Turn in your copy of God's Word to 1 Timothy chapter 2, verses 5 and 6. 1 Timothy 2, 5 and 6. Simple, straightforward, clear text. One God. one mediator between God and men, the man, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony at the proper time, one God One mediator stands between God and man. This is our text today. I pray that the Lord will bless the preaching of His Word. Now, as we look into these verses this morning, I want you to understand why it is such a tragedy to look to anything other than the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. It would be blasphemous, actually, to look unto anyone else. Any teaching that distracts, diminishes, or distorts the work of Jesus Christ is to be abhorred. The holiness of God and the sinfulness of man have created a gap so wide and caused an enmity so great that the only way of remedy will have to be the greatest work that has ever been done. God's holiness is of such infinite perfection that He hates sin with a vehement hatred, and He is angry with the wicked every single day. Now, on the other hand, man is so sinful and so selfish that mankind is at enmity with God. Enmity means hatred. So you have God angry with the wicked and man angry with God. Herein is the great problem, is it not? God's angry with the wicked and man hates God. Now already, we've already discovered a problem if we're tracking already. The problem is, is we can't conceive of a God with hatred, and we can't conceive of a man who doesn't like God. So it's like we've so messed up Christianity that people don't understand the holiness of God, they don't understand the depravity of man. So these things are like new information to us. But make no mistake about it, dress it how you will, but man lives in opposition to God every day. Mankind in church, out of church, there's an opposition, an antagonism towards God. And God hates sin. Every fiber of who God is emanates a direct hatred towards sin. Why? Because He is holy. He's the thrice holy God. Everything about God is a picture of opposition to sin. I'll put it to you to this degree. If you were to take sin and lay it upon His own Son, God would slay Him. And that's what He did. The reconciliation of these two parties is difficult, God and man. The reconciliation is difficult. The gap is so wide, it's beyond comprehension how these two parties could ever be brought into harmony. It's like it's an impossibility. The holiness of God demands that wrath be poured out on sin without measure. The wickedness of man insists that we will continually rebel against God. You read in the end of Revelation, it says all these things are poured out and it says man would not repent and would not give him the glory. They're opposed to God and God opposed to them. This great dividing wall that exists. The staggering sinfulness of man is revealed when we look into how man functions over the years. You'll remember some of these things as we ponder them. You go all the way back to Genesis. Man is so opposed to the God of grace that all the way back in Genesis they decide to build a tower where they can climb themselves up to God. Then you see in Exodus they make a golden calf where they can form God in an image that they can deal with. Or they build high places. Or they seek to obey a law perfectly that they could never obey. In our day, you want something more modern? People pray to Mary, hopefully that Mary would go talk to Father God, and he would listen to Mary because he won't listen to us. So we get someone else to pray for us. And many in the country of Mexico and across the world pray to dead saints, hoping dead saints might intercede for them. Many in our day here in America give money. They write a check, give some money, and hopefully God would be pleased with the money that they'd gave. There are people that join churches that God might have favor or somehow overlook their sin just because they're a member of a church. Or there are many who seek simply to have their good works gain credit with God because we did some good things and we helped some people out. And surely my good will outweigh my bad. Here's the problem in all of that. We're unwilling to simply trust the finished work of Christ. We always want to do something to gain favor, or we want to do something because we don't like being indebted into someone else. You see that all the time. Here's a couple of problems we'll list. Now, this doesn't work this way every time, but these illustrations are true, but they bring out kind of the nature of man. So I go around at Christmas time and I try to share the gospel with people. I give them things and share the gospel with them. So I go to one place and I share the gospel with this person, and when I get done sharing the gospel, you know what they do? They give me a free gift. I'm like, look, this isn't a carnival. It doesn't work that way. But I give the gospel, they give me a gift. I go to the coffee store, I share the gospel with the owner, he gives me a free cup of coffee. I go to the bicycle store, I give them the gospel, they give me a free hat and a free t-shirt. The gospel doesn't work like that. It's not like God did something, you do something to give something back, or you can gain credit. It does not work that way. The gospel is all of grace. God gives, God saves, God redeems, God reconciles, and you believe what He did. In our society, in modern day America, we cannot conceive of a God with wrath, a God with holiness, or a God with justice. The problem is, is too many people have listened to Oprah and Dr. Phil for too long and they have not read the Bible and understood who God is as he has defined himself to be. Then, on top of not