[0:00] Now let us turn in God's word to Isaiah 52. Isaiah 52, and we read again verse 14.
[0:16] As many were astonished at thee, his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men.
[0:30] On Thursday evening, I referred to a recent visit that I paid to Argentina, and an experience that we had there.
[0:46] On another occasion, just a few weeks ago, we went in the city of Buenos Aires to visit what is known as the City of the Dead.
[0:59] It is a huge cemetery, a mausoleum where all the great figures of Argentinian history, the aristocracy of that nation, are buried.
[1:13] Magnificent statues, tombs and carvings, and there underneath are the dead, the generals, the presidents, their wives, their families.
[1:28] And we visited, among others, the tomb of Eva Perón, who had been the wife in the late forties and early fifties of the then dictator president, General Juan Perón.
[1:45] Eva Perón, of course, enjoying, if that's the correct word, a certain celebrity in these years through musicals and films that have been made about her.
[1:58] Perhaps you know just a little of her story. Perhaps you know of her being an unknown actress from a little provincial town who made her way to the capital, Buenos Aires, to try and hit success.
[2:16] Well, she caught the eye of the president. And she married him. And Eva Perón became an idol of the working classes.
[2:30] She was a great auditor. Many people would describe her rather as the greatest of all the rabble-rousers. At any rate, she won the allegiance of the hundreds of thousands of the poorer people and successfully managed to get some legislation passed on their behalf, on behalf of the trade unions and of the working classes.
[2:56] And in that respect, some good was done. But she was idolized and she knew how to harangue the masses and to gain their popular acclaim.
[3:08] Well, she was only 30, 31, I think, when she was struck down with terminal cancer. And if you know the story, as I say, you'll know how she was operated on, but it was too late.
[3:27] But in the last months, in spite of this, her increasing weakness, she would go out onto the presidential balcony there in the heart of Buenos Aires, harangue the crowds, she would ensure that her people would, as best they could, have her looking beautiful and healthy in spite of her body being consumed.
[3:51] She would make special efforts still to win the acclaim of the crowds. Just a few days before she died, she took part in a great motor cavalcade through the streets in honor of the president.
[4:04] And there she was looking, it seemed as beautiful as ever, as attractive to the masses, waving, speaking with a microphone. A few days later, she was dead.
[4:19] But could she be dead? This great idol of the masses, many who virtually adored her as if she were a god. No, she couldn't be.
[4:32] And so, hundreds of thousands of dollars and many months were spent embalming Eva Peron's body. And there she lay, beautiful, in death.
[4:46] She herself had said often, I'll come back. And when I come back, I will be millions. Well, her body was smuggled away.
[4:58] There was a coup d'etat. Other generals came in. Her body was smuggled away to Italy, an unknown grave under another name. When it was disinterred, the coffin was opened in order to be sure that it was really she.
[5:13] We're told that the Italian grave diggers were absolutely astonished. We expected bones, crumbling dust. And there was this beautiful body as if it were alive.
[5:27] In order to be powerful, in order to attract the people, in order to hold them from the world's viewpoint, you must be attractive, you must be beautiful, you must be strong.
[5:40] It happens again and again, doesn't it? President Yeltsin is a very sick man. But we know how very carefully his appearances are stage managed.
[5:52] The cameras show him as if he were so much better. His words, carefully chosen, his appearances to give to the people. The aspect of someone still in control.
[6:05] And the world sometimes goes even further. Their great leaders die and they don't tell the people. their death is kept from them in order that the aura of their power might continue.
[6:18] That's how it is with the world. The world's leaders, they must be strong, they must be beautiful, they must be rich, they must be popular. How very different, my friends, with Jesus Christ.
[6:34] The Lord, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, but look at him. How openly weak, how poor, how unattractive, how unpopular.
[6:50] There he is, his visage marred more than that of any man, his form more than the sons of men. Weakness, ugliness, the King of Kings.
[7:04] There's a poem that very strikingly and movingly draws our attention to this fact, the weakness of God.
[7:17] Now the phrase is not mine, it's the Apostle Paul's phrase, an inspired scripture, the weakness of God. And a couple of lines in this poem say this, the other gods were strong, but thou wast weak.
[7:33] they rode, but thou didst stumble to thy throne. I'd like us today particularly as we reflect on our coming to the Lord's table and our remembering him who became weak for us.
