And as you do that, I want to begin with a story that's a real story. Happened some years ago. I was involved in counseling a certain person. Who had? Committed a really bad sin. Anne. At one point. On the phone with me, this person told me that through tears that they had been in the shower, literally scrubbing themselves to try to make themselves clean from the filthy feeling and disgusting feeling they had from the sin they had committed. I bring that story up and it comes to my mind because the good news of Colossians 2 and verses 10 to 15 is that although no amount of human effort that we could put forth could ever wash away the stain of the filth and the guilt of our sin. There is another work that was performed in another body, and that work can and does wash away sin completely. So let's read this statement from the Apostle Paul this morning. Beginning in verse 10, And in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority. And in Him you were also circumcised, with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with Him, in baptism in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us, and he has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. When he had disarmed the rulers and authorities, he made a public display of them, having triumphed over them, through him. Let's pray together. Father, come before you this moment to ask for your help. Pray you help me and everyone here to understand your gospel this morning as clear as we could ever understand it. Would you make it clear in Jesus name? Amen. So the main point of this text is that Christ has defeated all rule and authority. The elaboration of that point is that He has done this by becoming the avatar of the church and by rebounding Satan's killing curse. The purpose, as you can see from verse 10, is to persuade us that this is why he is all that we need. So you remember last time, we're supposed to know that he's all that we need, but we might not be able to answer that. We may not know it, and that might be the cause of our problem. So the purpose is to persuade us this is why He is all that we need. This is why we don't need to reach for anything else outside of Him. This text. So beginning with number one then, those are just the two points of the sermon. Number one, in verses 10 to 13, I'm saying here, Paul is Explicating and proving that Christ has defeated all rule and authority because he has become the avatar of the church. Now, by evoking this idea of the avatar of the church, I'm hoping to make use of a cultural idea that at least some of you will already know and others, you don't have to do a lot of work to get it if you haven't seen this, that's okay. This is something I'm trying to follow in the footsteps of John. You might think John does this with the logos idea. That was an idea coined originally by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. And then John uses it as if to make a contact point and say, y'all are after the logos. This is the real logos. So this is what I'm trying to do and I hope to use this cultural idea to help us all grasp one of the deepest ideas, I think the deepest idea in all of Paul's theology about the mechanics of how the gospel works. So, in order to lay this out, let me begin by saying I inherited a distinction from Martin Lloyd-Jones on the facts versus the meaning of the facts, where he would say preaching the Gospel is not just preaching the facts, but also the meaning of the facts. And he argued that when you read the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, what you mainly see are the facts. But when you read the epistles, what you see is the meaning of the facts. An analogy to this might be Genesis 50 verse 20, where Joseph says of the same event, he calls it it. You meant it this way, but God meant it another way. So there's a double intent to a single event. There's the human intent and there's the divine intent. And Joseph maintained himself by seeing the divine intent. To illustrate this with the Gospels, if you just read through the Gospels and you say, okay, based on what Lloyd-Jones said, what are the facts? And basically, you go through Matthew, and you go through Mark, and you go through Luke, and you go through John, and you say, what essential facts of the Gospel are they all presenting? Birth, the life, the death, and the resurrection. Actually, it's only Matthew and Luke that explicitly mention the birth, right? The others imply it. And so really, birth and life you can put together, but they all mention the death, they all mention the resurrection. So there's three main facts. He was born, he was crucified, and he rose. And it's not hard to do a horizontal reading and just think of human beings as to why it happened. Similar to the Joseph story. They were jealous, so therefore they put him in the pit. You can do that just horizontal reading. And how does it read that way? Well, the king has come. Men don't want a king. Nevertheless, the king has come. Nevertheless, men don't want a king. And it just keeps going and rising and escalating in tension between Christ and the people until they eventually crucify him. And then God says through the resurrection, nevertheless, the king has come. And Gamaliel says, y'all are not going