The Substitute Savior

Last week we talked about the resurrection of Lazarus.

That's the part of John that we were in in the kind of middle of John 11.

And what we see in this miracle that Jesus performed in front of Mary and Martha, Lazarus' sisters, and these Jews who were surrounding the family at the time is that the Bible says some of them left believing, right?

They had seen Jesus come onto the place where Lazarus was buried, call him out of the tomb, and they can't help but to walk away from this miracle, believing that Jesus really is the Messiah who had promised to come and redeem his people.

But the text also informs us that there are some of them who actually went to the Pharisees to inform them of what Jesus had done.

Now, we really don't get any clarity on the motivation behind them going to the Pharisees, right?

Maybe some of them were sympathizers with the religious leaders, or maybe some of them felt compelled to share the story of what Jesus has done in hopes that they would start believing also.

We don't know if the people who went to go tell of what Jesus had done were believers themselves, or they were people who remained in their unbelief.

But what we do know is the effect that it had on the Pharisees.

You see, the news of Lazarus raising from the dead by the power of Jesus calling him out of the grave, it caused the Pharisees to be fearful.

And that fear caused them to grasp for control.

And that's what happens with us, right?

Anytime that we're in a situation where we're afraid, the first thing that we want to do, because we feel like everything is getting out of control, is we want to grasp for control.

And usually that fear causes us to grasp for that control by any means necessary, right?

We don't care what happens around us, as long as we're able to establish control in the midst of this situation.

And what did that control look like for the Pharisees in this moment?

Condemn Jesus.

Condemn him to death.

Now, they condemn him by calling what the scripture says, what John says as the council.

They called the council together to determine their plan of action.

Now, the council is referring to the Sanhedrin, right?

The Pharisees, by themselves, they could not take decisive judicial action.

The highest judicial body in the land was the Sanhedrin, which under Roman authority was able to deal with all the internal affairs of the Jewish nation.

So if they were going to do anything with Jesus at all, it would have to be done through this national power.

Now, their fear around Jesus and what he's doing in his public ministry is evident.

And John makes it evident in verse 47 for us.

He says, This what are we to do?

For this man performs many signs.

If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him.

And the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.

Now, as we're walking through this text together this morning, I want those two words to stand out in our minds.

What are they afraid of?

They're afraid that Jesus and his following and his influence with inside culture is gonna jeopardize and cause them to lose their place and their nation.

They seem to be scrambling.

Everything that they hold dear is being jeopardized by Jesus and his public ministry.

They can't deny his power.

They make it evident.

If we allow him to keep doing these signs and miracles, he's gonna create this following after him.

But what they can deny is his power's origin.

And they remain in that disbelief.

They remain denying who Jesus truly is.

Their fear is that his power being displayed will continue to cause people to believe and follow after him, believing that he is the Messiah King who has come to liberate the people of God from underneath their oppressors and restore the kingdom to its glory.

Now, if you're just an everyday Jewish person in this time, when you think of Messiah, you think of a king.

You think of a king who comes to wage war against your oppressor, to liberate you from underneath their rule, and to establish or reestablish the kingdom of Israel to its glory.

That's the mindset you have.

So when you see this man performing these miracles and you're believing that he's the Messiah, your initial response to follow after him is with that view.

The heart of their fear at the council, it's rooted in what these believing masses would cause.

They know that if there's a civil uprising, the Roman power would trample it underfoot to eliminate any threat to the empire.

The Jewish people would risk losing their place of worship in the temple, and ultimately their identity as a nation altogether would be eradicated.

They knew there would be no way for them to face the opposition of the Roman sword and come out victorious on the other side of it.

They're desperately trying to survive here.

And so, in the midst of their proceedings, the high priest Caiaphas, head of the Sanhedrin, he speaks up.

It says in verse 49, but one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, You know nothing at all, nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.

Now, Caiaphas will play a significant role as we continue to walk through the Gospel of John, specifically in the crucifixion of Jesus, because it was at his palace that they dragged Jesus to for this hasty and illegitimate trial.

Caiaphas disrupts their deliberation with what seems to be an outburst.

You know nothing at all.

Or better phrase, in our context, you have no idea what you're talking about.

And then he reveals this kind of philosophically driven plan to kill Jesus and to put an end to the threat that's facing them.

