Shall we pray? Father, we're thankful to have a time in which we can consider your word. We spend a little time in it we confess. As we think on it, and on the person of your son this morning, may your spirit illuminate us and strengthen us and help us to know and understand the nature of our salvation and the character of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, and whose name we pray?
Amen. I just moved up a floor in my building where I work and with no parries. The new office doesn't have anything on the glass door of the glass part of the door, but the old one had a lot of stuff on it. And some time ago, one of the staff upstairs gave me a piece of paper to take this to your door.
It was a picture of a person sitting at a desk and underneath was written. I don't judge people according to color, creed, race, or political affiliation. I judge them according to punctuation, spelling, and grammar. I don't know if I should put that on the new door.
And so you see in the title of my sermon this morning, I have a word which is not a word. Greaterness, greaterness. But perhaps it will help us to remember the warp and woof in substance of what I have to share with you this morning. In the year of King Uzziah's death, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne lofty and exalted.
And with the train of his robe filled a temple, the seraphim stood above him, each having six wings with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew, and one called out to another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is filled with his glory and the foundations of the threshold shook. The God of the Old Testament is a God, and I love this word that was in that passage. He's lofty, he's lofty. He's set apart, he's holy, he's powerful, mortal men tend to become catatonic or paralyzed or speechless or all of the above when they have any kind, any kind of vision of God, Jehovah, that we were singing about.
Wouldn't it be a problem for us if the Bible stopped at Malachi, that the God of the Old Testament was God, the only God that had presented himself had done anything. I was reading about the psychology of the observant Jew. The observant Jew has kind of a problem, is a lot of problems, but the theology there, the Old Testament presents to us, presents to us a God who intervenes, a God who is personal, and then it ends, it ends at the book of Malachi. And the Jew is saying, where is this God?
And he doesn't have a way to know God personally and to be assured of redemption, having not recognized the Christ as the Messiah. He's kind of a living psychological, spiritual contradiction, having the Old Testament, but then the message is incomplete. Where is the rest of this personal God? Of course, we know what transpired.
God the Son was born in a manger. He became God incarnate. And that is the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. As we know, in his life, the Lord Jesus, in walking this earth, met all kinds of opposition.
He was tempted by Satan. He was confronted by disbelief. He was confronted by the ugliness of human hypocrisy in the highest religious circles. He was confronted with stupidity, obtuseness, venality, people concerned with the most unimportant things.
And how did he react? I am extremely thankful that he was not put off by us. One might think in reading up to my passage this morning, which is Luke 22. One might think that after this entire period of ministry of about three years, of encountering all kinds of horrible human behavior, especially considering his twelve disciples, especially considering that he is coming to the end, and that he is faced with imminent execution.
One might hope that there might be some glimmers of appreciation of who he is. And here we come at Luke 22, and the human beings in this historic account continue to be human beings. The disciples continue to exhibit what by any sort of prima-fassy observance of their behavior is disappointing human behavior, disappointing human behavior. All in the space of forty-some verses we see a lot about what we are, what we are.
And we can be very thankful this morning that the Lord Jesus was not put off by that. I marvel at it. What do we see in the first few verses? We see the human, the person, we see man at his worst.
Betrayal. Betrayal. Open your Bibles to Luke 22. I'll begin reading at verse two.
The chief freest and the scribes in the new American Standard Bible. It says, we're seeking how they might put him to death, but they were afraid of the people. And Satan, having entered into Judah, who was called a scariot, belonging to the number of the twelve. And he went away and discussed with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them.
They were glad and agreed to give him money. So he consented and began seeking a good opportunity to betray him to them apart from the crowd. Betrayal. In Yoruba, something like El-Atan.
In Portuguese, I'm glad Eile is here. I can't put the city at the bottom of the sea. Tres-al. Chinese gu-fu.
In the Greek, Paredosia. But in all of the languages of the world, with all the nuance of this meaning, we get the idea, don't we? And I think it's shocking that there would be a man who would see miracles, who would hear teaching, who would see the lovely character of this person, and betray him for something as venal as thirty pieces of silver. However much money that is, is kind of irrelevant, isn't it?
For a sum of money, you will turn your back on everything that you have heard and seen. Judas, a scariot. I mean, it's a bit like a name like Adolf Hitler, who would ever call their firstborn son Judas. No one.
He's a byword, a betrayal of dishonesty. And we sort of say, well, that he's in another category of human being, isn't he? No. It's us.
We are capable of that. The human heart is capable of that. Isn't that sobering? I find that very sobering.
