Well, it's a pleasure to be with you all this evening. If you have a Bible, I wonder if you would open it to Paul's second letter to the Corinthians in chapter 5. I want to read a short passage from that that I want to offer some reflections on this evening. 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verses 16 to 21. And my reflections tonight are going to culminate in verse 21, but the first four or five verses will give the context for where I want to go. Hear the word of the Lord. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness. of God. Praise God for His Holy Word. Let's pray. O Lord God and loving Heavenly Father, as we come now to reflect upon the teaching of Your Word, we pray that Your Holy Spirit would impress upon us the great truths that You revealed to us, not only through creation, not only through providence, but supremely through Your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. For it is in His name that we pray. Amen. Joe has already alluded to the fact that I did not grow up in a Christian home, and as I was reflecting on what to speak about this evening and reflecting on my childhood, I remember one incident. We would rarely go to church, but every now and then my parents would take me and my sisters to church, perhaps on Christmas or around about Easter time. And I remember asking them once at Easter, what is good about Good Friday? Why do we call it good if it's the day on which Jesus died? And from what I can recall, my parents had no answer to that question. I think they told me some version of, well, it's always been called that, so why change it? Not a very satisfying answer, it has to be said. The reason, of course, it's called Good Friday is that we don't simply look at the death of Jesus Christ in isolation. Like so many things in this life, there's context. And it's the context which gives the life and the death of Jesus its meaning. And so tonight I want to end up talking about the issue of substitutionary atonement as it's set before us, why and how Christ died. But I want to start by reflecting upon the overall context in which that takes place. And I think this passage that I've read gives us a good opportunity to do that. What this passage does is it sets the context of Christ's death within the context of the good news. And so what I want to do this evening is, first of all, look at what the good news is, and then see how Paul connects Jesus' death to that. And we're going to look at the good news for individuals. We will look at the even better news for individuals, because the picture is so much bigger than they are as individuals. Then we'll look at the motive for Jesus' death. And finally, the significance of Jesus' death. So first of all then, what is the good news? Well, the good news is laid out in part by Paul in verse 17. Therefore, he says, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new is come. What Paul is saying here is that those who are Christians Those who have identified with the Lord Jesus Christ by faith, by trusting His Word, they're new creations. They're not like new creations. Notice Paul does not say, if you're a Christian, you're like a new creation. That would imply a mere analogy with creation. We're actually new creations, Paul is saying here. When he looks at the phenomenon before him, when he looks at the church before him, when he looks at the individual lives that have been transformed by the Lord Jesus Christ, he knows that he's not seeing here something that is like a new creation, but something that is a new creation. When I was a kid, we had something called plasticine in the UK. It was the equivalent of Play-Doh here. And you can push Play-Doh around and make it into shapes. And perhaps your mom or your dad might come along and say, so what have you created today? Well, you haven't really created anything when you make something out of Play-Doh. You've reshaped something that already exists. What Paul is saying here, however, is that when somebody becomes a Christian, it's not that the Lord is reshaping something that already exists. There's such a dramatic break with the past that it's a new creation. It's something completely different. And underlying that, of course, is Paul's understanding of the human problem. What is the human problem? It's the human problem that we are not happy. that we don't find satisfaction in our work or our marriages or our families that we don't have enough money no for Paul the human problem is much more fundamental than that the human problem is that human beings are in rebellion against God and face death as the penalty for that rebellion and so powerful and profound a problem is that that no mere rule or technique we'll solve it Joe alluded again his introduction to me I made it's funny when people read stuff that you've written I have no recollection of writing that stuff at all but I'll take your word that it was me and not somebody using my name but one of the points drawn out there was that we live in a world obsessed with technique if we have a problem if there's a problem in society we need to pass a law to try to solve it or develop a technique to try to solve it if we're ill we pop a pill if we see somebody doing something wrong when we think well better education and maybe a law on that will stop it but the Bible sees the human problem as being so profound