He says, verse 50, nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.

So one man's life to protect and preserve a nation, that seems really rational.

Why would you allow this rogue, vagabond, blasphemer to jeopardize everything that you treasured and find such pride in?

If Jesus is not the Messiah, why would you forfeit everything for him?

And I think that's the question on the table for us this morning.

If Jesus is not the Messiah, why would you forfeit everything for him?

It's better to offer up a scapegoat, they say, a political sacrifice to satisfy the empire's wrath, kill Jesus so that Roman soldiers won't kill us.

Let's offer up a substitute in our place.

Yet here in the recording of the story, John, as he did earlier in the chapter, he enters the story with his own commentary.

And he says in verse 51 and 52 this.

Can we just take in what John is saying here for a moment?

As Caiaphas spoke, God spoke.

As Caiaphas was speaking, God was speaking also.

These weren't just the words of a fearful man who was realizing the fragility of his power.

These were the words of the sovereign God.

Now we have to recognize that these words coming from Caiaphas's mouth have a drastically different meaning than that of God's revelation, but their difference in meaning does not negate their divine providence.

These words would seal Jesus' fate.

You see, for Caiaphas, these words secured alleviation of political tension.

But for God, these words secured his purpose of redemption through the death and resurrection of his son.

Now, let's re-listen to these words as though they are the words of God.

Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.

Do you hear what God says?

He says, this is better.

This is better.

This plan of Jesus' death, this working of redemption through the sacrifice of God the Son is better.

Better than any other outcome, and better than any other means to accomplish it.

This is better.

In this, we see that the death of Jesus wasn't just a tragic outcome at the hands of sinful men.

It was the plan and purpose of God to use the hearts of sinful men to accomplish a glorious, better outcome.

You see, I think we can often look at prophecy as prediction, right?

When we think of prophesy or prophecy, we think of it as prediction, as communicating the end.

Yet we really never put ourselves into the process of understanding the means to accomplish that end.

It's as if we were being shown an end that God had little to no workings in the series of events that accomplished it.

But prophecy isn't prediction, it's revelation.

It's the revealing of an end by the sovereign God determining its assured outcome through the means of his good pleasure.

Let me say that one more time.

Prophecy is the revealing of an end by the sovereign will of God, determining its assured outcome through the means of his good pleasure.

That's what Caiaphas was communicating.

Prophecy is not just about the end, it's a holistic revelation of God who is able to accomplish that end for his glory.

That's what Caiaphas was unknowingly doing at that moment.

God, through Caiaphas, was communicating the end of God's sovereign plan, and he was unleashing any means necessary to accomplish it.

The death of Jesus, it wasn't the plan of Caiaphas, it was the gloriously better, sovereign plan of God.

And what was that gloriously better outcome?

It wasn't to save a nation.

It wasn't to save a geopolitical people group, it was to make a nation.

God was going to make a nation through the blood of his son.

Verse 52.

And not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.

It wasn't just for the Jewish people, it was for every sheep that the Father had given to the Son that was scattered throughout all the world.

He was going to gather them in and make a nation out of them.

Now somehow Jesus gets word of the Sanhedrin's plot to kill him.

And so he travels to a small town called Ephraim with his disciples to kind of lay low for a time.

Ephraim was about 12 miles outside of Jerusalem, the nation's capital.

It was far enough to be safe for a short while, but yet it was close enough for the upcoming feast of Passover that would be held in the nation's capital.

As the Passover was approaching, many people were looking for Jesus at the feast.

Some of them were looking for him, no doubt, because they had believed in him.

They had seen the miracles, they had heard his teachings, and they were looking for the master.

Yet some of them were there because they were sympathizers with the religious leaders.

And the Sanhedrin said that if you see him there and if you apprehend him, that let us know where he's at, that we might come and arrest him.

That's what John 57 says.

Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where he was, he should let them know so that they might arrest him.

But either way, what we see and what we've seen throughout the Gospel of John is Jesus' time had not yet come.

But it was surely coming.

Because the Passover would mark the final days of Jesus' public ministry.

So as we look at this text, here's what I think we need to draw out of it.

And what John was trying to communicate to us as readers today is that Jesus is our substitute savior.

Jesus is our substitute savior.

You see, substitution is at the very heart of the Christian faith.

