And God, I pray you would help us all as we look at this text tonight to realize the vital importance of this to our faith and to the faith of our children and our children's children. And God, that there will always be a believing remnant, as you promised to the end of this age. I use these words and speak to the hearts of your people, we pray. In Jesus name, amen. Because we are a high tech church and always try to use technology as much as we can in our services, I have prepared an audio visual. Quade, would you help me and just kind of hand these out to everybody, one per customer? Yes, we are not behind the times. I will be getting to that in a moment, the handout that I have there. been looking at Paul's instructions to the church, to Timothy and 1 Timothy chapters 2 and 3 in particular, and mentioned that this is Paul, as we can see here, he's writing to Timothy, wanting to set everything in order so that when he comes, the church would be prepared and ready and worshiping the way that God intended. And so we're going to look then, beginning at verse 14. I started that last time, but I want to, especially tonight, spend some time in verse 16 because it is such an important document for us to look at and to believe. And I'm going to go a little deeper than usual. I mentioned a week or two ago in one of the messages that sometimes I hear people arguing about, well, you know, if you know the Greek or, you know, the Hebrew or, you know, and they act like that solves the issues. And I said, it doesn't always solve the issues. In fact, I think sometimes probably without controversy, more times it doesn't solve the issue. And so I'm going to show you tonight a place where knowing the Greek is very, very beneficial. We're going to look at that, but then we're going to look at some spots where knowing the Greek isn't going to help you at all. And so that's that's I think you're going to see we're going to have one spot where it is or maybe two kind of things you can see where it becomes helpful and then some other spots where it really doesn't help us at all. So we're going to look at these verses very closely because they are we really have one of the first creeds or catechisms, a hymn form given to us. So it's very important for us to look at this. Now, these old verses, verses 14 through 16, they're like a hinge. They're a pivot on which this whole book kind of goes one direction or another. It links what goes on before to what goes on after. That's why I wanted to read chapter 4, verses 1 through 5. And Paul is going to move from the mystery of godliness to the mystery of ungodliness in chapter 4. But before he deals with false doctrine and all the problems that false doctrine causes, he needs to deal with true doctrine first. And so that's why we have this. So you're going to see that this is the context of what we have. The true faith comes first. And so all of this, what he's saying is, as we follow him in order, we need to establish the roles in worship. We need to establish the roles of men, establish the roles of women in worship. That's chapter two. Once we've established how we should rightly worship, we need to have right leaders to perform the worship of the church. And here's how you choose the leaders that are going to be in your church. And then he listed qualifications for elders and deacons. And then he says, now here is the truth that this church must proclaim in their worship. And so if you do all of these things right, what I've listed in chapter two, chapter three, Now you'll be ready to counteract the false teaching that he's going to refer to in chapter four. And if you noticed, almost everything in this has to do with Christ and it has to what all has to do with Christ. And it has to do with the work of Christ and the person of Christ. And, of course, these are always the doctrines that are assaulted. And we did a men's retreat a little while ago on church history. And in that we found that these were the doctrines that were very early attacked, the doctrine of Christ's person, who he was, his nature, and also his work. This is what was early heretical teaching. Now, there's probably little doubt, if any, almost all the commentators are agreed that verse 16 is a hymn. It's put in hymn form. The question is, is Paul quoting the hymn that was already in use in the church or is Paul, by inspiration, giving a hymn that then would be used in the church? And I don't know that we can answer that particular question. It is. Probably obvious in most of your Bibles, depending upon how they do it, that this is obviously different. It's not prose. And so you probably it's set apart, but it doesn't come through real clearly in the English how lyrical it is. And that's why I say knowing the Greek is going to help us a little bit. And so that's why I gave you this handout tonight, as we're going to look at this and see how it's kind of arranged. I think it's a little technical tonight, but I think it's interesting technical. At least that's what I think. So you have to think that, too. But what we have here is obviously we have these six phrases, six verbs that drive the phrases, and then six objects of those verbs, of course, or six nouns that are important in regards to them. And the first thing I'll draw your attention to on the sheet that I handed out is if you lay it out like it's laid out on your sheet, And you try to correlate the nouns. So flesh, of course, correlates with nations and world. You go like this and you see these are all things that refer to this world, where on the other side you have spirit, angels, and