Word of Salvation – Vol. 24 No. 46 – August 1978
The Central And Only Saviour Of Human History
Sermon by Rev. H. W. Pennings, Th. Grad. on Hebrews 1:1-4, Lord’s Day 6
Scripture reading: Hebrews 10:1-18
Psalter Hymnal: 281:1, 2, 7, 10; 412; 409; 284; 172:6
Beloved congregation,
When you open your New Testament to the book of Hebrews and start to read the first chapter, you immediately find yourself in the middle of the history of what God has done for our salvation. You find that the centre of the first four verses is Jesus Christ, and that He is also the centre of history.
The centre of salvation…the centre of history.
The Lord’s Day of our Catechism which we study in connection with Hebrews chapter one tells the same story. Jesus is the centre of salvation and the centre of history. The teaching of Hebrews one and Lord’s Day six is “old hat” to many Christian people. Because they are so full of theology, many people think, (AND PRACTISE!), it is best to skip over them quickly to go onto something more interesting and more relevant to our every-day joys and sorrows.
It’s a bit like learning multiplication tables at school; remember them? Nine times eight 72, nine times nine = 81. It never has been very interesting to learn these tables, and once you have mastered them you can go onto more interesting parts of mathematics like working out how long it takes dad to drive from Perth to Sydney if his average speed is 95 km/h. (But please don’t try to work it out during the sermon!) (And father, please slow down!)
But when you think this way you tend to forget that you would never be able to work it out if you had not spent time learning your tables. At the same time we all tend to forget that, were it not the case that we understood how Jesus is the centre of salvation and the centre of history, we could not understand life at all! No, not at all. We wouldn’t know where to begin to sort things out for ourselves and our families.
A little while ago many of you will have read in your newspapers, and maybe seen on the television news, about a rather well-to-do family in Utah, U.S.A. and the sorry end it came to. The father of this family, so we heard, imagined himself to be Jesus Christ. No, don’t try to understand how that is possible. Just accept it, for that is what he thought and that is how he lived. For some reason which will probably never be clear to anyone, he committed suicide.
The story hit the news headlines for the manner in which this happened. One after the other, apparently without protest or regret, each member of the family flung themselves down to the pavement from the fourth floor of the hotel which was their home. Their husband and father had died. He was, for them, the centre of history and the centre of salvation. Why should they remain alive? Why should not they die so that they could be reunited with him? What a tragedy, you think. So it is. But most people live and die in such tragic circumstances, please remember.
Another story which has hit the headlines in recent years is the story of Charles Manson and the Manson family. Manson also believed that he was Jesus Christ. He gathered around him a whole group of mainly female disciples and between them the Manson family murdered 35 people for their “god”, their “messiah”. During Manson’s trial one of his disciples testified that when she first saw him, “I thought… this is what I have been looking for…!”
It may be easy for us to sit back in our church pews in a relaxed mood, saying to ourselves, “These people must all have been insane.” But the trouble with such an observation is that it doesn’t get us anywhere, and, further, that it doesn’t help us to explain why so many people, young and not so young, have made Elvis Presley into their Jesus Christ, and that he is probably more popular among the masses now that he is dead.
And what causes us to follow other popstars and screen-idols so unquestioningly? How can the minister explain that when his Catechism class meets he has to try to get the class to stop talking about the latest release of so-and-so and the latest groovy film of others like him so that he can teach them the gospel of the real Jesus Christ, the real centre of salvation and the real centre of human history?
Hebrews one and our Catechism both set our thinking straight. Man appears by nature and inclination to turn other men (or women) into gods of their imagination. Only when these little gods call themselves “Jesus Christ” does it sink into us that something is wrong, not only with them, but also with us. For Scripture, does not talk about humans taking on the form of heavenly saviours, but puts Jesus Christ into the centre of salvation and the centre of human history as it describes how God has lowered Himself to become man. It is not from among us, but from among God, that love is shown us; such love that all those who come into it and will follow it themselves know that they have never to look for meaning and purpose in life elsewhere.
Yes, brothers and sisters, we need a Saviour. We know that. Everyone who is honest with himself and looks upon the frailty of life and the corruption of human thinking knows that. We need someone mightier than ourselves to come into our lives – to take hold of our lives – to create meaning out of chaos and to bring beauty into ugliness. But it is only when we read Scripture that we come to realize that the cause of every human corruption is our sinfulness, and that our sin is not so much against people as it is against the God Who made us. “Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned and done what is evil in Thy sight”, King David confessed to God when he came to a moment of stark human nakedness and truth. “Against Thee; Thee only have I sinned and done what is evil in Thy sight.” Psalm 51.
Therefore, God sends one into the middle of history to be TRUE GOD for us, and TRUE MAN, One Who willingly takes ALL OUR SINS AND EVIL NATURE upon Himself. And Scripture tell us the story. It tells of the promises which God made about this Saviour. “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets”, writes the author to the Hebrew church of the first century AD.
When we read about what they said to these our spiritual forefathers we quickly perceive that their message was of One Who would come into the world as God’s mighty servant of salvation. The prophets of old did not speak without Jesus Christ being the centre of their message. They didn’t point to themselves – they pointed to Him.
