Good Friday Communion

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I don't know about you, but there are some biblical characters that give me a great deal of hope, Peter is one of those. When I read about Peter, when I see the messes Peter gets himself into. When I see the things Peter says when he shouldn't, it gives me hope. I was struck this morning as many of you probably I was reading through the gospel accounts of the last day of our Lord's life before His resurrection and I was struck with the reality that the Lord had told Peter you remember at the Last Supper, He said, Peter, you're going to deny Me. You're going to deny Me at least three times before the cock crows twice. It was by three o'clock am on Friday morning that Peter had already denied our Lord three times, possibly four times, depending on how you look at the gospel accounts.

And then I was reminded my mind skipped ahead as I thought about that to what happens just a few months later. It's at Pentecost and Peter, timid denying Peter, preaches a powerful message. Turn for a moment to Acts chapter 2 and notice in his entire message all Peter says about the death and crucifixion of our Lord. Notice verse 22, "Men of Israel listen to these words Jesus, the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst just as you yourselves know." Here he gets to the heart of what happened on this day. He says, "this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death. But God raised him up." We'll get there on Sunday.

But notice what Peter tells us that really there are two possible perspectives on the death of Christ. One of those is the human perspective, the perspective that looks at the reality that what really was behind the death of Christ was the jealousy, the power hungry politicians, the corrupt religious leaders whose only motive was to advance themselves. And, of course, the fickle crowd they sort of went along as they always do and bought into the plot and were soon screaming with the religious leaders for Christ's blood; crucify Him, crucify Him. On the human level, you could say that Christ's death was really nothing more than the rotten fruit of corrupt men pursuing an illegal trial on trumped up false charges. In a sense you could say it was the murder of Jesus. It was the ancient equivalent of a mob lynching.

But Peter reminds us that there's another perspective about the death of Christ. Notice verse 23 again, he says. "This Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God." This is God's view. This isn't the human view in perspective of the cross. This is God's perspective. You see in God's mind the crucifixion was the perfect complete fulfillment of His great eternal divine plan. It was exactly the way He wanted it to happen down to every last detail. A plan that God determined in His mind if we can use human terms, God determined in His mind in eternity past and He brought into fruition in a tiny little Middle Eastern country in AD 30.

You see when we think of Calvary, when we think of the crucifixion; we tend to go to the first perspective. Our mind tends to go to the human, the extreme physical suffering and we've been reminded of that even this year in graphic ways. We think in terms of the beatings and the ripping out of His beard and the fact that cruel men would make a crown out of thorns and then place it on His head and then take small sticks and beat it into His scalp. We tend to think of the scourging that left His pulverized body frankly near death. We think of those six hours from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, six lonely hours, Christ hanging supported, His entire weight, supported only by three nails and maybe a small ledge for His feet. Six hours of dragging His body against those nails up to get a breath of air and then from the sheer pain slumping again until He couldn't breathe and then pushing His bare back against that raw timber again until He could get air and make it a few more moments. We tend to think of the utter indignity of the Son of God. Think about this, the second person of the Trinity in human form nailed, absolutely naked to a tree before a gawking and mocking crowd. His only clothing dried blood and human spittle and crawling flies. That's what we tend to think about.

But Peter wants us to know that the most important thing that happened there that day wasn't the human suffering. It wasn't the physical pain of Christ that wasn't what He had to pray about in the garden when He said Lord may this cup pass from Me. Christ was ready and prepared to face the human suffering it was something else. The most important thing that happened that day was the divine transaction. Just outside the city walls of Jerusalem, three men were dying. All three of them were suffering the same torment physically. But one of them was in the middle of a divine transaction. I think nowhere is this transaction this perspective of God put more clearly than in the Book of Romans.

I want you to turn to Romans chapter 3, notice Verse 25. Paul has just laid out the gospel. He's just explained how we can have this righteousness, this gift from God of righteousness put in our account, and then he says this. He ends verse 24 with the name of Christ Jesus, and he says "whom" verse 25 "God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith." You want to know what was in the mind of God during those six hours that Christ hung there on the cross. Here it is, it's contained in those simple words that one short phrase beginning of verse 25 "God publicly displayed him as a propitiation." There's what it was all about. There's why it was significant. It's in that one phrase and in that really that one word propitiation.

