seated and read the gospel. This is Jesus' great prayer just before he was put to death. When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you, for I have given them the words that you gave to me, and they have received them, and I have come to know in truth that I came from you, and that they believe that you sent me. I am praying for them. I'm not praying for the world, but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and have not one of them has been lost, except the son of destruction, that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake, I consecrate myself that they also may be sanctified in truth. I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may be all as one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they may be one, even as we are one. I in them, you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and love them, even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that they also whom you have given me may be with me where I am to see my glory and that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. Oh, righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name. I will continue to make it known that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them. Let's pray together. Father, we consider here these words of your only begotten son as he prays for himself and he prays for his disciples and he prays even for us all these centuries later. We were all in his mind. before he went to the cross where he would die for our sins. So we wanna thank you for this and we wanna ask that you would open our eyes to the glories of Christ this day and the reasons why he came to us. Pray that your Holy Spirit would be pleased to illuminate, to convict, to comfort, to teach, and to do all the things that you send him to do in the midst of your congregation. We ask these things in Jesus' name, amen. I just want to read one verse that I'm going to talk about throughout the sermon as we begin this. And this verse is John 17, 1. We just read the whole chapter. I just want us to think about this one verse for a moment. Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you. That's going to be kind of the focus of what I'm talking about this morning. I begin by asking this question, why? Why me? Why this? Why now? Why whatever it is that God has brought into my life? So this why question is really at the heart of what it means to be a human being. It's the question that gets at our purpose for existence, our reason for being on this planet. Everyone asks this question, why, at one time or another. In fact, even Jesus asked it. Do you remember? Why have you forsaken me? That's the Lord Jesus asking that question. Many stop asking this question once they feel that they've not received a good answer. In this vein, I came across a quote this week from, of all people, Friedrich Nietzsche. Here's the quote. He whose life has a why can bear almost any how. I thought that was a pretty profound quote. And I wanted to know the context, so I started searching. It's actually a proverbial statement that he writes in one of many in a series that he calls Maxims and Arrows. And because of this, it's really pretty hard to find a larger context to it. But I found somebody who tried. First, perhaps you may recall another maxim of Nietzsche's. God is dead, Nietzsche. Okay? Now unfortunately, most people are acquainted with that statement only from the bathroom stalls where somebody has vandalized them, okay? Nietzsche is dead, God is often the reply that you'll see underneath it. Because people are under the impression that Nietzsche actually thought we killed God. Nietzsche was an atheist. But what he meant by the phrase was that modern man no longer sees a reason to believe in God. The killing of God is cultural, it's not a literal killing. We sort of just grew up, I suppose is what he would say. But since God is the bedrock upon 2,000 plus years of Western civilization, it must all come toppling to the ground because God is dead. He admitted this. In other words, when he says God is dead, he writes it as a lamentation. Did you know that? He thought that as a culture everything would turn nihilistic, meaningless, relativistic, and immoral. And he didn't like the thought of where that might lead. Now Nietzsche hoped that the philosophers and other, here's the quote, free spirits illuminated by a new dawn. a new dawn without God, would help the poor, pathetic, ignorant, and superstitious masses reinvent the foundation of a new civilization, in the words of one Nietzsche blogger, upon the affirmation of life, because apparently Christianity doesn't affirm life or something. In fact, his prophecy was dead on. We are living today in the rubble of the philosophical bombs that were left by the great thought explosions of the 18th and 19th centuries. You know the words rationalism, existentialism, communism, utilitarianism, naturalism, nihilism, And the bloodiest century in all of human history that came in their wake, the 20th century. Over 100 million people murdered in wars. So make no mistake, Nietzsche was not a friend of Christianity. In fact, he attacked it relentlessly. And so, going back to that original quote, commenting on this, somebody writes, Nietzsche's assault on Christianity was on a religion of pity that glorifies weakness. You might remember one other thing Nietzsche's known for, the Übermensch, the Superman. He didn't like pathetic, suffering people. He wanted supermen. This fellow continues, I first encountered Nietzsche's ideas in 1958 while reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl several times cites Nietzsche as saying that, quote, he who has a why to life can bear almost any how. So that's the first quote I started