Category: Uncategorized

I Cor. 5:17.) if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here 18.) All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

Note 1st that verticality of this passage

“All this is from God”

The Spirit inspired Paul has been writing about the new creation… the full salvation in Christ and He plainly says that “All this is from God.”

This reminds us that that the all Paul speaks of includes the provision of Christ to go to the Cross to bear our sins. Christ going to the Cross was part of the “All this is from God.” The triune God is the alpha and the omega of our Christian faith.

This needs to be said repeatedly in our current climate. It needs to be said again to those who grew up with evangelism that began with “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” That statement might be true but it misses the God-centeredness of the Cross and misses that “All this is from God.”

The point here is that “All of this” that St. Paul speaks of teaches us that the all this is all about God before it is at all about us. The “All of this from God” not man centered. The “All of this from God,” is God centered.

Our Christianity is theocentric — God centered and not man-centered.

Even when Christ is hanging on the Cross as the center of Paul’s “All of this is from God,” we understand that it is not primarily about us. The cross wherein reconciliation is effected is ultimately about God.

The main thrust of this point is that the Cross, where reconciliation takes place, is not ultimately about us. In point of fact the Cross of Jesus Christ is only proximately about us. Before we can say anything true about the Cross in relation to us, we must first speak about the Cross and its meaning in relation to God.

At this point we are seeking to talk about what Theologian C. E. B. Cranfield in his commentary on Romans talked about as “the innermost meaning of the cross” (The Epistle to the Romans, 213).

And frankly, in all my reading and study one doesn’t stumble across very often this God-centered understanding of the Cross. In all the sermons I’ve listened to it is only been occasional the the case that the sermon was dealing with the God-centered understanding of the Cross.

I want to be clear I’m not denying that the Cross has effects, consequences, and glorious implications for man. However, I am convinced that before we talk about the secondary meaning of the Cross we should talk about the primary meaning of the Cross.

Steve Camp captured something of what I am going to be driving at this morning when we talk about what it means to think theocentrically about the cross.

Camp wrote these lyrics,

Christ Died For God
Steve Camp

There it is. The theocentric meaning of the Cross.

Christ died for God.

The deep inside meaning. The Ultimate meaning. The theology from above. The primary meaning. The theocentric meaning.

How many times have you heard this from pulpits? From your own reading? I was in the ministry for almost a decade before I stumbled across it in Jonathan Edwards and before him for John Owen.

Hear Owen for example in a catechism he used to teach.

Q. In what does the exercise of his priestly office for us chiefly consist?

A. In offering up himself an acceptable sacrifice on the cross, so satisfying the justice of God for our sins, removing his curse from our persons, and bringing us unto him. — Chapter 13.

John Owen

Note that before Owen speaks about the curse being removed from our persons he notes that Christ satisfied the justice of God for our sins. There it is. Christ died for God. Theocentric thinking on the Cross.

Well, where did they get this idea that Christ died for God? They saw it in Scripture.

Romans 3:23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, 26 to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

There it is. “The Father sets forth the Son as a propitiation by His Blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness.”

Christ died for God.

The Old Testament anticipates Romans when in Isaiah we read,

“But the LORD was pleased To crush Him, putting Him to grief; If He would render Himself as a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, And the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand.”

Isaiah 53:10

There it is. The theocentrism of the Cross. The Lord is pleased to crush the Son.

There is a vertical dimension of the Cross that must be spoken of before we speak of the horizontal dimension. Christ dies for God before Christ dies for man.

Note secondly the reconciliation

When we look at the idea of reconciliation we first notice that the text reinforces what we just noted … it is God who reconciled us to Himself. God did all the doing.

This kind of language from the Apostle explains why the Reformed have always been so put out with Arminianism (such as you find targeted in the Canons of Dordt) and with Roman Catholicism which the Reformation defined itself against.

It is God who reconciled us to Himself. No contributions on or part. Dead men can’t contribute anything to coming back to life.

