Well, good morning, and welcome to Christ Reformed Presbyterian Church live stream, live in East Providence, Rhode Island. Today is the Lord's Day, and so we are gathered each in our homes, and we are gonna worship the Lord this morning, because it is the Lord's Day. So I would like to greet you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace and peace to you. from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. And this morning, I will call you to worship with the words of Psalm 2. And Psalm 2 is also a psalm that I recommend you sing later today, if you get a chance to do that, I recommend that. Any of the selections I put down in the email, I said, Psalm 2a, but you can pick the tune you like best. So pay close attention to God's Word. Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed, saying, Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us. He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord holds them in derision. Then He will speak to them in His wrath and terrify them in His fury, saying, As for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill. I will tell of the decree. The Lord said to me, You are my son. Today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Now therefore, O kings, be wise. Be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way. For his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. Psalm 2 paints a picture for us of two different types of kingdoms. On the one hand we have the kingdoms of the world which gnash their teeth in rage against the Christ against God's Messiah, the Lord Jesus. And on the other hand, you have the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Himself. And the kingdoms of the world become, we read in Revelation, they have become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. And the rulers who oppose Him are crushed. This is going to be important for us as we look at Matthew chapter 27 today, the Sanhedrin and the chief priests, and how they fulfill prophecy against themselves. But I want to point out to you, especially as you look at this, the response that God has to the kings that rage against Him. He says, As for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill. And this is really important for us, to look at this and to see that it is when God set His king on the hill, when the Lord Jesus Christ was set on the cross, that He triumphed over all of His enemies. And that is what makes Christianity so different from all other religions. It is that we worship not just a mighty man, not just a mighty God, but we worship the crucified King, crucified and resurrected. And we remember that especially on the Lord's Day, on the day when He rose from the dead. So, I encourage you to think about those things as you turn to sing Psalm 2 later today. I'd like to take some time to pray now this morning. It's going to be a long prayer. I'll just warn you ahead of time. It's going to be a long prayer. We're going to pray for a lot of things. We're going to praise God in our prayer. We're going to confess our sins. We're going to give thanks to Him. We're going to ask Him for help. So, with those things in mind, we will turn to prayer now. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we praise you that you are in control. We praise you that you have set your king on Zion. We are in awe of you when we consider that nothing man does can make you suffer. Nothing that man does can change your plans or can frustrate you or make you impatient. But you, Lord, are in control. You are fair. You are just. You are patient. You are content. You are joyful. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you are perfectly content in who you are. And so we give you praise. We give you praise for your sovereignty, and for your patience, and for your justice, and we thank you for the very great salvation that you have given to us in the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord, as we come to you and praise you for who you are, we also have to stop and confess to you who we are, to confess our sins to you, to confess As we look at you in all of your holiness and your purity, we see ourselves and our sinfulness all the more clearly ourselves. We try to seize control. We try to take that control out of your hands, or we try to take control out of the hands of other people that you've entrusted it to. We are deeply impatient. We are impatient with quarantine. We are impatient with economic hardship. We are impatient with sickness. We are impatient with our families that we spend so much time with, more time than ever, perhaps in the past. We are impatient with those we work with, for those we work for. We're impatient with our employees, with our co-workers. You know our hearts, you see into us, and you know, even if we manage to put on a good face, you know the wretchedness that is inside of us, and how often we don't consider our sin. Perhaps that refusal to consider our sin is a big part of why we're so impatient with others and so impatient with you. We've spoken harsh words. We have been grumpy and malcontent. There have been times this week that we have been a lot more like Israel in the wilderness. Never satisfied with how you were providing