Clough Hebrews Lesson 17
Why Christ Became Man – Hebrews 2:14-15
In Hebrews 2:5-18 we have God’s program of professing the Redeemer of man by suffering and in verses 5-8 we found the destiny of man; and verses 9-18 how Christ fulfills that destiny. The important insight that you must gain from Hebrews to benefit the maximum degree is the point that sanctification depends at every point on justification, not sanctification depending on your works at every point and there is a whale of difference between these two views. One is a grace oriented view, the other is a works oriented view and that means that there’s a tremendous difference between these two points. On one hand, every bit of sanctifying work that God the Holy Spirit does in your life and mine He does because of and on the basis of something that He’s done before, prior to our experience, prior to your experience. You don’t feel the basis of the Holy Spirit’s working in your life.
So when we come to this Hebrews is a powerful argument against justification by works, a very powerful argument against justification by works and sanctification by works. And to further appreciate the point, if you’ll think of sanctification as having nothing to do with sin, primarily, it’ll help you out. In other words, if you see Adam at a point, so to speak, in history, in innocence and you see that God, on a theoretical line, this line never was completed because of the fall, but Adam was to acquire +R learned behavior patterns. And he was to acquire those before sin ever occurred; in other words, sin was not an issue originally in the Garden. The issue in the Garden at this point is whether Adam is going to obey God and through a series of tough decisions, Adam would eventually reach a point that was acceptable with God, and then he would have been, probably, we just can guess at this because this is one of those what-ifs of history, he probably would have been translated from his mortal body to an immortal body. The transfer would have been done without death, it would have been done as Enoch before the flood; it would have been done as Christ was transfigured, though there’s another point that enters in about Christ’s deity on the Mount of Transfiguration, but the point is that man could have, on a straight continuous line, moved up to God’s ideal or God’s final goal. And the final goal of man, as we have said before, is to be fit for God, or fit for God’s presence.
Now the trick in all this sanctification stuff is to keep your eyes on the goal
and don’t get distracted by what’s happening over here. In other words, you’ve got a final goal which
is to be fit for God’s presence. That
goal hasn’t changed; that was the goal before the fall, that’s the goal after
the fall. The fact that sin has come in,
the fact that death has come in, that Satan is around, all the rest of it, only
changes the way we get to the goal but it doesn’t change the goal. The goal stays the same. Now watch why this is so important that you
understand that the fall, and sin, and rebellion, and suffering, and sorrow,
does not change man’s destiny. Man is
still destined to be fit for God, and apart from all the sufferings and all the
rest of it, those things now are turned into something good. But those things are just intermediary steps
to this ultimate thing.
You might look at it again this way; man’s goal was to be fit for God. As a result of the fall we now have a burden placed upon that, a weight that presses down, that burdens us, called sin, and its byproduct, death. But the sin and its byproduct, or final product, death, is only something that’s been added but doesn’t change that original goal to be fit for God’s presence. So as before Adam had to learn +R, he had to acquire that as a result of historical decision making that would be commandment oriented decision making and not pleasure sending decision making, now we have added to it the additional problem of getting rid of –R learned behavior patterns that plague us all the time. But just because we have that doesn’t mean that getting rid of sin is as important as picking up +R.
Now let me show you why this should relieve some of you of a great deal of pressure in the Christian life, if you understand what’s happening here. You go through life and the more you grow in Christ the more acute your conscience becomes, and the more acute your conscience becomes the more you’re aware of your faults. And the more you’re aware of the faults the greater you tend to become depressed and feel guilty and so on. Well, the problem is that if you don’t manage this problem and meet it soundly, biblically, what’s going to happen is that you can take a nosedive. You’ll grow up to a certain point where you’re conscience becomes more and more and more and more sensitive, and then you’ll reach the place where you see so many things wrong that you know are out of conformity with God’s ideal in your life the tendency is to become depressed over it and just give up and then the [can’t understand word] comes down.
Now that’s exactly the problem the Hebrews are facing and this author meets it in a way that I’ve never seen in Christian devotionals. What he does is he simply says now look, you have gotten so much +R, say your curve of increasing righteousness in the sense of learned behavior patterns is like that, and you never reach the ideal. The ideal may be way up here and you’re always aware of this, plus the fact, to add insult to injury, your –R, you never seem to get rid of that either; you’d like to get down to the zero level but you can’t. And you’ve always got this crud that you’re having to deal with, and the tendency, and we have to fight it this requires a conscious effort on all of our parts, we have to fight off this tendency, the tendency to become depressed over this, we have to fight off the tendency to slowly and we won’t even notice we’re doing it, slip over into sanctification by works, that we have to now revert… even though in theory we argue oh no, I believe I’m saved by grace and sanctified by grace and all the rest, but in practice we veer off the road and get in this side ditch of legalism, which says that I have to gain approval of God first, before I can get on with the show.