And then He came. The true God and the true man. He came. Jesus came to be our Mediator before God because we are so desperately lost without Him. He wasn’t the type of “saviour” who committed suicide, and then left people so empty that their only remaining desire could be to follow him into nothingness. And He wasn’t the type of “saviour” who could command his disciples to take hold of a person, shoot him five times, club him fourteen times, and stab the corpse fifty-one times as the “jesus” Charles Manson commanded.
No, brothers and sisters, as we all well know, He was the Saviour Who called to His side all the oppressed, all those who were down-trodden and down-hearted, all who knew that they were spiritually poor because of their many sins, saying to them, “Come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Jesus could do this. and say this for the reason that He is all that the Catechism summarises about Him. Jesus was 100% one of us – 100% man. Our Catechism tells us that this had to be, but we only know this to be so because we know that this was God’s way. It was God’s strict justice that, because sin — yours and mine — is so horrible, and because He is the God Who speaks and so it always is, He could not just act as if sin was not there and He would not just lay it to one side. God’s way is that He becomes Emmanuel — God with us — in the form of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. God laid on that Man — that righteous Man Who was like us in all things except sin — our sins, and the sins of our fathers and the sins of our children too — the sins of all who will come to Him just as they are confessing their guilt and seeking to be delivered from it. It’s in one way pretty theoretical that Jesus had to be both truly human and truly righteous. But when we look upon Jesus like that we see the only Saviour of the world. 100% man and 100% righteous — that is, obeying the whole law of God both in body and in heart. But while the church confesses that Jesus was truly Man, “Born of the virgin Mary, crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, rose again on the third day, He ascended into heaven”, we also confess that He is truly God, “conceived of the Holy Spirit.” We read in Hebrews one about Jesus that God created the world through Him (verse two), and that He reflects the glory of God and bears the stamp of God’s nature. The prophets who spoke of old about the coming of our Saviour proclaimed, “And a virgin shall conceive and bear a child and His name shall be called… mighty God.” (Isaiah 9:6).
Scripture does not put its emphasis on the fact that the Saviour had to be God. But it does tell us, firstly, that He had to be sinless, and, secondly, that Jesus is God. Jesus, by the power which He had, being both 100% man and 100% God, took our sins upon Himself to restore us to peace with God.
When Jesus came to fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah chapter 53 “in these last days”, He did this as man, for only man was allowed to pay the price of sin; and He did this as God, because no mere man was able to bear all that guilt.
What a wonderful history God has given us – a history with Jesus Christ at the very centre. And what a wonderful Saviour we have. God has indeed spoken to us by a Son as He once spoke to us by the prophets. Yes, God in former times spoke through the prophets. But Jesus Himself tells us in the form of a parable what happened to these prophets. God sent one, and He was cursed – God’s prophet was cursed by man, when the only message from God which He had was the message of salvation!
Then God in His mercy sent another prophet. He was beaten up. Finally, after sending many prophets, God sent His Son to act for Him. They killed Him. He was God’s servant – truly God, and man’s servant – truly man, but history records that He was hung on a cross.
It remains the glory of God that He has turned our sinful actions into His way of salvation. The cross which more vividly than any other act of man in history portrays how corrupt and deceitful we are, at the same time displays more fully than any act of God which we can understand how faithfully He loves us to the end of divine endurance. There, on the cross, hung our Mediator, by OUR sin, and by GOD’S forgiveness of sin. This also helps us as nothing else can help us to understand the corruption of those who, as their fathers did before them, reject the Saviour Whom He sent.
How in the world can man imagine that a person like that excommunicated Mormon is Jesus Christ? And how can a woman and her children be so spiritually blind as to commit suicide after him? How can anyone look into the eyes of the filthy Charles Mansons of this world and see in them the way of salvation?
God says to the world, “Look upon the Son Who by My grace has become your righteousness, your holiness and your redemption” (1Cor.1:30). Unless He drags us – yes, we are even unwilling to come to Jesus! – unless He drags us to Jesus’ side and into the glory which He has earned for us to inherit unless this happens, we are cursed as the Manson family is cursed and we die still in our sins, as do all others who make gods out of men rather than bow before the God Who became man through the Son Who is now at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
We must never take it for granted that we can skip over these “theoretical” teachings of Scripture. Unless we put ourselves into the centre of human history with Jesus Christ, we remain as much on the outside of God’s grace as if we had personally hammered the nails into Jesus’ body. Our Catechism calls upon us to glory in what was done for us in the God/Man Son/Servant Jesus Christ. To glory in it so much that we never look upon the super-stars whom our society turns into gods with other than the deepest sorrow; and even some personal shame, for we, too, so often turn to man for salvation rather than to the only Saviour Jesus Christ.
When we read the central story of human history, and when we make ourselves to come into that history with our Saviour, we have utter confidence that the price of the guilt of our sin COULD be paid, and that it HAS BEEN paid. And then we know that yesterday… today and tomorrow, Jesus Christ is still Emmanuel – God with us – bringing us into God’s presence and causing God also to say about us, “My children, with whom I am now well pleased.”
AMEN.