52. Hebrews chapter 2 and Isaiah chapter 52. And I want to say that I am so grateful for you being here this morning. So grateful for you being in the house of God. And I'm just grateful for the spirit and the presence of the Lord here with us today. And it's I kind of have a privilege that I guess some song leaders don't necessarily get. I can plan songs based on what I know I'm preaching on. And that's what I did this morning. Because I wanted to try to set a stage for the message. And I try to be somewhat transparent. I never want anybody whatsoever to think that I'm holier than anybody, or I think that I'm holier than anybody, or I've got things figured out, or I don't have infinite, it seems, multitude of problems that I have to deal with myself, in my own self. But I have, the last several weeks, the Lord's been revealing to me and showing me as I've prayed and asked to be filled more and more with the Spirit, that I've been wanting Him to change people so badly that I've somewhere subconsciously started trying to preach hard enough that I could change people. And I've been reading a little book by Spurgeon on the power of the Holy Spirit, and there was a little chapter in there that I read this week that had one little verse out of Ezekiel, I believe it was chapter 33, and he didn't use the whole verse, he just used the first little phrase of it, and it just simply said, I will put my spirit within you. And by the time I got through that chapter, that was such a blessing and it was such an encouragement to me. And I told somebody the other day, I said, you know, we probably do not really have any idea the privilege that we ought to live at because he has put his spirit within us. We are sinful, wicked people. And the holy God of heaven took a piece of his spirit and put it within you. Now that, you need to stop and let that sink in. And because he has put his spirit within us, we have access boldly under the throne of grace. We have access by grace into this faith, Paul wrote, wherein we stand and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And you know, we should never be ashamed to go to Him, to cry out to Him, to call unto Him. And we should never be ashamed to take anything and everything to Him at all times whatsoever. And so I'm gonna try to do something this morning that's very, very hard for me. I'm gonna try to just talk and preach and absolutely let it go. So y'all pray for me as I will pray for you to receive what the Word of God would say. And stand with me this morning as we read out of reverence to the Word of God, Hebrews 2. This is our theme verse that we're looking at today. And then we'll go from here to Isaiah 52 in just a few moments. Verse 9 of chapter 2, But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, that he, by the grace of God, should taste death for every man. For it became him, it was fitting for him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, bringing many sons into glory to make the captain of their salvation perfect through, and everybody say that last word together with me, sufferings. May God add his blessing to the reading of his word. You may be seated this morning. That's the theme of what we're talking about for the next several, several weeks. Sufferings. If he made us perfect, or if he himself was made perfect, the plan of salvation was made perfect through sufferings, plural, then what are those sufferings? What we need to understand, what did it cost Christ to purchase eternal redemption on our behalf. Now we know, yeah, he came, he lived, he died, he was born of a virgin, he died on the cross, they beat him, they nailed him to the cross, he died, and three days later he rose from the dead, and then he ascended back to heaven. We know all of that, but in and amidst all of the knowing of those details, can I tell you that those are the superficial details? what he actually accomplished in those moments for you and for me. And last week we looked at the first of Christ's sufferings outlined here by the prophet Isaiah in the latter part of chapter 52 and then we're going to take our time week by week moving into chapter 53. We looked at the first suffering which was identified in Isaiah 52 in verse 13. Christ was made a slave or a servant that was indebted to do the Father's will of which he submitted to we see in a visible way in the garden when he said, Lord, not my will, but thine be done. If it's your will, I'll drink this cup and I'll drain every last drop of it. And inside of that cup was the curse that you rightly deserved, and I rightly deserved because of the sinners that we are. And upon him came that curse. According to Paul in 2 Corinthians 5.21, he who knew no sin was made sin for us. Or, to sum it up another way, he who was guilty of nothing suffered as if he was guilty of everything. As if every single sin that has ever graced the dirt of this world, he suffered the punishment for every single one of it. So that sinners could be set free and suffer no punishment whatsoever. This leads us now to our text for this morning. Look with me at verses 14 and 15 of Isaiah chapter 52. As many were astonished at thee, his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. So shall he sprinkle many nations. The kings shall shut their mouths at him. For that which had not been told them shall they see, and that which they had not heard shall they consider. These verses paint a picture for us that I want to try to present to you this morning. I'm going to be very honest, and I'm going to be very open, and I'm going to be very frank with you, and I will not spare you the details. Most of you in here have a pretty good indication of what Jesus Christ went through in his physical sufferings. But I'm gonna do everything I possibly can this morning to paint those physical sufferings in a way that makes you so uncomfortable that you almost feel like you need to get up and leave. And I want you to understand that regardless of how graphic I am, I cannot touch what they did to Him. I cannot touch what they did to Him. You see, Jesus was not the first man, nor was He the last man that was whipped at a post. He was not the first man that was crucified, nor was He the last. But we have a very clear indication here in verse 14 that there was never a man alive upon the face of the earth that was so beaten nor so marred as He was. And the indication here is that if you remember back in Jerusalem when all this began to take place, you remember that Jesus told the Pharisees and the religious leaders, he said, now is your time, your hour, and the power of darkness. You had a mob that gathered there outside of Pilate's hall that just a week prior were laying down palm branches in the road and