for us. Lord, as we confess these things to you, we are coming to you as the God who forgives. and it's the God who has made open a way of salvation in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for our sin. And so we pray that you would forgive us, that you would have mercy on us, that as we confess our sins to you when we come to you, we can claim nothing but the death of Christ. And so we pray, forgive us, Lord. Lord, we also give you thanks. We give you thanks for this salvation. We give you thanks for the atoning death of Jesus We thank you for the rulers that you have put over us who have responsibility for us, who have responsibility to govern us, to protect us in our state or in our nation. We give you thanks for the food that you provide for us day after day. We hear problems in the supply chain throughout the nation and food processing plants being closed down, and yet you continue to provide for us so far. We give you thanks for that. We give you thanks for the help that we have, that those of us who are able to listen this morning, you have given us bodies and help to do that and to worship you. We thank you for the shelter that we have. And on this day, we also thank you for our mothers, those who carried us in their womb, who gave birth to us, and who nurtured us and nursed us and raised us up and taught us how to be adults who trained us and educated us. Lord, you have been very good to us. We thank you for the children that you've given to many of our families, and we thank you especially for the new child that was born to our congregation early, early this morning. Lord, what a great blessing. You were very good to us, and we give you thanks. As we have given you thanks, we also come to you with our requests, and our first request, Lord, is that Your name would be holy in all of the earth. We pray that both beginning in our own homes and beginning in our own mouths, that we would speak of You as holy, that we would treat Your name with reverence and respect, and that our neighbors also would learn this, and that our nation would learn this, and our rulers would learn this, to treat You with fear and reverence We pray that we and our nation together would give glory to you, that we would give glory to you in our suffering, that we would give glory to you in our hardship, that we would give glory to you as we receive anything good from you, that as we face trial and difficulty and discipline, that we would give glory to you and honor you for your good and your love endures forever. Or we pray for wise rulers. We pray that those who are over us would learn wisdom, that they would learn to respect you, that they would kiss the sun, that they would take refuge in the Lord Jesus Christ and find blessing there. And we pray for the citizens, both us and our fellow citizens, that we would also learn wisdom. Lord, it seems like Wherever we turn, foolishness is just spewing out of our own mouths and out of the mouths of our neighbors. And we need your patience, but we also pray that since you are the God who gives wisdom, that you would make us wise together as a nation and as a world. We pray ultimately then for conversion, that through the trial we face and through the good provision that we still receive from your hand, And through your word, which is still going out today, we pray that many who are lost would be found. Many who do not know you would come to put their hope and their trust in you and to believe in the Lord Jesus. Lord, we pray for a return to worship. We pray that we would be able to gather in church buildings and to sing loudly and to pray to you with our hands uplifted. and to do that together and not separated and isolated in our own homes. Lord, we pray that you would continue to provide for us health and provision, that you would bring an end to the suffering of the pandemic, that you would bring an end to the suffering of economic hardship, and that you would watch over the peace of the world for good. Lord, we pray these things in the name of the Lord Jesus, amen. Alright, this morning we're going to be taking up our scripture reading from Matthew chapter 27 beginning at verse 1. So you can turn there if you want to follow along. Matthew chapter 27. And you remember that last week Pastor Howard preached on the end of chapter 26 with Peter's denial of Christ. And we turn now to another disciple of the Lord. And that is to Judas, the one who betrayed him. And we see how his story comes to an end. So pay close attention to God's Word, Matthew chapter 27. When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death. And they bound him and led him away and delivered him over to Pilate the governor. Then when Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, I have sinned by betraying innocent blood. They said, What is that to us? See to it yourself. And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed and went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is blood money. So they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field as a burial place for strangers. Therefore that field has been called the field of blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a price had been set by some of the sons of Israel. And they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord directed me." This is God's Word. Let's ask for His help and His blessing. Father in Heaven, we thank You for Your Word, and we pray that You would bless it now, that You give me the right words to say, and that each of us would be able to receive Your Word and to lay it up in our hearts. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, the point of this morning's sermon is that if you reject Jesus, you will get hell. You will get hell either now or later. This is not a happy passage of the Bible. This is not a passage of rejoicing and peace and comforting words. Here we see Judas, a disciple of Christ, overwhelmed with guilt and despair, with no comfort at all in the world, hang himself in the most, I would say, the most notorious act of self-condemnation the world has ever seen, when Judas hung himself. Matthew Henry says, miserable is the case when a man must go to hell for ease. And at the same time, we also see the chief priests who, in an act of hardened wickedness and blind evil, confidently fulfill against themselves and against the nation one of the most terrifying prophecies of the Old Testament. So, this is not a happy passage, but this is part of God's Word, and it's here as instruction for us, to teach us so that we will not do like they did, so that we will not reject Christ, so that we will not end our lives in fear and despair and self-condemnation And I realize that this is uncomfortable. We don't like to talk about hell. We don't like to talk about judgment in that way. But the more that we look at the Gospels, and the more that we look at Christ's teaching in particular, the more we are going to be confronted with hell. No one talks about hell more than Jesus himself. And so we have to face it. That the people who ultimately reject Christ get hell for themselves, and this is a serious, serious teaching, and so we need to pay close attention to it. And so first, let's pay attention to Judas and how Judas gets hell for himself now, immediately. Judas had won for himself deceitful wages. He had made his choice, he had taken money, 30 pieces of silver, a pretty nice chunk of To betray Christ, to give Christ over to the chief priests in the Sanhedrin, knowing that they would do wrong to him. He suddenly feels guilty about it, seeing that Jesus is going to be condemned. Maybe he had something else in mind, but he realizes that he is guilty. Proverbs 11 says that the wicked earns deceptive wages. And Proverbs 20 says that bread gained by deceit tastes sweet to a man. but afterwards his mouth will be full of gravel." And that's exactly what happened to Judas. He thought he had gotten himself a nice little pad in his wallet to make his life a little nicer, something that he could enjoy, and instead he found that they were deceitful wages, that he was unable to enjoy this wealth at all. He wasn't able to enjoy anything at all anymore. All pleasure had been taken away from him. His mouth was full of gravel. Why is that? It was because of his vengeful conscience. His conscience came back at him and confronted him and filled him with horror at what he had done. His eyes were suddenly opened to the wickedness of the city of Jerusalem and to the blind and hardened evil of the Sanhedrin and of the chief priests, and he saw his role He was like the key in the lock that made all of this possible. He was the one who had brought all of this about. So God suddenly opened his eyes to see himself and his place in the city with perfect clarity. And he was overwhelmed with guilt. He says, I have sinned because I've betrayed innocent blood. What a terrible thing, you know, to have killed, to be guilty of killing an innocent person. A lot of people in America right now are very concerned about the shooting of a man down south. And there's a lot of people who are asking, is this a crime? Was it justified? And if it's a crime, it's a terrible thing. To kill an innocent person is a terrible, terrible thing. And this is the guilt. that now falls on Judas is that he is guilty of taking innocent blood, but not just innocent blood, he's guilty of taking the blood of the Lord Jesus himself. Up until now, he hadn't really given much thought to Christ's innocence. He had given thought, perhaps, to what was in it for him, what he was going to get out of this. He had given thought to whether this was a profitable move to betray Christ, whether it was a savvy move, or whether it was an expedient move Well, friends, if God were to open your eyes to the sins that you have committed, and to see them truly for what they are in all of their gravity, the harsh word that you spoke, the little lie that you told, the wasted hours of the afternoon, or the way that you carelessly misused God's name, or the lust that you harbored in your heart, Can you imagine how overwhelmed and relieved you would be to see the eternal weight of that, the eternal consequence of your sin? How much more horrified than Judas, who was responsible for betraying Christ in his innocence and in his righteousness? He was overwhelmed. And he found no help from the priests. He goes to the priests, perhaps, Not just because they were the ones who