to win this battle. That's just sort of the human psychology of how the gospel works. But to use the Joseph analogy and think, okay, Pilate meant it this way. Herod meant it this way. Judas meant it this way. Everybody had some intent in it, the single cross event. But the way to really see what is going on there is what did God mean through it? And that's what you get when you go to the epistles. So for example, when you read the Gospels, you just see that Christ died, that He was buried, that He was raised. When you read the epistles, you say, hang on, hang on, hang on. You died with Him. You were buried with Him. And you rose with Him. You don't see that in the Gospels. And so I inherited another wonderful distinction from Jason Myers, who taught me in my LC NOBTS days before going to Minneapolis to take over for Piper. He used this analogy, and he put it in his book on preaching, of a play-by-play down on the field versus a commentary from up in the press box. Narrated that from him. And so he says, what you see in the Bible is like you have narrative in the Old Testament, and then you have prophetic commentary. Same thing in the New Testament. You have narrative from Matthew to Acts, and then you have apostolic commentary. So the way to fully take in the biblical message, it's like if you're gonna watch the football game later today, I don't know if you have some weird person in your family that always cuts the volume off. I have to deal with that sometimes and just watch the event. I'm like, I want to hear. So to not read the epistles and just read Matthew through John is to turn the volume off and just see the events. You don't need that. And so the way to fully take in the gospel is read the events, listen, kind of sit in the stands in the middle, see what happened, listen to Paul tell you the meaning, and then take all of that in as the truth. This is why I'm always down on passion plays that happen around Easter. Because they just give you the facts. They don't give you the preaching of the gospel. And that is what saves. It's the declaration of the meaning of those facts. And so all of that had been going on through the years, and I saw this, and I spent about a five-year period of time buying all the books I could find where these were the scholars to read on Pauline theology. These were the guys to read. Went through all of them. Bought ten books, bought ten doorstopper books, and who knows how much coffee, trying to understand What does it mean to die with him? What does this mean? And then I preached through Romans. I don't remember how many years we went through Romans. Four years. But two notable texts there that impacted was Romans 5, 12 to 21, where Paul just holds up these two men and all men. and you're either in Adam or Christ, either in God's family or the Adam's family. And then came Romans 7, 4, if you want to turn to that one, Romans 7, 4. This helps it be very concrete. Because there Paul says, You were put to death. And I want you to know when he says you were made to die in the Greek, that's not a vague... You can look this up later. You live in the day of Ai. You can check the preacher. Look it up. Put it in your thing. Where he says you were made to die, it's the verb for put to death. It's a way of saying you were crucified. And then he adds a prepositional phrase, through the body of Christ. So the death that happened to you, the vehicle of it, the instrument of it, was not my body, right? His body. And so that was impactful for me. That took me away from a more mere metaphorical kind of view. Oh, it's easy, Jeffrey, why don't you need eight books? It's just about turning over a new leaf. That's all it's talking about. You used to live this way, now you live that way. That is completely not what Paul's meaning by this. It has an effect in your life that way, but that is not what Paul means. That's one text to help. He says, you were put to death through the body of Christ. So the death happened through His body. Then came 2 Corinthians 5.14, which says, the love of Christ constrains us, having concluded... So I want you to note that word. It means to think. It means to draw an inference. having concluded this, and this is the way Paul thinks, so it's the way you want to think, and the way I want to think, that one died for all, that's the language we're used to, substitution. But then notice he says, therefore, ergo, all died for all. So the way Paul thinks is, if he really did die for me, then he died as me. So you've got an added element to our salvation, not just the mechanics are not just working off of substitution, but what we would call representation, federal headship. So then from there, this reckoned dead by means of being a Protestant and already having some vocabulary of that of reckoned righteous, I came to see that reckoned righteous is just part of, it's a species of being reckoned with Him altogether. So you not only have in the gospel imputed righteousness, you have imputed death. imputed burial, imputed resurrection, imputed ascension, in the mind of God reckoned that way. And you called now to reckon yourself in line with how God is thinking. So this led me to basically for some time dwell on two men and all men, two trees. You can either be