The Law of God: The Pastor’s Use of the Law, Part 2
The following is a transcript of a sermon delivered on Thursday afternoon, October 20th, 2011 during the annual Pastor’s Conference at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, NJ. The preacher is Pastor Albert N. Martin and this is the eighth and final session of the conference.
Those of you who were here yesterday will remember that Dr. Ferguson had to do some patchwork when he was not able to complete all he had hoped to cover in his first lecture and trying to patch it in to what he had prepared for the second lecture.
As I lay on the pew in the back there going over materials with a similar exercise, the analogy came to me that the lecturer sits on the back of the horse called the preacher and if the lecturer lets the reins go, the preacher takes off and you don’t know how fast and how far he’s going to go.
Well, I let the reins go a couple of times in the previous hour and it’s put me in trouble trying to find a reasonable and edifying way to finish up what I had hoped to cover in the last hour and still give you the fruit of my study in some areas that I feel are crucial.
So, what I’ve decided to do is to conclude the material by basically just giving you the five heads connected with what I called The Fact of His Sinlessness Applied, hopeful that you will then investigate these areas on your own.
And, before we pray and ask God to help us as I strike out on that course—I hope not strike out like a ball player–but as I embark upon that course, I would urge any of you who have the shorter writings of B. B. Warfield edited by Meter that in Volume 1 there’s a marvelous essay on the human development of Jesus and along with the work in Owen that I mentioned, Volume 3 on the place of the Holy Spirit in the nurturing of the human development of Christ, (this is a wonderful essay). He summarizes much of it by saying, we need not fear therefore that we may emphasize too strongly the true, complete humanity of Christ. It is gain and nothing but gain that we should realize with an acuteness that may bear the term poignant, all that man is, that Christ is to eternity.
And if you want your mind stretched, track with Warfield as he talks about the ongoing development of the human nature of Christ which He carried back into heaven and which He will retain in the new heavens and the new earth forever and I would not want argue his thesis from the biblical orthodox doctrine of two distinct natures in one person forever and when we grasp something of the wonder of that, then it makes heaven all the more exciting, because we though glorified will be glorified human beings and since Christ is the pattern and paradigm of our glorification as there is growth and development in His pure and holy human nature, so there will be growth and development in our pure, fully glorified human nature.
And God helping us, as we meditate upon these things, we’ll throw up the hands of our heart and cry out, Hallelujah, What a Savior!
Well, since you haven’t had a whole week for mental and spiritual leakage like your people do when you’re carrying a series and your recapitulation and reviews must take account of that leakage—you’ve just had a half hour or so of a coffee break to have any mental and spiritual leakage—I will not take time to review what we covered in the previous hour except to say that based upon those three fundamental presuppositions I sought to establish with you the true and real humanity of our Lord Jesus, and then secondly that it was humanity placed under the law in all the stringent demands of that law as we’ve come to meditate upon it in our conference together and now I want to take up with you this third line of truth that He who was truly man, man under the law, that in His incarnate life, He was absolutely without sin, and as time permits I want to follow that line along three tracks: the fact of His sinlessness established, the nature of His sinlessness expanded and the fruit of that sinlessness applied.
First of all, then, the fact of His sinlessness established.
As we enter this aspect of our study, it’s crucial to remember our fundamental presuppositions concerning the law of God and its righteous demands and prohibitions, the depth of and extent of those demands and prohibitions and that they must flow out of perfect unsullied love to God and man. The same Bible that forces upon us that lovely, non-inspired definition of sin: sin is any lack of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God, affirms that our Lord Jesus in His incarnate life was absolutely unqualifiably without sin of any kind. Apart from the guilt of our sin that was imputed to Him in His role as the Federal Head of His people, he was utterly, completely, unqualifiably without sin.
This is the testimony of the Word of God. Let me just quote several texts familiar to you in Hebrews 4 and verse 15, the writer to the Hebrews, who’s already established as we saw in the previous hour that He took to Himself real flesh and blood, that is, true wholly integrated human nature. He says of Him in Hebrews 4 and verse 15,
We have not a High Priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities but one that has in all points been tempted like as we are, yet without sin.
