Sermon: the Death of Sin (Good Friday 2010)

Sermon by Matt Kennedy
text: Hebrews 10:1-25
Good Friday 2010

The opening lines of Hebrews 10 should bring a number of questions to mind. Chief among them should be, what end or goal was the law with its sacrifices unable to achieve? 
        
If we can answer that question, Hebrew’s 10 will be easy to understand. In Genesis 2 scripture provides the image of the world when it was new. At the heart of this picture is the deep intimate union between God and human beings. God creates the cosmos, the planets, the sun, the earth, everything else and its all beautiful and it is all good, but then he forms Adam from the dust, breathes his own life into his nostrils and you get the sense that the garden was created for that purpose—to be the place where God and Adam live together. God plants a garden full of fruit that is both pleasant to Adam’s eye and good for him to eat. He invites Adam to eat from the Tree of life. He sets Adam in the garden to work it at a time when all work was fruitful and interesting—God cares for Adam’s every need, creating Eve from his own flesh. God walks with them in the cool of the garden. There is only one thing God withholds, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We are not told why, but God does say that if Adam should eat of it, he will die.
        
The serpent enters. He begins by confusing Eve—”Did God really say you cannot eat from any tree in the Garden”. Of course he didn’t but Eve doesn’t remember what God said. She’s confused. She does remember God saying if they eat the fruit they’ll die. “You’ll surely not die…God knows that if you eat from it, you’ll be like him.” God’s lying to you. He’s withholding this thing from you because he wants to keep you from gaining independence, power and authority. But you can have it. You can have everything you want and do everything you want just like him.” And though the garden is full of good things to eat, Adam and Eve listen to the the serpent and eat the fruit.

Suddenly the serpent is gone and they’re naked. God calls for them. They haven’t taken Systematic Theology so they haven’t learned of God’s omniscience and omnipresence. They hide.
Their sin has dramatic consequences. First, Adam and Eve’s distrust of God’s word, their longing for temporary pleasing fruit rather than eternal communion with God, their desire to be gods—all of that is passed on to their offspring. It becomes part of human nature so that every human child conceived inherits a mind, heart, soul, oriented away from God and toward the self so that when we reach the age when we can know good from evil we consistently choose evil. David says in Psalm 51 that he was a sinner from the time his mother conceive him. In Ephesians 2, Paul says that human beings are “by nature children of wrath”. Hearts are hard toward God. We want to be like him. We do not want him. It’s common for secular psychologists, thinkers, and talk show hosts to deny this truth. Many will say, people are naturally good, selfless, pure, but “society”—teaches us to be selfish, to lie, to want our own way. If you believe that I invite you to spend some quality time with my two year old daughter Gwendolyn. I assure you, we have not had to train her to seek her own way.
    
Second. When our first parents chose independence from God. God let them go. The world is no longer the garden. Death, disease, natural disaster, tragedy, warfare, genocide, all these characterize life outside the garden. “Why does God allow such things to happen?” “Where is God in Haiti, in Chile?” These questions are often accusations. The prodigal son after rejecting his father, leaving his father’s house, demanding the inheritance, getting it, spending it, now stands knee deep in the pig pen and rather than repenting, accuses the Father of neglect. The world wants the peace and immortality of the Garden without the Creator who made it.
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So here we are. We stand outside the garden, subject to the death, disease and the chaos we have caused—we break relationships, we break our word, we break our bodies, we corrupt our eyes and our minds, we bind ourselves to fruits that become addictions, and our hearts far from being turned back by all of this—instead grow harder and harder.
        
