God's grace is truly marvelous and if some of you are attentive you may have recognized that we already sang that last week and when our Sister Carol called with the hymns she had chosen for worship. She chose that one for the evening service. And so I said, well, I've already chosen that for the morning service. So rather than sing it twice today, it is a wonderful hymn. And one of the phrases that really I drew out of this for the message this morning is the second verse. Sin and despair, like the sea waves cold, threaten the soul with infinite loss. Grace that is greater, yes, grace untold, points to the refuge, the mighty cross. Please open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 27, where we have the record of someone who was entirely lost in despair. Entirely lost in despair. Matthew chapter 27. And we will read there the first 10 verses. We will rather, as we did last week, we'll read from chapter 26, verse 69, to compare the repentance of Peter with that of Judas. Matthew 26, verse 69, Now Peter sat without in the palace, and a damsel came unto him, saying, Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee. But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou sayest. And when he was gone out into the porch, another maid saw him, and said unto him that were there, This fellow was also with Jesus of Nazareth. And again he denied, with an oath, I do not know the man. And after a while came unto him they that stood by and said to Peter, surely thou also art one of them, for thy speech bereath thee. Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man. And immediately the cock crew. Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out and wept bitterly. When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death. And when they had bound him, they led him away and delivered him to Pontius Pilate, the governor. Then Judas, which had betrayed him when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself and brought again the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, what is that to us? See thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed and went and hanged himself. And the chief priests took the silver pieces and said, it is not lawful for to put them into the treasury because it is the price of blood. They took counsel and bought with them the potter's field to bury strangers in. Wherefore, that field was called the field of blood unto this day. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value, and gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me. as far in the reading of God's word. We have read a very somber and disconcerting passage. It jars at our emotions, and yet the Lord in his providence has devoted what we view as 10 verses in his Bible to the destruction of Judas. We might think that we'd be just as well off not knowing what happened to Judas, but the Lord says it's very important for you to know. And you might wonder why we have to spend time on it. And as we are involved in expositional preaching, we don't want to pass over it. And we want to hear what the Holy Spirit says. And we want to draw some good lessons for our souls. So therefore, we're going to ask the Lord once again, as we normally do, for His help. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we do thank Thee for every word that has been preserved for us in the scriptures, thy holy word. We pray, Lord, that thou wouldst grant that we may this day receive the warnings of thy word, as well as those words of blessing which we find also throughout the scriptures. Lord, soften our hearts We pray that Thou would deliver us from self-justification, from defending ourselves against the accusations of Thy Word. We pray that we may be delivered from self-righteousness, so that our only righteousness is that of the Lord Jesus Christ imputed unto us. Bring us very low, O Lord, that we may proclaim and sing the worthiness and the praise of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, we pray, alone will be exalted in the preaching of thy word. Lord, stir us up to love and good works, we ask in Jesus' name. Amen. Beloved congregation, it is important for everyone, but especially for Christians, because these words are written especially to God's people, to beware of despair. You might say, well, who wants to be in despair? Nobody pursues it. Nobody actively, I don't think, goes after and seeks out despair, but beware because it comes upon you and can come upon you very subtly to be aware that these things are perhaps coming upon you. Be on the lookout, the Lord says. Watch and be careful. Despair is defined in the dictionary not by what it is, but by what it is not. Dictionary says that despair is defined as the loss of hope. The loss of hope. We see that in the closing hours of the life of Judas. The Apostle Peter had hope. He had denied the Lord Jesus grievously, very grievously and openly and defiantly. But even in the midst of that, he had hope. As we see, we saw from other passages of Scripture last week, in the end, he had hope. And that hope was given to him by the Lord Jesus Christ himself. But in Judas we see someone who has lost all hope. His eyes have been entirely taken away from the Lord Jesus Christ, entirely removed. We read in the opening verses that the Sanhedrin meets again to ratify the decision of the smaller council that had taken place the night before. They met very early in the morning to hand him over to the Romans. We can't put anyone to death, but he's worthy of death, so we're going to make sure the Romans kill him for us. And we have in the passage before us an ominous warning. And this is kind of in a way that we could compare this passage to Psalm 88. Psalm 88 is a psalm of great discouragement, and there's no resolution. It leaves you hanging at the end, and you really need to go on and keep on reading Psalm 89 to receive hope. The passage that we have here in itself doesn't offer hope. It's very, very dark. a very dark place to be