If you think that you are immune to betraying, think again. You don't know the depths of the darkness, of the capabilities of your own sinful heart. If you think that you are incapable of behaving like that, we'll read a little further and consider what Peter said in a few minutes and what happened with him. In French, I left out our other official language.
If this was a political podium, I would be dead on my feet here. Whether you are an imposter or a traitor, I mean, that doesn't even really, none of these words really do it, do they? And yet we get the idea. And it is characteristic of what we are.
And here's the amazing message. Jesus came anyway. Go down to verses 24 to 26. This morning we celebrated what we often refer to as the Lord's Supper that may even be a heading in your Bible.
It is a holy meeting. It is a time of communion with our Savior that we hold dear and precious. And this was the very first one. No more real Passovers in any meaningful Jewish sense would ever be celebrated.
This is the transition from a Passover feast to the Lord's Supper and the Lord instructed you and I, believers, to do this in remembrance of him. A sacred and holy time. Just finished. And then what do we read in verse 24?
Just about makes your ears curl. If it's read out loud, I'll read it out loud. And there arose also a dispute among them as to which of them was regarded to be the greatest. Are you kidding?
After such a holy and precious meeting in which the Lord Jesus is trying to point the human soul to himself and to redemption, an argument breaks out as to who's the biggest boy on the block in the earthly sense. Is it unbelievable? Kind of strikes me as a little bit unbelievable, but there it is in the scriptures. Dr.
Akpan helped me with this Yoruba word. Not that one. The one who did her dissertation on drama and the performing arts. In everyday life that guy is one of the most undramatic people I know.
But not to say that Simi is a drama queen either. Actually I think I'm digging a hole for myself here. In Portuguese, Luxuria, please. In Chinese, Jingyu.
I can never get the why you were right. Sark, Sarkikos, Sarkos, the flesh. Now Paul actually writes a great deal about this in the letters. It's kind of untranslatable.
We share with the French word the idea of carnality. What is this? What is this? The flesh might bring to mind something that is sexual, which it is not primarily.
It is certainly not primarily. Let me try to think of some examples. Somebody is in the professional sphere and your place of work is kind of crashing and burning because of their decisions that you had warned the company about. And in your heart you go, yeah, I told them.
They're crashing and burning. I knew it. Good, good. That's sinful.
Do you know how God looks at that kind of attitude? That's the flesh waking up. And having values that are ungodly and unloving. Am I guilty standing here before you?
Yes, I'm sorry to say I'm guilty. Done it. Been there. Done that.
That's what we're like. That's what we're like. And again, I will emphasize this morning. And the Lord Jesus was not put off by it, even at this juncture.
When he's about to go and pray in a garden to find the strength to go to the cross. I don't know how. I don't know how he found it in himself to redeem the likes of such people. I don't know that love.
I know what it's like to be loved by someone, this Jesus Christ of Nazareth. I know what it's like to be loved by him. But I know little of the love that is him. I made much of poor Judas, a man who will not only spend eternity in hell for his ordinary sins, which are his ordinary is mine.
But will be in hell with a mountain of guilt and consciousness that he had contributed to the death of the only perfect man who ever lived. That mountain of guilt with no redemption, with no forgiveness. I wonder if you've ever thought much about that. We think of hell as a very awful place, and I'm sure it is.
But have you ever thought about what it would be like to see all of your evil and your sin and your guilt and to bear it by yourself forever? To see it in all its ugliness and its yours to bear and to know forever without remedy. That in itself is plenty awful enough. Now we come to pride, but that doesn't quite do it.
I like the word cocksureness because it reminds me of a brainless rooster thinking that he is the thing of the yard and strutting around and proud of himself and has a very, very tiny brain. He's very sure of himself and of his own sort of, if I say now of human beings, there is this element of humanness that says, I've got it all together spiritually. Don't I? Really?
Peter says, but he said to him, Lord, I am ready to go both to prison and to death. And he said, I say to you, Peter, the rooster will not crow today until you have denied me three times that you even know me. That too is what we are so confident, so sure thinking that we don't live by grace as the believer, thinking that we have perhaps a religiosity that will cover us as the unbeliever. There was no debate on Igg Baraga.
There was some discussion about the other words. I can't pronounce that, Eile. So how? You got to see it's flat and then rising?
That's got a spelling mistake, actually. That shouldn't be a zeta, it should be a delta, erdosa, fear, pride, this ridiculous confidence that we have in our spirituality. All too common, all too prone, are we not to that kind of thing? I'm afraid so.
And all of this just think at the end of three years of teaching, of three years of seeing miracles, of three years of love, here's a writer. His name is J. G. Bellitt, over a hundred years ago.
