Bad News/Good News
Now, turn with me, please, to Isaiah chapter 53. I shall read in your hearing verse 6, the verse that will be the focus of our meditation this morning.
Isaiah 53:6, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
My purpose is going to make an attempt to open up this one verse of Scripture, bringing many other Scriptures to bear upon it, to help us understand it aright. We’re going to look at it under two very simple headings.
1) Our desperate condition as sinners.
First of all, our desperate condition as sinners. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every single one of us to his own way.” That’s our desperate condition in sin.
Then we’re going to consider God’s gracious provision for sinners. “And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
My goal in seeking to open up those texts under those two, simple headings is such that if when the service is over, and some of us, if the rain stopped, we were mingling outside in the parking lot, if someone walking by saw all these cars and all of you people walking out of the building, and they were to come up to one of the families and say, «Excuse me, but I noticed an awful lot of people were gathered in that building, what do you do in there?»
Well, I would hope you would be able to say, «What we do is basically we worship the God of the Bible, we read from the Bible, someone stands up and explains the Bible, and we sing songs that are based on the Bible. Everything we are has to do with our Bibles and with the God of the Bible.» And if they should say, «Well, what did that man..what do you call him?»
«We call him the preacher, the pastor, the guest speaker.»
«Oh well, what did he preach this morning?»
I hope if you were the one that they were asking the question, every one of you would be able to say, «Well, I can’t tell you everything he preached, but this much I remember: he told us from the Bible we were in a desperate condition as sinners. Then he told us from the Bible that God has made a wonderful provision for sinners.»
I hope, from the youngest to the oldest, you would all be able to say: «We learned our desperate condition in sin, and God’s gracious provision for sin.
Looking at the text: our desperate condition in sin. How does the prophet describe it? Well, he describes it first of all by using a very vivid simile. A simile is a form of speech in which we compare one thing like another. We may say, “My teenage son came to dinner last night, and he ate like a hungry bear.” When you say, “He ate like..” you’re using a simile. Well, when the prophet wants to set before us our desperate condition in sin, he uses this simile. He says, “All we like sheep have gone astray.”
Now, many of us have never been in a setting where people were sheep-herders and kept many sheep, but for to the average Israelite this would’ve immediately registered in his brain. They were a sheep-raising people, with all their sacrifices of the animals. They had oxen and they had sheep and other animals that were offered in sacrifice. So this would have immediately registered in the mind of the average Hebrew. When the prophet said, “All we like sheep have gone astray,” using this simile he was highlighting three things.
1. When sheep go astray they leave the presence of the Shepherd.
Number one: when sheep go astray the first thing they do is they leave the side, the company, the presence of the shepherd. In oriental sheep-keeping the shepherd always went before the sheep. Remember Jesus spoke about it. “As the Good Shepherd I go before My sheep, and I call them by name, and they follow Me.” Well, when sheep go astray they leave the presence of the shepherd. They go off into a path other than the path the shepherd is marking out by going before them, and when they go astray they leave the presence and the companionship of the shepherd.
This underscores what is one of the greatest tragedies of human sin. When our first parents decided to believe the lie of the Devil and partake of the forbidden fruit, in that moment they became sheep that went astray, and because God had piggy-backed the whole human race on Adam, the entire human race went astray in him and with him.
This comes out so tragically in the earlier chapters of Genesis, for you remember that after Adam and Eve sinned what was the first thing they did? It says, “They ran to hide among the trees of the garden when they heard the voice of God.” Apparently God came in a visible form, most likely a pre-incarnate manifestation of our Lord Jesus. God would come in the cool of the day to hold special, intimate communion with Adam and Eve. But after they sinned, when they heard the rustling of God’s feet on the leaves or in some other way they knew God was approaching, instead of running towards Him and embracing Him and saying, “O gracious, loving, creating God who made us for communion with You, we can’t wait to talk to you and have You speak to us.” No. They ran to hide among the trees of the garden, foolishly thinking they could put distance between themselves and God. From that moment on every one of us—born as the children of Adam—we are part of that vast flock of sheep that has gone astray and have left the companionship, the fellowship of God Himself.
One of the saddest verses in all of the Bible is found in Romans chapter 3 where Paul is quoting from the Psalms concerning the nature of sin’s influence upon us, and he wrote these words:
“There is none that seeks after God.”
