Word of Salvation – Vol.32 No.17 – May 1987

 

How We Are Saved From God’s Justice

 

Sermon: by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 5

Reading: Hebrews 8; Col.1:15-23

Singing: BoW.10:1,2; BoW.10:3; PsH.192; PsH.252:1,2,3; BoW.811:1,2,5

 

One day the most powerful king of Israel was visited by a prophet.  The prophet did not explain the purpose of his visit.  He just began speaking about a terrible thing that had taken place between two men.  The king listened attentively for he assumed that the prophet expected an expression of anger from him.  The prophet told the king how a rich man had been terribly unfair to a poor man.  Both these men lived in the same town and one day the rich man received a visitor for whom he wanted to prepare a nice meal.  The rich man had plenty of animals and he could have easily slaughtered one and would not even have noticed that he had one animal less.  But the rich man didn’t do that.  He went instead to the poor man and took from him the only sheep that he had.  It was not even a full-grown sheep but a little lamb which was a family pet.  The poor man’s children loved it.  What the rich man had done was terrible.  It was just so unjust.  David, for that was the king’s name, thought so too.  He exploded with righteous anger and told Nathan, for that was the prophet’s name, that the rich man deserved to die for such a wicked deed.  But first he must pay back the poor man and give him four lambs for the one he took from him.  How could that rich man who had so much not have any pity on the poor man who had so little!

When king David had finished expressing his indignation about the rich man, the prophet Nathan gave him a long, measured look, and quietly but firmly said: “You are the man!” (2Sam.12:7).  I think that David might have already sensed what was coming seconds before the prophet said those shattering words that made guilt well up inside David to the size of a mountain.  He now knew that the prophet had all the time been referring to his stealing Bathsheba from Uriah her husband and even causing his death.  Uriah had just the one wife; he, David, had several already.  Uriah was just a soldier, he, David, was king, the rich man.  Uriah never stood a chance, he was the poor man.  But what is of interest to us right now is that David was intensely aware of his guilt.  And equally aware also of God being just in His anger.

Two facts could not be more clear in David’s mind: one, he had sinned, and two, God who is holy will not allow sin to go unpunished.  Everyone who sins, and there is not one who hasn’t, God will hold responsible for the wrong done.  When Cain murdered his brother Abel, God caught up with him and said, “What have you done?” (Gen.4:10).

Everyone knows right from wrong and when we have done a wrong, we know that we stand guilty before God.  And God is just!  And He says: what have you done?  We must therefore consider this question very seriously:
“How Are We Saved from God’s Justice?”
In the first place we will see that it’s a necessary question to ask.
Secondly, we will consider some wrong suggestions.
And thirdly, we look to its scriptural answer.

1. In the first place then let us see that it is very necessary to consider this question: How are we saved from God’s justice?

You will have noticed that by putting this question before us, we are doing the same thing that our confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, is doing.  So far, the Catechism has directed us to the teaching of Scripture where Scripture says that man is a sinner and therefore in misery.  This sinful condition of man has come through the fall of man into sin, and here we are unhappily linked with Adam who was the first to sin.  Man’s sinful state is not from God for God created Adam good – in God’s own likeness.  So we can’t blame God for the mess we’re in.  In fact, God has remained the same.  He created man with the ability to perfectly obey God and thus have a perfect union with God.  This is still God’s desire, it is still His command to man.  “Be holy, for I am holy.”  God will not settle for less, for it would take away from His perfection.  Perfection cannot have a perfect union with imperfection.  And because man wilfully rebelled against God, God will punish man for his disobedience.  His justice is so pure that He cannot tolerate sin.

And that’s why God said to Adam and Eve after they had disobeyed: What have you done?  And the same question was put to Cain, to David, and to every sinner in the world: What have you done?

Well, we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  And God’s judgment is upon man and man faces death, for the soul that sins shall die.

But is there no deliverance?  Is there not a way out of this mess that man is in?  Is there salvation?  Is there not some way man can escape the consequences of his sin and disobedience?  Can there be a way to avoid eternal death?  After Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thus cut themselves off from God, God closed off Paradise by putting an angel there with a flaming sword.  His task was to guard the way to the tree of life.  But is the way back to God completely cut off?  The answer is: No.  God is just but He is also love.  And it was God who called out, after man had sinned, and said: Where are you?  God did that to Adam and Eve, to Cain, and through the prophet Nathan to David.  Yes, through His Word, God calls out to every sinner: Where are you?  Oh, God knows where sinful man is, but God is calling man to tell him that there is a way back to Him.

And now the Catechism in Lord’s Day 5 is reflecting that call of God to sinful man when it asks: How can we escape God’s righteous judgment, that divine punishment in this world and forever after?  Yes, how can we return to God’s favour?  There is comfort in that question for we could not ask it if there was no hope of a way out.  The hope of being saved from God’s justice was given by God Himself because He looked up Adam and Eve after they sinned, and Cain and David, and us!