Substitution is a theme that's woven throughout the Old Testament.

It's in the narratives of the stories of God's people, and it culminates ultimately in the person and work of Jesus.

For Isaac, a ram was providentially placed among the briar to be sacrificed in his place under Abraham, his father's knife.

For Egyptian oppressed Israel, a lamb without blemish was sacrificed so that the destroyer would pass over their firstborn son.

For the nation of Israel, a sacrificial system was given so that they would not have to pay for their own sins in themselves.

And for us in Jesus, God once and for all provides a spotless lamb in the wilderness of our sin to die in our place.

We read about this act of substitution in 2 Corinthians 5, 21.

It says this, for our sake he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Listen to what is being said there.

It was for our sake, it was for our better.

He made God the Father made his son to be our sin.

He made him.

This is the active fulfillment of his sovereign plan of redemption through the sacrifice of his son.

He made him, Jesus, to be sin, who never was acquainted with sin, so that through his substitution in our place we might become God's righteousness.

Do you understand what this is saying?

We couldn't come to God with our righteousness.

We couldn't come to God with our own works.

They would never satisfy.

They would never be able to fully reconcile us back to our Maker, for whom our sin has separated us in fellowship and communion with Him.

We needed His righteousness, perfect righteousness applied to us.

And what was given to Him?

Our sin.

Our sin was laid upon the Son that we might have the righteousness of God laid upon us.

You see, for us to obtain that, God's righteousness, our sin had to be dealt with.

Because truly, if we can look throughout the theme of the scripture, sin is never passed over.

Sin is never swept under the rug.

Sin isn't something that God just kind of turns an eye away from.

He doesn't approach sin and say, let's just put this all behind us now.

I think we can move forward.

God always deals with sin.

And even in the Passover story, it was passed over them because there was the spilt blood of a spotless lamb that covered their doorpost.

God always deals with sin.

It cannot just be dismissed, it must be dealt with.

And so he deals with it in his son.

Jesus.

In his relentless and steadfast love for his people, he lays down his life as a sacrificial lamb in his sheep's place.

You see, in the mind of Caiaphas, the substitution was self-preservation.

We've got to protect what we have.

Jesus is threatening everything that we treasure, everything that we hold so dear to.

The substitution was self-preservation.

We killed Jesus so the Romans don't kill us.

We substitute Jesus for ourselves.

Yet in the mind of God, the substitution was self-sacrificial.

I will kill my son so I don't have to kill you.

You see, God substitutes Jesus for his enemies.

And that's gloriously better.

Yet many of us, if we're honest with ourselves, we're a lot like Caiaphas.

And the counsel that John records for us in this story, the presence of Jesus in our lives, it threatens all that we treasure and find pride in.

We hear the words of Scripture to die to self, to leave our life behind, and to pick up our cross and follow him, to forsake all things that we might gain him.

And honestly, if we're being real with ourselves, it often appears as too great a price to pay, too great a risk to take.

If he's really not the Messiah, is he worth forfeiting everything in our lives for?

Isn't this just an all cosmic gamble?

We see a better option.

And it's in taking whatever means necessary to preserve our stuff in ourselves.

You see, for the council, this expresses itself in the language of place and nation.

Place, the temple where they worshiped, where they studied the Torah, where they had the law, where they made sacrifices for their sin.

Yet this physical place, it's a reflection of their heart.

You see, this place of righteousness was what makes them have right standing before God.

It's what enables them to receive his blessing.

It is how they know they are favored among all the nations.

There's a sense of idolatry discovered in their relationship to the temple.

After all, they would be willing to kill the Son of God to protect it.

And what about nation?

The ethnic people group of Israel and the political power within it.

This, like the temple, was not just some outwardly observable thing.

It was also a matter of the heart.

In this nation, they found the fullness of their identity.

Who they were, and most importantly, who they were not.

You see, to Jewish people, there are only two people groups in this entire world.

There are Jews and there are Gentiles.

That's it.

That's all that matters.

We are the people of God.

We have right standing because of our works of righteousness.

You see, this was the factor that made them distinct from all the surrounding nations.

Yet we aren't much different from them.

I submit this morning that we actually wrestle with these very same realities in the language of self-righteousness and identity.

Many of us were afraid to lose our self-righteousness.

