God's Awesome Plan

Do any of you like watching movies? Do you like action movies? How about prison escapes?

There are two kinds of prison-escape movies. There are movies like Escape from Alcatraz or The Great Escape. In these movies the hero’s goal is to escape. There is no bigger goal.

Then there are movies which have prison-escape scenes but the escape is part of a bigger plan. In the Avengers movie Black Widow, Black Widow knows she has to break her pretend dad out of prison in order to get some information he has. In Mission Impossible 4, Ethan Hunt is in a Moscow jail. The Mission Impossible team has to break him out in order that the team can carry out the mission they’ve been given.

There’s a similarity between this and the Christian life. Before we become Christians, we're prisoners. We need to be broken out of prison.

In the early 18th century, the hymn-writer Charles Wesley wrote a hymn we still sing today. It’s called ‘And can it be’. In the fourth verse, Wesley wrote:

'Long my imprisoned spirit lay,

Fast bound in sin and nature's night

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray

I woke, the dungeon flamed with light

My chains fell off, my heart was free

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee'

Charles Wesley was an 18th child! That’s hard to imagine today! He was very privileged in many ways. He went to Westminster School and became head boy and then studied at Oxford University. But look at the words Wesley uses: ‘imprisoned’, ‘dungeon’, ‘chains’. Why would this privileged man feel like that?

Look how Wesley starts. ‘Long my imprisoned spirit lay … FAST BOUND IN SIN.’ Wesley believed that it was his sin that had put him in the dungeon.

He was right. Jesus once said, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin’ [John 8:34]. Paul wrote, ‘But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive…’ [Romans 7:6].

If we sin then the law has a hold over us. We’re captives.

But praise God … by going to the cross, Jesus broke US free from our prison.

I’m going to look at how Jesus did that later in this talk.

But I’d first like us to think about this prison break. I said at the beginning that there are two kinds of prison-escape movies. There are movies where the hero’s goal is to escape. The hero has no other goal. And there are movies where the prison escape is part of a bigger plan.

Christians fall into two camps. Some Christians think that the salvation Jesus has achieved for us is like an Escape-from-Alcatraz prison break. Jesus has broken us free. There’s no more danger of the fire of hell. But that’s it. Job done. There’s no more goal. There’s a great song by Amy Grant titled ‘Fat Baby’ which describes this kind of Christian:

'I know a man, maybe you know him, too

You never can tell; he might even be you

He knelt at the altar, and that was the end

He's saved, and that's all that matters to him.'

This Christian is saved and that’s the end of it as far as he’s concerned.

But some Christians think that salvation is like a Mission-Impossible prison break. Jesus has broken us free – and he’s done so with a purpose.

What do you think?

We started this little series of three talks on why Jesus went to the cross last week. My plan was to start with the Old Testament last week, to go on to the New Testament this week, and to think about how we respond next week.

I don’t want to spend much time going over what we looked at last week. But I’d like to remind you of just a couple of things.

We looked at the story, in Genesis 3, of how Adam and Eve ate from the tree God told Adam not to eat from. The Bible doesn’t use the word sin here. But this is what sin in. Sin is knowingly and deliberately disobeying God. God then banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and later, they die.

We see from this story that God doesn’t tolerate sin. That sin separates us from God. And that sin leads to death. I don’t want to elaborate on any of this now.

We also looked at the Passover. This is a very important story for us because Jesus was crucified during the Jewish feast of Passover. God doesn’t do things by accident so we imagine there is a connection between the Passover and Jesus’ death.

At the feast of Passover, Jews remember the time when they were slaves in Egypt. God sent a succession of plagues on Egypt to force the Egyptians to free his people. Finally, God sent a last, terrible plague. He sent a destroying angel who would take the lives of the firstborn in Egypt. But the destroyer didn’t touch the people of Israel. God had instructed the people of Israel to sacrifice lambs and daub their blood on the doorposts of their houses.