And again in chapter 7 and verse 26.
For such a High Priest became us holy, guileless, undefiled, separate from sinners and made higher than the heavens.
Though He was Friend of Sinners and mingled freely with sinners and ministered to sinners in terms of personal defilement, personal guilt, He was separate from sinners.
And then, someone who knew Him intimately, spent three years in the closest of associations with Him, saw Him in domestic scenes, saw Him in the scenes of the milling crowds and all of their pressing demands upon Him, was present when He interacted with vicious, ill-intentioned enemies constantly seeking to catch Him in His words—I’m thinking of Peter. It is Peter who could write in 1st Peter chapter 2 and verse 22 as an intimate first hand witness, who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth. Earlier in this epistle, he says, we’ve been redeemed by the blood of this Person and he describes Him as God’s Lamb without spot and without blemish. Here are explicit affirmations of the total sinlessness of our Lord Jesus.
When incarnate Deity reached full manly maturation, emotionally, physically, psychologically and all of the things that constituted His true humanity, in the event of His baptism, when He is officially taking His place as the Federal Head and Covenant Head of His people, to be their substitute and eventually, their sin-bearer and He takes to Himself and submits to this sinner’s ordinance of baptism, a voice speaks out of the heaven and speaking of Him as a mature thirty year old man, having tracked Him from Mary—the conception in Mary’s womb through every normal stage of development into a mature man, God the Father can look down upon His Son and say, You are My Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.
My searching eye as the God before whom all things are naked and laid bear can discern not one thing in You, My Son, that does not evoke My highest pleasure, for in You, who are My image, I see one who has perfectly, perpetually, without one deviation reflected Me in Your absolute sinlessness.
Those texts, that incident, established the fact of His sinlessness, but now I want to spend a few minutes developing what I’m calling the nature of His sinlessness expanded. I’ve already made reference to the fact that it seems to be Luke’s particular task to demonstrate that from a normal/supernatural conception in the womb of the virgin Mary all the way through being a babe to a boy to a young man to His full manhood as we see Him there in Luke 3:22 at His baptism, the picture given is that He passed through every stage of human development in a seamless and ordinary manner even though along the way there were evidences that He was no ordinary man. He was true man, but no ordinary man and Luke highlights that Mary ponders these things that she hears and sees and stores them up in her heart with a growing realization that my firstborn Son is no ordinary son.
This means that at every stage of His development, He was thinking, He was willing, He was feeling, He was desiring, He was acting and reacting, speaking and listening—where? In a sinful world, with sinful parents, with sinful siblings, under the influence of sinful spiritual leaders and yet not once in any of those relationships from the deepest springs of these various facets of His humanity common to us, motive, attitude, disposition, feelings, not once, not once in the whole course of that development from a babe to a man was there a millisecond when in any circumstances of life He did not love His heavenly Father with all the energy and passion in the totality of His sinless humanity, loving His heavenly Father with all His heart, all His mind, all His soul and all His strength and it was a love to His Father that found expression in complete and constant conformity to the first four commandments in the fullest measure of their internal and external demands upon human beings. If the Father’s going to say, I am well-pleased, it’s a well-pleasedness that has passed the test of His coming through all of those stages of human development.
Furthermore, in the whole course of that development, in the brief years of His manhood before His return back to the Father’s right hand, there never was a moment when in any situation with any other human being He did not perfectly fully love His neighbor as Himself and demonstrate that love by a meticulous extensive obedience to the last six of the Ten Commandments in the fullest measure of both their commands and their prohibitions. Perfect conformity to the law in terms of the motivation of His obedience, perfect, unsullied, undiluted, undiminished love to Father with all His heart, mind, soul and strength and perfect love to His fellow man as Himself every moment, every relationship and I want us to take a few minutes, and I can hope to only be suggestive and that you will then take the clue and follow this out in your own meditations. If we really believe this is true of our Lord, but true in a sinful world: growing up with sinful siblings, with a sinful father and mother (who showed something of their sinful limitation of perception and understanding in the whole matter of the temple incident when He was twelve years old); in a sinful world governed at that time in Israel by the wicked patterns of Romans and the decadent apostate religious leaders that He came to know so intimately that when it was time to expose them and castigate them, He does so with such accuracy and penetration. (He didn’t have that knowledge dumped down in a moment of time. It was acquired knowledge as Sabbath by Sabbath and throughout the week He had interaction with the scribes and the Pharisees and their patterns of life and their teaching.)
