NO Condemnation!
Romans Series
CCCAG August 2nd, 2020
Scripture- Romans 8:1-4
Introduction-
I grew up with the sneaking suspicion that God didn’t like me very much.
Broken home, horrible fights between my mom and dad. Being smaller and poor, I was teased a lot which made me shy and introverted.
So when I went to church and kept hearing about how God loves everyone, I was deeply suspicious of that message. I thought maybe it applied to everyone else but me.
As most of you know I grew up in the Lutheran Church. Even though I skipped most of the classes I was still confirmed at the age of 15. Because I was exposed to some Christian teaching I knew a few basic principles .
Principle one is that God is holy and hates sin
Principle 2 sinners go to hell
Because of the first two, I had developed a third-
principle 3 I am a Sinner that's probably bound for hell
That was as far as my personal understanding of God went, so I prompting put God on the back burner since he didn’t like me anyway.
For a good portion of my younger years I embraced that same lifestyle I grew up in- partying and living only for the moment and had no real future plans other than figuring out the next party time.
Due to a flood of negative circumstances in my life when I was 18, I enlisted in the military. In reception station right before you go to basic training, they used to give you those little New Testaments with Psalms as part of your general equipment. Outside of your basic training field manual it was the only book you were allowed to read at the basic training I attended.
So I read it a lot.
I was really confused by the teachings of Jesus. In one hand, he seemed to say that no one will ever qualify to go to heaven; not even The most religious among us. He said not even the scribes and Pharisees which I equated to be in like a priest or a pastor.
But on the other hand, he talked a lot about God's love and forgiveness, that God loved us so much that he sent Jesus to die for us.
I couldn't in my mind equate the two thoughts together.
I knew Jesus went to the cross for me but I didn't understand why.
The lack of understanding came from the same two places it comes from in our society today.
The first reason I didn’t understand the bible is because I never grew to appreciate the idea of respect for authority, even though the military was doing a great job pounding that into my head at that moment. Most of the authority figures in my life growing up had been deeply flawed and untrustworthy. That carried over into my ideas about God. I saw Him as a deeply capricious entity that just wanted to toss lightening bolts at people for any violation of His moral commands.
The second thing that kept me from understanding the bible is a serious lack of respect for the rule of law. I saw Laws or rules as challenges to circumvent. You put a fence up, I’d climb it. Put barbwire at the top of the fence, I’ll toss a jacket over it and climb it anyway. If you put arrows on the floor telling me to shop in this direction, my natural inclination is to go in the wrong direction. At best, rules were minor annoyances that kept me from enjoying life on my terms.
Because I grew up with these mindsets and attitudes, the ideas of justice, law, substitutionary atonement, or even that I was worthy of punishment was completely foreign to me. They had zero meaning or importance in my life.
After I went into the reserves and working in a factory on an assembly line run by a Christian, and the person to my right and left on this assembly line were very serious Christians.
I just mocked what they were telling me and caused a lot of frustration as they tried to show me the way to salvation. I wasn’t interested. After all, I had already read the bible and knew I was doomed to hell eventually, so I might as well try to enjoy life while it lasted.
That’s were most people I talk to today are.
Then someone showed me this verse we are going to read this morning. It began my journey toward understanding the cross of Christ, and all of what it meant to me personally, and to all of those who chose to kneel before the Savior and ask for forgiveness.
As you all know, we have been having members of the congregation read the scriptures while we have been in the book of Romans, but today, Because this scripture meant so much to me, I’m going to read it myself.
Just as a quick note- Romans 8 will be several sermons, so the month of August will be spent here in this chapter.
Scripture-
Rom 8:1-4
8 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.
Prayer
Whenever I read this scripture, it causes a lot of emotion within me to see the glorious Gospel condensed into a few verses.
We are going to take a few more minutes this morning to dissect what exactly Paul was saying to us here, and why it’s so important for us to not only live this, but proclaim it to everyone we know so that they can have the same chance we had to come to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ that we did.