[7:53] I'd like us to reflect on the picture of God that is given us in Holy Scripture. The picture that when we first see it, it seems so incredible.
[8:05] We can't accept that this could be God. God who is weak. God who is, and the word is shocking, but I use it, God who is ugly.
[8:18] God who is poor. God who is lonely. God who is dead. Why, you see, that's as blasphemous to speak thus of God.
[8:30] It sounds it, doesn't it? Surely the God whom we worship, is he weak? Doesn't Scripture say that the voice of the Lord is over the waters?
[8:41] The God of glory thunders. The Lord is over many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is full of majesty. God is strong, omnipotent.
[8:54] we look at God who is weak. We look at God who is ugly. How terrible, how shocking the very word sounds.
[9:06] And doesn't Scripture say to us, I will meditate on the glorious splendor of thy majesty. And isn't the beauty of our God set so wonderfully before us when we read that like the apple tree among the trees of the woods so is my beloved among the sons.
[9:25] I sat down under his shadow with great delight. His fruit was sweet to my taste, attractiveness, beauty, loveliness. Is that not the picture, the reality of God?
[9:39] And I say also, God who is poor, poor, is this not the God who says to us, every beast of the forest is mine and the cattle on a thousand hills?
[9:53] I know all the birds of the mountains and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world is mine and its fullness, God who is surpassingly rich.
[10:09] And yet I speak to you today of the God who is poor, and God I go on to say who is lonely, the lonely God.
[10:20] why is the picture not given us, that picture of God as he is, and around him, the voice of many angels that are around the throne, and the living creatures, and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb, this is our God, God who is acclaimed by the multitudes without number, the lonely God.
[10:53] And then too I say we are presented with the God who is dead. God? Dead? Doesn't the psalmist tell us the Lord lives?
[11:05] Blessed be my rock, let the God of my salvation be exalted. And don't we sing, and no doubt we'll sing tomorrow as we close our service of remembrance at the Lord's table, that his name shall endure forever.
[11:20] His name shall endure as long as the sun, and blessed be his glorious name forever. This is our God. And yet I say that we are presented in Scripture with a God who is weak, and ugly, and poor, and lonely, and dead.
[11:43] Well, all that I say about the strength, and the beauty, and the richness, and the acclaim of multitudes, and the livingness of Almighty God is true.
[11:57] And yet are we not told this? That God was in Christ. And Christ, the God-man, became these very things, became these very things for us, and that we will remember at his table.
[12:18] Let's explore it a little further. Let's look at these characteristics that I've suggested of God in Christ. God made flesh.
[12:30] Here we see him weak. Well, you remember our blessed Lord. You remember him in all the weariness that he endured, seeking to escape from the multitudes, that he might for a moment lie down, have time of rest with his disciples.
[12:50] You remember him there in the boat, so exhausted that in the tossing of the waves and the howling, howling of the winds, he falls asleep in his exhaustion.
[13:04] And you see him there in the garden. You see him so exhausted, so utterly cast down in all his weariness and in all the agony of the situation that an angel is to be sent to strengthen this God-man who is weak.
[13:24] And you see him captured helplessly, it seems, by his enemies. You see him bound, unable to move. You see him beaten.
[13:35] You see him collapsing under the weight of the cross. Other men could carry it, but he couldn't. you see him nailed helplessly to that tree.
[13:47] And you hear the taunt, he saved others, himself, he cannot, not able to save himself. And you see him, as we read here in chapter 53, led like a lamb to the slaughter.
[14:02] As a sheep before our shearers, he is dumb. The weakness of almighty God. Other liberators, well, they can bring the thousands and the millions onto the streets.
[14:20] We saw it, didn't we, with the toppling of the Soviet regime and the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and how even liberators unarmed were able to bring out the multitudes and receive their acclaim and topple regimes.
[14:36] There they were, but Jesus Christ, just a handful of followers, and these few, these few, they forsake him, they flee.
[14:49] It seems he can't even hold those few. Weak, weak, the God man. And then scripture tells us that he was ugly.
[15:05] Now that sounds terrible, it sounds as if it's a word that we shouldn't say. And there are those, perhaps there's some truth in what they say, that when God became man, incarnate in Jesus Christ, and as we look at Jesus Christ, the incarnate God, we see the most perfect specimen of humanity, the most handsome, the strongest, the best developed of all the men that ever lived.
