He Will Crush Death

So we've been looking at this sermon series called Promised and Fulfilled.

And what we've been looking at is the way that God has made promises to his people, and that Jesus fulfills those promises for our good, right?

For his glory and for our good.

And this last Sunday of Advent, we're going to look at the promise that God made to his people that he will crush death.

And so as we look at the beginning of this sermon this morning in Genesis 3.15, what we're going to see is that God promises to crush death.

You see, in the beginning, God created mankind to live in life.

Right?

And that might sound like I've kind of made this double term that doesn't make sense, but this is what God did.

He made his image bearers to live in life.

The life of Eden, the beautiful sprawl of plant life that was pleasant to the sight and good for food.

The sounds of rushing waters because a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden of which God had made for mankind.

And planted in the center of Eden was this tree of life whose fruit bore eternal life.

Eden was a garden of splendor and luxuries.

It was a true paradise.

Mankind was immersed in life.

And their joy-filled mission was to work it and to keep it, to cultivate life and to guard against death.

This was the mandate that God had given his image-bearers.

Cultivate the life that I have immersed you in and guard it at all cost against death.

But not only did mankind dwell in life, mankind dwelt with life.

And this was the beauty of Eden, that it wasn't just life because of the surrounding landscape.

That was just an implication of the reality that God Himself communed with his image bearers.

Eden was heaven on earth.

The fullness of life was present in the garden.

Where God is, there is fullness of life, and mankind was given Eden the temple of his presence to call their home.

But this life came with a caution.

It could be forfeited and lost.

Beauty and splendor could be exchanged for crudeness and squalor.

Life could be swallowed up by death.

And God warns mankind of this possibility.

We see in Genesis chapter 2, verse 16 and 17, God's caution and command to his image bearers.

Genesis 2:16

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

You shall surely die.

What could this have meant to people who have only known life?

What kind of weight could these words be able to carry?

It had to mean something.

God's caution, God's warning had to mean something to the people who were listening to it.

Because there is no word that comes out of the mouth of God that falls to the ground dead.

Isaiah declares this truth in Isaiah 55, 11.

He says, So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth.

It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

There had to be weight and gravitas to the words that came out of the mouth of God, and it had to mean something to those who received it.

Often when we hear the caution and the command that God gave to Adam and Eve, we tend to make this quick beeline to physical death, right?

That their hearts would stop beating, that their lungs would stop taking in air, that their brain would stop producing activity.

We make this quick beeline to physical death, but physical death would just be minor symptoms of a greater despair.

For them to die would mean that the fullness of death would replace the fullness of life, that the gates of hell would be flung open and its wretched presence would displace all that was beautiful.

It would mean that all that was very good would come unraveled, that thorn and thistle would overgrown, would overgrow man's home and overwhelm his labor.

The darkness of wickedness would cast an oppressive shadow over the light of righteousness.

Death would dispel life, hell would drive away heaven.

In some sense, we have to realize that physical death would have been merciful.

This exchange of life for death would be exactly what happened.

Mankind would disobey God, and in that they would usher in hell into all creation, and more seriously, they would usher in hell to their own heart.

Genesis 2, 6 says this.

He ate.

In response to their rebellion here in the garden, they they immediately sought to cover themselves and to hide from the presence of God by clothes that they made with their own hands.

But God pursued them in their hiding.

And he began to lavish grace upon them.

And the first way that God lavished grace on his image bearers was in this promise.

This promise that he would restore what had come undone, that he would redeem what had been forfeited, that he would crush death.

As God comes near to Adam and Eve, he sets his face toward the serpent and he makes this declaration to him.

He says that he is going to ruin his work through the work of a son.

He says this in Genesis 3.15.

You see, this is the first time that the gospel is actually ever proclaimed within Scripture, right here in Genesis 3.15, and it's proclaimed from the very mouth of God that there was going to be one coming who would declare war against the serpent and his work, a promise that death will be crushed by a son.

And we see in this very declaration the jealous lover that God is.

God is a jealous lover.

