His Glory No.2 The Man

We're glad to have you accompany this evening. We're going to be focusing our attention on our Lord Jesus Christ. He is, after all, the pivot of the Christian faith, and the Christian faith is unique because it is the only faith that speaks of someone who came into this world to die on a cross, the most diabolical way in which man has ever conceived, in order to rob his fellow of life and then three days later to be raised from the dead.

So we're glad that throughout the singing of our hymns, the focus of attention from God's Word, and as we come around the table, we shall be thinking of none other than our beloved Lord Jesus. Let's make preparation to come into his presence. Let's bow our heads in prayer and listen to the old-fashioned words of a very ancient tradition, of the Book of Common Prayer, a general confession to be said of the whole congregation.

Almighty and most merciful God, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws.

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their sins.

Restore thou them that are penitent. According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord, and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.

Join together in the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Now we sing more about what we believe. We're going to sing the creed, which is number 720, a mission praise. We believe he died to save us, for our sins was crucified.

Then from death he rose each morn, and ascended to the Father's side. Jesus, Lord of all, Lord of all. Jesus, Lord of all, Lord of all.

Jesus, Lord of all, Lord of all. Jesus, Lord of all, Lord of all. Name above all names, name above all names.

We believe he spent his spirit in his church, and lives on high. Lord, he's one of true confirming saints, and to the nations now, he will come again in glory, just the living, not the dead. Every knee shall bow before him, then will every tongue call him blest.

Jesus, Lord of all, Lord of all. Jesus, Lord of all, Lord of all. Jesus, Lord of all, Lord of all.

Jesus, Lord of all, Lord of all. Name above all names, name above all names, name above all names. No other name but the name of Jesus.

No other name but the name of the Lord. No other name but the name of Jesus. He's worthy of glory, and worthy of honor, and worthy of love, Jesus.

No other name but the name of the Lord. The name of Jesus. He's worthy of glory, and worthy of honor, and worthy of power, and of grace.

His name is exalted, power of the earth. His name is power of the heavens. His name is exalted, power of the earth.

His glory and honor and praise unto his name. No other name but the name of Jesus. No other name but the name of the Lord.

No other name but the name of Jesus. He's worthy of glory, and worthy of honor, and worthy of power, and of grace, Jesus. Let's turn to one or two striking passages of scripture.

Here is Mark in writing the gospel that bears his name. He tells us about Peter, and in the 14th chapter, Peter is in dire difficulty. He is being questioned about his faith in the Lord Jesus.

And powerful man that Peter was, he trembled like a leaf in the breeze as a slip of a girl came alongside and says to him in the 69th verse of this 14th chapter, This fellow is one of them. Again, Peter denied it. After a little while, those standing near said to Peter, surely you are one of them, for you are a Galilean.

He began to call down curses on himself and swore to them. I don't know this man you're talking about. Immediately, the cock crowed the second time.

Then Peter remembered. Slightly different context. Around the same time, Pontius Pilate's words were spoken.

And you find them in the 19th chapter of John's gospel. The arrested Lord Jesus is taken from pillar to post. He's cruelly beaten.

And verse 4, Pilate, as I'll try to remind you, feeling that he's got himself off the horns of a dilemma, discovers that actually he's even in a greater mess. John 19, for once more, Pilate came out and said to the Jews, look, I am bringing the Jesus out to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him. When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, here is the man.

As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, crucify, crucify. And finally, the apostle Paul writing to Timothy in the first letter of Timothy in the second chapter speaks about the necessity for Christians to pray for those who have authority over us. And he goes on in the third verse to say, this is good and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.

Join me in verse 5 and 6. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men, the testimony given in its proper time. And there we end the reading of Scripture for the time being. Interesting what the papers have been on about this last week.

I noticed that the Times tells us that the former USSR has got quite a lot of spaceships it wants to sell. They're going at a knockdown price of $10 million, which is cheap compared with the $29 billion that apparently it costs to make the things. Of course, if you do decide to buy one of them, you've got to ensure that you don't live near any woodpeckers, because they've created some problems for Cape Canaveral.

Perhaps less funny is what the Channel 4 authorities have decided to do. And that is put on that infamous film on the life of our beloved Lord, The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorese's representation of what he believes to have been a struggle of our Savior.

I guess I'll be one of the few clergymen still placed in the category of a feeble-minded Bible-ranter who will write to Channel 4 and tell them, You dare do that, but you wouldn't dare to read from the satanic verses. But actually, whether they screen that film or they don't screen the film, it won't make a one-eye utter of difference to the powerful message that there is that our beloved Lord came to proclaim. We live in a funny old world, don't we? Channel 4 screens that perverted account of the life of Christ.

