Good Friday: Deliver Us - Tim Horman

[SPEAKER_00]: Please join me and pray the prayer that Jesus has taught us, which is on the screen.

[SPEAKER_00]: Our Father in heaven, hello to your name.

[SPEAKER_00]: Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

[SPEAKER_00]: Give us the day our daily bread and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

[SPEAKER_00]: save us from the time of trial and deliver us from the evil one, for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now and forever.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: Please be seated.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, good morning.

[SPEAKER_00]: Friends, my name is Tim Hormon.

[SPEAKER_00]: I am the senior minister here at one and it is

[SPEAKER_00]: This tragic and yet ultimately liberating event.

[SPEAKER_00]: This central event in human history that we call good Friday.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, the very strange name of this day begs the question.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why on earth would anyone call this day good?

[SPEAKER_00]: Which begs a second question?

[SPEAKER_00]: Why was any of this necessary?

[SPEAKER_00]: How has the crucifixion of a man 2000 odd years ago and the image of the cross that he died upon?

[SPEAKER_00]: Once a symbol of the totality and the terror of Roman imperial power, now come to stand as the immediately identifiable symbol of the Christian faith just about anywhere on earth.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's to say nothing of the message that's behind it.

[SPEAKER_00]: that somehow in the suffering and the death of Jesus, God has brought salvation to the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: How do we make sense of any of these things?

[SPEAKER_00]: The brilliant Christian scholar Fleming Rutledge says in her book on the crucifixion in this regard that Christianity is weird and utterly unique.

[SPEAKER_00]: She writes that until the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the ancient world, no one in the history of human imagination had conceived of such a thing as the worship of a crucified man.

[SPEAKER_00]: The early Christian preaching announced the entrance of God upon the stage of history in the person of an itinerant Jewish teacher who had been gloriously nailed up alongside two of society's cast off criminals to die horribly rejected and condemned.

[SPEAKER_00]: discarded on the garbage heap of humanity forsaken by both the religious elite and the common people leaving behind only a discredited, demoralised handful of terrified disciples who had no status whatsoever in the eyes of anyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the weirdness of this beginning for a world transforming faith is not sufficiently acknowledged, even by those who call themselves Christians, even by those who believe it, that the central claim of Christianity is, in fact, utterly irreligious at its core.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Christianity is the only religion that celebrates as its central idea, the humiliation of its God,

[SPEAKER_00]: or as the historian Tom Holland says in his book Dominion that a man who had been crucified might be held as a God could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world, the ancient world, as scandalous, obscene and grotesque.

[SPEAKER_00]: No wonder the apostle Paul writing a few years later after these events acknowledged that the message of the cross was both an offensive stumbling block to the Jews and utter foolishness to the Gentiles.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, ultimately, he said, it is also the power of God for salvation.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now there are many ways to understand the events of good Friday, but I want to focus on just one, which flows from our study of the Lord's prayer that we've been engaging in through this season of Lent.

[SPEAKER_00]: But we have now come to the line in the prayer, which is perfect for good Friday, when Jesus teaches us to pray and we just pray to moment ago, deliver us from the evil one, deliver us from the evil one.

[SPEAKER_00]: So today we are exploring the meaning of the cross of Christ as the fulfillment of that prayer.

[SPEAKER_00]: The victory of God over the demonic powers of evil and suffering and death.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or to put it another way as Jesus' victory over the one he names in this prayer with the definite article, the evil one.

[SPEAKER_00]: The evil one, Jesus here is not talking about evil in some kind of vaguely generic sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, simply the bad things, the wrong things that we occasionally do, the personal sins that we commit, no.

[SPEAKER_00]: What Jesus has in his sights here is something that runs much deeper.

[SPEAKER_00]: something which operates with intention and with which Jesus understood as the malevolent and destructive power that stands behind and animates all the evil, all the pain, all the suffering and all the injustice that we see going on in the world, all of it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now the Scriptures call this evil power by many names, the devil, the Satan, Lucifer, or simply just the powers, or Jesus' favorite word for him, Billsy Bob, which translates as something like the Lord of the Flies.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's kind of a grossly evocative image.

[SPEAKER_00]: Something of an insult, because you know that nothing good is happening wherever large numbers of flies have gathered.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's always a sign of death and decay and well, other stuff as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: And one of our problems, of course, is that when we hear the word devil,

[SPEAKER_00]: We almost immediately think of some horror movie like the Exorcist, or a picture of medieval caricature of a man with red horns and a tail and a pitchfork.