glory. So you have the earthly things and the heavenly things like that. So when you draw arrows like that, and people do this all throughout the Bible, both Greek and Hebrew, and they call this chiastically arranged. And the reason they call it that is they put down as the Greek letter chi, which I put a larger text version of. It looks like our X in English. And that's, of course, what this ends up looking like. So there's a lot of phrases. There's a lot of poetry in the Bible. And a lot of the poetry is arranged exactly this way, chiastically. And like I say, both in the Old and the New Testament. And so that's the first thing that's kind of interesting about this. The other thing is the lyrical quality, and I'm always nervous when I'm reading through Greek because I'm never confident totally of my Greek pronunciation, although I'm confident in my reading of it, I'm just not confident in my pronunciation so much of it. But what you want to see is, if you look at English in the ESV version, What it does for the verbs to make them kind of alike is it puts an ed, but then there's two verbs in this that doesn't have that. Seen by angels. It doesn't have that ed. And taken up in glory doesn't have the ed. So it could have said something more like viewed by angels and received up in glory. Then you'd have that ed, ed, ed. But the ed is a very non-lyrical ending in English. It really doesn't do much of anything for rhyming quality at all. It's not a very helpful thing in that regard. But the Greek ending, as you can perhaps see if you look at every verb that begins every phrase there on the bottom of your page, it ends with a theta eta. Theta, the Greek letter Theta, and the Greek letter Eta. And so every first word of every phrase here, so the first words of each line, and then the first words after the comma in that line, all end with the same two letters, the. And so it becomes very much lyrical when read. So you see how everything ends in this A sound. Even the last word, which isn't a verb, still ends with that A sound. So it's very rhyming. in the Greek as you put that together, and you can emphasize the words with the ending of that. So it's very clear this is intended to be lyrical, and it's put together in this way. One man by the name of Walter Locke put it together this way. in flesh unveiled to mortal sight, kept righteous by the Spirit's might, while angels watched him from the sky, his herald sped from shore to shore, and men believed the wide world o'er when he in glory passed on high. There he rhymes the first two and the fourth and fifth lines and the third and the sixth lines to try to approximate the lyrical quality of this. But it is, it's obvious when you see it and you read it, this is definitely a lyrical kind of thing. So knowing the Greek helps you in that because you can see how it's put together with the English. You really can't, you can't duplicate it and so you lose something in that. But then Paul goes on to talk about this, and he introduces this by saying, great indeed, because of the greatness of the truth, because of the greatness of the God that we serve. Calvin says, because it does not treat of mean subjects, but the revelation of the Son of God. And because the object of our devotion is great, so our confession is great. Our religion isn't great because there's many adherents, or our religion isn't great because, you know, it's really a good religion as religions go. Our religion is great because we have a great God. We have a great Savior. And I have to go back here on this, and I think there's a little sly reference that Paul's making that we have to kind of go back to remember in the book of Acts. And again, this is being written to Ephesus. What happened in Ephesus? I referred to this before. Ephesus had one of the great temples, the Temple of Diana was at Ephesus. And if you remember what happened when Paul was in Ephesus and preaching, it says in Acts 1934, as he was preaching these truths, it says, but when they recognized he was a Jew for about two hours, they all cried out with one voice, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. For two hours, they cried out, great. That kind of reminds me of my old charismatic days. I mean, where we could, for two hours, say one particular phrase over and over and over again. But that's something, isn't it? They kept saying, great is Artemis, great. And Paul's saying, no, great is what we confess. That's what's great. It isn't Artemis of the Ephesians. The English standard says, great, indeed, we confess. I don't think that's I don't like the way it doesn't really bring out the word. The King James, I like better. It says without controversy. And that's really pretty literal to what the word meaning. It really could mean it really could be said this work could be said. This is acknowledged by all who've seen it. This this is this is a commonly acknowledged truth. Everyone who is in the mystery revealed knows that this is true. And then he says it is what is great is the mystery. And again, I told you before, it's not just something we don't know. A mystery isn't something we don't know about. But usually in the Bible, it refers to something that was hidden in times past, but since Christ has been revealed and any truth of God that's revealed to us. Well, any truth we have has been revealed, has been revealed by God is because God has opened our eyes to it. When Peter said, you know who Jesus was, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus said, Blessed are you, Simon of Arjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. When Paul