He's jealous after his own people, of which the serpent has tried to take from him.

And he here promises to enact vengeance against him, to get back what had been taken.

Nahim 1 talks about the jealousy of God in his very nature.

Nahim 1 2 says this the Lord is a jealous and avenging God.

The Lord is avenging and wrathful.

The Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies.

Here's what God was declaring: war was coming.

That was a promise.

The serpent had landed an aching blow against mankind.

But God was going to crush him through a son.

God would crush his head, God would fulfill where Adam had failed.

And he would do it through Jesus.

So our main idea this morning is that Jesus came to crush death and its works.

Jesus came to crush death and its works.

In the first epistle of the Apostle John, we have one of the most clear and direct reasons for why Jesus came, why he appeared, why he was sent in the first place.

It should leave us with no speculation or questioning about it as we read this text.

He says in 1 John 3, 8, the second half of it, he says that the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.

As we read that passage, there should be no question as to why did Jesus come?

He came to destroy the works of, he didn't come to just be nice to everybody.

He didn't come just to teach us how to live and love in community with one another.

He didn't come to uh uh make rich all that was poor.

When we look at why Jesus came to earth, he came to destroy the works of the devil.

This is the reason that he came, the reason why he took on human flesh, was born of a virgin, why he inaugurated the kingdom of heaven through his word and work, why he was crucified, buried, and rose again to eternal life.

All of this was to destroy the works of the devil, to crush death.

Now, we may have the propensity to look at this text and see it from the lens or place of a victim.

That's kind of our natural propensity as mankind, is that we tend to look at things like this and we see ourselves as the victim, the one who has been oppressed and bound by external powers against our will.

And now, because of the gospel of Jesus, we have been liberated from our captivity, liberated from our captive.

While this is true in part about the finished work of Jesus, he has crushed the devil, he has liberated his people from underneath the serpent's tyranny.

We have to work to see the text in 1 John in its greater context, in the greater scope of the narrative of Scripture.

You see, last week in our sermon, we read from a passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus teaches us that everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

You see, the slavery is on the responsibility of the one who practices.

It's not that one was uh subdued underneath some external force, but it's within our own internal desire that we participate in its work, that we actually enslave ourselves to it.

We discussed how we've made ourselves willing slaves to sin, just like Adam and Eve.

We have approached a relationship with sin, believing that it would serve us in our ultimate desires.

But like our first parents, we soon discover how wicked of a master it becomes.

The sin we thought would serve us quickly demands that actually we serve it.

And we see a glimpse of this, we we see the reality of this in the passage that we just read from 1 John about the reason that Jesus had come.

It's preceded by 1 John 3, 8, part A.

Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning.

Now, why in the world is John tethering our practice of sin to the very reason that Jesus came in the first place?

Why does he connect our sin with our very existence and identity?

Whoever makes a practice of sinning, he says, is of the devil.

If we go back to the garden and we see this text in the greater narrative of scripture, if we attune ourselves to the words of Jesus that we read from the Gospel of John, we actually discover the answer.

When mankind sinned, they willingly enslaved themselves to sin.

They forfeited their relationship with God and they bound themselves into a relationship with the serpent, a relationship with death and its works.

That's the spring from which their sin, from which the works of the serpent flow from.

You see, we don't sin because some outside power has forced us to.

That's foolishness in our thinking.

We sin because our internal desires have so persuaded us to be identified with the devil for the fulfillment of what we believe is absent in our lives.

That's the lie that Eve believed.

The serpent said, There's something missing.

And if you eat this fruit, you'll have it.

And what did Eve do?

The internal desire so persuaded her that she unhinged herself from a relationship with her maker and bound herself to a relationship with the serpent to be able to actually obtain what she had convinced herself was missing in her life.

And so then she ate the fruit.

The first place that Eve ever sinned, it was not in taking the fruit from its branch and biting into it.

The first place Eve sinned was in her own heart.

In Genesis chapter 2, we read When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

That's where sin entered in.

