Who is Jesus #2 - Jesus is the Atoning Sacrifice
Message Description
Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues into the second week of the message series "Who is Jesus?".
Message Transcript
Good morning. It's great to be together, the 10 different service gatherings around Pittsburgh this weekend online. But I've gotten a special question from some of you at our Bridgeville location that meets at the Phoenix Theater in Bridgeville. We're in week three there. And the question is to recline or not to recline. And just kind of like when you're on an airplane and you know how the seats can recline, just because you can doesn't mean you should. And so my take, just if you're at Bridgeville, is about 25% is good. After that, it's probably a little more than we want.
Hey, we are in week two of a series that we're calling “Who Is Jesus?” And we're taking a few weeks to consider some of the ways that the Bible depicts Jesus. And at first, that may seem like a fairly obvious quick question, but just in the book of 1 Peter, which we're not looking at today, there are over 20 images of Jesus Christ that the book of 1 Peter gives us. And when you go through the pages of the New Testament, there are dozens and dozens of titles, dozens and dozens of images that are used of Jesus Christ, all with different nuances to how we should understand Jesus. And how you understand Jesus is one of those significant things in all of our lives. But often, we're shaped as much by cultural narratives as we are by the narratives that we find in the Bible.
I was going to a Steeler game a couple weeks ago, and I was meeting one of my sons there who lives in another part of Pittsburgh, and it was just the two of us going. And so we drove separately, parked separately. And so when I was walking to the appointed gate where we were going to meet, I was probably paying more attention than I normally do to everything that was going on around me. You know how when you walk in the city with somebody, you might be in conversation, but when you do it yourself, you at least are paying a little more attention. And as I was approaching the stadium, I heard yelling. And it wasn't cheering. It was street preaching. And there was this guy with a megaphone who was standing out there telling everybody that if they didn't turn to Jesus, they would burn in hell, basically. And he had some Scripture in it and some things like this. And as I was walking toward this, I said, in my own mind, I appreciate the courage to maybe be on the street, but I'm not sure that that message in that exact context made everybody standing there say, oh, that's the Jesus that I want to worship. Even if what he said was true.
Now, obviously, God can use and does use all kinds of things, and there are different ways to approach things, but my bigger question became, how does he who was giving the message see Jesus? And how do these people who hear this? What is their opinion of Jesus Christ? And so in 1 John, chapter 2, verses 1 and 2, we see three descriptions of Jesus. We see him talked about as the advocate, the righteous one, and the atoning sacrifice. And we're going to look at those three. But first, I want to make two general statements that help set up those three images that hopefully come from this passage.
The first is this, and that is, sin is a disruption of God's way. So it starts out and it says, my little children, which is not a diminutive way to speak to somebody or a dismissive way. It's more a term of endearment. He's saying, those of you whom I love, he says, I want to write this to you basically so that you do not sin. And that word sin sometimes creates a problem for some people in our day and age because they hear the word sin and they say, I don't want to ever use the word sin to talk about my acts or other people's acts, because it communicates this idea that there's a standard and there's a right and wrong, and there's a good and a not as good. And I just want to live and let live. I don't want to have this notion of sin.
But what 1 John, in the chapter right before chapter 1, verse 8, 9, talks about, it says, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins. But if we say that we don't sin, we lie. And what sin is, what this word means in the original language is to literally miss the mark, to come short of something. And so what he's saying here is he's saying that sin is a disruption of God's good way.
Now, in the way of thinking about sin, theologians have long used three words to talk about sin. And this idea comes from Romans, chapter 5. They talk about what's called imputed sin, inherited sin, and individual sin. To say that sin isn't just the acts that we do, but it's part of our nature and it's part of our status, our standing. So the imputed sin is part of our standing before God. We have sin imputed to us from Adam that all of us are guilty of. Then we have inherited sin that we get as just being a human being born. This is why the virgin birth is an important doctrine because sin didn't pass to Jesus in the same way. And then we have individual sin.
Here's what Romans 5:12 says:
“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man...” so through Adam, “...and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.”
Now you may say, well, it doesn't seem fair to say that sin is something that we're guilty of because somebody else did it. And that's understandable. But again, what Scripture is very careful to say is you aren't just guilty of it because of Adam, although you do have that legal standing, that legal status before God, but you also have a corrupt nature.
This is Psalm 51:5. It says this:
“Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.”
So there's sin that is soiling each of us. And then we have individual acts of sin. This again is in 1 John 2. If we sin, and the way that the clause is stated here, it's, and we will, and we do. In other words, he says, I write this to you so you won't sin. But if we sin, and we will, we have an advocate with the Father.