writes of the mystery in Colossians 1.27, he says, To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. And again, you hear these same words. It is a mystery, but it is great. We understand part of it, but it's also a mystery because we can't comprehend all of it. It's way beyond us. As Paul says in this oxymoronic passage in Ephesians 3, 18 and 19, that you may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. How can you know something that surpasses knowledge? You can't. That's what a mystery is. We understand it, but yet there's parts of it we can't get to the end of. And so it's great. And this word for godliness here, the mystery of godliness, it's the word Eusebius. Eusebius, and the name Eusebius comes from that, if you've heard of that church figure. It means godliness, but everywhere I found it in the New Testament, it refers to the kind of godly behavior that a Christian is to have, to exhibit. Hendrickson refers to it and calls it piety in action. It's opposed, remember the false teachers that Paul's going to deal with in the second epistle. Remember what he said they have? They have a form of godliness. But they deny the power of form of it. It looks like it, but there's no power in what they acknowledge and what they confess. But this godliness is true, powerful godliness. John Trapp says. And the mystery of godliness, the gospel is called because being believed, it transforms men into the same image and stirs up in them admirable affections of piety. So as we meditate on the truth of Christ, it changes us into his image, into who he is in acknowledging these things. Well, let's look at the first two phrases. We'll spend a bit of time on them because they're very important. says he was manifest or manifested in the flesh. Now, flesh is one of those very, very common words, sarx in Greek. It's found over 150 times in the New Testament. And this is one of the times when knowing the Greek doesn't help you. You can say, all right, I know what the Greek word is here. All right, good for you. But this word is used in so many different ways in the New Testament. What is flesh? Sometimes flesh means simply our life in this earth. Paul says in Ephesians 5, 29, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it. Speaking about our life. Other times it refers to the sinfulness of that nature. Galatians 5, 13, you were called to freedom, brothers. Only don't use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love, serve one another. Sometimes it refers to our state before we were in Christ. Romans 7.5, while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. So you see those two things right there are confusing because you could say, well, are we in the flesh? Well, yes, but no, you know, according to Galatians 513. Yes, according to Romans 7 5. No. So the word doesn't settle this for us. Sometimes it means simply human standards. Paul says in First Corinthians 126, for behold, you're calling, brethren, that not many wise after the flesh, after human standards, obviously, is what he means there. So just because I understand the Greek word for flesh doesn't help me here because I don't know. I have to determine by the context. What does Paul mean by flesh? Well, here, I think we're on pretty solid ground. It's pretty obvious he's referring to the incarnation of Christ. When, as John would say in John 1 14, the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory. The glory is the only son from the father full of grace and truth. Now, this is very important, and it's very important in these days, because John says it's one of the tests of Antichrist. In 1 John 4, he says, By this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. So this was an important truth, because some people were saying he never came in the flesh. They were saying he was an angel, he was a spirit, and he never had any real true flesh. He looked like he had flesh. He looked like a man, but he wasn't a man. That's what people were saying. But the New Testament writers say they're wrong. He was a man. He was manifested in the flesh. This is part of Paul's other great creedal statement in Philippians 2, 5 through 8, when he says, have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus. who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being found in the likeness of man, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Now this is very important because you deny the humanity of Christ, you deny his suffering, you deny his suffering, you deny his death, you deny his death, you deny your salvation, and where are you then? So can't do that. That doesn't make sense. So Jesus Christ must be both man and God. And to deny either aspect of his nature is to deny our salvation. If he's not God, he certainly can't save me. And if he's not man, he doesn't go through what I go through and he doesn't live my life so that I might have his act of obedience imputed to me. So I need him to be God. I need him to be man. So when we say Christ was made flesh, we still make an exception. And Paul makes it so clear in Romans 8, 3, a verse I referred to several times that is so important because there's three words and you have to keep each one in or you become a heretic. It says that Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh. You can't take any of those words out. You can't say likeness of sinfulness, leave flesh out, because that's not what Christ came in, the likeness of sinfulness. You can't take out sinful because then you say he came in the likeness of flesh, which means he really wasn't flesh, but it was a likeness of flesh. And he