For Whom Did Christ Die?

3/07/09

Albertville

Lent 2

Romans 5:6-11

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“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungoldy. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

This is one of those verses that is kind of good news/bad news. The bad news is that it describes us as powerless and ungodly; it describes us as sinners. The good news is, that inspite of this, God still loves us and sent his Son to die for us and thereby forgives us. This teaching is the central teaching of the Bible. Everything in the Bible directs the reader to the point where they will hear and believe this most-important message: that sinners can be saved by Christ Jesus. Our entire faith, our entire hope rests on this truth.

But, Americans are do-it-yourselfers as evidenced by the prevalence of places like Menards and the Home Depot, Lowes and the like. We pride ourselves with the knowledge that in most things, we can do it ourselves. For some, calling upon outside help is the mark of personal defeat. While that might be true when you’re installing tile or a new bathroom fixture, it is not true when it comes to being justified before God. For when it comes to our sins, we are “powerless” as the text says. We are in definite need of some outside help. But still we try. We try to justify ourselves. And one of our favorite ways to do this is to make somebody else take the blame.

I was a pretty standard kid when I was growing up, and like any standard kid there were times when I did some pretty standardly stupid things. On one occasion, I was tossing a little nerf football around in the house. I knew i wasn’t supposed to be doing this, but I said “Hey its a nerf ball, I can’t break anything with a nerf ball”

And that’s true, just as long as you don’t knock anything to the floor, like your mother’s handpainted vase, from Germany, brought over by her great grandmother. I broke the foot off of it. And since Pogo paste doesn’t work so well on pottery, I had to think of something else, some other way to cover my guilt. Well, it just so happened, that if I were very careful, I could balance the vase on its foot. And the next poor schlub who comes along and just bumps it a little, would get the blame for breaking it. Well that poor schlub happened to be my little sister. She was in kindergarten and had just started taking piano lessons. And since the vase sat on the piano, she would be the perfect mark. The time came for her to practice, and wouldn’t you know it, with the first few notes, the vase came crashing down, now breaking into many pieces. And you better believe I was at the ready to accuse her. “ Look what you did! You were playing too hard!” I said. Only a little kid would believe such balony. I actually had her confessing to my mom that she had broke the vase.

I was this close to having committed the perfect crime. But close, as they say, counts only in horseshoes and hand grenades. As my mom consoled my little sister and picked up the pieces of shattered pottery, she felt the remnants of the sticky pogo paste from my earlier attempt---and she knew what had happened. I was properly punished.

Now, as adults we don’t normally try stuff that blatant, we are much more refined in our attempts to rid ourselves of our guilt. We are much more clever when it comes to shifting the blame off on someone else. One classic technique is to blame your bad behavior on your genetics. “Can’t help it, runs in the family!” Oh that’s good, blame your ancestors for the sinful things you do. Most of them are dead and can’t defend themselves. Yeah. That’s right, you’re a mindless organic Robot. You’ve been programmed. You are not responsible for what your hands do what your mouth says, or what your brain conceives. Your a victim not a perpetrator. A victim of your cruel combination of DNA. But you know what the Bible says “The soul that sins is the one that will die.” (Ezek. 18:3) Ezekiel said that....because the people were blaming their parents for the sins they were committing. But to that the Lord said through his prophet Ezekiel Make no mistake “The Soul that sins, is the one that will die.”

A variation of this doesn’t blame your genes, but rather to blame you parents for what they did or didn’t do. We’ve all heard the whining haven’t we? Your father never loved you enough, your mother wasn’t strong enough. And so on and so forth and that’s why you’ve screwed up your life and are now doing sinful things. They failed miserably in your upbringing, so once again, you are not blame for the things you do.

While it is true, parents do play an important role in teaching you right and wrong, it is not they who will stand in the judgment for you. You’re parents will not be asked to explain why you did what you did as an adult. No He’s going to ask you to explain what you did. Each person will have to answer for himself and only for himself. While shifting the blame over to some other person whoever that person might be may help you to numb your conscience, it does nothing to justify you before God.

So far we’ve covered justification by blame shifting, but there is another way that comes at the problem from a different angle. I call it justification by selective hearing. If you never hear that there is such a thing as sin, and you never hear that you yourself are a sinner, then you must not be one. Besides simply tuning out sermons or skipping church to avoid hearing the word of God. You can find other things to think about when you are in church. Like the hair style of the person in front of you; or the lack of the hairstyle of the person in front of you. Or that project you got going in your basement. IF that doesn’t work, if the pastor is too strident in talking about your sin and it’s impossible not to hear, maybe it’s time to go “church shoppin” and find one of them groovy hep cat churches where they talk about your mistakes and seven habits of highly successful Christians, where the theology “tastes great” but is “less filling”. Just shut your eyes to what God says about sin: that will make it go away.

Then you’d be like my older sister, who believed, when she was young, that if she shut her eyes, that not only would she stop seeing anything, but nobody else could see anything either. So she shut her eyes and tried to steal sugar from the sugar bowl in the center of the table with mom and dad sitting at the table. It didn’t work! You can shut your eyes to what God says in his word about you and your sinfulness but that won’t make it go away.

I’ve barely even scratched the surface on the things we do in our attempts to justify ourselves. It shall suffice to say that it is our tendency to do everything we possibly can to keep from being put together with that group of people known as “Sinners.” And when you consider what it says in the text, this tendency is most perplexing. There it says that is was for this group, this group called “sinners” that Jesus came; it was for this group that Jesus died; and it is this group, these sinners, justified by grace through faith, who will walk the streets of heaven.

When Jesus was at the house of Zacheus he said “The Son of man has come to seek and save the Lost”. If we remove ourselves from that group, then we are on our own. We must achieve righteousness on our own. The pharisees before us tried that and they failed miserably. As they went about their lives, seeking to justify themselves they completely missed the Savior whom God had provided. Let us not repeat their folly. Let us put aside all spurious attempts at self-justification and turn in all honesty to the Savior whom God has provided. And Let us join that group of people whom Christ has come to save: The” Sinners”. Make no mistake, we are not proud to be sinners and we must do everything to keep from sinning. But we are proud of the wonderful salvation and justification that God has provided for Sinners through his Son Jesus. AMEN