shouting, Hosanna, blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. And then a week later, they're screaming for his head. They're enraged by a bloodthirst. The exact same lips who praised just a week earlier. And you ask, what changed? What happened? The power of darkness began to descend upon that city. And what you see is you see all of the vindictive and hateful rage of the serpent against the seed. Because somewhere Satan remembered, Thou shalt bruise his heel, but he will crush your head. And he was going to do everything he could by whatever means necessary, but before he was crushed, he was going to crush him. And so I believe that when all of these things began to transpire against our Lord, there was a bloodthirst that descended upon those soldiers, upon those priests, upon those guards like no man has ever experienced before. And the things they did to Him, of which I can only begin to scratch the surface this morning, they are important and there is a point. And I hope to try to show you that this morning. There have been no shortage all throughout the history of humanity of the ingenious ways that one man has invented to torture another. All you've got to do is go back and study in history and men, the human race in general, can be horrifically cruel. Back in the ancient Greek times, they would build large bronze bulls that were hollowed inside. And they would take captives of war or political prisoners or people who just died. didn't agree with the status quo, and they would put a door inside of that hollow bull, and they would throw people, sometimes multiple people at a time, sometimes they would take entire families and shove them into that bronze bull and light a fire under it and cook them alive. And for days on end, they would roast inside of that bull until they finally passed away. You can read about one extreme thing after the next, after the next, after the next, of things and devices and ways that people invented to make people's lives utterly miserable and suffering. And they've done it since the dawn of time. But it was the Romans who perfected the art of torture, and they did so by means of crucifixion. There has never been an instrument of torture invented in the entire history of the ancient world, or the modern one for that matter, that has ever managed to do the damage that crucifixion did. And we're told here in verse 14, go back and look at it, they said many were astonished. They were absolutely in amazement. Why? because it says his visage. Now look at that word visage. That means his overall appearance, but it specifically relates to the glory of his face and his physical features. You know, it's possible for you to identify somebody from their back. If you know them well enough, you can recognize their form. That's what he means by the second word where it says his form. But how many of you have ever thought you knew that somebody was somebody walking away from you and you called their name and they turned around and you realized that you had the wrong person? But you can't get the wrong person when you're looking at them in the face. Because you recognize their face. There's something highly significant here about the face and about the recognition of the face. And we're told that his physical face, his features were so marred, that word marred means disfigured, more than any man or more than any man's has ever been. And then we see his form, this is his physical self, his physical body, his physical presence. And so this second of Christ's sufferings this morning is that he suffered disfigurement. He suffered disfigurement. And I want to point out this morning that the disfigurement that occurred to Christ occurred slowly over a multi-stage process of torture and cruelty. There are six things that happened to Jesus over the course of that night from when they arrested him in the garden all the way to the cross that I want to cover. The first thing is found in Matthew chapter 26. Verse 67, they had led him out of the garden and they had led him to Caiaphas's house, the high priest's house, and they were questioning him. And when they asked him, are you the son of God? He made this declaration and he said, thou sayest it, which means that it is as you said. In other words, it was an affirmative agreement. Yes, I am the son of God. And they rent their clothes and they said, it's blasphemy. And in Matthew chapter 26 and verse 67, it says, then did they spit in his face and buffeted him. Now you look up the word buffeted, it just simply means punched. They punched him in the face. Now there are probably some people in this room who've been punched in the face before. It's not particularly pleasant and nobody would say that it was particularly pleasant. but it will not kill you. And Jesus is not the first person in the world to have ever been punched in the face. But he was not punched once. He was punched multiple times by the guard, the Jewish guard that was there inside the priest's house. This punching would have produced some fair degree of pain, But it also would have produced some blood flow. Maybe his face was split. Maybe his lip was split. Swelling would have began to occur in his cheeks and around his eyes. But then, according to Matthew chapter 26 in the same verse, verse 67, "...smote him with the palms of their hands." They slapped him in the face. Not only did they punch the Son of God, they humiliated Him even further by slapping Him. But slapping Him with the palms of their hands also has a second meaning. It means they beat Him in the face with rods. They carried these short, what we would, you know, years and years ago, policemen would carry what they called billy clubs. Well, they carried something that was similar. and they hit him in the face repeatedly with their fists, their palms, and those little short clubs. And by the time this was done, his face now would have been red, swollen, bleeding, his lips split, his nose bleeding, his eyes beginning to blacken and beginning to swell shut. But then, In Matthew 27 verse 26, we see that when they were done there, they led him to Pilate. And when he was at Pilate's, when he was at the judgment hall, they had a conversation, and Pilate, willing to try to appease the mob, decided, you know what? If I can just appease them, I won't have to put him to death. So he delivers him to be scourged. were to be whipped. Matthew 27 and verse 26 said, Then released he Barabbas unto them, and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified. Now it's interesting you read all four of the gospel accounts, and all four of the gospel accounts tell us that Jesus was scourged. He was whipped. But has it ever struck you why none of them ever went into any kind of detail? about what that