on display. “Let your light shine before men that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in Heaven.” That's how you should live.

So what is it that motivates God here in this account? Is it not the dishonor done to him by the field commander and by Sennacherib? Isn't that what motivates him? Isn't that what Hezekiah knows is gonna motivate him? Look at verse 23, "Who is it you have insulted and blasphemed? Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes in pride? Against the Holy One of Israel!" This is the arrogance and pride of the Assyrians that motivates him.

Secondly, therefore, because this is true and central, God's actions, all of them are first for his own name and then only second for human salvation. There's just almost an infinite gap between those two. They're not at war with each other. God saves us from hell, he saves us from sin, saves us from our enemies for his own glory. That's why he does it. Human salvation then is the greatest work on which God has ever embarked, but I'm just saying the reason why he does it is for his own glory, and he says that again and again and again. It's not one or two times. “I want you to know why I'm saving you. I want you to know why I'm saving you.” Isaiah 43 says in verse 25, "I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more." So God saves us and blots out our sins for his own sake, for his own glory. He says again in Isaiah 48:9-11, "For my own name's sake I delay my wrath; for the sake of my praise I hold it back from you, so as not to cut you off. Behold, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this. How can I let myself be defamed? I will not yield my glory to another."

And so God saves us for his own glory, and he says this again and again in Ephesians, he says that he saves us, “In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace.” And again, in Ephesians 1, "In him we're also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who are the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory." And then in verse 14, Ephesians 1:14, same thing again, “for the praise of his glory.”

The greatest issue then surrounding the walls of Jerusalem that day is not the salvation of Hezekiah and the remnant of Jews still alive. It is that God might display his glory in saving that remnant. Now, we should not think that there's any kind of warfare between God's glory and his love, he does love us. It is because of love, he sent Jesus into the world to be our savior. Is not love an attribute of God? Is not an open display of the love of God for sinners like us much to his glory? Yes, it is. But it's because of that that he saves us. That's why he sent Christ to die for us for the praise of his glory.

Third, this chapter teaches us that God's power and knowledge are awesome. I said last week, I say it again, I'll say it another time as strongly as I can, every single one of us underestimates God. You are thinking too lowly of God. Actually, I could even take certain attributes and say, you underestimate the knowledge of God. You don't really understand how much he knows. How completely his knowledge has searched you, he has known you, he knows everything about you. The omniscience of God is just staggering. God's knowledge is overwhelming. And so is his power. So he knows the thoughts of Sennacherib's mind when he says in the middle of Isaiah 37, he said, "You said in your heart, I have done this and I have done that." He's telling him what his heart conversation's like. “Let me tell you what else you were thinking.” It's kind of like when Jesus, knowing the hearts, the thoughts of the people around him, answers them. I love that. Jesus answered them. “Well, I didn't say anything.” “You didn't need to. I know everything you're thinking. I know everything about you.”

God's omniscience is absolutely staggering. He knows everything. He knows how Sennacherib raged against him and his insolence has reached his ears. And then rather intimidating, and it's actually pretty terrifying, look at verse 28, “But I know where you stay.” We were talking about this last week at homefellowship, reminds me of a movie I saw in which there was a terrorist who was threatening a man. And he calls him up in the middle of the day and describes what his elementary school age daughter was wearing that day. Now suppose you've got a phone call like that. That's terrifying. You know what that is? That's a clear threat. And so is verse 28, do you not see it? “I know where you stay and when you come and go.” “You're right in the center of my cross hairs and you cannot escape. If you ascend to the heights of the heavens, I'm there. If you go down to the depths, I'm there. There's nowhere you can go to get out of my cross-hairs." Actually, there is one place though you know what it is, there is a place to get out of the cross-hairs of God the Father, that's the cross of Jesus Christ, that's the refuge where he will no longer single you out for judgment.

But just verse 28 is God's omniscience in threatening mode, “I know where you stay and when you come and go.” And he knows the future as well. He says, "I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. This is what's going to happen.” “I'm going to put a spirit in him so that when he hears a certain report, he's gonna return to his own country, and there I'm gonna have him cut down with the sword." So not only we do have God's incredible knowledge, we also have his power, which goes together making his sovereignty, he knows what to do, he's got a wise plan, and then he's got the power to do it.

So number four, God is sovereign over the nations and rules over the hearts of kings. The nations are nothing compared to God. They're like dust on the scales. They're like drops from a bucket. They're like grasshoppers as he sits in throne above the circle of the earth. The nations are nothing, and God raises them up and lowers them down and does everything he wants with the nations, as he says, "Have you not heard?" Look at verse 26-27, "Long ago I ordained it. In days of old I planned it; now I have brought it to pass." This is the sovereignty of God, and God's sovereignty goes right to the hearts of kings. “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases,” Proverbs 21:1. And so he says, "I'm gonna put a certain spirit in him," do you see that? “I'm gonna put a spirit inside his heart so that when…” And then he controls the external circumstance, "When he receives a certain report, he's going to do this," you see. It's like, "Wait, wait, wait, now I thought God wasn't allowed to do that. I thought we have free will and he's gotta stay outside and knock on the door of our hearts, and if we choose to let him in, then he can do some things, but if not, then he can't.” Friends, there is nothing God cannot do with the things he's made. He doesn't ask our permission and he has access to our hearts and minds. And he says, “I'm going to put a spirit in Sennacherib.” “Say wait a minute, Sennacherib doesn't even believe in you.” “It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what Sennacherib believes, matters what I can do, and I can put a certain spirit in him so that he will do what I want him to do.”

And this doesn't just apply to Sennacherib, it's applied to Hezekiah. Is not God working in Hezekiah too? Is he not stripping him of his confidence in his political machinations and his emissaries to Egypt and all of the stuff he likes to do all the time, isn't he stripping him entirely of that, and so he is cast completely and totally on the Lord alone? And so God has sovereign power over our hearts, and he is able to do these things, and 20 years later, to raise up a couple of assassins from Sennacherib's own family, Adrammelech and Sharezer and have him cut down with the sword. He's able to do that and he's able to do it in exactly the right place. The temple of his god Nisroch while he's worshipping him. Whose god is nothing now? God has that power.

Fifthly, fifth lesson, behold, the arrogance of the human heart. Behold, the arrogance of the human heart. Do you not see it? Do you not see the incredible arrogance? “Who of all the gods of these countries has ever been able to save his land from me? How then can the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand?” Do you not hear that? It's arrogant. Or, “Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the God you depend on deceive you.” It's blasphemy. Every single day, human sinners all over the earth do this kind of blaspheming. They underestimate God. They take his name in vain. They blaspheme him. They underestimate his power. They mock him. They do not believe in him. They do not understand him. They do not seek him.