can't take out likeness because then you say he came in sinful flesh, which he could not have come in if he used to be our savior. So you have to agree with Paul and leave them all there and say it is the likeness of sinful flesh. And this is a theological point, not a language point. It's understanding theology. in regards to that. Now, Calvin helps us to also notice that we need to pay attention to the word manifested. He says, Thus, Jesus Christ was true God. has he was the wisdom of God before the world was made and before everlastingness. It is said he was made manifest in the flesh by the word flesh. St. Paul gives us to understand he was true man and took upon him our nature by the word manifest. He shows that in him there were two natures, but we must not think there is one Jesus Christ, which is God and another Jesus Christ, which is man. But there is one God into nature manifested, which means he existed beforehand. Paul says in Galatians 4, when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law. Sent forth, which means he existed beforehand. Who being in the form of God, took upon himself the form of a man. The second phrase, the first phrase is pretty obvious when you look at it all, manifested in the flesh, incarnation. The second phrase is a little more difficult because it uses a word here that we're used to thinking about ourselves and not about Christ. Our versions to make that a little less, perhaps offensive to our nature, changed the word into vindicated. That's what the ESV uses. But the King James kept the word the way it was almost always translated, justified by the spirit. And this always caused a little bit of difficulty because we think of justified as what God has done to us who were sinners and God has taken us and said, no, you're not sinners anymore. I'm giving you the righteousness of Christ so that you are now justified. So we think of that, but we think, well, wait a minute. But why would Jesus need to be justified? Well, there is a very real sense in which this is very, very true and has to be acknowledged by us. You see, Jesus claimed several things when he was on the earth. He claimed to be the son of God. He claimed that he came to seek and save the lost. He claimed that at the end of three days after his death, he would rise again. Now, anybody can claim anything they want. But it's another thing to have it accomplished. So Christ becomes vindicated. Romans 3, 4 gives us a good use of this word. By no means let God be true, though everyone were a liar, as it is written that you may be justified in your words and prevail when you are judged. In other words, Let's try these words and God's words are seen to be vindicated and man's words are seen to be false. Now, sometimes when we illustrate justification, we talk about a courtroom and that's a good way to look at it. And we make sure that people understand the term justification is what we call a legal or a forensic term. And what we mean by that is we sometimes say, think about the opposite of justification. The opposite of justification is condemned. And so justification means we have not been condemned. So in other words, we have been in a courtroom and we have been declared innocent. Now, just because somebody is on trial and found to be innocent by the court doesn't mean that they're not guilty. There's many people who have been found guilty by courts of law or found innocent by courts of law that did exactly, you know, the old story of the guy that went on trial for stealing the watch. And the lawyer argued vehemently for him. And the judge finally said, well, I believe you and your client can go free. And he said, does that mean I get to keep the watch? I mean, that's the idea is that these guilty people go free. They are allowed to go free, but they're declared innocent. It doesn't mean that they weren't really guilty. Same with us. We're declared innocent. It doesn't mean we weren't guilty. We were extremely guilty. But think about it the other way. Are there innocent people who are declared to be innocent? And yes, there are. And that's a vindication also of them. Christ is innocent. And all these things do what the Spirit does is vindicate that he is exactly who he said he was. So when is he vindicated by the Spirit? When is Christ shown by the Spirit to be exactly who he said he was? Well, here we have several options, don't we? You might think of the first time when he was in the Jordan River being baptized by John and says, and the spirit like a dove came down upon him and the voice from heaven said, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. Well, that's a pretty strong vindication that he was who he said he was. But there were times he said that he was vindicated by his works in Matthew 12, 28. But if it's by the spirit of God, I cast out demons. Then the kingdom of God has come on to you. If what I'm doing is by the spirit of God, then I'm vindicated and the kingdom of God is here. But I believe personally that the vindication that Paul is referring to here is the resurrection. I believe that's the great vindication of the spirit. Peter says, For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit. And Paul says it so plainly in Romans 1, 4, and he was declared to be the son of God in power. He's talking about the resurrection, declared to be the son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ. By the spirit of God, he was declared to be the son of God. Now, he always was the son of God, but he's vindicated in his resurrection by the spirit of God in that moment. And so that's when I believe we are saying