and so we are going to go to the scriptures for a glorious hope. But we begin with this ominous warning. We read here the repentance of Judas and we're reminded that not all repentance is alike. The word repentance is used in your Bible, but it is not repentance unto life. The word that's used here is just a change of mind. It's not a change of heart. And we have to watch for that repentance in your own life as well as in the life of others. People can look at their life and say, well, I've made a great mess of my life. I'm resolved to reform my ways so that I'm not having a bad effect on my friends, on my family. I need to do better. than I have been doing. And we often hear about those at the first of the year. We often have that at the first of the school year. Remember when you were in school and you opened up your scribbler or your notebook, and there it was, a nice clean sheet? And most of you know I don't have very good handwriting, but on the first day of school, you always have your best handwriting. That page looks nice, you're going to keep it nice. And then pretty soon you just deteriorate into your old bad habits because you're trying to keep up with the lecture from your teacher. So then you just scribble to get everything down. And you've forgotten what strong resolve you had at the beginning because it wasn't attended with power. Your own will was exposed to be very, very weak. His repentance of Judas said, this has all gone south very, very quickly, and this is not the way it was supposed to be. He felt sorry for what was done, but he took no action to correct these things. In his mind, all of this was beyond correction, beyond remedy, beyond solution. There's just no way out of this. And that is really the picture of hopelessness, isn't it? And what he does is he returns the 30 pieces of silver. We'll read here in verse three. Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that Jesus was condemned. Sometimes you think, well, you know, I want this to happen. But yeah, I didn't want it to happen in this way. I didn't realize everything that was going to take place. I was involved some years ago in a domestic dispute, and it was a case where the police had to be called. It was very serious. And I went to the court, and the dear girl who had been assaulted, when her I don't know, husband, or I think it was her husband, when he was sentenced to go to jail, she broke down in tears and said, I never meant for this to happen. She had some love for this man, and she knew that she had to do what she had to do, but it grieved her that it had ended up in that. Now, in that case, that was not a false repentance. She just, it just, she realized the significance of everything that he had been doing, that it was very serious. It was so serious that he wasn't gonna come home for a few years. And that was the just consequence of his actions. But here we have Judas saying, you know, well, I know this wasn't, I know I didn't act out of love for the Lord Jesus, but really he's gonna die. This is not quite what I intended. But if he would have thought about it, he would have realized that's exactly what he intended. That's exactly what was going to happen. So beloved, it's easy to, fall into that trap of not thinking out the consequences of your actions. Because ultimately, you don't know what the consequences are going to be. And what an encouragement then to bring everything to the Lord in prayer and to say, I don't know the right thing to do here, but I pray that whatever I do, you'll bring good out of this action. So there is the repentance of Judas and just a plan that didn't go the way that he thought it was going to go. He was very sure of how it was all going to turn out. And then we have the death of Judas. The verse five, he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed and went and hanged himself. His last words were, in verse four, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. Those are his last recorded words of Judas. I have sinned. Notice that even this repentance in has the admission of sinning. I have sinned. He admits that. He's very open about what he has done. It was a wicked thing. I have sinned, and he knows the reason of it, in that I have betrayed innocent blood. So his very last words, his very last recorded words are a testimony to the innocence of the Lord Jesus Christ. So for all that he hated Jesus, For all that he despised, the benefits personally that he'd received already from Jesus, he declared him to be innocent. He turned him over to the authorities to be destroyed, but he declared him to be innocent. His testimony agrees with what we find in Hebrews 7 verse 26, that Jesus was holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners. That really was Judas's final testimony. And so he had a lot of things that he knew, a lot of things that he believed, but none of them unto salvation. Very finally, he committed suicide by hanging. It's a very horrible way to die. Acts 1 verse 18 records that falling headlong He burst asunder in the midst and all his bowels gushed out. And again, that might be too much information for you, but it's information that the Holy Spirit has given us. And God wants you to know the gruesomeness of the death of the wicked. So apparently he hung himself and came to the end of the rope with such force that his innards just gushed out. Very, very gruesome. And it was a horrible death for a horrible man. And we ought to be reminded, beloved, of the evil of suicide and the horror of taking one's own life. It's very tragic that we live in a land that encourages people to take their own life. put a very nice phrase on it. We call it doctor-assisted suicide, and sometimes we don't even like to use the word suicide, but just an end of your life is going to end anyway. You don't have any quality of life here. Why don't you just die comfortably? We'll give you the appropriate drugs and administer them for you, and you'll just fall asleep. and die in