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If confession is, as it is reported to be, good for the soul, I had better begin this morning's session with a confession and an apology. Yesterday, I concentrated your attention on verse four of First Timothy chapter one and talked at some length about the word dispensation, and suggested its various connotations. I was forgetting that so many of you might have a translation of scripture that did not contain that word dispensation, but in its place read edification.
Those two words are very similar in Greek. Edification means literally the building of a house. Dispensation in Greek means literally the running of a house. The difference is not, of the difference between my translation and yours, if it is different, is not a question really of translation. It is a question of the particular manuscript in the Greek that the translations have followed. I personally follow those manuscripts that I regard as having the reading best representing the original text.
But with that explanation, let's begin our reading this morning in First Timothy chapter two and the early verses of it. First Timothy chapter two and verse one. says Paul the Apostle, I exhort therefore first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all that are in high place, that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and gravity.
This is good and acceptable in the sight of God, our Savior, who wills that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator also between God and man, himself man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all, the testimony to be f- uh, born in its own times. Whereunto I was appointed a preacher and an apostle. I speak the truth, I lie not, a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
And then turning on to chapter three of this same letter, let us read the verses fourteen to the end. These things write I unto you, hoping to come to you shortly, but if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how people ought to behave in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness. He who was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up into glory.
And may God give us good understanding of his holy word. Yesterday, in our first session, we considered the phenomenon that one of the leading ideas in the first letter of Paul to Timothy is the concept of godliness. Upon analysis, it proved to mean respect, due, proper, good respect and reverence. And normally in these contexts, that respect and reverence is for God. Go- uh, godliness, therefore, is not just a mood that comes over us from time to time, nor a particularly emotional experience.
Godliness is a deep and deliberate set of the heart that turns constantly to God and pays him the due reverence and consideration in all circumstances. Because that is the main, one of the main themes of First Timothy, the development of godliness. This epistle lists for us, in the course of its conversation with us, many descriptions and titles of God. Because if we are to reverence him, as godly people should, then we shall need to know him in all his character and his, his different capacities and operations.
We found therefore likewise that the pattern develops as Paul speaks to Timothy. In each chapter, he is concerned with a particular situation and how to deal with it. And the way he deals with the practical situations and difficulties and problems is to focus first attention on the living God, to inquire what God's character is and how it should be interpreted and has been interpreted in this particular situation. And having considered God's attitude and character, then he turns to showing us how our blessed Lord has interpreted the character of God in that kind of situation.
And with the example of our Lord before us, he then entreats us, men and women, to play our part, our godly part, in interpreting the Christian gospel in our particular situations. This morning we must try to cover the main ideas in chapter two and chapter three, necessarily overpassing many of its details. Chapter two shows itself to be concerned with the men and women in government in the various countries of the world.
Chapter three concerns itself with those who have responsibility in the churches to guide, govern even, if I may use the word, and to shepherd the people of God. In chapter two, when we read of our Lord, we are told of his death, how he gave himself a ransom for all. But in chapter three we shall be told once more about our blessed Lord, not this time about his death, but about his life and the principles by which he lived that life, as interpreting in human circumstances the living God who sent him.
So then we ask ourselves, what particularly is the background of the apostles' exhortations to Timothy in chapter two? And there we remember that Paul had left Timothy in Ephesus. And Ephesus, you should know, was a very different city from Jerusalem. When the apostles began to preach in Jerusalem, they could count on this, that the majority of the people they talked to believed the Old Testament, as we call it, though they didn't call it that, to be God's word.
They accepted its authority. They believed that there was just one God. Their nation had stood for it for centuries. Of course, they didn't know what salvation was, many of them, in the sense that we would understand it. And therefore they needed to be shown their need to be saved, to be forgiven, and this through Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection. Victorian England, if I may speak for it, though I wasn't around quite then, and for a good many years following, was of this sort that you could normally suppose that seventy five percent of any congregation you address did believe, even though they were not converted people, they did believe that there existed a God.
There was one God. They believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God. They believed that the Bible was the word of God, even though many of them knew nothing about salvation. That was the background of preaching. We should be aware ourselves today that, generally speaking, if it is a real gospel meeting, you cannot suppose, not even in England, that the people you are addressing believe there is a God at all. They certainly don't believe the Bible is the word of God.
