Word of Salvation – Vol.38 No.29 – August 1993

 

The Mystery Of The Incarnation

 

Sermon by Rev. W. Wiersma on Lord’s Day 14

 

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ,

The most serious problem facing mankind today, and at the same time the most common problem with which people are struggling, is the problem of guilt.  It is the problem of knowing that you have done wrong.  Knowing that you have not done what you know you should have done.

Guilt results when you fail to live up to the standard you know you should have met.  Guilt, is your response to disobeying God and for having messed things up.

Guilt is a problem because it is impossible to live with.  It is impossible to live with God when you are at loggerheads with Him.  To know that you are guilty, is a terrible experience.  Not only because it makes you feel a failure.  But also because you know that somehow, sometime, you will reap the consequences of what you have done wrong.

One day God will judge you.  Everybody knows this.

You are not the only person who is struggling with the problem of guilt.  There are thousands, millions, of people out there trying to deal with guilt.  I expect there are a few in this very building, who find that their guilt is hovering over their head like a dark cloud, or weighing like lead in the pit of their stomach, or lurking like a deadly virus ready to break out and destroy them at any moment.

Guilt is a terrible thing to live with.  It makes you uncertain and afraid.  That’s why everyone is trying, somehow, to get rid of it.  The whole world is trying to get rid of guilt.  What makes guilt the most serious problem facing mankind is this; that men, women and children are trying to get rid of it in a way that does not work.

In fact, the way most people are trying get rid of their guilt only increases it.  It makes them feel even more miserable and desperate.

Let me put this plainly.  If you think I am talking in riddles, let me spell it out very clearly.  Most people LIE about their guilt.  They try to deny it.  They try to pretend that they are NOT guilty.

That seems to be the easiest way of dealing with guilt.  Even children practice it, don’t they?  Mum asks, ‘Who did that?’  Junior replies, (and all the little juniors reply) ‘I didn’t!  I didn’t do it.’

Why?  Why do children deny that they are guilty?  Do they really believe that by denying it, guilt will go away?  Or do they deny it because they are afraid of Mum’s anger, and of the punishment they know they deserve?

Adults are no different from children.  Except that they go even further.  Adults not only try to hide their guilt, they even go so far as to try and fool themselves into believing that there is no such thing as guilt at all.

To get rid of their sense of guilt and shame, many people are saying that there is no such thing as wrong or evil.

People are saying that there are no standards which can actually be applied or broken.  There are no laws of right and wrong.

That’s what we are being told today.  Honestly.

In their desperation to get rid of their guilt, people are even saying that there is no God who sets the standards for human behaviour.  There is no God who punishes those who do wrong.

This is the most serious problem that mankind is in fact trying to deal with.  And in the face of it, it is strange that while many people are desperately trying to stop the increasing pollution of the earth and our environment, while they are calling for stringent laws and hefty penalties for smoke, noise and chemical pollution, many of the same people are saying that we should abandon all reference to laws that are meant to prevent pollution in the moral realm.  We should abandon the thought of a divine law-maker or divine judge who holds people to account for messing up their own lives and the lives of others by breaking the laws of faith and love laid down by the Creator.

So, on the one hand people are saying that we need laws to keep the earth clean, but at the same time they are saying we don’t need laws to keep life clean.

We need penalties to make people see the seriousness of polluting the earth on which we have to live, but at the same time they are saying that moral pollution is not a serious matter.

All this kind of twisted thinking is the result of people trying to get rid of the guilt that bothers them.  They are trying to get rid of it in a false and futile way.

Fact is that no mere human being can get rid of his or her guilt.  There is no way you can make up for your failures.  There is no way to escape God.

There is only one way to get rid of guilt.  It is the way provided by God himself.  A way that is truthful, satisfying and healing.

God’s way of getting rid of guilt and of allowing and enabling people to live with a clear conscience in a clean, moral environment, morally, does not require any dishonesty, or pretence or any suppression of the facts.  I say that it does not involve any suppression of the facts, because it is often claimed that the Christian faith is like wishful thinking.

