Transcript
Lord God, the story of your love for us makes us realize that there are many others as well as ourselves who need your help and your grace. And so we bring our prayers to you for those who suffer pain, for those whose minds are disturbed or have never matured, for those who have not had the opportunity to realize their potentialities, for those who are satisfied with something less than the life for which they were made, for
those who know their guilt, their shallowness, their need, but do not know Jesus, for those who know that they must shortly die, and for those that just can't wait till they die. Lord God, your Son has taken all our sufferings upon Himself and has transformed them. Help us who offer these prayers to take the sufferings of others upon ourselves, and so by your grace become the agents of your transforming love. We pray through Jesus Christ our
Lord. Amen. The theme for the address today is the mediation of Christ in our human response to God. In one of His books, Athanasius tells us that Jesus Christ the incarnate Son exercised a and He ministers the things of man toward God. But this manward ministry and Godward ministry are one and inseparable in the wholeness of His life. They are one and indivisible in the whole movement of the incarnation through His ministry, to the atoning sacrifice,
resurrection and ascension. Now yesterday, in our consideration of the person of the Mediator in the incarnation of the Son of God, the stress fell upon the ministry of God the Son toward man. Now we are to stress the ministry of the incarnate Son as man toward God. In order to help us understand this, let us return to consider the covenant partnership between God and Israel, and the kind of reciprocity which God worked out in and through
historical dialogue with Israel. Now we are accustomed to think of the covenant as having two factors, God and man, God and Israel. And in the Old Testament clauses of the covenant we hear words like, I will be your God and you will be my people. I am holy, be ye holy, walk before me and be perfect. Are there, however, only two factors in the covenant? Are there not three factors? We have God and man or God
and Israel, the two polar, the two partners of the covenant. But there is a tertium datum or something in the middle, and that is a covenant way of response. You see, God knew that Israel would not be able to fulfill the covenant. That Israel would not be able to be holy as God was holy, would not be able to walk before him and be perfect, would not be able to worship him as it ought. And so
within the covenant, and as part of the sheer grace of the covenant, God freely provided a covenant way of response, a covenant way of fulfilling the covenant. And that we see particularly set out in the cult or the liturgy of worship in the heart of the covenant relationship. Recall the fact that at every particular point in the Pentateuchal account of the worship of God in the tabernacle or later in the temple, everything is ordained by God.
The Jews are not allowed to bring any sacrifice of their own devising. Not even the recipe for incense is one to be invented by man, but one provided by God. At every point it is made clear that Israel comes to worship God not with its own worship, not with its own sacrifices, but with sacrifices and oblations provided by God and put into the hands of Israel. And the priests offer for God, for the people, the sacrifices
that are provided by God. That is to say, here we have the covenant fulfilled through a divinely provided way of response in faith, obedience and worship. Israel within the covenant therefore is geared into a vicarious way of response toward God. Now that set forth in the cult was good enough, it was used by God as the instrument to instruct people day by day and year by year how the grace of God was met, how the provisions
of God for atoning, forgiveness were met. But that covenant response had to be worked into the very flesh and blood of Israel's existence. It had to be worked into and worked out of Israel's very being. It had to be built into the structure of the reciprocity between God and Israel throughout history. Now that is what we find in the servant, the servant of the Lord. Because the servant of the Lord is the actualization within the flesh
and blood existence of Israel of the divinely provided way of covenant response set forth in the cult, in the oblation and sacrifice. Here we have the officiating priest and the divinely provided way of sacrifice and worship welded together in the vicarious role of the servant. Now as that is spelled out in the Isaiahs, there's something there which I find extremely startling. You'll notice that again and again the prophet talks about the servant, the Ebed Yahweh, but
he also talks in the same breath again and again about the go'el, the redeemer, the holy one of Israel. And the holy one of Israel is certainly the Lord God, the redeemer. But the holy one of Israel and the servant of the Lord, the Ebed Yahweh, are held up together and held apart only by a hair's breadth. It's as though the prophet wants to say the real servant is God himself the redeemer who as go'el redeemer
has made himself of our very kindred and it is as such that he takes upon himself Israel's existence and offers sacrifice on Israel's behalf and that self-sacrifice is that of the servant. Now of course had the Ebed Yahweh and the go'el been actually identified we would have been in a state of incarnation. But the gospel of the Old Testament as the second Isaiah so often called can only hold them closely together without actually identifying them.