What was sinlessness for the Babe on Mary’s breast? You ask any nursing mother if she knows the difference between a legitimate cry of hunger and a cry of a petulant little sinner that wants the whole world to stop and pay attention to it. A nursing mother knows the difference.
Now, when you sing in that Christmas hymn, the cattle are lowing, the poor Babe awakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes, if that hymn means that He was abnormal and that being awakened and a proper cry of a Baby was given, Jesus didn’t cry, that’s heresy. When He needed a snort at Mary’s breast, He cried as loud and vociferously as any baby ever cried for its mother’s breast.
But my Bible says, they go astray from the womb, speaking lies and long before little babes can articulate words, they know how to lie. Their sinfulness manifests itself in selfishness. Think what sinlessness meant that not once as a babe, did Jesus ever utter a cry that had it’s roots in the inbred carnal self-centeredness of a baby.
It makes me want to weep. That’s my Lord without sin. My Son in whom I’m well-pleased.
He was the first-born. How long before the brothers were born? Was it all four boys, one after another and then at least two girls? But think of it, Jesus the firstborn, maybe Joseph crafted a particular toy for Jesus and gave it to Him as the toy of the firstborn and it isn’t long before one of the siblings there on the living room floor playing and takes Jesus’s toy and says, Mine! Never once did Jesus reach across and smack Him in anger. Never once did Jesus reach across and grab it and say, with a sinful selfishness, No! Mine! Not once. Not once.
And think of how siblings accuse one another. I can remember when we’d run in to my mother—and I’m one of ten children, so I know something about sibling relationships—and we’d both come in saying,
“Sonny did this!”
“No, Joyce did that”
“Sonny did this.”
“Joyce did that.”
And there were times my mother couldn’t sort out the facts, she says, “Well you’re both gonna get it, because if Sonny did that, he needs to be spanked and if you responded that way, you need to be spanked for responding that way, so you’re both guilty, you’re both gonna get it.”
Never once did Mary have to do that in any kind of interaction between Jesus and one of His siblings.
He had no sibling sin.
He had no infant sin.
Think of Him as He grew up and became what we say a preteen, when young people by nature begin to be sensitive to the influence of their peers and as He moved among the other children there in Nazareth, how our Lord might have seen things that were common in their possessions—He was gripped in poverty—and never once did His heart move with an inordinate covetous desire—I want what little Abi has because he has it and I think I should have it. Think of it! Not once of all the things He may have seen that were desirable in themselves that would have made life more pleasant, not once was there a motion of covetousness in His holy heart in that period.
Think of Him, at age 12, astounding the doctors of the law by His questions and answers. He had to have a consciousness that He was at home in that setting and that God was endowing Him with wisdom and insight beyond most of His peers but not for one moment was His heart ever lifted up with pride.
You preachers know what it is in the midst of preaching when God has drawn near and you’ve been conscious He’s given you more than a modicum of His help and things have come out of your mouth and out of your heart that you say only God could give me that and yet at that very moment you feel and smell a stench of your rotten, wretched pride trying to inject its poison into your spirit and you want to sometimes just say, Dear people, just bow your heads while I go into the confessional—never once, never once.
Never once in that period of His development and as He came into puberty He was full man, holy man and normal human male hormones begin to surge through that holy sanctified body—never once, never once did He look upon the form of a woman that He could appreciate was a beautiful woman, a wonderful reflection of God’s creative wisdom and handiwork and God’s aesthetics that lie behind all true physical beauty they reflect a beautiful God. Never once did He think, ah, I would like… never once, never once, never once.
Teenagers that often begin to feel their oats and feel the only way they can prove their emerging manhood is by demonstrating that they’re stronger than their dad, they’re wiser than their dad, they know more than mom and dad. Never once did He challenge Joseph to a wrestling match in order to prove His superior strength, never once.