That’s the human condition. We all know something is wrong. Every human being knows something is missing , something is out of order, something’s not coming together, and Paul even says in Romans 1, we know what it is. We know God exists and that we ought to love him and worship him but we refuse to do so.  We suppress that truth. We work not to see him. We work to replace him. Some sink themselves in alcohol or drugs or sex to distract, divert, and deaden. Others find better anesthetics in family and work, sports, entertainment, a thousand diversions. Still others find religion. Religion is the perfect diversion. It provides a series of things to do, disciplines, steps to take, mountains to climb, that promise to get us in touch with that missing thing by our own efforts and on our own terms feeds right into that primal desire for independence—I’ll do it my way. We want to get back into the Garden. That is the goal, that is the thing we all want even though we don’t all know we want it. But we want to get there by ourselves in our own way on the strength of our own efforts.
        
That is precisely how most of Jesus’ contemporaries understood the law. Get circumcised, follow the levitical laws. When you sin, bring sin offerings, guilt offerings, sheep, goats, bulls, pigeons, dove. The animals take on your guilt and then you go back out and you continue to follow the law. Those who do these things are righteous. They return to the Garden because their deeds have made them worthy. 
        
But God says, you’ve missed the entire point: “The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves.” God gave the law to teach us that we can’t keep it. The law is good. It’s not the problem. We are. The law was supposed to reveal that, make that clear and lead us to lean on something better. No religious practice, no life of good works, no family time, no meditation technique or prayer card no diet or exercise routine no self help book is going to fix us. The endless bloodletting, the endless repetition of sacrifices day after day was to show both the incurability of ourselves—that we are always sinning no matter how many sacrifices are made and to show that “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” The sacrifices that we offer, the blood we spill, does not really cleanse. Something else has to be done by someone else.
That message is shot through the Psalms and the prophets. The author of Hebrews quotes Psalm 40 in verses 5-7 “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; 6with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, O God.’ (Psalm 40:6-8)”
    
That psalm is one among many passages that speak of a coming sacrificial victim. In Genesis 3:16, God promises that a Seed of a woman will crush the serpent under his heal but suffer from his sting. Abraham and Isaac climbing mount Moriah. Isaac asks, where is the lamb for the sacrifice. What does Abraham say? God will provide the lamb my son. And he does. In Isaiah 53 we meet the suffering servant who is despised and rejected, the one we think is cursed by God but who is in fact, the one God sends to be crushed for our iniquities, punished for our sins, so that our guilt could be laid on him and we might be forgiven. “Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will.”
  
And what is that will? “by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”(10) All along the way. From the very beginning God’s will has been to make us holy through the willing sacrifice of his Son.
I have spoken so far of human sin—of our rejection of God, our suppression of his truth, our hardened hearts, our attempts to replace God with ourselves and with the things he has made, and the disaster, disorder and chaos that has been the result.
But while have been doing all of these things, in the midst of them, through them God has willed, has longed, and has acted to save us.

When God in Christ offered his own body on the cross, human and demonic hatred, rebellion, weakness cowardice, injustice all of it reached its climax and all of it was unleashed on him. He bore it. He took it. He received the full cup of foaming wine and drained it. He consumed it it and paid the penalty for it. And then he killed it. He gave up his life and crushed sin and the power of sin into the grave.

Christ took not only sins we have or will in the future commit—he took those and paid for them—but he also killed off Sin…capital S…the flesh…the desires and longings that hold us in bondage—the sin nature. Listen to what Paul says in Romans 6:6-7 “our old self was crucified with [Christ] so that the body of sin might be done away with that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.”

Somehow God in Jesus Christ on the cross broke the power of sin and death. He won freedom from the penalty of sin and from the bondage of sin. Christ did what no law can do, what none of our sacrifices can do, what no religion can do, what no good work can do—he’s made it possible for us to be free of that power in our hearts and minds that drives us away from God, to be free of it and go home with cleansed hearts and no guilt.

You do not have to keep drinking. You do not have to keep yelling at your kids. You don’t have to keep looking for something or someone to find meaning and fulfillment, you don’t have to keep breaking promises, breaking relationships.

Not only are these sins be forgiven because Jesus paid the price for them, but the power they hold over you has been broken.

Look at verse 14 “Because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.”(14)

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