with this morning. This fellow says, I thought that that was a strong apology for Christianity, and I did not realize until reading Nietzsche that it is his point of attack. Nietzsche accuses Christianity of glorifying suffering and giving it meaning. The priest class encourages weakness and suffering. The poor are kept in place by the promises of the reward hereafter for sufferings patiently born. And end the quote. And I thought, this is very revealing. It turns out that Nietzsche did not like Christianity's why answer. And I believe Paul speaks directly to him 1,800 years before Nietzsche was born when he calls our answer the foolishness of God and a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. So with that said, let's address in this final sermon on the W's of Jesus's of Jesus, the ultimate existential and practical question, which is why? Why did Jesus come here? Why did he do the things that he did? Why would he suffer when he was blameless? Why would he put up with you and I and the rest of this rebellious world and do even more than put up with us? I'm going to answer this question by looking at three related things. First is the why concerning his father. Second is Jesus' own personal why. Third, the why that pertains to you and me. And that third thing is going to be talking about the Spirit. And so this is my attempt at a Trinitarian answer to this question, because all things, especially the coming of Jesus, originate in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And my prayer, really it's been my prayer for this entire series, is that after hearing these things, you will know and understand the only answer that God gives you that can satisfy your deepest longings and solve your most difficult questions and give you hope in a civilization that's filled with increasing external evil and chaos. People may not like this answer. People who are full of pride in their own intelligence and self-importance. But as history always shows, and is doing so in ways that are beyond the worst nightmares of anyone living 100 years ago could have predicted, this answer remains as true now as it ever has been. So with that, let's turn to trying to answer why of Jesus. When Jesus was about to die, he began to offer up his longest recorded prayer, and he began it with these words. Father, the hour has come. Glorify your son that the son may glorify you. So this is going to be the key verse this morning. The glory of God becomes the great reason that Jesus would die on the cross. The father sent the son for this purpose. For his part, the son did this, he says, so that he might bring glory to the father. It's a perfect desire to glorify somebody else. This is the ultimate act of love on Jesus' part. See, everything Jesus did, he did as a faithful son for his loving heavenly father. Verse four in chapter 17, still in the prayer, says, I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. Indeed, Jesus tells us at the beginning of his ministry that this is exactly why he came. He says, as he begins his sermon on the mount, do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. That was his work. the fulfilling of the law and the prophets. So what does that mean, to fulfill the law of prophets? It means that he accomplished the work the Father sent him to do. The Father gave him some things to do, Jesus did those things. Our Lord said, I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but to do the will of him who sent me. So, here you need to understand a couple of things. We're gonna talk about the active and passive obedience of Christ for a moment. You ever heard these terms? The active obedience, the passive obedience. You read them in any systematic theology. It's tempting to think that the active obedience refers to Christ's life, all the things that he did actively, and that the passive obedience refers to his death because he passively died on the cross. In fact, the terms refer to his entire ministry from the beginning to the end. all of his work is both active and passive simultaneously. So the act of obedience means that Christ met and fulfilled the demands of the law. Put it more simply, it means Jesus obeyed God. And that included dying as a sacrifice on the cross. So his death is part of his act of obedience. The passive obedience means that he undertook all so that he might take the curse and condemnation due for your sin. In other words, he met the penal requirements of God's law when it is broken. And this means he had to come as a human born under law. So even his birth and the timing of it, all these things are his passive obedience. I want you to think here about some other things like types and prophecies as it regards Jesus' work and his obedience to the Father. Many things were predicted of the Messiah. And each time something new was fulfilled in those prophecies, it glorified the Father who knows all things and predestines all things according to the purpose of his will. Well, sometimes those were carried out passively by Jesus, like the place of his birth or going down to Egypt. I mean, he's two years old. He didn't tell his father, take me down to Egypt, okay? So it's passive. Other times it's carried out actively by him, such as when he willingly goes to the cross. So that's fulfilling prophecy. But at all times, it's through the love of the Father and the overshadowing of the Spirit that he does his work. And it's all done to glorify God. Now this in my estimation is the first reason why Jesus did all that he did. This is what he himself seems to tell us. It's the first commandment after all, right? To have no other God before Yahweh. And so he would not give his glory to anyone else. He would glorify his God, his Father in heaven. That's