THE VICTORY OF JESUS
John A Brown
Matthew 12: 18-21
John 19: 17-18 (to “crucified him”), 28-35
1 John 5: 1 (to “God”); 4-5
Romans 8: 34 (from “It is”) -37
At our recent meetings in this room on Thursday evenings, we have been speaking about a victory - Joshua’s conquest of the land of Canaan. Chapters 6-12 of the book of Joshua are a very interesting narrative, telling of how Joshua and the children of Israel came into the land that God had promised them. There were battles to be fought and victories to be won; the people who were there already were to be dispossessed. But it struck me that in Joshua 13, there is a list of cities and territory that Joshua did not conquer, v 1-6. We learned much from the victories that we have been reading about and the way that God used them; indeed they were really Jehovah’s victories. But, as always happens, the type falls short because after all of these victories, there was still a considerable amount of land that was still in the hands of the Canaanites and the Jebusites and other tribes. So the victory of the people of Israel under Joshua, although we learn much from it, was incomplete.
I have been thinking of the way in which Jesus came into this world, and the way in which He went to the cross. What a victory that was! It did not look like a victory, but in fact it was, and it is, a complete victory. In the gospel, God would present to sinners the results, the fruit of that victory. In going the way that He did, the Lord Jesus opened up the way into the presence of God as a Saviour God, made Him known as a God of love. Through faith and belief in that blessed One, God’s beloved Son, and in repentance, all men can have part in that complete victory. It was not partial. We are so used to what is partial; even the best of men’s endeavours will always result in what is only partial. But what Christ has done, the victory that Jesus has won, is a complete victory. How was that going to be won? Was it going to be won in a great display of power, with mighty acts that persons will be awed by? You may remember that in the invasion of Iraq, an attack called ‘shock and awe’ tried to use the power of munitions to overcome the country, but what happened? There was a victory, but it was not a complete victory, and the results are still causing trouble. Dear friend, the way in which God worked at the cross of Jesus secured a complete victory; not one that the world would recognise as such, but a victory that was indeed complete.
I read in Matthew about Jesus, this blessed One in whom God has made Himself known to His creature. These words were spoken by God through the prophet, but they are very like the words that the Father Himself used when Jesus came, thirty years old, to the Jordan to be baptised. The Father’s voice was heard from heaven and the gospel writers record what He said. It was very like these words which had been given hundreds of years before to Isaiah; “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, in whom my soul has found its delight”. These few verses spoken through the prophet encapsulate the whole of the period of time when Jesus was on the earth, right from the time when He was born. Think of the Lord Jesus coming into this scene as a Babe! We have been speaking about the mighty acts of men. Mr Darby refers to the comparison, the contrast between how man would operate and how God has operated, in his hymn:-
Nor yet in triumph passing,
But human infancy! (Hymn 188)
There is nothing weaker or less powerful than a baby, and yet in that Infant there in the manger in Bethlehem, God had this One of whom He would be able to say prophetically, “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, in whom my soul has found its delight”. God had before Him in the birth of Jesus all that He wanted in man. He grew up as a Boy, and there are many boys here in this room. He grew up as a young Man, and there are many young men in this room. Jesus was your age once. At thirty years old, this prophecy was effectuated; “I will put my Spirit upon him, and he shall shew forth judgment to the nations.” The Spirit came upon Him at the Jordan when He was baptised.
We hardly know anything about the life of Jesus before then; it had been one of obscurity. It certainly was not remarked on by the historians of the world. Even all that Jesus accomplished in His public service passed without notice in the histories of the world of that time written by the Roman historians. There is a paragraph of about four lines by Josephus, one of the Jewish historians, which remarks almost as an aside that at this time there was a man called Jesus who did good deeds, was condemned by Pilate to be crucified, yet who was reported by His disciples to have appeared to them alive again after three days; it might be said, a footnote in history.
That is how God came into this world:
Nor yet in triumph passing,
But human infancy!
That blessed Man grew up in obscurity under the eye of God, and every footstep of His gave God delight.
