We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.  Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.  - Romans 6:4 ESV; 2 Corinthians 5:17 ESV.

What a wonderful week to think about and dwell on these words, when this past Sunday we got to gather at Marine park, and watch 14 members of our Redeemer family be baptized, as the sunlight danced off of the water behind them.  Truly, I felt the weight of this means of grace for our church, as we celebrated this outward sign of the inward regeneration that had taken place within each of them, and as we remembered that we who walk with Christ have been identified with Him in His death, burial and resurrection.  It was a powerful and moving experience for me, and I thank God for the gift of baptism for those in His church.  He has blessed us richly.

I am struck today by the words “new creation”.  Those who have been saved by grace are not “different” or “better” or merely “on the right path”, they are a new creation.  The word creation seems to imply such a radical change, that the person is no longer the same person at all, but has been changed COMPLETELY.  Not one ounce of that person is who they were before they accepted this gift, but they are altogether a new person.  Who were they before?  They were a bag of bones, the walking dead, with the wrath of God bearing down upon them.  “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world ... and were by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:1-3).  This should cause you and I to tremble.

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us ... made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4-6).  It has been said that Jesus did not come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people, alive.  If ever there was a cause to celebrate, this is it!  Those 14 men and women who were baptized, were vessels of wrath who have now been resurrected in “newness of life”, and are now vessels of grace, freed from wrath of God, justified, adopted into His family as sons and daughters, to the praise of His glorious grace!  I can think of no greater reason to throw a party that this, that “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).

Let us continue to celebrate the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to give much thanks and adoration to Him who has blessed us so richly.

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.  In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:19-22).

Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.  In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace.  For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. - Ephesians 1:4-6 NASB; Romans 8:29-30 NASB.

These verses are incredible.  They are so pregnant with doctrine and theology and truth about God, that I feel as if my head will explode with each step forward I take.  I feel like I could write a thousand blog posts based off of these 94 words.

While you may think of yourself as "called" or "chosen" or “in Christ”, how often do you consider that you were chosen "before the foundation of the world".  That should cause YOUR head to explode.  Before God spoke the earth into existence by the breath of His mouth, He knew you, He loved you, and He chose you.  If you think you are significant because of your intelligence, or your charm, or your beauty, remember that God chose you before the foundation of the world.  It was THEN that He adopted you into His family.  It was not when you decided to follow Christ, or when you got your act together, or when you "figured it all out".  It was before the foundation of the world.  Spend some time thinking about that, and let it blow your mind away.  This should point you not to your achievement and your success but to an eternal and sovereign God who is so loving and so kind that He would adopt you and love you and conform you to the image of His Son.

Adoption is a theological topic that is very dear to me, as I now have two adopted children.  I realize that any comparison I would draw between my adoption of them, and God's adoption of me is limited and probably fraught with danger, given the infinite difference between myself and God.  But I do sometimes think about how my children, before they were adopted by my wife and I were helpless.  They could do nothing to "get adopted".  They could not merit my favor, they could not impress me, they could not charm me into adopting them.  I loved them before I met them.  I loved them from the day back in 2002 when God called me to eventually adopt them, 7 and then 9 years later.  God loved me before the foundation of the world.  He called me to one day be holy and blameless before Him.  And since I could not make myself holy and blameless, He sent His Son Jesus Christ, to atone for all of my sins and to clothe me in His robe of holiness, that I could now stand before my Holy God, my Father, who adopted me, before the foundation of the world, who called me, who justified me, and who will one day glorify me, the praise of the glory of HIS grace!

For a wonderful discussion of the "order of salvation" (ordo salutis) please see Wayne Grudem's book, Systematic Theology, Chapter 32.

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.  And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba!’ Father!  So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God” (Galatians 4:4-7).

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins (and) ... were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.  But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved.  For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. - Ephesians 2:1;3-5 ESV; Romans 5:6 NASB; 2 Corinthians 4:6 NASB.

I have three children, ages 2, 5 and 6.  They are occasionally children of my wrath.   However, my wrath is not a wrath that flows out of justice, but more often out of frustration. My wrath and anger are rarely righteous, but more often stem from my pride and my selfishness.  In unspeakable contrast to this, God’s wrath is pure.  God’s wrath is holy.  God’s wrath is moved by His wholly righteous anger towards sin and idolatry.  God’s wrath is justified and right and is ultimately good.