Now if the question: ‘How are we saved from God’s justice’ is so necessary and so important then why are we not hearing it more in modern-day evangelism?  In preparing this sermon I read a book by John Blanchard, published in 1971 and called “Right with God”.  It was such a refreshing book to read because John Blanchard, who is an evangelist himself, points sinners to Christ by instructing them in the great truths of the gospel.  Certainly no three, four minute job in getting a decision for Christ, based on emotional pressures.  Blanchard believes that for men to find salvation they need to be persuaded by scriptural truth and in his book you find the same biblical doctrines explained as you do in our confessions.  The same question is asked: how are we saved from God’s justice?

But in many modern-day evangelism you do not find much at all about the justice of God which all men will inevitably have to face.  The gospel that is presented today is often more man-centred than God-centred.  The needs of man are put in the centre.  These receive all the attention.  Are you afraid?  Jesus will help you overcome your fear.  Are you lonely?  Jesus will help you find friends.  Are you this, are you that?  It’s all about how you feel.  And Jesus is held up as the super-friend, as the cure-all, as the solution to all, your needs.  Now don’t be confused.  The Bible does speak about Christ overcoming our fear and being a friend.  Sure, He is the solution to all our needs.  But that’s only to those who are His people, to those who have been saved from God’s justice.  You cannot tell people that it’s wonderful to have Jesus if these people have no idea at all that God will judge them for their sin.  You ought not to ask people if they would like to receive eternal life, however much they need it, if nothing has been said first about the justice of God.

We, of course, live at a time where society is putting much emphasis on self.  You have all heard this generation described as the ‘me-generation’.  Statements such as, ‘You owe it to yourself’!’, and, ‘What’s in it for me?’ are frequently heard.  It’s all about self-realisation, self-fulfilment, self-awareness, self, self, self.  And if the church now comes along and says that Jesus will do a much better job in giving you good feelings about yourself, and never says anything about the need to face up to God’s holiness and justice, than it’s a false gospel that is presented.

The true gospel that sinners need to hear is about the justice of God to and how man can be saved from the judgment of God.  Man needs to be made aware of the fact that the Bible teaches a judgment and a hell and that unless God’s justice is satisfied, sinners who remain unforgiven will surely go there.  People are not helped when they are made to feel good about themselves.  They are helped by discovering that they are sinful in themselves and objects of God’s wrath and therefore needing deliverance from their darkness.  They need to be shown how the old sinful self can be abandoned, not pampered, and the bondage to sin broken, and not merely explained and excused, and how to surrender to Christ with their whole self, instead of discovering their own selves.  And the question: how are we saved from God’s justice?  is most relevant to all that.  It is, therefore, a necessary and important question to find an answer to.

2. In the second place, therefore, let us look to some suggestions which have proved to be quite wrong.

When Lord’s Day 5 holds back momentarily in giving the right answer, which is Christ, of course, then do not be too critical of the Catechism.  The authors of the Catechism lived in a different time from us and they were faced with Medieval Catholicism that had taught people to look to indulgences, saint-worship, purgatory, trusting in these to at least partially satisfy the justice of God.  And the Catechism here in Lord’s Day 5 has framed the questions with those wrong suggestions in mind.

Luther, for example, before he finally saw that the only way he could be just before God was to have faith in Christ, before he discovered that, was convinced that he himself had to somehow satisfy God’s justice.  So he tried praying six hours at a time, living in an unheated cell in the monastery in a German winter, not eating a thing for three days, hoping that by doing these things he might impress God.  Afterwards he said, “If ever a monk got to heaven by monkery, I would have gotten there.”  Such were the false beliefs of the time when the Catechism was written.  People were made to believe that they could pay for their sins by saying a certain number of prayers, by fasting, taking part in a crusade that aimed to capture Jerusalem from the Muslims, or going on a pilgrimage to Rome and climbing the stairs of St.  Peter on your knees and kissing each step and saying, “Our Father” as you did so.  But whilst the Catechism had those wrong practices in mind, the questions of Lord’s Day 5 remain relevant even today.  The Baltimore Catechism, still widely used in Roman Catholic Churches, speaks of people being able to make some atonement to God for their sins and able to make some satisfaction towards God’s justice.  And it encourages people to pray to the saints in heaven for, it is said, they are able to help the faithful on earth.  The questions of Lord’s Day 5 about our own ability to pay towards our debt to God, or another doing that for us, are therefore still applicable.  Not just with regard to the wrong suggestions of Roman Catholicism but also to all those today who make it plain that they somehow feel their religious good works will help to open heaven to them.  Just ask people why they feel they will go to heaven and not to hell and many will speak to you about their prayers, their trying to be good, reading the Bible, going to church, and so on.  You hope to hear some mention of Christ, that He came to pay the debt with His death on the cross!  Instead, many rely on their own performance.  They will even say, “But I have found great help in going to church”; or, “I have really felt God’s presence while I was praying”; or, “God seemed so real to me at one time.”  But is that sufficient?  Is it enough that God seemed to be real to you,or that you thought you were getting through to Him?  God says in Prov.14:12, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”  Blanchard in his book says: “You dare not take the risk of relying on feelings instead of fact!  The plain truth is that religious activity cannot save you.  Candles and confessions; invocations and incense; wine and wafers; services and sacraments; sprinkling and sacrifices – none of them can remove sin or reconcile you to God.” (p.39).