Now, here's the thing, when I say, "Behold, the arrogance of the human heart," I want you to look into Isaiah 37 as into a mirror. It's not, "Oh, look at those arrogant people out there." It's, "God, am I really... Am I like this? Am I anything like Sennacherib?" Yes, you are. Maybe you don't have his power, his skills, or capabilities, or his high birth, but as a descendant of Adam, you have the same kind of blasphemous, arrogant, rebellious streak against God, and Christ, his gospel is the only thing that can save you from it. We're all like this, apart from the grace of God, that's who we are, we are Sennacherib. We may not have his opportunities and powers and skills, but we've got that same heart of rebellion, and so apart from Christ and apart from the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, this is who we are. Look in this text as into a mirror.

Sixth. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Does this chapter not teach this abundantly? This text is given to us twice in the New Testament, James 4:6, "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." 1 Peter 5:5, "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." I figure if God says something twice, it's important. If God says something once, it's important. If he says it twice, it's really important. By the way, this story, this whole thing is in the Bible three times. It's in 2 Chronicles, 2 Kings, and Isaiah 36-37. The story is hugely important. God wants us to know he opposes. Do you want this kind of God opposing you? You will lose. And how does he oppose Sennacherib? Well, by killing him, by killing his troops, by putting a hook in his nose and dragging him where he wants him to go. He fights against him. And how does he give grace to the humble? Do you not see the humility of Hezekiah in his sack cloth, in his meek lowliness and his broken-heartedness as he seeks God in prayer, as he's mindful of his own sins and says, "This is a day of distress and rebuke and disgrace.” “We deserve what we're getting here." Does this text not make you end up being like that tax collector that stood off at a distance and beat his breast and wouldn't even look up to heaven and said, "Be merciful to me, oh God, the sinner." Let this text humble you. Say, “Is it really this bad, are we really this wicked?" We are. And yet God gives grace to the humble. He forgives their sins and gives them eternal life.

Seventh, God answers humble prayer that's focused on his glory. Hezekiah takes this thing and spreads it out before God. His life is directly threatened. I don't know what it would have been like for Hezekiah if God had chosen not to save him, what the King of Assyria would have done to him. They were known for their torture. I think ancient historians tell us they're the ones that invented crucifixion. They wanted a slow torturous death, so he was going to die. Sennacherib and his army was like a dagger right across his jugular, ready to kill him. And yet, for all of that, Hezekiah's prayer is ultimately focused on the glory of God. "Deliver us, Oh Lord…so that all kingdoms on earth may know that you alone, O Lord, are God." And God wants us to pray like that, he wants us to learn to pray not based on our own righteousness or our own good works or any of that, but based on his glory. “O God, deliver me from sin, so that you can be glorified in my life. My sin strips you of glory. Deliver me, Oh Lord. Glorify your name.” Learn to pray like that.

Eighth, God is patient toward the wicked. God is patient toward the wicked. Romans 9:22 says, "What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of wrath prepared for destruction." He bears with great patience these wicked ones. Sennacherib, as I said, history tells us was left alive for 20 more years after this. he had 20 years to think about what happened outside the walls of Jerusalem, but in all of that time, do not be misled, “Do not be deceived [by that long delay], God cannot be mocked,” you understand? His patience towards sinners is to give them an opportunity to repent, that they will repent of their sins. God's patience towards you leads you toward repentance, Romans 2 tells us that, but most wicked people don't use the time well. They do not use that delay well. They're under the death penalty. The wages of sin is death. It's appointed to each one of them to die and after that to face judgment, but they don't use that time well, and Romans 2 says, what they're doing instead is storing up more and more wrath against themselves. When the day of God's judgment and wrath will be revealed, God will give to each person according to what he has done. But the Lord has a day in store for judgment.

Ninth, God's wrath is terrifying. Instant death fell on 185,000 Assyrian troops. Now, there was something quite extraordinary about this, and something actually quite common place about this. It's extraordinary, obviously, because they all dropped dead. They were healthy soldiers, young men in their prime and they're all dead. That's extraordinary. What's not so extraordinary about this is that God actually does something about like this every single day. Statistics show that somewhere between 150,000 and 160,000 people die every day. Every single day. You're saying, "Well, God doesn't have anything to do with that." When God says, “You die,” you die. If God says, "You keep living," guess what you do, you keep living. Because in him, you live and move and have your being. And so Psalm 104 says, "When he takes away their breath, they die and return to the earth." So God kills 150,000+ people every day. Our God is a God who expresses his wrath every day. He just doesn't send newspaper headline and say, "Oh, by the way, here's some of my wrath and here's some of my wrath and here's... " No, no, but the time runs out for people, 150,000 every day.

And so behold then the wrath and the judgment of God, and fear it. And as John the Baptist said to his enemies who were coming out to here him preach, he said, "You brood of vipers who warned you to flee [From what?] the coming wrath.” There is a wrath to come. But thanks be to God, 1 Thessalonians 1:10 says that Jesus rescues us from the coming wrath. So this is, it's good to know there is a coming wrath and that Jesus can rescue you from it. Far greater numbers are gonna be slaughtered at the end of the world. Read about it in the book of Revelation. One plague takes out a third of mankind. Well, that's not 185,000, that's billions. God has that kind of power.

And tenth, God's grace and mercy to sinners is amazing. Sinners who were saved, who were delivered in Jerusalem were no better than the sinners who died outside the walls. Intrinsically, they were the same. The difference was the sovereign grace and love of God. It's the only difference. And marvel at it, marvel at the grace of God to sinners in Christ, and he is publishing abroad this one simple message: Repent and believe in Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. God saves sinners. And if you'll flee to Christ, he will give you eternal life.

Now, in all of this, there's a challenging question, isn't there? If God can do this kind of thing any time, why doesn't he do it more? Why do any of God's people ever suffer? Why are there any pastors languishing in jail? If God has the ability to deliver his people by supernatural intervention, then why doesn't he do it? And it gets even intensified when Jesus talks about his people like the persistent widow crying out for justice day and night, and Jesus says, "And will he long delay? Will he not deliver them quickly? But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” The martyrs in Revelation 6, who are martyred in the fifth seal, they're asking for it, they're saying, "Lord, how long until we get avenged?" And they're told to wait a little bit. Wait a little while until more martyrs come in. So if God can do this kind of thing, then why doesn't he do it all the time? Because it is God's purpose that some of his sheep be killed all day long for the advance of the gospel, that we should fill up in our bodies what is still lacking in regard to the afflictions of Christ, so that those who are elect chosen before the foundation of the world might yet hear the gospel. And the people who are surrounding them, and maybe even they themselves persecute those messengers and God allows it to happen.

