Gooding, David: 8 - Ephesians: Q & A

The first question given me here is, why or how was blood seen as cleansing sin? In other words, what does the Bible mean when it talks about the blood of Jesus Christ cleansing us from all sin? And when in the Old Testament, blood was seen as clean. It's important for us to notice that neither in the Old Testament nor in the New were people bathed in blood. They were sprinkled with blood. They were never bathed in it. How does blood cleanse? What is the idea behind it? Well, let me read a verse that talks about this particular thing. This is Hebrews chapter nine and verse fourteen— verse thirteen. If the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Let's pick up on that phrase. What does the blood of Christ do? What does it cleanse? It cleanses your conscience. But what does that mean, therefore? It's obviously not the literal blood of Christ, uh, somehow getting inside your head to your conscience. How does the blood of Christ cleanse our conscience? Why this way round? Because when we have sinned, done some grievous sin, our conscience registers guilt. It does so if it's working anyway. Registers guilt before God. And when I have a guilty conscience, the question arises, how can I get rid of this guilty conscience? No good just sweeping it under the carpet and say it doesn't matter. Sin matters. And if I've sinned, I have a guilty conscience. My conscience will not really be clear until my conscience has been cleansed from this guilt. How does the blood of Christ cleanse my conscience? Well, it's a metaphor, isn't it, for saying that when Christ died on the cross, the Bible says he bore our sins in his body on the tree, paid the penalty of our sins, so that when we repent and trust the Savior, God can forgive us our sins, and, to use a Bible term, justify us completely. God is righteous to do it because he has paid the penalty of the sin that we have committed, and our conscience can be freed from guilt. That is how the blood of Christ cleanses our conscience. Why does it have to be the blood of Christ? Because the blood of Christ is a symbol of his death. The wages of sin is death. The law of God prescribed death for our rebuking of his law. Christ paid the penalty by dying for us. That's why Paul sums up the gospel as this: the gospel is, if you want to put it briefly, not that Christ lived. The gospel is that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, was buried, rose again the third day, according to the scriptures. Blood cleanses our conscience, therefore. How does one know God was in the inner temple if people were not allowed in? Was it just a presence of God? Well, in one sense, yes, it was just a presence of God. If you'd have gone into the holiest of all, you wouldn't have seen God anyway. God dwells in light, unapproachable, no man hath seen him nor can see him. The presence of God in the tabernacle that Moses built and the Jews used while they were traveling through the wilderness and for some centuries afterwards, or in the temple at Jerusalem, the presence of God was symbolized by the cloud of glory that's filled the temple. But, uh, no one ever saw God in it. No one can see God. Uh, he has not seen nor can see, yes? So they knew about God's presence in the temple because of the glory of his presence in the holy place. And then they knew it, of course, because of the scripture says so. Yes. Similarly, the New Testament says, if you want an- another example, where two or three are gathered together in my name, says our Lord Jesus Christ, there I am in the midst of them. You say, how would you know he is? Well, no, we don't see him. But one, we know he's there because he's promised to be there. And two, when he speaks his word through scripture or what have you, we know his voice. We sense he's speaking to us. Do we need all this great knowledge to know God? Simple folk, busy people, even the uneducated, but all believers in God the Creator, religious, devout. What about them? Maybe they trusted in their works. Do we need all this great knowledge? Uh, depends, of course, what you mean by the great knowledge. If you've done me a compliment of thinking that I've expounded to you great knowledge in this weekend, well, thank you for the compliment. Some people would say it's very small, but uh, opinions differ. Do everybody need that great knowledge to be saved and get into heaven? No, of course not. You remember the story of the dying thief who was crucified next to Pilate? Next to Jesus. In the final hours of his life on earth, as he hung on that cross, he came to repentance, realized that Jesus was innocent, realized that Jesus was the Son of God, realized that Jesus, though he died, would come again in his kingdom, repented and said, Lord, remember me when you come in your kingdom. And our Lord replied instantaneously, I say to you, today shall you be with me in paradise. Didn't take a lot of knowledge, did it? Notice what Christ said to him. Didn't say try and do some better works, old boy. He was hanging on a cross. He hadn't got a few hours more to do any works. No, hand and foot anyway. It was repentance and faith in Christ, and Christ assured him, today thou shalt be with me in paradise. You don't need a lot of knowledge to receive that assurance from God and from Christ. This is what I feel very strongly. If you don't have the assurance at this very moment, that you are saved, that your name is written in heaven, and if you died this moment, you would be with Christ in heaven. Well, you could have. You don't need a vast amount of knowledge. Christ says it, you could have it. The tragedy is so many people think they can't have it, but that they are trying their very best by their good works to please God. But it doesn't come that