I won't keep you late, but I do want us to reflect on a few matters relevant to the occasion. Service we wanted to include opportunity for you to express your praise to God, you know It's easy enough to have a sermon wrapped in a tissue of a hymn or two or a psalm or two But I think we like to be able to give expression ourselves to our worship to God We turn with me very quickly to 1st Corinthians chapter 1 like to read the end of that first chapter and reflect on a point that it raises for us as we think about the meaning of Good Friday and the death of our Lord Jesus Christ on Calvary's cross. 1 Corinthians 1, verse 17, For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs, and Greeks seek wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of Him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord." Thus far, the reading of God's holy word. Let's just pray again quickly. Lord, we ask you to open our hearts. It's been a long work week. It's late in the day. We've breathed all the air out of this room now, O Lord, and so we will struggle to attend your Word. And yet we know that your words are spirit and they are life. They can revive us even in the midst of our weakness and weariness. And we pray that our reflection tonight might equip us better not only to appreciate Calvary's cross, but to proclaim it in our own day in a way that will penetrate the armor of our fellow human beings who are as skeptical and reluctant today as they ever have been. Lord, grant us your spirit that we might hear and believe his word given to us in the scriptures, and we pray it for Jesus' sake. Amen. As Christians, we glory in the cross of Calvary. And I don't know if you've ever caught yourself thinking about what a weird thing that is to do. To glory in the instrument of a criminal's execution. We don't customarily wear little electric chairs around our neck for ladies jewelry, but many Christian women have tasteful crosses that they wear to decorate their bodies. What is up with that? For many in the modern world, just as in the ancient world, the cross is an embarrassment. It's a scandal. It is a stumbling block, as Paul says. And you know, we live in such an insulated community as believers. Sometimes all we do is talk to other believers, and we all nod and say, yes, we agree with that. And every once in a while, it's worth putting ourselves in the non-believer's shoe, or maybe talking to hardcore skeptics about the things that we hold so dear. We need to look at the cross sometimes through the eyes of many people, even people who would consider themselves religious people in our day. As a matter of fact, those people do not see Calvary as the grand demonstration of the love of God. Far from it. They see Calvary, as a matter of fact, as Exhibit A in their case against the God of the Bible. That God, the God that we talk about as a God of wisdom and love, that God would inflict the kind of suffering on His own Son that's described in the biblical Gospels, not to mention the depictions of a film like Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, shows many people today that God is not the epitome of goodness and love. On the contrary, He is a God of jealousy, of brutality, of vengefulness. He's, as a matter of fact, just the kind of God that they want to stay far, far, far away from. They want no part of the God who could concoct something like Calvary. And when well-meaning but ignorant Christians scramble to justify God's ways to men by saying, well, you know, God can't control everything. Or God allows certain things to happen rather than ordaining them. They don't do us any good. They don't help us. Many today are not attracted by the cross, but rather they are repelled by it. And they are repelled from the man who was crucified there. They frankly want a different kind of gospel. They would find some other message good news. They want a kinder, gentler God, if they can find Him, or her, or it. And they want a Jesus who will point them to a way to a bloodless solution to man's problems. Preferably some kind of Enlightenment that causes us to enjoy a happier spirituality. I mean, after all, Christians are so grim. Suffering, death, pain, sin, sorrow. Who needs it? So say many in our own day. And this is not a new problem, as that passage that we just read from Paul indicates. And so I pose the question, if the cross is the answer, what is the question? And we ought to think about that, and I want us to do that quickly for a few minutes tonight. Because as a matter of fact, to a large degree, what you expect when you come to God, or when you come to the Bible, or when you come to the cross, Your understanding of your own needs and the place of your own desire in your spirituality, your expectations will, to a large degree, dictate your response to the message of the cross. Paul was well aware that the message that he preached was not likely to go down smoothly to his first century audiences, whether they were Jewish audiences or whether they were Greek audiences. He thought that they would think that this message was idiotic, was foolish. No reason that anyone should listen to this message. He knew that they would find it to be a scandal, a stumbling block, something over which men stumble and fall. He said that the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing. He said Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom. The Jews knew about power. They knew about strength. They worshipped the God who created the heavens and the earth by His Word in six days. They worshipped the God who brought Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, having cursed the Egyptians once, twice, again and again to the tenth full measure of judgment. They worshipped a God who parted the Red Sea so that His people walked through on dry ground. And that's what they expected their Messiah