he's vindicated by the Spirit. So incarnation, line one. Resurrection, line two. When he died, he died under our sin. We know that. He died under a cloud. He was guilty, the crowd said. They proclaimed him to be that, even though Pilate and many others proclaimed his innocence. But Paul said, he who knew no sin was made to be sin for us. If all he did was die, we'd have no vindication. How would we know? We wouldn't know. How do we know we're saved? Well, we believe in a dead guy. Well, that doesn't help us. We need to believe in someone who's alive. Romans 425, to them, God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery. Well, that wasn't it. It is Romans 425, but I must have cut and paste a different verse. So let me. Says, who was delivered for our trespasses and raised for our justification, his death was our justification, but the resurrection proved it. The resurrection vindicates it. Jeff Thomas says Christ's resurrection was the de facto declaration of God in regards to him being just. It proved he was exactly who he said he was. Let's go back to Ephesus for a moment. Great as Artemis of the Ephesians. Great as Artemis. Two hours. We may have a service like that sometime. Two hours just shouting this out. Now, this is really great. Verse 35 in Acts 19, going back, And when a town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, Men of Ephesus, who is there, who does not know the city of the Ephesians, is temple keeper of the great Artemis, and, here it comes, of the sacred stone that fell from the sky. They had a stone that fell from the sky. That's pretty goose bumpy, isn't it? What is it true? What is the vindication? We've got a sacred stone that fell from the sky. There's no vindication to that religion whatsoever. But Christ has been vindicated. We have a rock who came from the sky, who took upon himself the form of humanity, went to the cross, took our sins, died and was raised again from the dead. That trumps any rock from the sky and it falls from the sky. That is a much greater system of belief than a stone that fell from the sky. Well, let me take a little bit of time. We'll get into these next ones here. Scene of angels. Now, here again is one of those cases where the language isn't going to help us any because the word angels, as I told you many times in Greek and Hebrew, can mean angels or messengers. There's times it has to be translated angels. There's times it has to be translated messengers. For example, one example would be James 225. In the same way, it was not Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the. There's Angelas. It has to be messengers because we know it wasn't angels. There were the two spies sent by Joshua to go into the city of Jericho. So we know there were men. They weren't angels. So we have to translate it messengers there. So the Greek doesn't help us. Is it angels or is it messengers? Well, let's suppose it's angels. Were there ever angels involved in this whole thing with Christ and and being visited or seen by angels? Well, again, go through his life at the birth of Christ, the angel saying angels, of course, were even present at the beginning in the incarnation and visiting Mary and others. They ministered to Christ in the wilderness. They appeared to him there. There was an angel that appeared at Gethsemane when he was praying to strengthen him. There were angels at his tomb at the morning of his resurrection, and there were angels present at his ascension. And the scriptures indicate that the very first worshipers of Christ were the angels in Philippians 2, 9 and 10, that every knee should bow and every tongue confess Jesus Christ is Lord in heaven and in earth, first in heaven, the angels. And we see the angels worshiping him in Hebrews one, six, when he brings the firstborn into the world, let all God's angels worship him. Well, that makes sense. Angels, and this could be talking about their ministry at the resurrection to seem there could be talking about his ascension. But what if we translate it scene of messengers? That also makes a lot of sense. In fact, it goes along very closely with another passage. First Corinthians 15, because after Paul says the gospel, we believe is that Jesus died for our sins, according to scripture, and raised the third day. He then goes on to list a series of appearances. He says he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at once, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. And the word appeared here, Paul uses here, he appeared to me, is the same word we have here, where it's a scene of messengers. So we could also make sense to say he was seen of the messenger. So he resurrected. The angels were there. They they saw him at his resurrection. He was then seen by also the messengers that were going to be sent forth into the world. And that seems to make sense to what goes on after this. If there's any difficulty in that, again, it's this this whole chiastic arrangement, because if we change this to Messengers, human messengers, we don't have this anymore because this no longer relates to spirit and glory. But if we keep the angels, then the arrangement stays the same. This is another difficulty that's coming up in the next phrase. But we've ran out of time, so I can't do that. But he was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the spirit, seen by angels. Next time we'll take up with proclaimed among the nations. Well, let's stand together tonight and we're going to sing the Apostles Creed together. I've never sung that out of our hymn book, but we're going to use a different tune because I...