We are born runners and strayers away from God. We were made for Him, to know Him, to find our greatest joy and delight in Him, but the prophet says, “All we.” Without exception. He’s taking in the whole human race. “All we like sheep have gone astray.
The first result of that going astray is leaving the presence of the Shepherd Himself.
2. When sheep go astray they leave the path in which they ought to walk.
Then secondly, when sheep go astray they not only leave the presence of the Shepherd, they leave the path in which they ought to walk as marked out by the Shepherd. They choose to go into their own path.
God’s path for man is beautifully spelled out with those two commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and the second is like unto it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Those two commandments break down further: what does it mean to love God with all my heart? It means I have no other gods before Him, I don’t try to worship Him with images. I don’t treat His name lightly. I don’t disregard His day.
What does it mean to love my neighbor? The last six commandments tell us: I honor those God has put over me. I honor the sanctity of sex, of life, of truth, and of possessions. But we have all gone astray, so that Paul can say in Romans 8:7, “The carnal mind [the natural mind and disposition in which we are conceived and born] is enmity against God; it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be.”
Often when little babies are born they wait for that first cry, that wail that breaks out into the delivery room and brings the light to a mother and father and to anyone else present that a newborn has come safely into the world. One of the first things a little baby does it to grasp whatever touches his hand.
From that very infant state we all have a clenched fist towards God Himself saying, “I am determined to live my own life by my own standards, by my own desires, for my own purposes.” Why is this true? Because every one of us has turned aside as part of that vast flock of sheep that has not only left the companionship and communion and fellowship of God as our greatest joy and fulfillment, but we have left the law of God as the rule of our life. This is why the Scripture says, “By the law comes the knowledge of the sin.”
You may sit here and say, “Well, I am not that bad. I don’t kill; I don’t steal; I don’t cheat on my wife; I don’t cheat on my husband; I don’t take anyone else’s goods.”
But when we take God’s Law and realize that it touches not just our actions, but our thoughts and our motives and our desires, we find that day after day, by nature, we violate the law of God again and again and again and again. Why? Because we are part of that vast flock of sheep that has gone astray, leaving the side and companionship of the Shepherd, leaving the path cut out and marked out by the Shepherd.
3. When sheep go astray they lose the protection of the Shepherd.
Then we also, thirdy, lose the protection of the Shepherd. As straying sheep, we have gone into an area in which the Shepherd is not committed to care for the sheep that leave His protection and chose to expose themselves to every form of evil: to wild beasts and to other physical dangers.
The Scriptures tell us that having gone astray like a vast flock of sheep, we have exposed ourselves to the miseries of sin in this life, and to the pains of Hell forever.
The Scripture says, “The souls that sins shall die.” “The wages of sin is death.”
So that’s our desperate condition under this figure of speech: a vast flock of sheep that has gone astray. Leaving the side of the Shepherd; choosing our own path; and bringing ourselves under the righteous judgement of Almighty God.
Now, either God’s true or God’s a liar, and God has said, “All we like sheep have gone astray.”
I want to ask you sitting here today: where, when, how, and in what way did God bring you personally to see yourself as one of those sheep in that vast flock of the human race that has gone astray? Have you personally ever known what it is to feel the internal pain, the internal sense of grief and shame: that I who was made to know God, to love God, to serve God, to bring honor to God, I’ve done everything but the thing for which God created me. Have you been brought to that place, or is the word ‘sin’ and ‘being a straying sheep’ just words that pass through one ear and out the other?
Nobody ever comes to appreciate the gracious provision of God for sinners who has not come first of all to feel the pain of self-awareness. “I am a sheep that has gone astray.”
Peter understood this when he wrote his first letter, and at the end of the second chapter he said this:
“You were as sheep going astray, but you have returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.”
In other words, Peter is saying every one of those people, to whom he was writing in Asia Minor in his first letter, he said every last one of them had left the Shepherd. Why? Because they were part of this vast flock of sheep, all of whom have gone astray.
2) The gracious provision for straying sheep.
Then we come, secondly, to look at the wonderful announcement: that Almighty God has made a gracious provision for straying sheep.