Now I know, for a matter of fact, that many think this way; it comes out over and over and over and over and over again that people think, who have listened to the Word, listened to the Word, listened to the Word, over and over and over and over, still have the idea that they have to gain approval of God, meet His ideal standard, before God can work in their life. Now when will we get it through out heads that not only is this an impossibility but God never asks this. That’s where justification comes in; justification, which is the base of sanctification means that before you were even aware of sin… let’s use an illustration; when you come to Christ, suppose you know three –R learned behavior patterns you have. Now it’s five or six years later, you’ve grown spiritually and now you’re aware of about 20 or 30 –R learned behavior patterns that you have and you say boy, that’s great progress. Well, it is progress because what that forces you to do… forces you I say, it forces you to either go into a depression about the thing or forces you to come to terms with God’s grace, that when He justifies you, you didn’t even know the score at all because the moment He justified you, when you came to Christ, you had conscious awareness of only… say three sin patterns in your life, probable some overt thing that society makes a big deal out of. And so you were conscious of those things and that’s all you were conscious of but when God justifies you, since He’s omniscient, He justified you knowing all of them. Knowing things that you haven’t even yet discovered about yourself. In spite of God’s omniscient perception of your heart, which means a perfect perception of your heart, in spite of all that God justifies you.
And God cleared you on the basis of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And because He finished that work and God applied it to your account and God therefore legally clears you from all guilt, even the guilt that you don’t know as yet, and that was accomplished at a point in time and can’t be undone, because God has done all of that, you see that puts sin out of the picture as far as sanctification is concerned. It sounds odd to say it this way but I’m trying to make a point that sanctification before the fall didn’t involve sin and in the way I’m talking right at this moment sanctification after the fall doesn’t involve sin because before the fall there wasn’t any sin to worry about and after the fall the sin that is there to worry about is dealt with at the point of justification.
And so therefore sanctification is strictly the growth process by which the new nature is put on, putting of the new man and putting off of the old man. Now this putting on and putting off bit isn’t gaining approbation; you can’t improve upon justification. Here’s where we tend to get fatheaded about our own spiritual life. You can’t increase God’s approval by anything you do in this legal sense because when He justifies you He totally approves, not of what you have done but since by the doctrine of justification you are placed in union with Christ, when God sees Christ He’s perfectly satisfied, and therefore from the point of justification, if you’re a Christian tonight, from the point of justification Christ is seen in your place and therefore you are perfectly acceptable.
Therefore, God the Holy Spirit is now free to operate as He wishes in your life to straighten things out and rebuild and build a new nature, take over your personality and morally transform it. Now the Holy Spirit can do that only because the Holy Spirit has legal clearance to do that, first by this doctrine of justification. So I’ll go over this and over this and over this and maybe by the 55th time one or two people will see it.
Now the sanctification thing that we see in Hebrews, again if you want two
pictures of what sanctification’s goal is, and the goal is to be fit for God,
if you want two pictures of that, I would suggest you read 1 Samuel 3:1-3,
that’s where Samuel has this desire and thirst to see God’s presence, he’s
taken his sleeping bag and bivouac outside the tabernacle and the reason is
that he wants to be there when God’s presence speaks. And the other illustration is 2 Samuel 7,
when David gets this word from God, remember God doesn’t appear to him in a
vision, just the prophet walks in and tells him, Nathan tells him this, and
David gets so excited by what God has said in His word that David turns right
around and then goes and wants to seek out God’s presence.
Now that heart desire of Samuel and the heart desire of David is the goal or is the focus on the goal of sanctification; that’s what’s the story is all about. And those of you who have heard me read the quotation by McCauley on the Puritans, you remember that one statement where he said that the Puritans weren’t satisfied to peer through a veil, but they wanted to gaze on God full, in full glory. And that passionate desire to see God is the real issue in sanctification. That’s why the great saints down through the history of the Church have said if that desire is in your heart it’ll take care of the sin problem. They weren’t making light of sin, they were simply saying that will be just looked upon as an impediment to this higher, more final ultimate goal, which is to see God’s presence, and if you’re passionately concerned with and that’s your final goal, then obviously you’re going to be against anything that tries to thwart or come across that goal. And therefore you automatically find yourself hating sin.
But the hating of sin first is wrong; that’s putting the cart before the horse. Hating sin, we think of hating sin as always lead to monasticism, asceticism, legalism down through church history. The idea, for example of fasting, this is a good illustration where everybody is screwed up on this concept. Fasting is often cited as a religious exercise whereby because I give up food therefore I am benefited spiritually. And it’s the putting off of the weakness of mortality and then as a result of putting off the weaknesses or mortality, therefore I’m automatically blessed. Completely 180 degrees wrong. Fasting in Scripture always occurred as an intermediate goal, as a by-product of a prior goal which is to seek God’s presence. This is what Jesus Christ did for 40 days and 40 nights. It wasn’t that Jesus decided, say, you know I need some spiritual strength so what I’m going to do is give up food for forty days, and then the discipline that comes from giving up food, when the baked food comes by and I can smell it, when the steak comes in front of me and I can smell it, the discipline to say now, that’s going to help me spiritually. Well thank God the problem of sanctification doesn’t come that way. That isn’t going to help you, it’s only going to help you lose weight but it isn’t going to help you become sanctified. You’re sanctified for the same reason Jesus Christ was sanctified in this fasting process because He was so occupied, or we might even say preoccupied with seeking God’s presence that He didn’t have time for food.