way. Listen to Christ and that dying thief. In spite of all his crimes in the past, now he repents and puts his faith in the Savior. And the Lord says, today thou shalt be with me in paradise. I meet folks who come and tell me, you can't know you're go- you're saved and going into heaven. That is so contrary to God's word, that inside it makes me feel a bit angry to keep people back from knowing for sure what God's work tells them they can know if they put their faith in Christ. That seems to me a very serious injury to do to people. We can know. These things are written to you, says John, that you might know you have eternal life, you who believe in the Son of God. God wants us to know. Not vast knowledge and be able to cite the, the whole Bible off by heart, but he wants us to know this, to know the gift of God. Do you remember the story how our Lord met the Samaritan woman at a well? Boy, a brilliant story. Oh, forgive me if I get, I'm tempted once more, I do get tempted from time to time to tell some Bible stories. But anyway, our Lord was, uh, went up to Samaria and sat on a well, and there came out a woman to draw water. She was a Samaritan, he was a Jew. And such was the religious divide between Jews and Samaritans, they pretty well hated each other, Samaritans and Jews. The Jews had gone along and knocked down the temple of the Samaritans on Mount Gerizim. That didn't please the Samaritans. And the Samaritans went along, they took a sack full of old dead men's bones and scattered them in the temple at Jerusalem. That didn't please the Jews. And the rabbis in Judaism taught that, uh, a, a, a woman, a Samaritan woman spread uncleanness wherever she went. Fearful lie, of course. So our Lord went and sat on a well in Samaria, and there came this Samaritan woman to, to, um, draw water. She'll say. And our Lord said to her, give me to drink. But she was so startled that a Jew should even talk to a Samaritan woman, she nearly fell down the well herself. How is it that you, being a Jew, talk to me, who I'm a Samaritan, for Jews don't have any dealings and don't use the same cups as Samaritans? Our Lord said to her, my dear, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that's speaking to you, you would ask of him, and he would give you living water. Christ says the same to us today, you know. Do you know the gift of God? And what it is that God is trying to give you? What Christ is trying to give you. Trying to give you what here he described as living water. The gift of forgiveness, the gift of eternal life, the gift of the Spirit of God. Christ wants to give it to you. If only you knew the gift and he wanted to give it, you'd ask for it. And if you knew the gift of God, similarly, we should today ask for it. Do you thereafter need all the knowledge? Well, no, in the sense you don't need all this great knowledge to get to heaven. Do you see? There are in the body of Christ some, uh, uh, gifts that are teachers, and teachers have to know a lot, do you see? If you're not a teacher, you don't have to know so much, but pray. Do read the Bible, yes, as you can, in your way, and ask the Lord Jesus, as you read it, to talk to you. Um, yes. This is about the new heaven and the new earth. 1, 2, 3, 4 questions. What's that all about? Well, well, excuse my sarcasm, it's about the new heaven and new earth, but that's a good question to ask, you see, because this old earth is temporary, you know. We said that this morning. It's a fact that doesn't, uh, impinge very much on people, but this earth is temporary. In the days when you had a coal fire, did you have coal fires here, or a peat fire? Yes? And it all blazed up, but if you left it, it burnt through, and then it collapsed. The sun is a big fire, it's an atomic furnace. It's putting out tons, millions of tons of energy every second by the furnace that's raging, but by definition it will burn up and collapse, and then it will explode out as it collapses. In that moment, if not before, our tiny planet will be melted into nothing. The world is temporary, to say. But there's going to be a new heavens and a new earth. That's what God says. It'll not be the same as this heavens and the earth, uh, uh, and this earth, but it will be a material earth and heavens. God doesn't tell us much about it, eh, because we're not wired up just at the moment to understand it all, the physics of it and the chemistry of it and all the rest of it, you see. But God assures us there's going to be a new heavens and new earth, and we who know the Lord Jesus are going to reign with him and be used of him in the administration of that new heavens and new earth. Yes? And these sons and daughters that God's creating in Christ, he's just going to drop us off in the new earth. Well, that's one way of describing the process, to drop us off. But, uh, not quite like that, is it? Uh, you will see we talk about dropping people off as though they drop down from heaven with the force of gravity or something. Uh, that's not quite, uh, what God is up, uh, will do. Do you see? We shall have bodies, like the body of the Lord Jesus. When he was raised from the dead, he could have suddenly appeared in a room, couldn't he? And then disappear. He didn't have to open the door or make a hole in the roof to come. He appeared and then he disappeared. It was a real body. The spirit says he is not flesh and bone as you see me have. Handle me and see, it's me. But it is what the Bible calls a spiritual body. Just like you can have in our world a, an engine, and one engine is a petrol engine, and another engine is a diesel engine, and another one is an electric motor. And the differences are in the power that impels the motor and keeps it going. So when it comes to bodies, there is a natural body, and we have one of