Never once did He question Mary’s judgment as His mother in giving reasonable directives for taking out the garbage and clearing off the table.
Brethren, do you see what I’m trying to do? I’m trying to stir you up to think, what is absolute sinlessness in real, integrated whole humanity in a sinful world with a sinful mom and a sinful dad and sinful siblings in the midst of a sinful society in the whole course of that human development from conception through his mature manhood, never a millisecond, never a circumstance in that life that He did not love His heavenly Father with all His heart, all His mind, all His soul, all His strength.
Think of it in His adult life. Son of Man has not where to lay His head. He felt the sting and the reproach of excessive poverty. He never coveted the wealthy.
And then, when even His friends, according to Mark 3:21, as He’s pouring Himself out in love to His fellow man to the extent that He even forget to eat, His friends see this and what conclusion do they draw? He’s out of His tree. They don’t stand back in admiration at the depth of His love that He would forego His normal eating patterns and His normal human hunger to minister to others in self-denial. They say, He’s out of His tree, let’s take Him away from the crowds and get Him sorted out. Let’s give Him some pills and sit Him down on the couch with a psychiatrist.
No indication that He showed bitterness to such betrayal.
No trace of carnal anger and irritation at the dullness of His disciples. He showed sinless disappointment, He expressed it, but never carnal irritation, never carnal reactions and then when we read the record of His life, the incessant demands of the crowds, He says to His disciples, let’s take some time off and get in the boat, go across to the other side and rest awhile. Human nature crying out that He might some how put off the yoke and put off the traces of that constant burden of pouring out Himself for others, and by the time they get to the other side, Jesus comes forth and He sees the multitude and the Scripture says, moved with compassion He forgets His vacation plans, but no indication that He regards the pressure of these needy, hungry multitudes as an intrusion upon His turf, but in utter selfless, self-resignation, He gives Himself in perfect love to them.
And then as we trace Him on into Gethsemane and Golgotha and take seriously this was real humanity that underwent the buffeting, the spitting, the horrible verbal challenges hurled into His ears—He does no sin, neither is guile found in His mouth when He is reviled He reviled not again and then, think of Him now glorified at the right hand of the Father and what’s He doing? He so loves His own that He gives Himself to an unending life of intercession. He is able to save to the uttermost seeing He ever lives to what end? To make intercession for them and we make too little of the intercession of Christ.
In Romans 8, Paul makes it one of the four integral facets of a certain salvation. Who is He that condemns? It is Christ that died (number one); Yea, rather that is risen from the dead (number two) who is at the right hand of God (His ascension and installation at that place); number four, who also makes intercession for us.
All that He purchased in His oblation is certain to be applied for all of those for whom He died in the virtue and as the outworking of His ongoing intercession.
Brethren, the fact of His sinlessness is established but may God help us to spend time meditating on the fact of His sinlessness expanded: what it actually meant to come through all of that utterly untainted by sin.
And then, thirdly, the fact of His sinlessness applied. What implications come to us, what benefits to Him and to us because He is truly and utterly sinless in all that those words mean in the light of the breadth and length and depth and height of the demands of the law of God.
Well, let me give you five heads and it will only be suggestive and hopefully as you meditate upon them—perhaps, some day you may even feel it will be good to preach them to your people.
Number one, His absolute sinlessness as defined by the law validates His identity as the unblemished sacrificial Lamb of God.
You remember there in John chapter 1, John points to Him and says, Behold (look, consider), the One coming toward us is the Lamb of God who bears away the sin of the world and I don’t believe John is referring just to the Passover lamb that had to be [blameless] but throughout the Old Testament rubric there are constant reminders that lambs set apart for sacrifice had to be without spot and without blemish and if He is to be the Lamb of God who bears away the sin of the world, the One that Peter described in 1st Peter 1, whose blood was the blood as of a lamb without spot and without blemish. This stipulation about the sacrificial lamb surely was the finger of God pointing toward the very One whom John identified as the Lamb of God who is taking away the sin of the world.
