Gooding, David: 6 - Redemption

My topic this evening is to be redemption, and the paragraph of Holy Scripture that I wish to use as my springboard is found in the Epistle to the Romans, chapter eight. The Epistle to the Romans, chapter eight. And for you who care for the brethren, the passage begins in verse twelve. So then, brethren, we are betors not to the flesh to live after the flesh, for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die. But if by the Spirit ye mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. For you received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear, but you received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba Father. The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. If so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us all. For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. Not only so, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption to wit the redemption of our body. For by hope were we saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopeth for that which he seeth? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it. The word redemption in our English Bibles stands for a number of similar but slightly different ideas. It will therefore serve as a convenient bridge by which we may join together our studies in the week that is past and the studies that are still to come. We shall find that our word contains some ideas that will cover again the ground that we thought over in detail last week, and then it will, from that point, lead us on to the considerations that we shall be discussing in the remaining lectures. The word redemption has, in many parts, the basic meaning of to deliver. Sometimes the idea is prominently and almost exclusively that of delivering, and the idea is a delivering by power. At other times, we shall find that the deliverance is affected by money, by the paying of a price. And incidentally, of course, it is that meaning that is to the fore in our English word redemption, a buying back. And then in other parts, the idea of deliverance sinks into the background, and we are left with the concept of a simple purchase. When you go down the street and buy a commodity from Woolworths, I don't suppose you conceive of yourself as delivering and rescuing this particular commodity from Woolworths. You are just going down to pay the price and buy the thing because you want the thing for some particular reason. And so this idea of redemption leads on to the idea of purchase, a purchasing of people for a certain purpose. It is therefore both a delivering from by one means and another. It is a buying to some purpose or other, and we must try and combine those ideas in our thinking. Let us begin then forthwith with the idea of delivering, delivering from. As you may at once see, its suggestion is that mankind, if he needs to be redeemed, is in some kind of bondage. He needs deliverance therefrom. And all through, we shall see that this word redemption implies the wreckage that sin has caused, and all those ugly involvements in which mankind has become enmeshed by the fall of the race and by our personal sinning. And redemption is the word that sums up God's activity in delivering us from the bondages that hold us, both by the putting forth of his power and by the price that he has paid in the sacrifice of Christ. We may well ask then, uh, what is the bondage in particular? When, uh, the Apostle Paul was standing trial and had opportunity to state the purpose and point of his Christian gospel before King Agrippa, he used this summary of the activity of the gospel. He was sent to turn people from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God, bring them forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those that are sanctified. So that basic to this matter of deliverance, basic to the bondage in which we are held as men and women of a fallen race, is a bondage to darkness, to the power of darkness, a bondage to Satan. The Bible's account of the heathen is just this, that the human race started off with the knowledge of God, but gradually, because it found that knowledge unpalatable, suppressed it, forgot it, and thereafter sank level by level in its ignorance of what God is really like. With the consequent darkness, a darkness which exercises a power over people, keeping them from God, keeping them in the bonds of their sin, keeping them in ignorance of the consequences of the human fall. It is a power that holds men, is this darkness. It is the tool, of course, which Satan uses. We all know how Satan began his work by slandering God in the minds of our, our first parents. With that wrong concept of God, he began his ugly scheme of enslaving the human heart and spirit in its ignorance of what God is really like. In the heathen nations, the consequences were that men forgetting what God is like, and no longer having personally to do with God, began to worship lesser powers. They worshipped the psychological powers of their own bodies, the physical powers of their own bodies. The feeling of power and pride and hate and revenge that can well up so strongly in the human heart, men began to deify the thing, and they evolved a god of war and worshipped him. And coming to admire him, became like him. sadist and brutal. They worshipped sex and made their altars