R.C. Sproul once wrote this. He said: “God is indeed long suffering, patient, and slow to anger. In fact, he's slow to anger. So slow to anger that when his anger does erupt, we are shocked and offended by it. We forget rather quickly that God's patience is designed to lead us to repentance, to give us time to be redeemed. Instead of taking advantage of this patience by coming humbly to him for forgiveness, we use this grace as an opportunity to become bolder in our sin. We delude ourselves into thinking that either God doesn't care about it or that he's powerless to punish us. The supreme folly is that we think we can get away with our revolt.”
You see, you may question the idea of sin and its reality and not like what it means, but you have felt the impact of it. You feel it when you read a news story, when you watch the news. You've probably felt it in your family. You've probably felt it just in society or even in your own heart and soul, where you say, there are things that I know are not in God's good way, they're a disruption of God's good way. In fact, I would say every time your heart yearns and says, I wish this were better, I wish this were different. I wish this didn't feel so broken, what you're doing is your heart is yearning for what is God's good way.
Now and again, even in the church, sometimes there's a tendency to kind of diminish the idea of sin. And what I mean by this is sometimes in a more progressive setting, what happens is people say, well, does the Bible really talk about standards and all of this? And there's a tendency to reduce the standard. And sometimes in places that are more conservative as well, there's also a tendency to diminish sin. And that comes in a couple of ways. One is to say, I need to reduce the standard so that I meet it, or I need to pretend to be better than I am so that I meet the perceived standard. But either way, sin is a disruption of God's good way.
And that leads me to the second statement, and that is that sin brings the wrath of God. And this is something that, again, people don't typically like to think about. We like to say, well, God is love. But in some ways, talking about the God of love doesn't make a lot of sense if we don't understand and embrace this idea of the wrath of God. Here's What Romans chapter 1, verse 18 says. It says:
“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”
So what does it say? God has wrath that's being revealed from heaven against the disruption of God's good way. That's what sin is, and God has wrath because of it. In fact, in 1 John 2, where we're talking about this idea of an atonement, an atoning sacrifice, some versions say a propitiation there. Maybe you've heard that word. It's not a word you hear often besides church, but propitiation means to assuage basically the wrath of somebody else. And so the word propitiation is pointing to this wrath. And that's why when we talk about sin, we also need to talk about the wrath of God.
And I understand, that even as I say this, probably some of us are saying, well, this seems unworthy of God. To think of God getting angry or wrathful at something seems unworthy of God. But actually to love something means that you have the capacity to get angry, because that anger is trying to prevent something that is perverting the glory of that thing. Now there is unjustified anger, without a doubt. When you get angry at something that threatens your own glory, that can be a misplaced anger, where it's a perceived slight. But when you get angry at something that is about the glory of God or about the glory or the goodness of God's ways, then that can be righteous anger.
Let me give you an example. If you've had kids or, you know kids, were a kid, at some point, you probably went and got on a school bus, or you put your child on a school bus. Now, if you homeschool, you know, did something else, maybe you never did. But most parents have this moment where you raise your child from the time that they're born, to this moment, this seminal moment in your life where you put your child on a school bus and they go off to school. And it's a seminal moment in the sense of you have invested so much and all of a sudden you're not the only influence. Like they have teachers and friends and all kinds of things that change.
And so let's imagine that you put your child on this school bus and they come home the first day and they're sad, and you ask about it, and they won't tell you anything about it, but they just, something didn't feel right. You put them on the school bus the next day and they come home and they're sad, and you try to find out what's going on. They don't say much about it, they won't tell you about it. You put them on the school bus another day and they're a little anxious about getting on the bus. And what you come to find out is that there's a group of kids on the bus who are picking on, bullying your child. What happens? You have a righteous anger because you say, this is not how it should be. And this is what God has when sin persists. And so sin is a disruption of God's good way, and sin is a cause of the wrath of God. And now we're ready to talk about these three descriptions of Jesus. Here's the first description. It's the word advocate.
1 John, chapter 2, says this in verse 1 and following. It says:
“My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin...” And basically again, the way the condition reads, we will. It says, “...we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.”
So the word advocate is the same word that's used in John chapter 14, verse 16, John chapter 14, verse 26, John 15, verse 26, of the Holy Spirit. And it's a word that means comforter, helper, counselor. It had a wide range of meaning in classic Greek language here. Most commentators believe that it has the connotation of a judicial advocate, of somebody who comes alongside somebody who's accused, maybe rightly accused, and says, I will stand with you and fight on your behalf. And so the picture here is of Jesus being the advocate, the judicial advocate on our behalf because of our sin before the Father.
And then he uses a second term and he says, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. And the reason this is significant is because Jesus isn't just one who advocates for us, but he has a position being the righteous one, who can say, as one who is completely righteous, I am going to speak on behalf of those who are not. Now you might be thinking, okay, you're moving through this material quick. We're going to be done soon, but most of my time is going to be spent on the third one here.
