Make Believe: Fact or Fiction? with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Well, I want to welcome you here wherever you're joining us.

If you're here in Helotus, uh, Petrenko, or if you're joining us online, I'm so glad that you're here.

I think it's no accident that you are here.

We're in week two of our make-believe series.

And really, the the heart of what we are doing and presenting in this series is as believers, as followers of Jesus, we're answering the question: is this all just make-believe?

Ever since the Enlightenment, we talked last week, uh, this idea that we no longer need any kind of a religious system, we no longer need a faith community, we no longer need spiritual movements because we are now the enlightened people.

We have science and reason and logic.

We don't need these fairy tales to describe the rotation of the crops.

We don't need fairy tales and mythologies to help us deal with the hardship of life.

We were convinced around the time of the Enlightenment that science will continue to progress, and pretty soon we will have all the answers to all the questions in all of the cosmos.

And of course, as time has progressed, and science certainly has progressed, the more we learn, the more we are aware that we don't actually know.

In fact, we don't even know where to begin.

Interestingly enough, the deeper we delve into the realms of what science has afforded us in our modern age, the more the conclusions we come to beg for something transcendent to substantiate what we are observing.

We don't know how the universe got here, but the more we study the cosmos, the more it is begging us for some kind of an external creator, something outside of space, time, and matter that could get this whole thing going into motion.

We don't understand the origin of life.

And if there were a creator, we would understand that.

And of course, as Christians, we do believe in that creator, and we believe that about 2,000 years ago, that creator stepped out of eternity and into our world and put on human flesh, and that is the story of Jesus.

Now, last week we started with Jesus, and this argument that Jesus as a person can be mythologized and just put in a list of other myths.

And so you can go Zeus, Hercules, Athena, Horus, Jesus.

And just all of them are myths, and we don't have to take any of them seriously.

And so if you missed last week, I would very much encourage you to go to youtube.com slash metachurch and to catch up on that week because the one thing that proper historical analysis does not allow for is the mythologizing of the life of Jesus.

Now we're we try to be super honest here at Meta.

There are some robust arguments against Christianity.

I believe there are more than robust answers to all of those objections, but mythologizing Jesus is not one of those robust arguments.

It's actually a terrible argument.

However, some of the most persuasive arguments are also some of the most terrible arguments.

And so it's highly persuasive.

This week we are going to move on and we're gonna look at the moment that changed history forever.

We're gonna spend our time today on the cross of Christ, the crucifixion that he endured.

This is the moment that we believe is the difference between separation from God eternally and salvation through God eternally.

It is where we look to for our hope.

But many people deny the validity of the cross.

Increasingly, more people even deny the existence of the cross of Jesus.

And so today we're gonna look at the cross and we're gonna ask fact or fiction?

What are we dealing with here?

Is this a fact of history or is it simple fiction?

Now, there are a number of people who do not believe that Jesus actually died on a cross.

And if you have any kind of sense of ancient history, that might sound crazy to you, but it's not crazy.

And there's one specific reason it's not crazy, which is the second largest religion in the world now is Islam.

Uh, it's kind of hard to get exact numbers in some parts of the world, but we think there's somewhere around 1.9 billion people right now who are Muslim.

That is approximately 25% of the population of planet earth.

So this is a big deal.

1.9 billion people.

Here is what their holy book, the Quran, says it says, and for the Christian saying, indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah.

Here's what it says in the Quran.

And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but another man was made to resemble him to them.

Second largest religion, fastest growing religion, although there are credible accounts that right now there are massive numbers of Muslims around the world converting to Christianity.

Regardless of that, 25% of Earth's population, their holy book that they by nature have to hold to, says Jesus was not crucified.

Someone in his posse instead was disguised to look like Jesus, and that's who they crucified.

I want to know how that guy drew that assignment, you know?

Like you picked a short stick on that conversation.

You know, it's like, wait, I'm signing up for what?

This is uh.

There are even more modern historians and scholars who hold to something like this.

Richard Carrier, uh, he says Jesus is a mythical figure who never existed, whose supposed crucifixion is merely another dying and rising God legend.

