Genesis 2: 7, 16-18; 3: 6-9;
Romans 5: 12-14, 8-10;
1 John 5: 6 (“And it is …)-12
I have been thinking that there is a saying in the world, ‘a matter of life or death’. People call 911 for emergency operators and say, ‘it is a matter of life or death’ and what do they mean by that? They mean that somebody’s life is at stake. As I have been thinking about that simple statement, ‘a matter of life or death’ I thought how the gospel is really that, a matter of life or death. The gospel is all summed up in those two words, ‘life' and 'death’. From the very moment that we see these words in the book of Genesis, right to the end of the book of Revelation, life and death come before us throughout all scripture. Everything is tied up with those two things. You are either in life, or you are in death; there is no middle ground. You cannot be in death and be in life at the same time; you either have one or the other. We can say that naturally people are dying. Everyone from the day that they are born is on a course towards death, unless the Lord returns. So people are dying, but the fact of the matter is that you are dead already if you have not received Christ as your Saviour.
In the gospel message I would like to point out the beginning of things because God had life always before Him; He did not have death in mind. It was not His purpose for death, it was not His desire for death, but it is a necessity that death must come in so that there can be life on the other side. Life actually comes out of death in Christianity and it comes out of death through the death of the One who gave Himself for us. As a result of what He has done then we can come into life. What a wonderful privilege it is, and this is the essence of the glad tidings.
In the book of Genesis we see that God created man, and He created him to become, “a living soul”, not a dead soul. He had life in mind. Obviously when God formed man as dust of the ground, he was inanimate, he was not dead, you could not say he was dead, but God breathed into him, “the breath of life”, because whatever God touches it is going to bring in life: He is the God of life. He cannot breathe into something and not bring life with it. God made Adam a living soul and placed him in the garden. I am sure that it was a garden that was full of life; can you see in your mind how beautiful it must have been? It was like no garden that we have ever seen - it was a paradise. What a wonderful thing to think that God loved man, gave him life, and then gives him conditions for life to abound. Everything that he had need of was supplied, and in the midst of that garden he put the “tree of life”. There was that which could sustain the living soul for eternity as long as the conditions were met. But God had to test this creation; this man that he created, he had to be tested. He had to have man for Himself but only as man desired to be for God. He gave man a will, and a will to live for Him, or a will to reject Him. God gave man one simple test, “And Jehovah Elohim commanded Man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou shalt freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it”. Notice it says, “Of every tree of the garden thou shalt freely eat”; that included the tree of life. It was in the midst of the garden. “Of every tree”, but one tree he could not eat of. “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest of it thou shalt certainly die”. This thought of death comes in right from the very start, because death morally is separation from God. Think about it. We read in the third chapter where the serpent comes in and deceives Eve, and Adam eats of the tree knowingly; he knew what he was doing. Death came in just as God had said. The serpent deceived Eve into thinking that death would not come in. You could say they did not die, they were cast out of the Garden of Eden. They had sons after that, Cain and Abel come after this, but moral death came in, there was a separation from God, a separation that had not been there before. That is why I read, “they heard the voice of Jehovah Elohim, walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah Elohim, in the midst of the trees of the garden. And Jehovah Elohim called to Man, and said to him, Where art thou?”. It is a question that goes out to each and every one of us. We all have to ask ourselves, 'Where am I?' Where are we in our relationship with God? Where are you in your relationship with God today? Are you still tied to your sins? Are you still tied to the old man? Are you still bound by death? That is the question you have to ask yourself, and only you can answer it. Or, is there true life in you? Do you desire to have life? If you realise you are dead and there is no communion with God and no relationship with God, with divine Persons, then you are dead. Are you hearing the voice of Jesus calling? He is saying, ”Where art thou?” It is a wonderful thing when the voice of Jesus does call, and thank God the voice did call, “Where art thou?” What if God had left things as they were? We could have gone on to read about how they were clothed, and sacrifice was necessitated in order to clothe them with something other than fig leaves. Think about trying to cover your nakedness with fig leaves. Before God everything is naked. There is nothing that you can hide from God; He sees everything that you do, every moment of every day, He knows every detail about you; there is nothing that He does not notice. We will all answer before the judgement-seat of the Christ one day to review how we have lived our lives here (2 Cor 5: 10), but the turning factor is going to be whether you have life or whether you have death.