and so deep and so ultimate that no technique or rule can deal with it. The human problem of rebellion against God is not one that can be solved simply by learning to do better. What Paul says here is the only thing that will suffice for the human problem of rebellion and the death that comes as its penalty, the only thing that will suffice is new creation. It has to be that powerful. It's not a rule or a technique, Paul points people towards here. It's a person. He's going to culminate this passage by pointing to the Lord Jesus Christ. What you need, he says to the Corinthians, is not a technique. It's not a pill. It's not a rule. It's not better education. What you need is a person. The Lord Jesus Christ. The message of Christ's death and resurrection should still be a powerful one to us today. For we face the same problems as the Corinthians did in Paul's day. What is their basic problem? That they are in rebellion against God and one day there will be a reckoning for that rebellion. And the answer, Paul says, is Jesus Christ. Even today, when we live in a world where death has been shoved to the margins, we don't like to think about it. It still creeps in and encroaches every now and then. It's interesting, isn't it, how we've moved graveyards. I grew up in an old Gloucestershire village. The church was surrounded by graves. Generations of people would have gone to worship walking past the graves of their ancestors. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go to worship on a Sunday in church and to walk past the grave of your father or your mother or your brother or your sister? Death would have been a constant presence. We don't do that anymore. We don't do that. Anymore death has been shoved to the margins so that every now and then when it does intrude on our lives We're outraged by it a few years ago the comedian Joan Rivers. Do you remember Joan Rivers? She died in her 80s in hospital And there are all these demands for investigations into why Joan Rivers had died in hospital in her 80s Old ladies in their 80s die in hospitals every day you don't hear about it and then when you do hear about it because it's a celebrity somehow we feel something's gone horribly wrong but it has gone horribly wrong but not what you think it's not the fault of the hospitals it's the fault of human rebellion that has brought death as its penalty and that's where the power of Paul's message will lie because he will point people not to a technique and not to a rule but to the death and to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ, Paul is saying here, doesn't simply overcome the problems of the old creation. He translates those identified with him by faith into the new creation. Death is decisively overcome. Life is given. So that's good news for individuals, but it's good news for individuals because it's primarily good news for much more than individuals. Paul is using language here that if you trace it through the Bible indicates this is language of fulfillment of more than just individual salvation. Paul is using the language here of new creation to speak about much greater things than just an individual. In the first letter to the Corinthians he talks about the church as being the temple of the Holy Spirit. And if you trace temple language through the Bible, you realize that Paul's vision, the vision of the Bible, is that this, the great culmination at the end of time, will be a great temple. Heaven and earth will be a new temple. And Paul is writing to this tiny church in Corinth, a small church, probably 80 or 90 people, torn apart by internal factions, devastated by sexual immorality. drowning in a culture driven by money, status and power. And he writes to this church and he says, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit. You are the beginning, the in-breaking, the end of time. You are the in-breaking of the New Testament, the new temple, the new creation. It's helpful, I think, at this point to reflect a little bit on how the language of old and new creation is used elsewhere in the Bible. Paul is very consciously drawing here upon language that he finds in the book of Isaiah. The book of Isaiah is written at a very interesting time. Israel is in exile from the promised land, the land that God had given to her. The Lord has taken away because she's been so rebellious, and he's thrown her out into exile. And Isaiah, speaking to these people in exile, brings words of judgment, but he also brings some words of hope. And he expresses it in this way. Isaiah 43, he says this, Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. You're living in the desert now, he's saying, but a glorious time is coming when all things will be put right. Isaiah 65, he says, for behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. One day your exile will be overcome, he says. All things will be made new. Isaiah 66, for as the new heavens and the new earth that I make shall remain before me, says the Lord, social your offspring and your name remain. You might say, well, that's great. All this stuff about exile coming to an end. How does that apply to us today in Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, beginning of the 21st century? It applies in this way. We're all in exile, aren't we? Read the Bible from beginning to end. It's really the story of one long exile. from the