It is hard for me to wrap my mind around the wrath of God.  This is probably because I have not tasted it, and never will, thanks to the One who tasted it for me, Jesus Christ.  I suspect from what I know of the infinite holiness of God, that it is the most terrifying thing you could ever imagine.  When I was an anesthesia resident doing my trauma rotation at Harborview hospital in Seattle, one night a 20 year old girl was admitted.  She had been driving down I-405 when a piece of wood flew off the back of pickup truck in front of her and sheared off her entire face, skin, bones, eyes, nose, mouth, everything.  As I walked up to her room, I saw her lying there, motionless, with a towel over the crater that had been her face.  I knew that I, as part of her care team, was going to have to look at what was under that towel.  I was terrified.  I feared I might pass out in front of my attending, or start crying, or throw up.  Now take that terror and multiply it by a thousand.  Perhaps that gives us a place to begin to think about the wrath of God.

God’s wrath is an outpouring of His justice and His holiness.  We should praise God for His wrath, knowing that without His wrath, we are left with a God who does not care about sin, and justice, and who ultimately, does not care about us.

We were DEAD in our trespasses and sins.  We were not sick, we were not wandering astray, we were DEAD.  I have seen many dead people in my short career in medicine, and I am convinced that it is a position that one cannot save themselves from.  This is why we need Jesus Christ, because through His death and resurrection, we are now made ALIVE.  Always remember, that “by grace you have been saved”.  It was not by your obedience, or your good works, or your 15 minutes of bible study every week, it was by grace!  And to be saved means to be brought from death to life.  And this was accomplished by Christ dying for the ungodly.  This happened as an outpouring of God’s  “great love with which He loved us”, and was absolutely necessary because of God’s wrath, which is an outpouring of His justice.  Let us today give thanks to our Savior Jesus Christ, who took upon Himself the wrath of God, which we deserved, breathing life into our dead bodies, that we may now be made alive ..... by grace, and by grace alone.  Let us today thank God for giving us the knowledge of His glory, in the face of Jesus Christ.

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him”  (John 3:36).

(Jesus said) I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no ones comes to the Father but through Me. Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.  Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS.  For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.  Why do you spend money for what is not bread, And your wages for what does not satisfy?  Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And delight yourself in abundance. (He said) I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.  Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. - John 14:6 NASB; Matthew 11:28-30 NASB; Isaiah 55:2 NASB; John 10:10 NASB; 1 John 5:12 ESV.

The first verse above from John 14 is a kick in the face to our culture today.  I suspect it was a kick in the face to the culture of Jesus’s day as well.  It is absolutely shocking that Jesus would say that NO ONE gets to the Father but through Him.  Make no mistake about it, this claims absolute exclusivity as the only path to heaven, which is where God dwells in the fullness of His glory.  Why do we need Jesus to get to the Father?  Why can’t He just “let us in”.  I believe the reason we need Jesus to get to the Father lies in the fact that God is holy, and we are not.  I think we have a very deficient understanding of God’s holiness.  I admit that I have a very deficient understanding of God’s holiness.  But I know that whatever it is, when confronted by it, in my earthly flesh, I will be utterly demolished.  God’s holiness is so pure and so perfect, so unstained by sin, that nothing unholy can enter into His presence.  And so, Jesus Christ came to clothe us in His holiness, by taking on our sin, and imputing to us His righteousness, and so now we who receive this gift (and it is a gift, unmerited and undeserved) get to stand before a holy God, because we have been made holy by the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ.  This is why we need Jesus.  Without Him, we cannot stand before a holy God.

The call to accept this gift does not come with a list of rules, which we must meticulously follow to gain or to keep His acceptance, as many might think.  It is made clear throughout scripture that “no one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:12).  And so, we are free to enjoy the good graces which God has lavished upon us.  The call to follow Jesus is not a call to a life of denial and toil, but it is a call to a life filled with delight, and rest, and abundance!  How prone I am to forget this.  How quick I am to think that if I labor harder for the church, I will “impress” Him.  How many weeks do I neglect to Sabbath, believing that if I don’t finish off my to-do list, the whole world will crumble around me?  God has not called me to a life of performance, but to a life of rejoicing, and delight, that I may have life and have it abundantly, and that I may rest in the finished work of His Son upon the cross.

John Piper coined the phrase “Christian Hedonism”, which finds it’s definition in the phrase “God is most glorified in us, when we are most satisfied in Him”.  We are called to a life of satisfaction and joy.  The root of our joy, however, needs to be faith in the great gift we have been given through the gospel.  This is the greatest gift we could ever receive, and it should fill us with such unspeakable joy, so that we could not be more satisfied by any earthly treasure.  The “good life” does not start once we die and get to be with our savior in heaven ... it starts now!  God has called you to delight yourself in His countless graces upon you.  Be thankful, and live the life of joy that you have been called to.