Well, if there is any wishful thinking done on this earth it is the wishful thinking that there is no God and that there is no guilt.  That’s wishful, desperately wishful thinking.  That is suppression of the truth.

The Christian faith, on the other hand, deals with reality as it is.  The teaching of the Bible is honest.  It calls a spade a spade.

The GOOD NEWS for struggling sinners is that the God who knows our guilt has come to us and takes our guilt away and He assures us of His love and of His everlasting acceptance of us.

And the way God has come to us, is the mystery confessed in the words: “…conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.”

I call this a mystery because we shall never be able to understand how the Son of God – who was, and is, and ever shall remain eternal God himself – took on a human nature, so that in the person of Jesus Christ we have GOD and man in one.

I say, we shall never understand it.

But let us not be so silly as to say that because we cannot understand it, therefore it can’t be so.  Because the Bible, God’s Word, teaches that this is so.

And this is the fact on which the whole Bible message is based.  God came to this earth, to guilty people, to remove our guilt in order that we might have peace.  And in order that we might have real LIFE.

I said, we can’t understand how God came to us.  The Bible teaches that it happened by the operation of the Holy Spirit.  Through the Holy Spirit and from the virgin Mary, God took on human nature.  God became man.  The Word became flesh!

We have often stressed the amazing fact that Jesus is God.  But is it not equally amazing that Jesus is man?  That God incarnate is like his fellow human beings in everything, except sin.  Jesus was like us.  Jesus grew up like any other child – he learned to walk, to read and write.  There were things he could not do, and did not know.  He had to learn.

A real man.  He experienced disappointment, pain, sadness, hunger and tiredness, like we experience them.

God came to us and, in Jesus, God suffered like we suffer.

And why did the holy eternal God – who will finally judge his earthlings for what they have done – why did God become man?

Because God so loved the world!  God so loved mankind that He wanted us to have a mediator who with his innocence and perfect holiness would remove our guilt from God’s sight.

God became man in Jesus so that He could take our guilt upon Himself.  So that He could accept and receive the punishment which we, the guilty, deserve.

In Jesus, God became man, so that He might be our representative to God as well as God’s representative to us.

Jesus, the perfect man, the sinless one, entered into this world through a miracle of God.  And God is pleased to see the sinlessness of Jesus as our sinlessness.  God is willing to see our guilt as the guilt of Jesus.

That’s why Jesus had to die.  Because God transferred to him our sin and guilt.  God punished Jesus for our sins.  And that’s how God takes away our guilt.  And we may know that we are forgiven.

Guilt is a big problem, a serious problem.  It is a problem from the moment we are conceived, because when we are born we are part of the guilty human race.  We are part of a family.  We share a solidarity.  No one is just on his own.  O, that’s what we might like to be.  That’s one way of denying our guilt, isn’t it?  THEY DID IT, not me!  THEY’RE TO BLAME, not me.  THEY’RE AT FAULT, not me.  I am the innocent one.

We want to get rid of guilt, by every argument we can think of.  Man is desperate to be innocent, to be free from guilt, free from the fear of death which is the consequence of guilt.

God says to desperate guilt carriers: Look to Jesus!  Believe in Jesus!  Believe in my willingness, my desire to forgive, and your guilt will be gone!

O marvel of marvels, God was in Christ reconciling the guilty people to Himself.  That’s the Good News of the Gospel for people who know they are guilty.  That is the only hope which the Good News proclaims to a guilt- ridden world.

We have a message of hope to anxious people, to desperate people.  And I tell you, even though many people pretend they don’t have this struggle, even though many are joking their way through life, their jokes are often a very thin veneer to cover the struggle they have with their guilt.  There are many who are struggling with their guilt.  And God says to each of them: Look to Jesus and your guilt will be gone, and you will have life.  And you will have a glorious future!

That’s why God became man, for us men and for our salvation.

AMEN