They don't believe that Jesus is the Son of God. In this, they resemble Ephesus more than they resemble the ancient Jerusalem. I cannot speak for Canada, of course, but if we are to be effective in our witness for God in our day and generation, and effective in our evangelism, we must surely become aware that it is a different world out there that we're trying to preach to, than the world maybe we were personally brought up in.
And if we are going to be effective in our evangelism for God, we must take example, I suspect, from the way that Paul, aided with Timothy, went about his gospel preaching in the city of Ephesus. Paul founded the assembly there. There was already a Jewish synagogue, but they turned out to be hostile to the gospel. And therefore, presently, Paul separated the believers from the synagogue. They met separately. They were not content, however, to preach the gospel inside the little place where they met.
Paul hired the school of Taranis, a public place, and there expounded the gospel for all who would come for three years consecutively. That was pioneering evangelism. And of course, as he preached, he would have been aware of the religious background of the city. It was a city given over to the worship of the goddess. Diana, as the Romans called her.
She was a complex creature in the minds of people, was Artemis, her Greek name. She was a many-breasted goddess in her figurines, and yet somehow she managed to be a virgin as well. Difficult problem, that. She was the protectress of women in childbirth, the protectress of the young, be they human or animal. She was, in fact, a deification of the deeply rooted human instinct of motherhood and new life.
And certainly motherhood and new life and our instinctive regard for these sacred things is a healthy thing, but not if you deify it. And in Ephesus, they deified it. They worshipped the human instinct. Just as in the modern world, Christmas is fast descending into paganism, where people forget that the baby is God incarnate. And Christmas is celebrated simply as the birth of baby. How could anybody be so horrible as not to enjoy baby, the cozy, nice baby, particularly it's got plenty of talcum powder over it.
Mere human instinct. The deification of human instinct. It was a religion that made much money from the selling of its shrines and images of the goddess. And wo betide the apostles when they thrust their fa- their fists in the face of that paganism and preached the wonderful story of God's son incarnate. What must we do, therefore, if we would preach the gospel to our modern world?
We must be convinced in our hearts of the universality of the Christian gospel. For there is one God, says Paul to Timothy, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. The universality of the Christian gospel. The universality of the way to God. Not only one God, but one mediator between God and man, the man Christ.
Now we're told by many on all sides, and not least by our government these days in Britain, that you must not say anything offensive against any other religion for fear of their being offended and raising civil strife. That was a problem for Paul and Timothy in the Roman Empire. The Roman government was pretty tolerant of religion as such, but woe betide any religion the preaching of which caused riots in the streets. And it was the fact that very often when Paul preached the unique claims of Christ, the oneness of God, that riots did follow.
Paul never himself provoked them. The Christians did not fight. We must be guarded in our language, but we shall have to learn to stand in our modern Western civilizations presently, and we in Europe perhaps more than you here in the new world. We shall have to learn to stand with wisdom and dare to proclaim there is just one God and one way to God. An assembly in Britain recently held a gospel missi- m- mission.
They had a banner outside their place saying Jesus is the way. The town authorities contacted them and said that was the last time they would be allowed to put such a banner outside their place, because such a claim, one way to God, Jesus is the way, was offensive to many of the town's inhabitants who belong to other faiths. We shall need to be convinced in heart of the uniqueness of Christ and the fact that there is just one God. It is an interesting thing to observe, but when Christianity first came to Greece in the person of Paul, the citizens of cities like, uh, Philippi and Thessalonica, uh, were incensed against it.
They said it was an eastern religion that, as Romans and Greeks, they were not allowed to receive. Odd that, isn't it? Nowadays, when missionaries go from the new world to the old, they are accused of the very opposite. They are accused of being a Western religion that the Easterners cannot be expected to receive. What are we to do about these cultural differences? To start with, let's think about the first proposition, there is one God.
We needn't be offensive, just to point out that the idea there is one God is exceedingly widespread, is it not? Judaism, of course, believes there is just one God. Islam believes there is one God. If you go to the philosophers of religion, let's take a big leap back in time and go to philosophical Hinduism, as expounded by Shankara. Well, of course he taught there is one supreme being.
His idea of that supreme being was verily defective, but just one, as he taught, and had no time for the multitudes and millions of gods and goddesses, goddesses that pervaded Hindu religion. If you ask various forms of Buddhism today, not classical Buddhism, who doesn't- didn't believe in God at all, but most forms of Buddhism, they will tell you there is one supreme being. If you come to the ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, they would tell you that the deity is one.