This is a significant reason why we are Reformed. We believe in God’s sovereignty in all things w/o exception and that includes salvation. We affirm with tenacity and without equivocation that God alone reconciled us to Himself.

When we consider reconciliation we understand that the premise here is that there are two parties who are at enmity with one another. Reconciliation is the work by which that alienation between the two parties is put to an end.

Of course the two parties at war w/ one another are God and fallen man. And the passage teaches that it was only as through Christ the reconciliation was effected. And this reconciliation was effected by Christ on the Cross. Indeed this is why we call this day Good Friday. Good Friday is good because a reconciliation has been accomplished that otherwise could have never been accomplished.

Christ dying on the Cross is our reconciliation and the reason that we have an interest in gathering to worship on Good Friday. If not for Christ being our reconciliation on the cross the last place we would be on a Friday evening is a Church.

So, God is the author of our reconciliation but He elected to provide that reconciliation only through Christ. This explains why Biblical Christians insist on the absolute necessity of a known Christ in order to have peace with God. There is no concourse with God apart from the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Christ is the one who extinguished the necessary and just opposition of God towards fallen man that was an immovable force set against us, while at the same time removing our opposition to God. That opposition and hatred of God is sin that is paid for, for God’s people, in Christ’s death on the Cross.

You see then the reconciliation provided by Christ on the Cross was not only a reconciling of the elect’s sinful hatred against God but it is also a reconciling of God’s just wrath against man. So on the Cross there is a two-fold movement of Reconciliation that is occurring in Christ.

The plain meaning, thus, is that through Jesus Christ on the Cross, God established the basis of agreement between men and God as estranged, removed the barrier to the sinner’s approach to Himself, and accepted the work of propitiation in Christ.

Note thirdly here that the reconciliation was costly

God did not let bygones be bygones. The sin of man required restitution to God’s Holiness. God could not remain just and holy and merely be reconciled. No, reconciliation had to be on the basis of the satisfaction of man’s debt against God.

So, yes reconciliation was accomplished in and through Christ but that reconciliation was a work of restitution satisfying the father’s just claim against sinful man.

This reminds us of the necessary connection between reconciliation and restitution.

And all of this is from God

Out of love the Father sends the Son forth to take upon Himself the Father’s just penalty for sin so that reconciliation can be accomplished. Out of eternal love the Son defends the honor of the Father’s promise to give sin it’s full recompense. Christ died for God. Died for His glory. Died to give Him all honor. Died that the Father might be just and justifier of those who have faith in Jesus. Died that reconciliation would have its proper foundation found in a restitution that satisfied the loving Father.

God Himself — whose justice required the price of propitiation in order to be reconciled. God Himself who rendered up the price of the just penalty required by God. We see thus that it is God who justly required the penalty, and God who paid the penalty. God who required Justice and God whose Justice when it fell, fell as mercy for us.

Christ died for God.

Donald Macleod gets at all this in his “Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement — p 71”

“It was no part of the work of Christ to make God love us, The very fact of his being on earth at all was proof of the divine love. The business of the atonement, therefore, was to propitiate the God who already loves us: to lay the foundation for an advocacy directed towards him specifically as Father (1 John 2: 1). God unequivocally requires such propitiation, but in the last analysis God also provides the propitiation and God even becomes the propitiation. The whole cost of our redemption is borne by the triune God. In that sense, the atonement is a transaction entirely internal to the trinity. But by virtue of the incarnation, it is also external. It takes place not in heaven, but on Calvary; not in eternity, but on Good Friday.”

May God grant us His grace on this Good Friday to once again be lost in wonder love and praise for the great gift of the Christ on the Cross providing a reconciliation that can never be revoked.

There is a great deal here to examine so let us get right to it.

I.) God & the New Passover Time

Here in chapter 12 the 10th plague is being explained and the Hebrew children are being told how to prepare for the coming Angel of Death so that He will pass over.

An immediate matter of interest here that presents itself is found in vs. 2

² “This month shall be your beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you. 

