Living the life of Heaven 4. Sharing the Victory of Christ
Video: https://www.stmarksbassendean.church/post/sharing-in-the-victory-of-christ
Introduction
Something happened in a quiet corner of Germany in 1842 that triggered a revival. It was like the kingdom of God breaking in on earth. The sick and disabled were healed, mental illness was vanquished, stolen goods were returned, murderers confessed, broken marriages were restored. The catalyst for this mighty move of God was a specific example of deliverance. After a long struggle the demon possessing a woman came out with a howl, crying, “Jesus is the Victor”. The heart of the gospel is the revelation that Jesus is the all-conquering Son of God. The goal of this sermon is that we might share more intensely in the victory of Christ and be strengthened to communicate it to others. The shape of the life of Jesus points clearly to the character of his victory.
Setting
The way in which the Father prepared the Son for his comprehensive conquest of all evil is contradictory to ordinary human thinking. The arduous trials endured by Jesus from the beginning of his ministry show that the God revealed in the gospel is very different from every human imagining. The supreme wisdom of the victory of the Lord is to give triumph over suffering through suffering. Jesus understood this perfectly, especially from the time the Spirit led him into the wilderness. When Christ was starving there Satan suggested that he perform a food miracle to relieve his hunger, provoke an angelic rescue miracle to bring him to safety and rule over the world so as to abolish war, disease etc. so relieving humanity of its miseries (Luke 4:1-13). All these temptations were categorically rejected by Jesus because he understood that evil and suffering had to be defeated from the inside. The foundation for the devil’s final defeat (John 12:31) was firmly laid before Jesus preached or did any mighty work. The next step in Christ’s life was to go through an ordeal beyond the influence of external evil by suffering the maliciousness of his own community.
After sending Jesus into the wilderness the Spirit of the Lord intentionally led him to preach in the synagogue of Nazareth. It was to his own people who knew him well from childhood that he proclaimed his identity as the Servant of the Lord (Luke 4:16, 22-23) so provoking the first attempt to kill him (Luke 4:24, 28-29). This painful rejection by his own hometown and the miraculous deliverance from death there was a shadow of the coming great trial of the cross and the glory of the resurrection. All this was a part of the Father’s wisdom in preparing Jesus for his final victory.
Identification with Suffering
For many years I have been counselling people to “read the Bible backwards” for what God intends first, he accomplishes last. This is why we go to the book of Revelation to gain insight into the foundational purposes of the Lord for the world.
In the throne room scene of Revelation 5 we see all holy creation waiting in anticipation for the unrolling of the scroll which will move the world to its final destiny. The exposure of the contents of the scroll must however await until a critical disclosure. This is the disclosure to the host of heaven of the identity of the Saviour of the world. Jesus is about to make his entry into the throne room of God to be crowned Lord of all, but this must happen according to a definite order which to our natural senses is enigmatic/strange. The cry goes out in heaven, ““Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”” (5:5), but John doesn’t see a Lion. Instead he sees an all-powerful (7 horns), all-seeing (7 eyes), all-present (7 spirits) sacrificial Lamb that has recovered from crucifixion through being raised from the dead. “And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.” (5:6). This is the highest possible insight that God triumphs over suffering through suffering. Humanity has been exalted to the heights of deity through obedience unto death (Phil 2:8).
This vision imparts an understanding crucial to our faithful following of Jesus. God allowed sin, suffering and death to enter into his universe, and to spoil it, so that it might be triumphed over by Christ himself, and by Christ in and through us. This reality comes out clearly in a passage often used at Christian funerals, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?… 37 No, inall these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (Rom 8:35, 37). The victory which comes through our Lord Jesus Christ comes to us in the same way it came to him, by faithfully passing through affliction. This truth is powerfully affirmed by that Old Testament scripture most quoted in the New Testament, Psalm 110, “The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty sceptre. Rule in the midst of your enemies!” (v.2). Suffering in all its forms is an enemy to be overcome (1 Cor 15:54-56), in the wisdom of God it exists for this very purpose. Many examples spring to mind.
A young couple in our church had their fourth child born recently. At first she seemed to have some minor problems, then they suffered more and more complications until she has been diagnosed with a rare genetic disease which is incurable and will lead to increasing disability and premature death. They have been surrounded by faith, hope and love. The situation is sad, but not finally sad. In a passage about the Second Coming and the resurrection of the dead Paul counsels, “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” (1 Thess 4:13). Then I recall the response of some members of our congregation when someone holding a very senior position who was diagnosed with cancer. There were some men in the church that had found him quite difficult to relate to, but when his illness became known I quietly observed how some of the brothers who had experienced him as “standoffish/aloof” suddenly warmed to him and moved towards him in love. After all, “love bears/believes/hopes/ endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7).
The victory of which we are speaking is not the vague victory of love in general, it is the victory of the love of the cross, the victory of Christ’s God-directed love over suffering through suffering. The death-and -resurrection of Jesus infallibly testify that the Lord God has never been distant from suffering and struggling humanity. This is the essence of the story of scripture.
Old Testament
God’s familiarity with the suffering of his people in the Old Testament is much stronger than most Christians realise. This comes across at pivotal points in the history of salvation. On the threshold of the exodus from slavery in Egypt we hear, “During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. 24 And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. 25 God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.” (2:23-25). When it says “God knew” it means that the suffering of the Israelites entered into the divine experience. As it says in Isaiah, “In all their affliction he was afflicted” (Isa 63:9). The next thing that transpires in the exodus story is the appearance of the Lord to Moses at the burning bush, “Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them” (3:7-8). Even more acutely we read in the book of Judges that immediately before the Lord sent a deliverer for Israel, it says “he [the Lord] could bear Israel’s misery no longer” (10:16).