what ends up being a sleep. And it's a good reminder, beloved, for you and me that the Lord has appointed the day of your death and is not to be usurped by anyone. It's a very, very tragic thing. I know every suicide is a complication. And I have done the funerals for at least three or four suicides, and they're a great agony. They're a great trial for family and friends. And just leave a multitude, a multitude of questions behind. And so we ought to take this very, very seriously. Our society says death is nothing. Death is nothing. And when that person, just think about when that person passes into eternity, into a Christless eternity, they're gonna think if I would've had just a few more days even, or a few months more of even the cursed life in the world, I would've chosen that over the horrors of hell. And that most assuredly is the testimony of those who go to be in perdition. And Judas is the son of perdition. His judgment is pronounced and announced in the scriptures. There's no hope that Judas is in heaven, even though he was one of the 12 apostles. There we have the death, the very ominous, the very grievous death of the Apostle Judas. We want to look next at the hypocrisy of the Sanhedrin. They said that they wanted nothing to do with that blood money, verse four. What is that to us? See thou to that. The hypocrisy is that that money had actually come out of their treasury, And when Judas sought to put it back where he'd withdrawn it essentially from, all of a sudden they were distancing themselves from it. Oh, we don't want to have anything to do with that. We gave you the blood money, we don't, now it's, we want to really distance ourselves from that. And they themselves, I think, saw really the consequence of their actions. This was a great evidence of what Jesus had said in Matthew 23. Ye blind guides would strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. That's what they were doing here. They wanted the appearance of righteousness. We can't have blood money in our hands. So they decide what they're going to do is buy a field with the money and use it to bury strangers. Now Acts 1 verse 18 has maybe what appears to be a little bit of a discrepancy. Acts 1 says, now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity. So I think we can infer there that the Sanhedrin, the chief priest, bought the field in the name of Judas, it would appear. So they wanted that field to be connected with Judas, not in any way with them. So we'll use it to bury strangers. But the name of it, Acts 1 verse 19 says, the name of it was Akodama, and here it's called the field of blood. So it's a place of great disdain. The field of blood, who would want to be buried there, except for strangers that might die in your city and you have no other place to put them. That's where Judas, Judas's body is laid. And then we have here also the fulfillment of prophecy. Verse 10. Says verse 9, the prophecy by Jeremiah says, and they took the 30 pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value and gave them for the potter's field as the Lord appointed me. So this is attributed to Jeremiah. When you actually look at the quote itself, it looks like it was taken from Zechariah 11 verse 13, where it says, and the Lord said unto me, cast it unto the potter a goodly price that I was prized at of them. And I took the 30 pieces of silver and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord. So, I usually don't spend too much time on these apparent contradictions, but I think it's good for you to know that obviously there's a connection there between Matthew 27 verses 9 and 10 and Zechariah 11 verse 13, but there are also things that we read in Jeremiah chapter 19 that were not included in Zechariah 11. So it seems as though what Matthew is doing is bringing these two passages of Scripture together and that he's attributing them to the major prophet rather than the minor. William Hendrickson says what Matthew does therefore is this, he combines two prophecies, one from Zechariah and one from Jeremiah. Then he mentions not the minor prophet but the major prophet as the source of the reference. So don't look it up now, but if you're taking notes, you could look at Mark 1, verses two and three, where there's a reference to Malachi and Isaiah, but the quote is ascribed to Isaiah. So it's not a huge problem, but it might get your attention if you looked into this a little more deeply. So Jeremiah and Zechariah then seem to have these, or do have these prophecies regarding the death of Judas. So again, even in his sinful repentance, Judas fulfills prophecy. God is aware of this, and God, by his amazing and sovereign design, has purposed it. So we don't read the prophecies of Jeremiah 19 and Zechariah 11 and say, well, God just knew that this was going to happen, and so therefore he wrote down what he could see somebody was going to do in the future. No, that is not a sovereignty at all. He did actually decree this to be the case, and Matthew records it in such a way that that is the case. that God decreed that these things should be. There's no question, beloved, that Judas did this of his own free will. He did this because he wanted to. He didn't like the way it turned out, but he did it because he hated the Lord Jesus and loved his own righteousness. He wanted Christ to be out of his way. And in the end, it was worse than he thought it was in his imagination, but it really arose out of a heart that despised Christ and his grace. Beloved, before we go to the next point, we ought to be very aware of being hardened against the Lord. To take lightly his commands. Solomon says in Proverbs 29 verse one, he that being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy. So when you hear the admonitions of the Lord, and you resist them, and you decide that you are going to not obey the Lord, that you're going to go your own way in spite of the very clear statement that God has made in his word, there's a hardening that takes place. I