Israel, living among a pagan people marked time in the same way as the pagans around them. God tells them that the event that is about to occur requires them to mark time in a new way. The calendar is to be remade by the Passover and the new calendar would begin with the time of Israel’s redemption.

Today, though changing, we still mark our time as BC & AD. BC stands for “Before Christ and refers to all time prior to the birth of Jesus the Christ. The abbreviation AD stands for “Anno Domini” in Latin. In English, this means “in the year of our Lord.” This abbreviation refers to all time after the birth of Jesus Christ.

The humanists have sought to change this back to reflect their preferred pagan presuppositions. In France during the French Revolution  during October 1793, the Christian calendar was replaced with one reckoned from the date of the Revolution, and Festivals of Liberty, Reason, and the Supreme Being were scheduled and mandated.

Something similar is happening now in academia. Now the Christian time tags of BC & AD are being changed out for BCE (before Common Era) and Common Era.

This is not insignificant. It is a attempted means to create standards which would strip us of being able to be known, by objective categories, as a Christian people.

With God giving to His people a new way of measuring time God is giving Israel an objective marker by which they could be known as distinctly His people. It is one way that the Israel who are not “the Israel of God,” remain in some sense God’s Israel. There are these objective markers that mark out Israel as Israel.

Similarly, when we erase Christian time markers such as BC & AD we erase an objective marker that connects Westerners to the objectiveness of Christianity even if they individually are not subjectively Christian. To erase these is one more step into the void of the complete dechristianization of a people.

II.) God, Passover & The Family

In the Egyptian plagues God goes after the gods of Egypt…. their religion and their Temples. This demonstrates the centrality of religion in the life of a people. However, when God goes for the kill shot with the 10th plague, God does not go for the people’s gods, religion, or temples, instead God goes for the family. This demonstrates that should one desire to destroy a social order one has to attack both their religion and their family structure. These two are the foundation upon which all social order rests.

This in turn reminds us that the family is every bit as important as the Church in terms of the institutions of a godly social order and that in turn destroys both the ecclesiocentrics (CREC) and the familiocentrics when either or both of them insist on being the one and only institutional center of a Godly social order.

In the way God destroyed Egypt we see that both of these institutions (Church & Family) are co-centers of our undoubted catholic Christian faith.

Our enemies well understand this, even if we do not. The Marxists for example in the Communist manifesto desired to rid men of private property and they understood that the family was an extension of private property. One could not be destroyed w/o the other being destroyed.

Marx wrote,

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie,”

The family, by God’s design, is a foundation for any social order and if one desires to destroy a social order then one goes for the family. God does that in this final plague.

The flip side of this is the way God protects Israel in their family units. What we are noting here is the centrality of the family in God’s design. We have seen that in the fact that when God goes for the kill shot in Egypt He goes for the family.

But we see also the importance and centrality of the family in this final plague in the way that the Passover is kept. All of the language throughout this text demonstrates the centrality of the family to God’s social order.

The Passover is to be a family meal. The centrality of the family here is also stressed in the fact that the children participated in the Passover ritual by asking the questions, thus being taught the meaning of the Passover and of course children who could eat table food would have partaken of the Passover meal.

And as a brief rabbit trail, this mindset was carried over in the early church where the children were trained to ask question concerning the meaning of communion as a part of the earliest liturgies, and they then partook of the elements.

III.) God and Passover Atonement

Here we get to the crux of the matter. What I’m about to set forth is really Christianity 101 and the substance is that which we should all be as familiar with as the names of our family members.

In this whole plagues narrative we have seen Moses & Aaron serving as types of Prophet, Priest and King of God unto Pharaoh. They are types of Christ to the antitype that will be fulfilled with the coming Christ. Which is to say that they are those who prefigure the Messiah who is to come.