I want to present to you in all its appealing character the way in which God has come near to us in the form of a blessed Man. There is nothing to repel in the way in which Jesus came in such lowliness. It was in God’s purpose to do it that way. God came into the world in Christ, and He touched humanity at its lowest point as a Babe in a manger. Then as Jesus came to the Jordan, He submitted Himself for righteousness’ sake to the baptism of John the baptist, and the Father, as it were, could not restrain Himself and said these blessed words “Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I have found my delight”, Luke 3: 22. The Father had already found His delight in every day of these thirty years until that point. Then the prophet goes on to say, “He shall not strive or cry out, nor shall any one hear his voice in the streets”. Jesus did teach, of course; we read in John 7 this afternoon about how He cried, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink” (v 37), but He was not there to change this world. You think of all the words and the communications that are generated by an election campaign; Jesus did not approach people in that way. He came as a blessed, lowly Man. He spoke to people; He did good works; He cured people who were ill, blind and lame. “He shall not strive or cry out, nor shall any one hear his voice in the streets.” It was that lowliness and that way of approaching persons that made Him so blessedly attractive to those whom He gathered round Himself.
Then “a bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench”. People would say, ‘Someone like that is never going to achieve anything’. Someone who does not project Himself, someone who goes on in that lowly and humble way: to the mind of man, that will never do anything. My impression was that this is completely contrary to nature, but it was God’s purpose to come near to men in that way. He came in the form of a blessed lowly Man who was, and is, His Son. It says at the end of verse 20, “until he bring forth judgment unto victory; and on his name shall the nations hope”. There is a future meaning to that verse; the Lord Jesus will be vindicated when He comes to this world again. But I want to speak about the way in which He did “bring forth judgment unto victory”, and the basis of that was the cross. It was a victory like no other victory. Publicly it was just another crucifixion. I suppose the Romans would be crucifying criminals all the time. It was what they did with those who had transgressed the law. These soldiers who took Jesus and crucified Him as we read in John 19 would have done it before. “And he went out, bearing his cross, to the place called place of a skull … where they crucified him”.
Think of all that Jesus had done in these three and a half years since His baptism, since the Father had spoken these wonderful words, “Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I have found my delight”, Mark 1: 11. We know the gospel narratives well; He had done nothing but good, but He had been rejected by those to whom He came. The Jews could not understand Him. You can see that in the scripture we were reading this afternoon. The natural mind just could not understand Him. ‘Who is He?’ ‘What is He saying?’ “Some said, He is a good man; others said, No; but he deceives the crowd”, John 7: 12. The natural mind did not know what to make of Jesus. Then through the jealousy and the hatred of the Jews, just the evening before this account in John 19, He had been taken by the Jews who had paid Judas to betray Him. Think of what Jesus suffered in Gethsemane as He anticipated what lay before Him, but He went through with it all. Blessed, lowly Saviour!
Dear friends, if there is anyone here who has not been personally attracted by the blessed lowliness and yet the greatness of Jesus, I trust that something of what I am saying will make an impression on your heart. This is not a creed; there is essential truth that we get from the Scriptures. There are truths about the Person of Christ which are precious to know and to hold, but the essence of the glad tidings is that God is presenting to you His Son as your Saviour. If you have not come to Him before now, God is giving you an opportunity to come in repentance and put your faith in Him, and come to it that you need this blessed One.
Men generally, at the time that we are speaking about, came to the conclusion that they did not need Him. They did not want Him; they cried out in rejection. It was an awful thing for Jesus to listen to these cries of rejection; “Take him away, take him away, crucify him”, v 15. He had heard them say that, and now they do it: “where they crucified him”. Oh, the immensity of what these words convey! The Lord of glory, the Creator of the universe, allowed Himself to be taken by wicked hands and nailed to that cross, and He hung there to be scorned and jeered at. He allowed it to happen. As He said before, He could have had twelve legions of angels, Matt 26: 53. He says indeed in verse 36 of the previous chapter, “My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my servants had fought that I might not be delivered up to the Jews; but now my kingdom is not from hence”. Dear friend, if you have never been attracted in the depth of your soul by the blessed lowliness and attractiveness of Christ, come to Him tonight. Maybe it will not be for the first time: it may be that you have already believed in Him, but there is something in the way in which God would present the Lord Jesus in the gospel that is designed to attract our hearts to Him.