gave him the money. I don't know that we need to look at this and say that he was just going to sort of return the money like he was going back to Target to return something he had bought. Perhaps this is a desperate attempt to deal with his guilt, to deal with his conscience, to go to the priests in the temple to restore the money that he had gotten by oppression and deceit. Now, if you look in the book of Leviticus, in Leviticus chapter 6, there are instructions there. The law provides for this. If a man's gotten money by oppression and deceit, what is he supposed to do? He's supposed to go to the priest in the tabernacle, he's supposed to restore the money and add a fifth of its value, and also bring a ram without blemish as a sacrifice. And it says that the priests shall make atonement before the Lord, and he shall be forgiven This was what God had set up as a way of dealing with the guilt of our sin, when we are suddenly overwhelmed and realize the wrong that we have done. In the Old Testament, God had made a way for people to do that. And of course, as Christians, we understand that this is looking forward, the sacrifices of the tabernacle and the temple were looking forward. Christ's sacrifice. But these priests, they completely give up their job as priests. They completely reject it. They say to him, what is that to us? See to it yourself. They want nothing to do with him. This is just a reminder to them of their own guilt and their own role in the death of Christ that is about to happen. But at the same time we can also look at Judas returning the money as though it's a kind of sacrifice like Cain's sacrifice. It's just not enough. It's not in keeping with what God wants. He doesn't add a fifth to it. He doesn't bring a ram without blemish. It's simply not enough, even by the Leviticus 6 standard. But also it's not enough because He and the priests together have rejected Christ. They've rejected Christ. And so He has also rejected forgiveness and atonement. And so all that's left for Judas is despair and death. His eyes are open to his sin, and he is filled with horror. Nothing in the world is left for him to enjoy. And so, even religion, religion without Christ, going to the priests in the temple, going to religion that has no sacrifice, that has no substitute, that does not have the atonement that Jesus accomplished on the cross. So Judas chooses death and he hangs himself. And this is really, really striking. Judas is one of three suicides in the Bible. And the other three are also terrible ones. The first is King Saul who fell on his sword. The second is Ahithophel, David's counselor, who betrayed him and tried to overthrow David in Absalom's coup. Both of these other suicides rejected David as king and tried to kill him. And here we have Judas who rejected Jesus as king and tried to kill him. Now I want to say that suicide itself is not an unforgivable sin, but what we see here with the three suicides in Scripture is that they are each the fruit that is born out of an ultimate rejection of God's Messiah. An ultimate rejection of God's Messiah. And there's kind of an irony here in Judas' death as well. Christ's death is the one thing that can save a person from guilt and sin and despair and death. And Judas saw this salvation, but he tasted none of it. He's like the captain of Samaria in 2 Kings 7, who lived through the famine in the city while the city was under siege, and then saw the salvation come, saw the food come that would satisfy the hunger of the city, but he tasted none of it. He was trampled, and Judas too was trampled. He's trampled by his own guilt and his own despair. So, he is in hell. He is in hell now. So much for Judas. Well, we turn now to look at the priests and the elders, and how they get, for themselves, hell later. Now I want to say, usually as we read this passage, I think our eyes tend to focus on Judas. Judas is the one who goes back to the priests. Judas is the one who throws the money in the temple, and who goes out and he hangs himself. And it's striking to us. Judas is such a striking character to us. But I think actually that the emphasis of this passage is really on the priests and the elders. This is where You know, Judas is almost, he's almost just an accessory here, or like a symbol, just a symbol for what the nation as a whole has done, and what the leaders, the priests, and the elders of the people have done. This is where the focus is. Sometimes God crushes the wicked under the knowledge of their own sin and their wickedness, suddenly, and we see that with Judas, suddenly crushed, suddenly overwhelmed with guilt. But sometimes God endures with much patience vessels for destruction. And that is what we are seeing here with the chief priests and the elders. Now there's a question that comes up as we look at this passage, as you study this passage, there's a question which is, why does Matthew say that this fulfills the prophecy of Jeremiah? Matthew says that towards the end of our reading, verse nine, then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah saying, and then he gives a quote. Well, the trouble here, the difficulty here is that he's not quoting Jeremiah, he's actually quoting Zechariah. And it's even