[15:35] Well, there may be truth, perhaps, in such a thought. But that's not the picture that is set before us most of all in holy scripture.
[15:46] We see him, as in our text, his visage, so marred, more than any man, his form, more than the sons of men.
[15:59] We see him, as we read on into chapter 53, we see him as the one who is despised and rejected of men, man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and then, then, listen to this, people hiding their faces from him.
[16:16] Such a horrible sight. The eternal God, become like that. Or it goes on to tell us how, again, there in chapter 53, that he was wounded, he was bruised, stripes, and you can imagine him, can't you?
[16:39] You can imagine him there, bleeding, the blood caked on his brow and down his face, his back likewise bleeding, ugly, as we look on it, unkempt, the nights without sleep.
[16:58] You can see him there, staggering, and the Bible presents to us not the picture of a beautiful, in death as in life, a beautiful Eva Peron, so that she can be admired by the multitudes in all her attractiveness on Jesus Christ, and set before us as one whose visage is marred, whose form is made formless peace, because of the agony and the horror that he endures.
[17:32] And how often we sing, and we've sung already this morning, those moving words of Psalm 22 that tell us of what it was like to look on Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
[17:46] I am a worm, God made man, I am a worm, a worm and no man, the reproach of men, undespised of the people.
[18:00] Or we have it again, these were written a thousand years before he came, but they're the words of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God. They gaped upon me with their mouths, I'm poured out like water, my bones are out of joint, my heart is like wax, melted in the midst of my bowels, my strength dried up like a potsherd, my tongue cleaves to my jaws, not very attractive, is it?
[18:29] Not very beautiful. Something, as the prophet says, from which we instinctively turn away. But again, said before us in words that we'll be singing before we end our service in Psalm, 69, or that we actually were singing, there again the same picture.
[18:52] I'm become a stranger to my brethren, an alien to my mother's children. Sackcloth, my garment, the song of the drunkards, God made ugly in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son.
[19:11] And then I say we're presented with God who is not only weak, ugly, but who is poor, poor. Tell other leaders, they can't, they can't conceive of reaching their place of leadership and of power over the people if they are poor.
[19:30] You think of the political parties, we've all been sent the referendum party literature. well the millions that a multi-millionaire is spending in order to impress us, in order to gain our votes, in order to gain our enthusiastic support.
[19:47] You look across the Atlantic and you see the presidential campaigns and it leaves us sometimes cold to think of the millions and millions and millions of dollars that are spent in order to win the acclaim of the people, in order to enter into power.
[20:03] You must be rich, you must have resources beyond all computing. And Jesus Christ, we're told of him, that though the foxes had holes and the birds of the air had nests, he had nowhere, nowhere to lay his head.
[20:21] And as you follow him during those three years of ministry, you see a man who was dependent upon charity. He wanted to teach a lesson about whom we should submit to.
[20:32] And you remember how he had to say, give me a coin. Not even a coin in his pocket. Nothing. He had to be given food and shelter by others.
[20:44] And when he died, he had to be laying in another man's tomb. And what was his legacy? Oh, the leaders and the dictators of this world, what legacies they leave.
[20:58] Well, their legacies in their own name may be stashed away in Swiss banks. Peron, whom I mentioned, one of many. And the Lord Jesus Christ, what did he leave?
[21:12] Just a bundle of old clothes. That's all there was. There, at the foot of the cross, he was rich, became poor.
[21:23] God, who in Christ became weak, became ugly, became poor, but also lonely. Again, thinking of other leaders, it's not like that, is it?
[21:36] They want the acclaim of the multitudes. And if they win the elections, or if they put into legislation some popular measures, why, they have votes by the thousand, they have the crowds in the streets, and they're carried through, the masses, on the shoulders of their great followers.
[21:55] They have popular acclaim. And the Lord Jesus Christ, how was it with him who was God? Despised and rejected of men.
[22:09] Taken as a lamb to the slaughter, a sheep before her shearers, done alone, alone, the Lord Jesus Christ. alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on the wide, wide sea of man's inhumanity and man's rejection.
[22:31] And my friends, Jesus felt it. He felt it in the depth of his being, of his humanity that he had taken on our behalf.
[22:43] When many of his disciples, they found his teaching, too hard and it was going to be too difficult for them to follow this new teacher and they melted away.
[22:54] And you remember how our Lord turns to his disciples and he says, will you also go away? Or again, you remember in the garden as he agonized there, knowing what lay ahead as he was to be made the sacrifice for sin.