And I have it on reasonable authority that Saddam Hussein, he allowed the Jesus film, the text from Luke's Gospel, to be screened on Baghdad television. What a strange, strange business we've got ourselves into in our world at the end of the 20th century. The Last Temptation of Jesus, my dear friends, was not an affair with Mary Magdalene.

The only inspiration for that sort of stuff would come out of Hollywood. There's not one iota of evidence of that in the New Testament. But if the film wants to major on the humanity of Christ, then we can clearly tell the film producer and all who are involved what actually was the last struggle of our Saviour.

And it had to do with His humanity. There were four times when Jesus Christ gave blood. When He was circumcised as a young child, 12 days after being brought out of the womb of His mum, a little tinge of blood was seen on the crib.

When He was in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before His arrest, indicating again His utter humanity, His nerves stretched a breaking point like the strings of a violin across a bridge. He indicates something of a trauma, because on His forehead are bloody beads of perspiration. And later they'll take a Roman whip and they'll give Him 39 strokes.

And at the end of the Roman whips there were pieces of bone or metal to ensure that the whipping did the greatest amount of damage. And then if that was not sufficiently horrific, a little later they punctured His hands with nails and they thrust a spear into His side. It was real blood that flowed, for Jesus Christ was, is, a real man.

There is a sense in which if you can understand something of your frailty and something of your desires, you can begin to understand a little bit, though inadequately, about the humanity of Jesus. Do you weep? He wept. Do you get hungry? He hungered.

Do you get thirsty? He knew what it was to send someone for water. Do you sometimes feel the funny side, see the funny side of a situation? So did our Lord Jesus. Do you take pleasure on playing with kids or embracing a little child, taking an infant in your arms? So did our Saviour.

Everything that might be good within humanity you find reflected in our Lord. In fact, He was the ideal man. That expression, only human, used as an excuse for failure, is actually an illogical expression.

What we mean is we behaved in a subhuman fashion. Martin Luther, as often is the case, got it right when he says of Jesus in that wonderful hymn that He is the proper man. The person that God ideally wants you and me to be.

He was, He is, a real man. John, writing after the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus, one of his pastoral epistles, one of his apostolic epistles, he says of Jesus, we have seen Him, we have touched Him, we have handled Him. Even in His resurrected form He wasn't just a spook.

He wasn't a ghost. The humanity of Jesus is real. And it's necessary that you understand that.

The words of the Athanasian Creed, although they are a little antiquated in the form of the rendering in this prayer book, actually are helpful. They talk about our Lord Jesus and they say that He is perfect God and perfect man. Of reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.

Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead and inferior to the Father as touching His manhead. Who, although He be God and man, yet He is not two but one Christ. Man hungers as a man.

Thirsts as a man. Sleeps as a man. Man truly.

But He walks on water. He multiplies loaves and fishes. He speaks to the content of a coffin and tells a little fellow to get up.

Man truly. But not man only. Thus the Bible in its most popular descriptions of our Lord Jesus, at least in the Gospels, will refer to Him as the Son of Man and the Son of God.

Manly enough to represent you and me before the throne of God. Divine enough to deal with the consequences of your sin and my sin. You know, it's not always what you say that counts, is it? It's how you say it.

When you talk about the Lord Jesus as a man, how do you say it? Three occasions I've lifted out the reading of Scripture in which our Lord Jesus is referred to as human. One was out of panic. Here is Peter, this powerful fisherman, and he is in difficulty.

Strange that some months before, he has been full of inspiration. For with the disciples, he's been in the company of our Lord, and they're at a place called Caesarea Philippi, and Jesus is testing their theological argument. He's testing their reason.

Hey, what they're saying about me? You know, in the bazaars? The Jewish Chronicle? And the answers came, well, one of the prophets, Elijah, Jeremiah. Us is Jesus cutting through the foliage, but who do you say I am? And Peter said, you are the Christ, the Son of a living God. And our Lord, who doesn't give accolades, who doesn't give congratulations unless they're really deserved, says to Peter, blessed are you.

I single you out, Peter, because, well, you have arrived at the right conclusion, and you have not done it sheerly through human reason. My Father in heaven, he has revealed this to you. And on this rock, the rock of who I am, the Christ, the Son of a living God, I will build my church.

But you know, you can say one thing one month and flatly contradict it the next. How often have we sung Jesus is Lord? Pastors, elders, deacons, church members, here on a Sunday night. And by Bundy, by our action at any rate, we have denied our expression, our belief in the sovereignty of Jesus.