The Old Testament’s focal point God’s identification with the suffering of his people is Isaiah 52:13-53:12. The Lord’s servant, “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows….wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities…the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all ” (Isa 53:4-6). This level of identificatory suffering is realised only in the death of the Son of God.
The Cross
If Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29) so as to become the all-conquering Lamb of Revelation, what did he actually do on the cross? What happened when Christ died on the cross is something much more profound than most of us realise. Old Testament scriptures show that God in his heart already identifies with human suffering, but apart from the power of the gospel and the illumination of the Spirit no suffering person can believe in their heart that God really understands what they are going through,
Speaking in the transformative power of the death of Jesus Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor 5:17). This claim of the birth of a new creation is massively bigger than saying that the individual Christian is a new creature. A whole new cosmos has come into being in Christ. But how? The apostle goes on to expound, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:21). When Jesus stood in our place on the cross he completely identified with the pointless, foolish, bizarre and lost existence of humanity. I, for one, came to Christ by trying to find out if there was a meaning in life and today there are millions out there drowning in what seems to them to be a pointless existence. The message of the cross is that God understands our lostness because Jesus became all our lostness.
For Jesus to truly bear our sin (1Pet 2:24) he must be unknown to the Father. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) is an utterly profound cry. The Hebrew/Aramaic for “why” isn’t Jesus’ question about what he’s done to cause such dereliction, it’s an inquiry as to the purpose or goal of his suffering. At this juncture on the cross Jesus “can’t see the point” of his dreadful pain. this is because in his substitutionary suffering he has become the goalless summit of a creation that has lost its destiny. The triumph of Christ crucified is that whatever he is enduring Jesus does not sulk, turn in on himself or wish he could climb down from the cross, he cries out to God as he is able to know him. Such fully faithful submission of the Son of God is all that the Father had ever asked of his children. Christ turns the full force of his infinitely suffering humanity under the weight of sin and death towards God in heaven and in so doing transforms the meaning of our anguish, giving it a new and eternal purpose in HIMSELF. Everything, including evil, must now be understood in a Christ-centred fashion.
Even before death Jesus senses in himself that God’s grand purpose has been reached. “It is finished.” (John 19:30) means the goal has been achieved. A goal manifested in his resurrection from the dead and return to the Father in ascended power. Whereas the disciples previously could/would not believe that God had a purpose in the rejection of his beloved Son, now they knew the truth, “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”” (Luke 24:26). That Jesus has made suffering the vehicle of glory is the powerful revelation that transformed the early church’s attitude to afflictions.
Gospel Suffering
Suffering imprisonment for the Lord (Eph 6:20) Paul exhorts the Ephesians, “I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.” (3:13). Peter likewise pairs suffering and glory, “But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.” (1 Pet 4:13-14). Immersion in “the fellowship of sufferings” (Phil 3:10) is deeply creative of the essential nature of the Church. (And one fundamental reason why Western Christianity is ignorant of what it means to be the community of Christ.)
According to the New Testament, the mark of a church living in the victory of Christ isn’t numbers, wealth or influence, but shared sufferings. This is the sign of the power of the gospel to revolutionise human values and behaviour. There are a host of scriptures to this effect: “if one member suffers all suffer together” (1 Cor 12:26), “you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer” (2 Cor 1:6), “For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews” (1 Thess 2:14), “Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are ill-treated as if you yourselves were suffering.” (Heb 13:3), “I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos don account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” (Rev 1:9). For the Church to share the sufferings of Christ is her glory and it reveals his glory. Bearing suffering through faith in Jesus is a glory which prophetically images the transformation of the cosmos. In Romans 8 Paul teaches, “if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” (Rom 8:17), then he goes on to speak of the liberation of the whole creation from the corruption of death and decay (Rom 8:21).
Conclusion
We live in a society that has been progressively been stripped of Christian values so as to become increasingly impotent in dealing with suffering. In Australia you have a 50% chance of suffering a mental illness some time in your life, and the drive for euthanasia is a stark indication that since people can’t see the point in suffering they’d rather just end it all.
I sense the cry we examined “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?” (Rev 5:2) is a cry which echoes from heaven to the churches of Christ. It is an ongoing call to follow Jesus in laying down our lives for each other and a lost world and it is the key to the kingdom of God conquering the kingdom of this world (Rev 11:15). To have someone suffer willingly on your behalf is your glory. In following Christ, we should pursue this impartation of glory for the sake of others. In Christ, all suffering is a glorious gift, “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, 30 engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.” (Phil 1:29-30). Suffering is not some universal accident or inconvenience; all evil exists to be triumphed over. Knowing this, the apostles were “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name” (Acts 5:41). Our suffering in union with Christ should be considered as inclusive, and specific, as his atoning death. Sickness, poverty, singleness, rejection, foregoing a career, the agonies of intercession, grieving before the Lord etc. are part of the purpose-filled call of God understood in the Spirit. All of us can know in the light of the cross and triumph of the Lamb of God that the greater the vision the greater the suffering. We can all know that all our sufferings, and indeed all suffering, has one single, great and eternal purpose, to testify, “Jesus is the Victor”.