Now in a secular way most of you have fasted at one time or another and you never realized that what’s you were doing. If you have ever been too busy to eat, that is the nearest analogy to fasting. If you’ve ever been involved in a job, doing housework, painting something, fixing up outside, working at your business, wherever it may be, working on a paper, and you’re so busy that you can’t eat that is directly analogous to Biblical fasting. Except in the Biblical case you’d be concerned either with the counseling and exercise of some ministry, study of the Word of God, prayer, or something like that and you’d be so busy that you’d just forget to eat. And the true fasting, you see, you’re actually forgetting to eat, it’s not that you’re saying I must not eat, I must not eat, I must not eat, I must not eat. It’s not that at all because if you read carefully the fasting of Jesus Christ, after He was through, then He got hungry. He wasn’t hungry all during those 40 days. The Bible specifically says after the period of testing is over then the memory of food came to His mind. And then the angels came and ministered. So it wasn’t that He wasn’t consciously rejecting food. Fasting is not the conscious discipline rejecting of food. That’s Weight Watcher’s or something but that is not fasting. Fasting is you just simply forgot about it; that’s what it is.
Okay, so those should set in perspective the doctrine of sanctification in Hebrews. Now in Hebrews 2:14 we’re going to get into at least two verses tonight, we’ll have to go slow and I have to be very careful when I write Greek up here because we have budding Greek scholars. Verse 14, “Forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same, that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil, [15] And deliver them who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” We’re going to do those two verses. I never ceased to be amazed at how the Lord always times my study. We had one of the hardest funerals I’ve ever done today and the passage of Scripture that I was studying all morning happened to be Hebrews 2:14-15 and it’s amazing how this always works out. We had some teenagers in here this morning from the drug culture and from all other places around Lubbock and one of their own had been shot and killed and when some of these teenagers came by that casket this afternoon and looked in and saw one of their own who had died, I wished you could have been here and stood where I was, at the head of the casket, and watched the expressions on their face. I’m sure some of these kids never though that hanging around with the wrong crowd and so on can lead to this kind of thing. I think for some it was a very new experience. And I hope it will be a redeeming experience for them because this is the kind of thing where apparently some people only learn the hard way and some of these kids are only going to learn by facing death face to face and seeing that eternity is something that is not far away from them just because they’re young people. And some of you who think that way, that you have eternity to make up your mind what to do with the Word of God, that God is automatically going to let you live 60 or 70 more years, you have another thought coming because God might not. He could choose to take you right out tonight and you have no say in the matter, accidents, disease or anything else, He’s got a thousand agents that God can use under His sovereignty to take you out. And that means that you should live your life in the light of this kind of thing and never make light, or postpone, or procrastinate the application of the Word of God, you don’t have time to do it, there’s too many other things going on.
In Hebrews 10:14, “Forasmuch, then, as the children,” of God, the word then, oun, this is a Greek particle, it’s the particle indicating a sequence of thought and particularly those of you who are studying Greek, please notice these articles; they are keys to exegeting the text. When you see these inferential particles it’s a signal for you to stop and say just a minute, what has gone on before this. So when you see the “then” in verse 14, it must mean something is being concluded from what has previously been said. So verses 9-13 precede verse 14 and give the basis for this inference.
Now let’s go backwards again, through verses 9-13. In verses 11-13 we have one block of material there where it shows the Messiah and believers are of one design under God, it’s the one, “He that sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all of one,” that is one design under God. So you have the unity stressed between Messiah and His people whom He saved. Then in verse 10, backing up because it’s logically backwards, verses 11-13 is the first thing to know, the union of Messiah and believers, then verse 10 is built on that, because of this common design, then Messiah is to be treated in the same way as all other men. That’s why we have indicated that there are three things, three areas that you want to see: how man was before the fall; how man is after the fall, and Jesus Christ. Now before the fall man was to learn +R; +R learned behavior patterns under tension; Adam had tension in an innocent environment. He had tension in the sense that he had to face a real choice.
And people who fuss at you because you hold the historic orthodox Christian position on suffering and saying why, if God knew that we were going to sin, why did He ever make us? These wining crybabies would rather have no responsibility than the possibility of serving God. That’s ultimately their objection. Their objection basically is that if I can’t serve God and have my own way, I’d rather not have responsibility at all. Now that’s ultimately what they’re saying behind this objection to our position.