Now where do we see this type – anti-type dynamic? Well, we see it first here in the work of Moses & Aaron before Pharaoh. Moses and Aaron have been to Pharaoh prophet, priest and king, which serves as a type to Christ’s fulfillment anti-type. Christ is the great prophet, priest, and King of Scripture but all of that is anticipated in the OT. Here Moses and Aaron have been the anti-type prophet who have spoken forth God’s Word to Pharaoh at every turn. They have been God’s mouthpiece to Pharaoh and in doing so they have spoken with God’s voice. In this sense Christ is the greatest prophet who speaks forth as Prophet the Word of God… indeed He does so as the very Word of God. So when we look through Moses and Aaron here in the plagues narratives as coming to Pharaoh to speak the mind of God about what will be, we see the anticipation of a coming Christ who is the antitype .. the fulfillment of all they prefigured. In brief, when we see Moses and Aaron here we see Christ the prophet. Christ comes and speaks as God’s great Prophet.

In noting this we are reading the passage Christologically — in a Christ centered fashion. We are seeing Christ adumbrated and foreshadowed. And it is proper we should read the text in such a fashion for all of Scripture breathes the presence of our magnificent Lord Jesus Christ.

In the same way in these plagues Moses and Aaron have been anti-types — prefigurements — of Christ in His Kingly role. When Moses and Aaron command Pharaoh, “Let my people God that they may serve me,” this is the voice of the King. This is not the way of a negotiator, or the way of a manipulator, or the way of the salesman. This is the the way of a King saying, “Do this, or suffer the consequences.” Moses and later Christ in a much more fulsome capacity is a Great King and He is not selling something, He is not negotiating in His commands, He is not trying to manipulate. He comes to the sinner who is in great rebellion as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and He says to the sinner, just as Moses says to Pharaoh here … “Do this or die.”

Listen my friends, Christianity is not a religion where God’s spokesmen are beggars or cajolers or grifters. We are all here prophet priests and kings under sovereign God and we speak with the voice of Kings where our great God has spoken. We say to sinners as Christ says to Moses, “Repent or die.” There is a certain imperiousness to the Gospel command. This is why it is so often said of us, “you sure have a lot of confidence,” and even with frequency, “you sure are arrogant.” I’m sure Pharaoh thought the Kingly bearing of Moses and Aaron was “arrogant.” I’m confident that no one ever spoke to Pharaoh the way that Moses and Aaron spoke to Pharaoh. Of course the man thought it was arrogance on steroids.

I’m sure the Pharisees opposed to Christ also thought that Christ was imperious in the way He spoke. People who are sitting on the top of the social ladder are not used to be spoken to as if they are at the bottom of the ladder.

But there it is. We are not glad handers or grifters. We speak with earnest as Kings before God and His Christ, saying, “REPENT.”

Finally, Moses and Aaron serve as Priests before God in the larger Exodus narrative. Remember one of the key roles of a Priest was to speak to God for the people. We find that most glaringly in the plagues in Ex. 8

Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, “Pray to the LORD to take the frogs away from me and my people. Ex. 8:8

Pharaoh was imploring Moses and Aaron to do Priestly interceding work for him.

Later in the Exodus account when Moses intercedes before God that God might spare His people for their sin we see again the anti-type role of the Priest being raised up. It is a anti-type to Christ who is the fulfillment type who prays for His people as the Great High Priest in John 17 and who continues in His priestly role in Praying for us right now at the right hand of the Father. Hebrews 7 teaches that our Lord Christ ever lives to make intercession for us.

All of these offices are here in the plague narratives. These great truths of Christ as our Prophet, Priest, and King foreshadowed in the OT via the way that Moses and Aaron deals with Pharaoh.

And this is what we are called to now. Each of us buried in baptism with Christ are united to Him and in being united to Him we now are ourselves prophets, priests, and kings, under sovereign God assigned and delegated with the work of making his name known. Even, at times, saying to people, “Repent or you will die.” Even saying to men, “In times past God winked at your ignorance, but now He commands all men everywhere to repent.”

And if we need anymore support our own Catechism asks;

Question 32: But why art thou called a Christian?