So that we see the way in which God’s love towards us was there in Jesus and in what He did and what He bore in His sufferings. John speaks of some of them here, and the other gospel writers speak of all that was upon Him, the way in which the Jews taunted Him and the soldiers mocked Him. But then there came these three hours of darkness when the Lord Jesus bore the whole weight of God’s judgment against sin. He bore my sins then; I trust that you can say that He bore your sins. That darkness is not recorded in John’s gospel but it happened just before where we began to read again in verse 28. He bore in these three hours all that stood between man and God, and during that time, He said only one thing, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, Matt 27: 46. At the end of these three hours, He uttered that cry and He was not answered then. Jesus was forsaken by God, and in that time of forsaking He bore God’s judgment against sin, He absolutely exhausted it. He bore my sins in His body on the tree, on that cross. I trust that you can say, dear friend, that He bore your sins, and that you have come to know who He is - not only Someone that gospel preachers who you have listened to all your life have spoken about, not only Someone who you hear other people speaking about, but Someone who you know yourself. In all His lowliness, Jesus would reach out to you tonight and appeal to you. You may already believe in Him, and I trust that everyone here does. If there is anyone here who has never been attracted to Christ before, then let Him draw you, as it says in that lovely verse. “with bands of a man, with cords of love”, Hos 11: 4. These cords and bands would be used by God in the gospel, drawing persons to Christ as a Saviour, a Saviour for sinners.
And so it says here that Jesus knew “that all things were now finished”. Matthew and Mark tell us of the hours of darkness and the forsaking. There was yet the shedding of His precious blood, and I read verse 34 because the way in which His blood was poured out is so important. He still had to be laid in the tomb by loving hands; we spoke in the reading about Nicodemus and Joseph burying Him. Then there was to be His resurrection; I will speak of that later. But “Jesus, knowing that all things were now finished, that the scripture might be fulfilled …”; He had borne all that stood between man and God; He had borne all that stood between me and God. Can you say that? Can you come into the presence of God and lift your heart to Him in thanksgiving that you are there as a forgiven sinner, and more than that, as a justified sinner, as someone on whom God can look and see Jesus? He does not see the sinner because my sins are gone. I trust that yours are gone through faith and belief in this blessed One, and through repentance. If that is so, then you can come into the presence of God on your own, without a cloud! I trust everyone here knows what it is to come into the presence of God on your knees individually, and to nestle in your own enjoyment of the love of God which is towards you personally; because Jesus has taken away all that stood between you and a holy, sin-hating God. This is what it cost Jesus. “When therefore Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished”. Mark speaks of a loud cry: “Jesus, having uttered a loud cry, expired”, Mark 15: 37. John says here, “having bowed his head, he delivered up his spirit”. I say reverently, that was all; and yet in that act, in giving Himself, in going into death, He won a victory that was absolutely complete.
I thought of David, and how, when he went into the valley against Goliath, Saul gave him his armour, but David said ‘No, I cannot use this’, and he put it off because he had not tried it. He took five smooth stones from the brook and with one of them he killed Goliath. He killed him with one stone from his sling. It was accurately aimed and brought that giant down, and then it says that he ran and he took Goliath’s own sword, and he cut off Goliath’s head with it; it says he “killed him completely”, 1 Sam 17: 49-51. That is a type of what Jesus did on the cross. There was no outward sign of struggle, because Jesus went into death in power. He did not go into death in weakness, although it may have seemed that way. We sang:
Through weakness and defeat
He won the meed and crown; (Hymn 24).
This is “the word of the cross” that Paul speaks of at the beginning of the first epistle to the Corinthians (chap 1: 18); the death of Jesus was foolishness to men. They might have asked, ‘How will that work? What will that accomplish - another crucifixion among many? What does it mean?’. Oh dear friend, for those in the knowledge of who this blessed One is, and of all that He has done, and all that He was to His God and Father, we know what was accomplished there as we read these words, “having bowed his head, he delivered up his spirit”. So the hymn we sang goes on:-
Trod all our foes beneath His feet,
In being trodden down.
He Satan’s power laid low;
Made sin, sin’s reign o’erthrew;
Bowed to the grave, destroyed it so,
And death by dying slew. (Hymn 24)
What a wonderful thing it is that the power of death is gone. I was thinking of the scripture in Joshua where the ark goes into the Jordan and the priests’ feet entered into the water; it says that the Jordan turned back (Ps 114: 5), and “stood and rose up in a heap, very far, by Adam”, and that the waters “were completely cut off, Josh 3: 16. There was no partial stopping of the water; it was a complete thing, and that represents the completeness of the victory which the Lord Jesus accomplished in going into death.