did to him, and all we're told is he was scourged. It isn't because the detail is not important. It's because everybody that these men were writing to knew exactly what was entailed when they heard that word, scourging. They knew exactly what was coming when they heard the word, flogging. History records that just the very threat of a Roman with a whip was enough to quiet almost any and every mob that was ever incited against the Roman government. History records multiple times that hardened, fierce criminals, just at the mere mention of being whipped by a Roman soldier, they would immediately bow and acquiesce to the Roman government because nobody wanted a part of being whipped by a Roman. This was something that was so well attested that people had watched, they had seen, And so all Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had to do is just mention they scourged him and everybody, every single one of their audiences knew immediately what happened to him. But see, we, 2,000 years removed, have this vague idea of what happened to him. But let me give you some details on this scourging. He was stripped completely naked. and his entire body, and they did this for two reasons. One, the humiliation of it. But secondly, it was so every available piece of skin was completely laid open to the whip and to the soldier. They took him and they tied him by his legs, by his thighs, to a short wooden post that they had in the ground. so that he could not move at all. Then they took his hands and they stretched him above his head and they shackled them to another post. This was not like what you see if you've ever seen any of the movies or the portrayals of this where they've just got him where he can stand and he can move around like this in whichever direction. They didn't want you to move. Because if you can move with the whip, the whip can't do quite as much damage. But if you are completely and absolutely immobile and you cannot move at all, you are at the absolute mercy of whatever those soldiers choose to inflict. The whips that were used for the flogging process were shortened wooden handled rods to which they had attached pieces of oxide leather somewhere between 18 and 24 inches long and each whip had multiple strips at multiple lengths. Inside of these strips were bound up little pieces of metal, glass, wire, and human bone. that they had sewn into the leather straps. It was customary for those who underwent such a punishment that they were whipped from two directions at the same time. So one soldier would stand here, another soldier would stand there, and they would whip in this direction. One would take a turn, the other would take a turn. And as they laid the whip down across the skin, The varying length strands would stretch to different portions and lengths of Christ's back, and every time it hit, the glass and the metal and the wire and the bone would reach in and shred muscles, skin, and tendons, turning it to ribbons. It would be like if you took a very sharp pair of scissors and you took some very flimsy material and you took it and you started shearing it like this and watching it just rip. And then as it rips you see the little threads come off as it begins to shred. That's what they did to people's backs. But it wasn't just their back. They did it to their backs, their buttocks, their legs, their chest, their shoulders, their stomach, their neck, and they even whipped them in the face. Not only did they just beat them, but the leather straps would begin to curl around different portions of their body. You may have a leather strap that had wrapped itself over the shoulder of somebody and buried into their chest. You may have one that reached around and buried into the leg, and when that soldier would yank that strap, it is commonly reported that not only did it just tear the skin, entire sheets of skin would come off with it at one time. And the suffering was made altogether more intense because they could not move. There was no dancing around to try to get out of the way of the pain. They could not move. And you see, the Jews had a law. Couldn't beat anybody above 39 times. The Romans had no such law. They beat him. And they beat him, and they beat him. Various historical records of this scourging report that at many times the victim's backs would become so torn and mutilated that the onlookers could see their spine sticking through what was left of their skin. It is also commonly reported that sometimes people were beat to the degree that their bowels, their organs would begin to bulge from the holes left by the whips. And you would think, surely this has got to be enough. But that was just the precursor to what was to come. By the time it was all said and done, his back, buttocks, legs, stomach, chest, and face were completely and utterly disfigured from the use of the whip. I don't know how many of you, and I don't know what your opinions are, and you can keep them to yourselves. I don't know what, if you've seen the movie, The Passion of the Christ, or what you think about it. But that scene in that movie of them beating Jesus is incredibly difficult to watch. But it pales to absolute insignificance to the real Jesus being beaten the way that he was. And the Roman soldiers knew exactly how to take a man to one inch before the point of death and stop. They could see where that was, they knew where that was, and many times they would bring them right there before they let off. Because it wouldn't have been any fun if they had just died on the whipping post, not when they still have the cross to look forward to. They were cruel, they were tyrannical, they were vicious, And they knew how to make a man suffer. And I can promise you, having not been there to watch it, they made your Lord suffer beyond words. Then they took him off of the whipping post and they led him back inside of the judgment hall. And then according to Matthew chapter 27 and verse 29, they plaited, they wove a crown of thorns and they placed it on his head. Now again, his face swollen, disfigured, his face lacerated from the whip. And they didn't just take this little crown and just gently set it down on his head. They shoved it into his head and down over his face. And these thorns would begin to rip the skin. And if you've ever felt up here, you don't have a whole lot of skin right here. It's pretty thin between here and the bone. The thorns would have went down and began to scrape across the bone itself. And if that wasn't bad enough, As they were mocking him, they took a reed or a rod and they hit him in the head. They hit that crown with that rod and forced those thorns deeper into his skull. and down more over his face, so by the time it was done, it was not just this