I say that because we move on and we see Peter not in the glory of revealing who Christ is, proclaiming who Jesus is, we now see him in the position of utter cowardice. How can it be that such a mighty man can fall? Well, simply because Peter is operating at a less than ideal human level. He warms his hands, it's the scene of the high priest's palace.

He's in the garden, it's night, and panic has stolen over his soul. And he's being questioned as to his proximity to Jesus Christ. And he panics, and the girl comes along and says, surely you're one of his? You speak not like a southerner, you speak with a northern dialect.

And Peter, in blind panic, uses the most obscene terms. But the most crushing of all is when he says, I don't know the man. It's not what he said, but it's how he said it.

Conveying not his recognition of the glorious, spotless humanity of Jesus, but he uses the terms, one of abuse, one in which he wants to disassociate himself from being a disciple, the charge of being a disciple of Jesus. Jesus called man out of panic. But then, Jesus on another occasion was called man out of pity.

Here is Pilate in John's Gospel in the 19th chapter. He's a vacillating sort of man, that means he finds it difficult to make up his mind. Several times in the Gospels, not just in John's Gospel, but the first three Gospels, you find the record that Pilate can discover no wrong in Jesus.

His wife shares the same sentiment. She dashes off a little telegram to Pilate and says, don't get yourself into any worse trouble, have nothing to do with that just man. Now Pilate, because he's a little bit of a quizzling, and he's caught between his conscience and the preservation of his career, determines that he'll get himself off the hook by doing something that is brutal.

And if Jesus is an innocent man, it's illegal. But nonetheless, it might make a sufficient impression upon the enemies of Jesus for at least Jesus' life to be spared. So the flagellation.

So Pilate allows the Roman soldiers to whip the skin off the back of Jesus of Nazareth. And just as a little extra, they ridicule him as a king, they blindfold him, they pluck the beard, they hit him with their fists, and then they return him in a disheveled, blood-stained condition to Pilate. Who parades him in front of the high priests and the rest of the mob.

And he says, behold, the man. It's not panic, it's an attempt at evoking pity on the part of those respectating. At a sub-level, it's Pilate's endeavor to get himself out of a dilemma.

But it doesn't work. And Pilate is forced, because the Jews have got him in a corner, and implicitly they threaten his professional well-being, and so he hands over the responsibility for the future of Jesus Christ into the hands of Caiaphas and Annas and the whole bunch. But you can't do it.

You cannot do it in the 20th century as you cannot do it in the 1st century. When I was a kid back in our Sunday school, we used to sing the song, what will you do with Jesus, neutral you cannot be. Someday your soul might be asking, what will he do with me? Peter recognizes Jesus as a man out of panic.

Pilate recognizes Jesus as a man out of pity. How do you recognize Jesus? When you move through into Timothy's letter, that is the one that he received from the apostle Paul, what you actually find in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th verses of the 2nd chapter of the 1st letter is a theological explanation as to what historically happened when Pontius Pilate presented the Lord Jesus to his Jewish accusers. John tells you what happened.

Timothy is told why it happened. John sets the scene and Paul assesses the significance. This is good.

And pleases God our Savior, says Paul, congratulating Timothy and all who pray for those who have authority over them. And he goes on, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth? For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man, Christ Jesus. Peter says it out of panic.

Pilate says it out of pity. Paul says it out of pride. The man, Christ Jesus, here is the problem.

You have God on one side, you've got man on the other. You've got righteousness here, you've got sinfulness here. How can the two ever come together? The man, Christ Jesus.

Truly man, as I've explained, every bitter man, born as a man is born into this world, hanging to his mother's breasts. Every bit of a man inasmuch as he hungers and thirsts. A man like you who experiences emotion.

A man who knows temptation, but at its most absolute degree. And yet, more than just a man, God manifests in the flesh. The second person of the Trinity, taking upon himself humanity, something that he never had before.

And when he's raised after that diabolical death, when he's raised in the power of an endless life, and he returns to heaven, he does retaining his humanity. So it can be said with great pride, we have a man in the heaven who makes intercession for us. He has to be man in order to take upon himself the responsibility for your sin.

But he's got to be more than man. And so within the nature of our Lord Jesus, there is this duality. There is his humanity and there is his deity.

When he's on earth, there are certain aspects of his deity that he surrenders. He's not in every place at all times. There are certain things that he determines not to know.

Certain aspects of his humanity that come out in terms of the fragile life that he seemed to live. And yet, he never surrendered the authority that was his as God. So a woman is taken in the act of adultery, and Jesus can forgive the woman.