Now that might seem like funny language.

We're afraid to lose our self-righteousness.

But we're terrified.

We're terrified to not have something in our hands that we can put up before God and say, because of this, you accept me and you love me.

Because of what I've done and what I bring to the table.

You see, self-righteousness is understood as anything we believe gives us right standing, blessing, or favor before God, apart from the finished work of Jesus.

One author framed it this way: it is anything of our own doing that works to replace Jesus' done.

It is anything of our own doing that works to replace Jesus' done.

This could be anything in our life.

That we hold up before God and others and declare that it is causes them to love us, causes us to be accepted because of the things that we do or believe or speak or say.

Things like our theology, our denominational connection, our morals or values, our party affiliation or the way that we vote, the music we do or do not listen to, the way we dress, and the list can go so on and on and on and on.

We love having things in our hands that we can look at others and say, We're better than you because we have them.

And God, you must love me and accept me because I do them.

All of these things have the potential to present themselves as self-righteousness in our lives.

They become the things that we treasure for the ways that they make us distinct from the unclean people around us and for the ways that we perceive they earn merit from God.

But this flows from an essential and critical misunderstanding of the gospel.

You see, Jesus' righteousness alone gives us right standing before God.

And all of our works, all of our works are an outflow of repentance, submission, and conformity to his perfect finished work.

We're not adding anything to the gospel.

We're not adding or able to add anything to the finished work of Jesus.

It's not Jesus plus anything.

It is Jesus alone that saves us, and his righteousness gives us right standing before our Father.

We have no work in which we can boast, no work in which we can earn God's acceptance and affection.

We need to declare with Paul, like he did to the church at Philippi in Philippians 3, 8 through 9, he says, Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

It's for his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, trash to be tossed out, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

This should be the cry of every believer in Jesus.

I'm not working, I'm not doing anything in my life to try and give me some type of credit or merit from God.

I'm not trying to give some work before him that obligates him now to accept me and to love me.

I simply rest on the finished and total satisfying work of Jesus alone.

But we love our self-righteous works.

Oh, we love them.

We love everything that separates us from others and that we believe earns God's love.

If we're honest with ourselves, we're terrified to lose them.

And we're terrified because of this.

We fear standing empty-handed before God and others with nothing to plead our case.

Because of this, you should love me.

But the beauty of the gospel is that Jesus loves you in spite of you.

He loves you because he chooses to set his affection on you.

And in that love, in that relentless love for his people, he takes all of your works of self-righteousness and he crucifies them in himself so that he can freely give you by grace through faith his perfect righteousness.

Others of us, though, we're afraid to lose our identity.

Our identity is so funny.

We love to be identified so that we might create these kind of little nations in our lives.

And we'll be identified by anything, right?

Like what we eat.

No one cares that you're vegan.

Literally no one.

And I know you're trying to create a people group and a mini nation by your diet, but no one cares.

But see, our identity is something that we take the most pride in.

That's why we try to be identified with such frivolous things as eating plants.

Who am I?

It's a question we strive so desperately to answer.

It's a question that we can observe all of culture striving to answer in this moment.

Every person is working to define themselves, to set themselves apart from others, to establish their own distinctiveness, to create their own little nation.

Whether you're striving to find it in your progressive ideology and worldview, in your conservative principles, in your gender or sexual preferences, in your ethnicity or your interests, all of these identity pursuits become little nations to us in which we find ourselves and find those like us within.

We want to be identified by them because we believe that it fundamentally gives us value and worth and purpose.

Yet the gospel demands that we are identified with Jesus alone and not with the surrounding or the internal attributes we work to be identified by.

Galatians 2.20 says, For I have been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live, but it's Christ who lives in me.

And the life I now live, I live, uh in the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

Can we hear what Paul is saying?

A Pharisee of the Pharisees, a man who was so identified with his nation that he would persecute the very church of Christ, that he would drag them into prison, that he would stand before the saints of Christ as they were being stoned to death.

He found pride in that.

And he was willing to toss all of it aside.

Why?

Because he realized that that identity meant nothing anymore.

He was willing to be crucified with a crucified Savior, that he might live in his glorious resurrecting power.

I'm going to be identified with that.

Not with the trash I try to be identified with in my life.

You see, Jesus threatens our identity because he calls us to put it to death.