Let’s put this in order so we know how to present it. The first principle we need to know is this-
I. Condemnation comes from the Law (dispensation of law)
I’m going to start with this example-
Let's say you're driving home from church this afternoon, your listening to the radio and singing along to your favorite song and all the sudden you see flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. You pull over into the shoulder and the Sheriff's Department car pulls in behind you.
Now say the deputy walks up to your car and says, “Sir, Ma’am, please step out of the car. I’m impounding your vehicle because I can’t stand the color red and your car is red and therefore I’m taking it away from you.”
You would be right in saying that’s ridiculous- there is no law against red cars. You can’t be condemned or punished for violating a non-existent law. You need a law to set a standard in order to earn a condemnation.
But, that’s not what happened. You know you have a bit of a lead foot, and wonder if you were driving too fast.
That changes everything, and there are two things that you know at this point .
One is that the sheriff's deputy must have seen you violate a law at some point.
#2 is that you're probably going to get some type of condemnation- a declaration of your guilt in breaking the law in the form of a traffic ticket for violating that law.
The principle we learn here is this- you cannot be condemned without some type of standard. We will say in this case, the speed limit is 30 miles an hour, and you were going 45 when you crossed the deputy’s radar gun.
You are in violation of the law. You have to pay the penalty.
That’s what Jesus did for us- he paid the penalty for our sin- He took that condemnation of guilt and paid the fine for us.
That raises the question- why did Jesus have to do that?
That was my sticking point in believing the bible-
Remember- I was a kid with little respect for authority and doesn’t consider the rules to apply to him, and has been just smart enough to avoid many of the legal aspects of that mindset.
So, my thought was- why didn’t God just forgive us? My attitude about it was- “Come on God, relax a little- don’t be so stringent. We are only human, we make mistakes, and since you created us this way, you can’t then condemn us when you made us to fail”
So why did Jesus have to be the one to take the condemnation?
II. Jesus took the condemnation
Genesis 3- God creates Adam and Eve and gives them one simple rule- don’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and if you do, you will die.
God gave a rule, or law, and consequence for breaking the rule.
One of the missing ideas in my mind growing up is that God is perfect in character. Being perfect in character comes with a certain behavioral limitation- God cannot lie or change his mind as that would be saying he was mistaken in what he said earlier. Adam and Eve had to die if they broke that rule.
WE all know they broke the rule, and as the first humans on the planet, they condemned the rest of their descendants to be infected with the same genetic predisposition to rebel against God’s work that they had.
Instead of immediately taking their lives, God takes the life of animal, probably a lamb but the bible isn’t specific, and clothes them with the dead skin of that animal to cover their nakedness.
The animal took the punishment for the condemnation they deserved. Nakedness in this case wasn’t just physical, but evidence that the Holy Spirit that had resided inside them and upon them had left them.
Up until then, they had been innocent and that is how God treated them.
The rest of the bible tells us of God plan to bring as many as will come back into the Garden of Eden again, to live in perfect joy and innocence again. That’s what the New Heaven and New Earth in the last chapter of the bible is all about. It’s Eden, version 2.0.
To show you God’s ways of taking us back to Eden- we use a system to understand the bible called dispensationalism to understand why God does what He does in various points biblical history. This is not a perfect system, but does a fairly decent job in bringing us into greater understanding.
In this case, humanity went from a disposition of innocence in how God treated them, to a dispensation of Conscience- they did as they thought was right. Condemnation came through violating your God given conscience.
We all know how that turned out- the flood. God wipes out all but Noah’s family and starts over.
Then God institutes the dispensation of human government and gives humanity the right to enact punishment for crime. Condemnation came from either a ruler or a government stating you broke the law, and therefore had to pay a price or die for doing so.
Human government failed in obeying God’s command to spread out upon the earth and instead congregated and built the Tower of Babel. God’s judgment was to confuse the languages and humanity was scattered.