We are not preaching some little hole in the corner idea of God. It was originally universally acknowledged from Adam onward that there was one God. Our dear brother Long, for whom let our prayers be in his old age, provided me with all kinds of information of what they found as missionaries in Africa, that whereas the Africans worshipped demons and spirits and minor deities, they had some concept of the one supreme God.
Didn't normally worship him. In India today, there is no, well, very rarely a temple to the one supreme deity, though they're supposed to believe in him. They're content with their lesser deities. We need not be ashamed of the gospel of Christ, nor be willing to compromise this basic truth revealed by God, our Creator. There is one God. And why should anybody take offense at it, as though it were arrogant of us Christians to insist that that is so? Would it be arrogant of me to insist to some Hottentot somewhere that there's one sun up in the sky, and all of us are dependent on that one sun for our very life's maintenance and existence.
It is the objective fact there is only one sun up in the sky that, uh, is relevant to us. There are multitudes of other suns, but vis-a-vis our planet, there's one sun. And the laws of arithmetic, except when the merchants are bending them, the laws of arithmetics, arithmetic, are universally valid. It is certainly not arrogance to insist what the Bible declares, there is one God. The trouble, of course, is really with how people have interpreted that God.
As Romans one said, not liking to retain God in their knowledge, they have made gods out of all kinds of things, deifying the forces of nature, the storm god, and the god of fertility, and the god of sex, like our modern world does. And have abandoned faith in the one true God and acknowledgement of him. But there is another danger to which we should, uh, of which we should be aware in our modern world. And as parents, you should be particularly alert to it. And that is the opposition to the one true God that comes not merely from atheistic scientists, but comes in the departments of English and literature in our universities and colleges.
That's a far more serious opposition. For nowadays, in many literary departments in our universities and colleges, postmodernism holds sway. It is a pseudo-philosophy pretending to be literature. Where children and youths and undergraduates are taught that, of course, the old stories about the universe that included God, they have all failed, so you take that as a given without argument. And now they are taught that when it comes to interpreting literature, there is no one true interpretation.
Why not? Because as one famous French professor of literature, now recently died, Derrida put it, there can be no one true interpretation of any piece of literature because there is no logos, meaning there is no objective standard of rationality, though there is no objective logos. Oh, but there is.
For John's gospel begins by the assertion, in the beginning was the Logos, the source of all rationality and truth, the objective standard by which all rationality, on which all rationality is ultimately based. There is an objective frame of reference, and if your children are being taught in schools, in literature departments, that there is no one interpretation, no objective interpretation, it's anybody's choice what a piece of literature may mean.
Your opinion of it, well, okay for you. You can regard it true for you. You mustn't say it's true for me. I might have another opinion, and which of our opinions is right? Well, none of them, or all of them, doesn't matter. There is no objective criterion of rationality. There is no logos. You mustn't be surprised if then, when you get up to expound Holy Scripture and you say, this is what Scripture means, you will be met by the answer, but that's just your opinion, and there is no objective truth or standard of truth or of knowing truth. Recently, there was brought to my home a young gentleman, now in his mid-twenties, I suppose, that in his teenagers, in his teenage, had professed salvation through Christ and had gone out with a missionary team with other younger people and some older ones to guide him, witnessing to the Lord.
He came home, read philosophy and literature in one of our universities. As he sat in my room, he told me he believed nothing. All morality is socially determined. I said, what about, uh, cannibalism then? You say that's okay if they like to eat people, that's okay for them? Yes, said he, if their social situation allows it. Who are we to say it's wrong?
I trust you perceive the implications, not just for literature, but for people's attitude to Holy Scripture. Of course, their position is false. The man who sits to tell you, look here, there is no objective truth. It's just your opinion and my opinion. You could ask him, couldn't you? That proposition, my dear sir, there is no objective truth. Is that objectively true? Is that absolutely true?
For if it is, your theory that everything is socially determined is not true. And if it isn't true, I didn't, I don't need to listen to you anyway. You say, what has all that got to do with the preaching of the gospel? Well, my good Christian friends, you don't have to know all the latest twists and turns of modern philosophy. Get on with preaching the gospel. Because God's holy word brings with it its own internal truth. And the words spoken by him who is the truth carry their own conviction.
But you may need to remove obstacles from the path of your children and your university students, who are taught their postmodernism nowadays that denies the very basis of our gospel preaching. There is one God, one great objective Logos. Ah, but listen to the gospel. There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all.