God in His great love and His mercy has no desire for death. He has done everything He can to conquer death, to put death to nought, so that death no longer holds a bite, and has no sting. It cannot have the victory over you if you are a Christian, if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ; it cannot have any victory over you. That is one of the great things that we can have, an assurance as believers, that we are entering into life when we pass through the gateway of death. If the Lord does not come, every single one of us will have to go through death. Why? Because the redemption of our bodies has not yet occurred; the price for it has been paid, but the redemption of our bodies has not yet occurred. There is a day soon coming when the Lord Jesus shall come with that assembling shout and those who are already with the Lord will rise, and we will be caught up to meet Him in the air, 1 Thess 4: 15,16. What a wonderful thought that is! Why? Because we are living. He does not only call those who have passed on to death, who are asleep through Jesus, they are not dead. What we understand as death is the cessation of the body, but they are not dead. Paul said, “we are ... pleased rather to be absent from the body and present with the Lord”, 2 Cor 5; 8. What a wonderful hope that is. It is more than what the world calls hope, it is an assurance. People say, ‘I just hope I can make it’. I was speaking with my mother today, dear sweet woman, I love her, but she is so confused and lost as to her eternal salvation; she has no clue about the gospel, she hopes that she has lived a good enough life that the Lord will have mercy on her. I tried to talk to her but she did not want to hear it, she changed the subject and moved on to something else.
The idea that you can ever live a good enough life is totally absurd. Why? Because of where I read in Romans, “For this cause, even as by one man” - that is, by Adam - “sin entered into the world”. When did sin enter? When Adam partook of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “And by sin death; and thus death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned”, that includes you and me. There is nobody who has not sinned, “all have sinned”, Rom 3: 23. “For until law sin was in the world; but sin is not put to account when there is no law; but death reigned from Adam until Moses, even upon those who had not sinned in the likeness of Adam’s transgression” - to put it very simply - you do not have to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in order to come under the penalty of death. You do not have to sin the way Adam sinned, you do not have to do this exact sin. Sin has passed upon all, and there is no one who can get to heaven and receive eternal life on their own merit. If you think that by attending meetings, living a good life, or even praying, are things that are going to save you, they will not. I am not discounting those; they are all good things, and necessary especially for one who is a lover of the Lord Jesus. If you love the Lord Jesus you would want to be attached to where He is, and do what He has interest in. If someone loves the Lord I cannot understand why they would not want to be with the Lord’s people, and doing the things that the Lord would have them to do.
I have been thinking about what we enjoy here every single Lord’s day. Paul tells us, because “ye announce the death of the Lord until he come”, 1 Cor 11: 26. The Lord's table is not a table of death, it is a table of life because otherwise you get caught up in morbidity, there is no life there, there is nothing which you can lay hold of. If Jesus was a great Man, a great Teacher who came and died, then what else have you? If He was the Son of God, and He came and He died and He purchased your soul, then you have hope. He ransomed you, He bought you, He paid the price for you and He wants you. He desires you. Think about that! It is wonderful to think about how He loves us; He desires us. He desires to have you with Him, He desires to have you at the table. If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ then you have a right to the table, a right to partake of the loaf and to partake of the cup. Who could stop you if you wanted to be at the table? No one! I cannot stop you if you are a true lover of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you have committed yourself to Him, and, as we have spoken of many times, you have 'washed your robes', Rev 22: 14. Then you have a right to the loaf and cup, and you have a right to participate in fellowship, and not to distance yourself from it, because this is where life is. There is life here; whether you can see it or not there is life here. If you cannot see it, then you have to be dead. If you are dead, there is hope, because life is available to you, you do not have to be one who is caught up in death.
Where I read in Romans 5: 8 it says, “God commends his love to us, in that, we being still sinners, Christ has died for us”. What a wonderful thing that is, “Christ has died for us”. He knew that you were a sinner, He knew that Adam was a sinner, He knew what we were in our condition, and yet He was willing to lay down His life, to pay the penalty so that there would be justice served in the courts of God. Justice served and meted out. He took every ounce of it. None of us can fathom that. Think about the billions of people that ever have lived! He is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world (1 John 1: 2): that whole matter has been taken up completely by the Lord Jesus. He was holy, He was good, He was just, there was nothing that you could lay charge to Him about. He was the Son of God, and He died for you. It is a wonderful matter. On the cross He was able to cry out with a loud voice and say, “It is finished”, John 19: 30. That means that God is totally satisfied; He is satisfied with what Christ had accomplished. “Christ has died for us. Much rather therefore, having been now justified in the power of his blood”, think of that - “the power of his blood” - what wonderful power there is. It is cleansing power:
… wonder working power,
There is power in the blood of the Lamb.