But before the fall man had this obligation. Now after the fall man still has a primary obligation because he’s still man. Jesus Christ has the obligation in His humanity because He is still man, so that is the same; before the fall, after the fall, with Jesus Christ. What has changed is that after the fall we have the results of the curse; we have death. Now it pleased God to identify Christ, not with innocent man, but with fallen man, because Jesus Christ is going to lead a new humanity out of a sinking ship but He’s got to be part of the sinking ship first. So Jesus Christ is also identified with man, not a before the fall, but He’s identified with man after the fall, therefore in verse 9, going up one more verse, Messiah had reached the goal or the destiny of man in His own personal, individual life, by going through death.
In other words, before the fall man could have reached true righteousness without having to go through the events of death. After the fall no man can reach righteousness except by going through death, with one exception, that’s the rapture generation. But normally every man after the fall reaches the goal for man after he goes through death and there’s no way around it. There’s only one road and there’s a gate in the road that says death. And we all have to go through the gate, every one of us. The gate wasn’t always on the road, at one time we could have traveled the road without stopping at the point of death. Now we can’t because we’re all member together of a damned human race. That being so, and Jesus Christ identifies Himself with in our fallenness and He too goes through the same gate, the death gate, and it’s going through the death gate that He reaches the goal.
Now in verse 14, as a result of this there’s going to be a conclusion made, “then,” and then there’s a word in the King James that’s translated “forasmuch,” and this can also be translated as “since.” “Since the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same,” now the word “children” is a word that is identified from the context, because in verse 13 the word “children” is used from Isaiah 8:18. Do you recall what Isaiah 8:18; remember we studied Isaiah 8:18 and Isaiah 8:18 and we said this was a fore view of a particular thing about Messiah. Now the word “children” in Isaiah’s passage referred to two people; remember those big long names, he had to name his children those names after his ministry, which was announcing God’s judgment and announcing God’s salvation upon the saved remnant.
So the Isaiah passage, from where we get the “children,” originally they are children given to Isaiah as a sign of the future completion of God’s judgments upon the unregenerate and God’s deliverance of the regenerate remnant. So you have two sons, one son is judgment; the other son is remnant saved. And those are the two points of Isaiah’s message. And to reassure Isaiah that his message was going to be fulfilled, whether Isaiah saw it or not, it was going to be fulfilled, God gave him these two sons. So the sons have two interesting points: number one, they are Isaiah’s sons, and they are blood relationship with him, they are of Isaiah’s nature, so Isaiah and his sons both share the same nature, but then again his sons are an evidence, a testimony to him that God is going to keep His Word.
And so we said last time that we as the, as the remnant so to speak in our day, members of the body of Christ, are Christ’s children in the same way Isaiah’s sons were his children. We announce, by our presence, judgment and damnation upon the world, we are a savior of death to those that are dying, and the reason for this is that the unsaved man realizes and has no basis for pleading innocency because all around him people are trusting in the Savior, and if he doesn’t trust in the Savior he can’t blame God. Other men have trusted in the Savior, what’s his problem? Negative volition, so it wipes out the excuses. And then our presence in the world is also a testimony that God is going to finish His program exactly and perfectly.
So now the author of Hebrews takes the word “children” in verse 14 and if you have a Greek text you’ll see that it’s written in dark print, some of the Greek texts have it in dark print, because it is an exegesis of verse 13. He’s just made a point in verse 13, so he says “then, inasmuch” or “since those children” and by this now he exegetes it to mean the children are regenerate, the regenerate believers, “are partakers of flesh and blood.” Now actually it’s “blood and flesh.” It’s twisted around to emphasize mortality. Now what do we mean by mortality. There are three types of bodies in the world: corruptible, corrupted and incorruptible. Incorruptible bodies are resurrection bodies. Corruptible bodies would be Adam’s body before the fall; corrupted bodies would be our present state today, after the fall. Now those first two kinds of bodies, both the corruptible and the corrupted are classed as mortal, that is they are either dying or they’re subject to death. That’s what it means when the Bible talks about we are mortal. And immortality is the incorruptible.
Now, when it says then, “as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, it simply is saying that believers are mortal. We have corrupted bodies, we’re mortal and since we are mortal, then “He Himself likewise took part of the same,” mortality… mortality. This is a rather phenomenal statement because in all the ancient religions of the world the gods were always the immortal ones and men are always the mortal ones. And there’s always this seeking after eternal life, the Utnapistim legend, which is the Babylonian and Sumerian and Noah’s ark type thing; that has become incorporated in a search for eternal life, the Gilgamesh epic I’m thinking of. And you can go all through history and find these myths where men passionately seek immortality.
The reason men passionately seek immortality is because that’s the way you were made; you were made for immortality and mortality is intuitive to the human race, we intuitively sense that mortality just doesn’t fit us. We intuitively sense that we’re somehow structured and built for immortality. There’s something wrong about mortality, we can’t, without the Word of God really pinpoint it but we all have this gnawing feeling that mortality isn’t all there is to life.