little thing sitting up here like a victor's wreath from the ancient games. This entire portion of his face was mutilated beyond recognition, the skin hanging off of it in ribbons to match the skin hanging off of the rest of him in ribbons as well. And then they led him away to be crucified. When they reached Golgotha, it was customary that the condemned would carry the crossbeam of which their hands would be affixed to. The upright, the stipe posts, as they were called, were permanently left in place, cemented into the ground, but the condemned would carry their own crossbar. Jesus managed to carry his just the little ways before the extreme shock and blood loss of the beating that he had experienced overwhelmed him and he fell and they compelled Simon to carry it the rest of the way for him. And when they got there, what they would do, and they would lead them naked through the streets, but there was something interesting what they did about Christ. They had him clothed. They had put a robe back on him for the simple purpose of to mock him as they crowned him with thorns. As he went, all of the skin and the blood from the wounds in his body would begin to stick to the fabric of that robe. And when they got him up there on top of Golgotha, they grabbed the clothes and ripped them off of them, and I'll just let you imagine what that felt like. Then they threw them into the dirt, coating their wounds, with dust and gravel. Then they stretched their arms out and began to nail them to the crossbars. The spikes that they used were anywhere between five to seven inches long, made out of iron, with about a three-eighths of an inch head on the end. They nailed them not through their hands, but through their wrists. And they were so good at what they did They knew exactly where to place that nail to make sure that it would skewer and sever as many nerves as possible, yet touch no major blood vessels so they wouldn't bleed out and break no bones when they did it. And as I was sitting here and I was reading this, My mind just kept trying to imagine what it would have been like not just to be beaten but to have your hands stretched out to feel the point of that nail touch your wrist and know what was about to happen. And I guarantee you there is nobody in this room that has felt pain like that. They would scream if they had anything left to scream with. And then, when it was all said and done and they had their hands, they would begin to raise them up into position. Once they got into position, they would take their legs and they would bend their legs and place their feet together and they knew exactly where to put the nail on their feet so they would miss all the bones and all the major vessels. but make sure to skewer every nerve they could get. They said that the pain in the person's hands, it would have been like lighting your arms on fire and just letting them burn and burn and burn. They said sometimes the pain from where the nail pierced the nerve was so intense that the person's hand would shrivel into a claw and they couldn't open, they couldn't move their fingers. They said sometimes half of their hand would go completely numb while the other half felt like you had lit it on fire because of the way the blood was cut off to part of it. It was not uncommon for people to hang for three or four days at a time before they finally died on the cross. And with Christ on the cross, the disfigurement that Isaiah is speaking of here, finally comes to an end. Let me sum it up for you. He was naked, bloodied, covered in all manner of bodily fluids, skin and flesh hanging in shredded ribbons from his back, chest, arms and legs, some of it gone entirely. His face lacerated and covered in blood, puffy and swollen beyond recognition, the skin around his head peeled and torn from thorns. This is what he looked like hanging on the tree. And I don't have the vocabulary to paint the picture in the way that it actually looked. And it all leads to the question, why was any of this necessary? Would it not have made more sense for Jesus to just prick his finger and spill just a drop or two of blood and just call the whole thing done. Why the torture? Why the mutilation? Why the intensity of the pain and the agony and the suffering that he had to undergo? Well, there is a reason for the physical disfigurement. Because the physical disfigurement is a visible manifestation of the disfigurement that your sin looks like hanging in your life. It is a physical and a visible manifestation of the curse that he bore on your behalf and on mine. Now, go with me to Romans chapter 3. And we're going to look at the exact same description, but most of us would never read it as such. There are a lot of pictures in the Bible, there are a lot of scriptures in the Bible that paint sin in various ways. Some of them are just, for lack of a better way of saying it, just gross. But in Romans chapter 3, Paul sums up sin in about the most succinct yet descriptive way imaginable. And what we're about to read together is exactly what Jesus looked like hanging on that tree in the physical sense, but you and I look like it in the spiritual sense. So I'm gonna read this, and if you'll allow me this morning, I've changed some of these words and I've personalized this passage of Scripture. Romans chapter 3, beginning in the middle part of verse 9, Paul wrote these words and he says, For we have before proved, both Jews and Gentiles, that's everybody that's alive, that's everybody that was living then and is living now, that we are all under sin. As it is written, we are not righteous. We are not righteous. You are not righteous. I am not righteous. There is none righteous. No, not one. I read a thing yesterday about this particular passage, and they said that it was a preacher who was writing this, and he says, as far as I'm concerned, this is a passage of scripture that needs to be placed in every sermon that is ever preached, and every Wednesday night lesson that is ever given, and every Sunday school lesson that is ever presented. You could never talk about this passage of scripture enough. And the problem with us today is that it's not talked about really at all. We are not righteous. You need to let that sink in. We do not understand. In other words, we are ignorant. We're foolish. We're stupid. Sin makes you stupid. Sin makes you an absolute fool. It makes you completely and utterly ignorant. We do not understand. There is none of us, he said, that seeketh after God. Now hold on, hold on just a second. Doesn't the scripture tell us to seek the Lord while he may be found? To call upon him while he is near? Doesn't the scripture tell us to ask and to seek and to knock? Well what does he mean if he says there is none, none