Last week we talked about how God is determined that all those who would believe in His Son should spend eternity with Him, adopted into His family forever. That He has actually predetermined this.
Have you tried to wrap your mind around this idea of predestination, of God’s choice vs man’s choice? We are wired to understand, yes, but sometimes our response only needs to be that of awe and wonder. Worship.
Is. 55:9
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts."
God’s ways are SO much higher than ours. How much higher is that, exactly? Exactly…
-[v4] Now since heaven is a perfect place, and our heavenly Father is perfect, it is appropriate that part of His choosing us in Christ before the foundation of the world is for us to be perfect, i.e. holy and blameless. IN Christ! Let’s chew on that for a minute. Holy. That which is worthy of worship, before which one would stand in awe, which is not to be profaned, containing not one bit of moral spot or stain or imperfection, thus also blameless. Completely without blame. There is nothing that anyone can point out in your life, no wrongdoing or misstep or unwholesome word or impure thought even. Nothing. Nada. Thoroughly unblemished. This side of heaven it is aspirational (1Pet 1.15), a state yet-to-be fully realized and yet gradually being manifested in me as I walk in step with the Spirit of Christ Who lives in me. And one day, when fully revealed in glory, will be something so inconceivably awesome that it would potentially inspire worship. To quote C.S. Lewis: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations... There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.” To be sure, God has chosen us to be an everlasting splendour... [boom]
-And this is before Him. In His presence, face-to-face, no pretense or veneer of religiosity, fully and finally unmasked - and unashamed, the way we were and were always meant to be. We will stand before our Master and Maker and He will look at us and He will say, ‘Well done! Rejoice and celebrate with Me, now and forever!’ Yes, what a day that will be, when the pure and perfect thrice-holy God welcomes us into His sacred presence and embraces us with a huge daddy-hug which only our Abba-Father in heaven can give only to those He has washed whiter-than-snow, forever perfect and spotless in His sight. No longer and never again any need for hiding or covering up or pretending or apologizing. No fig leaves, and no fear. Only basking in the warmth and glow of His pure holy light, His amazing grace and everlasting love and acceptance. We will indeed stand before Him and see Him face-to-face as He really is - and we will be like Him, exactly as He always designed us to be. Forever holy and blameless. Everlasting splendor. Mind. Blown.
Think about that. Holy and blameless before Him. Holy and blameless - like Him. Way back before the beginning, God’s design was for us to be like Him. And His vision for us was for those who believe in Christ to be able to stand faultless before His throne in eternity. Not a single spot or blemish. Unashamed. Let me ask you - do you feel holy and blameless this morning? If you died tonite, and you went and stood before the Eternal Holy God, how would you feel? Would you maybe be shrinking back under the weight of the guilt of the things you’ve thought and said and done and haven’t done? We’re all in that same predicament! But let me ask you - this massive cleanup project that is my life (and yours) - whose responsibility is that? The message here is not, you do more, you try harder. No this is precisely why the Father sent the Son - to pay the penalty for all those things which separate us from Him, and to make us like Him. Jesus takes away all those things of which we are ashamed. His image - that was the intent originally. To be like Him. Holy and blameless. Moral perfection. Everlasting splendor. And this is what God is working in Christ. He gives us the power every day to walk in His footsteps. Sons and daughters of the thrice-holy God who increasingly resemble Him. And one day, you and I and all those who believe in Christ are going to be able to stand before the Lord in eternity without even a single tinge of guilt. Even today! In His eyes, I’ve done everything right - IF I’m in Christ. [boom]
But that's not the end. It doesn’t stop there. Paul says, verse 6, this is all to the praise of the glory of His grace - which He graced on us; abundant riches of His grace which He lavished on us, abundantly poured out. How much grace? All of it…
-And so here is the motive, the why, the why behind this massive cleanup project, behind why our Heavenly Father would do all this to make us holy and blameless and bring us into His family - and the ultimate why behind why Almighty God ultimately does all that He does. For His glory. To increase the knowledge and celebration of His glory. Paul will refer to this why again in verse 12 and we will come back to it there, but here Paul is seizing on one facet of God’s glory, and that is His grace.