[23:12] You remember how it was that the disciples fell asleep and he said, couldn't you watch with me? Just for one hour. And there his closest followers, knowing that the hour had come when he must leave the world, but it was via the cross and the agony of Calvary.
[23:31] He might have expected that there they would show understanding, but who is the one that has to bend down? They would not be slaves to wash their feet.
[23:43] They were men of standing and of prestige. No. And so there was no sympathy, no understanding, the loneliness, the loneliness of God.
[23:55] And there on Calvary's cross, the acme of all that loneliness, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
[24:07] And he was, he was alone. It's said of Martin Luther that during the months and years while he agonized to come to an understanding of justification by faith, that on one occasion he came out of his cell in the monastery.
[24:25] He had been immersed in the teaching of the Gospels and of the epistle to the Romans. And he came out one day and said, God, abandoned by God, who can understand it, who indeed the loneliness of God in Christ, Christ in our place there on the cross of Calvary.
[24:52] And then there is also this, God weak, God ugly, God poor, God lonely, God, how can we say it, God dead, the eternally living one?
[25:07] Well, of course, there are many who have wished it, many who down through the centuries have desired that God might be dead, that they might live freed from the restraints of a creator God who will be their judge.
[25:20] Back in the 60s and 70s, trendy theologians were announcing with great confidence that God was dead and that we had to be honest to a new kind of God, of their imagining.
[25:33] Well, that was nothing new. They thought, they said it was new, but it wasn't. Back in the last century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he proclaimed that God was dead, that the modern age could no longer have such a God as this, that the world had always thought was a true being.
[25:56] God, said Nietzsche, is dead. I don't know if you've ever heard the very witty epigram that someone wrote after this philosopher Nietzsche died, and it just went like this, God is dead, signed Nietzsche, and underneath it, Nietzsche is dead, signed God.
[26:20] That's our God, the living God, the eternally living one, and yet Christ, the eternal son of God, died. He truly died.
[26:30] Oh, there have been fables and myths and legends, there have been attempts to deny the death of God in Christ. Why, someone else took his place on the cross, his body revived in the tomb, he never really died, no doubt attempts to discount the reality of the resurrection, but there are many down through the years and centuries who have said this, God, Christ in God did not really die, but God, Christ, the eternal son of God in his human nature died on the cross of Calvary.
[27:10] The other day I switched on the television to look at the news bulletin and it was about a minute to go and they were showing a clip about some program that was going to be shown that evening or later on.
[27:25] it showed a man obviously dead lying there and it also showed a beautiful young woman her long black hair unloosed streaming down the side of her face and her shoulders.
[27:44] She was obviously grieving. She was singing a mournful song, a lament for this person who had died. when I saw what the program was just before they put on the news, the very title of it is the most horrible blasphemy, let alone the content which I only know from what I've read in reviews.
[28:09] Jesus Christ Superstar, horrible blasphemy. But as I saw that, it did come home to me that Jesus truly died.
[28:23] He did. The eternal God who became man, He went to the very point of death. And there were those among His followers and His friends who mourned because they knew, they had hoped that He would be the liberator of Israel, but He was dead.
[28:42] He died. Friends, that's the God that is presented to us. And we ask the question, why? Why should it be that God in His Son become flesh?
[28:58] Should go through with that? Should become all that? Why? Well, I want to suggest three very simple answers, very brief and very simple.
[29:11] He did it, first of all, to act for us. To act for us. God is none of these things.
[29:24] God is the mighty one, the eternally strong one. God is in Himself the object of adoring worship for His beauty and His loveliness, for all that He is in His attributes, in His nature.
[29:40] God is rich beyond all reckoning, not merely the cattle on a thousand hills, but all that you and I can see and much that we cannot see and much beyond that is as nothing to our God, who is the creator and possessor of all things.
[29:59] And God, lonely, why God, the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the joy of fellowship, God, a fellowship from all eternity to all eternity, and the angels and the archangels whom He created, and those whom He has redeemed who are there, adoring Him and singing His praises now, the ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands, that is God in Himself and in His nature, and God who lives and who lives forevermore, so it needn't have happened.
[30:36] God was none of these things, but it did, it did. God came, He came in Christ and He went through with all of this.
[30:51] I remember when I was still a boy at school, God in His mercy had come to me while I was still at school to bring me to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and I was very involved in the Scripture Union group in the school which was led by one of the teachers.