The Greek word translated propitiation occurs only a handful of times, and the family of words occurs only a handful of times in the New Testament. And yet this word lies at the very heart of our faith. It lies at the heart of what went on that day on Calvary. The word simply means satisfaction. It describes satisfying the holy wrath of God against sinners. God is angry, why is God angry? And why does His wrath need to be satisfied? Well Paul has already told the readers of Romans that notice back in Chapter 1 verse 18, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven," against whom "all ungodliness." That's men responding wrongly to God "and unrighteousness" that's men responding unrightly to men "who suppress the truth and unrighteousness." In other words, everybody who responds wrongly to God, everyone who responds wrongly to his fellow man, which is everyone lies under the wrath of God.

Notice Chapter 2 verse 5, he says, "Because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart" your refusal to repent of your sins and turn to God, "you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and the revelation of God's righteous judgment." What a shocking statement it's as if you're stockpiling wrath storing it up. Verse 8 chapter 2 he says "to those who are selfishly ambitious and who do not obey the truth" in other words, who don't respond to God, "but obey unrighteousness" they do what they want, "wrath and indignation."

In fact, there's an interesting phrase that Paul uses in the Book of Ephesians. In Chapter 2 verse 3, he says that we were by nature children of wrath. Think about that. You by nature were a child of wrath, in other words, a sort of a contemporary way of saying it might be this. Wrath is so much a part of who you are, and what you can expect that it may as well be your middle name. That's what he's saying children of wrath.

It's like the small boy; I don't know some of you may remember the cartoon Li'l Abner. When I was growing up the first thing I did on Sunday was try to find the funnies. And I could read through all of them, and there was this one cartoon called the Li'l Abner and in the Li'l Abner there was this one little boy who everywhere he went there was this dark cloud hanging over his head, and it always rained wherever he went. There was just on him, there was this cloud that followed him around everywhere where he went. That's humorous, but in a sense that describes every unbelieving sinner. It's as if the wrath of God looms over their head like a storm about to break.

But Paul says God has publicly displayed Jesus Christ as a propitiation that is as the satisfaction of His wrath. So this word propitiation identifies God's great reason for the crucifixion. It all had to do with Him. You see we think of Christ's dying for us, but in God's mind, Christ died for God, to satisfy His wrath and make it possible for Him to forgive sinners. As Paul says later in Romans to be just and yet still the justifier of ungodly men. You see Christ actually died for God.

There are a number of wrong views about why Christ died. You've probably heard some of them. One of them, for example, that I heard when I was growing up was that Christ that we were basically owned by Satan. And Christ came and died to make a sort of ransom payment to Satan to get us back. That's dead wrong. That has nothing to do with why Christ died. No, Paul gives us the divine perspective here, he says on the cross, God made His Son He set Him up in a public display as a propitiation; a satisfaction of His wrath. You see Paul's message in this verse is that God crushed His Son on the cross, so that we could go free. He crushed His Son to completely satisfy His wrath against every sinner who would ever believe. We can take this phrase here in Romans chapter 3, and we can rephrase it as a normal sentence. It would read like this. God publicly displayed Him as a propitiation. You see Christ himself was the object of God's wrath.

The Roman Christians, who read this letter would have understood that. Many of them came out of a pagan background. They were accustomed to the concept of satisfying their pagan deities. But there's a key difference, two actually, two crucial differences between what they were accustomed to and sort of satisfying their pagan gods and what Paul is describing here. One is the pagan gods, their wrath was capricious, it was evil. Whereas God's wrath is a holy settled disposition against those who choose to rebel against Him their Creator.

There's a second difference between the wrath of the pagan gods and God's the true God's wrath, and that is that in pagan religions the worshiper was responsible to satisfy the offended deity. How Satan loves to pervert the truth because the reality is instead of demanding a payment from the worshiper, the true God sets forth His own unique Son as the satisfaction. First John 2:2 says speaking of Christ says, "He Himself is the satisfaction of God's wrath against our sins." I love Isaiah 53, in fact, I thought about going there tonight, but I'll save it for future years. Isaiah 53, turn there just for a moment though I want to remind you of these rich verses. Because this goes to the heart of propitiation, when we talk about satisfying God's wrath, we're talking about Christ satisfying it for us. We're talking about substitution. Notice what he says in Isaiah 53:4, "Surely our grief." Let's start back in verse 3. "He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and like one from whom men hide their face, He was despised." And notice this next phrase, a slap in the face to every one of us who were made by Christ, "and we did not esteem Him." Think about that. "Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried; yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted." We thought God was judging Him for His sin, "but He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed" not for His own, but "for our iniquities, the chastening for our well-being. Fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity" the moral perversion, the twistedness "of us all to fall on Him." Substitution.