considered, God either considers you in union with Adam, with history, or with Jesus on history. So when Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ, it's not poetry, it's not metaphor, it's not talking about your change of life. It means God thinks Paul hung on the cross for his sins. Because God thinks of humanity not as individual units, but as being corporately joined to one of two men. So that whatever happens to them happens to you. Whatever happens to the king happens to the subjects of the kingdom. And so this sort of changed the way I presented the bad news and the good news because Jason wrote another book on this called The End of the Law, and he has a chapter in there, the fundamental structure of Paul's thought. And it's like all the contrasts we see in the Bible, grace and law, works and faith, sin and death, they're like the tip of an iceberg, these contrasts, they funnel down to these two essential contrasts between these two men. You're either in this realm or that one. And they flow from these two men. And then, I sort of capped off this adventure for a long time after coming across the famous Protestant theologians, Van Til and Hermon Babbanck. And Van Til had this idea of thank God's thoughts after him. That was big in his theology in Westminster back in the day. And then I learned he got it from Bovink. And Bovink was saying the same thing, thank God's thoughts after him. So then this is what I realized, that the great calling of the Christian life is to believe that I died. even though you're not dead yet, to believe that you've already been buried, to believe that you rose with Christ, because that's what God believes. So our faith is not to initiate the link. We do initiate a link. So when it says in this text, through faith in the working of God that raised Him from the dead, it is my faith that subjectively joins me to Christ. But it is my faith in the objective union that is already there. because I'm supposed to be believing in God who raised Him from the dead in union with me. So the gospel is to come to humanity and say, you've been in Adam and you've had this attachment. The gospel is the good news that there's a new attachment to a new Adam and God has already synced the eye devices together and now you are called to believe what He already believes. Your faith is simply a calling to match God's belief. So, all of which is to say, then came the attributes of God. I think we're the final thing of truth, and truth is whatever God says it is. Truth is whatever God thinks. and whatever God says. So if God thinks Mr. Ford is dead with Christ, that's true. Whether we can grasp it or not, it's true. It's a reality. Because what God thinks determines reality. And so all of this is to say, I hope, sort of give you a generic idea, working idea of this idea, to now come to verses 10 to 13 and see that this is what Paul's bringing up here. This is the doctrine he's bringing up here. So when he says, you were circumcised, past tense, with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of flesh by the circumcision of Christ. He's not talking about what happened in your past conversion experience. He's saying Christ was circumcised on the cross. He was cut off and his body was thrown aside. and it's the body of flesh and you see it there in 1.22, he's already said this, yet he reconciled you in his fleshly body through death. So he's referring to the historical death on a cross and saying God thinks of you as participating in it. And when he says, having been buried with him. He's referring to the historical burial in the tomb that you read of in the Gospels. And he's saying God never thought of Jesus as a solitary individual laying in the tomb. He always thought of Jesus and the whole church laying in the tomb. If you want to project this all the way back, this is why Ephesians 1, 4 says, He chose us in Him. He predestined us in the Beloved. God didn't even ever elect you. as a single unit individual out here. He has always conceived of you in union with Christ. So that what happens to Christ happens to you and is attributed to you. And so therefore, by saying in these verses, you were also raised up with him. And then notice verse, Verse 13, when you were dead in your transgressions and uncircumcision of your flesh, what he's getting at there, deadness, we as Reformed people have been taught to think, and it's good, dead means unresponsive. That's part of the meaning. And therefore, who could respond? And that's still good to say. Because that helps people grasp sovereign grace, it's good to say. But Paul doesn't just mean that. Paul is a rabbi. He was taught under the feet of Gamaliel. He knows the Old Testament law, the purity laws, that one of the most defiling, disgusting, filthy things in all the Old Testament was touching a dead human, a dead body. And so the rabbis had these laws of just like, If even your shadow comes into contact with a dead body, you're unclean. If your shadow and a corpse's shadow touch, you're unclean. If your shadow and a corpse's shadow and a third, like, roof shadow touch, you're ritually unclean. And this is why Jesus in the gospel says the Pharisees are filled with dead men's bones and what? All uncleanness. So when Paul says you