moment Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden human beings are in exile why is it that we live in an era where certainly in the West and in America we have more money, better health care, better life expectancy certainly than the generations 100, 150 years ago we have less to worry about in real terms than any generation prior to us and yet the levels of prescription antidepressants, the devastating levels of teenage suicide rising every year it seems. Why? We're restless. We're in exile. Great fourth, fifth century Christian thinker, a man called Augustine, wrote his autobiography and in the very first chapter he said this, the heart is restless above all things until it finds its rest in Thee, O Lord. We live in a restless age. Why? We're in rebellion against God. We have thrown ourselves into exile from God and we are restless. And the answer is what? Well, Isaiah points us to it. The answer is a new creation being brought back from exile, being brought back from alienation with God into intimate fellowship and communion with him. Read the Psalms when you go home tonight. If you've got a Bible, look at Psalm 44, Psalm 74, Psalm 137. See there the agony of exile. And then reflect upon the world in which we live. There's something deeply wrong, isn't there, with our world? Teenage kids kill themselves every day of the week. Teenage kids who materially often have more than any teenage kid has ever had in history. Why? We live in a world of restless exile. And where is the answer? Well, here is the answer for Paul. It comes in verse 18, doesn't it? How do we overcome our exile? Paul says this, all this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. How do we overcome our exile and restlessness, Paul says? in Him who reconciled us to God. And that brings us then to the second part of what I want to reflect on tonight, and that's this. How is Jesus' death connected to all this? Why is Good Friday good? Yeah, it brings to an end the exile, it brings about reconciliation. But how? How? Those are just words unless we probe and explain them. Well, I think the answer here is in this great verse at the very end of the passage I read. Well, I want to focus our attention for the rest of the evening. What's Paul saying there? He's saying this. In the person of Jesus Christ, God himself, took human flesh to himself and entered into our world and our experience to crush our enemies. Profound beyond imagining. Pointed to in the Old Testament. Ezekiel 34. Ezekiel is full of some crazy stuff when you read it. But Ezekiel 34 is one of the clearer, more obvious chapters there. When the Lord looks down and he sees that earthly leaders have failed in Israel. And he says, I myself will be the shepherd of my people. That is fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ. And that brings me then to the question, so what is the motive? What is the motive for the Lord doing this? For coming and taking flesh and putting to an end the exile the dissonance that exists between us and God. Well, we find the motive laid out for us in short form in the Gospel of John chapter 3 in verse 16, when we're told this very famous verse, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. So the motive there is what? It's love. Straightforward enough. It's love. But that's where we need to be careful today, I think. Love is one of the most meaningless words in modern society. It has become an almost vacuous word. What does it mean? For most people I think we talk about love, it's a sentimental feeling. The person you love comes into the room, and you get a nice feeling in your stomach butterflies in your stomach or your pulse races a little faster there's a kind of squishy feeling when they're around and you feel good and that's love well what about when that person is descended into Alzheimer's disease surely love looks much more like a husband feeding his wife of 60 years who can no longer feed herself that's love And that comes closer to what the Bible means when it talks about love. God does not get a sentimental feeling when he thinks about those who've rebelled against him. God does not give his son as a present to us, as I might give my wife a present or a friend a present at Christmas. Well, is divine love like the highest form of human love, we might say? That between a husband and a wife? Perhaps, to some extent. Though, as I say, not so much the first time their eyes meet across a crowded room and they fall in love. Maybe more like when the husband is serving his wife, when she can no longer serve herself. Ultimately, though, I think God's love is of a different order to human love entirely. How would I put that? I would say this. God's love is creative, not reactive. Human love is generally reactive when you think about it. What do we say when we say, I fell in love with somebody? We mean, I saw somebody, and I saw something intrinsically lovely in them that attracted me to them. Their intrinsic loveliness pre-existed my love. That's not God's love for human beings. Listen to this, Romans 5 verse 8. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. What's the logic of that verse? The logic of that verse is that God's love is creative, not reactive. What do I mean by that? God loved us when we were still in and of ourselves utterly repellent to him. Somebody said to me, asked me, you know, why did you fall in love with your wife? And I'd say, well, I looked across the room and man, she was repulsive. And I just decided to make her lovely. my wife would probably have something to say about that after the service I'm sure but you'd all say that's a nonsense that's a nonsense and yet that's what God love is like it's how it's described in the Bible Martin Luther the great reformer put it this way the love of God does not find but creates that which is lovely to it for God so loved the world not because the world was intrinsically attractive God loved the world because it was a place full of darkness, and he delighted to make it light. That's God's love. So the motive for Christ's death, yes, it's love, but not because God sees us as lovely, has a predisposition towards Westerners because we're better than everybody else, feels sorry for us, and therefore is moved to bring us back from our rebellion. That would be cheap love, comparatively speaking. God's love is much greater than that. It is precisely because we are not lovely that God decides to love us and to make us lovely in Christ. So the motive then is love, but not love as you've ever encountered it before. Not love that is analogous to your love for your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your mom or your dad or your spouse. It is not reactive love, it is creative love. Secondly, that brings me then to the significance of Christ's death. Again, to verse 21 in 2 Corinthians 5, For our sake He made Him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. Background to this is an idea that comes up again and again and again in the Bible. The idea of substitution, of one person acting on behalf of another person, or more typically, acting on behalf of many people. Hold that in mind. Again, I've said one of the points about the Bible is this, it's very clear, where rebellion ends, rebellion ends in death. And from the get-go in the Bible, it's very clear that the death to which rebellion, human rebellion, tends and ends can only be dealt with by some kind of sacrifice. Genesis 3. Remember Adam and Eve, they sin and they fall. And the first thing, one of the first things they do is they make themselves clothes out of leaves. I think one of the old translations of the Bible says, they sowed themselves fig leaves and made themselves breeches. They covered themselves in leaves. And then God enters the garden and he finds them. And what does he do? He covers them in skins. Have you ever reflected on that? We tend to think they covered themselves with fig leaves because they were naked and ashamed. If nudity was the problem, fig leaves would have been an adequate solution. Covered up their private parts. Two final points on it. But no. God slays animals and clothes them in the bloodied skins of those animals. Why? He's sending a message. Your rebellion will end in death and only a sacrifice Only death is powerful enough to deal with death. And that continues, that sort of line of sacrifice continues in the Old Testament. We find it supremely in Leviticus 16, the so-called Day of Atonement, still celebrated today as Yom Kippur by the Jewish community. And in Leviticus 16, there's a sacrifice. Two goats, one will be sacrificed and the other one will be sent out into the wilderness. And just before the one goat is sent out into the wilderness, what does the priest do? He places his hand on the goat and he confesses the sins of the people over that goat and then sends it out into the wilderness. What is he doing there? He's identifying that goat with the people and with their rebellion. and sending it far, far away. When we think about sin, we often tend to think of sin as this or that action, don't we? If you were to hear somebody say, it's a slightly old-fashioned word now, but if you were to hear somebody say, oh, he's a terrible sinner, you'd think, oh, he's somebody who gets up to all the bad stuff. He commits this bad act and that bad act and the other bad act. And that's certainly an element of truth in that. Sins are individual actions of rebellion against God. But what Paul is pointing to here is something much more fundamental. That sin is actually the fundamental identity of those who are in rebellion against God. We might say, if you like, that our rebellion and who we are are inseparable. You can tell from my accent, I'm not an American. every July the 4th you celebrate American Independence Day I would say the illegal rebellion in the British colonies day as soon as that declaration was signed who are Americans? they're rebels they may never have fired a bullet yet but they're rebels at that point that's who they are that's their identity think about the war second world war When Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany in 1939, when Roosevelt declared war on the Axis powers, every single British person, every single American person is at war with the Axis powers. You may never have fired a bullet, you may never have joined the armed forces in those years, but if you had handed secrets over to the Japanese or the Germans, you'd have been in serious trouble. Because every single American, every single British person was at war. Their status was prior to their actions, if you like. The declaration of war was prior to any act of war by individuals. So then, notice what Paul is saying here. When Paul says he made him to be sin, he's