The Descending God

Hello, you are listening to Second City Sermons,

a ministry of Second City Church in Midtown Harrisburg.

It's our hope that these sermons will draw you

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Son and Holy Spirit. Please consider coming and

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Instagram and YouTube. We hope you enjoy this

sermon. God Bless. Let me pray again for us,

Lord. God, we carry crosses around our necks.

We fold palm branches into crosses. We have them

before us often. And yet, It is our desire, Lord,

tonight to see it maybe more clearly, to have

our gaze fixed more intently. Not just on a cross,

but on you, the one who went to the cross for

us. God, would you do this tonight in us? Would

your Holy Spirit move among us that we might

wonder again, wonder afresh at the extent of

your love and your grace for us. Hear this prayer,

Lord. May the words in my mouth and the meditations

of our hearts be pleasing in your sight. Amen.

Many of you are probably familiar with the Dutch

Christian, Corey Ten Boen. She survived the horrors

of the concentration camp. She had been harboring

the Jews. She said, there is no pit so deep that

Christ is not deeper still. I suggest you tonight

that sin makes us less human. Sin is a dehumanizing

thing. Now what it does is sin promises us sort

of a godlikeness. What it does actually is it

makes us subhuman. It humanizes us. In 1943,

just months before Corey Ten Boom would be arrested

and forced into the Ravensburg concentration

camp, so right in the middle of World War II,

The great author C .S. Lewis, whom I hope also

you are familiar with, he gave a series of lectures

at the University of Durham. Those lectures became

one of his well -known books called The Abolition

of Man. Abolition, the doing away with man. His

argument, which is much easier to make in the

middle of war when your country is being bombed.

is that the world was losing its sense of what

it is to be human. Our technological advances

were, yet once again, as they continue to do,

being used to destroy human life, to depersonalize

others, to dehumanize. He begins the book largely

talking, if you've read it, about a British textbook

that was used in his day. because he was arguing

that the intellectual and the cultural movements

of modernity were a significant part of the problem

of this abolition of man, this dehumanization.

Modernity was dehumanizing. And of course, what

do we say of the origins of modernity? The father

of modern modern modernity philosophy is often

called Descartes. Of course had the famous phrase,

cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. And

of course that was replacing St. Augustine's

famous phrase, crede ut intelligis, believe in

order that you might understand, that you might

know. Which is to say that modernity is sort

of founded on this idea of the supremacy of humanity.

You can move God aside. We are enough. Sin promises

us to be like God, can replace him. But it makes

us less human, subhuman, dehumanizes. Think with

me back to the garden, our original parents and

their first rejection of God. The serpent comes

to them, right? And he promises them to be like

God. will not surely die for God knows that when

you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you

will Be like God And promises us this sort of

godlikeness But makes us less human What are

it what are its effects right initially its effects

are hiding Hovering up that's the most immediate

thing And then quickly, if you know the story,

it's blame shifting. But then just as soon as

they are out of the garden, what happens? If

children were filled with envy, rage, revenge,

and murder, sin is dehumanizing. And then you

may remember this a little bit. At the end of

the chapter four in Genesis, you have Lamech,

Lamech who takes two wives, and then he has this

song where he says, if Cain's revenge was great,

mine will be sevenfold. It will be more complete.

It will be more dehumanizing. Rejection of God

leads not to a God likeness, a subhuman reality.

And if we could go through more stories in the

scriptures, I'll just give you a couple kind

of quick ones. Think with me of the beginning

of the next chapter or the next book in the Bible,

the book of Exodus. Ancient Pharaohs were considered

divine, gods, replacements for the true God.

And what do we find that Pharaoh does with this

so -called divine reality, God -like reality.

He enslaves. We read he murders babies. He hardens

the workload on others. He treats others as though

they are subhuman. God -like thing that is promised

with sin dehumanizes. He enslaves. promotes violence,

dehumanization. If we went a little bit farther

along, one of the things that happens that once

these Israelites are saved out from that, and

they make the long journey, often rejecting God,

and the journey gets longer, and they're finally

brought into the promised land, having followed

Moses and Joshua, they're then there in the promised

land. And the book of Judges, one of the refrains,

the refrain of the book of Judges, tells the

story of them rejecting God and doing their own

thing. Everyone did what was right in his own

eyes. I am the arbiter. But what you find story

after story is the destabilization of the people.

violence again and again, dehumanization again

and again, as they lived into this dynamic that

they're just going to do what is right in their

own eyes. Sin promises godlikeness. I can decide.

I can do. But it makes us subhuman. Think of

the Ten Commandments with me. Historically, you

may know this, the Ten Commandments are kind

of broken down into two tables. oftentimes it's

thought of as the table that is God word and

towards our fellow humans. You can think of,

you know, you shall have no other gods, you shall

not worship idols, you shall not take the Lord's

name in vain, honor the Sabbath, orient your

time as God has instructed and God has oriented

His. All these have to do with our relationship

towards God, right? But then the commandments

that flow from these have to do with our relationships

with others. Honor your father and mother, but

also lying and stealing and adultery and not

coveting and all the rest flow out of this. And

what happens when you actually don't follow the

first ones is that you don't follow the second

ones because rejection of God is the dehumanization

of others. So again, sin promises us to be like

God, but makes us subhuman. And think about this.

The first one that's oriented towards humans,

murder. What does murder do, but make us believe

that we are the ones that decide when life can

happen or not, when somebody can exist or not?