were dead and he adds in your transgressions, And the idea of the uncircumcision of your flesh, just in physical circumcision, there's an undesirable piece of flesh that you want to cut off of you and throw from you. The way Moses' wife Zipporah did, she caught him a bridegroom of blood because she cut this off and threw it because the Lord was about to kill the boy. The idea is there is filth upon us that brings the wrath of God. To be uncircumcised is to be corrupt and filthy. Which means this human being that I knew that was in the shower scrubbing themselves, their conscience was telling them the truth. They are filthy before God. But Paul is trying to get us to see here the good news of the gospel is there is a cleansing done without human hands. And so the idea he made you alive, it's beyond saying you were unresponsive. Your whole entire body was corrupt like a corpse. You can't do anything with this. Everything it touches, it corrupts. You can't pray a prayer. It corrupts the prayer. You can't walk forward. You corrupt the whole entire aisle walking forward. Everything from, what does Isaiah say, the crown of the head to the sole of the foot is corrupt. Total depravity. As Sproul put it, radical depravity, Latin radix, the root, all the way down to the motives. The motives are corrupt. And that is to lead you to see nothing I do in my physical body can wash away the filth. And this is why we have hymns that we do where the evangelist is talking to the sinner and the sinner is saying, what can avail to wash it away? And then the evangelist responds and says, do this and do that. No, no. He points to Jesus, which is another human body. You've got to see this. You were put to death through the body of Christ. Your body and your brain and your head and your emotions and your heart and your tongue and everything is categorically excluded because it is corrupt. It cannot be used to make yourself pure. And so when he says you were raised up with him and he's like, you were dead and that's why you had to be made alive a different way. He's saying it had to happen through a completely different body because your body was corrupt. So when he refers to the historical resurrection here out of the tomb, he's saying, God thought of you as walking out of the tomb. Now understand, this is a hard concept to grasp. Romans 6 even says that, you know. Paul's using the slavery analogy. He says, I'm speaking this way because of the weakness of your flesh. What does he mean there? It's just, you're trying, right? Even when you're listening to a sermon, some of you are juggling children. Some of you are just, we're just a little bit older. Our brains don't work as well, but you're just trying to love the Lord your God with all your mind. You just say, I just want to understand the gospel. And it's difficult to understand, and that's why I want to give you a new analogy today. in my extended journey of trying to understand this, because I have obviously sought to give my life to try to take pains with these things, like Paul says, and then come and find a way to say it in such a way that a mom juggling two children can grasp it. That's what you want. And so, I came upon this idea that just, it just clicked, it just, it laid right over it and I thought, wow, I think Paul would approve of that analogy. And that is by saying Christ is the avatar of the whole church. If you, like me, have never even watched a full film of that. I tried to watch one the last two nights because I know I was going to be using it. But the idea in that film At least the first one is there's this man named Jake and he's crippled, something wrong with his body, but he's able to be linked. There's this other world with these other beings and he's able to be linked. to another body. And through that link, he's able to run again. He's able to live a certain life out here by being linked to another body. And then by the end of it, he completely transfers his identity over to this new body. Something like that. I know it's an analogy. You probably say, well, there's all kind of stuff that doesn't work. I'm only referring to the part. that by means of a link to another body, you're able to do something that you could not do. It's all in the furniture. Paul is saying, though you were dead in your transgressions and uncircumcision of your flesh, that there was nothing you could do in your body to remove the filth and guilt of sin from you, by any action you could perform with your hands, nevertheless, God has provided another body, a pure body that never sinned, that knew no sin, Now you start to understand the preciousness of the incarnation. Hebrews says, you have prepared for me a body. It's like this is a uncorrupt body in this world where sin has no dominion, where all the other bodies are corrupted. And He's provided this body. And there's the good news. It serves as the avatar of the whole church as an instrument and a medium by which we are invited to vicariously experience the cutting away of the filth and guilt that this poor soul could not get away with her soap and rag. so that we return to a fresh, clean state with God. This is the good news of the incarnation, subsequent crucifixion, subsequent resurrection. It is not meant to be a