[SPEAKER_00]: And those seem like our only options to work with.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe you don't believe in the existence of the devil at all.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you're like me, you try to be sensible.

[SPEAKER_00]: and thoughtful person, you know, you value science, you have lots of doubts, you struggle with skepticism, believing in God is sometimes hard enough, believing in the devil just seems like so much harder, I totally get it, so some of us just find this aspect of Christianity, awkward and uncomfortable, and we'd rather not talk about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: But we can't do that because if we want to grasp how Jesus Himself understood His own mission, how Jesus understood the coming of the kingdom of God, which we have prayed for through His ministry, and especially when we talk about the meaning of His death on the cross, you cannot ignore the presence of the devil in this story, primarily because one of the first things that Jesus did when He began His ministry,

[SPEAKER_00]: or to come face-to-face with the devil or the Satan when he was tempted in the wilderness for 40 days.

[SPEAKER_00]: And having resisted him, a huge portion of Jesus' ministry then was dedicated to freeing people from the power of the Satan.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's still doing that today.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus also said that through his ministry, he saw Satan fall like lightning out of the heavens, an image that's picked up again in Revelation 12, which describes the fall of Satan's kingdom, or his reign of control over the world, or you might say his reign of terror,

[SPEAKER_00]: over the world and the promise in that text is that although the evil one is still present and active in the world but because of the cross and especially because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, his days are numbered, his end is coming and he will be finally destroyed when Christ returns to heal and to restore and renew all things and then like the prophets say

[SPEAKER_00]: Or as one John 38 says, and it's on the slide, the reason that the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.

[SPEAKER_00]: But again, I get it.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a Christian here tonight and someone asked you, perhaps, to give a quick explanation of what it is that you believe about Jesus, you're probably not going to start with this.

[SPEAKER_00]: This might not be your elevator pitch.

[SPEAKER_00]: You'll go to verse.

[SPEAKER_00]: You might choose something else, like John 3, 16, talk about the love of God, for God so love the world that He gave His only Son, but whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life.

[SPEAKER_00]: Even so, this aspect of the cross, that it represents Christ's victory over the powers of evil and death, is an essential part of the story.

[SPEAKER_00]: C.S.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, gives us a brilliant summary of this aspect of the coming of Christ into the world in his book, Be a Christianity, where he describes Jesus' mission as a great campaign of sabotage.

[SPEAKER_00]: He writes that one of the things that surprised me.

[SPEAKER_00]: When I first read the New Testament, seriously, was that it talked so much about a dark power in the universe, an evil spirit who was held to be the power behind death and disease and sin.

[SPEAKER_00]: The difference is that Christianity thinks of this dark power.

[SPEAKER_00]: was created by God and was good, in fact, when he was created but rebelled and went wrong.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as a result, the universe is now at war.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it does not think that this is a war between independent powers.

[SPEAKER_00]: It thinks of it as a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.

[SPEAKER_00]: enemy occupied territory.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's what this world is.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed.

[SPEAKER_00]: You might say landed in disguise, and is calling all of us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now I know someone will ask me, Louis Wright, do you really mean at this time of day to reintroduce our old friend that devil hooves and horns and all?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what time of the day has to do with it?

[SPEAKER_00]: I do not know.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm not particular about the hoofs and horns, but in other respects, my answer is, yes, I do.

[SPEAKER_00]: Though I don't claim to know anything about his personal appearance.

[SPEAKER_00]: We live.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need to tell you this.

[SPEAKER_00]: We live in enemy occupied territory.

[SPEAKER_00]: But.

[SPEAKER_00]: The rightful king has learned it and is now calling all of us to join him in a great campaign of sabotage, a campaign it must be said that is never ever directed toward people.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus did not give us that option but instead calls on us to love our neighbors and especially to love our enemies.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that even when Jesus was being crucified, He was still praying for His enemies, and He cried out from the cross-father forgive them, but they don't know what they're doing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus' mission is not a campaign against people, but against the malignants and destructive power that is behind and which inflames and animates everything that corrupts the goodness and love and beauty and peace that God intended for this world.