It’s because of this reality we find this language in the writing of Paul and Peter. He who knew no sin was made sin for us and He could not be made sin for us if He had any sin of His own. He who knew no sin was made sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Or Peter’s words in 1st Peter 3:18. He suffered for us the just for the unjust. Justice defined by the law of God in all the depth and penetrating extent of its demands upon the whole of the humanity of our Lord. He was the Holy, Pure, Just One. That’s why the writer to Hebrews can say in Hebrews 9:14, through the eternal Spirit He offered Himself without spot unto God.
Had there been in our Lord Jesus the least taint of sin, sin as defined by the law of God with all its sweeping prohibitions and demands, He would have been disqualified as the spotless Lamb to bear away the sin of others for the inflexible rule of God’s court is: the soul that sins shall die. The wages of sin is death. Had He committed the least sin by the least failure to keep the least of God’s commands in the least measure His death would have been the retribution of heaven for that sin but not for the sins of others and when we remember that He maintained His sinlessness at the price of great spiritual exercise of mind and soul, our heart should run out in love and adoration to our sinless Lamb of God who laid down His life for the likes of us an acceptable sacrifice because it was without sin.
Meditate upon Hebrews 5:8 and 9 which I believe refers primarily to Gethsemane in which our Lord, to maintain His course of utter obedience to the Father went into that horrible experience of facing the cup and in those wrestlings said, My soul is exceeding sorrowful even to the point of death and I believe our Lord may well be saying—and a number of commentators share that view, He is not saying it’s sorrowful up to the point where I will actually die, but here and now just the pressure of facing in some new dimension what awaits Me in the drinking of that cup, My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death and so with strong crying and tears, He cries, the writer of Hebrews says, to Him who was able to save Him from death and He was saved from a death that He felt in His human soul would crush Him even there in the garden, that He might pour out His soul unto death upon the cross as the uplifted One.
Second line of thought I’d like to lay before you, not only does His sinlessness validate His identity as the spotless Lamb, but His positive obedience to the law of God in all the length and breath of its demands establishes the ground for our reception of an imputed righteousness.
There are many in our day who are seeking to overthrow the truth that the righteousness imputed to the penitent, believing sinner is comprised of the suffering obedience of our Lord as well as His obedient suffering, but Romans 5:19 stands in my judgment as an impregnable wall establishing this fact that the righteousness imputed to the penitent believing sinner actually credits him with the obedience which Christ effected in His real humanity.
That as through one man’s disobedience the many were made or constituted sinners, even so through the obedience of the One shall the many be made righteous.
It’s through the obedience of the One that there is a righteousness available to us to have credited to us and behind that wall of the truth of Romans 5:19 there is a buttress and that buttress is a text like Matthew 3:15 where at the baptism, Jesus insists that He must be baptized, why? Thus it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness. Everything righteously demanded by God must be fulfilled if there is to be given to penitent believing sinners, the credit, the imputation of a perfect acceptance in the court of heaven.
Galatians 3:13 clearly asserts that His death under the anathema of God cancelled our hell deservingness in the same way Romans 5:19 asserts that His perfect law-keeping procures our title to heaven. It is one thing to have our righteous sentence to hell cancelled, it is another thing to have a righteous declaration that we can enter heaven because God said, This do and you shall live and we live because there is One who did on our behalf fulfill all righteousness.
Jeffery Wilson stated it simply and beautifully when he wrote, quote, As the surety of a sinful people He came to pay the debt they owe to the law of God, not only to fulfill its precepts as our representative but to exhaust its penalty as our substitute.
Our righteousness is one comprised of His fulfilling its precepts as our representative and exhausting its penalty as our substitute.
Some of us have reservation about using too freely and without qualification the traditional terminology of the active and passive obedience of Christ. It was interesting, Dr. Ferguson used it without any qualification or explanation and I think that reservation is indeed legitimate if people are led to think that by the passive obedience of Christ He was not active in those events which led to and issued in the cry of abandonment upon the cross. He was never more active in His obedience then when He laid down His life and whether we’re comfortable with the traditional language, I trust we’re all very comfortable with the words of John Ede who captured the Biblical truth contained in those traditional words when he wrote, In obeying, He suffered, while His suffering was His last and highest act of obedience.
