Changed into his Likeness 7

(1 Corinthians 15:49) …And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven.

1) Adam and Eve sinned

2) Their sinned earned death; physical, spiritual, eternal death

3) As their descendants you inherited their sin nature and its punishment

4) So each of us must pay the penalty for our rebellion against God… the penalty is death!

5) God in his mercy allowed for the principle of substitution ( in place of)

6) In the Old Testament God allowed peoples sins to be covered by substituting another life for the life of the sinner. ( bull, goat, lamb, dove, pigeon)

7) In the New Testament Jesus became the final sacrifice This final Lamb would serve in place of every lamb ever killed to cover man’s sins before and to take the place of all future lambs to come. More importantly.. this final Lamb would not just cover man’s sin with his shed blood….this LAMB would take away the sins of the world!

(Hebrews 9:26-28) …. But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people…. (NIV)

Here is the reality of what happened in a single sentence:

All the evil justly due to come onto us came onto Jesus so that all the good due to Jesus, earned by His sinless obedience, might be made available to us!

As a conclusion I simply stated these amazing facts:

You notice in everyone of these cases there are exchanges being made…Something good is being exchanged for something bad.

This principle of receiving more than we deserve is built into the very fabric of human life. It’s what the whole advertising industry is based on. When we give somebody something and feel like what we received in return was not worth what we gave for it we are incensed….we got ripped off…

On the other hand, one of the great experiences in life is when we exchange something of limited value and we feel like what we received was worth so much more than we gave for it.

That coat that you found on the sale rack 60 % off of the already originally slashed price and you bought it on a day when everything in the store was an additional 10% off.

You feel like the guy who with one call to Geico saved 20% on his car insurance….you just have to tell everybody…

Perhaps God built all that entrepreneurial spirit into us so that we could fully appreciated the Divine trade that was going to take place in our lives. Perhaps the whole basis of the world economy in designed to help us to understand the hugeness of the exchange God was providing for us:

Generally:

All the evil justly due to come onto us came onto Jesus so that all the good due to Jesus, earned by His sinless obedience, might be made available to us!

Specifically:

1) Jesus was punished so that we might be forgiven!

Let me take these one at a time and show you just how far Jesus went to make sure that you got it all…..at his expense!

There are probably far more but these will be enough to prove the point… I’ll go as far as I can today…then we will come back next time and pick up the rest:

I took you to a familiar passage last week in Isaiah 53 last week and we need to visit there again: I pointed our last week… .

…. the last 27 chapters of Isaiah are often called the: Gospel of the Old Testament

At the middle verses of the middle set of the middle chapter of the middle set of chapters of the middle section of the part of Isaiah known as the Gospel of the Old Testament lies Isaiah 53:4-6

Understand that what I’m talking about may actually have some significance because the Hebrew language unlike any other language that I know of , is a mathematical language. When I studied Hebrew one of the first assignments was to learn the mathematical equivalent of each letter. One of the ways the scribes used to check their work was to add up the mathematical value of each letter and find the mathematical center of each sentence. In the Hebrew text there is actually a mark at the center of each sentence…. But that is another story…another study.

We dug deeper into the phrases:

1) pierced for our transgressions

Now let’s dig into these two phrases:

Observation #1: As long as your sin is not forgiven you cannot have peace with God!

One of the things I envy in Adam and Eve before the fall was that that unbroken communion between them and their Creator. That sense that young children get when they are on their Daddy’s lap and his big arms are wrapped around them. That wonderful sense of wholeness, and wellness, and safety, and sureness of the future. That sense that daddy loves me unconditionally, and there will never be a time when he is not with me and helping me with every need and protecting me from all harm. That’s peace!!!

When Adam and Eve rebelled against God one of the worst things that happened was a loss of peace. If you are sitting here today and you do not have a right relationship with God,….. I can predict with absolute certainty that you are living with an aching void between you and your loving heavenly Father. You don’t have a sense of sitting on Daddy’s lap and knowing that all is clear between you and him; that he will always love you unconditionally, That in him you have wholeness and wellness and safety, and sureness of the future; that he will help you with every need and protect you from all harm.

Instead you are hounded by a sense of guilt, an inner knowledge that your natural inclinations always seems to run counter to your heavenly Father. You look across the isle at your friend who has a right relationship with God and you know that they still struggle with personal issues of their own but they have something you don’t have…..