It's the very same thing he did to his own Son, he didn't spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all. And so Habakkuk 3, Habakkuk said, "You know, Lord, we've heard about your great deeds in the past.” “Renew them in our day, in our time make them known." So take Isaiah 37, say, "God, you can do this, do anything. Spread the gospel. Work in our church. Let us be evangelistically fruitful. Let the missionaries plant churches and let those churches multiply. If you can do this, Lord, if you can bring death then you can bring life." Pray based on the truths of this chapter.

Now, I wanna finish with one observation on how this chapter preaches Christ. Do you see Jesus in this chapter at all? Any of you see Jesus? I'm not gonna ask you to raise your hand, but maybe you can nod. Any of you see Jesus in this chapter? Yes. Amen. Alright, you say, "Well, where is he?" He's called in this chapter, the angel of the Lord. And you're saying, "Wait a minute, wait, wait in Chronicles, it says an angel." Well, he's both, but the angel is a little more precise. The angel of the Lord is the one who stopped Abraham from killing his son, Isaac. He's the one who spoke to Moses out of the flames of the burning bush. The angel of the Lord is the one in Judges 2, who says, "I brought you out of Egypt…into the land that I swore to give to your forefathers." What kind of angel talks like that? Well, the pre-incarnate Christ does.

Now, why would it be Christ that would go out and slaughter all these enemies that are right up to the walls of Jerusalem, because you know what? It's a dress rehearsal. He's gonna do it again at the end of the world. And he puts on display and he says with these words in Matthew 24, "As it was, so it will be." The enemies are gonna come. Read about it in Zechariah 14, the enemies are gonna come right up to the walls of Jerusalem, and then the Lord will come with all of his holy ones. Revelation 14:3, he is gonna do it again. And so this is the Lord as he returns and displays his glory. But that's not the only way I see Jesus in this chapter.

I see Jesus in this chapter, because Sennacherib and all of his wicked soldiers represent to me Satan and my accusing sins that come after my very soul. And I am represented by Hezekiah, trembling believer who has no other answer. And Jesus is my savior who goes out before me and establishes my salvation so that there even is a remnant that's gonna take root below and bear fruit above. And he says very plainly, with this code language, if you know what to look for, “The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.” It's on the cover of your bulletins. The zeal of the Lord Almighty accomplishes a remnant getting saved. How does it do that? Well, it's the exact same way that he use the phrase earlier, as I mentioned last week in Isaiah 9, "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his kingdom and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.”

So what does he say right before the angel goes out, right before it, verse 35, "I will defend this city and save it, for my sake and for the sake of David my servant." He's going to deliver for the sake of David, and it isn't David, it's the son of David, it's the promise he made to David to raise up through Jesus, a savior and a remnant who will believe in his name. So trust in him, dear friends, trust in him. Learn to be God-centered like this chapter teaches. Learn to pray like this. Learn to spread out your problems before God. Say, "God I know I tend to be idolatrous in the way I pray. Make me God-centered in my life and in my prayers. Teach me to live for the glory of God alone, and teach me to bear patiently your plan while you are patient for the wicked and give them time to repent. And let me pray for my persecuted brothers and sisters who are feeling the weight of that wickedness while they languish in prison and cry out to you for deliverance. And teach me to number my days and to realize that only in God's hand do I live and move and have my being. If the Lord wills, I'll live.” He can take the breath out of my nostrils any moment. And if you are lost, if you are outside Christ, my final word is to you, don't think that just because you're not aware of any way that you could die an hour from now, or even five minutes from now that God is in any way limited, God can take the breath out of your nostrils any time. Flee to Christ right now. Flee to him right now while you have time. Flee to him and believe in him for the forgiveness of your sins. And he will welcome you warmly. He will not drive away any that flee to him now by faith. Trust in him. Close with me in prayer.

Father, what an awesome chapter, Isaiah 37 is, how it proclaims the gospel, how it proclaims your strength and your power. And Lord, I pray that you would take the words that are in this chapter now and press them to our hearts and teach us, O Lord, to number our days. And not be like Belshazzar in Daniel 5, for Daniel, the prophet said to him, "You did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways." Help us to not live like that, but instead to live honoring the God who holds in his hand our life and all our ways. In Jesus name, amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Isaiah 37:1-37. The main subject of the sermon is how God pours out His wrath on arrogant sinners.

So we come to one of the most spectacular, one of the most awesome displays of the power of God ever in all of history, as we come to Isaiah chapter 37. I picture in my mind's eye—I don't know if it happened this way—but I picture in my mind's eye some terrified Judean going up to the wall, climbing up maybe the ladder or the stairs up to the wall and looking over parapets or whatever there was, to this vast Assyrian army that was ready to begin, perhaps, the siege works, ready to bash down the walls and the gates and to come in and kill us all, and see that something's different, something's unusual, there's no activity in the camp. There's no early morning smoke rising from campfires. There's nothing. There's no movement at all. And wondering, what in the world has caused this change? And not knowing at that point that 185,000 Assyrian troops lay dead on the ground, and that the threat had ended and that God had displayed his power and that their enemies were dead and would not harm them at all. Conversely, I wonder what it was like to be Sennacherib and to look out and see the same thing, or to have reports coming back, confused at first, but then consistent. “Your army is dead. They're all dead.” And to try to marvel and to wonder at what had happened.

As I said, this is one of the greatest displays of the power of God that there has been. The greatest of course, of all the spectacles of the Old Testament is right in the very first words of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Nothing is more spectacular than that. And dear friends, if God can do that by the word of his power, he can do anything, anything at all. This is small, what he does in this chapter is small compared to that. But think of the other great moments, the displays, the spectacular displays of the power of God. Think of the worldwide flood in the time of the days of Noah and what God did there. Think of the raining down of fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, and the erasing of two very powerful and popular cities in one night. Think about the display of God at the time of the Exodus, the 10 plagues on Egypt, and the curses that he brought on the gods and on the people of Egypt. And the Red Sea crossing, very spectacular with water walling up to the right and to the left and the crossing over, and then it crashing back down on Pharaoh's army and destroying them forever. Think about the descent in fire and cloud on Mount Sinai for sheer spectacle, the sense of the power and the presence and the majesty of God. Or the crossing of the Jordan River when the water walled up in a heap and they crossed as on dry ground. Or the fall of Jericho, when the walls fell down and the people of Israel went straight in. Or perhaps the descent, the igniting of the sacrifice in the time of Elijah as fire came down from heaven and burned it up. It's amazing isn't it? As you think about all of these spectacular displays of God, and so many of them really are displays of God's wrath, of God's judgment on sinners. Friends, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And if we get anything out of reading the scripture, out of an account like this, we should get that, that our God is holy and powerful, and he is not to be trifled with.