not saying that Jesus simply took on his shoulders every individual sin we'd ever committed. He's not saying less than that, but that isn't all that he's saying. He's actually saying that Christ took our very identity as rebels against God upon himself. And his God treated him as if that was his identity. And he died for every person who's identified as a rebel against God. The wrath of God, we're told elsewhere, fell upon Christ. He took the punishment for our identity so that we might not have to take it ourselves. You might turn around and say at this point, but isn't that unfair? Isn't it kind of unfair that one person stands in, one good person, a person who's not a rebel, stands in and represents others? Well, you can come at this from various angles, but I would certainly say the principle of representation is one we live with every day. When the president goes abroad and negotiates with a foreign power, he represents every single American. Think about sporting events. I mentioned I'm a rugby guy. Every time Gloucester Rugby Club win or England win at rugby, I'll turn to my wife and I'll say, we won. I've never trodden on the turf at Gloucester Rugby Ground. I've never come out of the tunnel at an English international. I've never played as part of the team. The team has represented me, if you like. I feel I belong because they represent me. We see it again and again in the Bible. Was it unfair? Was it unfair that David went out and defeated Goliath on behalf of all the Israelites? We don't tend to look at that story and say, that's really unfair. Every single Israelite should have gone on to the battlefield and risked his life at that point. No, we think that's perfectly okay. for a champion to represent his nation? In taking on our rebellious identity and destroying it on the cross, God acts unfairly, if you want to say it that way, only as one acts unfairly who voluntarily pays the debt of somebody else. If you're bankrupt and somebody steps up and says, I'm going to write a big check and clear all your debts for you, Is your immediate reaction, oh, that's unfair. I really need to languish in bankruptcy and sort this out myself. If you did that, you could do that. You'd be an idiot. Complete idiot. We don't use language of fairness in that context. It's what the Lord does. He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us. And if you think that's unfair, then you're a fool. It's not unfair at all. It's the most amazing act of undeserved and unprovoked generosity the world has ever seen. Maybe we might say, well, God is foolish. Well, Paul has an answer for that. The foolishness of God is so much greater, he says, than the highest wisdom of man. Maybe God is foolish. He's still wiser than us. Thus Christ becomes sin, so that we might become righteousness. Takes us back to the beginning, we might become new creations, total, complete, absolute, reconciled with God. Reconciliation and new creation, two sides of the same coin, two ways of expressing the same thing. And when we think of it in those terms, when we set Christ's death in that context, as terrible and as horrific as it is, it allows me to answer that question that my parents couldn't answer for me so many years ago. Why is Good Friday good? It is good. It is counterintuitively good, we might say. Because we're reconciled to God by it. From now on, Paul says, we judge no one according to outward appearance. That includes Christ himself. The cross may look foolishness and pointless. to the outsider looking on. But when you set it in the context of the whole of the Bible story, it makes perfect sense and points us directly to the grace and to the creative love of God. And what does that mean for us very, very briefly? Well, what does Paul say it means for us? He says this, be reconciled. Be reconciled to God. How, we might say. Well, go to John, that verse I read from John. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him shall not die, but have eternal life. What John is saying there is both very profound and very simple. It's profound in that we can never plumb the depths of the creative love of a God who would send his son to die not for the lovely, but for the unlovely. It is simple because of the obligation it places upon us, which is what? Believe. Trust that Jesus Christ is who he claims to be. Trust your life to him. He has been through death and emerged the other side. He has done that not just for himself, but for all who trust in him to do it for them. We will each of us here one day wake up for the last time, and we will never go to bed again because we will die before nightfall. And when that moment comes, those who trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, trust in one who's already gone through death and come out the other side for them, and we'll bring them with him. Let us pray. O Lord God and loving Heavenly Father, we do thank you for the words of your scriptures. We pray now that you might press the glorious truths of your love and of the work of Jesus Christ upon our hearts, that we, Lord, who are rebels in our hearts, in thought and word and deed against you, might come to put our trust in him, that you might press his gospel upon our hearts, and that we might know through him, Lord, the power of the resurrection, even here and now. For we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.