-Grace. Grace. God’s grace. Wonderful, amazing grace. Marvelous. Matchless. Glorious, breathtakingly good, how sweet that word does sound to those who have received it. Grace goes where no man can tread, where you would least expect, going after the despised and the wretched, the least and the rejected, to the helpless and the hopeless and the least of these, to all those who have no hope of rescuing themselves. Which happens to include pretty much everyone who is honest and humble enough to admit it. This is God’s great favor, so rich, so free, undeserved and unearned - the sublime supreme game-changer. No longer must I labor for a lifetime (or even one day!) to curry favor with the Divine. Never again need I work to try and gain right standing before my Maker. Grace does what I cannot do, what I can never hope to do even on my best day. Grace reaches down and rescues me from the most dire of straits. Grace is the Heavenly Father reaching down towards the struggling child - and a disobedient one at that - and saying, ‘Here, I got this.’ Grace secures our salvation and provides our daily bread, grace pours out God’s blessings when we have done absolutely nothing to deserve them. In fact, we deserve to be punished for our transgressions.
Isaiah 53:5-6
But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities;
The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed.
All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;
But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.
A gift we don’t deserve - when in fact we deserve something else entirely. That’s grace. God’s riches at Christ’s expense. He paid it. We receive no dash of favor, no blessing of His that we ever deserve - it is all by grace, and one day, when I do stand faultless before the throne, holy and blameless face-to-face with my Maker, the One thrice-holy, it will be abundantly clear to all that only by the grace of God am I there. And then the chorus of praise, the cheers will erupt! (or rather continue, as those have been going on for quite some time now...) Cheers not for me, of course, but for the glorious grace of God. To the praise of the glory of His grace. That’s what Paul is talking about. Blessed be God…!
-And to be sure, this saving grace is found only in the Beloved, God’s only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, Whom He loves and Whom He sent into the world to save the world, to save sinners, to save a wretch like me... And for those who choke on calling themselves a wretch, if that word gets stuck in throat of your soul like some horrid oversized pill, it probably means you are sadly in no place to receive this grace. Not yet. Which means you are on your own, and good luck with that.
-So Paul’s giving us the why, and next he gives us the how. Practically speaking, here’s what needed to happen in order for us to be able to stand in the presence of God as sons and daughters without stain or blemish. v 7. Yet another unfathomable blessing. Redemption.
In Christ, we have redemption. Release. To be set free from some kind of bondage or enslavement. And to be sure, without Christ we are slaves to both sin and death, unable to escape either on our own. We were born to die and born into slavery to sin as surely as sparks fly upward, the common destiny and shared predicament of fallen man, originally designed to live forever in paradise, but now no more than a vapor, just a few fleeting years and then to the grave. Death gradually and relentlessly consumes every man. And while he lives - unable to NOT sin, completely unable to avoid rebelling against his Creator, freely choosing to do so at every turn. Separated from the God Who loves him and doomed to pay the penalty for his sins - his lot is indeed hopeless. That of a slave.
[story of slavery/freedom] - Mr. Burwell came to the cabin, with a letter in his hand. He was a kind master in some things, and as gently as possible informed my parents that they must part; for in two hours my father must join his master at Dinwiddie, and go with him to the West, where he had determined to make his future home. I can remember the scene as if it were but yesterday; - how my father cried out against the cruel separation; his last kiss; his wild straining of my mother to his bosom; the solemn prayer to Heaven; the tears and sobs - the fearful anguish of broken hearts. The last kiss, the last good-by; and he, my father, was gone, gone forever. My father and mother never met again in this world.
Slavery. Your life is not your own. Withering injustice, sweltering summer of our discontent; destitute of the milk of human kindness.