a little bit of a loose translation of Zechariah. And so the question is, why does he say Jeremiah? And as I looked into this, I found a lot of modern liberal biblical scholars look at this and they say, this is an obvious contradiction So we know that the Bible has errors and mistakes in it, and yada, yada, yada. And I gotta say, the more I studied this, the more I felt like that's about as astute as saying that the Earth is obviously flat. Well, yes, some things that seem obviously true are actually completely false. And here, as we take a closer look, and as we look more carefully at what Matthew is doing, what we are gonna find is that Matthew is actually weaving together two Old Testament prophecies. One, he quotes, and that's Zechariah 11, verses 12 and 13. But there's another prophecy from the book of Jeremiah that Matthew is rithing, he's interpreting. One commentator says that he is, that Jeremiah targums, that Matthew targums Jeremiah 18 and 19. And the targums, of course, Jewish interpretations of the Old Testament. It was kind of like a, sometimes a loose translation of the Old Testament that would have interpretive comments thrown in. And so that's what this commentator says Matthew's doing, and I think that's a great description of what Matthew is doing here. And so, let's turn and look at the prophecy in Jeremiah, which is Jeremiah 18 and 19. And this is where God calls Jeremiah and sends him to the potter's house, to the house of the potter. And you can see the connection there, the potter's field and the potter's house. And so Jeremiah goes to the potter's house in chapter 18, and he watches the potter work on a clay pot, and as the potter's working on it, it spoils in his hand, and so he reshapes it. And God tells the nation of Judah, Look at this potter. See how he is shaping this pot. I also am shaping disaster against you. So you need to repent. But the response of the nation of Judah was, it's no use. We're just going to keep on being stubborn. We're going to keep on in our ways and we're not going to repent. And so they actually turn and they plot against the prophet. They plot against Jeremiah. And so in chapter 19, Jeremiah takes a clay pot and he takes the elders of the priests and the elders of the people That's important. We have the same the same Group of people the elders of the priests and the elders of the people and he takes them into the valley of Hinnom okay, the valley of Hinnom is probably where the where the potter's house was the valley of Hinnom is the valley just to the south of the city of Jerusalem and And Jeremiah preaches there, he preaches a sermon, and he says, this people have profaned this place with innocent blood. This people have profaned this place with innocent blood. And I hope as I'm going through this, you can hear the echoes of the passage that we read in Matthew 27. This people have profaned this place, filling it with innocent blood. So he says, this place will no longer be called the Valley of Hinnom. but it will be called the Valley of Slaughter." And so then Jeremiah took this clay pot that he had brought with him, and he smashed the pot in front of the elders and in front of the priests, and he said, God will break you, He will break this nation, and He will fill this place with dead bodies. People will bury in this place because they will have nowhere else to bury their dead. And so Matthew is saying that the chief priests are fulfilling this terrible prophecy against the nation of Judah. The priests and the elders and their nation are bringing on themselves this same destruction When you read Jeremiah and you see the clay pots smashed in front of their eyes, Matthew is saying, this is what is coming on Jerusalem and on the chief priests and on the nation. They are going to be smashed. They are a vessel that the Lord has prepared with patience to display His wrath. They have stiffened their neck. They have plotted against God's prophet. they have tied up their innocent human sacrifice, and they have turned the valley of Hinnom into a burial ground and into a field of blood forever." And just as a side note, probably the field that Judas buys and hangs himself in, which is, whether it's Judas buying the field or the priest buying the field, it's the priest buying the field for Judas with his money. Probably it is the Valley of Hinnom. That's where it is. In fact, to this day, the traditional location of Aheldama, which is what it's called in the Book of Acts, is in the Valley of Hinnom. So this is where it all happens. And they've carefully led their nation through the gates of hell. And of course, what's the Hebrew word for hell? Gehenna. The Valley of Hinnom. And this all happened when Christ's own clay vessel, when the vessel of his flesh was crushed This sealed their fate. It was a symbol to them of their coming destruction." And so Matthew goes on to quote Zechariah, and he says, essentially, that like the sons of Israel in Zechariah's prophecy, they have dismissed God's shepherd, and they have placed so little value on him. It's sarcastic when you go to Zechariah chapter 11 and you read that. And Zechariah says, the lordly price that they weighed out for me, he's being sarcastic, he's saying they