So, then he says, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sin. Again, some of the older versions, the New American Standard, the King James, the ESV, all use this phrase propitiation to assuage wrath. And so there's a background to this. Often in the Scriptures, what we have in our Western cultures, we like to think in terms of principles, to say, well, there's a concept, and if I believe something, then I have it.
In kind of the Eastern cultures that the Scriptures emerge from, there was often a tendency to think more in pictures, to use a picture to communicate a truth, not just a principle. And this is one of those instances where this phrase atoning sacrifice has a principle, but it actually points to a picture in the Old Testament that when you understand it helps us gain some understanding of how this should strike us. In fact, I think that when we get this, it can actually help us really appreciate who Jesus is.
And so in Leviticus, chapter 16, we get a picture of this. And here's the picture. If you are looking at a copy of the bible, in Leviticus 16, at the top, it says “A Day of Atonement”, which is a human supplied title, but it's because this whole chapter is about a day of atonement. So atoning, sacrifice and then day of atonement. So what this should tell us again is now the New Testament writer is going to take this Old Testament picture and say, I'm going to give you some significance of this. And the way that the day of atonement worked, is it was a day that was a feast in which the Jewish people, if they could, would travel to Jerusalem.
So there would be this huge mass of people that would descend on Jerusalem. Actually, they'd ascend because Jerusalem was high. So they would go up to Jerusalem and they would have this moment where they would say, this is the day of Atonement, and it would lead to Yom Kippur. And it was this huge celebration, but there was a solemn moment that was part of it, and it was the moment when they would make a sacrifice of a goat.
But if you read through Leviticus 16, there isn't just one goat, there's two goats. There's one that was sacrificed whose blood was shed for the forgiveness of sin, and one who was symbolically made the scapegoat and was sent into the wilderness to wander around with the sins of the people. And when the goat left the temple area, that they would have a gentile take the goat out and lead it into the wilderness so it didn't come back. And legend has it they would push it off a cliff somewhere so it didn't wander back into the city with all the people's sins. But they had this moment of joyous celebration, like all of our sins of the last year have been taken out into the wilderness and they're gone. They're never to come back on us.
And here's what we read. In Leviticus 16, verse 8, 9, and 10, it says:
“He cast lots...” speaking of the high priest, “...for the two goats — one for the Lord and the other for the scapegoat.”
And if you look at your Bible, there's a little footnote by the word scapegoat. And at the bottom of the page or on your hyperlink, if you're reading on a digital version, it says this. It says, the meaning of the Hebrew for this word is uncertain, also in verses 10 and 26. And you say, well, that doesn't really help me to say the meaning is uncertain. But some translations just simply transliterate the Hebrew word and it's the word azazel. And then those footnotes will also often say, this has an uncertain meaning. It could be about demons or a goat, a scapegoat. Here the NIV has made the decision to say, this is a scapegoat. And you might say, okay, does this matter? Well, the idea was uncertain in the sense of, are we putting our sins on the scapegoat to send it out, or is this becoming, in some symbolic way, pointed to all the things that are counter to the goodness of God, that we send out God's good ways?
And so the high priest would go into the holy of holies and in this whole process would make this sacrifice of the one goat and release the other. Now, notice, the high priest would be one who was ceremonially clean, would be presented as perfect, Jesus, the Righteous One, he was the advocate for the people in this moment. But even more, what the text tells us is he became the atoning sacrifice.
Verse 9 of Leviticus 16 then says this. It says:
“Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the Lord and sacrifice it for a sin offering.” So now the high priest goes in, he does this, Aaron. “But the goat, chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it into the wilderness as a scapegoat.”
So what's happening? He's saying, when the sins are placed on this goat, they go with the scapegoat, away from the people, and they are gone. They are done, never to come back. Now, this led the people to have a feast, a party, a celebration, because they said, our sins are taken care of. And the New Testament picks up this image, and it says, there's not just a feast, but Jesus is your atoning sacrifice. He's your propitiation. The wrath of God is not on you because of your sin or the sins of anybody else.
And here's another piece that's a little different. Between that culture and our culture, we tend to think about the forgiveness of sins very individually. And what I mean by this is we see it as a transaction. I say, I believe in Jesus, my sins are forgiven. I get heaven. That's not untrue, it's not inaccurate. But they thought of sin being forgiven communally. They came together in Jerusalem. They all waited as the sins were placed on this goat and sent into the wilderness. In other words, it wasn't just an individual thing. It was a communal thing.