[31:12] And on one occasion this teacher, fellow Islander yourselves, he had invited a special speaker. It turned out to be Professor Finlayson, at that time Professor of Theology in the Free Church College.
[31:28] And he came into the classroom where we had our lunchtime Scripture Union meeting, and he said, I want to speak to you today, give you a class on prepositions.
[31:42] You know what prepositions are? By and with and for and under. And he didn't have any Bible reading, he just started talking about the importance of prepositions.
[31:56] I think probably some of us wondered if he thought he'd been invited for an English class and not for a Scripture Union meeting. And he began to talk about nouns and verbs, very important words, but they're nothing without prepositions.
[32:11] How important they are. He gave us some examples of sentences that would be meaningless without prepositions. And we were all sitting wondering, and then very, very skillfully indeed, he brought us to a verse of Scripture.
[32:30] And having given us this ten-minute lesson on the importance of prepositions, he brought us insensibly to where Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ.
[32:45] Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. The life that I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
[33:00] I still remember Professor Finlayson pausing, and on that last phrase, we obviously had seen which the prepositions were. For, a wonderful preposition, a wonderful word.
[33:16] The Son of God, he said, who loved me and gave himself for, for me. And he turned it round and then spoke to us as to whether we knew how Jesus had died for sinners.
[33:32] And could we say that the Son of God had loved us and given himself for us. And there in that simple little word, it's all there, isn't it?
[33:44] Why? Why did God go through all this? Why in the person of his Son did he endure all that? For, for others, for his people.
[33:59] And that, of course, is set out before us in this passage that we read again and again and again. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities.
[34:12] again in verse 7, he was oppressed and he was afflicted. It was for us. He, the sacrificial lamb, taking our place for sinners.
[34:27] And as we go through scripture, we find that this was how God prepared the world for this. All the sacrifices, the Israelite would come, he was a sinner, aware that he couldn't stand before a holy God.
[34:42] So what could he do? All that he could ever try to do would not be enough. It wouldn't satisfy the demands of a righteous God. And so he comes, he comes with his unblemished lamb.
[34:55] And that lamb is slain. He himself takes the knife and slays it before the priest then takes the blood and sprinkles it. And you remember the detail. The detail we're told that at every sacrifice, the Israelite laid his hand on the lamb or the kid, the sacrifice.
[35:13] And he is saying in effect, I'm a sinner in the sight of God. I stand under his judgment. I can't do anything about it myself, but this takes my place for me, the transferring of his sin to the sacrificial victim.
[35:30] And of course, the preparation that there was through all these sacrifices brings us to the profound reality of Calvary, where the Son of God became a substitute for sinners, for us, taking our place and doing it through satisfaction, his life satisfying the righteous demands of a holy God, not only his life, his death, as he was plunged into the hell of those hours of darkness that led him to cry out, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me, the loneliness that he endured there on the cross of Calvary, and it was for us.
[36:20] He gave his life a ransom for many. And Paul could say that the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.
[36:33] And to do this, he endured that. And he was willing to be made weak and ugly and poor and lonely and dead to act for us, that we might be redeemed, that we might be freed from the chains that bind us and brought into the glorious liberty of the family of the living God.
[37:02] But it's not only to act for us, he also went through it all to be like us, to be like us.
[37:14] Now that follows on what I've just said. The first that I have said is the heart of it, his taking our place. God had to be like us.
[37:27] He became man like us. He tasted all the bitter fruit of sin. You and I know something of the fruits of sin.
[37:38] We know the suffering, the injustice, the pains and the griefs that plague us and plague mankind in this world in which we live.
[37:50] and in every pan that rings the heart, the man of sorrows had a part. And that tally of human suffering that is so immense.
[38:03] We think and we feel we can no longer cope with it. Of all that goes on in the world today, of all those who are the millions, who are driven out of their homelands and we see pictures of them in all their agony.
[38:20] We see children without their parents. We see them staggering in illness and into death, into a refugee camp so filled with plague and disaster.
[38:32] We see it all and we know that that's only a part of all the suffering and the agony that is the fruit, the bitter fruit of sin. And then we remember that Jesus Christ knew it all.
[38:48] He went through all this. He became like us as we experienced the suffering and the agony of this world and all its sin.