and images thereto, and perverted God's gift and became filthy and outrageous. Then they started worshiping the wild beasts and some of the tame ones. And having lost contact themselves with God and not really knowing what God is like, they began to fall in fear of the creation around them, and began to worship the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole of which led them increasingly into bondage. What a frightful bondage that must have been. Beneath the surface of the classical literature, sometimes we can perceive what was the outlook of the common crowd of men in those ancient times. Why, if the moon went into an eclipse, many of them would run out into the streets, beating their bins and tins and cans to make a big noise to frighten off the spirit that was in charge of this affair on the moon. They hasted to offer their sacrifices to avenge and to please. They lived in fear and bondage. What a blessing and what a mercy it was when our Lord came. Says Paul, we have redemption in him, in him who is the image of the invisible God. We have a deliverance from all that reasonish fear and ignorance and the power of darkness in him who has come and shown us exactly what God is like. It is the wonderful fact that in Jesus Christ dwelled all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And if we want to know what he is like, who is behind our universe, we want to know it in terms that we as humans can understand, we may find it in the person of him whom we call Jesus. He tells us that behind the vast mechanics of this universe, there is a God who is a person. Thank God, he, it proves that he, it proves, I mean by experience, that he is anxious to reestablish contact with us, his creatures. He is a person that can have personal dealings with us, who are persons. And the story of re- of redemption is in this level, the bringing back of the creature to know the God who made him. The forming of personal relations again, so that the power of darkness is broken. Man comes to live intelligently in the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. But you say, yes, Mr. Lecturer, I see that that is all important for heathen, but then we are not heathen. Perhaps not. And yet, even in modern times, we have had terrible exhibitions of what can happen to civilized nations that forget God. Back of Germany's great outbreak, perhaps to a greater extent than many realize, was the intellectual and spiritual casting off of the true God of heaven. That tried to stamp out that nation that for centuries was the living representative on earth of the God of heaven. That nation that raised its voice loudly and at the beginning in that intellectual movement that would tell us that this Bible is largely in the Old Testament myth, legend, the record of the often failing and wrongheaded and positively perverse and oftentimes corrupt attempts of mankind, uh, to figure out God for himself. Having cut loose from the God that has revealed himself in history and substituted for that an evolution of religion. Having done their best to reason out of the Old Testament, its miraculous element, and conceived a hatred of the jewel that was the means by which those oracles were given us. They put in their places the old German war gods, Wodin and company, and worshipped their military machine and the fearful bondage and sadism and misery that it produced beg a description, though perhaps we early have forgotten its more vivid details. To many a popular mind in these islands, somehow or other it is supposed that science has proved the Bible wrong. And if this Bible is wrong, then we have very little evidence for what God is like at all. We are back with the heathen. We live in a world where communism is regaining ground. I wish not to be alarmist, but these are facts. And as you know, communism is based on a philosophy that has no God. Paul stated it, and that by inspiration, that the end of this age shall see a tremendous move from God. There shall come an apostasy, a falling away, says the Bible. This world is yet to see a brilliant genius on earth who will sit in the temple of God and claim that he is God, and forbid all other worship, save the worship of himself. That, I repeat, is not the New Testament summing up of ancient history. That is the New Testament's forecast of what shall be. And I submit to you, though it is not my purpose to indulge in politics here this evening, nor do I hold a brief against communism. But I do submit to you that against all this invasion of pure heathenism, there is only one safe bulwark, and that is a knowledge of God, personal and practical in our lives. It isn't not not enough, I submit to you, that we here in the West believe that there is a God. The demons believe there is a God, says the Apostle James. It doesn't do much good. But that we come to know God personally. That, let me remind you, is the very kernel of God's salvation. This is eternal life, says Jesus Christ, that we might know God by personal experience, by personal transaction with a living God, so that we know him. It is the tragedy of much religion, as Christ himself summed it up, that whereas it devotes itself to eating and drinking in Christ's presence and attending on the public reading of his word, that it misses that personal knowledge of a personal God. Was it not that that our Lord