As we come to Isaiah 37, we come to a pinnacle moment in redemptive history, a display of the power of God. It's meant to engender faith in us. We are to read this and to take in this account, and to believe in the Lord, ultimately to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of our souls. How are we gonna do this? David only read half the chapter. How are we going to get through this? So this is what I propose to do. I'm going to just go through the entire chapter today this week, just the narrative, and go through every phrase, and every word, and just describe briefly what's going on, and we're gonna just upload the chapter in our minds, and next week we're gonna talk about the theological themes that flow from these words. It's the only way that I could think to do it. But I'm gonna do a little bit of theological theme work this time too—I can't resist. And we're gonna see from these truths just how great our God is. So without any further ado, we need to dig right in.

First, let's look at verses 1-4, as we see Hezekiah humbled, laid low, disgraced, in sackcloth, and seeking answers. Verses 1-4, Hezekiah, just by way of background, had joined in a rebellion against the power of the king of kings, so to speak, Assyria, who had dominated all these smaller kingdoms and had subjected them, and was receiving tribute from them. Then when his father Sargon died, Sennacherib took over and some of these lesser kings decided to challenge the son and see if he was as determined to hold on to his empire as his father had been. Well, he was. And Sennacherib went after first Babylon went down and went after Merodach-Baladan, and put him to flight, and then comes back up and starts to work his way down the western coastline of the Mediterranean, just crushing and destroying one small kingdom after the other. And it seems that Hezekiah has been somewhat of a ring leader in this rebellion against Assyria's power, and so it seems almost like Sennacherib saved him for last. And last week, we looked in chapter 36, as Sennacherib has sent the Rabshakeh, the field commander, with the detachment of the Assyrian army to intimidate Hezekiah, while Sennacherib is besieging Lachish, and we'll have it soon. He sends this detachment in this field commander in Isaiah 36, is that chapter and filled with blasphemous, arrogant statements in which the field commander represents his king, the great king, the king of Assyria, as he tries to intimidate the Jews, intimidate Hezekiah into opening the city walls and coming out and surrendering. It would save him, Sennacherib I mean, the cost of a lengthy siege, and he'll be able to kill all of his enemies much more easily that way. But it's a terrible time.

And so as we begin in chapter 37, we have Hezekiah receiving the message of what had happened from this field commander, and he's reacting to it, that's the beginning of this chapter. Now, Hezekiah was a godly man filled with zeal for the religion, the pure religion of Judah, that he would purify it. He was a religious reformer as a king, but he had a weak spot, he had a blind spot. And that had to do with politics, it had to do with trusting in his own ability to his own machinations to make arrangements with Egypt or with other kingdoms to fight against Assyria. This was a weakness, but now all of that has been stripped away. The envoys sent with gold and silver down to Egypt to hire for himself a cavalry and chariots will amount to nothing. They're going to come and fight, the Egyptians are, but they're gonna get swept away by the Assyrians. And so he's stripped away the money that was sent, in which he stripped off the gold from the doors of the temple and Senate to the king of Assyria, that has been received now by the king, and he says in effect, “I'm coming anyway. Thanks for the gold and silver, but I'm coming.”

And so it's a terrifying time, a terrible time, and he's got nowhere left to turn, and here he sends some messengers to Isaiah the prophet. Now, I don't know what the nature of his relationship was with, Hezekiah, I mean with Isaiah, I don't know that they were buddies. Isaiah kept telling the truth, and that meant that not all of Hezekiah's policies were well-received. Isaiah 30-31 are really just like missiles going right after Hezekiah's policies towards Egypt. So I don't know that they really had any kind of warm, close relationship, but all of that is swept aside now. There's nowhere else to turn. So in verse 1, we have Hezekiah as he receives the message of what had happened in chapter 36, “He tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and went into the temple of the Lord.” He tore his royal robes, he's humbled. He puts on sackcloth, that's a display of humiliation. And he goes into the temple of the Lord, you see his humiliation here and his faith. He's very God-centered at this time. And he sends messengers Eliakim, the palace administrator, and Shebna the secretary, and leading priests, they're all wearing sackcloth too, and they go to Isaiah son of Amoz, the prophet. And this is the first time Isaiah is called a prophet in the book of Isaiah. He was a mouthpiece of Almighty God, and Hezekiah wanted to speak to God, and even more, to hear from God. And he sends these folks to come and to ask for prayer from Isaiah. Look at verses 3-4, the messengers came to Isaiah and said, “This is what Hezekiah says: This day is a day of distress and rebuke and disgrace, as when children come to the point of birth and there is no strength to deliver them.” This whole invasion, the whole thing, was a rebuke to the kingdom of Judah. This whole thing was a discipline from Almighty God for their sins, for their worship of idols, for their violation of the law of God, the laws of Moses. They were being struck as with a rod by the ling of Assyria. The king of Assyria was a rod in the hand of God, and he was giving his people a beating.

It's a day of distress and rebuke, and disgrace, he says. And that is right. In effect, Hezekiah humbly says, “We deserve this. We deserve what's happened. We are being punished justly for our sins.” Sennacherib has destroyed, has conquered 46 cities or towns in Judah, lots and lots of dead people by now. He says right here in this section, “Pray for the remnant that still survives.” There's not many left. It's a time of total humiliation. He likens it to a time in which a woman has reached the end of her time, the end of her pregnancy, but she just doesn't have the strength to give birth to the baby, and with that being the situation, there's every likelihood that both mother and child are going to die, and that's a time, he says, of distress and rebuke and disgrace.

He has in this dark time only one hope, and it is a sure and certain hope, although he doesn't know what God is going to do, and that is that our God is zealous for his own glory. It is, I think, the strongest force there is in the universe. There is none stronger. God's commitment to his own glory is the strongest force there is in the universe. Look what he says in verse 4, “It may be that the Lord your God will hear the words of the field commander, whom his master, the king of Assyria, has sent to ridicule the living God, and that he will rebuke him for the words the Lord your God has heard. Therefore pray for the remnant that still survives.” Remember the field commander went too far. He said two things about God. He said, “First of all, God sent me, so your God will not deliver you from us,” but then he goes even further in the second phase, he says, “Not only that, haven't you heard of what we've done to all these other gods and their kingdoms and their countries? Not only is it true that your God will not deliver you, it is even more significantly true that he cannot deliver you. Your God cannot defeat us. No god ever has.” Dear friends, that's blasphemy. Hezekiah knew it, he knew it. Every human being on earth underestimates God. I'll say that again. Every human being on earth underestimates God. It's impossible to overestimate him. But Hezekiah knew this: their God is the God of the universe, and if he wants to destroy Assyria, he is fully capable of doing it.