spectator sport where we just hear about the victory of the one. That's not it. It's the victory of the many in the one. So it's like you're on a team and your teammate scores the touchdown. It's not a boxing match where you're out here as a spectator disconnected and you're just happy for him that he got a victory. You are with him in the victory. God believes Cory Chandler has been crucified for all of his sins. And cut away and thrown off the earth into the tomb for his sins. And risen from the dead without his sins. And they're gone. If Paul were here, he'd be saying, yes, yes, yes, that's what I mean. Please believe that. That is what you must believe to even begin to live the Christian life. Remember Romans 6? Reckon yourselves dead to sin, alive to God in Christ Jesus, and therefore, do not let sin reign. Piper said this best. The only sin you could ever get victory over is a forgiven sin. You must see that the first way that Christ has defeated all the rulers and authorities is by becoming an avatar for the whole church so that you're invited to experience in His body what you cannot accomplish in your body. That's number one. Number two, verses 14 and 15. by rebounding the killing curse of Satan. Here, as some of you can tell, I'm hoping to make use of another cultural idea to help us grasp another way that the gospel works. And this one comes from the climax of the story of Harry Potter. And as with the first one, let me start with the text first. And as with the first one, you don't have to read that story. to get the analogy and feel the wonder of this. Paul says, having forgiven us all our transgressions. This means what happened in this avatar body, as a result of it, God has forgiven us everything. When he says, having wiped out, I want you to taste each one of these phrases. Man will live by every word. I want you to taste them with me. When he says, having wiped out the handwriting of death, The Certificate of Debt. This is in IOU. This is a paper that any of your enemies could bring up and say, what y'all talking about? Kelsey did this. Jordan did this. It's right here on the list. And it's true. It ain't even slander. It's true. So what are you talking about? You're in here. No, you're out there. Like the guy of David, your sin is on you. Throwing rocks at it. Your evil is on you, David. God says no, it's not. God says He wiped out. Beautiful word. Anointed egg. Liquided egg. That's the literal Greek. Best analogy would be like they had papyri. They had a special sponge. Like one way they could get rid of the ink on the papyri. These expensive piece of paper back in the day, right? You could just get one of these. So it's not like, I mean, they had to like weave this thing together. They didn't want to have to do another one. So one way is they had this knife to kind of like flick it off. Another way they had a sponge. And we have egg sponge that would anoint the thing and let it soak a little bit and then wipe it off. And you know what? When they did that, based on the chemical structure and all that, all of the ink came off. And it's just as if it had never been written on. And that's the word Paul uses. We're not talking about us back in the day where the teacher erases the board You can still kind of see it a little bit, right? We're talking about Monday morning, the janitor has come in and has used the wet rag. There's nothing there. You realize this. God does not think of your sin. That's what it means. He's not like looking at you like, And I still kind of, it's gone. It's gone from his mind. So that's what he means when he says he's wiped out the handwriting of death. Past, present, future. When he says, consisting of decrees against us, which were hostile to us, this means, this hostile, the word means standing over and anti you. It's like someone trying to push you out. You can't be in here, you're being pushed out. And decrees is dogmas, meaning opinions. Meaning thoughts in other beings in reality. So this is the rulers and authorities. It would be a physical earthly authority. It could be a spiritual authority. It could be the cherubs with the flaming swords. Those are the ones this text is talking about. Christ is head of those cherubs. And they cannot keep you out anymore. He's above every name that could be named. And these Colossians were being drawn in like all the Greeks and pagans. Oh, there's these beings, there's these authorities, there's these angels. I've got to deal with them. No, you don't have to deal with any of them anymore. None. And let me give you this. Even your own conscience. I say that because Romans 1.32 says even though they who practice these know the decree of God that they're worthy of death. The same word for decree is dogma. Your conscience is an authority. Remember I said the person who's scrubbing themselves, they're right, their conscience is telling them the truth. We're not just talking about evil authority, good authority. That puts two and two together and says you sinned. That. So even your conscience, your conscience is a ruler in authority that Christ has put the pacifier in the mouth of. Christ has pacified all the powers. He has reconciled all things. through His cross. No, they don't go away, but it's like at the end of