Have I told you before? Because I'm getting old, and old men have just a few stories that they keep on repeating. Well, bear with me, you'll be old one of these days. Some years ago, I was in Ukraine and was invited to go along to a state school to talk to the students about Christianity. This was just after the collapse of the Soviet system, and this was a novelty in that school. I did my best, of course. The students looked astonished. But anyway, after the session, the deputy headmistress came to me, and a gracious lady she was.
She said, might I ask a question? I said, certainly, madam. She said, what do you think of UFOs? I said, madam, we haven't had any our way, so I don't know what to think about them, you see. And those we thought were UFOs, the government said weren't. I said, I believe you've had a lot. Oh yes, she said, we've had a lot. And she said the recent lot that came when the occupants of the spacecraft got out, they told the locals that Buddhism was the true religion, not Christianity. So what do you say of that, she said. I said, man, that's astonishing.
I said, for my part, Ben, I have a little difficulty with Buddhism, because most forms of Buddhism teach that there is no such thing as forgiveness. Buddhism that believes in the reincarnation of the soul teaches, like Hinduism, that you carry with you the burden of your wrongdoings from your previous incarnation, and you must suffer, for the only way to get rid of that guilt and burden is yourself to suffer. And if you have not suffered enough to get rid of that burden by the time you come to die, you'll have to be reborn once more.
And so the cycle goes on. I said, ma'am, I don't need to be told to be good. I know I ought to be. My problem is that I haven't been good. And what I'm looking for is a forgiveness that I can receive... that will maintain my own standards... so that I don't have to pretend that sin doesn't matter. And yet I find forgiveness. And a forgiveness that meets God's standards too.
I said neither Hinduism nor Buddhism offers any such forgiveness. I said, I know of only one in the whole world's history that does, and that is Jesus Christ, our Lord. He's the only one, ma'am, I said, that will come aside alongside you and say, my dear, I am your creator, and I love you with all the creator's love, and I want you to be saved, for you, like the rest, have sinned, and you can't pay the penalty of sin yourself, and I can't forgive you without the penalty being paid, and I want to tell you that Jesus Christ, my son, God incarnate, died for you, ma'am, that you might be forgiven.
Excuse the term, there's no one else on the market. I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes the glorious message of God's incarnate Son who gave himself a ransom for all. How do you know who the true God is? The story is told of Solomon when he first came to the throne and was famed for his wise decisions.
So they brought before him a couple of prostitutes, and these two women lived in a house together in the same room. They both had an infant. One night, one of them in her sleep rolled over on the top of her infant and smothered it and killed it. She woke up to find the babe dead and quietly crept out of bed and across the floor to the woman in the other bed, removed the live baby from her and put her dead baby in the place and crept back into bed. When the other mother woke in the morning and discovered the child was dead and then looked at it, she said, but that's not my child. Went across the room to the other one, that's my baby, she said.
And there began a fight and much pulling of hair. They brought the two women before Solomon. The one woman said this, and the one woman said that. Both claimed to be the mother. Solomon eventually called for one of his officers and announced, I'm going to be fair. Fair to both women. So, officer, take your sword, cut the babe in two, give one half to the one woman and one half to the other. Yes, said one woman, you do that. And the other woman said, oh no, king, no, let her have it But then.
which was the true mother? Oh, the true mother would do anything to save that child. How would you know who the true God is? Well, forgive me if I put it crudely, he would do anything to the point of giving his son to die for you rather than you perish. I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. There's no other savior like it on the market.
If that is God's attitude and the attitude of our blessed Lord towards mankind, God our Savior, who would have all men to be saved, how shall we Christian men and women fulfill our part in this? Generally speaking, we are to pray for the governments of the world, be they democratic or totalitarian. For democracy is not necessarily the best form of government that ever was invented. We are to pray for governments.
Why? That in God's mercy, men and women at large might have peaceable lives in all quietness and godliness, in conditions conducive to their thinking about their eternal spiritual needs and opportunity to be saved. In particular, in the church, the men are to pray publicly, holding up holy hands without wrath and quarreling. It's not necessarily that we always adopt that gesture, perhaps part of it's cultural, is it?
In my church, very few uphold their hands. In some churches, all of them do. Nothing against holding up your hands for God to see. They better be clean, though. And if we're quarreling amongst ourselves... and refusing fellowship with our fellow believers, how do we expect God to treat our prayers sincerely when we're praying for all men? And what can the women do? It will be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the women's part in this thing.