All that we've worked to be identified by, our social class, the neighborhoods we live in, the schools we send our kids to, or the living rooms we do school for kids in.

He calls us to be identified by one thing alone: His death and resurrection.

That's it.

You see, Jesus threatens both our self-righteousness and our identities.

And too often this threat of loss causes us to enter into a protection of our perceived better things.

In the face of Jesus, we step back and we start to tighten our grip.

But the tragedy is this that the things we've tightened our grip around are infinitely lesser than what Jesus has promised for us as his people.

We're white knuckling trash in the presence of all-satisfying treasure.

Because we're scared.

The upside-down reality of the gospel is that Jesus comes in his relentless love for us to take from our grasp, to open up our hands these lesser things, these works, these identities, to place within them an infinitely better hope and future.

Himself.

The true and satisfying righteousness, the perfect and whole identity.

And how does he do that?

What do we put our hope in as his people?

That Jesus dies in our place to make us a holy nation.

Jesus died in our place so that we might become his people, that he might make a holy nation of us.

We were a people with repugnant self-righteousness.

We grasped toward fictitious identities, and this left us in a place of hopeless despair, orphaned and wondering for a place to call home.

But Jesus stood in that place.

He was cast out of the city as one who was orphaned from his people.

He stood in that place on the cross.

And he would take all of our works that we knew fell short of his standard.

We know the sin in our life that falls short of the standard of God.

We know the places that we've lusted after God's daughters and sons.

We know the places where we've cheated and lied.

We know the times that we've used anger against them.

We know those things.

Jesus took all of those things to the cross.

But he also took every single thing that we believed earned something for us with him.

Every single act that we thought was going to gain us some type of right standing before God, that went to the cross with him as well.

And he'd put all of them to death.

Every act of disobedience and every act of stench-filled self-righteousness.

He died where we should be killed under the judgment and wrath of God so that we can live and never die in him.

And in the laying down of his life, he gathers a people unto himself, giving them an identity, a family, a nation to belong to, without any fear of ever being rejected or cast out forever.

I know what that feels like.

Some of you probably know what that feels like.

Where you've been cast out of friend circles, or you've been rejected by people that you love, and you've wondered what is your name?

Where is your place?

How do I have a family or a place to call my own any longer?

We don't have to fear that rejection in Christ.

Because he's established us eternally as a child of God through his finished work.

There is no failure that we could present before our Father and cause him to push us out of his home.

Because when he looks at us, he only sees the perfect finished work of his son, our true and better elder brother, who stands in our place.

This is the heart of John 10.

John 10, 11 and 16.

Let's remind ourselves of this.

I am the good shepherd.

And what does the good shepherd do?

He dies in the place of his sheep.

He lays down his life for them.

And I have other sheep that are not of this fold.

I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.

So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

There will be one king and one people.

There will be one glorious home and one beautiful name by which we will live.

And we fix our eyes on that promise and hope alone.

You see, church, because of Jesus, we can loosen our grip.

We can loosen our grip and in and we can come empty-handed.

Is empty-handed.

Because the Savior who loves you and who laid his life down for you is going to see those empty palms and he's going to fill them with the fullness of himself.

Better.

It's better.

I know that terrifies you, it terrifies me, but it's true.

What I grasp for is so much less than the better he wants for me as his child.

I want you to listen to this exhortation from the apostle Peter as he was writing his epistle, 1 Peter.

He was writing to the dispersia.

These were Jews who had believed in Christ and they had lost everything.

For Christ, they lost their place, their worship, their sacrificial system, their belief of righteousness that gave them good standing with God.

And they lost their nation.

They weren't identified with the nation of Israel any longer.

And the way that they understood it for their whole lives, they were cast out and rejected.

And now they find themselves in this wilderness, this exodus, and they're trying to understand who am I?

Was this worth it?

Is Jesus really the Messiah that forfeiting everything that I have, is it gonna pay out?

And Peter, he writes this but you are a chosen race.

You're a royal priesthood, you're a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of the darkness of your own self-righteousness, of all the ways that you thought that you had right standing amongst culture and amongst your creator.

It called you out of that, into his light.

Once you were not a people, you didn't have an identity, but now you are God's people.

Once you had not received mercy, but now in Christ you have received mercy.

Praise God.