All right, we are mortal, but “He Himself likewise took part of the same,” that is Jesus Christ became mortal. Now look at the difference in the verbs; those of you studying Greek I want you to look at the tense difference. This is a good illustration of what happens when you have a tense shift. kekoinoneke , this is a perfect tense, this koino, you should know that, you can guess at the meaning of these, koino, Koine Greek, common, something shared in common, and so this is the word to share in common, have fellowship with, have the same thing. And when you have a perfect tense in the Greek you repeat the first consonants, put an en usually and you get kekoinonos, and this[he’s writing on overhead] is the perfect, that’s the perfect tense and the perfect tense has this kind of an action, it starts at a point in time and continues. So the perfect tense is used for this verb, “are partakers,” that is, from creation up through the present moment we are mortal. That’s what it’s saying.
But it’s interesting that he doesn’t use the perfect tense when he comes to Jesus Christ, because when he comes to Christ the verb is in the aorist tense and the aorist tense means a point in time. And here Christ’s point in time is from the virgin birth till the time he dies. So what it’s saying is that though we are still in, from virtue of creation, we are still mortal, we haven’t gotten, there’s been no human being yet that’s got a resurrection body. Jesus Christ, virgin born and died and that’s the end of it; for a span of time Christ was mortal. That’s what this verse is saying. This also is a very important verse because it shows you the author believed that Christ preexisted the virgin birth because at one time He wasn’t mortal, He then became mortal, and now He’s no longer mortal. So obviously he’s talking about Jesus Christ as God man, picking up mortal humanity in the same person, dropping it, receiving an immortal human nature and going on.
So for a time Jesus Christ took part of the same, “that,” hina, this is the purpose clause, “in order that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death,” now there’s something that’s going to be very, very critical here and again I hope this will… it’s kind of hard to say it clearly and that’s why I’m going to just say it again and again and again in this Hebrews series. Usually you would hear it said, and there’s nothing wrong with this, it’s just incomplete, but usually you hear it said why did Jesus Christ become a man? Anselm wrote a great work, Cur Deus Homo, why the God-Man. And in the Middle Ages he tried to show why the incarnation had to be, and the incarnation had to be because deity can’t die, and only humanity can die, only something mortal, that’s what the word means, mortal; therefore Christ had to become mortal in order to die.
Well, that’s correct, but if you go back to our original point that sin, see the cross, the death of Christ on the cross, is tied up with the whole problem of sin. But this passage is teaching that Christ would have become man whether sin existed or not, because… forget the sin problem, if Jesus Christ is going to identify with the human race and be its head and its leader, He too has to learn righteousness as a man. He too.. pretend, for example, He is [can’t understand word] and in this case unfallen state, Jesus Christ learning +R learned behavior patterns, He would still have had to have learned absolute righteousness by historic obedience. So when you say why did Christ become man, it’s true He had to become man to die, that’s true, but He also had to become man if He ever wanted to fulfill His position as the head of a human mortal race, and the Savior.. He wouldn’t be a Savior without sin, but the leader of a mortal human race. So you can debate the details, well, we wouldn’t have needed a Savior if there hadn’t been sin but I’m trying to separate in your mind the sanctification, the overall goal from the immediate goal, the sin problem. Don’t consider the sin as an ultimate question because it really isn’t, that came in after creation. It’s not part of the original creation. Sin is a temporary problem in history and I’m not trying to minimize sin when I say that, I’m just trying to set it in its proper perspective.
So Jesus Christ became man, He became mortal. Now incidentally, the purpose of it was to die, yes but death wasn’t the only reason, “that through death He might destroy,” now this word is loaded with all sorts of theological connotations. The word “death” is prefaced with a preposition, dia, dia can be used with certain cases. When it is used with a genitive case, dia refers to agency and it refers to the fact that Jesus Christ is going to destroy something. And he’s going to destroy something or that person by means of the agency of death. Here you have God’s fantastic sovereignty. He’s a master chess player. The very thing that damns us is the thing that is a two-edged sword that cuts right back and finally destroys death itself. Death destroys itself.
“… that through death He might destroy,” now the word “destroy,” katargeo, this is a word that doesn’t mean to destroy in the sense of annihilation, because if it does we’re in trouble because that certainly hasn’t happened. See, it says “destroy him that had the power of death, that is the devil,” well Jesus Christ certainly hasn’t annihilated the devil. The word doesn’t mean annihilate; the word means to deactivate or to render inoperative. Let me give you some illustrations as to how this occurs in the Scripture.
Turn to Luke 13:7; Luke 13:7 is the best illustration in the Bible because it gives you something concrete to get in your mental moving picture screen and visualize it. To sympathize with the problem of Luke 13:7 think of an apartment or house where you may be and you have a limited amount of grass, a limited amount of garden and you want to make the gets use of your garden possible. The only problem is now you go home and you look and you see some cruddy plant that you planted there that occupies space, it doesn’t produce anything, it just takes up space. Now in Luke 13:7 that’s the point. “The said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none. Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?” Now that is the same verb, why they translated it this way I don’t know but it’s the same word, katargeo, and it refers to rendering the ground inoperative. Now does the fig tree destroy the ground? No. Does the fig tree poison the ground. No. Does the fig tree do anything to the ground, really? No. But what the fig tree does, it blocks the ground from its usefulness. It’s acting as an impediment or block because you can’t use the ground for anything else.