[SPEAKER_00]: And although you may not know what to call it, even if you're not comfortable with this language of the Satan or the devil in some respects that doesn't matter because I think we all know it,

[SPEAKER_00]: We all know what we're talking about when we see it, when we experience it, when something happens that causes us to cry out, that is wrong, that is unjust, that should not happen.

[SPEAKER_00]: The world should not be this way, and that is what we're praying when we say God deliver us from the evil one.

[SPEAKER_00]: While on the one hand, evil is something that holds all our lives in its grip.

[SPEAKER_00]: No matter how hard we try,

[SPEAKER_00]: just cannot seem to escape from or fully control the impulses or desires that drive us and shape us in harmful and destructive ways, making us everything from perfectionists to procrastinators, to liars, abusers, addicts, bullies, adulterers and all.

[SPEAKER_00]: The other manifestations of sin that afflict the human soul, and yes, Jesus wants to deliver us from all of that.

[SPEAKER_00]: However, Jesus is also talking here about the sin, capital S, the destructive global evil that takes hold of nations and empires and political systems and ideologies and religions.

[SPEAKER_00]: that the Bible calls the principalities and powers which stand behind everything from this Stalinist school lags to the Nazi gas chambers to endless global wars fueled by greed or religion or just because Mike makes right to sweatshops and force labor to human trafficking and slavery to school shootings the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of so few while billions struggle to get enough to eat.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that we seem so powerless to stop it, to keep this from happening over and over again, despite all the lessons of history, that is what we call the Satan.

[SPEAKER_00]: And because all of that is the opposite of everything that Jesus represents, when the way of Jesus came crashing into the way of Satan,

[SPEAKER_00]: When Jesus entered the world to sabotage and dismantle Satan's empire, the encounter was not pretty friends that collision caused Jesus to be crucified.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as we said at the beginning,

[SPEAKER_00]: We have to understand how crazy this is, that we worship a crucified God, a God who was willingly humiliated and murdered by the very power that he came to defeat.

[SPEAKER_00]: And again, the question I asked at the start, why would God do this?

[SPEAKER_00]: Why was this necessary?

[SPEAKER_00]: Why didn't he just show up in power and glory and crush his enemies?

[SPEAKER_00]: Why didn't he just extend his mighty arm and squeeze the devil like a pimple?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then take out all the corrupt nations and governments and evil people in the world, along with him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Surely if he's God, he would have had the power to do all of that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Jesus didn't do that because friends, it would mean that all of us would have had to have been taken out as well because none of us are innocent.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whether by the things we have done, or by the things that we have failed to do, we all have blood on our hands.

[SPEAKER_00]: Pilot may think that he could wash his hands of this man's blood, but he couldn't and neither can we, but also consider what it would mean.

[SPEAKER_00]: with me for just a moment.

[SPEAKER_00]: If God had exerted His will over His enemies and forced them to obey at the threat of violence or death, that would have led to our utter dehumanization and to our absolute enslavement to God's power.

[SPEAKER_00]: We would have just traded one violent overlord for another.

[SPEAKER_00]: The point is, Jesus could not defeat the devil's tactics

[SPEAKER_00]: By using the devil's tactics, it had to be another way.

[SPEAKER_00]: It had to be the way of non-violence.

[SPEAKER_00]: It had to be the way of suffering and surrender.

[SPEAKER_00]: It had to be the way of death.

[SPEAKER_00]: It had to be the way of the cross.

[SPEAKER_00]: That is the only way.

[SPEAKER_00]: Any other way and Jesus becomes another Satan by another name, but infinitely worse.

[SPEAKER_00]: no longer a loving and merciful Messiah but a murderous yet all-powerful and all-knowing tyrant from whom there would be no escape.

[SPEAKER_00]: That is what would have happened if Jesus had taken up the sword and led a rebellion to destroy his enemies instead of taking up the cross to die on their behalf and to liberate them.

[SPEAKER_00]: He willingly took into his own body all the worst of what human and demonic power can unleash and he submitted himself to a humiliating and dehumanizing death, even death on a cross.

[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, the cross.

[SPEAKER_00]: we believe is the place where the decisive battle between Christ and sin, between Christ and the Satan, the place where the wages of sin, which is death, were accepted on behalf

[SPEAKER_00]: of the whole human race and in their place God offers us mercy and freedom and forgiveness and a new life liberated from the curse of sin.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now one objection I often hear at this point which I want to answer briefly as I finish again, why was all this necessary, why couldn't God just forgive us?