[39:01] And so we have the reminder, don't we, in those great words of the writer to the Hebrews that tell us of the humanity for us of Jesus Christ, our Lord, how he is for us a compassionate and merciful high priest.
[39:20] He also took part of the same that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death. It may behoved him to be made like his brethren, like you and me, to be like us, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people, for us, for our sins, for that he himself had suffered being tempted, he is able to succor those who are tempted.
[39:54] And aren't we encouraged by how the writer to the Hebrews goes on and tells us that we do not have a high priest who cannot be touched with a feeling of our infirmities.
[40:06] In all points he was tempted just as we are, though praise God, without sin. I mentioned a poem earlier on that speaks of the weakness of God as we see him incarnate in Christ and as Christ goes through what we have described.
[40:27] That poem goes on to say in another few lines this, we must have sight of thorn pricks on thy brow. We must have thee, O Jesus of the scars, but to our wounds only God's wounds can speak.
[40:44] And not a God has wounds, but thou alone. Wounded for us, bruised for our iniquities, wounded for our transgressions.
[40:58] And this is the Savior who calls us to trust in him, and trusting in him to profess him, and to meet with him when he is host, invites us to his table.
[41:13] But one other thing, very briefly as we close, why did he endure it all? To act for us, to be like us, but also this, to rule over us.
[41:27] Well, you say, and you say rightly, isn't God ruler anyway? Yes, he is. He rules over all his creatures by sovereign right. He is the creator. We are but the dust of the earth.
[41:40] And so he is sovereign. As creator, sustainer, he has that sovereign rule over us. But there's more here. There is more for those whom he has called out to be his own people.
[41:55] Verse 14 here speaks of what we have been considering, that visage marred more than any man, the form more than the sons of men. But it doesn't end there. It talks of many.
[42:06] But then the next verse goes on to talk of other many. So shall he sprinkle many nations. Now that's a difficult verse to understand.
[42:18] The commentators disagree about some of the interpretation. But I think the thrust is perfectly obvious. That many who rejected him and despised him, who did not esteem him, because God in mercy came to Calvary's cross, God having a people that he had given an eternal covenant to his son, and desired to have in his own embrace that they might enjoy his fellowship.
[42:45] God from among those many who were appalled at him, who despised and rejected him, God's purpose was to bring out many who would bow before him.
[42:57] And through the sprinkling that comes through Calvary of the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, that way and that way alone, we who once were among those who were appalled, who rejected and despised him, who turned away, esteeming him not by the grace of God, pointing us to Calvary, quickening faith within us, granting his Holy Spirit to give us understanding and to raise us out of spiritual death, then we can say, thank God we have become those of the many, remember the thousands and thousands and ten thousands and the innumerable multitude, many from many nations and you and I by the grace of God brought, then there is the right of rule by creation, but there is this rule that comes as we become the subjects of the King of Kings.
[43:56] You remember how the shorter catechism, when it asks us how Christ executes the office of King, begins in this way, he exercises the office of King in subduing us to himself.
[44:16] And so as we are brought to Jesus Christ by faith, to put our trust in him as our substitute, as our savior, then by God's grace, we are subdued to himself.
[44:30] Then it comes, he rules and defends us, he restrains and conquers all his and our enemies, but first he subdues us to himself. And if that is so, then surely we are called to exercise and demonstrate our obedience to our King.
[44:52] And if today you have been presented with God like that, become all that for sinners, I ask you, can your heart remain hard if it should be that you are here today, as it were, on the outside, on the fringes of the people of God?
[45:13] Christ, enduring that for sinners, among whom we all are, you are, and calling you, calling you by his suffering and his agony, to trust that he did it for you.
[45:29] And then I ask this, if that is true, if you do know that all that Jesus endured for you, and it was to act for you, to be like you, but also to rule over you, I ask you this, when he who endured it all and now is King of Kings and Lord over all his church, if he says, do this in remembrance of me, can you, can you say, no, there's this problem, there's that problem, I don't understand it, I'm not young enough, or I'm too old, or I might fall back, I might not be what I ought to be, can you, can you?
[46:15] When this one, whose visage was more marred than any man's, is far more than the sons of men, but who reigns from that cross, his throne, as he dispenses royal favours, today you shall be with me in paradise, and also calls for allegiance, can you then?
[46:36] If you have never done so, can you fail tomorrow to be with us? In all our own weakness, he had brought to Christ by faith, remembering him at his table, let us pray.
[46:50] in all até when