But that is exactly what we find immediately on the pages of the gospel. Jesus presents himself and stands before us from his baptism on as he who came to fulfill all righteousness to offer himself a ransom. Here we have in Jesus the fulfillment in his incarnate reality of the divinely provided provision of vicarious response to the covenant. We remember the promise in the Isaiah's of a new covenant which the servant of the Lord would mediate with
people and which through Israel would be mediated to all mankind. It's in that light we have to understand the incarnation and the incarnate life and work of Jesus who came to fulfill the covenant and to mediate a new covenant in his body and blood. Jesus Christ then and this is Athanasius point is the fulfillment of the covenant from both sides. I will be your God and you will be my people I am holy be you holy.
But in Jesus Christ the covenant fulfilled from the side of God toward man but it's also fulfilled from the side of man toward God in the obedient life and the obedient self-offering of Christ on our behalf. There are then three fundamental factors to be taken into account God and man but within that we have the polarity, the vicarious humanity of Jesus, the divinely provided way of fulfilling the covenant response in the life and work of
the mediator. Now let's think that out for a moment in terms of revelation and reconciliation and look back again at God's historical dialogue with Israel in which he chose this way of realizing actualizing his self-revelation to mankind in such a way that the receiver of the divine revelation Israel would be molded and shaped into an appropriate vessel to receive that revelation. So all through Israel's history we have the word of God coming from God to
man laying hold upon Israel struggling with it, wrestling with it, breaking it down, remaking it, penetrating into its existence and calling forth response of obedience and often intensified disobedience. But in all that reciprocity God's word comes to Israel in such a way as to create and form an appropriate, an increasingly appropriate response to God's word and that response is assimilated into the mediation of the word of God to man. So that God's word comes to Israel
in such a way that Israel's response is taken up, purified and assimilated to the word of God as the very medium by which that word is spoken to Israel and through Israel spoken to all mankind. Now that's what we have in Jesus. In Jesus Christ we have God's word become man but in Jesus Christ we have also man speaking and responding to God. God's word comes to man and is translated into human form, into the form
of a human life and that human life is lived and offered by way of response of man toward God. But the response of man toward God is taken into, incorporated within the very word of God come to man as the very medium and essence of its communication toward man. What does that mean? That means that the real text of the New Testament revelation is the humanity of Jesus. All through the Bible as you read the New
Testament and listen to the real text is not the written word of Matthew, Mark or Luke or Romans or Hebrews. In and through all that the real text is this word translated into the flesh and blood of a human being, of a human existence in which we have perfect response on behalf of man toward God, namely Jesus. But Jesus as the real text of God's word, God's address to us is also the real text of our
address to God. In other words if Jesus Christ is God's address, God's word to man, Jesus Christ is also man's word toward God. We have no speech with which to address God but the speech called Jesus Christ. In him our humanity, our human word, our human understanding, our human speech is taken up, sanctified and hallowed and in him presented back to God. So that it is in and through Jesus, the incarnate son, that we have not
only the word of God come to man but our true human response to that word. Now look at it in terms of reconciliation. As we saw in Old Testament and New Testament this is looked at basically in terms of the God-child relation and we look at the incarnation of the son as the incorporation of the son of God into the structures of our estranged and alienated human condition. Or put it this way, in Jesus Christ
God's beloved son has come into our humanity and laid hold upon our sonship in which we have forfeited our right as children of God, in which we have distorted our childhood as sons or daughters of God. We have twisted this relation around in such a way that it is not a genuine sonship of the father but something that is expressed as ourselves. And in so doing we have alienated ourselves from God the father. But what does
Jesus Christ the son do? He penetrates into this alienated distorted existence of ours. He lays hold upon our humanity and in himself he bends it back to obedience to God the father. And in so doing he brings man back in reconciliation to the father. And as we look through that we see this not only taking place as Calvin put it to the whole course of Christ's obedience but that fulfilling itself at last in the cross and