Here are the words: “And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
We’re going to look at four things that this tells us about God’s gracious provision for sinners.
1. This gracious provision comes from God.
Who is the Author of this provision? The first is this. Up until now, throughout this whole section we’ve been reading about what happened to the Servant of the Lord. He was despised; He was rejected; He has borne our griefs; He was smitten of God etc. But now we come to verse 6, where God is condensing the whole message of this wonderful chapter into its boiled-down essence.
He says, “And the Lord.” In other words, this provision comes from God Himself. If you want to test any religion, test it by the direction of the arrow from which it comes. All man-made religions are man’s effort to reach up, to find God, and to get right with God by something he can do. The arrow goes from earth to Heaven, whereas in true, saving religion the arrow comes down from Heaven and touches earth. Put every religious system to the test of the direction of the arrow. Is it going from earth upward, or from Heaven downward?
This provision that has been made has God Himself as its Author. That’s what makes it fully and completely undeserved and gracious. What do we deserve from God as sheep who have gone astray, who’ve turned every one of us to his own way?
Let’s pause a moment to look at that. I’ve skipped over it inadvertently.
Notice what that text says, “Having turned aside like sheep.” That’s the vivid picture, but now here’s the blunt assertion: “We’re turned every one to his own way.”
Lest we get lost in the flock of sheep and not see our face, God takes the zoom lens and says, “Furthermore, the human race is not made up of those who constitute one vast flock of sheep that’s gone astray, but every single one of them has turned.” Not to drunkenness; not to adultery; not to murder; not to thievery; not to slandering. No. That would not be true. But it does say, “We have every one of us turned to his own way.” That means we have turned into a course where self-will and self-pleasing is the very pattern of our lives.
That’s why Paul could write in 2 Corinthians 5:15, “That He, Christ, died for all that they who live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their sakes died and rose again.” Paul is assuming that every one of those converted Corinthians to whom he wrote at one time their whole life was taken up with three words: living unto self. What I want; where I want to go; what I want to do; what lust, what desire, what ambition I want. That’s what regulates my life. That’s the definition and description of every one of us, by nature.
We have turned every one to his own way, and brought ourselves under the judgement of God, but for such straying sheep, for such self-willed, self-determining creatures, God has done something, and we’ve noted first of all that it is the Lord Himself who has broken into this situation. The great test of all religious claims is: what is the direction of the arrow? So first of all, we note that this gracious provision comes from God.
2. This gracious provision centers in the Servant of God.
Secondly, it centers in the Servant of God.
Look at the text. “The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
Well, who is the ‘Him’ to which the prophet is referring? That’s an indefinite pronoun, a masculine pronoun, but what is the noun? Who is the ‘Him’?
Well, look back to verse 5. “He was wounded for our transgression. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him and with His stripes.” All pronouns, but who is He? He doesn’t tell us!
Verse 3, “He was despised, rejected. We despised Him. We esteemed Him not.” But who is the ‘Him’?
Go back to verse 2. “He grew up before Him like a root out of a dry ground. He has no former majesty that we should look at Him.” But, Isaiah, who is the ‘Him’? Who is the ‘He’? Who is the ‘Him’ and the ‘He’?
We go back to verse 1. “Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord been revealed?” He’s not there.
Well, remembering the chapter verses and that the divisions are put in by man, back up to verse 15 of the previous chapter. “He shall sprinkle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of Him; for that which has not been told them He shall see.” But he still hasn’t told us. Isaiah, we’re frustrated! We want to know who is this One upon whom sin was charged and laid! The Lord has laid on Him.” Who is the ‘Him’?
Well, when we come back to chapter 52, verse 13, we finally find Him. “Behold, [God says] my servant shall act wisely, He shall be high and be lifted up and shall be exalted.” The servant of Jehovah—He is the ‘Him’ of verse 6 in chapter 53.
From Matthew chapter 12 we know very clearly that our Lord takes to Himself this title of the Servant of the Lord, and there are four or five ‘Servant songs,’ as they are called, in the book of Isaiah. So this Servant of the Lord is none other than our Lord and Saviour: Jesus Christ.
Our text tells us that the provision for sinners comes from Jehovah, from God Himself, but the Person who is central in that provision is none other than the Servant of Jehovah, our Lord Jesus Christ.