gave me, they valued me so little. They've become the foolish shepherds, Zechariah describes, shepherds who don't care for those who are being destroyed, who don't seek for the young, who don't heal the maimed, who don't nourish the healthy, but who devour the flock. And you can see this even in their response to Judas. What is that to us? See to it yourself. And so as we look at Matthew chapter 27, we have to face the bad news, but we can also see in it that there is good news. And first, the bad news is that hell is real. Hell is a real place. Men, women, and children who ultimately reject the Lord Jesus Christ will go to hell, and they will spend eternity there. And the cross of Christ confirms the reality of how, just as when Jeremiah smashed that clay pot in front of the elders, that was a seal to them and it confirmed to them that this destruction was coming on them. In the same way, when Christ dies on the cross, that is a seal and a confirmation to the elders and the priests of Jerusalem that they are going to be destroyed. Hell is real because sin is real. and because God is completely fair and He is completely just. And so, as we look around us, as we look at ourselves, we need to come face-to-face with this reality and realize that niceness and good looks and a personal discipline and wealth don't matter. These don't matter in the end. Unless you and I repent of our sin and turn to Jesus Christ, hell is what we will get for ourselves. We will harden in our sin, and we will repeat our sin again and again, even the worst kinds of sin. We, as individuals or as nations, will just keep on killing innocents. Cain killed Abel, and Cain's grandson, Lamech, killed a young man. The Nazis killed the Jews, and the Chinese Communist Party killed tons of their own people, and still abort forcibly many of their own people. The Soviet Union killed many of the Ukrainians, the KKK lynched blacks in the South, and America today continues to abort its unborn. The wages of sin is death, and we will get hell for ourselves unless we turn and give ourselves to the one truly innocent one who died, who was killed. And I wonder if we think about our sin, if you think about your sin, or if you think about your neighbor's sin in this way, think of it with this gravity and this seriousness, that sin gets death in hell. That's what it results in, that's where it leads, that's where it will go. And when we have our conversations with our neighbors, when we have our conversations with our coworkers, or with our family, or with anyone who is around us, do we think Do we think in these terms, do we think in eternal terms, that every person will either end up in hell, or they will repent, and they will turn to the Lord Jesus, and they will be saved? Well, and that is the good news. The good news is that Jesus does save, and He saves from hell. There's a third passage here that I'm really convinced Matthew is also interpreting, a third passage that he's targeting, and that is, if you think back to the very beginning of the book of Matthew, who is it that Jesus is the son of in the very beginning of Matthew? He is the son of Abraham. He is the son of Abraham. Jesus fulfills what another son of Abraham could not fulfill, what Isaac could not fulfill. When you turn to Genesis 22, you see there also this son of Abraham who rose early one morning and who walked up a mountain, and who was bound by his Father. And while the priests in this passage, early in the morning, they take counsel and they bind their human sacrifice, and they lead them off to Pilate, and they tell the despairing sinner, see to it yourself. What is that to us? What is your guilt and your sin to us? But when Isaac was bound, And when Isaac was laid on the altar, and when Abraham took up the knife in his hand to slay his own son, the angel of the Lord, God's Son, stopped Abraham's hand. And Abraham believed and learned something so important. So important that he gave a name to that place. And he said, the Lord will see to it. the Lord will see to it." That's what He called that place. And so, as it is said, to this day, the book of Genesis says, on the mountain of the Lord, He will see to it. And it is time for you to leave the valley of slaughter, and to leave the field of blood, and to turn and go up to the mountain of the Lord. The message of this chapter that we are looking at here is that if you see to it yourself, if you, like Judah, see to it yourself, if you see to it yourself like the priests see to it themselves, you will end in despair, and you will end in death. But if you will go to the Lord on His mountain, He will see to it Himself. So, are you in despair? Are you overwhelmed with guilt? Are you ready to end it all? The Lord will provide for you. The Lord will provide for you, not just in the sense that He can give you the money that you need, or that He can give you the food that you need, or the work that you need, or peace and relationships that you need. Look at Jesus. Look at Him crucified on the cross, all of God's punishment and His anger taken out against sin, and see that the Lord will provide for you. Whatever terror you have of yourself, whatever grief you have over what you've done, whatever shame