the resurrection where God the son penetrates into the utmost extremity of our alienation and refusal. And when Jesus takes upon himself the ancient cry of the 22nd psalm, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? The son of God penetrates into the utmost extent of our self-alienation from God. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And de profundis, in the depths of Calvary, he converts that back into another cry. Father, into thy
hand I commit my spirit. And so there you see or you can see it earlier in the Garden of Gethsemane where he wrestles over the cup that God has given him and his prayer is not my will but thy will be done. Let's say not my will, your will and my will, our human self-will which Jesus took upon him and he bent it back in the agony of Gethsemane into obedience to the will of God
and then acted that out to the end on the cross of Christ. You see the whole obedient life of the Incarnate Son is the way of reconciliation from man toward God and the answer of God the Father was given in unmistakable terms in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Thou art my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Here we have the Son who had gone to the far country, brought back, reconciled to
the Father in and through the Incarnate life, atoning death and resurrection of Jesus. Now what I wish to stress today is the profoundly radical nature of Jesus' mediation of our human response in all this and we must try to bring together and think into each other the concepts of representation and substitution to take the traditional terms in systematic theology. We have to take these two concepts and sink them into one another in order to grasp the
vicarious role of Jesus in his humanity. If we think of Jesus only as representative, what does that mean? He represents us in our response. He is the leader of humanity in humanity's response. Well then that would be Jesus encouraging us all to be pelagian. But if Jesus is a substitute in detachment from us who simply acts in our stead without any ontological relation with us then the whole concept of the vicarious mediation collapses and has no
meaning. But if we think the two together, we allow them to interpenetrate one another, be united with one another in the incarnate being of the Son, in the mediatorship, then we have a deeper understanding of the vicarious humanity of Jesus. Now here's a strange fact. Liberal theology tends to reject often with utter contempt the concept of substitution and concentrates on the historical humanity of Jesus and as we saw in so doing it regularly loses the humanity
of Jesus. The fundamentalist accepts the concepts of substitution and concentrates upon the deity of Christ and again tends to lose the humanity of Jesus. But both sides are revolted when you bring together the humanity of Jesus and substitution together. That's something that neither the liberal nor the fundamentalist likes. Jesus as man takes our place and acts on our behalf and in our stead in his humanity. Now that's where the gospel cuts into us and through us
like a surgeon's knife but that's the essence of the gospel and that's where it hurts most. Now let us try to spell this out. Take faith and here I can hear some of you saying but do we not respond in faith? Do we not have a response of our own? Is faith not something that I do, do not, I believe? But the biblical way of looking at faith is different. It looks at faith in terms of
the polarity between the faithfulness of God and the answering faithfulness of man and we can see that in the covenant faithfulness of God toward man and mark you it's a covenant faithfulness of God which upholds the faltering response of man. As we saw the other day in the picture of Hosea we see that the covenant is unconditional and unilateral from God's side. Israel is blessed by the love of God that will not let Israel go even
if it adulterates its faith even if Israel becomes a god holds on to her in the covenant. He will not divorce his people. That is the undergirding and utterly invariant faithfulness of God and it's within that faithfulness that there is called forth the answering faithfulness of man. But here we have to think of the third factor, the fact that Jesus in that context believes in our place and on our behalf. Yes, if Jesus acts on our
behalf he doesn't simply do that as God acting for us. He does that in the depth of his humanity at every point we human beings act and if we place an emphasis upon faith and belief then even at that point Jesus acts on our behalf and in our place. He believes, he trusts God, he has faith in God on our behalf. Now this is something that people find very difficult indeed to understand. One day trying to
preach this I recalled a word that comes from John Welsh the son-in-law of John Knox which I had earlier related thought of when my little daughter was learning to walk and I'll put it this way. When she was learning to walk she clutched my hand and I held her hand and I can still feel her little fingers tightly gripping my hand as she took her first steps. But she did not rely upon her feeble
grasp of my hand but upon my strong grasp of her hand which grasped her grasp of me. Now it's in that way John Welsh said that God's faithfulness has laid hold upon our utterly weak and faltering faith and held it in his hand. You remember Jesus said to Simon Peter at the last supper you will betray me but I have prayed for you that your face may not fail. Of course it failed but in all its