It’s crucial that if we are to understand the provision God has made for sinners, we understand something of the Person in whom that provision has been made.
Never forget this simple, little principle: Jesus can do what He does because Jesus is who He is. Now, I don’t know how that comes across in Spanish, but that should stick very easily if your brain is processing English. Jesus does what He does because Jesus is who He is! And who is He?
Well, in the Westminster Shorter Catechism we have the question: who is the Redeemer of God’s elect? The answer is one of the most beautiful, uninspired—from the standpoint of the inspiration of Scripture it’s not inspired—but it’s a beautiful, biblical answer that takes many strands of biblical truth, brings them all together, and arranges them in this beautiful, accurate answer. Who is the ‘Him’ upon whom the Lord has laid our iniquity? What is the answer to the question who is the Redeemer of God’s elect?
Here it is: “The only Redeemer of God’s elect, is the Lord Jesus Christ, who being the eternal Son of God, became man, and so was, and is, both God and man in two distinct natures, and one person, forever.”
I can’t quote that in the pulpit without goosebumps, and I’ve got them right now. I admit it without shame: that’s who my Saviour is! Eternal Son of God with no flesh, no body. He may have taken temporary, physical bodies—like angels do take temporary, physical bodies—in that approach to Adam, in the Jehovah passages where it speaks of the Angel of Jehovah, but the Redeemer is One who though being the eternal Son of God becomes true man.
He is conceived in the womb of a young, Nazarene virgin, and passes through every stage of human existence. He became a zigot. There was a time when Mary felt life for the first time and may have run to her mother and said, “Oh, Mama, this is what you tried to describe! I felt a strange kind of flutter down here. Is that what you were telling me about?” Then Mary and Joseph begin to see that belly getting bigger and bigger, until the Scripture says, “The time came for Jesus to be born, and she brought forth her firstborn Son.” No indication that she even had a midwife! Maybe Joseph was the only one there coaching her through the stages of the birthing process, and then He was pushed out through the birth canal, smothered with blood and mucus, just like you were! Just like I was!
True humanity; tied by an umbilical cord, to Mary, that had to be cut and tucked. True manhood! He wailed that little wail your kids have wailed, that firstborn cry. He had to have His diapers changed! He had to be taught His Hebrew alphabet.
“Am I saying it right, Mama?”
“That’s very good, Son, you’re learning your alphabet well.”
The time came when He had to say, “Pop, Papa, will you teach me how to tie the latch on my sandel? I want to put my own shoes on.” The time came when Joseph took Him out in the carpenter’s shop, and for the first time trusted to put a saw in His hand and say, “Jesus, this is how you use a saw. This is how you use a mallet. This is how you use a chisel.”
Jesus, in His human understanding, had to learn by instruction and practice just like you! The One who is God, who figured out how to create the galaxies, had to learn how to button His shirt and tie His shoes! True man, while still remaining true God. In two distinct natures, but in one Person forever.
Why? Because there could be no good news without that reality. Because, as Hebrews 2 tells us, if someone were to die a real death as the punishment for sin he had to have real flesh and blood.
So, the writer to Hebrews 2:14-15 says, “For as much as the children are flesh and blood, He likewise partook of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For verily, He took not on Him the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham.”
So, our text tells us that God’s provision comes from God, it centers in a Person. That Person is the God-man, Christ Jesus. As much God as though He were not man; as much man as though He were not God; not a mixture of both; in two distinct natures, but not two people; in One Person. That’s how He will exist forever.
When we are brought into the presence of Christ, how our disembodied spirits see I do not know, but we’ll see a real man in His glorified body, and we shall be made like Him when He returns again.
Let’s look at our text. The provision comes from God, the provision focuses on a Person, but now look at the next words.
“And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
If God is the Author of this gracious provision, if the Person of Christ is the focus, what is the means by which God deals with our wicked straying, our wicked turning to our own way? What is the method of this provision for sinners?
I’m going to use some technical language. I trust you’ll grasp it. I’ll try to explain it as clearly as I can. God’s method is substitutionary sin-bearing.
3. This gracious provision is substitutionary sin-bearing.
When your read these words, “The Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all,” that’s the language of substitution.
