Measure Upon Measure – Death – The Restoration Of God - Part 10 (Section 2) Series

MEASURE UPON MEASURE – DEATH – THE RESTORATION OF GOD - Part 10 (Section 2)

I am doing a presentation on the results of sin that entered the human race. There are six consequences of that sin I am outlining, and we began DEATH in the last message with Serenity Ruined in the Garden through sinful disobedience. The study on death is the largest of the six, and I have had to split it into five separate sections. This time we are looking at the Saviour’s Road, that is, how our dear Lord encountered death in this world and on the cross.

Death is not nice and people shy away from it, and I think also they shy away from reading about it. I don’t expect too many might want to read these studies resulting from Adam’s sin and I can understand that. It is the isolation principle. In recent times I have lost so many relatives and friends to death, but praise the Lord, most of them belonged to Christ. Once you hit 70 and 80, you deal with the death of friends a lot.

Jesus did not shy away from death and one command he asked of us is to remember His death in the Lord’s Supper (Communion). Therefore it is imperative for us that we understand the death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

THE SAVIOUR’S ROAD

In this next section about death, we shall analyse what Christ has done on our behalf and the manner in which He identified with us in this particular consequence of sin, which was death. When considering the Saviour’s Road it soon becomes apparent that there are many angles from which this study could be approached. That is not surprising as the death of Christ stands as the central theme in the whole canon of scripture.

Paul delivers it concisely as, {{“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPTURES, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPTURES.”}} (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). We shall therefore reflect upon those portions which I feel are among the more significant.

Every sacrifice made in the Old Testament for sin carried with it a time projection spanning the centuries to the momentous morn on Golgotha’s hill. The central truth of any sacrifice, is that of a victim surrendering its life in a substitutionary role for the sinner. The animal sacrificed thus, stood in the place of the one who should have been there and whose sins would now be covered by the sacrifice. The account of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis chapter 22 is an example of that SUBSTITUTION but it also demonstrates God’s PROVISION of a sacrifice.

The first record there is of sacrifice involves the two brothers, Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 where one recognised the requirement of an acceptable offering. Abel then brought a lamb from the flock, but in contrast Cain brought the produce of a cursed earth, the best collections of human effort in his own strength.

God rejected Cain’s offering and while many reasons have been forwarded for that rejection, I think one valid reason was that it did not typify or portray the greatest sacrifice of all, that of the Lord Himself. Without shedding of blood there can be no remission of sins and that was recognised by Abel. Abel’s lamb spoke of the coming Lamb. As mentioned last time it was a lamb in all probability that God killed to provide a covering of skins for Adam and Eve. Cain rejected God’s way.

A precious account has been given in Exodus 12 of the Passover that meant redemption and deliverance for the families of Israel held under bondage in Egypt. Each family took its lamb and the shed blood was applied with hyssop to the doorposts and the lintel of each home. It was the blood that saved the firstborn sons. {{Exodus 12:13 “The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live 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.”}}

The lambs died for the deliverance from death when the angel of death visited. No blood, no deliverance; the blood saved from death. The people, safe from the judgment of God, sheltered in safety and feasted on the lamb, which was their strength for the exodus ahead in their wilderness journey. The lamb that met their redemption also provided their strength. What a wonderful provision God planned for those people.

One of our key verses in the New Testament is, “. . . For Christ our Passover has also been sacrificed.” (1 Corinthians 5:7). That is an eternally supreme fact for at the centre point of our faith that simple statement anchors an unfathomable depth. Charles Wesley put it this way, “‘Tis mystery all, immense and free, that Thou my God shouldst die for me.” Our Lord Jesus is the Lamb who stood in our place, in the place of sacrifice. He accepted our sins as His own and suffered the righteous punishment for us, and died in our stead. Through Adam we were dead, and death had its stranglehold over us. The Lamb made all that His own. As God provided for Adam’s covering to make him acceptable, so God’s Lamb has done the same for us.