And then goes on to give as the answer (and I am summarizing here) we are called Christians because we are prophet, priests, and kings under sovereign God.

B.) God and His Passover Lamb

Here the text describes the requirements of God in order to be passed over by the wrath of God.

³ Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: ‘On the tenth of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household. ⁴ And if the household is too small for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the number of the persons; according to each man’s need you shall make your count for the lamb. ⁵ Your lamb shall be without^[a] blemish, a male ^[b]of the first year. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats. ⁶ Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at twilight. ⁷ And they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two  doorposts and on the lintel of the houses where they eat it.

There is a great deal to speak off here.

Of course, once again, we find anti-type and type all over the passage. The Passover Lamb is an anti-type of the to come type of the lamb of God who giveth his life for the sins of the world who Himself was without the spot or blemish of imperfection/sin.

Here we find the reality of danger. God is going to kill dead the first-born of of every household where the blood does not cover the lintel of the home. If Hebrew homes don’t have the blood, Hebrew homes are going to wake up with fewer family members then they went to bed with.

God’s wrath is coming upon all men, and the only place of safety is to be found as under the blood of the lamb that was sacrificed as a means of protection of the just wrath of God. God is an avenging and jealous God. He will by no means clear the guilty apart from His proscribed way of escape.

And so that passover lamb in this 10th plague is a lamb of propitiation. The blood of this lamb turns away the just and fierce wrath of God against sinners who will not repent. This is propitiation. God see’s the blood on the lintel and His wrath is turned away and He passes over the household.

Of course the blessed Lord Jesus Christ is the lamb of God who provides our needed propitiation. God sees the blood of Christ covering us and His wrath passes by because it was already spent on the sacrifice.

And so we can understand why it is said that, “without the shedding of blood there is no turning away of wrath.”

Of course there is the idea of substitution here as well. That Passover lamb was dying a substitutionary death in the place of those whose household was under the blood. By recognizing the necessity for shed blood they confessed their need of a substitutionary and vicarious sacrifice to spare them the just wrathful judgment of God.

This idea of vicarious points to substitution. The language in the NT is that Christ died in our place, on our behalf, in our stead, for us. The word ‘vicarious’ (vicarius from vicis, ‘change,’ ‘alteration’) means acting, or suffering, for another, or in the place of another. The idea of change, transfer, or substitution pertains to the term. It has the same root as ‘vice’ in ‘vicegerent,’ ‘viceroy’ or ‘vicar,’ and other words which signify that one person has assumed the place, position, or office of another.

That lamb assumed the place, and position of the one who deserved the treatment that the Passover Lamb received in their stead.

All of this is screaming at us. It not only screams propitiation, and vicarious substitution, it screams sacrifice.

God’s wrath is just and God determines that the only way it can be turned is by a sacrifice that He determines. The sacrifice has the purpose of appeasing the just wrath of God. Pharaoh didn’t take seriously the wrath of God and so didn’t bother offering up the requisite sacrifice.

With the consequence that the first born of all of Egypt died.

Here, modern man plays the role of Pharaoh. He does not take God seriously. He does not flee to the sacrifice that God provided for his safety. Instead he seeks to provide his own sacrifices to assuage his conscience. He offers up his children as sacrifice by sending them to Government schools and by sometimes literally burning them in the fires of Molech.

If man will not have God’s sacrifice he will find his own sacrifice to desperately find forgiveness for his offenses He cannot escape.

How can we preach this or hear this apart from a sense of burden? Burdened that God’s glory is so routinely neglected? Burdened that modern man would rather die eternally …. would rather experience the wrath of God then flee the wrath to come by trusting in Jesus Christ as God’s only place of safety.

The weight of God lies so lightly upon me … lies so lightly upon all of us.

Looking at the plagues, reminds us that we needs be a people who fear God and consequently are a people who command all men everywhere to repent.

My friends… much of this is the core of the Christian faith. I trust that all of us here have this at our fingertips and know this truth better than the names of our family.