Now, what is a substitute? A substitute is someone who comes and acts in the place of another.
You kids know this. You’re playing a soccer game and somebody twists an ankle, and your midfield man has got to go sit on the bench. They send in a person is his place, and we call that person ‘a substitute.’ When you go to school and you hear someone say, “Oh, we got a substitute today,” what do you mean? Well, the regular teacher’s not there. She’s home sick, but someone comes in her place.
The prophet is telling us that God’s provision for sinners—coming from God Himself, focusing in the Lord Jesus Christ—His method is constituting Christ the Substitute Sin-Bearer. The Lord has literally made to strike our fall with vehemence upon Him. God appoints His Son in the counsels of eternity, and the Son embraces the role He will have to be the substitute of all those upon whom God sets His love and favor in His electing grace.
When Christ comes among us He comes as the Substitute, and from the very beginning of His existence God is giving us hints that this is what He is and what He will accomplish.
He undergoes the bloody ritual of circumcision. Though that ritual speaks of the necessity of cutting away the fleshy heart and replacing the heart, our Lord had no fleshiness to be cut off. But He subjected Himself to a sinner’s ritual to demonstrate He was identifying with sinners.
When He comes to age 30 He goes to the waters of Jordan, and there He is immersed and takes the place of the sinners He came to save. He identifies with a sinner’s ordinance. He had no sin that needed washing. He had no sin that needed the virtue of death burial and resurrection symbolized in baptism, but He identifies with us.
That identification comes to its pinnacle point in the events from Gethsemane to that final cry from the cross, “It is finished.” He enters Gethsemane, and the Scripture says, “He began to be troubled and sore amazed.” We would use the term, “He began to be blown out of His mind.”
There in Gethsemane the Father began to show His Son new dimensions of what it would mean that our sin should be charged to Him, and He would be treated as we deserve to be treated. When the Father presents that under the image of the cup—you remember all the accounts of Gethsemane—it’s the cup that is central. Jesus says, “Oh My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.” What did He see when He looked in that cup? What did He smell when He sniffed that cup? What He saw was a boiling cauldron of the furious wrath of Almighty God that He was going to have to take to His lips and drink and drink and drink and drink until He felt in His soul that last drop was drained, and then He would cry, “Tetelestai!” It. Is. Finished.
He says, “Father”—not “O God”—but, “Father, into Your hands I commit my spirit.” But it was that cup of divine wrath. When He comes out of the garden, and the disciples try to hinder Him from being arrested He said, “No, no. Stop it. The cup which My Father hath given me shall I not drinketh? I’ve settled it. I’ve seen what it’s going to mean in a new way.” For remember, His human mind was not omniscient. It learned as you and I learned: by exposure to new facts and experiences. The Father informed the Lord Jesus in a more definitive way what He was going to actually suffer when He kept moving towards the cross.
What validates the trauma of the cup is the piercing cry from the cross. No speech made when He was spat upon, when He was buffeted, when He was mocked, when He was scourged as a lamb before its shearers. He opened not His mouth. When the nails went through His wrists, and every nerve in that part of the body screamed with pain nothing came from His mouth, perhaps some groans of agony. Then, when the feet are impaled and the cross is lifted, He has words of grace for a dying thief, words of concern for His mother who would be left without care, words expressing a disposition of love and concern.
This is all that came from His lips until from the sixth hour to the ninth hour, from high noon to three in the afternoon, the heavens are covered in blackness. Our Lord’s soul is plunged into the blackness. The outer darkness of Hell itself, for that’s how Hell is described! Outer darkness. “Depart from Me ye cursed, into outer darkness.”
No beams from the Father’s face fell upon His bloody cheeks. No smile from the Father’s lips broke across the Father’s countenance. It was abandonment; it was experiencing what Isaiah prophesied, “The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” Speaking as an Old Testament saying to came to understand the heart of the gospel through passages like this. The prophet says that the Father lays upon His Son the iniquity of His people, and when He does, He bears the full measure of the unleashed fury of the wrath of God against human sin.
Notice verse 10 of the same chapter, “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush Him; He [God the Father] has put Him to grief. When You [Father] shall make His soul an offering for sin.”