And I can read this book about four pages at a time. I find it too much to think about, how to go. It's also written in sort of an eloquent British English that my brain has to sort of work through. What shall we say, beloved, of the condescending, the faithfulness, the greatness, the simplicity, the glory, and the grace together that form and mark his path before us?
We know what he is in this moment and what he will be forever, from what he has already been as we see him in the four gospels. And we may pass into his world in all ease and naturalness, as a believer, when we think of this. There, no stranger God shall meet the stranger thou in courts above. He is the same yesterday and today and forever in his own proper glory with him is no variableness, neither shadow of turning, James chapter one, according to his essential divine nature.
But so in his knowledge of us, his relationship to us, his affections for us and his way with us. After he had risen and was returned to his disciples, he never once reminded them of their late desertion of him. This tells us of him. I know no one says another writer, so kind, so condescending who has come down to pour sinners as he.
I trust his love more than I do any saint, not merely his power as God, but the tenderness of his heart as man. None ever showed such or had such or proved it so well. None have inspired me with such confidence. Let others go to saints or angels if they will.
I trust Jesus more. That's quite a beautiful statement and passage. We know that Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13 about faith, hope and love, and that the greatest was love. That makes sense, actually.
Faith will one day be sight. Hope will one day know the arrival in the place of God in heaven. So those things become defunct. You are with the Lord.
You are in his presence one day if you know the Lord. But the thing that never becomes defunct is his love for you. He loves you now. He loves you then.
He loves you into his presence. The greaterness of the Lord Jesus, that he was God and Savior to us in a way that so transcended the God, the lofty God of the Old Testament. His greaterness comes to me that he was not even put off by the examples that I have given you this morning of total object, human sinfulness and failure. I think we would be put off very much by each other as we sometimes do treat each other like that.
It puts us off. We want nothing to do with people who exhibit these kinds of fleshly and prideful and traitorous behavior that is characteristic of the whole society. We avoid such people. Jesus came to redeem and to save exactly such people, including you and I, including you and I.
He decided on the moment of his own death, he said, father, into your hands, I commit my spirit. Having said this, he breathed his last. That is how he secured your salvation. But it gets better.
We know that the New Testament is the Gospels and so on. We replete with how Jesus appeared to prove that the redemption had been accomplished for all eternity. Those are some of my favorite words in the Bible right there. It's basically the Lord saying, it's me.
It's me. It's done. I have conquered death. I have conquered the very death that has been working in you all of your lives.
And one day when you physically die, you will be with me because I have conquered death. See? It is I myself. I love that statement.
It is I myself. That is who the Lord Jesus is to the believer. He himself personally. He says to our hearts, it is I myself.
Yes, Lord, it is you. We know it's you. Who else? Who else could accomplish our salvation and defeat death?
I have shared this morning from the point of view of, in some sense, on one side of redemption. That the believer can be thankful on the redeemed side of redemption. That the Lord Jesus was not put off by our sinfulness and our humanness and our awfulness. And so, as a believer, when you fail yourself and you revile yourself, you know, and you know that you have failed God, keep in mind that the Lord Jesus loves you and he will not.
He will not be put off. Yes, you and I are abject failures. He will not be put off. His love is there for you.
He doesn't change. His love endures. It is eternal. And you can go back to him and draw on that love and overcome these things that plague you knowing that he will not be put off by you.
And I want to also say in closing that on the unredeemed side of redemption, you should be given pause. You should think very seriously if you know not the Lord, what it means to be separated from God by sin. Isn't that horrible? Doesn't the horribleness, the awfulness of that strike you?
That if you are determined not to be redeemed, if you are determined to turn away from God, in spite of all that you know, in spite of all this book presents about what the Lord Jesus did and what he said, you are determined. To not turn to him in faith and be redeemed, that all of that awful stuff you get to keep forever sitting on top of you, a mountain of awfulness and guilt that will be yours forever in a place called hell. I don't know why that's even a choice, right? What kind of a choice is that?
On the one hand to face hell and all the guilt that is there or redemption and forgiveness and all the love that is there, clearly, the right choice is to turn in faith to Christ for the sacrifice that he made for you on the cross to save your soul. May we go out this week, strengthened and encouraged, that is, courage coming into us to give us courage to speak a word in season and to know that though we'll fail, that the Lord still loves us and the Lord is with us. Shall we pray? Father, we thank you for the Lord Jesus, that he was not put off by our abject tendency to fail again and again, our sinfulness of our nature, our inability to grasp things that are all over the world.
We need to grasp things that are obvious. Help us, Lord, to grasp those things that we need to grasp to appropriate them. Help us to make our own the truth of the gospel and to rejoice in it. We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.