failure it was upheld by the faithfulness of Jesus so that in and through all that Peter partook of the faithfulness of Christ and was the rock of the church. You see to understand faith we have to understand it in the polarised relation between God and man but in such a way that our faith is that which we have through being yoked together with Jesus and sharing in his vicarious belief and faith on our behalf. That's what
faith means and so as Calvin used to say faith is an empty vessel. I don't have in faith my believing, my trusting, my faith. It's empty. I have Christ and his faithfulness alone and faith is relying upon Christ's vicarious faithfulness for me. Now think of that also in terms of conversion and decision. Here people say but surely I have to make my personal decision for Christ. I have to turn my life round one way and go
another way. But look again at what we see in the incarnate life of Jesus. What was it that he did? He took our estranged humanity that was running away into the far country further and further away from the father. He laid hold upon it and in himself he converted it back into obedience to the father. So the whole life of Jesus from his birth to his resurrection is the life in which he converted our humanity back
to art. You know we talk about regeneration and what happens in here when we are born again. But the New Testament never once uses the term Pelligenesia of that. Regeneration is used only of the incarnation, the birth of Jesus, or it is used of the final transformation of the world when Jesus will come again. One day when I was moderator I was visiting a Gaelic church and Highlander came up to me and said to me moderator
are you born again? And I said to him yes I'm born again. When were you born again? And you should have seen his face when I said I was born again when Jesus was born to the Virgin Mary and rose again from the Virgin tomb. I said what do you mean? I said this Tom Torrance you see here that is full of iniquity but the real Tom Torrance is hid with Christ in God because my humanity
was taken up by Jesus in his incarnation, sanctified, cleansed, redeemed, offered to the in sacrifice and raised again from the dead and so I was converted in the whole work of Jesus from his birth of the Virgin Mary to his new birth from the tomb. You see our new birth, our regeneration is that which took place in Christ and therefore when we talk about our conversion it is our sharing in that which Jesus Christ has done
on our behalf. Or take worship and prayer and here we come close to the whole pattern and significance of the Old Testament cult. If Jesus Christ fulfilled that also on our behalf where you I worship and say our prayers and we know how faulty, how unclean the very words we are that we utter in prayer Jesus Christ comes into our place and on our behalf he stands where we stand and he prays to God and so
taking our nature upon him and within our humanity and with us he says our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven and so on. Then to say where we are unable to pray our father Jesus Christ prayed our father on our behalf and for us and then as Calvin says he took that our father and he puts it into our dirty
mouth so that we may say our father in and through Christ. You see you do not worship God in your own name. Prayer and worship are not ways of expressing yourself before God. You worship God only in the name of Jesus Christ who took your place, who alone offered sacrifice and worship and prayer on your behalf. Jesus Christ is indeed our worship. He is our speech toward God. He is our worship. He is our prayer. In
the old canon of the Eucharistic rite the words run through him and with him and in him. Why with Jesus? Because he came and prayed with us our prayer. Look at it like this. Jesus Christ as part of his incarnation penetrated not only into the depths of our being but he penetrated into all our existence and he gathers up our faltering unclean prayers into himself assimilates them to his one self offering to God and when he
presents himself to the father as the prayer of all creation and the father says you are my beloved son. God accepts us in Christ and our prayers are presented in and through Christ but who then can distinguish our prayer from Christ's prayer because they are so assimilated to him in his response that he is our vicarious prayer and response to God. At the end of the day and I'd yield down and say my prayers I know
that there's no prayers that I can offer that are tall worthy and it's always then with joy at the end that I say the Lord's prayer because this is the prayer the real prayer that gathers up all prayer and Jesus Christ alone is my prayer and worship. That's what it means to Christ takes our place in prayer and worship. But now look at the sacraments. Baptism and Eucharist are acts of human response to the proclamation of
the word of God. We say yes but they are above all divinely provided ways of and obedience. Just as in the Old Testament the people of Israel are not allowed to offer any sacrifice or to sprinkle it with any incense of their own concoction from beginning to end the sacrifice is one that is divinely provided. So here even in the new covenant sacraments are divinely provided ways of response in which they direct us in two different