those. Christ's resurrection body is a spiritual body, and he could and did ascend from Mount Olivet into heaven. So we have to prepare our minds for a different kind of world, and therefore some of our thinking about it is, um, uh, doesn't come up with very good answers because we're not yet equipped ourselves to understand all the chemistry and physics of that new world. What about procreation in the new earth, in the eternal world, they neither marry nor giving in marriage, says our Lord, they're like the angels. No longer needing to perpetuate the race by physical procreation, because they who attain to that world have eternal life and shall never die. Is the new earth the same location thing as heaven? Well, no, they're going to be two. The new heaven and a new earth. Now, this is about growing in the Holy Spirit. We can do the simple Christian basics, but how do we seriously develop our personal relationship with God? A very good and practical question. We can do the simple Christian basics, what like loving one another, perhaps. And that is absolutely basic, as Paul has reminded us. How do we develop our relationship with God? Well, we use the means of grace to start with. Do you see? That is very important. Our Lord Jesus knew what he was doing when on the last night he took bread and wine, gave to his disciples and said, take this and eat it and drink it. You will notice he didn't say offer it. Didn't say take this bread and wine and offer it to God. He said, take this bread and wine and eat it and drink it. What for? In memory of me. Why did he ask us to remember him in that form? He could have asked us to remember him by getting up when we meet as Christians and rehearsing all his miracles, and we should have remembered him as a miracle worker. Well, he did miracles, and they were important, but he didn't ask us to do that. We could have read his Sermon on the Mount. That would remind us of his moral teaching, and he was important moral teacher, of course. He didn't ask us to do that in remembrance of him. What he asked us to do was to take bread, eat it, and to drink wine. In remembrance that at Calvary he gave his body and his blood for us. We want to make progress in the spiritual life. Do what I say, says Christ. Meet with your fellow Christians and remember me in the way I have told you to. Because that takes us back to Calvary. The main spring of a Christian's devotion to Christ. Listen to Paul saying, the life I now live, I live by faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. So Christ brings us back constantly. We call it the means of grace, don't we? To remember him. I must remember him personally. He gave himself for me. He loved me and gave himself for me. Now, if Christ gave himself for me and died for me, the Bible says, then I belong to him. He's bought me. I'm not my own anyway. He bought me. If one died for all, then all died, that they which live should no longer live to themselves, but to him who died and rose again for them. Hence the mainspring of our devotion to Christ, constantly to be renewed, to remember him, that he gave his body and blood for us and now lives, and we're his, and we are his to serve him. And then, as we can, let his word be our guide. You say, do we need all that knowledge? Well, half a minute. Uh, these letters in the New Testament I've been reading from, they were written by apostles, for instance, and they were sent to churches. As you'll see from the letters, a lot of the people in those churches were slaves. They wouldn't have had much education, some of the slaves. Some of the slaves would have had, you see, but, uh, some of the slaves had little education. Those letters were written to them amongst the others, as slaves. And people in the church who could read got up and read the letters, and the teachers explained it to them, even to the slaves. So it's not all that difficult, you know. Shouldn't be. For us in our day, who were much better educated than the slaves in that day, to get a Bible or to meet as Christians and start to read it and study it, and let the teachers in the church teach us and help us to understand it. For every believer has the Spirit of God, and God is able to communicate himself to each one according to their particular abilities. So that is how we seriously develop our personal relationship with the Savior, by using the means of grace, by attending a reading and preaching of his word, by personal prayer, of course, and talking to the Savior regularly and every day. Yes? They that wait upon the Lord, says the Bible, shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint. This says, I know there is no marriage in heaven, but will I recognize my wife and you, et cetera, et cetera, and various friends? Now, this is a vexed question. You would think it was a simple question, but I have found in my experience and in several countries, it's not as simple as it sounds, because some people hope when they get to heaven they won't remember their husband. Do you see? And would it be embarrassed to meet him if he's up there, and all sorts of reasons. So the question is posed to me very often in the terms, will we know each other in heaven? And I reply, I've learned the skill since I've lived here in Ireland for nearly fifty years. I've learned the skill of answering one question by another. You say to me, shall we know each other in heaven? Well, my reply is a question, shall we realize that we were Joe Smith or whatever, or Gene Patrick or something, um, when we were on Earth? Or shall we be absolutely new, completely not us at all? Well, it seems obvious to me what the answer is there. Of course you will know yourself. Some people take the verse where God says, I will not remember their sins anymore, and they take that to