know what God says, but I'm going to do things differently. I'm going to do things in my own way. And so what can be the harm in that? The harm is that you more and more take lightly the things of the Lord and begin to despise them because you've not taken that first step of gospel response to his warnings. Matthew Henry says, those that will not be reformed must expect to be ruined. It's at the very heart of repentance to change not only your mind, but to have your heart changed and to have those changes evidenced in your actions. And that's what What is the trouble with repentance? To show everybody, by your repentance you show everybody, I was wrong. I've been living my life in a wrong way, but I need to reform. God has convicted me of this sin. Because I love the Lord Jesus Christ, I'm going to live differently. Because I have reverence to my Heavenly Father, because I do want to hallow His name, I'm going to live differently, and I'm going to do that only by the power of the Holy Spirit. It was the Holy Spirit that convicted me that I was wrong. I need the Holy Spirit to live in a new way, to actually live a life of repentance. and to have it be evident that I am not the person that I used to be. Even though I may have been saved several years or even decades ago, I'm still in the process of repentance. There are still things in my life where I'm drawing closer to the Lord Jesus, and as you draw closer to the beauty of his holiness, you are going to see the wickedness of your own heart. We were Again, reminded of that this morning in our Bible class, just how corrupt our hearts is, how corrupt your heart is. And you don't want to believe it, do you? I don't want to believe it, but it's very true. And as I draw closer to the Lord, it becomes more and more corrupt. You don't get, day by day, you don't get better and better in your old nature. You grow in grace. You grow and become more sanctified. But isn't it odd? Especially you have been walking with the Lord for a while. Isn't that an odd feeling to actually feel yourself getting more holy, but being more aware of your sinfulness? It's very odd. And you become sensitive to sin. and you become more and more aware of how far you still have to go to be like the Lord Jesus. You read your scriptures daily, you read through the scriptures every year for 10 and 15 years, and as you continue to do that, what happens? You realize how little of God's word you actually know. Isn't that true? The more you read God's word, The more you realize how little, certainly how little you've put into practice, and you know more information, even there you realize there's so much more to know. There's so much more that you can understand. There's so much more that brings things together and are tied together than you could have ever thought of in your philosophy. It's a treasure that then you ought to want to mine even further, to draw out more jewels from God's precious word. So here was Judas who had heard the reproofs of the Lord Jesus, seen evidences of his wonderful grace, but in the end, he turned his back on him to his own destruction. So beloved, it is good for you and I to hear the warnings of the Lord, the calls to repentance. And always in your sinfulness, you must have an eye to the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace that is greater than all, all my sin. That's what grace is. You realize how deep your sin is, how vast it is, how black it is, how vile it is in the sight of a holy God, and you have to apprehend then that God's grace is greater than that sin. And that is the work of the Holy Spirit, where you realize, I have no right to go on If God cast me into hell this very moment, he would be just in doing so. It's what I deserve. And how could God possibly forgive my sin? It becomes that great. but grace overwhelms and overcomes and rises above the understanding of your sin. You're not taking sin less likely, you're making it more intense, you're making it greater. And then God's grace is greater than that. God's grace transcends your sinfulness. so that you can say, marvelous grace, grace that is greater than all my sin. And beloved, that is your only, only hope. It's a hope that Judas did not have. It's a hope that Peter had. He had a tough time realizing that Christ was going to forgive him, and Christ did forgive him. He brought him through trials to make him to realize that forgiveness, but he did have hope. He didn't go out and hang himself, did he? You think three times denying the Lord Jesus, Judas just went out and gave him a kiss. Peter's sin, we might estimate as being worse than Judas' sin. Three times, with an oath, with cursing and swearing. Come on, Peter, smarten up. Judas just went over and gave him a kiss, that's all. Got 30 pieces of silver for it. He could have gone merrily on his way, but he couldn't. He went out and hanged himself. And Peter had hope. He stayed. He stayed with the disciples. He stayed waiting for Jesus. He was on the shore at the end of the Gospel of John with the disciples watching Jesus catch fish and come out and eat with them. So he was there. So the Psalm 130 verse 5 ought to be your verse here. I wait for the Lord. My soul doth wait. Peter had to wait. And in his word do I hope. That's where you have the promises of God's word, in his word. It's the only way you have assurance of sin's forgiven. Verse seven of Psalm 130 says, God's word will lead you to God himself. Let Israel hope in the Lord. As you read God's word, as you study God's word and draw out the promises, you're going to be led to God himself. Not just staying with the scriptures and saying, well, I wonder about the language here and comparing this. But no, everything brings you into God's presence. The place of hope, the place of grace, the hope that is there brings you into the very presence of God himself, because he's the one who makes these things actually happen. Spurgeon has an interesting illustration where he quotes the Puritans who