But notice the broken-heartedness and the humility of Hezekiah, look what he says in verse 4, “It may be that the Lord your God will hear the words…and that he will rebuke him” for the words that the field commander has said. It may be, not, it must be. There is no must when it comes to God and us. God doesn't owe you a thing, he doesn't owe me a thing, he doesn't owe us anything. He will never be our debtor ever. And he does not owe to anyone an explanation or a certain pattern of action, because of anything he's done in the past. He doesn't ever owe us an apology, and so it's merely, “It may be that God will act because of what he heard.”

Ironically, it's very similar to what the king of Nineveh himself, the Assyrian king of Nineveh said when Jonah came, a number of decades before this. You remember that. How God sent Jonah to Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria?  And, he says, “40 more days and Ninevah will be destroyed.” You remember what the king in Nineveh did? He took off his royal robs and put on sackcloth, and he had sackcloth put on all his royal officials and on all the cows, and it was world class repentance, friends. And he humbled himself, and he issued a proclamation. The king of Nineveh said, “Let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence,” and then he says, Jonah 3:9, “Who knows? [Who knows?] God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” Isn't it amazing how similar, the king of Nineveh and Hezekiah, king of Judah, were at this point? And they're both dead right, absolutely right. Who knows what God will do? God's not bound in this at all, he has the freedom to act as God, as the sovereign king.

And so he asks for prayer, “Therefore pray for the remnant that still survives.” He asks Isaiah simply for prayer. He's not even asking for a word from the Lord at this point, he's just asking for prayer. And notice he says, “Pray for the remnant.” That tells you just how much slaughter there's already been of the people of Judah. Lots and lots of them have been killed by the Assyrians, a lot of dead people. And it's the very thing that we've seen again and again in Isaiah, this remnant language. It says in Isaiah 1:9, “Unless the Lord Almighty had left us some survivors, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah.” We're no different morally than them, but God left us some survivors, that's Isaiah 1:9. Or in his call in Isaiah 6. Remember, “Here am I. Send me”? You remember that? “Alright, what's my mission? Lord, I'm ready. Here am I, send me.” Well, “Go and tell this people: ‘“Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes and hear with their ears and turn with their hearts, and I might turn and forgive them and heal them.’” And then Isaiah says in Isaiah 6, “For how long [do I have to do that], Lord?” He says, “[You're gonna keep doing it] until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken. And though…” Listen to this, “A tenth remains in the land, it will again be laid waste. But as the terebinth and oak leave stumps when they are cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.” That's all remnant language. Do you hear it? A tenth are left and they're gonna be a seed for the future.

Or, again in Isaiah 10, “A remnant will return.” Isaiah 10:21-23, “A remnant will return, a remnant of Jacob will return to the Mighty God. Though your people, O Israel, be like the sand by the sea, only a remnant will return. Destruction has been decreed, overwhelming and righteous. The Lord, the Lord Almighty, will carry out the destruction decreed upon the whole land.” A remnant, just a remnant is going to survive. And the apostle Paul picks up on this remnant language and says, “That's exactly what's going on spiritually with the Jews of his time. There is a remnant,” he says, chosen by grace, by the sovereign grace of God to believe in Jesus and the rest are not.” It's remnant language. And so he says, “Please pray for the remnant that still survives.”

And so in verses 5-7, God gives his first answer. His first answer, “Fear not, the blasphemer will die.” Now, I just wanna give you an observation I just had a moment ago, right before I preached, and it occurs to me the majority, the overwhelming majority of Isaiah 37, is words happen, words spoken before the event happens. The overwhelming majority is God's promise of what he's about to do, and then just a simple two verses on what he did. You see what I'm saying? You know what the significance of that? That's where we live, dear friends. We live in promised land. We live in the land before God has acted to cut off all of our enemies, and so most of our lives is the bulk of Isaiah 37, waiting for God to fulfill his promises. That's why the majority of this chapter is all about promise, God saying, “This is what I am going to do.” And so the first answer comes in verses 5-7, in effect, this, “Fear not the blasphemer is going to die. I'm gonna kill him.” Look at verses 5-7, “When King Hezekiah's officials came to Isaiah, Isaiah said to them, ‘Tell your master, “This is what the Lord says: Do not be afraid of what you have heard—those words with which the underlings of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. Listen! I'm gonna put a spirit in him so that when he hears a certain report, he will return to his own country, and there I will have him cut down with the sword.”’” This is an immediate answer that God gives. Sometimes God makes you wait. Sometimes you have to be like the persistent widow. That's not the case at this point. He gives him an immediate answer, “Go, tell your master. This is what I'm saying.” The word of the Lord had already come to Isaiah concerning this matter.

And notice immediately the first thing he says is, “Do not be afraid. Fear not.” Do you realize how often God says that to us in Scripture? I mean, frankly, in the end, fear and faith are diametrically opposed. Fear drives out faith, or faith drives out fear, that's how it works. And so he's saying, “Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of the words you heard. Don't be afraid of the Assyrians.” Fear and faith are opposites. And so, fear not. He's giving him in effect the same message he had given to his ungodly father, Ahaz, concerning the same kind of thing, “Don't be afraid. Be strong in your faith. If you do not stand firm in your faith, you will not stand at all.”

And notice he talks about the underlings of the King of Assyria. So he puts the Rabshakeh, or the field commander in his place. It's like, “I'm not even talking to you, I'm gonna talk to your master, you underling.” So he humbles him here. He says, “Don't be afraid. These words of blasphemy with which they have blasphemed me.” Do you realize what blasphemy is? It's speaking words of disrespect, of dishonor concerning Almighty God. It's exact opposite what we're supposed to do. We were created in the image of God with a verbal faculty, the ability to speak, to understand words, and we are to use our words to praise and exalt and glorify and magnify God, but this underling has blasphemed him.

Jesus addressed the issue of blasphemy in Matthew 12, you remember how his enemies had ascribed his miracles to Beelzebub, “It is by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that he casts out demons.” It is an understatement to say that Jesus didn't take it kindly. And in Matthew 12, he talks about speaking, he talks about words. He said, “You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. But I tell you that men will have to give an account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted and by your words you will be condemned.” So in other words, “I heard what he said, I heard what the underling said, and he's going to have to give me an account on the day of judgment for his blasphemy, just like Jesus' enemies.”