mean that God so blots out our sins that he doesn't remember that we ever did them. That is not true, ladies and gentlemen. When the Bible says, I will not remember their sins, it's talking in the language of a law court. God, for a believer, will never open the books and bring up the question of their sins and decide what punishment they must get. That will never happen. God has forgiven them. He's wiped out the debt. But God hasn't re- forgotten the fact we were sinners, nor shall we forget the fact that we were sinners either. We shan't forget that for all eternity. For as we hear the choirs of heaven saying, worthy is the Lamb that was slain, who redeemed us to God by his blood, we shan't find ourselves saying, I wonder what on earth they're talking about, and nudge our next door neighbors, what are they talking about? What, what, what will happen to this lamb? The lamb of God. He was slain. Well, what was he slain for? We can't find that, shall we? Nor will God ever think, I wonder why my son died on Calvary. Can't think now, forgotten. But of course not. We should remember that we did sin. It will enrich heaven. By the grace of God gave Christ, the Lamb of God, to die for us and bring us home to heaven. In that same sense, we shall recognize other believers. We shall recognize the Lord. Says Paul, talking to his converts. Now pull up your socks, he says. Well, he, no, he uses more polite language than that. Uh, pull up your stockings or something. But, uh, uh, do you see, um, he said, now do behave, he said, because you see, you are my glory, my joy and crown of rejoicing when I get home to heaven, do you see? And when I stand there in heaven, uh, and I, I, I look at you, oh, this is so and so there from Ephesus. Oh, there's a couple of there from Colossae. I remember I preached to them. They got converted. You will be my crown of rejoicing when I get home to heaven. How could that be if he didn't know who they were and couldn't remember preaching to them? Yeah. So righty ho, uh, can you explain what it means for us in reality to be in the spirit? In reality, to be in the spirit... First of all, we have to, uh, uh, uh, believe what Christ says. The thing that distinguished Christ from John the Baptist, let John the Baptist tell you, he said, I baptize you with water. You shall be baptized in the Holy Spirit by this Jesus Christ, for he it is that baptizes in the Holy Spirit. That is the unique function of Jesus Christ our Lord. No other prophet, not Moses himself. Nor the Apostle John or anybody like that could baptize you in the Holy Spirit. Only Christ could do that. For the Holy Spirit is not so much stuff, like electricity, and you switch a switch and it comes on. The Holy Spirit is divine. And when the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, Peter pointed out to him that this is what this is, this is the explanation. This Jesus whom you murdered, God has raised him to his right hand, and Jesus has poured out his spirit. Who then is Jesus, said Peter? If Jesus can pour out the Holy Spirit of God, who must Jesus be? And Peter answered his own question and said, God has made him both Lord and Christ in the fullest sense of those terms. It Christ that does it, you see. He puts us therefore in the Spirit. We are in the Spirit, in Christ. He puts us in the Spirit. And the famous verse to be read in this connection is Romans chapter eight. I turn the page just to show you that I am quoting actual Scripture. This is Romans chapter eight and verse nine. But you are not in the flesh, but you are in the Spirit, if so be the Spirit of God dwells in you. If any man has not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. You can't be a true believer without having the Holy Spirit. And if, uh, uh, if the Spirit of God dwells in you, says Paul, you are in the Spirit. That satisfies me as the plain statement of Holy Scripture. If the Holy Spirit is in you, you are in the Spirit. Now we have different spiritual gifts, but that's another matter. We are, if the Holy Spirit is in us, we are in the Spirit. Yes? And Paul has to challenge some of the early Christians. He says, don't you realize the Holy Spirit is in you? Unless you are not true believers at all, unless you are irrepropert. We have to learn to believe what God says, by faith to believe it, and if we do, we shall find it works. I, we don't have to try and work up the spirit. We can work up our emotions. We don't have to try and work up the spirit. We have to believe God's word that the Spirit is in us if we are in the Spirit, and we in the Spirit if the Holy Spirit was within us, and be open to his leadings, and not to grieve him by our misbehavior, and to submit our plans to the direction of the Holy Spirit in our daily life and in our evangelism. But we start by believing what God has said, not trusting our emotions, nor trying to work up our emotions, but by trusting what God has said. He's given us his spirit. And you heard it in Po- Po- in Paul's letter to the Ephesians that we read, upon believing. That is what the Greek means, upon believing you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. To see God marked you by giving you the Spirit that you belong to God, and then the Spirit acts as the down payment and the guarantee of our full and final salvation. Yeah. I think, as I have been careful to sort these pages, that that is, um, all the questions you have asked, and I thank you for them. I trust my attempt to ask them have have been of some help, but of course you won't take it simply because I said so. You're wiser than that, I know that, and you will search the scriptures daily to see whether these things are so. God bless you everyone, and thank you for your company and the encouragement your presence has been to me.