why he did what he did. Now this is central and foundational. Because it means that if Jesus carried out all of his hows in life, through this why to glorify his father, that should not this be the reason you do all things too? What changes would occur in church, in families, in schools, in governments, if everyone began doing all that they did because they knew from the scripture that this is what pleased God? Virtually no one even thinks about this reason these days because we don't teach it. And I wonder how many even know it or believe it. But I promise you, if you did everything you ever did from here on out with only this reason for why you were doing it, all of those things that you worry about, fret about, struggle with, would take on a completely different perspective in your heart. I was tempted when I was thinking about this. to say that all of your worries would go away. That's not true. The worries of Jesus didn't go away in terms of he didn't want to die on the cross, but it put things in a completely different perspective, and he was able to deal with everything sinlessly. As Jesus himself shows you when he's about to willingly hand himself over to the authorities, this is what he prays, and you know it well. Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me, but not my will, but yours be done. In other words, it's not about Jesus's personal glory, it's about his father's glory. And often the strength of the glory of God he went to face his greatest ordeal. The glory of God begins with the father, but it doesn't end there. It also includes himself. In fact, Jesus came to this earth because of something he wanted. And believe me when I tell you that he didn't want to die, okay? It was something else that he wanted. Think of the psalm, ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. So what is that verse talking about? Well, this is what the father says to the son, ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. And do you know what that presupposes? That presupposes that the son thought, yes, father, I want that. Give me those things. Have you ever thought about that verse like that? Well, what is asking for the ends of the earth to be your own possession, if not a desire for glory? Jesus says in the text we just looked at, that he wants to glorify the Father. So we'll return to John 17, one. Just before he says that, he begins by asking, Father, glorify the Son. That is Jesus asking the Father for Psalm 2-8, in my opinion, and for other passages to be his. He calls it his own glory. Basically this, Father, glorify me. Give me all these nations. Make them my possession. Exalt me to your right hand. Cause me to be the king of kings. Make all things in heaven and earth subject to me. Have you ever thought about it like this? I don't believe it's common for people to think that Jesus came to this earth because he wanted something for himself. especially not his own glory. Instead, it's probably much more often the case that we think that he did it only because of someone else. And we've seen that that's true. He came because his father wanted him to. It's important to understand, though, that Jesus came here of his own volition because there were things that he wanted. This means that everything Jesus did, he did not just because from a motivation of glorifying the father, but because he greatly desired to be king of heaven and earth. This was his rightful birthright, if you want to call it that, even though, of course, he's the only begotten eternal son of God. Imagine if Jesus gave his birthright to someone else, like, say, Satan, who's called the prince of this world. Have you ever heard of Edward VIII? Some of you who know your British royalty might say, yeah, I know who he was. Most of you, if you're like me, would say, I don't have the foggiest idea who Edward VIII is. Edward reigned as King of England for less than a year before he abdicated the throne. One site explains, Edward was the most popular Prince of Wales Britain has ever had. Consequently, when he renounced the throne to marry Miss Wallis Simpson, the country found it almost impossible to believe. The people as a whole knew nothing about Mrs. Simpson until early in December 1936. Mrs. Simpson was an American, a divorcee who had two husbands still living. This was unacceptable to the church, as Edward had stated that he wanted her to be crowned with him at the coronation, which was to take place the following May. So Edward abdicated in favor of his brother, George VI, and took the title Duke of Windsor, and he went to live abroad. So even though the most popular prince up to that point in history is Edward, history does not remember Edward fondly. Abdicating the throne is not a good thing, much less is breaking church law because of your own personal whims and fancies. How much more if Jesus had disobeyed his father or decided he just didn't want the throne that was rightly his? To receive this throne, which would become his glory, Jesus would not seek it by glorifying himself, but by glorifying others. This is the backwards nature of the kingdom of heaven from the kingdoms of men. From celebrities to athletes to politicians, unless of course they're the wrong party, we honor those in our culture who seek their own glory. It's why narcissism is pandemic. The more you glorify yourself, it seems, at least if you can back it up, the more money you make, the more popular you become. Now there's a few who break this trend by doing what they do for the glory of others, but these are looked upon as quaint aberrations. Why would they do something like that? Our world knows little of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, in part because the greatest message of