said the master of the house should say, when he rises up and shuts to the door, and there are found men and women outside, and they shall begin to knock on the door and say, Lord, open to us. And he shall reply, no, depart from me, I never knew you. The Lord doesn't mean he didn't know they existed. He knows everybody that exists. What he means is that he never had anything to do with them personally, and they with him. That personal link between God and man that is salvation was never forged with them. They knew a lot about God. They attended the holy ordinances. They listened to the holy word, but for all that, they did not know God, they did not know Christ, and he never knew them. I submit to you that we, with our exalted Western civilization, need to be reminded of this thing, lest we drift too into the growing shades of heathenism. The point of redemption is that Christ has come to show us exactly what God is like, and to forge again with individual people who will have it, those personal relations with God that are regeneration, that are being saved, that are eternal life. We ought to ask ourselves as we proceed, if that be the purpose of redemption, are we redeemed? Do we really know God? Have we personal experience of him? Or is he, as one student said to me the other month, well, you know, God to me, I believe in a God, but he he might as well be the man in the moon, for all I'm concerned, he's a vague being somewhere. Then we read that our Lord delivers us not only from the power of darkness, brings us to know God personally. He delivers us, or at least he proposes to deliver us, if we will have it, from the power of sin. You remember the occasion when our Lord announced himself as the light of the world? Certain of the Jews came along, and they outwardly professed that they believed him. Then he said, we read, to those Jews that believed on him, now if you continue in my word, then you shall be my disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Uh, free, they said, um, what did you quite mean by free? Uh, for they said, you know, we were never in bondage anyway. What, what, what are you inferring by, by s- by proposing to make us free? We don't get this free thing. We are free, surely. Well, our Lord said you, freedom I was referring to is freedom from the slavery of sin. Everyone that keeps on committing sin as the habit of his life is a slave. He is the slave of sin. There will come a time when God's house must be freed of all slaves. Unfortunately, but perhaps very true to life, those men that a moment ago had professed to believe on him became most indignant. And our Lord had to remind them before they left him that they were of their father, the devil. Now let us be practically minded. Let us not cast stones at these ancient people, shall we? This is perhaps the more common reaction to our Lord's teachings than we care to think. We may believe in him and say he is redeemer, yet shall we not be honest enough to observe what are the implications of that? His redemption, if it does anything, is aimed at delivering us from the power of sin. It will be our first step in experiencing his gracious work to be willing to admit that hitherto we have in fact been slaves of sin. Will you grant me that? Slaves of sin. Is this a hard thing for a man or woman to face, to wake up to the fact that is nevertheless true, that we are not free men and women? We find ourselves with habits and powers that we cannot break. The good that we would do so often, we just don't do. And the evil that we try to avoid, that we do. We are slaves. Is it not so? The thing that the Bible kindly advises us to be wary of is the fact that sin is a deceitful thing. That is, by long establishment in it, in us, it will color our outlook and make us believe that we like the things that underneath we don't like, and make us think and feel that we don't want the things that really deep down we do want. No man or woman surely would knowingly and deliberately and with an open heart reject God or reject his son. And if there is a salvation that Christ has provided, and we may have it and know we have it, what man in his sanity would deliberately reject? And yet... And yet... Is it the fact that gospel is popular? Is it the fact that if you will talk to your fellow men and women about this matter of being saved, that you will find a very popular response. Is there not a certain antipathy in the human heart when it comes to this point, to the practical point that we need to be saved from sin? That Christ offers us a very serious program. It begins with regeneration that will continue through life. It is a salvage work. It is a practical process of being saved from sin. It means business. It means taking God seriously. It means taking the Savior seriously and cooperating with him. There is the rubstone, the test stone of it all, surely. If we claim to believe in Christ as a redeemer, then let us ask ourselves, am I serious in this business? Have I begun the course yet? Do I know by personal experience that first loosing of the chains of sin, by knowing my sins have been forgiven. Do I yet know by personal experience that I am right in my relations with God, and I shall never come into his judgment? Has Christ begun his work in redemption in me? Have I personal experience? And if I have that, am I daily