understanding a holy God, we cannot comprehend the depth of man's depravity. We can't understand the depth of the depravity of the human heart. You just don't understand how wide this gap is between holiness and wickedness. This gap is so wide, it's wider than the Grand Canyon. Blinded eyes are unwilling to see that the Son of God is the only substitute for sinners. In our generation, we have a sentimental view of God. We cannot comprehend a God who would pour out wrath on His own Son, much less comprehend a God who might pour out wrath on me. You can't comprehend a God like that. And then people will say something like this, that's not my God. That's not the God I believe in. Well, you should read the Bible because how he defines himself to be is who he is, whether you feel that's right or not. This is who God is in Scripture. Following rules and going through motions is much more appealing to the flesh than what the gospel teaches. I'd rather do something, gain credit, take some credit for something I do. Now, let's look at this text. Hopefully, you got a little bit of the gist of the distance between God and man. Let's look at this. In 1 Timothy 2, verse 5, one God. The Greek text says, for one God. There's not even a verb here. One God. Let me give you a little historical application from the Bible. There's only one. Whatever God we have, there's only one, no matter what you define, there's only one. Deuteronomy 6, verse 4 says, "'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.'" This is the revelation of God's word to us. We at least know this, there is only one God. You say, well, there's God, and then there's Allah, and then there's Buddha, and then there's Heidi Krishner, and then there's Joseph Smith. There may be all of those things, but there's only one God, just one. In Isaiah 45, verse 5 and 6, he says, I am the Lord. and there is no other." It's not another one. Besides me, there is no God. He goes on to say, I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know from the rising of the sun and from the west, there is none beside me. I am the Lord and there is no other. Also in Isaiah chapter 46 verse 9 and 10, just pick up verse 9, he says, for I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me. Now, we at least have tried to establish the oneness of God. Now, we observe just a couple of things to keep in mind. This one God that we're talking about is holy. You have to understand that. You can't define or make up some other type of God. The one thing that stands out as the foundational understanding of the Bible is that God is holy, holy, holy. What does holy mean? Other than sin, opposed to sin, against sin, diametrically against all sinfulness, set apart, unlike any other, in a category all by himself, one God. This one God hates sin. It's a revelation for some of us and for the world. God actually has hatred. He has hatred for sin. Everything that makes God God is opposition to sinfulness. God's judgment comes upon sin. It gets poured out upon sin. There's no sin in heaven. There'll never be sin in heaven because God hates sin. And so he takes sin and sinners and pushes them all into another location called hell. The one God is angry in Psalm 711 says that God is angry with the wicked every single day. Some of you think sometimes you see events and things happening in our own community or in the world and you say, why doesn't God do something? Why doesn't God do something? Why doesn't God do something? God hates sin. Nobody's getting off. Nobody's going to escape God's judgment. Everything is going to come to fruition on the final day, the day of the Lord. Nobody gets away here. God's justice reigns because he hates sin. Think about these things, just some biblical history. This one God, when the angels rebelled, he cast them out of heaven immediately. He hates sin. You think about the ancient world, and all these people around the globe, and they would not give God the glory. He says to Noah, build a boat, and in that boat was the only way to be saved. Everybody outside of the boat was drowned on that judgment day. Only eight people survived. You think about Sodom and Gomorrah. Think about our world and homosexuality, lesbianism. Think about all the immorality in our world. Do you know what happened to Sodom? Do you know what happened to Gomorrah? Because of all their sodomy, the judgment of God came down because he's diametrically opposed to homosexuality and he slaughtered them with this fire and sulfur and evaporated the city to an ash heap because of sin. You say, well that's the Old Testament. Okay, we can also think about, I'll give you another Old Testament and a New Testament. You can think about Uzzah, who touches the ark. He touches the ark and God strikes him dead on the spot. You look at Acts chapter five and you have a man named Ananias and a wife named Sapphira and they lie to the Holy Spirit of God and God struck them dead. You look at these examples, let it sink into your mind and heart. God hates sin. Everything about him is opposed to sin. We have not the liberty to redefine this God. One God, you say, man, it's not making me happy for Christmas. I don't care to make you happy. I want you to know who God is. I want you to understand who God is because then you might begin to value the mediator. Okay, so in my text, we have this one God, but we also have one mediator. A mediator stands between two opposing parties to bring them to be reconciled unto harmony. So my text says, one God and one mediator. And note, the mediator is working between the two parties of God and men. And, specifically, this mediator, in case you're confused, the text says, he's the man, Christ Jesus. Now, if you