self-sacrifice for others has nearly been silenced, first and foremost through self-imposed silence in pulpits who talk about anything these days but the one message that gives the most profound why answer a person can ever have. To begin to get at this answer, I want you to think about the means by which Christ's work comes to you. the Holy Spirit. The apostle contrasts two ministries. He contrasts the ministry of the law through Moses and the ministry of the reconciliation that we have with God through the Holy Spirit. He says, will not the ministry of the Spirit have more glory? And he concludes, we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. There's a glory that belongs to the Holy Spirit and it's the glory of God to glorify the Spirit. This happens, we are told, when God gives His Spirit to anyone who is justified by faith in Christ. John 7, now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given because Jesus was not yet glorified. The Spirit will glorify the Son by taking what is Christ and declaring it to you. And then incredibly, the Spirit will glorify us with Christ as we partake in his sufferings, as we suffer for his name. And in this way, the Spirit is glorified as God rests upon you. But this all happens because Jesus says, when I ask the Father, he will give you another helper to be with you forever. the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name. And when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness about me." In other words, this is Jesus' work as it concerns the Holy Spirit for you. So we talked about His work. He came to do the works of His Father, and part of that work is to send the Spirit to His people. And so the ultimate question we need to ask is why would he do all of this in terms of you and I? So there's a serious problem that you and I have. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. This is the exact opposite of Jesus. And I mentioned a moment ago that this world knows little of self-sacrifice. The Apostle Paul knew the same truth when he said this, very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man, someone might possibly dare to die. Self-sacrifice, that hardly ever happens, he says. But he immediately goes on to say, in a verse that we looked at under the when question, but God demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. So for the rest of the time, I wanna focus on the event Jesus prayed about in our key verse, his death. Go back to John 17, one again. Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you. In other words, that glorification has as its ultimate context, the hour has come. The hour was the hour of his death, an event he had been predicting for three years in various ways and nobody seemed to get. It's truly remarkable that God tells you in his word that you have fallen short, and yet God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Do you understand how incredible that is? You have fallen short of his glory, and God so loved the world that he gave his only son. This tells you first and foremost about God, not you. But when you understand it in light of yourself, then it shines that much more light upon God and why Jesus would come. Why would God do this? In many ways, the answer to that lies in his heart alone. I don't understand why God would love the world that hates his guts. Why would God do that? We could answer it in a lot of ways, I suppose. God is love, it's just what he is. But I can't mine all the depths of that truth. But nevertheless, it is true. And it is true, and it needs to be shouted from the rooftops that the God that I have forsaken loves me. So let's look at the context of John 3, 16, this most famous of all verses. Go to John 3, 16 in your Bible, and go to the two verses that are right before it, because I want to show you something. People talk about John 3.16 all the time. You know, the banner man in the football games, John 3.16. But what's its context? It's preceded by 14 and 15. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up. So this refers to his death. But so that you can see that it is the death of Jesus where the love of God is in sending his son is most evidently seen. I want you to notice the parallel. Look at the beginning of 14. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. Now go to verse 16. For God so loved the world. Now go back to 14. And so must the son of man be lifted up. And now go to the next part of 16. That he gave his only son. There's a parallel there, the son and the son. Now go back to 15. That whoever believes in him may have eternal life. Now go to the end of 16. That whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. It's the exact same thing. In other words, the way that God loves the world refers directly to the death of Jesus on the cross where he is lifted up. So what is the death of Jesus about? Why did he die? I thought here, the best way that I know of to talk about this is to look at the different theories of the atonement that have been proposed in theology throughout church history. And in my mind, each one of these shines a unique light through a different point in the prism upon the glory of God. So I'm gonna talk about, I think, about five of these. There's many more than that. I just brought up Romans 5.8, and again it says, God shows his love for us, and that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. And here I just want you to think about the first part of that verse. God shows his love for us. He shows us something in the death of Christ. He shows his love. So based on this and other passages, some have concluded that Christ's death is a kind of moral influence upon sinners and Christians. Lewis and Demarest, who are my professors at Denver, explained