Now let me show you a very, very interesting thing. Turn to Romans 6:6 and we’ll see Paul uses katargeo the same way for the sin nature. This is one of the greatest promises you’ve got going for you in Scripture. And by careful study of Romans 6:6 you can tell how successful you are in appropriating what God has done for you. In a way it’s kind of discouraging because when you see what God has prepared for us and you see what actually comes out you realize that we are not operating very smoothly or very wisely. In Romans 6:6 it says: “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be katargeo, [destroyed]” neutralized. Now look at that, here’s number one enemy, the sin nature. And that sin nature is said to be in Romans 6:6 just like the ground was with the fig tree growing on it. Now what did we say? Think back to the concrete easy to visualize illustration from Luke. Visualize a plot of earth, occupied by some idiot tree, that is just taking up space, wasting the ground and keeping the ground from being useful.
All right, now reverse it bring it over here to the sin nature, pretend the sin nature is the plot of ground. Now what does the sin nature want to grow? It wants to grow weeds. Weeds, in Proverbs, there’s a little analogy here between the weeds that grow up from the ground and the –R learned behavior patterns that are sin nature wants to sprout in our soul. The sin nature wants to send up these sprouts all the time, of weeds. This is why you can never say well, I got rid of that problem and now it won’t be back. You can no more say because you got rid of a problem it’ll never be back than you can say because I got rid of the weeds in my garden they won’t be back. Wanna bet! All right, same thing with the sin nature. But look at this promise in Romans 6. If the Greek means what it’s supposed to say, it’s saying something very powerful. What the Greek is saying is that this sin nature is blocked, that Christ has given the assets to us at the point of salvation to keep that sin nature completely walled in.
Now compare that to the practice in our lives and you see the tremendous discrepancy of what Jesus Christ has already given compared to how we’re using it. Now that’s a fantastic discrepancy. And the Scriptures go on and on and on and promise that this is one of the things you’ve been given. Now you see, some people see this discrepancy, they see the fact they’re not having victory in the Christian life, they get all discouraged and run off to the charismatic movement because they want extra stuff, extra power, extra this, extra that, because they feel like they never got it at salvation. Yes you did; everything was given at the point of salvation plus nothing afterwards. You are complete in Him, past tense, aorist. Very few people in the charismatic circles use their Greek; few know it and those that know it don’t use it properly. If they did they wouldn’t be in the charismatic movement because the New Testament simply doesn’t support it. The whole point is that all these assets were already given. Katargeo, the sin is not destroyed, that’s not what the New Testament is saying; it is saying that Jesus Christ died in order to make it inoperative, so it can’t send up the weeds.
Now come over and look at the same thing in Hebrews 2:14; now it’s not the sin nature that’s the problem, now it’s Satan himself that’s the problem. Look at how powerful this verse is; this is just as powerful as Romans 6:6 is against the sin nature, so Hebrews 2:14 gives us the power against Satan himself. Jesus Christ, hina, that, “in order that by means of death He might render inoperative him,” who? Satan. In other words, Jesus Christ’s death was intended to deliver us now, not just in the future, now. Christ intended that when He died, that the results of that death be enjoyed now at the present possibility. Not just waiting for heaven but enjoying it now, for Jesus Christ has died to render Satan inoperative. Just like that plot of earth, can’t send its shoots up, Satan can’t have his barbs and all of his problems, he wants to develop problems, he wants to divide believers, he wants to destroy the Church, he wants to keep men blind to the gospel, he wants to knock believers out of the Word of God, he wants to get you looking at all your problems instead of all of God’s grace. He wants to destroy you from being grace oriented, he wants to wipe out the promises from your conscious mind, he wants you to forget every piece of doctrine you ever learned, particularly when there’s a problem around, and he tries the one-two punch. If he can’t get you to lose faith in doctrine, if he can’t distract you, then what he does, he’ll hit you with a tremendous problem that will destroy you down to the core of your soul and at the same try then to distract you from the Word and it usually works.
But the point here is, that’s what he wants to but the cross of Christ renders Satan inoperative. But again we have a discrepancy; as in Romans 6:6 the sin nature is rendered inoperative, and yet in practice we all have the experience, the sin nature is not rendered inoperative and we can only conclude it’s our failure to correctly and wisely appropriate what we have received. Now do you understand why it’s so important to study the Word and study the Word and study the Word and study it some more; it’s the only place where we’ve got the instructions on how to do it.