Now, why does that matter? You see, individually, you may come here today and you may say, I know that I need forgiveness. And you feel the sting of guilt or shame of decisions you've made. Maybe things that aren't known by whoever's sitting near you today, maybe they are known. And either way, you feel this, I wish I hadn't, and I can never make it right. But you see, the message of Jesus Christ is those sins, when they're gone, they're gone. It is fresh, it is new. That does not define you anymore.
But it isn't just that. See, the communal aspect is all of us find that our lives are impacted by communal sins. And although there still needs to be individual appropriation for the forgiveness of the sin, for the individual, there's a sense in which, when a community experiences the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, even communal sin's power is diminished, which means if you're here and you have been betrayed, you've been violated in some way, been abused, that the atoning work of Jesus Christ takes those sins into the wilderness in the same way to say, you don't have to let the impact of those sins still be on you today. And now the people say, and this is why we can have a celebration, a feast, a party, because this is what God has done. I don't know how you come here today, but the message of Jesus Christ is the goat, the scapegoat, takes your stuff and the communal stuff, and it goes into the wilderness, never to be seen again.
A few years ago, I was talking with a man who doesn't intersect with Orchard Hill, and I say that just so you know, that, you know, you don't know this story. And he had had an affair, and his wife found out about it and was rightly angry, and she was in the process of divorcing him. And as they were going through this whole thing, he, who was a believer, kind of started to come back to his faith in all of this. But I remember talking to him at one point about his journey, and he said, and my wife wants everyone to know why we're getting a divorce. He said, I can't go anywhere without everyone knowing the story. And I feel so much shame.
And while that's certainly understandable, what I said to him in the moment was I said, do you realize that every time you walk into a setting where everybody knows this story, you actually have a moment of being able to choose to believe the message of Jesus Christ, the Gospel, forgiveness of sins, or not? I mean, it doesn't take away how people necessarily see you. But what you're dealing with at a fundamental level is, do I believe that what Jesus says about me is more important than what people say about me?
And the reality is what he could say, what any of us could say when somebody else says, oh, you haven't lived up to this standard. You haven't, you haven't, you aren't. What any of us could say is, you're right. And in fact, it's way worse than you know, because even this guy, even though this event was publicly known, chances are there were many things that he thought that he did that weren't known. And in other words, it's worse. But that is the beauty of the message, of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, because the scapegoat has left the building. And if the scapegoat is gone, so are the sins, giving you freedom and joy, regardless of what has been. Because our status is not based on what we have done, but on what Jesus Christ has done.
Romans 5:19 talks about how just as sin entered the world through one man, Adam, the imputed sin, there's imputed righteousness that comes from Jesus Christ. Because through another man, Jesus Christ, now there is redemption, there's forgiveness. Now notice what John writes in 1 John 2. Why does he say he's writing this? He says, my dear children, chapter 2, verse 1, I write this to you. Why? So that you do not sin.
You see, sometimes people hear this and they say, well, does this mean that I can do anything I want and God forgives me? And the answer is, well, yes. But why does he say, I write this to you so you will not sin? What did he say in 1 John, chapter 1, verse 8 and 9? He says, 9 and 10 right in there. He says, if you confess your sins, he's faithful and just to forgive you your sins. How does this help you not sin?
Well, the way that it helps you not sin to understand the essence of what Jesus Christ has done is you say, if he's such a good God that he'll forgive me wherever I've been, whatever I've done, however far I've wandered, then I can know that his way really is the best way and choose to say, that is the God that I will trust. That is the God that I will listen to, and the God I'll align my life with.
So today, as we're gathered, for some of us, maybe this is a call to say, is your hope is your faith and your own personal reform, or is it in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ? Because you can believe in Jesus today, acknowledge your sin, that it's the rightful place of God's wrath. But say it's the atoning work of Jesus Christ that gives me hope. And you can just simply say, God, I trust you today what Jesus has done, and enter into that space.
And if you're somebody who says, you know, I've been around a long time, I kind of know the story of Jesus and the forgiveness of sins. Maybe there was a detail about Leviticus that I didn't understand today. But, you know, I kind of know this thing. What this message does, if you get it in your soul, is it inspires worship. It inspires obedience. It inspires you to say, why would I ever want to step out of the loving care of a God who is this good?
And so today, I just want to encourage you when the topic of Jesus comes up in any context, to remind yourself that he is an advocate, the righteous advocate who is the propitiation for God’s wrath. You see, Jesus didn't just die for your sins, he died for God. So that God would say, my wrath has been placed on the perfect sacrifice and now you are free.
God, we ask today that you would help each one of us to not just simply see our relationship with you as some kind of a transaction, but that it would warm our hearts to love you, to serve you, to follow you with everything in us because of your goodness and beauty that has been offered to each of us. And we pray this today in Jesus name. Amen.
Thanks for being here. Have a great week.
This transcript was automatically generated. Please excuse errors.