That men and women might be saved. For women, if I've got it anywhere near right, are the keepers of a nation's morality. I cannot say what it is here in, in Canada. I can tell you what it is in Europe. With a press that reduces human female form for pornography to make millions of dollars for the press.
I can tell you that in our schools, kids are very often taught that homosexuality and lesbianism are proper forms of human behavior. I can tell you that as a result of our so-called sex education in schools, England has the highest statistics of teenage pregnancies anywhere in Europe. And as for the multi-millions that have been aborted, babies, I mean, there's a God in heaven who cares.
And it's the women, isn't it? That are the bastions of morality. Unfortunately, in some of our women's progress on BBC Radio Four, the programs advocate homosexuality and and lesbianism, and some of them are positively pornographic. And therefore the question of dress, even though you must allow here a bachelor to speak, the question of dress becomes very significant, doesn't it? I say no more.
But the dress is not to deny beauty. God's idea of dress. Consider the lilies. God dresses them. They're beautiful. It's a dress that should guard modesty and that inner balance of healthy judgment. That doesn't provide for evil desires in others. Teaching, says Paul, meaning authoritative teaching in the church, is not given to women.
That is not a cultural thing. The reason for it, Paul gives, goes first back to the order of creation in the unfallen world, and then to what happened at the fall. Denying women authoritative teaching in the church is not obviously not meant to forbid what Timothy's mother and grandmother did to him. Surely not. What a foundation they laid as they taught him the scriptures.
Not meaning to forbid the Samaritan woman going to witness to the townspeople, come see a man who told me all things that ever I did. Not willing, meaning to for- forbid what Anna did in the courts of the temple, speaking of Christ to those that were looking for the comfort of Jerusalem. Let's keep a balanced view on the matter. We need all that scripture permits against a world that grows daily more corrupt.
And notice the final triumph. She shall be saved, it says, through childbearing. That scripture does not mean, surely, that no Christian woman will ever die in childbirth. Many have. What does it mean then? There are two possible explanations. Both have some truth in them. One is that it means she and all womankind and all the rest of us will be saved through the virgin birth of Christ. That though woman was deceived by Satan and came under God's sentence of discipline as a result, yet God, in his wisdom and marvelous foresight and mercy, had ordained the human race to be such that God himself could get inside the human race, using a woman.
All the wonder of the story, that when man inspired by the devil in the form of the final beast will try to elevate himself and be God. Man shall be God. God's answer was for God to become man. What a marvelous strateg- uh, strategist our God is, isn't he? Overcoming the devil by himself, becoming man through the woman. Attractive as that is, it is not without its difficulties. The phrase could refer to the fact of the discipline that God imposed both on Adam and on Eve when they sinned.
Adam, he was not thrown out of his business as a farmer, but the earth was cursed. Now farming would be hard labor until man died. But that very labor would, labor would be a solitary discipline, for the devil finds work for idle hands to do, and when men are sinners, they need a discipline that will keep them doing their healthy jobs and give them less time for sinful occupations.
Jobs that produce character of per- of determination and persistence and fairness and so forth. And woman, her lot made more painful, but the very pains and sacrifices of womanhood and motherhood under God producing a character that is holy and on the way to being Christ-like. If they find the Savior and take the whole business of the rearing of family, like Jacob's wives did, take it to God in prayer and learn in the disciplines of the home and the sacredness of motherhood to develop a Christian character that shall shine for all eternity.
Oh, let's catch, uh, the final emphasis. S- they shall be saved, says scripture. That God will save us all in the fullest sense of the word, but a God who is interested also in saving us and our characters in the domesticities of life. And I have led little time, and you have very little patience left, for me to comment at any length on what is said to us about godliness at the end of chapter three. But I'm comforted to notice that some seminar in this conference is geared to talking about the mystery of godliness.
I advise you to attend it. All I will say now is this, that as he comes to the end of chapter three, Paul is talking about how men ought to behave in the church of God. It is the church of the living God. In particular, he is talking about elders and the deacons. And you will notice that he doesn't tell us at any length what the job is that elders and deacons do. In this chapter, he is concerned simply with the character and lifestyle of the elders and the deacons.