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.  Let your reasonableness be known to everyone.  The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made know to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:4-7).

Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! - John 1:29 NASB This week I challenge you to do a word search for the word “lamb” in the bible.  You will find that it appears 191 times in the ESV bible, all the way from Genesis to Revelation.  You will learn the importance of the lamb in God’s system of sacrifice for His people in the Old Testament, and you will see how Jesus was the Lamb who was sacrificed in one great, terrifying and glorious moment of atonement for God’s chosen people, His church.

I would ask you read Exodus 12 in which the Lord tells Moses and Aaron to take a lamb for each household, a “lamb without blemish”, and to put some of the blood from that lamb over their doorposts.  God tells them that “The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are.  And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:13).  This points us to Jesus, who was and is without blemish, and whose blood is now painted on doorposts of our homes, that God would pass over us in His judgement.

I would ask you read Leviticus 6 and the description of the lamb as an offering for sin.  “And the priest shall make atonement for him for the sin which he has committed, and HE SHALL BE FORGIVEN” (Leviticus 6:35). Also Leviticus 14, “And he shall kill the lamb in the place where they kill the sin offering and the burnt offering, in the place of the sanctuary.  For the guilt offering, like the sin offering, belongs to the priest; it is most holy” (Leviticus 14:13). This points us to Jesus, who was the great high priest who made final atonement, so WE MAY BE FORGIVEN.

I would ask you to go back to those words in Isaiah 53, describing the suffering servant, Jesus Christ.  “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).  This points us to Jesus, who was the lamb, led to slaughter on the mount of crucifixion.

I would ask you to read that glorious announcement of who Jesus Christ is, as John sees Jesus coming toward him and boldly declares, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).  And again, as Paul declares “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).  This IS Jesus, the Lamb of God, who has been sacrificed as our Passover Lamb, taking away the sins of the world.

I would ask you read Revelation 5, in which the elder John sees “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth” (Revelation 5:6), and who then sees “the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders” who “fell down before the Lamb” (Revelation 5:8).  This IS Jesus, who is worshipped day and night by the four living creatures, and the twenty-four elders, who alone is worthy to be worshipped, who alone is worthy of our complete devotion, our affections, our time, our talents, our money, our prayers.

Our God came to save us, not as a mighty warrior, or as a rich king, or as a brilliant philosopher, but as a lamb, innocent, submissive, humble, offering Himself as the only acceptable sacrifice for our sins, in fulfillment of the scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation.  Who is the hero of every book of the bible?  It is Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God.

“Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people an nation, and you have made them a kingdom of priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9-10).

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.  Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.  Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors. - Isaiah 53:10-12

I have heard many analogies of substitutionary atonement through books and sermons, stories of “righteous” men facing punishment and sometimes death in place of another.  All of them have helped me, but today as I read God's prophetic words to Isaiah regarding His plan of atonement, I cannot help but think that they have all fallen short of the reality of the absolutely shocking truth that a perfect and holy God would clothe Himself in human flesh, and stand in the place of my judgement.  How can this be?  What kind of God could ever be so loving, and so merciful as to do this?  There is no other faith system in the world that professes anything like this.  It is truly truly shocking.  It is so shocking, that I am forced to ask myself, could this be true?  I don't think questioning your faith is a sign that you have not been saved.  Sometimes these questions may spring from a deeper understanding of just how extraordinary the gospel is.  And yet today we read these words, written hundreds of years before His plan took place, declaring that the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ was and is His plan to redeem us from all of our sin and iniquity and transgression.  God did not just carry out this plan, He announced centuries beforehand, that this was His plan.  This gives me great reassurance that the staggering truth of the gospel is in fact truth.  Instead of me blogging about God's word in Isaiah, why don't I let God Himself blog about His word in Isaiah, placing side by side the prophecy of the Old Testament with the glorious fulfillment of the New Testament.

1. “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief”;

“Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know - this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men”  (Acts 2:22-23).

2. “when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days”;

^“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God” (Galatians 4:4-7).

3. “the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.  Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities”;

“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18).

4.  “Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong”;

“At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne.  And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald.  Around the throne were twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones were twenty-four elders, clothed in white garments, with golden crowns on their heads.  From the throne came flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and before the throne were burning seven torches of fire, which are the seven spirits of God, and before the throne there was as it were a sea of glass, like crystal” - (Revelation 4:2-6).

5.  “because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors”;

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?  He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?  Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.  Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised— who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?  As it is written,

"For your sake we are being killed all the day long;

we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered."

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:31-39).