And so God gives at this point through Isaiah an early verdict, on this whole case and a verdict on the king of Assyria. Look at verse 7, “Behold! [He says, or listen,] I'm going to put a spirit in him so that when he hears a certain report, he will return to his own country, and there I will have him cut down with the sword.” “Behold or listen, just watch what I'm gonna do with the king of Assyria.” There's an awesome display here, of the sovereignty of God over all nations and over the smallest movements, the smallest inclinations of the heart. God says he's gonna put a certain spirit in Sennacherib. It's gonna make him think a certain way, so that when he hears a certain report, he's going to act in a certain direction. He's going to return to his own country. This is the key to God's sovereign power over the unfolding of human history, the ability that God has effectively to influence the human heart in one direction or the other. So it says in Proverbs 21:1, “The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.” And that's exactly what's going on here. He's gonna hear a report and God's gonna put a spirit in him, so he's gonna act a certain way, and so there he says, “After he leaves, there in his home country, I will…” Look at what it says, “I will have him cut down with the sword.” What does that say about God's power over the inner workings of the nation of Assyria?

It reminds me of the enemies of Israel who said, “You know their gods, Israel's gods, are gods of the mountains, not of the plains. If we can just get them out of the mountains and fight down in the plains, we will win,” and God in effect says, “Look, I can do mountains, I can do plains, I can do rivers, I can do oceans, I'm really good at all of it. I'm really very versatile. So I can do Judah, I can do Israel, I can do Assyria, I can do any country. It's not an effort for me to have you cut down in your home country, even in your own temple. I can do that any time.” And so God's sovereign over all of these things. He rules over the temple of his god, his false god Nisroch. God's sovereign over the temple of Nisroch. And so while he's worshipping in his temple, he's going to move so Sennacherib's own sons to assassinate him. He's sovereign over the inner workings of the politics of the throne of Assyria, it's incredible, but he doesn't get into all that at this point. He'll talk about it more later.

The next section, verses 8-13, we have phase two of the king of Assyria's blasphemy. First time was just through the underling, through the field commander. Now, we get it from Sennacherib himself. Same thing though. There's no difference. The circumstances are given in verses 8-9, “When the field commander heard that the king of Assyria had left Lachish, he withdrew and found the king fighting against Libnah. Now Sennacherib received a report that Tirhakah, the Cushite of Egypt, was marching out to fight against him.” So at last, Egypt moves out and Egypt comes under Tirhakah and they're there to fight Assyria. That's gonna be a very short battle. Assyria is going to win easily. The field commander has failed in his mission, Hezekiah has not surrendered, he's not been intimidated, he didn't come out, so he failed. He goes back to join his master, and so the immediate threat to Jerusalem is removed.

And so we have the movements here of the Assyrians, but Sennacherib sends a letter to Hezekiah. Four possible reasons. First, having heard from the field commander that Hezekiah did not surrender, he wanted to give Hezekiah one final opportunity to surrender, so he sends this letter. Secondly, Sennacherib especially wanted to strip Hezekiah of any confidence that he may have in the news he had just received that the king of Egypt was coming out to fight against him. “Don't be confident about that, I'll take care of Egypt,” which he will. Thirdly, the letter would come with the personal stamp of the great king, the king of Assyria, not merely an underling now, but “This is what I myself am saying to you, not merely the words of a messenger.” And fourth, Sennacherib wants to zero in, especially on the central remaining, the only pillar left in Hezekiah's hope, and that is his religion, his faith in God. And he wants to try to knock that out from under Hezekiah, and so he sends this letter.

Look at verses 10-13, this blasphemous letter, “Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the god you depend on deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be handed over to the king of Assyria.’ As surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries, destroying them completely. And will you be delivered? Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my forefathers deliver them—the gods of Gozan, Haran, Rezeph, and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of the Sepharvaim, or Hena or Ivvah?”

This is a dark look into the incredible blasphemy and pride of the human heart. Look at the first thing he says, “Do not let the god you are depending on,” what does he say? “Deceive you.” “Don't let him trick you. Don't let him lie to you. Is your God saying to you that Jerusalem will not be handed over to the king of Assyria?” This is a bit creepy in a way, I wonder if Sennacherib had spies in Hezekiah's inner circle giving back information concerning maybe even what Isaiah the prophet had said at the beginning of this chapter, “O great king Sennacherib.” He's being told by the prophet Isaiah that God's gonna deliver him. “[Oh, have you heard that? Well, let's deal with that right here in this letter.] Don't let the God you are depending on deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be handed over to the king of Assyria.’”

And then he makes his central argument, a powerful argument based on past history. “We live, we Assyrians live for war, we're very good at it, and we have an incredible track record. Every time we take the field, we win. And that goes right up to recent history, that includes me. I've been toppling one kingdom after another, and why would you be any different? And those kings, they all relied on their gods, why would your God be any different than theirs?”

Now, when he receives this letter, Hezekiah has to make a life or death decision. He has to look in his own heart, he has to look concerning his character, he has to look concerning his faith ultimately, and say, “Is my God able? Does he even exist? Is it all just words? Can he do this? Will he do this?” It's a time of the searching of hearts. “Is our God really no different than all the gods of the nations?” Well, Sennacherib had the right facts, but he had the wrong conclusion. That history was true, but he had drawn the wrong conclusions. We'll see. The drama has now reached its peak and the time has come for a decision from Almighty God.

But first, Hezekiah prays. Verses 14-20, he receives the letter from the messengers and read it, then he went up to the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord, and Hezekiah prayed to the Lord. He spreads the letter before God, he takes it up to God in prayer, Hezekiah goes back to the temple, he's got the letter and he spreads it out. He had nowhere else to turn. There was nothing else he could rely on. Egypt is now defeated. There's no money left. There's nothing left, only God. God, however, would be sufficient. Prayer would be sufficient. And so he spreads out this letter before the Lord. Now, it's not because God didn't know what was in the letter. Not at all, and Hezekiah knew that. It was rather to underscore and intensify the issues in that letter in his own mind and heart. The symbol of spreading out a matter, spreading out a letter before God is helpful for us. God doesn't need it. The Puritan pastor Thomas Manton said, “One way to get comfort is to plead the promises of God in prayer.” Thomas Manton said, “Show him his handwriting; God is tender of his word.” So say now, “God, you said right here, this…” And show it to him. Lift it up to him. Alright, well, God knows what he wrote. He knows it better than you do, but I think in this way, it's about the same thing. He shows him now, the handwriting of the king of Assyria, he says, “God, did you see this? Look at this,” and he prays to the Lord. This is a great, great moment here.