you have, if you will look at the Lord Jesus on His cross, you will see, the Lord will see to it. He will provide for you. So look at Him. Look at Him bound, plotted against, crushed, and trapped. He is your way out. And if you will receive Him, He will receive you. And He will rescue you from despair, and from sin, and from suicide, and from hell. And I think, what a great reminder of that, when you turn to the book of Acts, and you see another man who is ready to take his own life. When you see that, the Philippian jailer in Acts 16, I think, who despaired of life and was ready to take his own life, The word of the gospel came to him in his despair and made him a new man. On the other hand, you may feel hardened, you may feel stuck, stuck in your sin. You may feel like your ears are, you're understanding the words that are coming out of my mouth, but the importance of them and the significance of them just isn't hitting home for you. And so I would say, Ask Jesus to help you. Ask Him to open your eyes. And if you know those around you who have hard hearts, who seem helplessly stuck and blind to their own sin, then ask Jesus to help. Jesus rescued Saul on the road to Damascus and opened his eyes. But to all of you, To all of you, I would say this, don't for a second think that there is a more pressing question for you, or for your family, or for your neighbors, or for your city, or for the country that we live in, or the world that we live in, than our relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ. Will we turn away from Him? Will we reject Him? If we will, if we will not listen to Him, if we will reject Him, if we will ignore His death on the cross, then He will smash us. He will smash us to smithereens. He will grind us to powder. But if we will turn to Him, if we will listen to Him, then He will save us from hell. Lord, we are grateful to you for... We are grateful to you that you allowed yourself to be bound thankful that you have given us a way of escape. And so, Lord, I pray that for each one of us who hears you today, that we would turn to you, that we would go to you, that you would rescue us and we would not become just another corpse in the field of blood. But we are asking that you would make us alive together with you. To open our eyes, not just to the horror of our sin, but to but to what you have done. In going to the cross, we are very grateful. We pray that you would show this same salvation, not only to us, but to our friends and our neighbors, to our family. I pray in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, also for singing this morning, besides Psalm 2, I encourage you to sing Psalm 141, which is in two selections, selection A and B, in your Psalter. So you can turn to Psalm 141. I'm just gonna turn to it in my Bible. Psalm 141, which has been our custom in our evening services to sing this together, it begins, with a prayer, with a request, that our prayer would be acceptable to God. That it would be pleasing, like fragrant incense to Him. Not an abomination. We don't want our prayer to be a nasty smell to God. We want it to be acceptable to Him. And so the psalmist asks for God's help. He says, set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth. Don't let my heart incline to evil. And he goes on to say, let a righteous man strike me. And then he says something kind of striking and shocking. He says, when their judges are thrown over the cliff, then they shall hear my words, for they are pleasant. as when one plows and breaks up the earth, so shall our bones be scattered at the mouth of Sheol." And this is a frightening picture of what Judas and the priests in the Sanhedrin fulfilled against themselves. The judges of Israel thrown over a cliff, their bodies and their bones scattered. In fact, archaeologists, when they have gone and looked at this part of the Valley of Hinnom, found the ruins of a structure that was just filled with human bones. Many, many feet down, it was just bones. This was maybe the burial for strangers that's mentioned in Matthew 27. But what a terrifying picture. But the psalmist goes on to say, my eyes are toward you. In you I seek refuge. And that is where a refuge is. A refuge is in the righteous man who strikes us to discipline us and to teach us, as a kindness to us. Lastly, I have you sing Psalm 118, Selection D. In particular, verses 22 and 23, That stone is now the cornerstone that builders once despised. This is the doing of the Lord, wondrous in our eyes. This is the Lord Jesus Christ, who was rejected by the builders. He was rejected by the elders and the priests of Israel, but He has become the chief cornerstone. And the psalm goes on and says, The Lord is God, and he to us has made the light arise, and we can think here of that morning light dawning on Jerusalem as Jesus was bound with cords, bind to the altar thorns, the festal sacrifice. We are able to come to the Lord's house, to enter his gates with singing, to rejoice in each day that God has made because the Lord Jesus himself was bound. Well, that's my sermon for you this morning, and I will give you God's blessing as you go. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Go in peace, and have a restful Lord's Day.