to be like. A God of power. A Savior who would bring a Joshua-like deliverance. And when they saw what happened to Jesus, they were sure that He was not the one. The Greeks, on the other hand, knew about wisdom. They had their philosophers, they had their poets, they had their playwrights. And they had an understanding of how the world was and what our place in it is, although they disagreed with one another like philosophers always will. And they were looking for some intellectual answer to man's problems. Someone who would be able to sort out all of the paradoxes and the conundrums of human experience and thought. And Jesus, wasn't what they were looking for. And they were skeptical about things like resurrections. You know, it always makes me laugh when I hear modern people speak as if we invented skepticism, like nobody ever had trouble believing unusual events until the 20th or the 21st century, maybe the 18th century. Matter of fact, I heard one time that when the Jesus Seminar was analyzing the statements in the Gospels about the resurrection, and then they wanted to present their findings and explain why they didn't believe that Jesus really rose from the dead, even though there were stories like that, they got somebody, a nurse who worked in a morgue, to come and explain to people that in her experience, dead bodies don't come back to life. Whoa, what a revelation, right? The first century Greeks knew what resurrections were and they said they do not happen. So people in Paul's day were skeptical. The astonishing thing is not that so many find the biblical gospel impossible to believe. The truly amazing thing is that anyone at all believes in the biblical gospel. Because it does not pander, it does not meet our expectations. And those who cannot swallow the biblical message of the cross either reject Christianity outright or they invent some alternate version. Let me give you a case in point. You've probably seen that book around. If you go to bookstores, I rarely go myself, but I've been told by people who do go to bookstores. Okay, three people here are awake. The rest of you are sleeping. As you walk through the door of Barnes & Noble, there it is. You walk through Borders front door, there it is. Oh, you can't read it from that far away. Reading Judas, the Gospel of Judas, and the shaping of Christianity. by two scholars from Ivy League colleges, Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King. I thought you might just recognize the cover. You know, you can't judge a book by its cover. But anyway, even down in the airport, if you want some light reading for your trip off to wherever you're flying, there it is. You know, It would be really funny if it wasn't so sad. But wouldn't you like a nice Easter book that deconstructs everything about the Gospel? Well, there you have it. And I don't know, I didn't look at the bestseller list. I don't know whether it's there. Anyway, this Gospel of Judas, I ought to say, I'm going to make a plug for John Store. This book should be right next to this book at Borders, but it's not. This is Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, which is a powerful reputation of this book, even though this one was published first. So in the battle of the books, it goes like this. This Gospel of Judas is kind of interesting. Maybe some of you heard about it in the news. I mean, it made the news last year when it was finally published. The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic writing, don't worry if you don't know what Gnosticism is, we don't have time for that tonight, from the mid or late 2nd century, so it's an old document. This particular copy of the Gospel of Judas was discovered in the 1970s in Egypt, along the banks of the Nile. Before it was discovered in the 1970s, it was known only through the criticisms of Gnosticism written by the early church father, Irenaeus. Well, after a lot of comings and goings over 30 years, the book was taken to... The scroll, the document was taken to Cairo and then it ended up in a vault in a bank in New York City. Then it went to Yale University. Finally it got in the hands of an American dealer and went to Switzerland. And at last someone got hold of it who actually recognized what it was and knew what to do with it to preserve it. It was actually very badly damaged in its 30 years of bumping around places. And now, in the last year, 2006, it was translated and published by the National Geographic Society, no less. And it's prompted a number of books. And Pagel's book, she has written many books on Gnosticism. Her most famous book is called the Gnostic Gospels. She teaches at Yale. And she now tells us this book actually has the text of the Gospel of Judas in it, but it's got her, Pagel's, analysis of the significance of the book. And I really can't go down this rabbit trail again because it's late, but it's kind of fascinating because her whole point is there were lots of legitimate versions of Christianity in the early days. And it just so happens that Irenaeus and the gang who followed the canonical Gospels won. And so the Gospel of Judas was suppressed. And, of course, this is such an appeal to the Da Vinci generation, the Church has been hiding it ever since. So now, if you read this book, after you pay for it, you'll find out what the Church does not want you to know about the Gospel of Judas. Well, what is the story with Judas? First of all, let me say a quick word about the worldview behind this Gospel. It's rooted in Greek Classical dualism. That is, the world or existence is divided into darkness and light, good and evil, and evil is located in the physical realm, in the physical world. And so, for these Gnostics, matter is evil, spirit is good. The world in which we live, messed up as it is, has always been messed up, and it's messed up because it's the shoddy creation of a