I trust that what I am saying means something to you. I can tell you that it means something to me, and I know that it means something to many in this room, but I trust that what I have said about the Lord Jesus means something to you individually. It is not just to be what you hear other people speaking about, or your parents talking about, or even what you read in the Bible - although I would encourage you to read about Jesus in the Bible, but Christianity at its core is a relationship between the Son of God and you yourself. There is much more than that because it broadens out, but that is the essence of it. It is knowing the Lord Jesus as a living Man. He was in death, He was put in the grave, and He was there for three days and three nights; then He rose again. It is a living Saviour about whom I am speaking, and it is a living Man that those who know Jesus and love Him can speak to, a blessed living Saviour who lives for us now.
So in 1 John 5 it speaks of, “Every one that believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God”. Is that not wonderful? It is not just that you are entered on a list of people who have believed in the Lord Jesus: it is far more than that. There are books; God keeps books, He keeps records, but, “Every one that believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God”. Then, “Who is he that gets the victory over the world, but he that believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”. That was why John wrote his gospel. A long time after the event, when he was an old man, he decided, with the Spirit’s prompting no doubt, to write another gospel. There were already three gospels in circulation because Matthew had written his and Mark and Luke had written theirs, but John wrote another one; and he wrote it so “that believing ye might have life in his name”, John 20: 31. God presents to you the One in whom you can have life. It is a wonderful thing to know these streams of living water that we were speaking about this afternoon in John 7, “out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water”, v 38.
I would like to speak of what John writes about here, being born of God - that is an amazing thing to know. There is something in you that does not belong to this world or to nature; it has been put there by God. It is His work. It starts with new birth; it starts before you even believed in the Lord Jesus. You were sitting in gospel preachings thinking that there is something that you needed to attend to here, feeling your conscience aroused, but not knowing salvation. I can remember that; I used to sit as a boy in this room, and I have a memory of brothers standing here, and speaking in a way that aroused my conscience. That is the beginning of new birth, something just working there. But then to be born of God - what a wonderful thing it is to see that God has worked something in you in faith and in belief and in life, and it is His. It is something that has its origin with Him; it is by the Spirit. Verse 4 refers to “all that has been begotten of God” - that is in everyone who has had that experience of belief and of life - “gets the victory over the world; and this is the victory which has gotten the victory over the world, our faith”. So dear young person, if you go out tomorrow and you are faced with a challenge when the world would say to you, ‘Come along this way, come with us’, then think of this: “For all that has been begotten of God gets the victory over the world; and this is the victory which has gotten the victory over the world, our faith”. What a power believers have - a gift of God. If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and you know Him in the way that I have been speaking about – I do not just mean knowing about Him because you might have heard other people talk about Him, but knowing Him, believing in Him - then you can have this victory which is our faith. The victory is given in the power of faith and of the Holy Spirit.
Then in Romans 8, Paul writes, “But in all these things we more than conquer through him that has loved us”. Jesus has loved us; He loved us on the cross: “the Son of God, who has loved me and given himself for me”, Gal 2: 20. That is personal, it is individual, and it is true for every believer that Jesus had you in His heart even as He bore the wrath of God that I deserved, that you deserved. “But in all these things we more than conquer through him that has loved us”. Paul says, “It is Christ who has died, but rather has been also raised up; who is also at the right hand of God; who also intercedes for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”. These are marvellous words. They were written by the apostle Paul, but could you write them, and mean them, and know that they are true of you? There is nothing complicated about them. We believe that Christ has died and then been raised up; that is the foundation of faith, that you really believe that Jesus is alive. He is living, and it is a wonderful thing to know that He intercedes for us as He is there at the right hand of God. He loves us; His love is an active and present and operative matter, and He is interceding for us. “But in all these things we more than conquer through him that has loved us.”
May that be true of every one of us! The enemy was defeated at the cross; he is a defeated foe, but he would seek to do all he can to deflect persons from a living personal relationship with the Son of God. May we all prove what it is to be freshly attracted to our Lord Jesus Christ, and to “more than conquer through him that has loved us”, for His Name’s sake.
Linlithgow
21st February 2016