of us seek after God? If God did not begin to draw you, you would die in your sin. absolutely and unequivocally ignorant, stupid, and foolish of your absolute need for the Savior in your life. And if God, if you know now, if you have known in the past, and you have felt Him draw you, Can I tell you this morning that you have been given an absolutely inconceivable gift? And if you throw it away and you spurn it, you are a fool. You are the epitome of a fool. Because he may never speak again. If you feel him, if you sense him, draw you and you reject him, You are a fool. But blessedly He does draw every single person at least once. The grace of God that brings salvation hath appeared to all men. Some men, some women, some children, some teenagers, some young people, some old people, they've been drawn and drawn and drawn and drawn and drawn all throughout the course of their life by the mercy of God. Some people have been spoken to one time and one time alone. That's why the writer said, if today you hear his voice, don't you harden your heart. Don't you harden your heart. Because I promise you that the day that Israel woke up and said, we can't go into that land. We can't go conquer that people. Those people are just, they're too much for us. They're too big. There's too many giants. We're like a bunch of grasshoppers. We can't go there. We can't conquer them. Do you know what they were speaking from? Fear. They were speaking from fear. They had no idea in their mind that they were sealing their doom with the words of their mouth. And then when they found out, when God said, your carcasses will fall in this wilderness, and they will rot, and you will all die. Then they decided, now hold on just a second, wait a minute, wait a minute, no, no, no, let's go up, let's go up and conquer it, we can do it, let's go up. And Moses said, don't you go up, the Lord is not among you. but they went up anyway and they were routed and they were beaten and they were defeated and they came back a defeated people and for 40 years that generation wasted away. And if you read Psalm chapter 90, what you will find is a despairing, pitiful picture of an entire nation of people, millions of people who died in their sin with no hope at all for their eternity because they spurned and rejected The grace of God. If you hear His voice, harden not your heart. Don't harden your heart. He goes on to say, we are all gone out of the way. We are all together become unprofitable. Not only are we foolish, ignorant, and stupid in our sin, we're useless. We're useless. We're of no benefit to anybody. And I'm gonna go as far as to say this, and you can be mad at me if you want to, but in our sin, we have no point, and there is no purpose whatsoever. The Bible tells us we're like a vapor that appears for a little time, and if you can get every single thing the world has to offer you, but you die in your sin, not only are you a fool, but you have lived a useless and unprofitable life. There is none of us that do good. No, not one. Let me quote from Isaiah chapter 64 in the middle of this. The prophet says, but we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. Have you ever been out? Have you ever gotten so dirty doing something? I could ask Charles, what's the dirtiest you've ever gotten working on a car? You ever remember, you remember as a child, you would go out and you would play in the mud, you would play in a mud puddle after it had freshly rained, and you were covered from your head down to the skin, bottom of your feet, just every bit of you just covered in mud. Would it have made any sense whatsoever for your parents to say, all right, you need to get cleaned up for you to come to this house. I'm not letting you in this house looking like that. So here's a towel. Go back out into the mud hole and clean yourself off. And you go out into that muddy brackish water and you dip that towel in it and you smear it with mud and you start rubbing yourself. That's a picture of us relying on our righteousness to clean us up in the sight of an infinitely holy God. In fact, we will have more success in the mud puddle with the rags in terms of cleaning our physical self than our righteousness will ever have in the courts of God above. He continues on and he says, We all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities like the wind have taken us away. There is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee, For thou hast hid thy face from us and consumed us because of our iniquities. Maybe you're here this morning and you say, you know, I don't feel anything. I don't know if God's ever dealt with me at all. I don't know if I can ever remember a time when God has ever dealt, drawn, shown me anything at all. And I don't feel Him right now as you're telling me this. What can I do? You fall on your face and you begin to beg until He does. You go get alone with God and you do not get up until you feel Him begin to stir in your life. Because if you say, well, I don't feel Him. Well, whatever. If He decides to deal with me, then so be it. If you've never felt Him and you don't feel Him now, you're in a horribly dangerous spot. You're in a horribly dangerous spot and it would behoove you to the infinite degree to come up here and get on your face and say, somebody come pray for me. But a lot of times we're so bound up in ourselves and so we're so bound up with our pride that we would literally rather die and go to hell than ask anybody for help, let alone surrender ourselves to Jesus Christ. Can you imagine being such a fool? that you would sit under the convicting power of God and all you have to do is just say, God, I am yours. But you just sit there and you fight it and you fight it and you fight it and you fight it all your life until all of a sudden you don't even know, just like Samson, you wist not that the presence of the Lord is gone from you. And before you know it, your life is spent, you have nothing to show for it, and you go out into eternity absolutely dead. And forever and ever and ever and ever, all you will ever remember is all of those times you could have yielded. And all of those times you could have called upon His name. Paul goes on to say in the next verse, our throat is an open sepulcher. With our tongues have we used deceit. All of the filthy words that may come out of your mouth, all of the gossip that may come out of your mouth, all of the hurtful and hateful things that may come out of your mouth, do you know why they come out of your mouth? It's because when you open your mouth, if you could look down in your throat and see what's inside, you would see rotting, gelled corpses that stink of death. Because the Bible says in the book of James, the tongue is an unruly and