malevolent deity. The Gnostic Jesus, then, is the one who will help us escape from this present, horrible, physical world. Man's goal, man's salvation is found in escaping. And he escapes through enlightenment, through gnosis, knowledge, secret knowledge. That's where the term Gnosticism comes from. And that enlightenment will help them transcend the confinements of this present created order and live happily ever after. You can see why contemporary Americans eat this stuff up. They love that. the divine spark within me. That's who I am. And the Gnostics teach that. What's interesting about the story of this Gospel of Judas, then, is the actual story that it tells. Judas, not surprisingly, is the only one of the disciples who really understands what Jesus is all about. The other eleven are louts. They worship the Jewish Creator God, who is the bad God who made this messed up world in the first place. And Jesus and Judas even laugh, kind of knowingly, you know, when somebody knows a joke about you, but you don't know it. So Jesus and Judas, they laugh at the other disciples because they're so foolish, worshiping that Jewish Old Testament God. Far from betraying Jesus, in the usual sense, according to the Gospel of Judas, he hands Jesus over to the authorities in accordance with Jesus' own wishes. So that Jesus will die, because Jesus needs to die to escape this physical order of things, and then Jesus transcends it and Judas also and others who are similarly enlightened will live beyond the limitations of the present world order." The characters are the same, some of the events are the same, but the interpretation is completely inside out because it comes with a different set of expectations, a different understanding of man's need, of man's problem. And that's just one example of many alternate gospels that people have invented over the years that they embrace today. Sometimes some of the elements of the biblical story are taken and some they're almost completely avoided as unnecessary. The point I'm trying to make here is that the good news in these versions is tailored to fit the understanding of the human need according to one's worldview. So you get to make up the question and then answer it with your own gospel. The answer is dictated by the question. And as a matter of fact, all of us do this to one degree or another. You know, we've been taught for 500 years that religion is a private matter and it's kind of a smorgasbord matter. And so you kind of pick the ideas that make most sense to you. You gather them together. If they make you feel good, if they get you through the day or through the night, then that's fine. That's all you would ever expect from a religion. That's the view. And if we have that view of our situation, then we will never consider the cross good news. We'll never find the word of the cross a blessing, something to glory in. One time when the Pharisees were upset that all of this riffraff were coming to Jesus, They got on his case about it and they said, you know, why are you letting prostitutes come to you? Why are you letting tax collectors come to you? Why are you talking to Gentiles and women and such? Don't you know anything? Aren't you supposed to be a holy man? And you know, Jesus responded by saying, it's the sick that need a physician. Only if you and I let the Bible diagnose us, only if we let the Bible define the question, Will the cross really be a satisfying answer to our deepest need? I mean, think about it. If someone were to come in here tonight, this is going to get a little gory here for a moment, but I've got a point. And they take one of you guys out and they drag you out into the parking lot between some of the cars and they cut your guts open and they start pulling out organs. We would say, oh, that is horrible. Jack the Ripper must be back. This must be Hannibal Lecter or something. What kind of a monstrosity is this? To disembowel or mutilate someone that way. Or what if they hauled you off to a warehouse someplace and strapped you into a chair and started pumping your veins full of poisonous drugs? We'd say, that's horrible. No one should ever do that. But if, on the other hand, your doctor in his white coat tells you that you have a very serious cancer and he's going to have to remove some of your body parts to save your life, we don't call it a monstrosity anymore. Even though it scares us, even though we're doubtful, we say, go ahead, doctor, cut away. Because I'd rather live with part of my body missing than to die whole. Or if this cancer, the doctor says, we're going to have to fill you full of poison. Now we call it chemotherapy, but it's poison. In the hopes of killing the cancer before it kills the rest of you, we say, man, I'm not sure, but day after day after day. Now you see, it's the same activity, but In the back lot or in a warehouse, it's a monstrous butchery. On the other hand, in a doctor's office or a hospital, it seems the reasonable, the necessary thing to do. And for people today, the cross seems pointless butchery unless they understand just how serious our problem as human beings, as men and women is. And if we don't let the Bible diagnose us, then we will never accept the Bible's medicine. The Bible says that our problem is not that we are imprisoned in the material world, but rather we have sinned. We have fallen short of the glory of the God who created each one of us in his image and likeness. We've been taught as moderns that nobody has a fixed nature. Nobody has a fixed character. We can reinvent ourselves any time we want, any way we want. And so we can't conceive of a God whose nature is unchangeable, who is holy in His character and who cannot deny Himself. Men aren't like that. How could God be like that? And so modern people have real difficulty understanding what the Bible says about sin. That we are ungrateful