in their book, Integrative Theology, that the focus here is on, quote, the change of attitude Christ's death produces in sinners. This may or may not be true depending on the work of the spirit in a person's heart through the gospel. But to put it in another way, most advocates of this theory are modern liberals. The originator of the idea was actually Pelagius. So most proponents claim that there were no obstacles in God that needed to be overcome in order to restore sinners to fellowship with their creator. Jesus didn't have to do anything else except be an example so that then people can lift themselves up by their own bootstraps as they see this great example of Jesus. Now, of course, if you just take it at that, it's deeply flawed. And the problem comes, and frankly, this is true with several of these views, when the person who talks about a moral influence actually denies other aspects of the atonement are necessary, and almost always that deals with penal substitution. They don't like that one. But I wanna ask a question here, one that I don't hear often asked when people talk about these things. Does it mean that the kernel that they have latched onto is therefore wrong? Or to put it another way, must this be an either or? Consider Peter, for to this you have been called because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps. In the past, I've been critical of an old book that has gone through various stages of popularity. It's called In His Steps. And I've done this because the focus of that book is on the example of Jesus, as if he and his work are only an example and everything falls upon you to follow him. But does it follow that because the major theologies are missing in Christ's death, that it's not an example? Well, only if you wanna throw Peter out of the Bible. He says it's an example. Now clearly Jesus's death is an example and a demonstration of God's love. And clearly this love is given according to the scripture so that it might be an example for you to follow. The spirit may use this as the gospel is preached to reach the heart of a Christian who needs to be spurred on to do good works in their sanctification. How can I sin like that when Jesus did this for me is the question you might ask. And so the work of Christ, especially in his death, is a great moral example. It is part of why he came. Some people will say, nope, he didn't come to do that at all. I totally disagree with that. There's a second view. It's called the governmental theory. This is the idea that Christ's suffering upholds law and serves the interests of moral government. In other words, it affirms that God is the ruler who preserves moral government. They use a key verse that's found in Isaiah 42 that says, the Lord was pleased for his righteousness sake to magnify his law and make it glorious. Now admittedly, when you look at the context, that doesn't seem to have much to do about Christ's death, but it's one of the key texts that they use. Christ's death is therefore viewed as an offering to God that displays divine justice. In Lewis and Demarest's words, it communicates God's hatred of sin and it strikes fear into the hearts of persons so that they will forsake evil and seek personal reformation. In other words, in this aspect, it's not unlike the moral influence theory. You look at what Jesus did, you see that it communicates these things about justice and so it makes me want to be like that. And so therefore, it's like in another way, the moral influence theory, that it's usually held by people on the far left theologically. For example, the guy who brought this to prominence is a guy named Hugo Grotius. He became the darling of later Armenians when he insisted that Christ did not bear the full penalty of human sin, nor did he propitiate God's wrath. So he says, it's a governmental theory, but it's not a penal substitution. And frankly, sometimes guys bring wrath upon their own heads when they're pig-headed like this. I get frustrated when professors and pastors in the past or present teach these things as either-ors, because when you create a false dichotomy, you lose something not only important but biblical by forcing you to choose between friends. And this can also cause us to not listen to God's word or hear others who disagree with us as we ought, even when they themselves are being obstinate and hard-headed and downright hostile in the way they present a thing like Grotius was. This view, in fact, has ramifications for an individual's life and for the church's mission and the way that the world is to operate under God's law as his sword on earth. And as we're seeing in our day, when nations lose total sight of Jesus's death, look at what happens in a society. It totally disintegrates and it happens very, very quickly. I'll give you an example of that. In Ireland, I asked this week some people about why in the world did these people in this Roman Catholic country legalize abortion for the first time in their history this year. And they said, you want to know what? Break it down by age. Those who were 70 and older voted almost completely against legalizing abortion. Those who were 50 and older, something like that, 45 and older, it was about half and half. And those who were younger than 40, it was like 95% wanted to legalize abortion. One generation is all it has taken. One generation that has forsaken God, forsaken the cross, don't care anything more about Christianity, and boom, it's all done. One generation. Okay? Perhaps a better passage for this theory is found in Philippians 1. For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake. engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have. Suffering like Christ suffered. So it's kind of still a