It was when she was convinced internally that there was something God was holding out from her, something that was missing in her life.

And she chose disobedience in order to obtain it, rather than righteous, obedient trust that God would fulfill her in every single regard.

This actually affirms the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount that sin starts in the heart before it's ever expressed through the hands.

Jesus says, You want to know what adultery is?

It's not sleeping with someone who's not your spouse, it's desiring to sleep with them in your heart.

You want to know what murder is?

It's not striking your hand against your enemy, it's desiring that their life be taken from them.

It's here within the heart, before it's ever expressed through the hands, that sin starts.

And all of it is because we convince ourselves that sin will get us what we truly desire and God is unable to.

The man who murders doesn't believe that God is a vengeful God.

He believes that he has to take it into his own hands.

The man who commits adultery, he doesn't believe that God is able to satisfy him and fulfill him in his very soul.

Every sin is a disbelief in God and what he promises for his people, and it's a belief that the serpent will be able to give it to you.

We've convinced ourselves that enslavement to the serpent is far better than for us to be bound to our Maker.

And how quickly many of us, after Hugh and I, just like Eve, pluck the fruit from the tree and take the bite, man, how many of us discovered what a cruel lie we deceived ourselves with.

So from this point of despair, we're actually able to see the powerful truth of the gospel of Jesus.

You see, Jesus doesn't come to just destroy the devil, he comes to destroy all of his works, including the sin and death that resides in us.

This is the mystery of the gospel.

This is the profoundness of Christ's death and resurrection.

That in Christ's death we encounter our very own, and in his life we inherit his.

Galatians 2.20, the apostle Paul proclaims this gospel mystery.

I have been crucified with Christ.

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

And 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.

When we see the fullness of the work of Christ, the reason he came, it wasn't just to crush the devil, it was to crush the devil in us.

That we are crucified with him, so that in our own death we might inherit the beauty of his life.

To crush death, to abolish its work in us and its effect on all creation.

All of this done by and through Jesus' own substitutionary death, where by grace, by grace, you and I are put to death also.

Not a death that is rooted in the consequence of our sin.

Christ bore the consequence of our sin.

It's a gracious death, a merciful death that permits us and allows us to be raised with him in eternal life.

We can only be raised to life if we first die.

Only in sharing in his death will we also share in his life.

Romans 6, 5.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his also.

Yet many of us we fail to understand and live out the reason that Jesus came at all, right?

We we have this notion of why Jesus came.

He came to teach us all how to be nice and be kind to one another, right?

He made sure that we were very accepting and inclusive and affirming.

This is why Jesus came, right?

He's just this blonde-haired, blue-eyed hippie that spread peace and love to all of mankind.

But but that's not the reason.

Jesus on the cross didn't you know hit some cosmic timeout.

Wait a second, wait a second.

Did I just tell you all to be nice to each other?

I forgot that part, right?

I did, I forgot the part.

Okay, God, get me down off this cross.

I don't have to do this.

We can just be nice to each other.

No, the the crucifixion is the evident reality of what our sin demands.

That it's not enough for some uh uh wise sage to come into the scene and teach us to be kind and nice to one another.

No, God Himself had to have been crucified in our place.

You see, we fail to understand this.

We fail that Jesus came to save us, to save us from us.

We don't live out the truth of the gospel that we have died to our own sin through Jesus and now are alive to his righteousness because of the resurrection that he experienced.

You see, many of us we continue in death claiming to have life.

Many of us we continue in death claiming to have life.

There's many within the church, especially in the American evangelical world where Christianity still has some positive reality to its claim to be a Christian, to be one of faith, you know, God and country.

There's many of us who claim to have life in Jesus, claim to be receivers of his amazing grace, but our lives experience little to no true change and transformation.

Our lives actually continue to reflect the death that we actually profess that we have been saved from.

In saying that we have come to know God, come to know his salvation through Jesus, but not expressing genuine life change and transformation, sincere joy.

Joy-filled obedience to his word, our lives simply prove ourselves to be liars.

And that might sound really uncomfortable for some of you, right?

That I'm standing up here calling you a liar.

If you confess to be a Christian, if you confess to have faith in Jesus, but there's little to almost no true, genuine transformation and change in your life, in a direction toward joy-filled obedience to Christ in his word.

It's not me who is judging you.

I am not calling you the liar.

The scriptures testify to this truth.

The Apostle John, the one who wrote the Gospel of John and the Epistles of John, he declares this in 1 John 2, 3 through 6.

He says, And by this we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments.

Whoever says, I know him, but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected.

By this we may know that we are in him.

Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.

Scripture condemns us in its own testimony that if we confess to be Christians, but we fail to abide in his righteousness, we are liars.

Now, we have to understand something in this, right?

Because all of us are sitting in this room, like, yeah, I've sinned like six times this week or more, or today.

Uh, what does this mean for me?

Right?

Here's what I want us to get through.

The Christian is not perfect, the Christian is being perfected.

The Christian is not perfect, the Christian is being perfected.

And there's a key word in that passage that we just read, which is abide.

And you and I have to work hard to differentiate the difference between act and abiding.

Every Christian will participate in the act of sin, but Christians do not abide in sin.

They don't dwell in it, they don't celebrate it, they don't embrace it as part of their life.

This is true about all of those who are in Christ.

They may act out sin, but they fail and they refuse to abide in it.

This is what the Proverbs actually declare about the righteousness of God, about those who are righteous in Him.

The righteous will fail, but He gets back up because He detests the sin, because He refuses to stay in it.

He does not embrace it as something attractive and lovely to Him.

He is known as righteous, not because He didn't sin, but because his response to sin, that He got up and He kept moving forward toward the cross and greater faith and deeper sanctification in the very image of Jesus.

It is the wicked who fall down and they revel in it.

The wicked fall in sin and they remain there.

This is how we can know if we are in Christ.

When we sin, do we embrace it?

Do we abide as a response to the act?

All of those in Christ will act the sin, but they will not abide in sin.

The life of a Christian, I believe, reflects the sentiment and tenacity of the Puritan John Owen in his work, The Mortification of Sin.

He says this.

And indeed, one of the choicest and most eminent parts of practically spiritual wisdom consists in finding out the subtleties, policies, and depths of any indwelling sin, to set the wisdom of the Spirit against the craft of the old man, to trace this serpent in all of its turnings and windings, to be able to say, at its most secret and to a common frame of heart, imperceptible actings, this is your old way in course.

I know what you aim at.

John Owen was a beast of a theologian, and he understood what sin could do to man, what sin does do to man.

And he refused to live a life that he abided in that old man, in that old flesh of which he had been crucified to.

John Owen was not perfect, but he understood he was being perfected by the power and wisdom of the Spirit.

Now, in hearing all of this, you may ask, but aren't we saved by faith alone and not by our works?

Yes, we are saved by faith alone, but it is a faith that is genuine and sincere.

It is a faith that produces the works of life that we abide in.

How do we know that we have true faith?

It will be by the way that we live our life.

It'll be discovered in the reality that you and I refuse to abide in sin, though we fall to the act of it.

That we press on toward perfection, that we press on toward the conformity to the image of the Son of which we are called to.

You see, Jesus came to destroy that in us.

Some of us, though, we understand the reality of the new life in Christ.

We understand that we are ones being perfected, though we are not perfect.

Yet we understand this concept of sanctification and putting sin to death in our life.

But yet, many of us, we are very preoccupied with the sin in other people's lives.

You see, many of us we focus on the sin in others and neglect destroying our own.

I think this is a sad state of the church.

For a moment, if you would entertain me, how often have you pondered and obsessed and highlighted the sin in other people's lives, then you have your own sin.

I bet if we were to take some type of weighted measurement, we would discover a gross uh uh uh um uh I don't know what this is called.

I didn't write it down.

Unbalance, imbalance, I believe, John Green, thank you very much.

Uh a gross imbalance of the time and energy we spend highlighting, obsessing, being preoccupied with the sin in other people's lives and neglect the sin in our own.