Mario, the new Mario movie, where the little dragon, he's just bouncing in the little jar over there. He's just as evil as ever, but he's irrelevant. So Satan is who he is. There are people that hate you, but they're irrelevant. They're nothing. They don't matter anymore. You're at peace. It doesn't mean they were converted. They're just converted to irrelevance. Peace has been made. So there may still be villains, but peace has been made. And look at this. When he says this, when he says God has lifted them up and taken it out of the way and nailed it to the cross, you've got to see the flow of imagery. Circumcision. Take something off. This person in the bathtub, I want it off. I just want to be clean. That, that, that filth and guilt. He's saying God took it, nailed it to the cross, meaning Pilate in all of his arrogance when he said, what I have written, I have written. Paul says, no, that's not what was learned how to read the story. You meant this. God meant something else. There was something else written there. And what God has written, God has written every wicked thing you ever did. That's what was written there. And God took that and he nailed that as the sign that hung upon the cross, as the reason that he hung on the cross. Every past, present, and future sin God wrote above the cross, and that is why Jesus was hanging there. This means as far as God is concerned, they're gone. I hope something in this sermon clicks. In my life and yours, they are gone, gone, gone. You just want to say hallelujah. My sins are completely gone. Forever. So that forever, no one ever in this life or the next can ever call you to account. Because God won't listen. God doesn't even think about them. You can't bring a charge. Nothing can separate you. And so now He says, Disarmed, keep following me here, keep drinking the juice. Disarmed is fine, I like that because it makes me think of Clint Eastwood's scene where like, do you feel lucky there's nothing in the gun? So people are still pointing things at you, there's nothing, that's a helpful illustration, but it's not really true to the text. The text is ek dunamai, which means to strip. Strip, and it's a wonderful Roman word picture. Paul is using two of them here. When the Romans would battle and one general got the victory over another, they would walk into the throne room, take the crown, Polian did some of this stuff, take the crown and strip the robes off this person. So as to say, you're no longer in authority. And Paul is trying to say Jesus has stripped the robes off of the devil. Anyone who would judge you, the cross has stripped the black robe off of them. No one has a black robe on. No one has any authority. All other judgments of you are irrelevant. And moreover, he says, he made a public display of them. You know the juice of this word? This word occurs only one other time in the whole Bible when it says Joseph wouldn't do this to Mary. He wouldn't put her to hope and shame. God did do it to the devil. The devil wanted to make men naked. The devil wanted the uncovered nakedness. The devil wanted to expose the guilt. and publicize people's foolishness and sin. And God has done that and elects to lay honest judgment back to the devil. Hope and shame. And then from that he segues way into the last word, which is having triumphed over him. The Roman general, this is a Roman triumph, after they conquered another general, they would have a parade, because they didn't have Facebook back then. People couldn't know that you conquered, you had to come and do the parade. So they would take all the spoils of war, they would have this parade through the city, and they would drag, like Achilles drug Hector behind his chariot, except alive, they would drag the previous general all the way through the end of this parade and execute them in the Colosseum. That is the analogy Paul is using here. That Jesus, on the cross, conquered the devil, stripped him of his authority, and for 2,000 years has been leading him in triumph, at the end of which he will execute him. in the lake of fire. Literally, the lake of fire is the destiny of everyone that would accuse the saints. This is epic, amazing stuff in this text. And to even make it more epic when he says, Through Him are some of your translations. Through the cross, they don't know which one to choose of the pronouns. Is it through Him or is it through the cross? But it means through this avatar body of Christ that hung on the cross. The great irony is that the cross was Jesus' coronation. The gallows killed Haman. The gallows became his victory car. You remember the joker in the dark night? The cop says it dawned on him he meant to get caught. Jesus meant to be crucified. He outwitted the devil who was crafty in the garden. We see who's crafty. The Lord catches the wise in their craftiness. Boston says he put out the mouse trap and caught the devil on the wood of the cross. in the mousetrap. Or Edward says, when he was buried, it was like Jonah. He was in the mouth of Jonah and spit out. That Satan swallowed Christ and spit him out, regretting his morsel. When Jesus was being stripped of His garments and they were mocking Him, Paul says, I know who was really being stripped. Satan. That's who was being stripped. And