He who has been tortured remains tortured…. He who has suffered torment can no longer find his place in the world. Faith in humanity — cracked by the first slap across the face, then demolished by torture — can never be recovered. -Primo Levi
Hopelessness at the hands of a cruel master. This is why the Good News is so good! There is another Master, and He has purchased your release from sin. Freedom is just a heartbeat away... Freedom from sin and death, from separation and condemnation - that's redemption! Release. It was secured in that one last heartbeat of the Savior Whose blood poured out and Who in that final breath declared, ‘It is finished’. It is a heartbeat away for each one of us, who can in that very second pass from eternal death into the eternal freedom of the children of God simply by trusting in what Christ did on the Cross. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty…
-Redemption. But how did God accomplish that? What WAS the price for our freedom? The blood of His Son. Through His blood. God had a plan, a plan to expiate sin, to fully pay for it and completely remove it, this great spiritual Berlin Wall, that which separated man from his Maker since that fateful day in paradise many eons ago. The foundational truth about sin is that there is no forgiveness for it without the shedding of blood. That would be the great price of our freedom from the penalty and power of sin. And to prepare His people for the day when He would provide the payment for sin, God gave us pictures. Like when He killed an animal, shedding its blood, to clothe Adam and Eve after their tragic choice to commence disobedience. Or when He asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son but then provided a ram to take his place. Or when He instituted the covenant with Moses where His people every year would kill an unblemished lamb whose blood would symbolically cover their sins for one year. All just pictures, these, this shedding of blood - precursors to the Lamb of God, the perfect Son of God Who was inconceivably both fully man and fully God and Whose perfect, precious blood bled out to cover all the multiplied sins of mankind. Let’s not rush past this monumental truth like a hurried sip of grape juice rushing past the lips on a Sunday morning. Oh how amazing, that crimson flood, the blood which so freely flowed out of that beating heart for me - yes, how can it be, that You, My God, should die for me? And how does crimson blood make something white as snow anyway? Unfathomable.
-Through this precious blood we can have forgiveness of sins. Which means, they are gone. Simply gone. They have been sent away as far as the east is from the west…
Psalm 103:12
As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.
In other words, my sins are completely gone, never to return. Every single one of them, past present and future. That horrible thing I did? Gone. All of them. That really big thing I haven’t even done yet? It’s gone too. Covered over and completely washed away. That is forgiveness. There is no trace, no memory of them whatsoever. They are buried in the deepest ocean, never again to surface. Obliterated. If they are not gone, they are not forgiven. But the God-Who-sees and Who saw all I ever would and would not do long before He ever sent His Son to shed His blood to cover my sins, now no longer sees even the faintest trace of imperfection in me. Every last one - gone. forever. He doesn’t hold them against me anymore when I am in Christ. No more. That’s how we get to “holy and blameless” - not by do-more-try-harder. Forgiveness. God lets them go. I need to let them go too... Let go of the guilt, the shame, that feeling of being dirty in God’s eyes or unworthy of His love. That’s how we forgive someone else too - we let it go. Real gone. In truth, not one of us deserves even one drop of Christ’s precious blood, so unworthy - and yet we were worth so much to God that He did send His only Son for each one of us. And now we are free. Clean. Completely forgiven in Christ. Yes - mind blown once again.
-And all this, according to the riches of His grace. Just how rich is God’s grace? How much undeserved favor does He possess? How much has He put at our disposal in order to wash our sins whiter than snow and completely erase every last one of our trespasses? Vast riches, untold and unimaginable, unfathomable. An inexhaustible supply, neverending, overflowing and flowing freely from the veins of Calvary. Way more than enough to provide forgiveness and freedom for a few billion souls. Paul says God lavished His grace on us, He abounded and overflowed it onto us - He covered us over and slathered it on extra thick and gave us way more than we would ever need. We’re swimming in grace, and it’s way over our heads. All this grace poured out for us, and the level hasn’t even dipped a bit...! How much grace might you or I need today? There’s still an infinite supply to cover anything and everything we need, and then some… [boom]
All this - to the praise of the glory of His grace. To the praise of His glory. God gets the credit, the glory, the praise. Blessed be the God Who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing - in Christ. To the praise of His glory. We’re right back where we started...
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