And let me tell you the danger in this.

When we exert this energy, when we lose sight of our own desperate need for putting sin into our own life, this actually might be one of the most successful tactics of the serpent to get a Christian so distracted by the sin in others that we drop our guard to the sin in our own life.

It's right here.

At this moment, we become most vulnerable to sin's ever-crouching posture.

This is what God told uh uh Cain after he slew his brother Abel.

He said, Be careful.

Sin is crouching at the door, and its desire is for when I say sin's ever crouching posture, you think you're gonna catch the devil off guard?

You think you're gonna catch sin off guard?

By no means.

It is ever crouching, waiting to pounce.

It will be us who are caught off guard.

It's here we become our most vulnerable.

And we have to realize Jesus never said anything about not judging other people.

He didn't say that we shouldn't uh exercise judgment in our life against others, that we should never call out the sin in other people's lives.

Some of us misconstrue what Jesus is teaching us.

Actually, the church is supposed to execute judgment in the people uh uh that call themselves Christian.

We're supposed to call out sin.

Here's what Jesus does say, though.

He does say that we should be so immensely more concerned about our own sin that we should not be oblivious or dismissive to it, that we should expel our energy first and foremost on our own sin before we go to call out and judge the sin in others.

But we don't do that.

We we obsess over the sin in other people's lives and we drop our guard and we become vulnerable to the serpent's tactics.

Jesus commands us that we use our energy to destroy the sin in our own life before we point it out in others.

But too many of us are foolishly vulnerable to the attack of the enemy because we're fixated on the sin of others.

To draw from the wisdom of John Owen even more, he said in his book, The Mortification of Sin, be killing sin, or it will be killing you.

That's the reality of the life that we live.

To be killing sin, or it will be killing you.

But church, I want us to know something this morning.

That our ultimate hope is not found in the crushing of our own sin, but it's in the Son who is crushed for us.

That is where our ultimate hope resides.

Jesus was crushed so that death would be crushed for and in us.

Jesus was crushed so that death would be crushed for and in us.

This is the promise of God that was made before Adam and Eve, that is fulfilled in Jesus alone.

And the mystery of the gospel is that Jesus makes war against sin and death, not by taking up arms and going to battle as we understand it and know it.

No, Jesus makes war against sin and death by laying down his own life, by himself dying, by submitting himself to the will of the Father, a will that determined Jesus would be crushed in our place, and it would be that he would be crushed by the Father's own hand.

As Isaiah 53, 5 and 10, the prophet declares, he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

Yet it was the will of the Father of the Lord to crush him.

He has put him to grief.

You see, the summit of our hope is not in our ability to put sin to death in our life, but that all of our sin, all of our guilt, shame, and transgressions have been put on him.

And he was crushed under the weight of them.

He bore them all in his own flesh.

He was pierced through so that we might be healed from the works of death that we have inflicted upon ourselves.

You see, the death of Jesus brings healing to a people, a people who have known the stinging bite of the serpent's fangs.

First Peter 2 24 shows us this truth.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.

By his wounds you have been healed.

Do we see the context of what Peter's saying of that prophecy of Isaiah?

By his wounds you are healed.

It's in direct context to the sin in our life.

How are we healed?

We are healed of sin.

We are healed of its effect in our life.

We are healed of the serpent's bite.

And it's from this gospel truth that we joyfully work to our own death to sin that is realized in his life.

So my hope for us, church, as we enter into this Christmas day is this that we would live death destroying lives.

We would live death destroying lives.

You see, I hope this Christmas you take time to be still and to reflect on the true reason Jesus came.

I pray that it motivates you to see the sin in your own life crushed and destroyed, to truly realize that apart from Jesus, we are not the victims, but we are the villains.

And that in Jesus we become the beloved.

We become those who have died to the works of the serpent, who have the darkness of their hearts dispelled by the radiance of his light.

I pray that this Christmas we are able to remember the proclamation of the angel to Joseph.

She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.