They have to be ensembles of the flock to show us what our lifestyle should be. And they are stewards of the great mysteries of God. To them, therefore, in particular, Paul talks about their lifestyle and sets before them, not now the death of Christ, but if I may use the term, the lifestyle of Christ. You will notice in the six things that are said about Christ in chapter sixteen, Great is the mystery of godliness. There is no mention of his death.
No mention of his atoning suffering. No explicit mention of his resurrection. For now, the writer is not thinking about Christ in his death. He's thinking about Christ in his life and the principles by which he governed his life and led his life. This is the secret that lies behind our godliness as we learn to imitate that holy person. He was manifest in the flesh. The very phrase implies his deity, of course. Uh, you'll see, when you were born, nobody thought you manifested anything in particular, for you had no pre-existence, did you?
But when Christ was born, yes, there had been a pre-existence. He was God, a very God. In the beginning with God, he was God. When he was born, it was God manifest in flesh. Marvelous story. However, would we have known about God, what God is really like, unless God had been manifest in the flesh, in human terms that we can understand. Godliness on our part will mean the same, won't it?
Not that we had pre-existence, but true godliness is not manifest so much by theory and preachers. It is manifest by the practitioners, as the principles of godliness are worked out in actual human flesh. Christ was manifest in flesh, he was justified in spirit. You'll see at the end of that superbly godful, Godly life, the verdict of religion and politics upon him was that he deserved nothing but a cross. Where did his justification come from?
In the prophet Isaiah, he is heard proclaiming, he is near that justifies me. And before he suffered our Lord said the Holy Spirit would come. He would convict the world of sin because they believed not on him, of righteousness because he went to the Father. The coming of the Holy Spirit demonstrated that Jesus Christ is true. As you hear Peter say, on the day that the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, would you understand what this outpouring of God's Spirit is? It's the evidence of this, that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified, he's made him Lord and Christ.
Christ justified, declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead. Where shall our justification in this sense come from? You elder, you have taken a line in your church, have you? That you feel is the godly line? You have your critics. What are you relying on for final justification? Well, says Paul, and we must follow his example. I know nothing against myself, brethren. I'm not hereby justified. He that justifies me is of the Lord.
I wait for the day to compare it. For all things shall there be made manifest. If I would be justified in my actions, the final court of appeal will be the judgment seat of Christ. Yes? Our Lord was seen of angels, preached among the, the nations, and though he scarce left Palestine, God saw to it that that godly life had the maximum publicity. Seen of angels. What a wonder. Not angels saw him, uh, not he saw angels, angels appeared to him, but angels watched him.
What a lesson they learned. I try to imagine sometimes what Michael the Archangel said to Gabriel when they saw him, creator of all angels, made lower than the angels. What did Gabriel say to Michael? Michael, what is the Lord of all, Son of God, making himself lower than us for? What did Michael say to Gabriel when they saw the Son of God taken and nailed to a tree.
What was God saying? What were the angels to learn from it? Something perhaps they'd never guessed to be in the character of God, who knows? I don't know it helped Gabriel all that much. If it was explained to him that God was allowing his son to be crucified for the sakes of us sinners. But what the angels learned about God in it, oh, what a magnificent lesson. And still in the church, as the angels observe our behavior, they are being taught the manifold wisdom of God.
He was preached among the Gentiles. His name is worldwide, and one day he shall be universally vindicated. He was believed on in the world. That life was not in vain, was it? Look at you here, believed on by a lot of old Gentiles in two thousand and four. That life still holds its power. And in our little way, if honestly we work for God and preach his word as best we know how and leave our example and teaching behind.
Many others, maybe, in God's grace, will come to believe because what of what we have done and said. And the end of that godly life, he was received up in glory. Oh, how the angels did sing. When the heavens were opened and the Son of God made a little lower than the angels and human still, was received up of the welcome of glory and made to sit far above angels, principalities, mights, ma- powers and dominions, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but in that which is to come.
And I'm almost afraid of this, to say this, in case you don't believe it. But then it is said that you who believe in God through Jesus Christ our Lord, and have been purged of your sin by his blood, you too are raised with Christ and seated with him in the heavenlies, above all principalities, powers, mights, and dominions. And you shall reign with Christ. Believe it?
I don't know what the angels are going to say about that. That you should be placed above them. How shall we comprehend such mercy? God fill us with the sense of the wealth and the sheer riches of God's grace, so that we may go forth to proclaim him and our Savior without compromise throughout the whole world.