I love the way he has stated it.
In obeying, He suffered, while His suffering was His last and highest act of obedience.
At the pastoral level, brethren, what use is this doctrine of a righteousness comprised of both aspects of the work of Christ?
Well, let me tell you what it means to me experientially in my ongoing struggle with sin and temptation, particularly heart sins, attitudinal sins, dispositional sins. I’m not talking necessarily about sins that crop out in actual speech or in actual deeds, but the inner sins, at the point where the discovery of those things makes us feel very keenly the language of Romans 7, Oh, wretched man that I am, I am thinking in a way that is selfish, lustful, prideful, vengeful, and at that point, one feels the sense of moral uncleanness and one would rid himself of himself if he could! What a wonderful thing it is at that very point, to say, my Lord Jesus was in circumstances similar to this and He did not think such a thought. He did not experience such an attitude. He did not experience such an inclination to that which is so unlike God and contrary to His law. “Oh, God, I can approach You, I can still call You my Father, I can come with new covenant, Spirit-empowered filial liberty and say, “my Father, because at your right hand is One who in this very area did no sin,” and I like then, to think of myself going back to Jordan and seeing my Lord standing in the waters of Jordan and hearing the voice from heaven, “This is My Son in whom I’m well-pleased.” I say, Oh God, by faith I am in Him. I run and hide under His robes. You look down from heaven and You say of me, in Christ, you’re My beloved son, I’m well-pleased with you.
That’s when the theology of it becomes experiential and then you say, “Thank God” as a dying—who was it said, “Thank God for the active obedience of Christ”? It was Machen on his deathbed, “Thank God for the active obedience of Christ.”
At the end of a time like today when you’ve tried to preach something of your glorious Savior and you reflect upon what you said and what you didn’t say and how you wish you’d said it this way or that way and you feel the sins of your preaching! You say, I wrap myself up in one who never said one word in public declaration in one way with one attitude, one motive, one disposition, but what the Father could say of it, “I’m well-pleased, I’m hidden in Him, I refuse to grovel in self-defeating guilt and flagellation. I am in Christ, I confess my sin, I own the reality of it, but then I rejoice in my sinless Savior.”
But then, thirdly, and quickly, His absolute sinless before the law of God constitutes our pattern for the pursuit of holiness. Romans 8:29, you all know it, He’s foreordained that we should be conformed to the image of His Son, 1st John 2:6. He that says he abides in Him ought to walk as He walked. 1st Peter 2:21, He has left us an example that we should follow His steps, Philippians 2:5, Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.
The mysterious wrestlings in Gethsemane underscore the fact that our Lord was resolutely committed to a life of perfect obedience to His heavenly Father. The One who could say I do always the things that please My Father is the One who could say amidst His bloody sweat and excruciating agony of soul, nevertheless, not My will, but thine be done out of passionate, pure perfect and perpetual, whole-souled love for His Father joined to a passionate pure, perfect, perpetual, whole-souled love to His neighbor. These were the internal engines that drove the wheels of His obedience on the tracks of the law of God. That’s how He lived. He that says that he abides in Him ought himself so to walk as He walked never content that we merely have the tracks, never daring to profess that we have the engine and need no tracks, but driven by that engine of an ever-growing, pure, never perfect, but passionate, whole-souled love to the Father and love to neighbor, we have the law as love’s eyes, the tracks upon which the engine of a heart that loves God and loves men is to run because that’s how Jesus lived and He is our model and sets the pattern for our pursuit of holiness.
And then, very quickly, the last two and may God help me to preach this in some measure commensurate with what it deserves.
His absolute sinlessness is the paradigm of what we shall be when God completes His work in us. His absolute sinlessness, the sinlessness of the human nature of Christ is the paradigm of what we shall be when God completes His saving work in us. You know the passage I’m going to quote.
Beloved, now, 1st John 3, are we the sons of God but it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He (or it) we shall be manifested, we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is.
The work of Christ for me has given me a standing before God in the court of heaven, which is as positive, complete and irreversible as is the standing of the Son of God Himself in the presence of His Father.