God -like action is dehumanizing. What does adultery

do? What does lust do? What does pornography

do but make others objects? Objects for our use.

Sin dehumanizes. Sin dehumanizes. What does stealing

do but make us the one who decides who has what

possessions? We can be like God. And yet it's

dehumanizes others. What does lying and deceit

and covening and all the rest do but make us

believe that we can control the narrative? We

can decide what others believe or not. A God

-like reality that is dehumanizing. Again and

again and again, again and again, we see this.

Sin promises this idea. You can be like God.

What it does is it makes us less than human,

less than ourselves. Is it any wonder that on

the first holy week, way back when, you know,

there's a lot of events in the gospels, of course,

that take place that we've recounted some this

week together. But in that week, some of the

Pharisees get some of their crew to go up to

Jesus and ask him about paying taxes to Caesar.

And the very coin that they would have shown

had both the visage of Caesar on it, but it also

would have had written on it, Tiberius Caesar,

Augustus, son of the divine, Augustus. to be

claiming to be like God. And it's in that context

where Caesar was the divine, where people would

literally have to offer incense to Caesar and

bow down and say, Caesar's Lord. It was in that

context in the world of the divine Augustus that

the instrument of torture was created. The most

dehumanizing instrument of torture came to be.

Form of torture that hung you for the world to

see as you died. And the cross is where people

hung, often naked, almost always publicly, slowly,

slowly dying. Cross. is where Jesus would go

after a throne, sorry, a crown of thorns was

pressed upon him. It wasn't a real crown. They

knew he was being mocked. They were treating

him as less than worth dignity, a subhuman. You

know that he was instructed to carry his cross

out. to the place of the skull, where all the

crowds were, treating him as subhuman, less than,

dehumanized, across where he would be nailed

to and raised up, for all to mock him, to laugh

at him, to scoff him. It was dehumanizing at

its best. If there's a death that epitomizes

the dehumanizing effects of sin, it's the cross.

Where man is enthroned as God, dehumanization

runs rampant. Because sin promises us a God -like

reality, it is actually a dehumanizing thing.

It makes us sub -human. But here's the wonder.

But in the providence, in the unbelievable thought

of God, that is how Jesus dies for us. The most

dehumanizing death, and that is what he went

to for us. That's where Jesus hangs. That's where

Jesus dies. Because Jesus does not just come

among us as one of us, which we celebrate wonderfully

at Christmas. He does not just come among us

and die some kind of way, but he dies the most

dehumanizing kind of way. He goes to the place

that epitomizes the effects of sin in the world

that he might bear our sin in his body on the

tree. He not only gives up the glory of heaven

to walk among us, but to the go to the place

that epitomizes the effects of sin. Our sin is

where we decide that we must be our own gods,

but it's God Himself who comes among us and dies

for us the very death that shouts the effects

of sin. You want to see the effects of sin, you

look at how we dehumanize others, how we decide

how we are God. And one of the greatest pictures

of this is a cross. And yet, Corey Ten Boon says,

there is no pit so deep that Christ is not deeper

still. If you were to swim off the coast of Italy,

just north of Portofino in the Bay of San Fruttuoso,

if I can say that right. and you were to dive

down 56 feet, you would find a bronze sculpture.

That bronze sculpture was submerged in those

waters on August 29th in 1954, 10 years after

Cory Ten Boom was arrested. And there, if you

drove down there, you would see this large sculpture

of Christ and his hands are reached up. His hands

are reached up like this. And I want you to think

of this, instead of this massive bronze sculpture,

life -size sculpture being installed in this

great church or a great museum, it's their submarine,

right? Below the water, below the surface of

the water, which is to say it's even below the

surface where we exist. In some ways, it's almost

subhuman. It's below our dwelling. And it's a

lovely picture because that is exactly what Jesus

does on the cross. He goes to the place where

we are sort of subhuman, takes our sin upon himself,

which dehumanizes others. And what he's doing

there in our subhuman reality is lifting us up.

As His hands are outstretched, that is exactly

what He is doing. It's going to the low place

that even there He might lift us up out from

our sin. There is no pit so deep. There's no

pit so deep that Christ is not deeper still.

And we see that wonderfully in the deeps off

that seacoast. But we also see it more clearly

and more wonderfully in what we celebrate tonight.

That Jesus goes to a cross for you. He bears

the dehumanizing effects of sin. He bears your

sin upon himself on that tree. Thin promises

us a god -like -ness. Brothers and sisters, it

makes you less human, subhuman. But it's where

the cross at the cross this place of dehumanization

where Christ's arms are outstretched that he

goes to deep place and he lifts us up May pray

for us Lord pray that we would hate our sin I

pray that we would see how it wrecks ourselves

and others And I pray that we would see how it

makes us less than what you intended for us.

That it dehumanizes not only those who we sin

against, but we ourselves. And so God, I pray

that we would throw it at the cross where you

took our sin upon yourself. God, that we would

rest in this reality that you, Christ, Lord Jesus,

you died for us. That though we rejected you

in the garden long ago, that we rejected you

right out of the garden, that we rejected you

time and time and time again. You came for us.

You died for us. There is no depth that you would

not go to. There's no shame that you would not

bear. There is no sin to grave. that you would

not lift us up as your hands were outstretched

on that cross. Just again, the wonder of your

death. Amen. Thank you for listening to Second

City Sermons podcast. We hope this sermon has

encouraged you to worship God and to celebrate

the gospel of Jesus. Please consider subscribing

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bless.