Even some of the new atheists who can't get away from the historical reality that a man named Jesus of Nazareth, who was a teacher and a healer and did die on a Roman cross, they can't get away from that.

They'll paint narratives like, you know, the cross, assuming it happened, this is just some form of like cosmic child abuse.

God sends his son and then nails him to a cross.

Others who are a little more honest with what Christians actually believe, and that we believe in a triune God, and so Jesus is God Himself and chose to go to the cross willingly for us, they will still say things like, How can you base a spiritual movement off of a creator who would be humiliated and executed by his creation?

Some people are willing to go as far as to say, we can't really know if Jesus ever died on the cross or not.

It happened so long ago.

We really can't know anything about ancient history.

Of course, they say that about Jesus, but they believe in Julius Caesar and they believe in Alexander the Great, and they believe in basic, basically every other ancient historical fact except for the one that is inconvenient to them.

This is part of the symptom of living in the social media generation where it's like, if you don't post it on Instagram, did it really happen?

You know?

And of course, there is an entire discipline of ancient history, and ancient historians have very precise ways that they forensically look at the evidence from the ancient world, and we can have high degrees of certainty about what we're looking at and what actually happened.

And so, did Jesus of Nazareth actually die on the cross?

That's probably the first thing that we need to know.

And if he did die on the cross, then why did he die on the cross?

And if he died on the cross, then we can answer why, then why on the cross?

Why is that how Jesus had to die?

And those are all questions we're gonna investigate together today.

The first is, did Jesus of Nazareth in the first century die by Roman crucifixion?

We do know that Jesus existed.

As a matter of fact, there is exponentially more historical evidence for the life of Jesus of Nazareth than for any other figure in the ancient world, period.

If we cannot say with certainty that Jesus of Nazareth existed in the first century, then we cannot say that anyone in antiquity existed with confidence.

It is so deeply attested.

And so we can go, we have historical documents, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but people will call these biased because they are the Christian scriptures.

And so part of what you want to do is to see what people who are antagonistic to your faith are saying about it.

And one of the greatest antagonists to Christianity today is the New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman.

Bart Ehrman is an atheist who is a New Testament scholar.

He doesn't study the New Testament to build his faith in the faith of others.

Instead, he studies the New Testament to try to destroy the faith entirely.

That is his aim.

Bart Ehrman has to come to the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth really did live and walk the earth because he is an honest historian.

And here's what Bart Ehrman says: He says that Jesus was crucified is as sure as anything else about him.

In other words, this is a fact of history.

And one of the reasons that Ehrman has to come to that conclusion is he's aware that we don't just have first century documents telling the history of Jesus in our scriptures, but we have non-Christian, extra-biblical outside of the Bible references as well, and we have a lot of them.

Like Tacitus, who is a famous Roman historian in the time of Christ, he said, Christus, from whom the name Christians has its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of Pontius Pilate.

During the reign of Tiberius, at the hands of Pontius Pilate.

Not only is he saying this as historical fact, he is framing it in the historical reality of the governmental structure at the time.

Another famous ancient historian is Josephus.

He's kind of unique because ethnically he is Jewish and he was from uh Israel, and yet he ended up working for the Roman Empire, and his expertise was obviously the history of the Jewish people.

He also acknowledged multiple times who Jesus was and that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.

We even have really interesting things.

Like there's a guy named Lucian, and he was a satirist.

And one of the satires he wrote was a satire making fun of Christians.

And in his satire, his main point to talk about how these Christians are just such idiots is he makes the point very clearly that they worship a guy who was crucified.

He set out 2,000 years ago to mock our faith, not knowing that he was actually giving us ancient evidence for the very central point of our faith.

The reality of Jesus dying by Roman crucifixion, uh, really, historically, if you're going to handle the evidence honestly, it cannot be denied.

There's more evidence that Jesus died on a Roman cross than that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon or that Alexander the Great ever existed.

His crucifixion is one of the most well-attested events in ancient history.

It's confirmed by multiple independent sources, both Christian and non-Christian alike.