Your standing cannot be improved because it’s a standing in Christ which is perfect, complete and, for us, irreversible.
My justification secures that standing.
It is for this reason the apostle Paul can hurl out the challenge to the entire moral universe in the words of Romans 8:31 and following.
Who is he that condemns? Come forth, give your witness, and bring a just condemnation. On what basis does he dare challenge the whole moral universe of men and angels, devils and demons? Christ died. Christ is risen. Christ is at the right hand of God. Christ intercedes. Who is he that condemns? It is God that justifies.
Complete, irreversible—that’s our standing.
However, hear me carefully, in the heart of every true believer that rejoices in the reality of this standing before God in the court of heaven, secured by Christ’s work for us, the heart of every such believer has been impregnated by the Holy Spirit with a passionate desire to be as holy as his Savior is holy by means of His work in us.
You see the two? Every true believer who has biblical grounds to rejoice that the work of Christ for him, external to him, is complete and gives him an irreversible standing of acquittal in the court of heaven, when the Spirit of God brings a sinner to see his sin and to repent of his sin and to lay hold of Christ, at the same time He works in that sinner to lay hold of and rejoice in the perfect standing that is his in Christ, He impregnates that sinner with a passion to be what one day he will be because of the work of Christ by the Spirit in him.
Christ for us, Christ in us is our salvation. It’s never, never, never just His work for us. That’s why John goes on to say what I left unquoted, doth not yet appear what we shall be but we know that when He shall be manifested we shall be like Him, we shall see Him as He is and—and—everyone—everyone—brethren, hear me, everyone that hath this hope in Him goes on purifying Himself even as He is pure.
His perfect sinlessness is our passion and our goal and our earnest, present pursuit and it will never, never, never be our experience without that passion for it going before to its enjoyment and it’s when we gaze at our sinless Savior, what a wonderful thing to know: I’ll be like Him. Every last vestige of that which grieves me and shames me and pains me and grieves my wife and pains others who may be the recipients of some of the outcroppings of that lawbreaking—it’s not going to be that way for ever. It’s not going to be that way for ever.
Most of us will go through the rough door of death and get the first installment and join the spirits of just men made perfect and then we’ll be put in the cold earth where the worms are there wringing their hands and licking their chops to have a feast on your bones and your muscles and your sinews, but they don’t have the last word. The voice of the archangel will sound. The trump of God will blow and the dead in Christ shall rise first and, as Paul says to the Philippians, He will fashion the body of our humiliation like unto the body of His glory. The sinlessness of Christ is the paradigm of what we will be when God’s done with us.
And then, my final fifth point, it’s obvious. What do we do in contemplation of the perfect sinlessness of Christ, His absolute sinlessness in all of its length, breadth, depth and the blessings it has procured for us should provoke us to prayer, to love, to wonder, to worship, and increased trust in such a Savior. That’s the point of the writer to Hebrews in 1st Peter 4:14-16.
Well, I got through my notes, and then, in my preparation as I looked back upon how I came to settle on this subject, I went back to the old standard, the Larger Catechism and I said to myself, I wonder if this seed for these two sermons was not sown sometime in the dim murky past when I was reading question number 97 of The Larger Catechism. I close by reading it in your hearing.
Question 97: What special use is there of the moral law to the regenerate?
Answer: Although they that are regenerate, and believe in Christ, be delivered from the moral law as a covenant of works, so as thereby they are neither justified nor condemned; yet, besides the general uses thereof common to them with all men, it is of special use, to show them: How much they are bound to Christ for his fulfilling it, and enduring the curse thereof in their stead, and for their good; and thereby to provoke them to more thankfulness, and to express the same in their greater care to conform themselves thereunto as the rule of their obedience.
Huh, I said, the old buzzards were telling me what to preach and why to preach it for I said in my opening introductory comments I embarked upon this theme of the sinlessness of Christ, the fact of it, the expansion of what it meant and it’s implications that we might know, love and serve our Lord Jesus with increased understanding and passion and singleness of heart. May God bring those fruits into each of our lives.
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