often quoted the remarkable experience of Mrs. Honeywood as an instance of the way in which the Lord delivers his chosen. Spurgeon says, she for year after year was in bondage to melancholy and despair, but she was set at liberty by the gracious providence of God in an almost miraculous way. She took up a slender Venice glass, which I guess was very delicate, and saying, I am as surely damned as that glass is dashed to pieces. She hurled it down upon the floor, when to her surprise, and the surprise of all, I know not by what means, the glass was not so much as chipped or cracked. That circumstance first gave her a ray of light, and she afterwards cast herself upon the Lord Jesus. Beautiful picture. So as she saw herself as being delicate, as being destroyed, but she looked to the Lord Jesus by her own illustration, by the providence of the Lord. Let me close. with a reminder that was brought home very forcefully to me again this week of the story of Christian in Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Christian and hopeful, he was traveling with hopeful, decide that there's a bit of a shortcut as they make their way to the Celestial City And it looks like a good way. And they ask somebody, where does this lead? And they say, well, it leads to the celestial city. And it's a shortcut. And it seems much easier than the way that they were going to go. And so let's go this way. And Hopeful says, well, I guess we could. He's the younger one. And he said, I guess we could go this way. Pretty soon, it's called Bypath Meadows. That should have been a clue, right? Anyway, Bypath Meadows. So they go off to the side and things get really bad. It starts to thunder and rain. And they're just in a really bad way. And they try to go away, go back, and they realize that things have gotten so bad that they would drown. If they tried to go back the other way, they are just in a real jam. And then where do they end up? Do you remember the story? They end up in the castle of giant despair. Not just despair, but giant despair. Isn't that what despair is like? It just overwhelms you. It gets big. And you can't deal with it. And what does giant despair come out of? He said, what are you doing on my property? Come on in. You're coming in here. He grabs the two of them, casts them into the dungeon. And what did they do there? They started beating themselves up. What did we do? Why are we in this place? It's my fault, Christian says. I went because I was looking for the easy road. I was looking for the easy way. And here we are. This is all my fault. giant despair checks with his wife, Diffidence, and says, what do you think I should do with these cow drills? She says, you know, I'd go out and get a crabapple branch, and I'd just beat the tar out of them. So he says, that's great. Next morning, he gets up. He gets a branch off of a cudgel off of the crabapple tree, which is pretty hard, and starts beating and thrashing on these two guys. And then he said, well, I'm done with them. And so he leaves them. And the next morning, they're still there. But in the process of all of this, Christian says, what an idiot I've been, what a fool I've been. All this time, I had in my chest, on my chest, on a string, a key. Remember the name of that key? It was promise. I have a key here called Promise. Surely, that's going to get us out of this castle. Doubting Castle, it's called, by the way, Doubting Castle. He takes the key, he goes into the lock, bang, it opens it up. He had the key all along, but he forgot about it. So beloved, when you're in despair, you need to remember the promises of God. Open the scriptures, look for the promises. Look for the things that you need. And they're gonna take you out of Doubting Castle, and they're gonna keep you from the blows of giant despair. Because giant despair will keep you in that place. He wants to keep you low, he wants to beat you up. And you will let yourself be beaten up. because you know that it's your fault that you're there in the first place. I shouldn't have been here, I should have been wiser, I should have been smarter, but here I am. That's the time you look to the promises of God. You look not to yourself, you look to the key that's outside, was outside of Christian. And he went in, sprung the lock just like that. Of course, Giant Despair went running after him. The second lock didn't go quite so easily, but it finally sprung, and they were free from Giant Despair. Of course, he couldn't run as fast as them because he was big. But they got away, fleeing to the Lord Jesus Christ. There's great hope. Pilgrim's Progress is on my hand. list of books to read again this year. I hope I get to it, but it's a wonderful, wonderful book. We commend it to you for all the blessing it will do to your soul. Beloved, take seriously the warnings of the Lord Jesus Christ. the warnings of scripture, the warnings of those who have fallen away and gone into the ways of hell and flee to Christ, cling to Christ, cling to his promises, use his promises, claim the promises through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as a hope of being delivered from any despair which may come your way. Let us pray. Lord our God, We hesitate often to think of despair and yet we confess that we have found ourselves there in the dark place. Lord, we pray that we may make good use of Thy promises. We pray that Thou wouldst deliver us from doubting castle. We pray, Lord, that Thou wouldst deliver us from the blows of giant despair. We pray that we may behold the glories of Christ, the sweetness of His forgiveness, even of the greatest of our sins, that we may walk with Thee in humility, with true joy, in gladness of heart and calmness of spirit. We pray, Lord, that thou would deliver anyone here who is now in the bonds of despair. Grant them faith to use thy promises aright so that they will be refreshed and renewed and redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. We pray in Jesus' precious name. Amen.