an untamable member and it sets on fire the course of nature and it is set on fire of hell. You and I have hell burning on our tongue. That's why no one has to teach us to lie. No one has to teach us to slander people. No one has to teach us to run people down. That is so easy for us to do. We do it without even thinking of it. But you do have to have the Spirit of God to teach you how to speak peace and grace and love and compassion and kindness to people because that's not part of you and it's not part of me. When we speak, it goes on to say the poison of asps is under our lips. Our mouths are just like our natural father, a snake. We bare our fangs and we will inject people constantly with poison. And we don't even have to say anything directly to the person we're talking about. Just the words coming out of our mouth can be poison themselves. Our mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Our feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in our ways. One of the terrible things about the blindness of sin is that the people who are in the blindness of sin have no idea how miserable they actually are. Can you imagine being so enslaved? And I'll just use meth as an example. Anybody who's ever been on meth, that no one, none of them would have ever told you their plans were to absolutely wreck their life with that stuff. But do you know what that does to you? After you've been reduced to next to nothing, your body, you've convinced yourself, your mind has convinced yourself that if I can just find the right hit, I will feel so much better that the misery I'm in right now will all go away forever. In other words, if I can just sin in the right way, if I can do or be pleasured by or accept or live in just the right thing, then this insatiable need inside of myself will forever be satisfied and then I'll quit doing it and I'll get my life together because it will finally be satiated. That's like saying, if you can keep giving me enough gas, I can put this fire out. It won't work. And before long, you'll chase sin enough until you chase it straight off the edge of the cliff into the pit and you'll never crawl back out again. That is the destruction of sin, the way of peace we have not known. And the most terrifying of the entirety of the description Paul leaves here, there is no fear of God before our eyes. When was the last time that your sin made you quake in the sight of a thrice holy God? When is the last time that you were brought to bear with your sin in the presence of God and you saw yourself for who you really are? Because he goes on to say, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. You see, we don't see it because we're so used to sin. We live around sin. We're surrounded by sin. We sink in sin. We swim through it every day in our jobs. We're constantly bombarded with it through our eyes and through our ears. We smell sin. Almost every single thing we touch is tainted with it. But what Paul just described for you here is the spiritual picture of what I painted for you of Jesus Christ hanging on the cross. Because if you or I are in this position that Paul has written here in Romans chapter 3, then that's exactly what we look like. And why were such things necessary? Well, if you go back to Isaiah chapter 53, that oft-quoted verse, he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes we are healed. Do you want your transgressions gone? Do you want your iniquities gone? Do you want your soul healed? Do you want to have peace? Because the way of peace you cannot naturally know. Do you want peace? He had to be disfigured. He had to be reduced to ribbons in order for you to be made whole. Inside of the disfigurement of Christ, we see the awful disparity between guilt and innocence. And specifically, we see the innocent suffering on behalf of the guilty. Salvation, in and of itself, is an undoing of everything that was done wrong. Salvation is a healing of everything that is diseased and dead and cursed. Everything Adam did wrong in the garden, Jesus Christ did right on the cross. Everything Adam messed up, Jesus fixed. It is an undoing of the wrong and of the torture and of the torment that sin has worked in our lives. That is why, listen to me, brothers and sisters, listen to me. If you are saved, raise your hands, worship God. Don't look at your circumstances. Don't look at your grief. Don't look at your pain. Raise your hands and praise the Lord. because you could be dead and dying and miserable in your sin and he has given you eternal life. Raise your hands and bless his name. Or go wallow in your misery and go wallow in your pain and let the devil destroy your life. when Jesus Christ came and was disfigured on your behalf to heal you from your sins. But at the end of the day, you got to accept the healing. When Jesus walked up to the leper and reached out to touch him, the leper could have been like, oh, hold on just a second. You're not supposed to touch me. You're not supposed to touch me. It's written in the law, you're not supposed to touch me. And he could have just kept backing away, kept backing away, kept backing away. And guess what had happened? He had backed away far enough that Jesus would have just let him go and he'd have spent the rest of his life a leper. You may be here today and Jesus is walking towards you, stretching his hand out. He may be stretching his hand out to you to heal you, to help you, to give you grace, to give you glory, and as long as you are content to swallow in your misery, you just keep backing away saying, nope, not today, not today. I'm better off sitting here where I am. I don't want you to touch me. I don't want your help. I don't want your compassion. I don't want your grace. And there's gonna come a point you'll back far enough up that he'll just let you lie. And you'll have nobody but yourself to blame. You will not blame your circumstances. You will not blame your situations. You won't blame your trials. You won't blame your sin. You won't blame your suffering. You will have no one to blame but yourself. If you hear his voice, don't harden your heart. Adam, and by extension all who are in Adam, are rightly guilty. And you know, God could have put every single one of us to death for our sin, but it would have never fixed sin. We could have all been nailed to a cross and it would have done nothing except fulfill the condemnation of the law against me and against you. And the law would have been just, and God would have been justified for putting us to death. Has it ever occurred to you that God could put you to death? And He would be perfectly just to do it. He would be perfectly holy to do it. He would be within His bounds to kill me. Right now, right here. and all that I have ever