everybody who would accuse you. So when you see Jesus stripped, your accusers are stripped. And so what do I mean by this rebounding of the killing curse? In Harry Potter at the very end, Voldemort, the satanic figure, has this killing curse, which didn't work at the beginning, which perfectly matches what happened in the garden. They were supposed to die. Like Voldemort, Satan should have known something is up. It didn't happen. But there's something Voldemort didn't understand, something Satan didn't understand. And it's mentioned in the old Disney movie, Maleficent, Sleeping Beauty, where the fairies say, We know, we have an idea. There's one thing Maleficent will not suspect because there's one thing she doesn't understand. Love. That's why arrogant, sinful men always get caught by the Lord. There's a kind of knowledge they can never get. Because they don't have it. They don't look for it. And their pride causes them to miss information. and be called. So Voldemort casts this killing curse on Harry and it rebounds and kills him instead. So Paul is Satan. Satan thought he could overthrow God's intent to have an image of himself in man. Here's his killing curse. Suffering. He used it without him and it worked. Just like Voldemort's worked on everyone. Oh, y'all can't have this fruit. Ain't that sad? That sad-brainedness thing you're missing in your life. Ain't that sad? And Satan just works on us by that. Until you eventually start saying, you know, it is kind of sad. I kind of have a sucky life. I don't really appreciate this. And I wonder if God's even good. And you eventually start going down that road, right? And you say, I might as well sin. Who cares? Cold reality, there's no such thing as love. This was his killing curse. He said it in joke. Everything that a man has, he will give for his life. Just put some boils on him, it's done. So what did Satan do when Jesus came into the world? Immediately, in the wilderness, Simpson was suffering. Didn't work, left him for an opportune time. He comes back through Peter. Remember? Get behind me, Peter. You're not going to go to the cross. That's not for God's anointing. That's not the kind of story God would write for someone He loves. And then what happens at the very end? Who was it that put it into the heart of Judas to do it? The Bible says Satan. Satan is working his killing curse again. And so what does he do? Not just a death, but the most humiliating form doable on the earth at the time. Death in the purview of your mother's vision. Death hanging naked on a tree. Death with the other criminals rebuking you. Nobody thought you were awesome. Nobody shared your pose. Nobody thought they should listen to you. Everybody hated you. Every friend left you. He turned up the heat, turned up the heat, and turned up the heat. And every step of the way, Jesus, our great champion, never sinned, submitted to the Father, the obedient Son, again and again and again. It's like in the the desolation of Smaug, that son who's sitting there and the father shoots the arrow at the dragon. Jesus was the obedient son who trusted his father and trusted his father, and through the cross, God healed Satan. He obeyed him no matter what. All the way to death. And Satan just kept going, right? He got the criminals to holler. He got the Pharisees to say, save yourself if you're the Christ. Who was that? We know who that was. Because that phrase has already been repeated through the Gospels. Jesus knew it was Satan. He knew he was trying to provoke him. He knew he was trying to get him to sin. Satan kept turning up his killing curse of suffering. Jesus, because he is the love of God, because God is love and he so loved the world. Jesus, full of humility and meekness, never sinned and kept going and kept going until Satan drove him all the way in his physical body to the point of death. And when he died, he died sinless. as the new Adam in activated redemption. And Satan's killing curse rebounded. Satan killed Satan. So how can we end this? There's so much to say. Let me just end with this. This avatar analogy is so helpful. Probably one reason it was on my mind is, in God's sweet providence to my family, the couple times we've been able to go to Disney World, they have this ride there called the Avatar Ride. And like all them rides there, we were talking to Mr. Ford one day, he's in the engineering, like how they do this. Well, this one, you sit on, I mean, you feel the thing breathing in the simulation, like it really makes you feel, that you're in this other body. So, of course, that came to my mind. I hope you just will feel that the Bible is inviting you to link your identity to Jesus and to even feel the breathing, to somehow feel so linked to Him that you can almost feel the cross being executed on you, and feel the burial happening to you, and feel the resurrection out of the tomb, coming out of the tomb with no sin, and resurrection life, because God has linked you to Him. So would you do that by faith if you're here, you're an unbeliever? Or if you're a believer? I just want to ask you, will you do this? Will you believe it? You may say it sounds crazy, but this is the good news of the Gospel. Believe that you hung there. And feel all the guilt of sin coming out