going on with him, letting him expose s- my sin to me, as I can bear it, and then deliver me from it? Is it real? Oh come, this is what personal experience of God means, if it means anything. And then we read in the New Testament that there is a deliverance, there is a redemption from the curse of the law. The words I might even read to you from the, uh, epistle to the Galatians, we read, cursed is every one that continueth not in all things that are written in the law to do them. Now that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God is evident, for the righteous shall live by faith, and the law is not of faith. But he that doeth them shall live in them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, becoming a curse for us. For it is written, cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree. You see, when we face this question of sin, and it comes home to our hearts that our personalities have been enchained by a power that we cannot break of our own strength, we very often experience a sense, well, I must do better. I must take myself in hand. I must be more regular in the reading of my Bible. I must be the more regular in the saying of my prayers. Perhaps I ought to cut out a hobby or two and, um, give myself more to Christian work. Naturally, we feel a need to do something. And as we attempt to turn over that new leaf, we oughtn't to forget, should we, that turning over a new leaf in itself will not cancel the debts that are on the first page. Just a moment, says God to a man who proposes to turn over a new leaf, we haven't yet settled. Your account so far. You see, suppose I have here a man, and he has been in business and foolishly wasn't insured, and, uh, happened of a flood and a fire and various other disasters, and he is bankrupt to the tune of thirty thousand pounds. He's lost his premises. A kind friend comes along and says, look here, old fellow, I'll give you all these premises up the road here. There's a fine new factory up the road, I'll give it to you. Start over a new leaf. If a man were to try and start over a new leaf and start again in those premises, just like that, the law would be on his track in a moment. Oh, but you can't just walk out of your debts just by turning over a new leaf and starting again. What about the debts? And you can well see that those debts would be like mighty chains, chaining that man down, and forever stopping him turning over a new leaf and starting again. Until the law in its mercy comes in and discharges the bankrupt. Now this is exceedingly important practical point, for there are many honest folk, and they know themselves sinners, and from time to time they form their new resolutions. They determine to start again, to be keener in the work of their church than hitherto, to say a few more prayers, but they are not beginning to touch the root of the matter. What about the past? We are not automatically forgiven. Some righteous account has got to be given of our sins before we are free to start again. Therefore, let us give attention a moment to what God's New Testament says. He says that our setting free will never come by trying to keep the law from now on. Will it? You see, if I say to the judge in the bankruptcy court, I say, well, look here, um, I, I, I determined now never to get in debt again. Well, you never should have got in debt before. He may respect my good intention, but that won't do anything for the satisfying of my creditors. And my determining to keep God's law won't wipe out the past. And then, of course, there is the most awkward observation, that however hard I try to keep God's law in the future, I shall come short still. God's law, I say again, as I have many times said in these lectures, is an impossibly high standard. It demands a hundred percent. Ninety nine percent won't do. Ninety nine percent will bring down on our heads the curse of the law. And we had been in an impossible situation, had it not been for this glorious redemption and the wonderfully gracious thing that Christ has done. From that back leg, from those chains, from that curse of a broken law that threatened to chain us down forever. We read Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law. How? By keeping the law for us? No. By telling us how we may keep the law? No. But by himself accepting our debts, if you will allow the imagery, by being made a curse for us. That is the doctrine of his cross. That, amidst many other things, is its significance. The curse of a broken law that was on our heads. He took. He was made a curse for us. And it is wonderful news, at which we would do well to shout for very joy, that it is possible for us to start up again, to be men and women. It is possible for us to start up again because Christ has taken over the debts, because Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law. Redeemed us, that is, who trust him. But more of that anon. The Bible talks of redemption, not merely in bringing us out of the power of ignorance of God, redemption by delivering us from the power of sin, redemption by delivering us from the curse of the law. And God proposes to deliver us from the bondage of physical corruption and death. I will redeem them from the power of the grave, says God. I will wipe away tears from their eyes. Death one day shall be swallowed up in victory. The