ways in a once and for all way and a continuing way to the vicarious response of Jesus on our behalf which in and through these sacraments is sealed upon us. They are sacraments then of our belonging to Christ and our sharing in his one vicarious sacrifice if you like sharing in the finished work of his atoning reconciliation. They are not sacraments of what we do. They're not Pelagian sacraments granted that they are sponsors that we are
called to make but they're responses that divinely provided to indicate to us and to seal to us our sharing in the vicarious obedience of Christ once and for all offered and eternally prevalent before the face of the father in his heavenly intercession and in the mediation of the son. But now look at this in terms of evangelism. What do we do when we preach the gospel? Well here in the United States particularly you're concerned with great
evangelistic movements and evangelistic creature and as I listen to them I hear them saying again and again and this we hear all over the world this is what Jesus Christ has done for you but you will not be saved unless you make your personal decision. You will only be saved if you do this or do that. So here the gospel is preached as a form of conditional grace and is there not a multitude of poor sinners
hanging about the evangelism? And they know that in the last resort if the full responsibility is taken off the lamb of God and placed upon the poor sinner he cannot be saved. They know perfectly well that if the chain that binds a man toward God has in it one link the human act of decision then the whole chain is as strong or weak as the weakest link and then they know that if everything finally depends upon
them you will not be saved unless you will only be saved if their salvation is conditional upon what they do they cannot be saved. And so there's a way of preaching the gospel legalistically which pushes people away. But we are told to preach the gospel in an evangelical way and what is that? We preach the gospel in such a way that we say this is what Jesus Christ has done for you from beginning to end. He's
done it for you not only as God but as man. So he takes your place in the whole range of your humanity including all decisions and your response. That whole response is one in which Christ has acted on your behalf. That is what Christ has done for you. He's even believed for you. He's even made personal decision for you. Therefore repent and believe the gospel because the unconditional grace of the gospel calls for an unconditional response
not a conditional response. It's not conditional grace. So we are taught here to preach the gospel in an evangelical and not in a legalistic way. To preach unconditional grace in an unconditional way and not in a conditional way. That's to say we have to set before people the staggeringly good news of the vicarious humanity of Jesus. He really took our place, your place and mine. And the gospel is come and be yoked together with him and
share his faith. Then I do not need constantly to look over my shoulder to see whether my faith and my response are adequate. Then I don't build into my response to the gospel ulterior motives of self-expression or self-salvation. I am liberated from all that and I'm summoned to joyful spontaneous response and worship in and Jesus Christ through whom with whom and in whom we come before God. Now let me direct you finally to those
magnificent words of Saint Paul in Galatians 220 which played such a profound part in the life and theology of John MacLeod Campbell. I am crucified with Christ nevertheless I live yet not I but the life which I live now I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God which gave himself for me. There we have gathered up this whole message of the I yet not I but Christ and the life which I now live I
live within the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Now that passage we have to translate into every human act we do in worship and prayer and sacrament and liturgy and evangelism and pastoral care and daily life. I am crucified with Christ nevertheless I live yet not I but Christ and the very life that I now live I live embraced and upheld and undergirded by the invariant faithfulness of Christ
who will never let me go that all my faltering and all my weakness is here taken up and transformed by the strength and unfailing steadfast love of God become man in Jesus of Jesus the man for man. Now let us pray. Heavenly Father we offer ourselves to thee in all the weaknesses and self-considered strength of our human being and we thank thee that in Jesus Christ thou hast provided not only the actualization of the love
of God but provided for us in actual reality the perfect response of man toward God with which thou art well pleased grant unto us the spirit of Christ spirit who cries in him Abba that he may cry in us also with and through and in Christ our father who art in heaven that through sharing in the brotherhood of Jesus we may share that in thee the father and so be thy children and by all our life
praise and worship and glorify thy name father son and holy spirit one God eternal amen.