So Christian historians and non-Christian skeptics, they both agree that this happened.

Jesus of Nazareth was alive.

So the next question is like, why did this happen?

And I think a lot of people have this view of scripture that God is kind of trying to put a plan together.

And of course, we mess like everything up.

And so when one plan fails, God's kind of like scratching his head and is like, all right, okay, well, here we'll try something else.

You know, I give you a real nice garden, and then you kind of screw the garden up.

And so we'll go outside the garden, but I'll give you some rules.

You mess that up, so I gotta send a flood.

And it's like, okay, I did the flood, so now you're definitely gonna behave.

Oh my gosh, there's a tower, like, like one thing after another.

And so eventually, uh, does anybody remember uh you know Marvel has like their post-credit scenes, and there was the one where after the first Avengers and and Thanos had sent the legions to New York.

Why do I feel like everyone's lost?

Okay.

And then, you know, the Avengers assembled.

That was Avengers won, right?

And they assembled, they defeated them, and then if you're a nerd like me, right?

You stay until all of the credits have rolled because there's a five-second scene that you can't miss, right?

And so at the very, very end of all of that, Thanos walks into the scene, puts on the infinity gauntlet.

This is not in my script, by the way.

I'm ad-living right now.

I've just lost everyone.

He puts on the infinity gauntlet.

And does anyone remember what he says?

The oh my gosh.

I don't know what you win, but you win something.

He puts his hand in.

I felt so alone.

He puts his hand in, and the only line he says is, I guess I'll do it myself.

You know?

This is this is the picture so many people have of like, God tried all of these things and we screwed all of them up, and so then he was like, I guess I'll do it myself, you know?

I'll go down, I'll I'll put on, you know, a human suit and I'll walk around.

I guess I gotta die for these idiots.

You know, like nothing else works.

So and what's important, it's hard because we're humans, and it's like almost impossible for us to see a plan from like point A to point B to point C.

So we project that onto God, but but that's not what scripture reveals to us.

And so, like, if you go to the end of the Bible, the book of Revelation, which is written by John, who might be Jesus' dearest friend during his time on earth, and John is exiled on the island of Patmos because, like all of the apostles, they were trying to kill him, and the other apostles they successfully martyred for their faith, and they just could not kill John.

So history tells us they tried all these things to kill him.

Um, they tried to boil him alive.

And John was like, I love a jacuzzi.

This is actually great for me.

And they were so frustrated, they were like, We're just gonna throw him on this island and he'll just die out there, you know, and be fine.

So they put him on Patmos, and and Jesus, his friend, his savior in God, Jesus, shows up and gives him the revelation.

And it's so interesting because one of the things is as as John is in this vision, he sees Jesus, and you know what it says?

It says, Behold the Lamb of God.

Remember, that's John chapter 1 in his gospel, now we're in Revelation.

John 1 · chapter mention

He said in John 1, the gospel, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world in Revelation, just in case you think like God just keep messing these plants up, and then finally, like Jesus, like, I gotta go.

Behold the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world.

This was the plan before the garden, before the flood, before the tower, uh the tower, before the nation of Israel.

The cross was always the plan.

And it's so beautiful because we have the scriptures, and they were inspired for us and preserved for us and protected for us, and it and it's a very interesting collection of documents.

We split it into two sections: the Old Testament, which is the Jewish scriptures, like even today, Orthodox Jewish people actually do not like that we have taken our New Testament scriptures and like bound them together with their scriptures.

They're actually quite offended by that.

They are the Jewish scriptures, and then we have the New Testament documents, those were written like more than 400 years after the Old Testament, inspired by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead to help start the movement and inspire the movement and form us into the image of Jesus.

So these are like two sections, the Jewish scriptures and the Christian scriptures, and they seemingly have almost nothing to do with each other, except that God is speaking across them to each other and through each other in like innumerable ways.

And so in the Old Testament, there are over 400 prophecies about Jesus.

And Jesus shows up and fulfills those prophecies.

I've shared this before.

Years ago, there's a group of like top mathematicians, and they were trying to answer the question what is the probability of one person, Jesus, coming hundreds, even thousands of years after these prophecies, and fulfilling them.

And they were gonna try to figure out like all 400 of the prophecies, and it's just literally a number that they couldn't work with.

So they they scaled it down and down and down, and they went, okay, what if one guy centuries and centuries later came and fulfilled eight prophecies?

Eight of these specific prophecies.

And these mathematicians came up with a probability that was somewhere in the quadrillions, one in some odd quadrillion.

I didn't know that was a number, right?

Like that's that's a number we can't understand.

And Jesus didn't fulfill eight prophecies, he fulfilled all of them.

I want to show you just a couple today to help you understand that this is a plan that God was enacting to not only redeem and rescue humanity, but to demonstrate his love to humanity.

And this plan was in place from the jump.

I'm gonna go to one of the Psalms of King David.

This was more than a thousand years before the crucifixion of Jesus.

Over a thousand years prior to this.

In Psalm chapter 22, verse 1, it opens like this.

Psalms 22:1

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

I grew up in church, and you might know this.

When Jesus was on the cross, we have seven recorded sayings.

He said seven different things recorded across the gospels.

And all of them are great.

You know, the the final one, Father, and two your hands, I commit my spear, that's really beautiful and touching.

Growing up, hearing this one, this is one of the sayings of Jesus on the cross.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

It never sat right with me.

Like God forsook Jesus during his time of greatest need.

What does that mean?

And what does it mean for me?

What does it mean for I didn't get it, it didn't feel good, it didn't feel right.

It doesn't mean it's not right.

I'm just telling you how I felt growing up.

And then finally, when I started studying scripture, I began to realize what was happening.

And so this is Psalm 22.

This is the Jewish Psalter, it's a book of poems.

In Jesus' time, they weren't necessarily numbered, you know.

Open up to Psalm 22, that's what we call it today.

But it was uh a part of their religious practice.

And what would happen is there would be someone who would lead in a reading of the Torah, and typically they would go through one of the psalms, and they didn't have the words projected on screens, right?

It was like everyone memorized the Psalms.

That's what you did.

And that's the beautiful thing about them being poetry and being able to sing them because you can memorize songs.

Like, okay, you can't memorize anything, but you can still sing every word from Country Grammar by Nelly in the year 2000, right?

It's like, how can you do that?

It's because there's something about music and there's something about poems and songs, and so everyone memorized the psalms.

And and whoever was leading, they would get in front of the people, and the way they would introduce the psalm was with the first line.

And so if you're doing Psalm 23, the person would stand in front of the congregation and they would say, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

And then everyone would repeat that the whole psalm.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He leads me beside still waters.

They'd go through the whole thing.

And so Jesus on the cross is lifted up above the congregation, and he calls out for Psalm 22.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And every Jewish person there in the audience, which was almost everybody, understood what that meant.

I want to read you just some of Psalm 22.

Starting in verse 14, it says, I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed, my heart is like wax melting within me.

My strength is dried up like baked clay, my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

You put me into the dust of death.

For dogs have surrounded me, a gang of evildoers has closed in on me.

Pay attention.

They have pierced my hands, they have pierced my feet.

This is a thousand plus years before Jesus is crucified, and maybe more astonishing, this is more than five hundred years before the Romans invent crucifixion as a form of execution.

They have pierced my hands, they have pierced my feet.

I can count all my bones.

People look and stare at me.

They divided my garments among themselves, and they cast lots for my clothing.

Do you remember in Luke's gospel?

That is literally.

What's happening?

Jesus lifted up above the congregation, people at his feet, casting lots for his garments, and he cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

He is calling his people back to a prophecy a thousand years in the making.

When we have this view that God tried this with Adam and it didn't work, and he tried it with Moses and it didn't work, and he tried it with King David and it didn't work.

We have this picture that once again Jesus comes and it doesn't really work.

And so he has to end up at the cross, and we see the cross as a detour because who would put themselves on the cross?

And then you look at the prophecy of Scripture a thousand years earlier, and it starts to dawn on you that the cross was not a detour, the cross was always the destination.

And it changes how you view the life of Jesus and why he came and what he did on your behalf.

Isaiah was a prophet 700 years before the life of Christ.

The latter half of his book in the Old Testament is often called the fifth gospel.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in Isaiah because he spells out so clearly why Jesus came and what he accomplished.

In Isaiah 53, it says, He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was.

He was like someone people turned away from.

He was despised and we didn't value him.

Yet he himself bore our sickness and he carried our pains, but we in turn regarded him stricken, struck down by God and afflicted.

If you want to know why Jesus went to the cross, Isaiah is going to tell you, 700 years before it happens, he was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquity.

Punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds.

Why did he have to go through that?

Because we all went astray like sheep.

We all have turned to our own way.

And the Lord has punished him for the iniquity of us all.

The cross happened, it's a fact of history.

We see why it happened.

In one sense, it happened because it was always the plan.

Jesus was the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and that Lamb was chosen to be slain before the foundation of the world.

And Isaiah further clarifies why it had to happen.

Because we, like sheep, have gone astray.

We've gone our own way, we've tried to live as our own gods.

In Romans chapter 5, it says in verse 8, God proves his own love for us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

We're in rebellion, and our rebellion cost him his life.

We are full of sin and iniquity, and because of our iniquity, Jesus was crushed.

God desired for his children to live with eternal peace, and our peace cost him his punishment.

Here's what it says in verse 18.

So then, as through one trespass there is condemnation for everyone, so also through one righteous act there is justification leading to life for everyone.

I mean, the story's there from the beginning, God creates humanity.

And he says, You have to obey.

And if you obey, you will have life and life abundantly.

And if you disobey, then death will creep into this world.

And it didn't take long before we went astray.

We chose ourself, and death came.

And the wages of our sin is death, and all of us have sinned.

We've all fallen short of God's glorious standard.

And that does mean physical death of our mortal bodies, yes.

But when scripture speaks of death, it is speaking way more than just your body becoming deceased someday.

It's talking about eternal separation from God and all that is good.

And the plan that was here from the foundation of the world was to come to save you from that death.

And that's what Jesus did.

And so we understand that, and we understand it theologically, that our sin has brought death, and we have no way to remedy that.

And so God came in the person of Jesus and died in our place.

Whatever you think about that, whatever you believe about that today, that is the story of Scripture, and it's there from the first page of Genesis to the last page of Revelation.

But I think there is still one question.

Did it happen?

Yes, it did.

Why did it happen?

It happened because it was the plan from the beginning to save us from death, to bring us back into relationship with God.

There's one more question.

Jesus had to die, but why did Jesus have to die how he died?

Why the cross?

In the early 2000s, Mel Gibson put out the Passion of the Christ.

And I don't know, okay, I've prayed about this.

I don't, I don't have any conviction around it, so I'm just gonna say it.

If you've seen any movie about the life of Jesus that came out before the Passion of the Christ, it was terrible.

Am I wrong?

So bad.

Cheesy, you know, and it's probably not their fault.

They did the best with like the budgets they had and you know the technology they had.

But the Jesus movies prior to that one were so bad you would almost feel like it was a disservice because it just was like fodder for people to ridicule Christianity.

And then the Passion of the Christ came out, and it was not cheesy, it was deeply intense.

You know, I was a young man when it came out, I saw it in theaters, and it was the clearest and most graphic depiction of what Jesus actually went through that anyone had seen.

And I remember it was the first time in my life that I was so heartbroken that I became physically ill.

I didn't even know that was possible.

And so maybe you saw the Passion of the Christ, and here's my guess.

Uh my guess is you don't watch it all that frequently.

There's some movies I can watch like every six months, you know.

That one's so tough.

It's so heavy.

Like, odds are you watched it once in 2002 and you haven't seen it again, or maybe you've seen it one more time.

Here's my guess across our venues online right now that there's no one who watches The Passion of the Christ once a week, every week.

If you do, I've got questions.

You know, like that's that's a lot.

Maybe you've watched it a few times since it came out.

And I as I was prepping for my message today, it just struck me how different that was from the people who lived in the time of Christ.

Where a crucifixion wasn't something that you had to rent a movie for, it was something you experienced as a fact of life.

The Roman Empire had taken over the world and they had dominated, and at the time of Jesus, they were trying to like lead peace through strength, packs romana as much as they could, but there were times in their history where they would crucify people by the hundreds.

Outside the city limits, there might be a hundred crucifixes set up with a hundred people dying on them.

And we're just so far removed from it, and we don't quite understand what it means.

Jesus died in the most brutal way imaginable, and you can't actually understand what he did for you, and you can't fully understand his love for you if you don't understand that.

Jesus died, and what's so interesting is the people just wanted him crucified.

They wanted him dead.

So the angry mob demanded crucifixion, but Pilate did not want to kill Jesus.

He didn't feel like he had grounds to.

So I'm going to sentence him to the most brutal punishment available that is not execution.

40 minus one lashes.

Now, it was known that 40 lashes could potentially kill a man, and so they would do 40 minus one.

You even see some of the apostles get 40 minus one lashes in the book of Acts, but they would be lashes with a standard whip.

A standard whip typically had three leather straps that came off the end of it.

It would welt and bruise your body up.

It might even cut the skin at times.

But Pilate knows he has to give the people what they want.

He orders them to 40 minus one, not with a standard whip, but with what's called a cat of nine tails.

It doesn't have three leather straps, it has nine.

And what actually makes it unique is at the end of each of these straps, embedded in the leather, are things like shards of bone or metal.

Which means every time those nine whips hit your body, the bone and metal dig into your skin, and every time the whip is removed, it removes chunks of flesh.

Thirty-nine times he was beaten with nine whips.

That's 351 lashes.

Scripture says that after that beating, which by the way, remember, was supposed to be the act that spared him the cross.

After that, he was unrecognizable as a man.

Some translations say as a human, which means he was disfigured to the point that you couldn't really recognize him.

Others say he was unrecognizable as a man.

Before you were beaten, you'd be stripped naked.

And many people would be so genitally mutilated by the time they were done with this punishment that you could no longer tell their gender.

Pilate thought he would appease the crowd and he was wrong.

And as they draped him in a robe and put a crown of thorns on him and presented him, the people cried out, crucify him.

And Pilate felt he had no options.

He washed his hands of it and he released Jesus.

They put the horizontal beam of the crucifix on his back, somewhere around 75 pounds.

He carried it as far as he could, and he got help.

When he finally made it to the place of his execution, the first thing they would do is they would drive nails through your wrist.

This would hit your median nerve, which would shoot unbelievable pain through your body.

It would basically cripple your arms, making them useless.

Before they pinned his feet to the cross, nailing his feet, they would slightly bend their knees.

And what this would do is when they would bring up the cross, it would put your shoulders and hands higher than your neck, be cutting off oxygen to your brain, make it impossible to breathe.

And in order to get a breath, as your lungs collapse and begin to fill with fluid, you would have to push up to get your head above your shoulders.

And of course, they did not sand these crosses down.

They were as rugged as they could get them, in order that every time you had to try to breathe, you had to go through the pain of the splinters entering your already opened wounds.

And then you would die, and the cause of death varied: heart failure, asphyxiation.

Your lungs would fill fluid, so many people would die by drowning in open air.

Some would just die from shock, losing so much blood.

And he had to die because that was always the plan.

And he had to die to exchange his life for ours.

But man, there's one question remaining.

And the question is something like why did he have to die like this?

The Romans were experts at execution.

And the crucifix was their crowning achievement.

It was the slowest, the most painful, the cruelest way that you could take somebody's life.

He had to die.

But why?

Why did he have to die like this?

Let me remind you what Romans 5.8 says.

But God proves.

Just to level the playing field.

God doesn't have to prove anything to us.

He's God.

We're not.

But his love for you is so immense and so radiant.

So deep.

God proves his love for us.

That while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

It isn't just that he died for us that proves and demonstrates his love.

It is also how he died for us.

The enemies of God are very crafty, and you need to know that, especially if you've never put your faith in Jesus.