Next week is April 15th, now I hate to bring that up because for most of you, the thing that immediately pops into your mind is the fact that you still have your taxes to do. Gladly mine are completed, but that's not the big news on April 15th, next week, April 15th marks the 92^nd anniversary of a very significant event in the life of our world, it was at 2:20 am on the morning of April 15th and the year 1912 that the Titanic sank on her maiden voyage from Great Britain to the US. Or between Great Britain and the US I should say. Of the 2228 people on board 1523 died. In his book that he wrote that same year 1912, Jay Mowbray describes a famous scene that you may have heard about that happened that night on the Titanic.

There was a millionaire on board a man by the name of John Jacob Astor and his young bride. As the story goes and as he heard from accounts from those who were on board the ship who were rescued, Astor helped his wife to find a seat in one of the lifeboats, and he noticed as he was there at the lifeboat that it wasn't completely filled. There was a seat left and he looked around, there were no women anywhere to be seen anywhere near that particular lifeboat, and so he asked the second officer who was helping to oversee the loading of the lifeboat would it be all right If I take that seat next to my wife, my wife is ill, she's not well, would that be ok and the second officer nodded and John Jacob Astor took his seat in the lifeboat. As the story was told by the survivors and by his wife as the ship, as the lifeboat began to be let down he noticed down the way, down the deck a woman was running with all her might to get to this lifeboat. He told them to stop, he told the second officer to stop the boat stop lowering it, and he jumped out. He helped this young woman gasping for breath into his seat. And then he stepped back and his wife, Lady Astor immediately responded with screaming and trying to get off the lifeboat herself, and the witnesses say he patted her and tried to calm her and said honey the ladies need to go first. He turned, saluted the second officer and continued to help other boats lower. He died in the sinking of the Titanic. You see Astor took the place of that woman. He actually died so that she could live.

That is exactly what Christ did, but Christ bore not the wrath of the sea, but the wrath of His own Father in the place of sinners. You see on the cross God poured out on Christ the wrath that every believer deserved. He became a kind of lightning rod for God's wrath. There's an image in the Old Testament well actually in both the Old and the New Testaments. There's an image of God's wrath that's graphic. It's pictured as a cup of wine, imagine for a moment that there's a chalice and you're pouring into it the liquid and you're pouring it slowly, and as it nears the top, you can see it almost break the surface to the top edge of the chalice and then as you overfill, it begins to flood the sides. That's a picture God often uses of the cup of his wrath. Listen to Psalm 75:8, "For a cup is in the hand of the Lord, and the wine foams; it is well mixed, and He pours out of this; surely all of the wicked of the earth must drain and drink down its dregs." And in Revelation 14, the Apostle John tells us it's about eternal punishment, listen to what he says. "He will also drink of the wine of the wrath of God; which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger, and He will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb."

You see that's what we deserved, but Christ drank it for us, and there's not a single drop left for us. You see in the end it comes down to this, God because He's holy because He's righteous will pour out His wrath against your sin. It'll either be against you for all eternity, or if you're willing to repent and believe it'll be against His Son on the cross. When we partake of the Lord's Table, as Paul calls it, we're remembering the reality of propitiation. The night before His crucifixion, Christ ate the Passover meal with His disciples. Luke records this in chapter 22 verse 19, and "when Christ had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and He gave it to them, saying, "This is my body which is given for you;" I'm going to die in your place. "do this in remembrance of Me." And in the same way took the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup, which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood." As we eat the bread and drink the juice, we're remembering the reality that Christ died as our substitute to satisfy the righteous holy wrath of God against our sin. As the men come, I want us to take a few moments to prepare our hearts to confess our sin to thank our God for the amazing sacrifice of His Son in our place.