And he begins where we should always begin, he begins with worship, he begins with a sense of the honor and the greatness of God. Verse 16, “O Lord, Almighty God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You made heaven and earth.” There are five statements here, one after the other, directed toward God, directed to the issue of God's position in reference to the human race, in reference to human history. All of them go in the same direction. First, Lord Almighty, he calls him Yahweh, Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, the God who rules the armies of heaven. Second, God of Israel. “You are the covenant-keeping God who made a covenant with our forefathers, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, you're the God of Israel, so that we would be your treasured possession out of all the nations of the Earth.” Thirdly, “You are enthroned between the cherubim.” Cherubim are angels, and a throne is where a king sits. God is enthroned between the cherubim. That's a picture of the ark of the covenant, where God said that the blood of the sacrifice, which prefigures the blood of Christ, the blood of the atonement, will be poured out on the mercy seat between the cherubim, and that's where the shekinah glory of God descended and was, and Moses heard the voice of God speaking from between the cherubim. It's a symbol of God dwelling in the midst of his people by his glory. “You are enthroned between the cherubim.” Fourth, “You alone are God over all the kingdoms of the Earth.” It's the repeated lessons again and again of Isaiah 13-35. God rules, God rules, God rules. The nations are like grasshoppers before him, the nations are like a drop from the bucket. They're like dust from the scales, the nations are as nothing before God. God is the ruler of all the earth. And then fifth, “You have made heaven and earth.” This mighty God is the God of the universe, the Creator of everything that exists. These words at this moment are not merely some theological recitation of a catechism. These words had become for Hezekiah his very life, his very life. If God would not live up to these words in his case, he would die, and so would all the remnant in Jerusalem.

And so he makes his first request in verse 17. Five imperative verbs, “Give ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; listen to all the words Sennacherib sent to insult the living God.” Again, we should not be misled by this, God is more attentive to everything than we are. With the Lord, a day is like 1,000 years, like everything moves in super, super, super slow motion for God. He is able to judge every little glance of the eye, every inclination of the heart. God doesn't need to be told to open his eyes and open his ears, but again, this is a focusing here saying, “God concentrate on this issue.” And it's amazing, Hezekiah's tone here, his whole approach in this prayer is not, “O God, we are such an incredible awesome people, and I know you love us, and we really could keep on serving you very well if you would just deliver us.” It's nothing like that at all. The whole focus here is “God, be zealous for your own name. Be zealous for your own glory.” It's just like Moses's prayer for Israel when God wanted to wipe the Israelites out, remember, and make of Moses a great nation. Remember that? Moses said to God, “O God, if you do that, what about your reputation among the nations? They're gonna think you took the people out of Egypt and you were not able to bring them in the promised land. What about your reputation?”

Daniel prays the same thing in Daniel 9. He prays that God would restore the Jews back to the promised land so that they can rebuild the temple and all that. He prays all that in Daniel 9, but the same thing. “God,” he says, “Give ear, O God, and hear; open your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears your Name.” This is Daniel speaking, “We do not make a request of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, listen! O Lord forgive! O Lord, hear and act! For your sake, O my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your Name.” That's a good way to pray. Friends, if I could just get one thing across to you in reference to this whole chapter is that you would grow that have the same zeal for the name and the honor of God that he does, that you would come to realize the most important thing in your life is the glory and the honor of God, that all of your good works are for one purpose, that they may see your good works, and praise and honor and glorify your Father in heaven.That he must increase and you must decrease, that's a good way to pray. And so Hezekiah prays that way.

And he goes over these recent facts, verse 18-19, “It is true, O Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste to all these peoples and their lands. They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods, but only wood and stone, fashioned by human hands.” So he's got it right. Same history, different conclusions. Now request number 2, verse 20, “Now, O Lord our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone, O Lord, are God.” So the request has been made.

Now the verdict comes down from the King of the universe in verses 21-38, and it comes down in two phases: words, then action, as I already told you. The words are verses 21-35, the action, verses 36-38. First, the words. “Isaiah son of Amoz sent a message to Hezekiah: ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel says: Because you have prayed to me concerning Sennacherib king of Assyria, this is the word the Lord has spoken against him.’” Notice that God specifically mentions Hezekiah's prayer. “Because you have prayed to me.” The relationship between divine sovereignty and human responsibility is incredibly complex. No one fully understands it. God had planned all of this before the foundation of the world, but yet he uses the prayers of Hezekiah to bring about his end. God ordains not only the ends, but the means to the end, and the prayer was a means to the end. “Because you prayed, now I'm going to do this.” The way I understand this is that God already has a plan, and we're supposed to get with the program, dear friends, and we get with the program when we study the word and when we pray and the Spirit moves. Then we suddenly start to see what God is doing. And like Jesus said, “The Father is at his work, and I too am working.” The Father and the Son perfectly working together, then we together join the Father and the Son in the work that they're doing by this prayer.

Well, there are four parts of God's answer in words. First, God promises to judge the blasphemer, verses 22-29. Second, God promises to save his remnant, verses 30-32. Thirdly, God promises to deliver Jerusalem, verses 33-35, and then finally God makes it clear, he does all of this for his own glory, verse 35. First, he promises to judge the blasphemer, verses 22-29. The people of Judah are pictured as the Virgin Daughter of Zion, who tosses her head as Assyria flees, laughing and singing. Virgin daughter, because it's a picture of purity and a picture of frailty and a need for protection. Sennacherib basically would like to come and rape Jerusalem and her father or husband, you could put it either way, says, “I'm going to protect this city.” Furthermore, women frequently in the Old Testament were the ones that would go out and celebrate after the victory was won. So like Miriam, after the Pharaoh's army has been destroyed, she gets her tambourine, and she goes out there and they celebrate and they're not holding back. It's full celebration. It's, “Ha, ha, ha! You wanted to kill us. Now, look at you, look at you now.” And that's about what's going on in this chapter. It's the very thing David didn't want the daughters of the Philistines to do when Jonathan and Saul died. Tell it not in Gath, don't let the daughters of the Philistines go out and celebrate. So here, “The Virgin Daughter of Zion tosses her head as you flee.”

In effect, the king of Assyria has said to Hezekiah, “Don't you know who I am? Don't you know what I have done? Why aren't you afraid of me?” God totally turns that thing around. In effect, he says to the king of Assyria, “Don't you know who I am? Don't you know what I have done? Why aren't you afraid of me?” God discusses the centerpiece of Sennacherib's argument, the recent history of success. He captures the soaring blasphemy of their heart attitude. “I have with my chariots gone up on the mountain heights.” That's ridiculous. Anybody knows you don't take chariots up a mountain. I mean, why would you do that? They're for speed and agility and all that, you don't take a chariot up a mountain. So how is it with your chariots, you've ascended the utmost heights? You know what's going on there? It's that demonic satanic pride. Just like Isaiah 14, the king of Babylon says in his heart, “I will ascend to the most high; I will make my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned above the mount of the assembly; I will make myself like God.” It's the same language. But not only that, the king of Assyria says, “I've dug wells, and I've drunk their water.” So in effect, he says, “I have ascended to the heights, I've gone down to the depths. I am God. I can dry up the rivers with the soles of my feet.” “No, you can't. You're just a man. You're nothing. I'm Almighty God. And let's get this straight,” verses 26-27, “Apart from me, you have done nothing. Don't you know?” “Haven't you heard? Long ago I ordained it. In days of old I planned it; now I've brought it to pass, that you have turned fortified cities into piles of stone. Their people, drained of power, are dismayed and put to shame. They're like plants in the field, like tender green shoots, like grass sprouting up on the roof, scorched before it grows up.” “I planned it, I ordained it, and now I have brought it to pass. You are nothing, nothing but my puppet.”