moral influence idea. But none of this moral reformation of a person or the church or society would be possible if atonement didn't also have certain other components. This is where things get much more interesting to me. The remaining three views that I will look at get at the more objective work of Christ rather than this subjective, how does it make me feel sort of a thing. And they answer much more deeply the why question for you. So the first one I'm gonna look at is called the satisfaction theory. This is the view of the great medieval theologian Anselm. Anselm claims that sin is the failure to render to God his due, namely, entire subjection and obedience. When a person disobeys God and sins, he offends God's honor and violates the divinely ordained order of the universe. God's nature is such that he requires either satisfaction or punishment for sin. In other words, Justice is at stake when you sin against God. Jesus said this of his death. I have come to cast fire on the earth and how I wish it were already kindled. Hendrickson comments the fire of which Jesus speaks and all probability refers to the judgment of God of God upon the sins of his people. That judgment would be rendered at Calvary. It is Jesus himself who was satisfied God's justice and bear the punishment. Satisfy justice. What this theory adds to this multifaceted death of Christ is that he satisfies the demands of justice. In Colossians, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands, he set it aside, nailing those legal demands to the cross. The legal punishment for sin is what, do you know? It's told you in Genesis 3. Or two, it's death. When you sin against God, legally you must die. You're sentenced to a death penalty. Which sin? Whose sin? There's no distinction here. All sin and all are sinners. Jesus' death covers the legal debt for these things. What did Christ do on the cross? He died. His death satisfies God's justice for sin. Nothing else needs to be done or can be done to make things right. His death is perfectly sufficient for anyone because he satisfies the demands of justice. That's what that view adds to our thinking. There's another one. Jesus did more, and thank God that he didn't just leave it at that. For if it's just a satisfaction and a moral influence, all would be left in their sins because there would be no power to break its bondage. The earliest and most well-known view of the atonement in the first thousand years of church history is what's called Christus Victor. Essentially, this is Christ's cosmic victory over sin, death, and Satan. The classic text used is in the Church Fathers, it's probably marked 1045, that says, for even the Son of Man came not to serve, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. Now today, many people poo-poo the idea that Christ would, would or could pay a ransom to Satan. I mean, God is king, right? God's the one offended, what is Satan? People forget or they don't know about divine counsel theology anymore like they did in the early church. They forget that Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth. They don't seem to remember that he's called the prince of the world. They don't understand that we are by nature children of wrath, slaves of the power of the prince of the air and darkness. Now, it isn't that Satan has an inherent legal hold on humans. He isn't God. Rather, it's that God gave humanity over to Satan at Babel, as Moses tells us in Deuteronomy and Paul explains to the Athenians. Think of it like a covenant that men made with the devil at Babel, kind of the first Faustian bargain. And as such, because men broke covenant with God and ran off to marry another, Satan has a legal hold on the nations, all the nations except for Israel, whom Yahweh took for his own possession. Jesus' death then is an offering for the world, and it defeated the legal hold that Satan had, thereby allowing Christ to legally save anyone he wants to without having to become national Jews. I still have to become spiritual Jews. And why, it's why he can no longer deceive the nations. And it's why all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to the church and why the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. There's two other scripture for this I think are important. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him. That refers to the heavenly powers and principalities that are mentioned so often in the New Testament. And then another one, Hebrews 2. Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook in the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil. And 1 John, whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil's been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. That's Christus Victor. As the old song teaches, up from the grave he arose. You know how it goes? With a mighty triumph for his foes. He arose a victor from the dark domain. Christus Victor. But the last song line of that song says, and he lives forever with his saints to reign. And that takes us to the last and probably the most important aspect of the atonement. At least as far as you are personally concerned, we call this substitutionary atonement. This is foreshadowed. You go, what's a substitutionary atonement? Well, it's foreshadowed for you in the near death of Isaac on Mount Moriah as a sacrifice. He was to be a sacrifice, but instead God graciously provided a ram that became a burnt offering in the place of his son. Because there can only be one human sacrifice for sins. Isaac wouldn't be it. Isaiah tells you, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace and with his wounds we are healed. That's the heart and soul of substitutionary atonement. Christ dies in the place of sinners, bearing their