Then the dispensation of the promise with Abraham- the chosen people lived by the promise that God would bring them into a land and rule them. The condemnation came because people doubted the promise.
Ten of the Twelve spies bringing the bad report is an example- they failed to believe God’s word and promise were true, and destroyed the faith of the Israelites in the Desert. Then condemnation came in the 40 years of wandering. This lasted until Moses instituted the law.
Moses gave the law, which was the way God interacted with humanity until Christ. Under the law, animals had to die for the sins of humanity. This lasted until the death and resurrection of Jesus.
All of the dispensations point to one thing- the utter impossibility of humanity to fix the problem of their sin nature.
God gave us conscience- we blew it
God gave us human government- anyone in 2020 America thinks that can solve anything? My favorite quote from Ronald Reagan is” The most dangerous phrase he knows is, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”
Generally, makes things much worse.
We are all too cynical now to hold onto a promise.
How about law- does anyone think that we can get to God by following the rules? Go to Portland, Seattle, or Minneapolis and see if people are obeying the law.
So we are left with no hope in ourselves.
So we have to go back to the beginning-
With Adam and Eve, God placed into practice the idea of substitutionary atonement. A big phrase meaning something else takes your deserved condemnation and punishment. In the case of the Jewish people, it was animals, usually goats, bulls, or birds that were killed and offered as burnt offerings before God to “Pay for sins”
One very important point about these sacrifices- in order for them to be acceptable to God, these animals had to be the best of the best animals- no flaws, no weird markings, and no defects- as physically perfect as possible.
The problem is- the bible says this about substitutionary atonement-
Heb 10:1-4
The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming — not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. 2 If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. 3 But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, 4 because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
Why? Because the animal didn’t commit the sin. A human committed the sin, therefore if we really wanted to be cleansed and healed from our sin and the sin nature, some human has to take that punishment.
In other words, since no human had ever lived a completely sinless life, they were not perfect and therefore could not be the sacrifice.
We all have moral blemishes, condemnation, and guilt so we can’t take our own sin and condemnation away much less other people’s.
That, and being mortal human, could not take upon themselves the weight of the sum total of all of the sin that humanity has every committed or ever will commit.
That is, until Jesus.
Jesus answers that question I struggled with my whole life- why did he have to die for me?
Because, he was the perfect sacrifice
He was born as a human- he is therefore able to not only able to identify with the guilty, but be subject to the same trials, temptations, and sufferings that we are. But he lived without ever failing and earning his own condemnation.
Secondly, Jesus is also God and therefore being all powerful could take the weight of all of that sin upon Himself.
Jesus solved the problem of human sin. Jesus accomplished the plan and purpose of God in restoring to us what was lost in the Garden of Eden- God living in us and being upon us in power through the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, there is NO condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
John Piper puts it this way-
Justification (taking away condemnation) is an act of God not man. It is a divine decision to acquit the guilty, to give all the benefits of the children of God to us who deserve hell. It is based on a transaction that happens outside of ourselves, namely, the death of Jesus Christ in our place.
Thank you Jesus!
How do we apply this to our lives?
We are going to close today with just a thought about the Law of the Spirit of life-
III. Living with no condemnation- Law of the Spirit of Life
Go into that in depth next week, but some quick thoughts on this as we prepare to close.
When we say law- we think of a rule meant to restrain bad behavior. In this case, the law we are talking about here is meant to be liberating to us.
It’s like if I told you that if you are in Chicago on the south side, do not walk alone down dark alleys.
Do you consider that law to be considerably constrictive to your freedom?
No- it’s meant to keep you safe.
In the same way, the Law of the Spirit keeps you close to God so that you don’t walk into the dark alleys of sin anymore.
Paul describes it this way in Galatians-
Galatians 5:16 (NLT) So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves.
In other words, hold onto your Fathers hand as you go through this life, and He will keep you safe until you see Him face to face.
That’s the law of the Spirit- intimate connection with God where there is no condemnation or fear, but instead there is joy unspeakable.
Salvation call
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