Some of them may be very good things in themselves and we should keep on doing them.  But they cannot save us from the justice of God.  People may give glowing testimonies about how real Jesus is to them, how He helps them to be more efficient in solving their own problems, how He helps them with this or that.  But the point is not whether you find Jesus such a help to you.  The point is are you right with God?  God wants perfect obedience, not 60% or 80% or 99%, but 100%.  Even one sin is enough for God to judge you for that one sin.  A chain has many links but if only one link snaps, the whole chain has failed.  One break in a telegraph wire and communication is lost.  One puncture is sufficient to make useless an otherwise perfectly good tyre.

What matters is not how we feel about ourselves after we have tried hard to be good and religious.  All it needs is a penetrating question like, “what have you done?” and we are reminded of our sin and stand naked before a righteous God.  Yes Lord, it was I who lied, it was I who cheated, it was I who lusted, who was unfair, unkind, selfish, hateful, impure, corrupt, disrespectful, dishonouring.  It was I..!  And the sinner knows his guilt, knows he can’t make it up to God because he is imperfect, and he knows that another can’t do anything for him either.  How then can we be saved from God’s justice?

3. Let us in the third place, see the scriptural answer.

What a comfort that God has not left sinful man to his own devices.  God, so holy, so infinitely just, is also so infinitely loving, for see, He comes to man in his fallen state.  Christ has come to satisfy God’s justice.  God sent His own Son so that He could do what sinful man was powerless to do.  Christ is the deliverer we need.  When God called out after Adam and Eve when they sinned, “Where are you?” He had already planned a way for sinful man to escape the justice of God.  And when God says to us through His Word, “What have you done?” then He is not wanting to banish us from His presence everlastingly, but He is directing us to Christ as our only hope.  When God says to us, “You are the man who sinned,” He is but making us see that we are in desperate need of salvation and thus believe in Christ.

Why the Day of Atonement in the Old Testament times?  Why that lamb which was banished into the wilderness after the people’s sins were confessed over it?  Why the whole Old Testament sacrificial system?  It was all there for the purpose of helping men see their need for a mediator and a deliverer other than themselves.  It all pointed to Christ as the sacrifice.  The old covenant with its laws and regulations could not help man to satisfy God’s justice, for man was unable to keep those laws perfectly.  So a new covenant came, in which Christ is the mediator and He is able to bring about what was needed – a perfect obedience to God.

It is Christ who can save us from the justice of God.  It is He who fully satisfied God’s justice.  The one thing sinful man needs is to be reconciled with God.  Man, if not brought back into God’s favour, will perish forever.  And the apostle Paul was made to say it so beautifully: “God made Christ who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2Cor.5:21).

Christ became the substitute for sinners.  He could pay the debt of our sin by being willing to stand in the sinner’s place.  And on Him God’s punishment came, thus doing two things for us.  He satisfied God’s justice and opened the way for God to accept us fully.  For when we have Christ as our Saviour then our guilt is gone and we are made the children of God, heirs of all Christ’s blessings, and receiving eternal life.

Now that is how we can be saved from God’s justice.  In Christ, the substitute, we must put our trust.  Therefore always believe in Him.  Do not hold to a saviour who does nothing more than help you solve your own problems, or a saviour who only makes you feel good, or a saviour who helps you towards self-fulfilment.  Some may even call such a useless saviour ‘Jesus’, but the name does not fit the saviour they have made up.  For Jesus refers to the One who saves His people from their sins.  But if there is no mention of sin or the guilt of sin, neither of the justice of God, then the name Jesus is not relevant.

Can you look to Christ and trust Him alone for your salvation?  Can you see Him as the only One who by His death can take away your sin?  What Christ did on the cross, has that a meaning for you personally?  Can you say that, in spite of all your sin, Christ died for you?

You may do all that, for Christ died to set sinners free from their guilt.  By His sacrifice you can be right with God.  Believe in Jesus Christ as the Saviour from sin.

Amen.