Bible says that death is not the normal thing. We may not argue because the flowers in our garden grow up from seed into full flower and bloom, and then by natural process fade away and die, only to repeat the process next year, that human growth, death, and decay is a normal process. The Bible maintains it is not. By one man, sin entered into the world, and death. By sin. I do not say that everybody's death is a result of his or her personal sins. But the Bible maintains that this evil power, sin, has wrecked the human race as a whole and made it subject to death. I have no intention of being morbid, or at least no desire. But sooner or later, if not earlier, then when life begins to go downhill, we shall all find ourselves facing this great problem: death? Corruption? Is this that for which humanity was made, to turn to dust and worms? Is that all? Oh, thank God that Christ has brought us light and victory here. Death is not the end. God has a glorious destiny for humankind, for those at least who will trust the Savior. Death, the grave, and the worm is but the sorry result of sin. God does not propose to remove it immediately. Even for those who trust him and his son, God leaves death for the meanwhile. And perhaps God is wise in so doing. How easily would many forget God completely if it were not for death? Like the erupting sore on the face, death shows us that all is not well beneath. And it were wise of God to leave death among men, that men might have outward evidence that there is something basically wrong, and he needs to be delivered and to be redeemed. I remember as a small boy playing with marbles in a forbidden spot. The spot was by the drawing room window. I had often been warned what might happen if my marble went in the wrong direction. But I played there, and one day my marble did go in the wrong direction, and the result were three or four angry spider web cracks right through that pane of glass. Father came home, and after the briefish transactions that took place over such things, I was, of course, forgiven. I can't say whether it were intentional or not. I think it was not intentional. Perhaps the man who puts glass in wasn't readily available, but the glass was left with its cracks for several months. I say again, I don't think my father wanted to be unkind. He'd forgiven me. He didn't know what went on underneath my skin. When visitors would come, oh, what a pity, you've broken that big pane of glass. Yes, and then the story came out. And for months, that pane of glass stood there. I was forgiven. But perhaps it served a good purpose. I didn't play with marbles there anymore. Not just there, at any rate. There is forgiveness all now, for all who will trust the Savior. But the broken pane of glass is left for the while. Death is around us on every hand, reminding, reminding us that we need to be redeemed. Reminding us that the redemption of our soul is a number one necessity. And though this is a lecture and not a sermon, I can scarce refrain from pushing home this practical point. This business of being redeemed, I repeat, is a number one necessity. If it should happen that any of us cannot honestly say that we have had these personal dealings with the Savior. If we cannot honestly say that the work of redemption has begun, we are born again and know it. We have forgiveness of sins and know it. We have eternal life and know it. If we cannot honestly say that, if the work has in fact not begun yet, then let God's broken pane of glass, let that ugly thing called death warn us that we need to get this thing started, lest death remove us and our state become eternally unchangeable. I have built long on deliverance from, I must say just a little about deliverance to. Redemption delivers a man from the ugly wreckage of human sin. Will one day deliver all who trust the Savior from even the physical results of sin. And of that I hope, God willing, to speak tomorrow. What for? What shall we do when we are redeemed and all the damage has been undone? What then? The Bible points out that God has a purpose in human life. God has a purpose for his universe. We must rid ourselves of childish ideas of heaven and eternity, as heaven as a place where we all graciously retire and put our legs up on the sofa and don't do any more work. Heaven will be a place of ceaseless activity. His servants, we read, shall serve him. In ways not given us now to understand, we shall be with God again, developing and enlarging and ex- exploring his universe, and that eternally. A new heaven, and indeed a new earth. Not that we shall all end up as spiritual beings without any physical manifestations, there shall be a new heaven, but a new earth to go there with. We read that creation shall be delivered from its bondage of corruption. The blight and the blast and the canker shall be removed from the lower grades of creation. And that great event is waiting, the time when God's work in his redeemed people shall be ready for manifestation. When God's people, saved, forgiven, restored, shall reach their spiritual majority, and God shall be able to hand over to them in Christ the running of his vast universe. There is a great purpose in human redemption. We do not look forward to cold death by the universe shriveling to nothing. We look beyond that great event of which scripture speaks, when heaven