All right, same thing here with Satan. Christ is not interested in having Satan destroyed in the sense of annihilation. That’s coming later in history. Satan is around but he is rendered inoperative. Now you say well how, give me more details. All right, all the details are here in verses 14-15. “…that He might render him,” now this is interesting, “who has the power of death, echo, this is a form of the verb echo, echo is a word, it means to have, possess, the word echo, used here in the present tense tells you something very interesting. Satan still has the power of death; that has not been taken away from him. So whatever this neutralizing work is in verse 14 it can’t mean that he’s taken the gun out of Satan’s hand; that can’t be it. He’s going to, but 1 Corinthians 15:55 says that the last enemy that Christ is going to destroy is death. And He hasn’t destroyed it yet. We’re not in the eternal state in case you haven’t noticed.
So that being the case, therefore it must mean that there’s something else that’s happened, not disarming Satan, not annihilating Satan, but doing something else to render his program inoperative. Now it’s very critical that we study carefully what’s coming up here, because master this and you break the back of Satan’s influence in your life. This is a very critical passage.
“…that He might neutralize him that has the power of death,” Satan is pictured as the hooded executioner of the court of God. He is the one who kills, Satan. Who is it that God turns over for death in 1 Corinthians, even after Pentecost? Turn him over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. Satan still carries out his sentences of execution passed by God in His divine import. Satan is still the executioner, Satan still has the power of death. That has not been taken from him, but what has been taken from him is something else that is now mentioned in verse 15 and it’s this something else that is a key to handling and [can’t understand word] counterattacks against Satan.
Hebrews
You say, well I don’t see how that’s the master weapon that’s used. Well you have to interpret the phrase the way the author of Hebrews is using it. And how does the author of Hebrews use “fear of death?” Turn to Hebrews 9:27, here’s the concept; you interpret on the basis of the context. And if you see a phrase you don’t understand look how that phrase is used by the same author in the same epistle. Now look; our objective now is to study Satan’s weapon. We’re getting some intelligence on the enemy, “fear of death,” and we have to understand what “fear of death” is.
In Hebrews 9:27, “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” All right, in the context of the way the author of Hebrews uses the word death what do you think is on his mind when he says “fear of death,” anyone. [someone answers] Which we would translate …what term does that come across? Psychological term? Guilt. Guilt! You say well I don’t see the connection; because you don’t look long enough. That is Satan’s number one device.
Let’s look at how he uses it, certain ways that he’s using it. One way that he uses it simply to terrorize. Let’s list the number of ways he uses guilt. To terrorize; if you can terrorize a group of people you immobilize them, they can’t think, they can’t be stable, they fall apart. You watch what’s going to happen around this country a few more months, when this economic thing gets worse and you watch the people that are going to be falling apart and shooting themselves and everything else. We have a person in this congregation who’s related to a doctor and they tell how the patients come into the doctor all the time, even now, wanting tranquilizers, wanting to talk to somebody about this kind of thing. People all around you are falling apart. Now the heat’s turning on and the temperature is getting hotter. And only those believers who systematically take in the Word are going to be prepared to hack it And you’re going to watch what you thought were great believers fall completely apart because they grounded their whole Christian experience on experience and all the experience they have now is sorrow, heartache, job loss, this disaster, that disaster, this crisis, that crisis, and because these are the kind of people that use over and over of building everything on the basis of experience, when their experience goes rotten they go rotten. When their experience is bad they’re bad. Now that’s what we have to learn as believers, to prepare for disaster, by making something other than experience the base, and that something other than is the Word of God.
Now if you haven’t yet learned to make the Word of God your base, you are going to be one of those that falls apart when the going gets rough. God is going to teach this nation a few lessons because the Word of God has been taught in this country and taught in this country over and over and over and over and self-righteousness works type Americans still can’t get through their head the concept of grace. And God intends that mankind learn it and so therefore we’re going to get it. We have violated God’s laws in every sphere, we have violated in the economic sphere, in the military sphere, every sphere you can name we’re in rebellion. And God isn’t going to tolerate it and so He’s just lowering the boom. Now in those kinds of conditions you’re going to have people in terror and you watch, you’ll have the opportunity to watch what happens when leaders fall apart, because they too are terrified. People in terror can’t think straight, and therefore they can’t decide, they can’t choose, they can’t do anything.
The only thing you’ve got going for you is the Word and this passage is going to show you something about this. Satan will terrorize you at the point deepest in your heart, so deep in fact, that probably 90% of the satanically administered terror in all our hearts is almost unseen. It’s just there as a seething caldron of guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, and the more he can inflate the sense of guilt deep in our hearts the more unsettled we become because we don’t have confidence, we can’t relax. And so we’re always doing this, doing that, doing something else, stopping this, going somewhere, terror, that’s one of the ways Satan uses guilt.
But there are more sophisticated techniques that he uses just besides terrorizing you. He will magnify the sense of judgment, the sense of guilt to the point where you will become discouraged. Where he will say, not the Holy Spirit but Satan, will so emphasize your sins and your shortcomings, and he will want you to dwell on these things to the point you get discouraged and you say look, I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, it just doesn’t work, I’m going to chuck the whole thing. That’s another very useful technique.