of your body onto His body. Believe you were cut off. God already cut you off. God already removed it. What you're trying to scrub away, believe God already removed it. And the killing curse rebounded and you walked out of the grave without your sins in this. Now you can do what you really want to do without any hindrance. These are the people I'm really talking to. Do you really want to be a Christian? Could you sing that old spiritual, I want to be in that number. Do you know how the Bible ends? Whosoever wishes, let him. And he says, if you're filthy, let the filthy remain filthy. If you're unrighteous, let the unrighteous remain unrighteous. And let the righteous remain righteous. What's the idea there in that verse? Be what you want to be. The only people God excludes from His kingdom are those who exclude themselves. I'm a 78-point Calvinist and I also believe that. The only people who He excludes are those who exclude themselves by their own free will, choice. So you can now enter. No one can tell you if you're here today and you want to. You say, if I could just have my dream and my bucket list, it would just be to have a clean conscience and serve the Lord with my life and God not be mad at me and me be right with the Lord. If I could just have that, I'm saying you can have it. You can have it. If you will believe that God has already linked you to the body of Christ and you have it in Him. And now you can serve God with a fresh, clean conscience, because Christ has defeated all rule and authority. The rule of your conscience, the rule of angels, the rule of people who don't like you, and all of their opinions. He's defeated it all. So stop. Let me just get these out. Here's a couple of applications here at the caboose. Stop. Can we stop with this idea that the only difference between a Christian and a lost person is I'm just a sinner saved by grace. That's not the only difference. The only difference between me and them is I'm forgiven. That's not the only difference. More has happened to you. What did Isaac Watts say? Be of sin the double cure. save from wrath and make me pure. You're called a saint, you're called a holy one in the New Testament. It doesn't refer to you as a sinner, it refers to you as a saint. And yet today we have saints going to AA meetings and introducing themselves and saying, hi, I'm Bob and I'm an alcoholic. I hope you see how anti-Christ that self-identification tag is. Paul would rip his garments. That is not who you are. And you cannot make progress until you stop referring to yourself that way. You are crucified. You are buried. And you are raised. Therefore, let's talk about what I need to do. That indicative reigns. But we are awash in a culture today of what I call the new works. See, the new works. The old works is just this worn out thing we've all heard. We don't have to do anything to be accepted with God. We're Protestant. We're not Catholic. We don't have to do Hail Marys to be made right with God. Faith not works. And we just play that on repeat. Just redo the record, play that again. The new works is the self-identification gospel. We have a mental health crisis today. Everybody knows, like, I have to have value. I have to get away from toxic thoughts. I have to be stable. And then here comes the message. You need to think this way. If you could just think this way, if you could just reason through this kind of thought process, then you would maintain your respect and your dignity and your life could take off. I want you to know Paul would have rinned his garments at that too. Because the gospel is a gospel of grace. That means I don't have to think anything. God thinks something of me. When I look in the mirror to brush my teeth before I get into bed at night, I don't have to gather my thoughts together. Because God has already gathered his thoughts together for me. God cares about me. And God thinks I died, was buried, and risen in Christ. And that's my new identity. But yet, saints are being drug in to this. It's what the whole Inside Out 2 was about. Sense of self, and I'm not good enough, and I'm this. And then we fall into it. We're like, oh, that's a really sweet movie. You know, that's kind of who we are. We are all of our experiences. Still missed it. You are dead. You are buried. You are raised. Now let's put some more experiences on top of that one. This is the fundament. What would that do to your mental health? So instead, you want to know the last juicy irony? Instead of being taken captive, remember the previous verse, let no one take you captive by these ways of thinking, Realize that Christ has taken them captive and drugged them. You are crucified, dead, and buried. That's your identity. Your sins are gone forever. God believes you died. God believes you rose. God believes your sins are gone. So don't think about it. No, I didn't think about it. Think. All right. I can read my Bible. All right. I can go serve. All right. I can go pick a flower. I can go enjoy lunch after this. I can go learn a new subject. I can enjoy hunting. I can decorate for Christmas. I can do anything. With full freedom, my slate is clean. I hope the Lord has blessed you through this sermon today, and I hope you never forget this text and this passage. Amen.