and earth shall pass away in great heat by some colossal atomic fission. We look beyond all that. To that glorious destiny to which God is determined to bring all whom Christ redeems. Hitherto, if we have never come to the Savior and allowed him to begin saving us, we have perhaps unknowingly been trespassing against God's purpose. That is the great charge that God lays at human doors, not that we've been outrageously immoral or hopelessly corrupt in our business dealings. Few of us have been that. But God's charge is that we have turned each one to his own way. We have lived life as decent, respectable citizens, but, uh, without thinking of God's plan, God's purpose. We've gone our own way. We have said to ourselves, but isn't it enough? What more could God expect of a man or woman that they should be decent? Oh, much more. He made us to fulfill his will. And my life may be never so fair, but if it isn't going in the line of his will and serving his purpose, then I'm living athwart the very purpose of the maker who made me. It is evident that such a process shall spell disaster. Suppose I have here a car, beautiful, fresh from the works. It was made that an owner might buy it and get behind the wheel and drive it, and the car with all its wonderful mechanism should serve the purpose of that drive. Suppose one day the car goes off on its own. Somehow or other, the engine gets started and the car goes off on its own, and you could speak to the car and you said, car, look here, you're going wrong, you're heading for disaster. And the car says, no, I'm not. No, I'm going, my engine's going very well. My plugs are good. My cylinders are yet untarnished. My gears don't even scrape. Or would you say, car, car, though all is well at the moment. Uh, it must end in disaster, for you are not, um, going for the purpose for which you were intended. And suppose the car turns around and says, but I don't intend. Do you suppose I'm going to hand over my life to somebody else to drive me? I should go where I please. That is not freedom. That will presently be utter ruin. Says God, that is precisely what all of us have done. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. We have trespassed against the great purpose of God in our lives. Redemption is the chance to come back. There is forgiveness for our trespass. There is more. Christ is willing to bring us back into the line of God's purpose and make our lives meaningful, both here and in eternity. But the Savior himself warned us that if we die without being saved, without being forgiven, without being regenerate, without this being personally reconciled to God, if we die in our own way, the end will be to be put on the scrap heap of eternity. Redemption is real. We may judge its urgency by the price which was paid for the deliverance. Christians celebrate it frequently. This is my blood given, a ransom, a redemption. That redemption, we are told in scripture, is an eternal redemption. The moment a man or woman comes and, in true repentance, hands over to Christ his life and bids the Savior come in and has those personal dealings with Christ which are being born again. That moment the Savior does come in. That moment there begins a process that God himself has sworn to complete. The redemption is eternal redemption. So that all of us who here tonight sit and can honestly say we have had those personal dealings with Christ, we not only know he is a redeemer, but we have begun to experience his redemption in our personal lives. We may indeed shout in our hearts for very joy. The prospect is exceedingly good. But in cold logic, and yet with all the human feeling that I possess, I must tell you, in the name of God and Christ, that if a man miss eternal redemption, by very definition, the result is eternal perdition. There is no alternative. God give us the grace to face this great thing, and not to give slumber to our eyes until we can honestly say that Christ has redeemed us personally, and all is well. Shall we pray? Our gracious God, now again we pause to thank thee before we go for the wonder of thy redemption, that thou art prepared to forgive the most blatant rebellion, that thou art prepared to deliver from weakness and folly and sin, that thou art prepared to receive us knowing all that we are, and receive us just as we are, and extend to us a love that will not let us go and already has purchased for us an eternal redemption. For these great, marvelous things, we give thee grateful thanks. We thank thee too for everyone whose experience goes to prove thy word, that being redeemed is a reality in life now. It may be known. We thank thee for its blessedness and experience. We humbly pray that thou wilt encourage all who have so begun, that thy gracious work may proceed unimpeded. O Lord, if it be yet that any of us here have not yet begun, not forgiven, not regenerate, not redeemed, not saved, not really knowing, in ignorance still, not knowing God personally or Christ personally, and not having thy Holy Spirit, and not really understanding the thing at all, but in uncertainty and doubt, with no certain outlook for the future. For these, O Lord, we pray, inasmuch as just for these thou didst come, and for these thy redemption has been procured, show them their needs, show them how they might be saved, through Jesus Christ our Lord.