They have peace!

In spite of the fact that, you know there are still some things in their life that are not exact pictures of Jesus, you do see a steady improvement in their “likeness” to Jesus and they seem to have a calm sense that their heavenly Father is hugging them and assuring them of his forgiveness and guidance and protection. What do the “got” that you don’t?

They have peace!

“That’s not fair!!! They have been just as sinful as I have and they still struggle with sin yet I’m living with guilt and they are living with peace!”

Exactly!

Here’s what they know that you don’t:

(1 John 2:1-2) My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense-- Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. (NIV)

This is not as simple as it seems on the surface…..

When I was a boy I managed to get in a lot of trouble. My parents weren’t subscribers to the modern view that you would leave your child an emotional cripple if you punished him for wrongdoing….so… punishment was just about a daily thing for me. I didn’t manage to get away with anything. I remember going to my younger friends house and breaking the lamp in his bedroom. I can vividly remember showing him how to hide the pieces of the lamp in the bottom of the wastebasket and cover them with other trash…. It somehow didn’t occur to me that when his mother dumped out the trash the lamp would then be on the top of the pile…So I developed calluses on my backside, then I developed calluses on the calluses and so on…

However one pattern was clear…after doing my next wrong action I would live with the guilt of that action until I was punished. After receiving my punishment that wrong was cancelled and I was good to go until the next one. Some had lasting results…the time I ran my dad’s motor scooter through the wall of the garage; they time I drove my brakeless dune buggy into the garage at 30 mph…those had lasting consequences ..but after I was punished; the guilt for the wrong action was over.

Here’s the paradox:

1) Forgiveness brings peace

I’ll choose the first…thank you

That’s fine….It’s your spiritual birthright….It’s Jesus gift to you:

(Romans 5:1) Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (NIV)

Go ahead.. Rejoice in the fact that your faith in Jesus forgiveness of your sins brings you peace.. that’s a glorious truth. Revel in the fact that you don’t have to bear the punishment for your sin, but instead you can enjoy the lack of guilt that comes through faith in Jesus great gift.

The fact that you’re not bearing the punishment for your sins, the fact that simple faith on your part brings “ the peace of God that passes all understanding that guards your heart and mind in Christ Jesus” (as Paul said in Philippians) doesn’t mean that your sin past present and future didn’t take a vicious toll on somebody.

You know the answer to this but it is important that we hear it again…that the timeless truth buries itself into the deepest recesses of your soul…

The only way any of us have the peace of God, and peace with God is because the punishment of our sins is being born by our Savior. When I sin and come to God and say I’m sorry and I have such a sense of forgiveness and acceptance and peacefulness come over me….I must understand that God didn’t just say: No sweat! No harm…No foul! Don’t worry…be happy! No..No!!

My sin has to be punished!! The sin you commit today brings with it guilt, and shame, and punishment! The sin you might commit today still has the wages of death attached to it…If I go out of here today and I tell someone an untruth; I have just racked up a new tab of death; physical, spiritual, and eternal death!

The flippant idea that God just overlooks your sin and grants you forgiveness is nonsense, your sin has to be paid for or there is no forgiveness…there is no peace!

Here’s the amazing answer:

(Colossians 1:19-22) For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation-- (NIV)

Every time I find myself, yet again, falling short of God’s mark and I come back to God with yet another sin the last thing I can afford is to be flippant. If I sin, again…, and breeze on with barely a nod in God’s direction I am brazenly missing the point that when my Savior hung on the cross, that sin was at the top of his list. They all were equally bad to him, their wasn’t Hitler’s Holocaust first, and Osama’s bombing of the Trade Towers second and your sin number 14 billion down the line. Every single sin brought with it the sentence of physical, spiritual, and eternal death!!!! Every single one!!!!!

Apart from Jesus’ death and resurrection any sin you commit this week would send you straight to hell! (Have we lost sight of that?)

If we sin this week we can instead receive forgiveness, freedom from condemnation, peace of mind and heart, peace before God, and with God, but only because Jesus himself carried that exact sin to the cross…paid the terrible price for it, carried the punishment for it; into the very depths of hell, took on the one who tempted you to commit the sin, defeated his claim and power over your life and rose from the dead to bring you forgiveness and eternal life!

Back to Isaiah 53: