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Sermon: Reconciliation (Part Two): Christ's Work
Reconciling All Things
#1344A
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 03-Oct-16; 77 minutes
summary: Christ's work "squares" us—that is, justifies us - before God. Through one man (Adam), mankind was condemned, but through Christ (the second Adam) we are justified and reconciled. After reconciliation, there can finally be a meeting of minds as we are fashioned into a new creation, invited to sit in heavenly places. As a work in progress, created for good works, we will ultimately be just like Him. If we faithfully use His Holy Spirit, we will be part of the first-born, qualified to receive our inheritance of eternal life in the family of God. Christ's work at Calvary reconciled us to God, setting in motion a process which will eventually bring the entire creation into reconciliation with God the Father. Currently, the entire creation groans in agony awaiting the liberation from corruption. The Feast of Trumpets anticipates the return of Jesus Christ to this earth, having resurrected the dead saints and receiving the living saints at His coming, a day which harkens back to the time when the Law was originally given to the Israelites, a time when Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, when trumpets resounded, and the people were terrified, shocked to learn how powerful their God really was. The events preceding Christ's return will be exceedingly terrifying to those who oppose Him, but welcome to the displaced remnant who will finally be allowed to return to their homeland. God will then pour out His spirit upon them, rendering their hearts pliable, submissive, and deeply repentant for their transgressions.
transcript:
Most of us are not accountants, not by any stretch of the imagination, or even maybe bookkeepers. Probably some of us have had to keep a book a time or two. But I would guess that a great majority of adults just about anywhere here in the United States own a checkbook. Checks used to be far more important than they are today with all the electronic banking and Internet stuff that we are able to do. I mean, even the church has the facility to be able to take your money from you. No, you are giving it. It is free, voluntary offerings but we can do it electronically over the Internet. I can remember when Beth and I would go through a book of checks in about a month. What do you have, 25 checks in a book and you had to write all your bills on checks. You could not do it over the Internet or whatever. So you would go through checks pretty easily once you add up all those things you have to do during a month. But now a book of checks will last us 3-4 months, five months, six months. We only have a couple of checks to write every month. And some of those, if we wanted to, we could stop writing checks and go ahead and do it online somehow. But we have decided not to. Now, one of the things that used to be taught to people when they first got a checkbook was how to reconcile the checkbook. It is also called balancing a checkbook, where you take what you have written down in your little ledger and you compare it to the statement that the bank sends you at the end of the month, and you would look and try to match one entry of yours with one entry of theirs. And if you came to the end of the line of things that you put in, their transactions and everything was ok, you got the same figure as they got, well, your checkbook was balanced. You had reconciled it. On the other hand, if there was something wrong, you had to go through line by line and check to see which one you had missed. And normally it was something that you had missed. The banker seemed to be pretty good at recording credits and debits and they were able to make it all right. And then, once you found the error, usually bad memory or sloppy bookkeeping, then you were able to reconcile it to the bank statement. This usage of reconcile is defined in a dictionary as to make one account consistent with another. And the word consistent there is what we are interested in for the moment because it is a synonym of balance, harmonize, or even the word square. You square things with your buddies so that one does not buy all the beer and you just drink it. You have to square accounts every once in a while and give him a little money for what he has offered to the common pile there. In other words, two things are brought into agreement, they are harmonized, they are squared, they are balanced, they are consistent with one another. What you could say is the two accounts (going back to the analogy of the checkbook), reached the same conclusion at the end of the month. Once you get down to the end of the month there, and you have gone through all the transactions, both figures say 15 cents or something, depending on the amount of money you have in your bank account. So they are alike. They are so consistent that they are alike. Now, this is very similar to the type of reconciliation we see in the Bible between God and man. When you compare the two (let us go back to the checkbook analogy) and put God in one column and put you in another, or we could put all mankind in that one other column if we wanted to, we still do not come up to His level, and we check all the things off. Faith, love, hope. We check off all the good things. And when we look on the other side of the ledger where man is, well, there is very little faith, very little love, very little hope, and a lot of red marks there. Things like idolatry, taking God's name in vain, Sabbath breaking, dishonoring parents, murder, adultery, stealing, false witness, deception, coveting, and you name it. We can go on and on. Paul makes all kinds of lists of bad things that people do. And there must be some reconciliation between these two if we are going to reach the bottom of the ledger and have them balance, be consistent, be equal, be in agreement, to harmonize, to be reconciled. But we are human beings. All of our combined sins make an atrocious error. That is what they are. All these things, all these errors and inconsistency are man's sins, and stacked up against God's holiness and righteousness there is no agreement, there is no meeting of the minds, there is no consistency, there is no balance, they are not square, these two ledgers. All of the human errors, all the sins in that one line of the ledger, the one column of the ledger, have to be corrected somehow so that the accounts will balance in the end. And this, of course, is the work of Jesus Christ. Because he places Himself in that other column and covers all of those sins. If you would, please turn to Romans the fifth chapter. Romans 5 has a section that is what we call the classic Pauline explanation of this process of reconciliation. We are going to be reading between verses 6 and 11 and then we will jump down to verses 18 through 21. I will just go ahead and read this entire passage so that we can get Paul's flow of thought here and he lays out Christ's work of reconciliation very plainly here. Romans 5:6-11 For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation. Romans 5:18-21 Therefore, as through one man's offense [he is talking about Adam here] judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man's righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one man's obedience many will be made righteous. Moreover the law entered that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Like I said, that is the classic explanation of reconciliation as Paul understood it. So what we have here, I think it is pretty clear. By an act of grace and self-sacrifice on the part of Jesus Christ, He died for us while we were still full of sin, fully unworthy of any kind of help like this, and unable to do anything. And I mean, anything for ourselves to balance the books, to make reconciliation. With all the sin that we have, what could we do to make things right with God? There is no amount of money you could give, no amount of works you could do. So the only thing that we could actually do if that were part of it would be to die. And we would just be able to die for our own sins and there would be no possibility whatsoever of any kind of life after death because our life would pay for our sins and that would be it. We would have nothing more for added life. And that is why it says here that we are saved by His life because He was resurrected after giving the great sacrifice that He gave, justifying and reconciling us. So now, because He has life, we have the hope of eternal life through the resurrection from the dead. But you see everything is from His side, God's side. He provided the grace, He provided the sacrifice. Therefore, He provided the justification, He provided the reconciliation, and of course, He provides the life on the other end of it. So we can see how much we have been given. And Paul is very clear here that all of this is through grace, we do not deserve a bit of it because, remember, those entries in our side of the ledger are all red. They are all bad. But God in His love for us gave us grace, and Jesus Christ in willing co-operation, sacrificed His life so that we can have both justification and reconciliation with God. When God calls us out of this world, taps us on the shoulder, gives us an understanding of His truth, and gives us a little bit of faith, allows His Spirit to work with us, and then we accept His invitation to salvation and to eternal life, the blood of Christ not only justifies us—and that means it makes us upright before God by paying the penalty of our sins, so He has wiped those sins away, paid the penalty for them, and stands in our place—but He also reconciles us to God. The two are slightly different. Justification clears the books, paying the penalty for our sins. Reconciliation, on the other hand, happens because now that we are righteous, meaning our sins have been wiped away and we are pure as snow because His own righteousness stands in for us, we are now able to be placed in a harmonious relationship with Him. Because He cannot have a relationship with us when we are full of sin, when we are dark and dirty with corruption. But once our sins are wiped away, and Jesus' righteousness stands in for us, then there can be a meeting of the minds, then there can be harmony, then there can be a relationship where there is sharing of what needs to be shared in a friendship, in a relationship. Let us go to II Corinthians 5 and we will see another few little aspects of this. Actually, we are going to be reading three longer passages from three different books. We will start here in II Corinthians 5 and we will read verses 17 through 21, and then we will go to Ephesians, and then to Colossians. But we will read these in order because these say essentially the same thing. They come at it from maybe a different angle, but they will, I think, help us to understand what is going on here. II Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new. When this happens to us, when God calls us and brings us into His Family, the old is gone. But we start life afresh. We are babes in Christ and we can then begin to grow and mature into a God being, ultimately. But this starts the process and all that other stuff has passed away. II Corinthians 5:18-19 Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation [It is a service here. It is a responsibility, a duty of reconciliation.], that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. So there is a message of reconciliation that needs to go out, he says, and it has been committed to us, to the church, specifically to the ministry, but we each have a part to play in this. So he says, II Corinthians 5:20-21 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. This helps us to understand the transaction a little bit more. And it is all very clear, I think, from what has been explained so far. Christ gave Himself for us, justifying us. He became sin for us. And so that covered our sins and then we were able to be reconciled to God because now the righteousness of Jesus Christ covers us as we come before Him. Let us go to Ephesians 2 and see a little bit more of this same sort of thing, just written from a little bit different perspective. Ephesians 2:4-10 But God, who is rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. So this takes things maybe a little bit further than what Paul said in II Corinthians 5. But here we have another classic section on grace and what has been done for us and the fact that this justification is through faith and God has given us all these gifts from by Himself, out of His love for us. But he also says that there is something beyond just this, as Paul also mentioned in II Corinthians 5. There is more to God's grace and justification and reconciliation than just this initial act that He does on our behalf. He is thinking quite a long-term process here until we get here where he says here, "in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace." He is looking long term to all the way to the end, not just the creation of us as a babe in Christ, but all the way to the formation of you as a son or daughter of God in His Kingdom. So right now, we are in kind of an intermediary position. It says here we have been raised up to sit in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That means we have now a spiritual relationship with Him. One day it will be more than spiritual. It will be an actual sitting in the heavenly places, where we will be spirit-bodied, we will be just like Him, as I John 3:2 says. But we are in that intermediary stage between our calling and being a babe in Christ and being like God Himself. And then, of course, Paul mentions here in verse 10, the works that He has prepared for us to do. That is also part of the same process. Of course, we are getting into now not just the idea of justification and reconciliation, but sanctification where He has given us works to do so that we can mature to that place where we will be ready to be part of His spiritual Family in fact, in totality (let me put it that way, that would be better). Let us go on to Colossians 2. Colossians 2:11-14 In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. Now, I do not necessarily need to go through the explanation of all this. I think it is pretty clear what has happened here. That He did not nail the law to the cross. It is very clear what He nailed to the cross is our sins and the penalty for them has been paid. The handwriting or the writ of accusation, and actually of our guilt, has been nailed to the cross and it has been bled all over, if you will, the price has been paid. So now we can be, as he says here, raised with Him through faith in the working of God, in baptism and into this life in which we are now growing and maturing toward perfection, toward completion, and spiritual maturity. So I think we have a pretty good idea of what is going on here in terms of Christ reconciling us through His blood, through His death. Jesus Christ, as the Creator of all things—the One whose life is more precious than all of our lives put together, more precious than the life of all the animals added into that, more precious than all the planets and stars and galaxies in the entire universe—this One took on the sins of the world, wiped away our guilt, and with His own righteousness covering us, we can now have a spiritual relationship with the Father through faith, a spiritual relationship. We are now spiritually alive when we were dead before. We were spiritually dead. There was nothing about us that was worth anything before our calling because we were full of sin and we stank of death. And God did not want to have anything to do with us at that point. But then He called us out of this world and He covered us with the blood of Jesus Christ. And now we are able to go to Him. We can come boldly, Paul says, before the throne of grace, and day by day work with the Father through Jesus Christ to become more like Him. Because of that relationship that we have with Him now God can work with us intimately, within us by His Spirit to create the new man in us, which Paul says in many places is the image of Jesus Christ. So we are now in the position, with our sins covered, where we can become like Christ. If we use the gifts of God that He has given us through His Spirit, we can keep the law, we can do what is right, we can reconcile our relationships with one another. We can do all these things through Jesus Christ who strengthens us day by day, minute by minute, if we will just take the opportunity to do it, to submit to Him and to what He has told us to do, which will bring us into the image of Jesus Christ Himself. We are here in Colossians, let us just go across the page (as it is in my book here) to Colossians 1, verse 12. There are two ideas here that Paul brings out that I want to stress here. One is the one that we have already been going over AD nauseam here for the last 25 minutes. But the other is very important too. Colossians 1:12-22 Giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light. [Notice that it is the Father that has done this. He is the one that qualifies us for this position.] He has delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. He [meaning Jesus Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross. And you, who who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable in His sight. As I said, in this very memorable passage, Paul is explaining two major ideas to us and the New King James in my Bible has very solicitously provided these two points as subheadings. One there starting in verse 9, The Preeminence of Christ, and the other one, Reconciled in Christ, starting in verse 19. Now, the first of these is the fact that Jesus Christ is preeminent and that means He is supreme and foremost above all others. And we saw that. He created all things and all things that we were created for Him, and by Him all these things consist, it says. So the Creator obviously stands far above His creation. And we need to understand just how special He is. The Greek word that is used here by Paul a couple of times, first in verse 15 and then in verse 18, translated as firstborn, which is actually a literal translation of this word. But in Greek, it is prototokos. That word literally means firstborn but it has two senses that we need to understand. Because if we think of firstborn, we normally think first born, you know, it is just in time, you are speaking of something in time. But the word actually has a sense of quality because the firstborn is special. So it has two senses. The first sense, of course, is as first or it has existed prior to or before. So there is that idea of time in there. I do not want to say that it is not there. It is probably out there right out front. But the second sense is of quality, and that is, most excellent or we could say superior or supreme or preeminent. Any of those definitions will do. It just heightens Paul's message here that He is greater, superior, beyond anything else in the universe. He wants us to really to get the idea that Christ is something super-special, something we should never forget. And I think we understand that. There is no being in this universe that is superior to Jesus Christ, other than the Father. The Father directs Him in all that He does. And Jesus clearly says, in John 14:28 that the "Father is greater than I." But after that, there is no greater being in the universe. I think we understand that. The second concept is the fact, as we have seen, as I have shown over the past 20 minutes or so, that this awesome Being, at the urging of the Father and through the love of the Father and of Jesus Christ, spilled His blood. He sacrificed His body. He gave His very life—the very life of the Creator God—to bring about reconciliation between God and man. But if you will notice in this passage, Paul makes a bit of a distinction that he did not make in the other ones. And this comes out as two different reconciliations. Maybe different is the wrong word. There are two reconciliations based on the same supreme act of selfless sacrifice that Jesus Christ did. But it reconciles two separate things. And we need to understand this. The first is that Jesus Christ gave Himself to reconcile you singular, you in particular, you personally and individually. Not just the church, you are not just one of many, you are not just part of a blob group that fills up His body. That is not what he is trying to get you to understand here. What he is trying to get you to understand is that of all the people on the face of the earth, all the billions that are running around madly like ants out there, He chose you specifically and He wants a relationship with you. It is a remarkable and joyous and humbling fact that Christ died for each one of us. Not just for the whole world, but for us as individuals. If you were the only person on earth and you would have sinned at some point, He would have done that great sacrifice for you. And He does this, as it says there in verse 22, to present us holy and blameless before God. He is our Mediator. He takes us by the hand after covering us, covering our sins for us with His own blood, and He leads us to the Father and says, "Here, you can be friends now." You can have a relationship, you can talk—you, person, individual—you can learn, you can grow. And of course, God puts Himself at our service and gives and gives and gives. His whole relationship with us is giving us grace, giving us gifts, giving us everything that we need to become like Jesus Christ and to make that relationship eternal, an eternal bond. And He has done that for you for each one of you as a singular individual. But there is another thing which we will spend the rest of the sermon on here. It is the second thing that I think is very interesting and it has a great deal to do with the Day of Trumpets. This second reconciliation is that He did this awesome work of giving Himself and reconciling in order to bring together or to reconcile all things to the Father, not just you as an individual, not just the church of God, but everything. Notice what it says here, verse 20, "By Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of the cross." So we see that the same act of divine sacrifice is the basis for both of these things, not just the reconciliation of you to Him, but the reconciliation of all things in heaven and in earth to Him. So even though I hopefully amazed you by the fact that it was you individually that He called and gave His Holy Spirit to and died for, but it is also amazing that He is going to do this for everything in time. Christ's work at Calvary changed gears in a process that has been at work from the foundations of the earth when sin threw a monkey wrench into the works. Romans 8:19-22 tells us that the whole creation groans together waiting for the redemption of the sons of God. But it is not just people, it is animals, it is plants, it is dirt, it is rocks, it is metal, it is wood—it is everything—planets. The whole universe is waiting for the time when sin will be gone forever and all things can then be in agreement with the holiness of God. Now, obviously, the sentient beings are the ones that are most important, but God and Christ are at work to make sure everything in the universe squares with Them, is in agreement with Them, there is harmony and consistency with Them. And He is starting with us, with a small number of people, and it is eventually going to spread out through other people, other groups, other nations, finally, the whole earth and then the dead. At some point, there will be a judgment of angels and then all things will be reconciled with Him. It is an amazing process that He set Himself to do, an amazing project, I should say. It is going to take millennia of time, has taken millennia of time. But Jesus' death on the cross put into play the wonderful hope and goal of bringing everything that is into harmony with the Father, everything that is and everything that was. And one day the entire cosmos and everything in it will exist and function in perfect harmony with God. Remember how it said in the first few chapters of Acts that once He called the church and it was just a little fledgling group, it says everyone was there "with one accord"? Someday that will be everything and everyone will be at one accord with the Father. That is what He is working toward, to where everything in the entire universe is humming along blithely in unison with Him. Now, the work of this reconciliation to God, and especially our reconciliation to God, has been accomplished. Remember I said this has been done. It says here, "having made peace through the blood of His cross." That work is a done deal, as it were. Christ does not have to die again and again to do what needs to be done, to ensure that each person's reconciliation to God occurs. That is what Paul writes in several places in Hebrews: Hebrews 7:27 and Hebrews 9:12, and in verse 26, and once again, in verse 28. It says He died once for all. So He only had to give Himself that one time. His blood is so precious, it covers everything and one for all eternity. So He does not have to give Himself again and again. But in terms of the second category of reconciling all things in heaven and earth to Himself, there is work to be done. There are stages in the process that have to come about. Each one of these later points of God's plan occur over centuries or millennia until the creation of the New Heaven and the New Earth. It is like the work has been done originally, but there needs to be a building upon that original work. Other chips have to fall, as it were, in order for everything to work out. And as I said, that reconciliation will also be based on Christ's sacrifice because that is the foundation of all reconciliation in this world. But certain stages have to be accomplished to bring total reconciliation into being. And one of those significant steps to total reconciliation is the day we are anticipating in our observance of the Feast of Trumpets. If what is prophesized on this day should for some unimaginable reason not take place, then the reconciliation of all things to the Father could not occur. But we are assured in Isaiah 55:11 that when God says He is going to do something, it comes to pass. He has the power to bring it about. He has the foresight to see any problems along the way and work around them or work through them. What God has prophesized will happen. The reconciliation of all things will happen. It is just going to take some time and a few significant events to make sure that it does happen—and God is in control. Let us go now to I Thessalonians 4 and start talking about this step that is going to take place, hopefully in the very near future. I Thessalonians 4:13-18 But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. Now, the fact that Christ descends from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, with the trumpet of God, is what connects this feast with the return of Christ. As we know from this and other passages that we could go to, it is the day of the first resurrection. It is not just the return of Christ, but the day of the first resurrection, when, as we see here, the dead in Christ will rise and the living in Christ will rise to meet Him in the air and we will be changed, as I Corinthians 15 says, from mortal to immortal, from corruptible to incorruptible. And we will always, then, be with the Lord. But it is also the day that, once Christ comes, there will be a terrific battle between Christ and those He brings with Him and the forces of the Beast and the False Prophet, who will be defeated and cast into the Lake of Fire. As Revelation 19 tells us, it is going to be an astounding day, so much that we have been looking forward to what happens. The evil of this world gets wiped away, not completely, but the main forces of it get defeated. The two, the Beast and the False Prophet, get cast into the Lake of Fire and die. And pretty soon Satan himself is put into the bottomless pit. And of course, what we are probably looking even more to forward to is our change, being able to meet Christ in the air as a spirit being. It is an incredible time to think about. And hopefully, like I said, it is just a few years away. Let us go back to Leviticus 23 and see the consistency. This is the the command about keeping the Feast of Trumpets. We will see the consistency between this series of verses and what it says in I Thessalonians 4. Leviticus 23:23-25 Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the children of Israel, saying: 'In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a sabbath-rest, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation. You shall do no customary work on it; and you shall offer an offering made by fire to the Lord.' We have done all these things here on this day. But notice what the only little detail is about this day that we can really latch on to. And that is, it says there at the end of verse 24, that this day is a memorial of blowing of trumpets. That is the only thing that sets it apart. Now, this literally it says it is a memorial or remembrance of shouting. Either "yay!" or more likely the shout of a shofar, because that is what they they thought it sounded like. When you blow the shofar, it is more like shouting than necessarily a blast of a trumpet, which has a more metallic sound. But this is the difference here. This one holy day is all about this trumpet, with the shouting of the shofar. And what it likely does, it looks back to, at least in the way it was presented to them at first, it looks back to Exodus 19 and the shofar that was blown when Christ descended another time. It seems to be a fixture of the descent of Christ here that it is accompanied with a shout, or as it says in Thessalonians, the voice of an archangel, or as it says, the trumpet of God. So let us go back to Exodus the 19th chapter and just read the situation there. The word trumpet is used three times in this chapter. Verse 13, verse 16, and verse 19. We will just start with verse 16. Here, this is the day that that Christ was going to come down or the Lord is going to come down and give the Ten Commandments. Exodus 19:16 Then it came to pass on the third day, in the morning, that there were thunderings and lightnings [Now just notice the description here because we are going to build on this as we go forward through the sermon.], and a thick cloud on the mountain; and the sound of the trumpet was very loud, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. This trumpet was blasting at such a volume that it made them vibrate in time to it, as it were, that they were trembling in fear because it was so loud and demonstrative and it meant something was going to happen, probably drop them to their knees. Exodus 19:17-20 And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was completely in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire. Its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly. And when the blast of the trumpet sounded long and became louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him by voice. Then the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai, on the top of the mountain. And the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. What we see here is that on both occasions of divine descent to earth, in awesome power, that there are displays of cloud and darkness and lightning and thunder and smoke and earthquake. All elements from God's arsenal of massive natural forces at His disposal. He can do anything. He is the Creator God. He made all these things. He knows how they work and He could make a display like no one else. And of course, that display is both a warning and a triumphant response, I guess (I do not know what the right word is), about who is coming, who you are going to deal with. Because God did this to the Israelites to impress on them the great importance of His law, that He was coming down personally to deliver the Ten Commandments to them. And not only that He came to shock them so they would realize just who their God is. He was not just this local tribal deity with minimal powers. He was very God, the Creator, who could do anything. He can make the very ground shake. And so He came down with thunder and lightning and cloud and smoke and fire, and of this blast of the trumpet, long and loud. But of course, the Israelites forgot within a few days, a few weeks, and they were back to their wicked ways. But this should impress upon us who we are dealing with. And in just a few short years, this whole world is going to experience this again. Not just the Israelites, but everyone. Let us go to Matthew 24, verse 29. Jesus' own description of His coming. Matthew 24:29-31 "Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." So Jesus describes His coming back to earth—His second coming, His return—in similar terms to what He had Moses write in Exodus 19. The two are linked and of course, there is also a link with the Day of Trumpets with Leviticus 23:24. Though He makes use of these natural forces, the sun, the moon, the stars, clouds, and all these other things that are going on here, the four winds, etcetera, it will be clear from an observer on the ground that there is nothing natural about what is going on. When Jesus Christ returns, it may look like nature is blowing up, but there will be a hand, a mind behind them, the mind of God, that is going to impress this world that their Creator is coming. That a Being of awesome power and glory is descending and that they should fall to their knees in worship of Him. But it says instead, verse 30, all the tribes of the earth will glorify Him, worship Him? Nope, all of the tribes of the earth will mourn. They will be sad. They will be grieved. They will be upset. In this great display of divine power, these people will not be just afraid. I do not think they will not just be crying in grief. They will be livid with terror, with horror, that such a thing has come upon them. They will see their doom in the terrifying expression of God's wrath that they understand from all of these natural forces going haywire. Now, the question for them at that time will be, how will they respond? When this presents itself to them they are going to have to react. What will they do? Will they fight or will they submit? There is only really two ways to do this. Will they fight or will they submit? Will they defiantly empty their guns into the oncoming Christ? Or will they throw them to the ground and fall to their knees and surrender? Well, we know the answer. I think it is very clear; they will fight. Because submission, especially to God, is not something carnal men do readily or even in the face of overwhelming natural disaster. But only those who surrender will have the opportunity to reconcile with Jesus Christ and God the Father. But they will not do it. We see in Zechariah the 14th chapter just what happens. Zechariah 14:3-5 Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as He fights in the day of battle. And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east. And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two, from east to west, making a very large valley; half of the mountain shall move toward the north and half of it toward the south. Then you shall flee through My mountain valley [this is to those who are still in Jerusalem there], for the mountain valley shall stretch to Azal. Yes, you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Thus the Lord my God will come, and all the saints with You. Zechariah 14:12-13 And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the people who fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet, their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets, and their tongue shall dissolve in their mouths. [What a gruesome death!] It shall come to pass in that day that a great panic from the Lord will be among them. Everyone will seize the hand of his neighbor, and raise his hand against his neighbor's hand. I think these verses more than suggest overwhelming hostility to Christ and they will pay for it with their lives with this gruesome death and with internecine warfare, people fighting one against the other. Romans 8:6 tells us that to be carnally minded is death. That is the way it is going to end. It is going to end very quickly for these people who currently decide to, rather than submit, to defy God. It says in the next verse, Romans 8:7, that the carnal mind is enmity against God, it cannot be subject to His law. Another way of saying it, which is what we are talking about in this sermon, is that the carnal mind is irreconcilable to God. It is entirely hostile and opposed. It will always be hostile unless it is changed. So this is why the stubborn heart of man must be changed by the gracious infusion of God's Spirit after His calling. Otherwise we will continue to be hostile, we will continue to be opposed to God, we will not reconcile. And this is what happens with these people here. Let us go to Jeremiah 23 and find out what happens next. Jeremiah 23:5-8 "Behold, the days are coming," says the Lord, "that I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; a king shall reign and prosper, and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth. In His days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell safely; now this is His name by which He will be called: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS. Therefore, behold, the days are coming," says the Lord, "that they shall no longer say, 'As the Lord lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,' but, 'As the Lord lives who brought up and led the descendants of the house of Israel from the north country and from all the countries where I had driven them.' And they shall dwell in their own land." The fulfillment of the Day of Trumpets is when the king mentioned here in verse 5 returns and begins His reign, as it says there, with decisive acts of judgment against carnal, hostile mankind. It must occur, it must be put down. Carnality must be managed at that point. And among His initial works will be clearing out the rebels, those who still rebel against Him and the enemies, of course, of God, and pacifying the whole land of Israel. That will be the first objective because once that happens, the remnant of Israel, captive and enslaved around the whole earth, can return to the land of their fathers. He wants to bring Israel back into the land. That is first thing that He is going to do on this earth once He begins to subdue the land. Let us now go to Ezekiel 36. This is all part of the reconciliation of all things. But this particular Day of Trumpets or Feast of Trumpets, foretells these particular things of what He needs to do right away. Ezekiel 36:24-32 [he says] "For I will take you [He is talking to Israel] from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. [then there is a turning of the approach here] Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. [One that is soft and malleable, one that will change.] I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them. [He was talking again about His law, get them to understand what their forefathers did not by giving them His Spirit.] Then you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; you shall be My people and I will be your God. I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. I will call for the grain and multiply it, and bring no famine upon you. [He is talking about blessings here. That is part of the benefits. The reward of reconciliation is blessing.] And I will multiply the fruit of your trees and the increase of your fields, so that you need never again bear the reproach of famine among the nations. Then you will remember your evil ways and your deeds that were not good; and you will loathe yourselves in your own sight, for your iniquities and your abominations. Not for your sake do I do this," says the Lord God, "let it be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your own ways, O house of Israel!" So the remnant of Israel will come back into the land of their fathers a very humbled people. And then God, once they are in that state, can give them grace. Because before they were just like everybody else, resisting, hostile, opposed to Him, irreconcilable. Then they will be justified by the blood of Christ. And He is the one, it says in Zechariah 12:10, that they had pierced. I just want to read that. Zechariah 12:10 "I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom they have pierced, yes, they will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a firstborn." They will reach a point of total contrition and they will repent because they misunderstood so badly. And they will, as it says here back in Ezekiel 36, loathe themselves for all the mistakes that they made and all the resistance that they had against God and Christ, for the Son, especially among the Jews, whom they condemned and repudiated for centuries as a fool, a devil worshipper, among other things that they have called Him. They will be ashamed because of what they have done and how they have resisted God. But it says that God will give them a new heart through the Holy Spirit. That is the only reason why they have these feelings and why they are so distraught at what they have done. It is because their heart has begun to change. And it is all because of the work of God's Spirit in them. Note verse 28. It says, "You shall be My people and I will be your God." It is at that point that Israel is reconciled to the Father. They will be one people again with us, with the Israel of God, and we will then accept them into that greater Israel and they will then be reconciled to us as well. So that is how the Millennium will begin, with God pouring blessings out on Israel once they have submitted and reconciled to Him. And it is all the result of the activities that are prophesized to happen on this day and on the day Christ gave Himself as our sacrifice. Of course, it goes on. Let us go to I Corinthians 15, verses 22 through 28. Paul gives us a bit of a timeline here about how things will go. Once God starts with Israel, the ball really begins to get rolling and soon it will be nations around Israel that see what is going on there, and then nations further out, and then nations further out than that. And then finally the whole earth and then there will be some bumps along the way. Satan will be released and people will have to prove themselves whether they truly are reconciled with God. But then it will continue. I Corinthians 15:22-28 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. But each one in his own order [there is an order to God's reconciliation of all things]: Christ the firstfruits, afterward those who are Christ's at His coming. Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. For "He has put all things under His feet." But when He says "all things are put under Him," it is evident that He who put all things under Him is excepted. Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all. What is he talking about there? When Christ delivers up everything, even His own self, to the Father at that future time, that is when all things in heaven and earth will be reconciled to the Father. The job will be complete and God will be all in all. Everything will be part of Him, in harmony with Him. And there will be no hostility, no sin, no death. Not even the memory of it will exist. We will forget about it because all of that has passed away. There will be no grief, no sorrow, no weeping, all of that will have passed and we will all exist in the New Heaven and the New Earth where righteousness dwells—and that is all. There is no other. It will all be righteous and holy. Everything, from the Father on down to the smallest of things. It will all be in unison and harmony with God. This will continue forever throughout eternity. All of this is wonderful, it is great to think about and we have faith in God to bring it to pass. It is mind-bending. It is hard to believe, hard to consider that there would be so much harmony in the universe. But that is kind of out there too. It is future. The question is, what do we do now? What is our part in this? Let us go back to II Corinthians 5, verses we have seen already. II Corinthians 5:18-20 Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. God, from the very beginning, has been the agent of reconciling us to Him through Christ. It starts with Him. And as we have heard just in the offertory sermonette today, He works. He is always working. He is consistently working to keep it going. He is not only the beginner of the reconciliation, He is its engine and He keeps driving so that reconciliation continues to happen. But that is not everything. There is a part of reconciliation that belongs to us, and that is, we must receive reconciliation from God, first of all, and then we must, like Him, continue to work to respond to Him in faith. It is not like the people out there in the Protestant world that think that all is done at the beginning and you are saved and that is it. You do not have to do anything more. You do not have to keep God's Word, hardly. It is all concentrated in that initial call, they think they have been justified and that is it. We know better. We must continue to respond in faith to Christ. We have got to deepen our agreement, our harmony with Him. It is not enough just to rely on the covering of Jesus Christ because that is like the Parable of the Talents of the man who buried his gift in the ground. The master, when he came back, was not happy with him and he condemned him to the Lake of Fire. God wants us to respond and work with the gifts that He has given us to continue to reconcile with Him and with each other. And this is why Paul says in chapter 6, verse 1 here in II Corinthians, he pleads with us not to receive the grace of God in vain. And then he goes down in the end of that chapter, in verse 16 (I am going to start right at the end). II Corinthians 6:16-17 As God has said: "I will dwell in them and walk among them. And I will be their God, and they shall be My people." [an echo from Ezekiel 37] Therefore "Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you." [so we need to work on getting rid of sin] "I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty." II Corinthians 7:1 Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. So what is He saying? We have been given this ministry of reconciliation and we can become totally reconciled to God by becoming holy.
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