And one of the things that Satan will leverage, the devil will leverage, is your guilt.

And it's such a paradox because our guilt that we have no way of dealing with, our guilt is the one thing that should drive us to the cross.

Because of our guilt, we should throw ourselves at the mercy of Jesus.

But Satan will pervert even your guilt.

And I've heard so many people who will say, I'm sure Jesus came and died for most people.

I'm just not most people.

You don't know who I've hurt.

You don't know what I've done.

You don't know the pain I've caused.

You can't read my mind.

You don't know my thoughts, the murderous thoughts that I have had.

You don't know the depths of my perversion.

You don't know what I did to my first wife.

You don't know how I've abandoned my own children.

You have no idea what I have done.

And so, sure, Jesus loves the world and died for the world, but there's no way he died for me.

And so why?

Why did he go through what he went through?

He had to die.

The penalty of our sin is death, and he came to save us from death.

He had to die, but why like this?

Why was he beaten first unnecessarily?

I want to suggest to anyone whose guilt has kept them away from Christ, that Jesus suffered at the deepest possible level to leave you without excuse for the sins that you have committed at the deepest possible level.

To leave you with an understanding that however extreme your sin has been, Jesus' suffering was deeper than your sin.

He came so every time we try and buy the lie that God would not want anything to do with us, we would get our eyes off of ourself, off of our sins, and get our eyes onto the cross.

And when you see, when you see and you slow down and you understand what Jesus went through, to say that he cannot save you is to say that what he did was not enough.

I have sinned at the level that was available to me.

And when I see the cross, I see a grace and a salvation through suffering that's deeper than my sin.

It's true for me.

And it is true for you.

And God did not sit at a distance and demand that you try to deal with your sin and make your way to him.

He not only came to us, but he suffered in a way to leave you without excuse.

God proved his love for you.

And that at the depths of your sin, Jesus went through hell so you would not have to.

As we close, would you pray with me right where you're at?

Just bow your head and close your eyes.

Create a little bit of space for reflection.

If you're here and you are already a believer in Jesus, I want to encourage you that the cross of Jesus is not just a moment in time, it's not just an insurance policy keeping you out of hell, allowing you into eternity.

That the cross is a way of life.

You know, one of the ways that we keep the cross in view, get our eyes off of ourselves and onto Jesus and the work that he accomplished is by doing what Jesus said.

If you want to follow him, you will take up your own cross.

Instead of using who you are and what you have to try and run from the pain in your life, you will embrace the pain and suffering of this world.

You will use your life to reach those around you.

And you'll do it because that's what Jesus did for us, and you'll do it because there is no greater depth of intimacy with Jesus than when he meets us in our suffering.

If you're here at one of our venues watching with us online, and you've never had a moment in time where you've put your faith in Jesus, today we went through brutal explanation of why Jesus came and what he did, and he did it for you.

Not you in general, everyone who's here at our venues, you specifically.

He sees you, he understands your sin, and he gave his life for you to save you from it.

Jesus did not come offering religion for you to jump through a bunch of hoops.

He did all of the work.

Jesus said God loved the world so much, he sent his son Jesus into the world, so that everyone who simply believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

I'm not here to play games today.

The content we've gone through, it's too significant.

If you do not have a relationship with Jesus, I am encouraging and inviting you to put your faith in him today.

And so, with everyone's eyes closed, across our venues, if you are ready today to say, I'm ready to put my faith in Jesus, I want to ask you right where you're sitting to just lift your hand.

By raising your hand, this is a symbolic act.

You are saying, Today, I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

Amen.

Amen.

For those who raise a hand, Jesus sees and accepts your faith.

He forgives all of your sins, all of them, past, present, and future, covered by his sacrifice.

You have been adopted into the family of God, and because of that, you have eternal life with him, a gift that no one and nothing can ever take away from you.

And here's what I want to do.

For those who raised a hand, I want to help you acknowledge this moment very simply through a prayer.

I'm gonna ask you to repeat this with me.

I'm gonna ask all the believers across our venues to pray this as well.

Let's pray like this: Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast, you can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.