There is power to forgive you, to cleanse you of all your sins, of all your unrighteousness, of all your unworthiness. There is also life in the blood, and that life is for you so that you can receive life because He does not want you to be in death. “For if, being enemies, we have been reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much rather, having been reconciled, we shall be saved in the power of his life”. We have the power of His blood, and now have the power of His life. In Colossians it says, “for ye have died, and your life is hid with the Christ in God. When the Christ is manifested who is our life, then shall ye also be manifested with him in glory”, chap 3: 3, 4. You have died, and you are dead in your trespasses and sin. Ephesians says, “and you, being dead in your offences and sins - in which ye once walked according to the age of this world, according to the ruler of the authority of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience: among whom we also all once had our conversation in the lusts of our flesh, doing what the flesh and the thoughts willed to do, and were children, by nature, of wrath, even as the rest: but God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love wherewith he loved us, (we too being dead in offences,) has quickened us with the Christ, (ye are saved by grace)”, chap 2: 1-5. Quickened is a simple word, and means “made alive”. He has made you alive if you have faith in Christ. If you do not have faith in Christ, you are, as it says in the first verse, “dead in your offences and sins”. Death came in, death passed upon all men because all have sinned, you could not escape the penalty of death unless there was One who paid the price for you. Judgement was meted out on Him so that you could avoid judgement. He desires to give you life and He desires to be life to you. He becomes your life and the more that you grow in your Christian faith, the more that you love Him, and the more that you desire that He would be your life. I have the assurance that no matter what happens, and no matter what I do, my life is hid with Christ in God, and it is secure there. He is at the right hand of God, never to die again, and my life is hid with Him.
Am I going to fail? I will. I have failed many times already. For the sake of the young people, I can honestly say I led a wicked life when I was young, but I have two words to say… “but God”. If God had not moved upon me in my life, where would I be today? Where would I be today if the Lord had not moved in my life? I would not be here amongst the brethren, I would be out doing wickedness like I was before. My own natural brother has spent most of his adult life in and out of a penitentiary, and I would probably have been there with him. There are levels of death; you can see it in people around you. You can look and say, this person has more death in them than others, you can see more death working. It seems that if man is left to his natural self all he wants to do is to gravitate towards death, darkness and despair. Man rejects Christ, but the offer is still there for everyone. There is not a single person that will be able to stand before the Judge of the living and the dead who will be able to say, 'I did not know'. The offer of life is there and it is your choice.
I read the passage in 1 John because it says, “He that has the Son has life: he that has not the Son of God has not life”. Here again we have to ask ourselves, do we have the Son? Do you have the Son? You have to make it personal, do you have the Son? If you do not, do you want to have the Son? Life is in Him, “Christ who is our life”, life is in Him. You can continue to go on in death and reject the Son, that is your choice. Nobody is pressuring anybody, God is not pressuring anybody, but He is making you an offer for life. He is saying that you do not have to go on in death, and you can accept His beloved Son and accept what He did for you. If you do not accept the Son then you only have one thing to look forward to, that is judgement. The one thing you are going to be judged on is whether you have accepted the Son or not, whether you put your trust and faith in Him.
In 1 Peter it says, “who shall render account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead”, chap 4: 5). The living are the ones who have accepted Christ and have asked Him to be their Lord and their Saviour and have trusted on Him. They have put faith in His finished work, faith in the blood, faith in His life. The dead are those who are outside of all that, “For to this end were the glad tidings preached to the dead also, that they might be judged, as regards men, after the flesh, but life, as regards God, after the Spirit”, v 6. God has a desire that the dead should live. He does not want death; His end in view is never death. He has done everything to overcome death and one day death will be no more. There will be those who will enter into the second death, the lake of fire (Rev 20: 14), and they will spend eternity there separated from God, and there will be no more calls, “Where art thou?” There will never be a call like that again - “Now is the well-accepted time” (2 Cor 6: 2) - have you heard the voice of Jesus calling you? Have you been resisting the gospel and resisting the Son of His love? Now is the time to say, “O God, have compassion on me, the sinner”, Luke 18: 13. He has been waiting for you. Many of us have heard the story of the prodigal son since we were children. The father was looking out, waiting for his son to come, and when he saw the son a way far off (you do not have to come really close), he started toward him. He was waiting for the one word from the son to say, “I will rise up and go to my father” Luke 15: 18. That is all it took for the father. It is a precious thought to think of the father running to meet him. He did not crawl, he did not dally, because he was overjoyed; he could not wait to embrace his son, and he said, “for this my son was dead and has come to life, was lost and has been found”, Luke 15: 24. How wonderful that is, and what a joy to heaven it is when one repenting sinner comes home. Just one! All of heaven rejoices and all the saints on all the earth should rejoice whenever we hear of one who has repented and turned towards Christ. It should never matter who the vessel is or anything else, what matters is that God has secured another soul for Jesus today. Another one has come into life and out of death. What a blessing, what a great privilege it is to be of that company. The company of the living!
In Deuteronomy 30 God tells the children of Israel, “See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil … choose then life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed” (v 15, 19). The choice belongs with you. God has already made His choice, He has given His Son, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him may not perish, but have life eternal”, John 3: 16.
I pray that every single person in this room will enter into the joy of the Lord when this body is changed when the Lord comes for us. For “He that has the Son has life: he that has not the Son of God has not life”.
May it be so, For His Name’s sake.
Denton
20th January 2008