professed in front of you, all you have ever looked at in my life, I would not be able to say a word against Him. Yet He offers mercy, constant mercy, constant grace. This grace determines then the undoing of sin and the only way to undo the guilty that the innocent must suffer for the guilty so that the guilty be made like the innocent we see this innocence in the conversation turn with me to John chapter 18 between Pilate and Christ when they delivered Jesus to Pilate's house They led him from Caiaphas' house, John chapter 18, verse 28, and they go to the hall of judgment. And in verse 29, Pilate comes out and he says, what accusation do you bring against this man? And you can read the way that these religious leaders just, they just cozy up to Pilate. And they said, hey, if he were not a male factor, if he were not a criminal, if he were not an evil criminal, we wouldn't even have brought him unto you. So Pilate says in verse 31, we'll take him and judge him according to your law then. And look at the statement they made in verse 31. They said, well, it's not lawful for us to put anyone to death, but that certainly was not going to stop them from stoning the woman they caught in adultery. And it did not stop them from killing Stephen. It's not lawful for us to put anybody to death, Pilate. Why did they mention that? Why did they say that? Look at verse 32. But the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled, which he spake, signifying what death he should die, because they did not have the authority to crucify somebody. And they hated him so much. They wanted him exposed to the most awful, humiliating, and torturous death that man could have devised at their time in history. They wanted him to suffer. The devil wants you to suffer. Sin wants you to suffer. Pilate enters verse 33, the judgment hall, and he calls Jesus and he says, Are you the king of the Jews? And Jesus answered, Do you say this of yourself, or did others tell it to you? And just listen to the words he says. Pilate answers, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me. What have you done? If Jesus really was a criminal, if he really was trying to overthrow the Roman Empire, these are not the words somebody who was guilty would be speaking. He says, my kingdom's not of this world. And if it were, my servants would fight so that I would not be delivered into the hands of the Jews. But now is my kingdom. Not from thence. And by this point, he's got Pilate's attention. Don't think for a moment he doesn't have Pilate's attention. Remember, they were already wondering at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. He had Pilate right here. Pilate said unto him, Are you a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest I am a king. In other words, yes, I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth, and every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." And Pilate said, what is truth? And he goes back out and he says, I find no fault in him. You see, Pilate knew he was innocent. He knew he was as innocent as it was possible to be. He knew he was innocent because not only were they having this discussion, his own wife had come up to him and said, don't you have anything to do with this man? In fact, she said, don't you have anything to do with this just man? Because I have suffered many things because of him in a dream today. In Matthew's Gospel, it's recorded that Pilate knew that they had delivered him to them, or they delivered Jesus to him because they were envious of him. And that was the only reason he was there. He also knew when he said, I wash my hands of the blood of this just man. And what you see here as you read specifically John's account, you can see Pilate becoming more and more fearful the longer this goes on. So he decides, hey, I'll scourge him, I'll whip him, and I'll appease them. But I'll still save his life. Chapter 19, verse 1, Pilate takes Jesus and scourges him and the soldiers put the crown of thorns on him and they mock him. Hail, King of the Jews. And then verse 4, Pilate goes back out and he says, I'm bringing him forth to you. You need to know I don't find any fault in him. And the chief priests were instant there. Crucify, crucify, crucify him. And the statement in verse 6 is one of sarcasm. Pilate says, take ye him and crucify him, I don't find any fault in him. In other words, he's not guilty of anything. And the Jews said, we have our law and by our law he ought to die because he made himself to be the son of God. And when they said that, look at verse 8, Pilate heard and he was the more afraid. And he goes back to Jesus and he says, in other words, where did you come from? And Jesus answers him, nothing. And he says, do you not understand that I have the power to kill you and I have the power to set you free? And Jesus, like no criminal has ever made the statement before, says you could have no power at all against me unless it was given to you from above. Therefore he that delivereth me unto thee hath the greater sin. And the Bible says in verse 12, from henceforth Pilate sought to release him, but they kept crying. And now look at the ironic thing they say. They say, well, if you let him go, you're not Caesar's friend. Because whosoever maketh himself a king is speaking against Caesar. Verse 15, they cried out, away with him, away with him. And Pilate said, am I supposed to crucify your king? And in absolute derision, ignorance, and blasphemy, look at what they said. We have no king but Caesar. We have no king but Caesar. And he delivers him therefore unto them to be crucified. And they took Jesus and they led him away. And very quickly this morning, go back to Isaiah chapter 52 and look with me at verse 15. He was marred and disfigured beyond all human recognition, so shall He sprinkle many nations. We see in this verse the significance of Christ's disfigurement. Notice, the kings shut their mouths at Him. This was referred to in verse 14, as many as were astonished at Thee. It means that they were filled with absolute amazement at what they saw, and they were rendered speechless. We see two examples of this. We see the thief on the cross, who at first look, both of them are mocking him. Both of them are ridiculing him. And then there was something about this man in the middle that caught one of them's attention. He looked beyond the shredded nature of his visage and his form, and somehow, by the power of God, he could see this is not an ordinary man. And the longer he looked at him, the more he turned his own gaze inward and looked at himself and thought, you know what, I'm deserving of this. But this man's done nothing. I'm guilty, but he is not. Have you come to the inescapable conclusion that you are