want a Greek definition of the word mediator, one who mediates between two parties to remove or reach a common goal, an arbitrator, arbitrating between two parties. Thomas Watson said it this way, one that makes up the breach between two disagreeing parties. Man doesn't agree with God, and God doesn't agree with man. We have a person in the middle that's going to bring these into harmony. Some of you around here read a prayer book called The Valley of Vision, and in the middle of that prayer book, there's this helpful line, and it says this, when deity and humanity were infinitely apart, So make no mistake about this, the gap between a holy God and sinful man is infinite. You look at the Grand Canyon, you might entertain the engineering idea of how to build a bridge. You might entertain the idea of how to create an airplane to fly over to the other side. You may be as goofy as somebody like Evel Knievel and try to jump something on your motorcycle, but you understand that gap is really wide. This gap is infinite. You can't measure how wide it is between God and man. Job asked the question. It's a good question. He uses the word, in the ESV, he uses the word umpire. Other translations would use the word mediator. King James uses the word daysman. A daysman was the one who appointed the day for the two parties to meet. Here's what Job says. Here's his question. Here's his statement, Job says, for he is not a man as I am that I may answer him, that we may go to court together. Then he says, there's no umpire, there's no mediator. day's person between us. There's no one to lay one hand on one party and one hand on the other party and bring them together. That's what Job says in Job 9, 32. There's no umpire laying his hand upon us both. Think about it. I told you the gap was infinite and now we're dealing with a thought from Job that someone could lay their hand on God and lay their hand upon man and stand between the two opposing parties to bring about reconciliation. Now we're grasping what a mediator does. Now this mediator who is Christ, he is the superlative mediator. Now you don't have to look at all the texts, they're all going to say basically the same thing. But in the book of Hebrews, let me just remind you of a few lines from Hebrews. Hebrews 8, 6 says that Christ is much more excellent than the old, the covenant he mediates is better. He mediates a better covenant. Or in Hebrews 9.15, therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant. Or Hebrews 12.24, Jesus the mediator of a new covenant. A covenant between God and man, a covenant that cannot be broken. And the text in Hebrews says the mediator, Christ, mediates this new covenant that he could take a holy God and he could take a sinful man and he could bring them together in covenant that cannot be broken. That's why I love Jesus. All others are excluded. There's only one mediator. The great divine Thomas Watson said it best in his book, The Body of Divinity. He said, quote, as there was but one ark to save the world from drowning, so there is but one Jesus to save sinners from damning. It's just one. If you're not in this boat, you're done. It's just the way it was in Noah. It's not different with Christ. It's not like, I'm in Christ, I'm in Buddha, I'm in Allah, I'm in good works, I'm in this, I'm in that. If you're not in the boat of Jesus Christ, your ship is about to be sunk. Under the just righteous judgment of a thrice Holy God you better get in this boat because you read Genesis God shut the door and when God shuts the door no man opens it God shut it and one day friend your doors gonna shut Time's gonna be no more, and you're gonna be standing before the thrice holy God on judgment day, and you got nothing in your hands, and you're begging for mercy, and it's too late, and he says, I do not know you. The day's coming. Back to Job. Job 28, 12, Job 28, 14. Great questions, this is what Job asked. Job says, Where shall wisdom be found? Where's wisdom at? Where is the place of understanding? Where's that at, he asked. And then in 28.14, the deep says, well, it's not in me. And the sea says, well, it's not in me. Now, I'm going to add here, just to further the thought, that's the end of the verse. He says, the deep says not in me, the sea says not in me. I'm going to add to this, the angels of heaven say, not in me. Read Revelation, get up, don't worship me, worship him. Not in me. Morality says, not in me. I'm a moral person. That will not give you right understanding with God. The law says, not in me. You can't keep the law. You've already broken it. Everybody in the room. Good works say, not in me. You can't make enough cookies for your neighbor to get yourself to heaven. You can't do it. What does the New Testament say? There is salvation in no one else. For there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we may be saved." If there is any opportunity for you and God to be in harmony, you'll have to come to this mediator. God's providence of His Son excludes every other means of reconciliation. God's providence gave the best. Think about it. What else could heaven give? He said, what it could give, there's nothing you can name that is more valuable than the Son of God. The God of heaven, who is holy, moved in love to provide the absolute best that could be provided and to give him unto the world that you may be saved. You must embrace Christ. Now, one God and there's one mediator. There's one relationship between God and man here. He gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony at the proper time. This one relationship between God and man. Let me give you some implications of this and then we'll work this out. The two parties, as I've already said repeatedly, are not in agreement. That's the issue. In Romans 8, verse 7, listen to this verse. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God. Think about a world living for the flesh, living for self. The Bible says their very position is hostility towards God. Why? They don't submit to God's law. Indeed, they cannot submit. They don't even have the ability to submit, and they don't want to. this is a positive verse but it reminds you of the difficulty. Ephesians 2 14 through 16 and it says about Christ, Christ himself is our peace. who has made us both one, and notice what he's done. He's broken down in his flesh, what? The dividing wall of hostility. The verse recognizes the hostility between God and man. It describes in Ephesians as a wall. Christ knocks down the wall. of hostility. How did he do that? By abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances. That he might create something in himself. What is he going to create? One new man. He's going to create a brand new man in place of the two. So making peace and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross. And then notice what the text says. killing the hostility. A holy God angry with the wicked every day, sinful man at enmity with God every day, and Jesus kicking down the wall and killing the hostility. You think about James 4, verse 4. He says, you adulterous people, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? This is a problem in the church as well as in the world. You've got all these religious people trying to hang on to both rims. I want to have God where I can go to heaven. I want to have the world where I can satisfy my flesh. Do you not understand to try to maintain friendship with the world is a direct attack upon the living God? Friendship with the world is enmity with God. Whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself the enemy of God. Hang on to the world. You've stated your line. You've drawn the line. You've stepped on this side and said, I'm against God. That's what James is saying. Make no mistake, there has been an offense. The offense is found in the way that man has responded or not responded to God. The offense is when man redefines God by creating a God that fits his own fleshly agenda. Now, we give more honor to idols than to God. It is an offense. Now, notice the offender is man. Man made the golden calf. Man built the high places. Man spurned the law of God. Man rejected the Son of God. Now think, usually when you try to reconcile, you want to do marriage counseling, you try to reconcile the husband and the wife, get them to come together. Anytime you do marriage counseling or you've got counseling between two friends, here's what you do. You listen to one side, you listen to the other side. As you listen to both sides, here's what you discover. There's faults over here and there's faults over here because nobody sitting in this counseling appointment is perfect. Both of them have done boneheaded things and we've got to work through the mess and try to see if we can reconcile the two parties. Here's the difference for us. We've got two parties, God and man, but there's no fault on the part of God. God doesn't have to change anything. There's no fault there because He's absolutely perfect. This reconciliation has to come all because of the fault of man. Now, because the fault is upon man, there are consequences to the offense. The wages of sin is death. That's what happens with sin, is we deserve death. Whoever does not believe God is condemned already. You understand that every day a person is outside of Christ, every day, they live under condemnation. You go out and you try to witness or share the gospel with anybody and they say, you can't judge me, you're too condemning. Look friend, you're already condemned. I'm not condemning you, I'm just telling you that's the state you live in every day. Because outside of Christ, that is the state of man. Or you get to the end of the Gospel of John, chapter 3, and it says, if you do not obey God, the wrath of God already abides upon him. So you're condemned and under the wrath of God presently as long as you're outside of Christ. There's no possible way to simply overlook this issue. We're getting closer to the end, but you can't take sin, pick up the rug, sweep it under the rug, and lay it back over, stand on the rug, and pretend like it's not there. If you sweep dirt under the rug, there's dirt under the rug. This is not going to help. If somebody moves the rug, they're going to see what you did. You just shoved it under there. We have to have something to take it away, not just sweep it under the rug. Look, if you're falling asleep, it's about to get tricky. Something has to be done with sin. Somebody has to pay, and whoever pays needs to pay a sufficient amount. Look, the issue cannot be forgotten without injury to the offended party. Oh, let's just let bygones be bygones. But you offended God. You broke His law. You spurned His Son and you want Him to just forget it? You cannot do that without injury to the offended party. The issue cannot be overlooked without injury to justice. The issue cannot be minimized without great harm done to the character of the offended party. Somebody's got to do something with sin. Either you've got to do something with it or somebody's got to do something with it for you. Here's where the gospel gets tricky. Are you ready? It's hard for us to believe in grace. that God can forgive a wicked sinner and let them go free. You say, it's not fair. You want an example? Eighteen years ago, December 18, 2004, The guy that I race motocross with, James Kukovac, 18-year-old kid, going down Interstate 20 to see