[SPEAKER_00]: Why was the cross part of this equation, why couldn't God just say, oh well,

[SPEAKER_00]: guess your sins aren't really that bad?

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm gracious.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you're really sorry, I'll forgive and forget.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the short answer to that question is that it makes a mockery of justice.

[SPEAKER_00]: If God just forgives all the wrong we've done without they're being a reckoning, without they're being judgment, then justice is meaningless and evil wins.

[SPEAKER_00]: We wouldn't accept that, if someone sinned against us in a gross and violent way, if we were the victims of a terrible crime, and neither would God.

[SPEAKER_00]: Fleming Rutledge, again, says, forgiveness without judgment is not enough.

[SPEAKER_00]: Wishful thinking without the intrinsic goodness of every human being is not enough.

[SPEAKER_00]: Inclusion is not inclusive enough as it does not deliver real justice.

[SPEAKER_00]: There are some things, many things that must be condemned and set right if we are to proclaim a God of both justice and mercy.

[SPEAKER_00]: And for that to happen, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, offered Himself to be the condemned and the rejected one, giving Himself up in full knowledge of what would happen to Him, and in perfect union with His Father, He went to Calvary, carrying His own cross upon which He was nailed, despise and rejected for at the time and place of His inhuman crucifixion, all the demonic powers loose in the world, convened and unleashed their forces upon Him,

[SPEAKER_00]: outcast and God forsaken.

[SPEAKER_00]: He hung there as the representative of all humanity and suffered condemnation in the place of all humanity to break the power of sin and death over all humanity.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or as Paul puts it in Colossians 2 on the screen when you were dead in your sins.

[SPEAKER_00]: All our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness which stood against us and condemned us.

[SPEAKER_00]: He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

[SPEAKER_00]: And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them triumphant over them by the cross.

[SPEAKER_00]: Paul is telling us that the moment that looked like the greatest defeat, Christ's greatest defeat, the moment

[SPEAKER_00]: It looked like the principalities and powers had won, was in fact the moment of Christ's greatest triumph, Christ's greatest victory, and he has triumphed over them, Paul says, not by exerting violence against them, but by absorbing violence exerted against him.

[SPEAKER_00]: In this way Christ disarmed them, he removed their power.

[SPEAKER_00]: It means that the freedom that Christ won for us on the cross, the freedom that He won for us over the powers of death can now be given to all who believe.

[SPEAKER_00]: As Hebrews 2 says, since we are flesh and blood,

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus shared in our humanity so that by His death He might break the power of Him, who holds the power of death, that is the devil, and to free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.

[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, those powers are still at work in the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that is coming to an end.

[SPEAKER_00]: The death and resurrection of Jesus that we'll celebrate on Sunday is the beginning of the end.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the end is coming.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this means, friends, this means that we do not need to live in fear.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot going on in the world right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't use fear, but we don't need to give into it.

[SPEAKER_00]: When we put our faith in Jesus, we are joined to Him and to His victory, which means we can now live in hope.

[SPEAKER_00]: rather than in despair.

[SPEAKER_00]: And all the despair and hopelessness that we do see going on in the world can, I believe, and only will be healed, not by more conquest, more war, more violence, more political power, but only by embracing the self-giving love of Christ, poured out by His bloodshed on the cross, which we do not deserve,

[SPEAKER_00]: And we cannot earn, but is a free gift of God's grace to all who call on His name.

[SPEAKER_00]: All we need to do is ask, turn to Christ, and He will set you free.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen and amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: Would you please join with me now in prayer as we prepare our hearts for communion, the prayers on the screen, and we'll pray in unison together the sections

[SPEAKER_00]: Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world have mercy on us, grant us your peace, amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: Friends on the night that Christ was betrayed

[SPEAKER_00]: He took bread, and after he'd given thanks, he broke it, and he said, this is my body, which has given for you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do this in remembrance of me.

[SPEAKER_00]: In the same way after supper, he took the cup, and he said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do this whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.

[SPEAKER_00]: You proclaim the Lord's death until he comes again.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, friends, I'm going to invite you to come and to receive if you would like to.

[SPEAKER_00]: The table is ready, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

[SPEAKER_00]: The instructions are on the screen that come as the helpers will direct to you, amen.