punishment so that you can be saved. Second Corinthians 521 he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in him. It is this substitutionary death him for me. That becomes the basis of Jesus' teaching. It is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish. Do you understand the ramifications of this? If Jesus does not die on the cross, everyone in here must die for their sin. Eternally. That's what Jesus is saying. It's better that just one man die than that the entire nation should perish. See, all ancient peoples knew that God had set up a system whereby an innocent could appease the God's wrath. So with the pagans, it becomes human sacrifice. And God would have none of that because only one man could die for others. And it has to be a perfect man. But he did install animal sacrifices that would foreshadow this and simultaneously show the need for people to be atoned and to be atoned by something that is perfect or unblemished. This was God's grace in giving them a sacrificial system. So why? Well, here's where the rubber meets the road. Luke 19.10, for the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. That's an answer to the why question, isn't it? He came to seek and save the lost. He did not merely make it possible for men to be saved, should they believe upon him. He came to accomplish it through his entire life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, giving of the spirit and second coming. This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is where the Holy Spirit becomes so important. For God does this by the Spirit, who effectually calls all God's elect as they hear the gospel, that Jesus has done all things necessary for you to be forgiven of anything that you have ever done. It is the atoning death that makes all this possible. As you think about these various aspects of Christ's death, I want you to think about the offices of Christ that we talked about in the who question. What are the three offices? Prophet, priest, and king. I'm going to attach these to the theories of the atonement. As prophet, Jesus' death encourages you to obey him and live for him. It's the moral theory. It shows the entire world that he takes the law seriously, because he's upheld the law, even as societies and churches and individuals are also supposed to do. As a priest, he mediates between God and man, offering himself as a sacrifice that upholds God's holiness and justice, and atones for your sins. That's the satisfaction and substitution angle. And as king, he rules over this world, that's the governmental idea, having conquered the one who has the power over death, that's Christus Victor. They're all important, and they all show you different aspects of why he came here. Now as I conclude, these are things that Nietzsche and so many others cannot accept. Even many Christians do not have them, do not want to have them all. There is foolishness here. There's foolishness in the way we would have done it if it was up to us, because we are glory seekers for glory's sake, for our own sake. Nietzsche created a parody of Christianity in his mind, as all unbelievers do, and he blew his straw man down like the big bad wolf and the three little pigs. Why? Because he could not stomach who Christ was and he felt it weak what he had come to do. He ignored where he come to do it, when he did these things was wholly irrelevant, but most of all he created his own why to satisfy the how of his choosing. People are always asking pastors the more practical questions like, Pastor, how do I do this? Or, where should I do this? Or, what do I do with this? They want to know how to live, and rightly so. But as Nietzsche did get right, you need the why in order to root everything else. Indeed, he who has a why can bear almost any how, as we started off with. Now it was probably Viktor Frankl who was more than even Nietzsche responsible for making that quote famous. So who's Frankl? I mentioned him in that quote early on. Frankl was a Jewish Holocaust survivor who wrote down his experiences in a bestseller that he called Man's Search for Meaning. In the first half of that book, he deals almost entirely with surviving the concentration camps. And Wikipedia says that he was in Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were murdered, and two camps affiliated with Dachau. So he went through it. Someone writes, he doesn't go into detail about the ovens and gas chambers. Instead, he explores the mundane stuff of torture and why he didn't run into the wire. That is what they used to do. They would electrocute themselves on the fences as their own preferred means of suicide because things were so bad in those camps. He became interested in why some people have resilience even in the most difficult suffering. This author goes on to state then a fascinating point. Though it goes against all of our commonly held beliefs, the people who survived the concentration camps were not the toughest or the sturdiest. They were the ones who were sensitive and had developed an interior life upon which they could draw and into which they could withdraw. Frenkel says this in as many words in his own book. So immediately after quoting that quote of Nietzsche, he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how, this is what Frenkel writes. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. As for myself, when I was taken to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine, ready for publication, was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helps me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in. For instance, when in a camp in Bavaria, I fell ill with typhus fever, I jotted down on little scraps of paper many notes intended to enable me to rewrite the manuscript should I live to see liberation. I'm sure that this reconstruction of my lost manuscript in the dark barracks of a Bavarian concentration camp assisted me in overcoming the danger of cardiovascular collapse. In other words, he found his why. He found his purpose for making it through the how of the death camps. Here's the thing, Frankl was not a Christian, and this is hardly an eternal satisfactory why? What, just so you can write a book and hopefully make a name for yourself if you should be rescued? You've got to be kidding me. Furthermore, perhaps even showing how fragile these man-made why answers can be, Franco was not without serious controversy in the years after publication. You see, several scholars actually called into question just how grim his time in those camps actually was. It appears that he was hardly at the bottom rung of the Jewish prisoner ladder, starve and work nearly to death only to find himself gassed in an oven at the end. He was there. But were the experiences his own or more just those of the people he was observing? My point is, when your why isn't rooted in the rock, in the Lord Jesus Christ and his work in forgiveness and salvation on your own behalf, and the glory of God, then at the end of the day, if something gets in your way to fulfilling your own how, through your own smuggled in why answer, very little is going to stop you from getting it. For it has become your reason for existing. In other words, ethics, truth, and goodness, it's all expendable. Just ask Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh as the latest high-profile case in point. Somebody lied. And the cost may very well be Western civilization itself. For at stake is one of the most foundational of all principles, presumed innocence until proven guilty in a court of law. Destroying this takes us right back to the Salem witch trials and the burning of Christians for simply translating the Bible. See, nobody's safe when this kind of stuff happens. Beloved, you need to know and be fully satisfied and personally invested in the why of Christ. I can tell you about it, but it's up to your own heart. I can't do that for you. That why roots and grounds you in your deepest heart in the who and what and where and when of all that he has done. Why did Jesus come? I came that you might have life and have it abundantly, he said. And this in turn is the only thing that by God's grace, through the means of grace, by the Holy Spirit, that will enable you to go out of here and carry out the how of your own salvation to the glory of God. For these questions encompass the totality of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the power of God unto salvation. Jesus said, I have come into this world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice. I have to ask you, have you heard his voice calling you to repent of your sin and come to the living God that you may have forgiveness of sins and life more abundant than you could ever dream or imagine? He is a magnificent, perfect Savior. He is God in the flesh. He accomplished all this and more in the pages of scripture in the land of Israel long ago in real history for you. The Spirit is calling you right this moment. Do not be hardened in your heart, but turn to the living God and he will give you and show you the how as the only why that matters that can change your life. Let's pray together. Our Holy Father, we are to pray to you in Jesus' name, because he is the one who has done all these things for us. We spent these last few weeks talking about our Savior, and it's the best and most fun thing that any Christian can ever do, is to explore all of the things that he has done for us. And my prayer, Lord, is that you would use these words from your Holy Word as we've explored them and thought about them, and especially these today, in the hearts and the minds of the saints that are here, to teach them why it is that Jesus came for them. Maybe somebody has a really bad attitude about themselves and they just look down on themselves, and that's the whole point. Jesus came here because he is love and he loved us while we were his enemies. And I would pray that you would show them that Jesus loves them and died for them and that you would cause them to believe and trust in him. But Lord, it's only your spirit that can do this because we are by nature your enemies and we are wicked people who do not return to you. And it's only if you draw us to yourself that we will come to know and cherish the why instead of being like Nietzsche who rejected it and rejected all of Christianity and really our entire civilization is living in the wake of that. I pray Lord that you would draw people to yourself by your spirit through the words of the gospel of Christ and his death and resurrection and ascension and his coming and pray that It would be the focus of your saints that when we leave this place we would cherish nothing more than to talk about our Savior with others and to have that why impact everything that we do and especially that it would be the glory of God in all the things that we do. Lord, we're tempted to sin this week. in the many ways that we're all tempted to do. Help us draw us back to the idea of the glory of God and the love of Jesus that he has for us. Let it be an example for us his love for us that we might choose to obey him. But Lord let it be because we know that it's grounded in things that are effectual for us. in the substitutionary death of Christ, in the sending of the Holy Spirit, which is the work of Christ, to lose none of those you have given to him. I pray that you would keep these things in our mind, that you would use them to sanctify us, and I ask these things in Christ's name, amen.