And the terror of God's omniscience and omnipresence now comes right down on Sennacherib personally. Let's look at verse 28. I get chills every time I read these words, 28-29, “But I know where you stay.” Do you hear that? That's a threat. “I know where you live, and how you come and go, and how you blaspheme against me. I know these things. Is there anywhere you can go and be away from me?” “Because,” verse 29, “you rage against me and because your insolence has reached my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will make you return by the way you came.” Archaeologists have found drawings, Assyrian drawings of them doing something very much like that to a defeated king. They bored a hole in his jaw right through and put a rope in it and dragged him away. The Assyrians were vicious, cruel people. God says, “Okay, that's what you do, I'll do it to you. I'm gonna put a rope through your nose like the beast you are, and I'm gonna drag you back to your country and there you will stay.”

God promises then to save his remnant, verses 30-32. “This will be the sign for you, O Hezekiah: ‘This year you will eat what grows by itself, and the second year what springs from that. But in the third year sow and reap, plant vineyards and eat their fruit. Once more a remnant of the house of Judah will take root below and bear fruit above. For out of Jerusalem will come a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.’” So in other words, “When Assyria leaves, you're gonna have a hard time finding food. It's gonna be hard, the whole land has been destroyed, so you just have to eat what you can find. In the second year you'll eat whatever grows up from that, but in the third year, it's back to life is normal.” And he says, “That will be a sign for you.” It's just like the sign that he gave to Moses, “This is the sign that I'll give you. When you all come out of that country, you'll worship me on this mountain. It's a sign after the fact. So when it all happens, you'll stand and look back and when that third year you're eating that harvest that you planted, you'll know I did this. You'll know I did this.” So God promises to deliver Jerusalem.

Verses 33-35, he says, “Therefore this is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria: ‘He will not enter the city or shoot an arrow here. He will not come before it with shield or build a siege ramp against it. By the way that he came he will return; he will not enter the city,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will defend the city and save it, for my sake and for the sake of David my servant!’” This is the final verdict. Five times in the Hebrew, there's the negation. Five times. “No, you will not enter this city. No, you will not shoot an arrow here. No, you will not come against the city with a shield. No, you will not build a siege ramp against it. No, you will not even enter this city. I tell you, no.” Who wins? But we know who wins, God wins. “By the way that you came, you'll return.” God said, “I'm gonna fight for this city and I'm going to defend it.”

Now, frequently in situations like this, God would raise up another army that would come, or they would turn on themselves and fight each other, that happens sometimes, it's like insanity would come, like the days of Gideon, that would happen. Sometimes God would just raise up mighty leaders and the Jews themselves would go out empowered and they would go fight. God said, “No, no, I'm doing this one alone. I'm gonna do this one all by myself.” He already said he's gonna do this in Isaiah 31:8, he said, “Assyria will fall by a sword that is not of man; a sword, not of mortals, will devour them.” “I'll do it myself. I will defend this city and save it, for my sake and for the sake of David my servant!” Now, next week, we're gonna get more into, for the sake of David my servant, and how this relates to Christ.

But God's ultimate purposes is to establish with his zeal the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and he said already the same thing, “The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.” He's already said it once in Isaiah 9, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his kingdom and peace, there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.” Same phrase, “The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.” “I am intending to raise up from the Jews a Savior, and his name is Jesus. So no, you're not going to extinguish the Jewish flame here today.”

Well, that's his prediction. That's what God said he would do. What did he do? Well, verses 36-37 say what he did. Verse 36, “Then the angel of the Lord went out and put to death 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there were all the dead bodies!” It's just absolutely staggering, overwhelming. I did a little research this morning, Battle of Gettysburg, one of those bloodiest in history. In that battle, 7,800 soldiers combined died, 7,800. God killed 185,000 in one night. That's more than the combined forces of North and South at the Battle of Gettysburg. It's more, it's about 15,000 more. So you can imagine if Robert E. Lee and General Meade got up on the morning of July 1, 1863, and they found that all of their soldiers were dead, that would still be less than the ones that died outside the walls of Jerusalem. It's awesome.

Who killed them? Well, it says the angel of the Lord. How does this chapter preach Christ? Some say it's just an angel of the Lord. I think when God says, I got this one, I think he sent his Son to do it. And it's just a foretaste of what he's going to do at the second coming of Christ, when he defeats his enemies with a sword coming out of his mouth. This is just a small dress rehearsal. Jesus went out, I think, pre-incarnate Christ, the angel of the Lord, the same one that spoke out of the flames of the burning bush to Moses, the same one that stopped Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, the angel of the Lord went out and killed these troops himself for the zeal and the glory and the honor of his own name.

Next week we'll talk about lessons, we'll talk about the question that remains concerning this. I just wanna finish with a simple gospel presentation, ‘cause I can't get up here and preach without talking about the cross and the empty tomb. Alright, how does this point to Christ? Well, some day you're gonna be surrounded by an enemy that's going to seek to take your very life, it's called death, and at that point, it will be very easy for Satan to bring up to your mind all of your many, many sins, and your sins will mount up 185,000 strong and they'll accuse you and say, “You don't deserve to go to heaven.” And they'll be right, they'll be right, except for one thing: God sent Jesus to defeat your enemies, to destroy your sin, to destroy death, and to bring you to heaven. The blood of Christ is sufficient to cover all of our sins, and by the blood of Christ, Satan, our enemy, that ancient serpent will someday lie crushed and dead under our feet. So for you, if you came in here unregenerate, not knowing Christ as Savior, do you not see how terrifying it would be to have God as your enemy? The converse is how delightful to have him as your deliverer. Trust in Christ, simply trust in him. No works needed, simply faith. Say, “Jesus died for sinners like me, I'm a sinner, he shed his blood, I trust in you for forgiveness.” Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the things that we have learned in Isaiah 37. There's never enough time. I thank you for the patience of these people, and I pray that you would please now cause these words to live and to glow and to shine in their hearts, and next week, God willing, if we're able to meet again, that we'd be able to celebrate some of the vast, awesome themes that flow from this chapter, in Jesus' name, amen.