fundamentally guilty? And Jesus Christ is absolutely not. We see it also in the centurion and his company of men that were in charge of this crucifixion. We see that in all four of the gospel accounts and we piece these scriptures together, we can see that they go to Jesus and the centurion commands one of the soldiers to shove the spear through his side. And when it does that, when they pull that spear out, the water and the blood sprinkle. And the centurion and his company see the water and they see the blood and they follow their face and they said, surely this man is the son of God. What's significant about these two instances? They're all Gentiles. They're not Jews. The Jews are standing there jeering and mocking him, but they see, their mouths are shut. They're in absolute astonishment. Why? Because of the rest of verse 15. That which had not been told them. They were never given the law. They were not given the covenants. They were not given the promises and the ordinances by which they looked forward to the arrival of the Messiah. And since they were not, they just simply looked on Him by faith and believed that He is who He is. And it made all the difference in the world. And then the last line. that which they had not heard shall they consider." Even back here in Isaiah chapter 52, we see the importance of giving the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip. In Luke chapter 9, and I'm going to wind this up, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John onto a high mountain. And the Bible says that when they get up there, he was transfigured before them. His raiment began to glow and glisten. Peter wrote in 2 Peter chapter 1 that the scene was a scene of majesty. It was a glorious scene. There was bright light. There was an overshadowing cloud. There was Moses and there was Elijah that appeared talking with Jesus. There was the literal voice of God. It was an absolutely incredible scene for them to see. But Moses and Elijah showed up, and they didn't talk about glory and heaven and majesty and splendor. It says that they spoke with him about his decease, which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. bathed in glory. They spoke of death. Why do you suppose that is? Because the mountain of transfiguration shows us, you see, we are attracted to beauty. We're attracted to glory. We're attracted to bright things and shining things. We're attracted to things that are warm and fuzzy and give us good feelings and grace and we're attracted to things that make us feel good. That's the glory. But let me tell you something, you cannot have glory until you've tasted death. The mountain of glory will never be yours to walk until you walked up the hilltop of suffering and the hilltop of Calvary. You see, on the mountain there was glory, but on Calvary there was shame. On the mountaintop there was a bright and shining cloud, and down there on Calvary there was absolute darkness. On the mountaintop of glory, there was the voice of God, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear ye Him. But over here at the cross, there was absolute silence as God the Father turns His face away from the one in whom He is pleased because He is so overladen with your sin and mine. that God cannot look at him any longer. We want all of heaven, we want all of the joys, we want all the graces, we want all the benefits of the divine, but very, very few people are willing to first go to Calvary and pay the price it takes to enter this world to come. because it costs you everything. You cannot sell, you cannot give God 80% of your soul. You can't give him 90%. You can't give him 99%. He's gonna have 100 or he will have none. There's no other God beside him. He knows not any. And if he knows not any, guess who's not going to be a God in your life? You. And if I am perfectly fine to give God most and me keep some, I am a hypocrite and I do not know God. You cannot have the glory if you're not willing to submit to death. It costs everything to be a Christian. It costs you everything to be saved. You have to give up your life. You have to give up your wants. You have to give up your ambitions. You have to give up your desires. You have to turn every piece of that over to Him if you're going to be a disciple and if you're going to follow Him. Jesus said that he who puts his hand to the plow but yet looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God. In other words, they have no place in the kingdom of God. When God told Moses, Moses, no man can see my face and live. Because that's what Moses asked. He said, Lord, show me your glory. And so God said, Moses, you can't see me or you'll be destroyed. And so God said, Moses, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to cause all my goodness to pass before you. And I'm going to proclaim the name of the Lord. And the Bible says that God came down and stood with him there and passed by him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful, gracious, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, one who keeps mercy for thousands, who forgives iniquity and transgression and sin. And what Moses heard is God's He's heard God's character and he peeks out of the cleft of the rock and he sees God as he passes by, but he cannot see His face because if he did, he'd have died. But do you realize that 2,000 years later, man saw the face of God in the person of Jesus Christ? And what they did not see... You see, Jesus took Peter and James and John up there and showed them a glimpse of the glory. But when they got down there to Calvary, they didn't see the glory dying. They saw the man. If you want God to change your life, you cannot go to him in his glory or he'll destroy you. But if you'll go to Him in the face of Jesus Christ, then on that cross you will see His love, His mercy, His grace. You will see His long-suffering, His goodness. You'll see the truth of what you are, and you'll see the truth of who He is. And it ought, dear friends, it ought to bow your heart under. It ought to make you look at him in a different light than you've ever looked at him before. Because he hanging there took what you deserve so that he could give you everything you don't. And my question this morning is we've examined this second of his many sufferings. He was disfigured so that you and I could be transfigured into his likeness. There's a little song that my wife is teaching Jules to sing. It says, I was made in his likeness, created in his image. I was born to serve the Lord. And I can't deny Him. I will always walk beside Him. For I was born to serve the Lord. The only birthright you and I had into this world was death. But because of Jesus, We have absolutely everything in Him. Stand with us this morning.