Against you, you only have I sinned, said a man in a similar situation, and he's referring to God. And Jesus says to this woman, I forgive you, go and sin no more. Only the one sinned against can forgive sin.

And Jesus never blushes to forgive sin. Jesus never quotes God in terms of what God says. He uses the formula, verily, verily, I say unto you, why? Because he's more than just human.

Human he is, but more than human, he is God. Now, I come to a conclusion. You see, you have to make your own confession as to who you estimate Jesus to be.

The first two confessions were utterly unacceptable. Peter out of panic, and he very quickly put the record right, let me say. A pilot out of pity.

But the most pitiable person actually was pilot himself, and not the Lord Jesus. Paul, out of pride, he loved me and gave himself for me. I live, no, no longer I. Christ lives in me.

It oozes through every epistle. It throbs in almost every verse. The pride that Paul has in the Lord Jesus, why? Because he is the mediator.

Who at the right time gave himself as a ransom for all men. How do you confess Jesus? Panic, pity, or pride may the last be the stimulus. And that means you're prepared to come around this table and to take bread and wine, believing that the breaking of the body of Christ and the releasing of his blood was the price paid for your salvation.

Believing that he's been raised from the dead, and in heaven he associates you as part of his family circle, because you have confessed him as your Lord and as your Savior. A moment of quiet reflection. No one in this world has done what you've done.

There's no one in this world like you. No one in this world has done what you've done. There's no one in this world like you.

Oh, you've done what nobody else could do. There was nothing you did that was wrong. When temptation called so invitingly, you refused to go along.

Yet you died to pay the sacrifice for the sins of the world. And you broke the powers of darkness, so that death is now destroyed. No one in this world has done what you've done.

There's no one in this world like you. No one in this world has done what you've done. There's no one in this world like you.

Oh, you did what nobody else could do. By rising up from the dead. And this new life gives hope again for all that lies ahead.

For there's nothing in heaven or earth of this we can be sure. That can keep us apart from your endless love today and evermore. No one in this world has done what you've done.

There's no one in this world like you. No one in this world has done what you've done. There's no one in this world like you.

No one in this world has done what you've done. There's no one in this world like you. We offer you these emblems not because you're a member of a tab, but because you confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and you do so out of pride.

Pride in Him, but out of humility in your own spirit. Recognizing that the death of our Lord was the payment for your sin. During these precious moments as we quietly wait for the emblems to come our way, let's stay our minds on what I've tried to share about our beloved Lord.

Let's make our repentance and prepare for taking these emblems ourselves. Lord, we thank you we can sing such precious words about yourself, that you do mean our all and you require our all, even tonight. And Lord, as we take this bread, it's just a symbol, but it does show to us again the depths to which you went to purchase our salvation.

You poured out yourself for us. And Lord, we thank you that you know just where we are with relation to you at this time. We pray that you will fire our hearts afresh.

And as we partake of these emblems, may it be an act of commitment afresh to yourself. Lord, thank you for your humanity, but thank you for your divinity as well. And that you came down as a man to identify with us.

We thank you that you know us by name. So now Lord, bless this act of commitment tonight in Jesus' name. Amen.

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus, how though he was rich, yet for your sakes, he became poor, that through his poverty he might make many rich. What had he to leave? They stripped him of his garment and played bingo at the foot of the cross. His body was so battered, no hospital really would have wanted the corpse for medical research.

But what he had which remained intact was the most precious thing that any man, any woman ever has. And that was his dignity, his unsolid reputation, his white as a lily righteousness. And in that final moment, he dropped that and took upon himself the vileness of your sin.

That's why the Father turned his back on the Son. That's why from the cross came that horrific cry, darker than the deepest darkness, Why have you forsaken me? And the answer was, because he, the Lord Jesus, was made sin, transferred to your account. The only thing he had to leave, his righteousness, taken upon himself, the consequences of your misdoings.

This bread, it bespeaks his body, not broken at the moment as I lift up this piece, but now in remembrance of him and recalling his words at the last supper, the Lord Jesus took the bread. And when he had blessed it, he broke it and said, this is my body, broken for you. This eat in remembrance, we might dare to add, in proud remembrance of me.

Brothers and sisters, eat with thankfulness. And let's now stand in his presence and in his honour. For the Lord Jesus said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Shed for many for the remission of sin. This do you as often as you will in remembrance of me. Let's drink with thankfulness of heart.

And not out of pity. And certainly not out of panic. But out of pride.

Amen.