to God. That we are rebellious and disobedient. Indeed, that in our heart of hearts we would rather worship ourself than worship the God who is there. Modern thinking has taught us that our problems about feeling bad are just a matter of feeling. We're not really guilty, but we have guilt feelings. And so if we get over the feelings, maybe with a bottle of whiskey, maybe with some tranquilizers, maybe in some other way, then we'll be fine. But the Bible says we have offended a God who must punish sin. And guilt may have feelings, although there are psychopaths and sociopaths who don't feel bad about doing horrible things. But they're liable to punishment. Each one of us is liable to punishment. And God says that punishment is death and eternal condemnation. Now, you don't have to take my word for it, and I'm probably preaching mostly to the choir, so you know these things are true. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The wages of sin is death. In Adam, all die. It is appointed for man once to die and after that comes judgment so that we live with a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. That's what the Bible says is wrong with us as human beings. And until we recognize that that's true, we won't be willing to accept the extreme measures of God to cope with our human need. That kind of a dire, deadly condition requires a desperate remedy. And that remedy is nothing less than the substitution of the innocent Son of God for guilty sinners like you and me. Someone who will bear in His own person the wrath and curse of a holy God. Jesus came into the world to give Himself up in the place of His people. Peter writes, He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds, you have been healed. You recognize that language from the portion of the Old Testament that Pastor England read earlier. Surely Messiah has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. He was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. And the Lord has laid on Him, on Messiah, the substitute, the iniquity of us all. It is because God was willing to give up His Son. Now, you see, that doesn't seem like a sadistic piece of butchery anymore when we realize that the only way that you and I could be pardoned is if our guilt is satisfied. Justice is executed. You know, if you ever get arrested and go to court, thankfully, I've never been arrested, but I've been to court to watch it a few times. How people feel about one another really doesn't matter all that much. I mean, it's nice that the judge doesn't scowl at you and treat you like you're dirt and where the lawyers aren't just waiting to rip you apart. But what finally matters is the verdict. And the verdict for those who trust in Jesus is, it is finished, paid in full. God provided His Son as a substitute for the sins of His people. And so, for those who believe, salvation is possible and the cross is wonderful news. Those of you who know your Bibles know the sequel to those verses that I read earlier. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but are justified by God's grace as a gift. through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. The good news is good news when you see it against the backdrop of the bad news of our own sin and condemnation. God put forth Jesus, His Son, as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith. And in that, then, God can be both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. It is indeed true that the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. Indeed, in Adam all die, but also in Christ shall all be made alive. It is true that man is appointed once to die. But to be absent from the body for believers is to be present with the Lord. So as we think about the cross, we think about it as those who are called, as those who believe. And so we do glory in the cross, but we're rubbing shoulders with people every single day at work, at school, in our own families. who think, although they may be too polite to mention it, although sometimes they do, that we are completely insane to worship a monster God and believe crazy fables. And they'll keep on thinking that way until they are called. And the lights go on. And praise God for the sovereignty of His grace that He does call people. But we need to help people understand And we need to understand more deeply ourselves that this matter of letting the Bible tell us what's wrong, let the Bible form the question in your mind, so that then the cross truly is not only the best answer, it's the only answer for us, the only solution to our problem. Let's pray. Lord, I suppose as long as the race continues, There will be the invention of pseudo gospels that, after all is said and done, are really not good news at all because they cannot address our central need, the need of our sin, of our liability to punishment, the reality of death and eternal condemnation. And Lord, we pray that you would make us wise As serpents and gentle as doves, as we go among this unbelieving world in which we live, trying to help them understand, and by your grace to grant repentance, helping them understand why it is that we understand that they wouldn't be at all interested in a message like this one, given what they think about what's wrong with them and what they think about what they truly need. but help us with gentleness, but with honesty, with penetrating insight to help do the diagnostic work using the Scriptures so that they will come to see that given that question, how can a sinner be right with God? How can the rebel human be reconciled to his Creator? The only answer to that question is the cross of Calvary in which we truly glory. Amen. Let's close by singing together number 251. And after the service, we invite you to stay. We've got some munchies out there and some refreshments. And we hope you'll take this opportunity for some