his mama for Christmas. This Bible here on the table, you can look at the front of it, it's written in inscription in memory of him. Young boy just going home to see his mama for Christmas. Some goof-head, lost ignoramus decides that beer is a good option and he gets drunk. He comes across the interstate and he hits my friend head-on and kills him. And I have to stand there over James Kukovac's casket and look his father Douglas in the eye and preach this gospel. You say, why is that tricky? You understand that that guy that was drunk and head-on collided into James was to believe in Christ, he would be pardoned? You want it more tricky? What if, God forbid, such a tragedy that a little girl would be bumped into by a FedEx truck? I'm afraid she's going to tell her daddy, whatever the case may be. And he tries to break her neck, unsuccessfully, and then he strangles her to death. And he takes her up here on Bobo Crossing and dumps her out on the side of the road. Sitting in the jail. What if he believes Christ today? No. No. No, he can't be forgiven for that. That's over the line. Look, I'll be honest with you, if it's my little girl, I'm killing him. I'd have beat his brains out. I'm just being human with you. I mean, I'm beyond capacity to deal with something like this. It's the outside of my flesh to handle. I can't deal with the magnitude of something like this, but yet my gospel tells me that Christ is a substitute. It tells me that our sins are laid upon Him. And I read a Bible where there's a man named Saul who was killing people. and he was slaughtering men and women, and he was approving of the stoning of Stephen, and yet when he looked to Christ, grace came running. You say, are you telling me that he was forgiven? Yeah, he got a new name. His name's Paul. He wrote all these epistles in the New Testament, and we have no problem with that, but when it comes down to a personal level where there's things we don't like, we say, not my God, not my God. You don't understand the substitute. You say, it's not fair for God believes and He gets away with everything. He doesn't get away with it. It's not swept under the rug. All the fury that you feel is magnified to infinity in God and poured out on His Son. Every bit of justice is poured out on Christ and Christ's perfect righteousness is imputed to another. And here we sit in America and go, I'm not that bad. You're that bad. And we all need Christ to that degree. We need a substitute, because we're liars, we're idolaters, we're Sabbath breakers, we dishonor our parents, we covet, we steal, we commit adultery, and we deserve to go to hell, and all of heaven would rejoice, but yet Christ stands in our place, and he says, look, look unto me and be saved. It's all grace. You don't deserve it, no more than that guy sitting in the prison, no more than that guy that ran into James Kookabot. You don't deserve it, and I don't deserve it, but yet God, in his own free will, out of his own love, sent a mediator. One more time from the Valley of Vision prayer book by the Puritans. Here in his wisdom, When I was undone, with no will to return to Him, and no intellect to devise recovery, He came, God incarnate, to save me to the uttermost, as man to die my death, to shed satisfying blood on my behalf, to work out a perfect righteousness for me. Christ did that for every person that would believe Him. A perfect righteousness. If you want, turn to your Bible very quickly. Two verses. The greatest two verses upon this subject, Luke chapter 18. Luke chapter 18, you get a righteous, self-justifying Pharisee and you get a tax collector. But notice what this tax collector does. Luke 18 verse 13, this is the right position of every man, woman, boy or girl in the room. Luke 18.13, but the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven. He simply beat his breast, and this is what he said. Let me give an alternate translation, but let me give you what he says. God be propitious to me, thee sinner. I need someone to do something with the wrath of God on my behalf because I've looked all over this whole world and I've come to this conclusion. I am the sinner. There's no one more sinful than me in the whole world and if somebody doesn't do something with the wrath of God, I'm done. That's what he prays. Notice what verse 14 says, I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other. Everybody that exalts himself is humbled. Everyone who humbles himself will be exalted. What should you do this day? God, I'm the sinner. I deserve every ounce of wrath that you have to be poured out on me. I'm just asking that you would put one in my place to avert your wrath that I could go free. Be merciful to me. You must be reconciled to God or you will be eternally estranged from Him. Reconciliation is the balm that your soul needs for everlasting comfort. The providence of God, even this day, nothing by chance, nobody's here by accident. God, through the preaching of this preacher, is setting again before you a mediator. Don't look to me. Don't look to the deep. Don't look in the seas. Don't look to angels or works or morality. I'm setting before you Christ. And everybody in this room who's Christian, oh, happy day. You're on your way to heaven. That's where you're going. And you're going to heaven, and you're going in peace. Why? Because you have a mediator who's already pledged your case, and you get to walk into the eternal rims of glory and be with him forevermore. And if you're outside of Christ, you're one day closer to hell. And one day, you will suffer the wrath of God for all of eternity. Oh, that you would look to the mediator. Brother Jeff Crago, come and lead us in a closing word this morning.