You got to be careful here because the Holy Spirit will do the same thing and the only way I know to distinguish how God the Holy Spirit convicts and how Satan convicts, two guidelines; when Satan convicts it’s never specific, it’s always just a vague guilt feeling, just guilt for the guilt’s sake for guilt’s sake. When the Holy Spirit convicts you generally He does it through the Word. He’ll drive you into the text of Scripture, and as you read, all of a sudden a verse will pop out at you or a principle you’ve learned in doctrine will pop out and you’ll say I’m in violation of that point. And the Holy Spirit loves you and when He corrects you it’s done but it’s loving. See, the Holy Spirit doesn’t want you to be terrified. And the Holy Spirit doesn’t [can’t understand word] in making us miserable, He wants to get on with the work, the work isn’t just the doctrine of sanctification, the work is not just to get rid of sin, the work is to go on to better things, to make us fit for God. And that’s what the Holy Spirit wants to get us on to, not just getting rid of the sin. But Satan doesn’t want to make us fit for God’s presence, so what does he do. He sits around, sits around, dwelling upon it, day after day after day after day after day, same old crud. Now that’s the satanic nature. Satan doesn’t go to what is better, the ultimate test. So the second way that Satan uses the fear of death, which is guilt, is discouragement, to get you to quit. All he wants you to do is quit, then he’ll leave you alone for a while. He cannot stand Christians who keep on moving. And so people that are generally brought up in these homes today where there is no discipline are quitters. The average young person, the average teenager I saw this morning was a quitter. And I think just walking in front of a person whom they loved and they knew very closely, suddenly destroyed by gunfire, taken out, and now they have to look eyeball to eyeball, the fear of death. It impresses and it shocks but it’s what we need.
So a third weapon how he’ll use the fear of death in your heart: he’ll get you to fear God, to an abnormal degree where you forget grace, to the point where you forget grace! Again, it’ll sound very pious at first, God is a God of justice. Yes He is. God sends people to hell; yes He does. But God is also a God of fantastic grace. And so a third way he’ll use guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt until you get to the point where you turn away from grace, go over to works and then he’s got you locked in good, because the moment you forget grace you have no way of coping with the guilt then and then what you’re going to do is you’re going off to see some psychiatrist and he’ll give you a punch of pills, four a day or something to take, or five a day, or three after every meal or something until he has you so drugged you can’t add two and two and get four, and that’s just a cop out, take a pill to great real, that’s real smart!
All right, then the fourth thing, the way this usually pans out and this is an occupational hazard of believers who are otherwise well balanced, through fear of guilt and disapproval he will drive you into forms of asceticism, where you deny legitimate pleasures. And he’ll get you feeling guilty over just enjoying life and sell you a big long bill of goods that in order to be a spiritual person, pleasing to God, you’ve got to be unhappy.
Now that’s how he uses fear, fear of death, the way the author of Hebrews means it. so let’s turn to Hebrews 2;15 once again, Christ intends to “deliver them who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime, subject to bondage.” Now that’s not talking about salvation in heaven; that’s talking about right now, Christ intends that we perceive that He has completely paid the price and therefore we are perfectly acceptable; we’re in a family, it’s no longer a question of getting into the family, the only question is are you or are you not adhering to your fathers’ will? Are you or are you not getting with it and in tune with His training program in your lie? That’s the issue not whether you’re acceptable in the family; you’re in the family if you’re a Christian tonight and if you’re not, it’s very easy, but if you are a Christian tonight then you’ve been accepted. And when it says that “He might neutralize Satan that has the power of death…and deliver them” it means that Christ in His finished work has removed the legal threat.
Now look, you’ve got to know something here, Satan will come along and he has the power of death. The Bible says he has this. What does that mean? He has among other things the power to stimulate guilt in your mind. Just from outside, from external situations, he can influence, mental telepathy, I don’t know what it is, but he has a way of stimulating guilt and knocking you off balance. And he’ll try to do this, and he’ll always do this, the power of death, the fear of death, the idea… see, he’s the executioner, and he’s essentially saying I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you. And this is why Peter pictures Satan as a roaring lion, a lion isn’t looking around for some milk to lap up, he’s looking around for some meat to eat. “A roaring lion seeking whom he may devour,” that’s Satan, I want to get you, I’m going to get you. Now if you don’t know the doctrine of justification he will because very foolishly you’re not using the weapons that God designed for you to meet this attack. And the weapon is given for you in this verse.
I want to end by turning to Revelation 1:18
because here’s the transfer of authority and here’s what it means that though
Satan has the power of death, he’s got a higher commander now. See, before Christ sat on the throne God had
the reign over Satan but now the neat thing now is this. In the Old Testament God, see the book of Job
and other passages, 1 Kings 22, God sent down to Satan what he could and could
not do. Now Jesus Christ sends down to
Satan what he could and could not do because in Revelation
Next week we’ll finish up Hebrews 2.