You see, you’ll never understand the cross if all you see is what men did to Him. They spat upon Him; they scourged Him; they mocked Him; they buffeted Him; they put Him through a mock coronation with a staff in His hand and a purple robe and a crown of thorns! If all you see is what happened at the horizontal level, you will never find hope for the salvation of your soul!
It’s not what men did to Him that secures our salvation, it’s what the Father did to the Son!
Romans 8:32, “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us.”
Delivered Him up to what? To wicked men, yes. Delivered Him up to the powers of darkness, yes. Jesus said, “This is your hour in the power of darkness,” but most of all He gave Him up to His own wrath. “He hath made Him to be sin who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
Again in Galatians 3 Paul says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law.” How? By becoming a curse for us. “For it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone that hangs upon the tree.’”
So, here’s God’s gracious provision for sinners. It is God who has worked. It is God who has worked primarily in the Person of His Son. He’s worked in the way of substitutionary sin-bearing, and there is one final note that I want us to consider concerning this provision that God has made. That is: the nature of this provision.
4. The nature of this provision.
First of all, it’s completely finished. He said, “It is finished,” and it is finished.
There’s only two kinds of religion in the world. I said to think of the arrows. There’s another way to test all religious claims: either it’s a religion of do or done. Do or done. We either try to do something to fix ourselves up, to make ourselves acceptable to God, or we rest the whole weight of our soul upon Another.
The work is done. Christ has completed the redemption. We do not do in order to obtain it. We embrace by faith, a completely finished salvation.
Secondly, it’s this salvation that is now freely offered. The nature of it: completely finished; secondly: freely offered to all without discrimination.
This very prophet will go on to say in chapter 55, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, he that has no money; come, buy and eat; come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread? and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to Me, and eat what is good, delight yourself in rich food. Incline your ear, come to Me; that your soul may live.”
I am so thankful I can stand this morning and say I don’t know you, I don’t know the depths to which you sin. No one else may have a clue what your sins have been, but God knows, and God is so confident in the finished work of His Son He says to any sinner, in any place, with any rotten, stinking, foul, ungodly background: “This is a faithful saying worthy of all acceptance, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” (1 Timothy 1:15.)
That’s the gospel! This marvelous salvation that’s completely finished is freely offered, but thirdly and finally, it must be personally embraced.
It must be personally embraced.
That’s why the prophet goes on in Isaiah 55 to say, “Seek the Lord while He may be found; call upon Him while He’s near; let the wicked forsake..” What? “Let the wicked forsake his way.”
Get out of the god business! Stop living your own way! Repent; turn from your self-centered life! “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts.”
Give up all your foolish thoughts that somehow you’ll fool God and God will let you off in the Day of Judgement. Give up all your stupid thoughts that you can get brownie points to make yourself acceptable with God.
“Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return unto the Lord and to our God, [why?] he will abundantly pardon.
I say to any and every sinner here: go to Christ to embrace Him. You’ll get every bit of the salvation He purchased with His own blood: forgiveness of sin, acceptance with God, the gift of the Holy Spirit, a cleansed conscience, a new life, a death filled with hope of resurrection, and eventually a glorified mind and a glorified body, and forever to be in a glorified new heavens and new earth. All of that salvation is purchased, and it’s in Jesus!
Go to Jesus and say, “O Jesus, I bring you nothing but my sin. I bring you nothing but my failures. But I give myself over to You to be saved by You with every bit of the salvation You purchased with Your blood and that was validated by Your resurrection.”
When God raised Him from the dead, everything God said about the salvation He was purchasing was signed and sealed. It shall be accomplished. That can be true of you. Run to Christ, and you will find Him a welcoming Saviour who says, “Come to Me all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
So we’ve heard the bad news of our condition in sin, but I hope we’ve heard with the ears of the heart the good news of God’s gracious provision for our sin.
Let’s pray together.
Father, what can we say when we’ve been privileged to look into things that baffle angels and cause angels to want to inquire more fully into them? We thank you that You’ve revealed them in the Scriptures and in the gift of Your Son. Lord, bless Your truth, that Your saints may be encouraged by reviewing what they were and what they now are by grace, and that sinners will find for the first time everything You say about Your Son is true, as they embrace and receive Him by faith. Seal Your Word to our hearts we pray. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
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