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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on December 4, 1983 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace be to you, and peace, from God Our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. PLEASE TURN IN YOUR BIBLE TO THE BOOK OF EPHESIANS. It begins, “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints…” The Greek word translated “saints” is ἄγιος. Notice there is a little mark like a reversed apostrophe above the first letter, which means you pronounce it with a guttural sound ha; so we would spell it hagios using English letters. This word “saints” does not mean what most of the church world says it means. It has nothing to do with righteous performance. It has nothing to do with the kinds of things the church normally says you have to do in order to “qualify” to be saint. The church throughout the centuries has made void the word of God by their traditions; they call someone a “saint” only after he has proven he “deserves it” because he did certain things the church approves of. But Paul called every one of these Ephesian Christians “saints” which simply means they were people who had offered themselves to the Lord. In the New Testament times, hagios was a liturgical word used to describe laying something on an altar, turning loose of it and giving it to the deity. God grabbed this word and made it His, and now saints are people who have the breath of eternity on them, people who can say by faith, “I offer myself as an instrument to make a faithing connection to God’s word.” A saint is someone who resists the drift of this world by grabbing hold of God’s word. Faith begins with the realization that God spoke the universe into existence. God spoke and nothing became everything. He didn’t create the universe by merely rearranging elements that were already there, and He didn’t need some small, initial piece of matter to work with. He was the beginning, and by His word, nothing became everything. Furthermore, this universe is held together by God’s word and one day will be destroyed and reassembled by His word. So as a faither, I start with the premise that God’s word was before everything else that impinges on me, therefore His word will be there when everything else is gone. He was, is, and will be forevermore. Psalm 119:89 says, “For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.” When the circumstances pull you down, you can either hang on to the things of time and demand that God prove His word, or you can grab hold of His word and tell the circumstances of time to move aside. You become a saint when you plug into God’s word and offer yourself as an instrument to demonstrate God’s faithfulness. Hebrews11 begins, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This verse is sometimes mistakenly called a definition of faith. It is not a definition of faith, rather, it is a description of what faith accomplishes. God’s word of promise gives us hope that our circumstances will be different than they are now. So we can reach up and grab hold of God’s word, and that very connection of faith begins the process of substantiating the things hoped for. I like to say that faith “concretionizes” things hoped for. When you pour concrete, it is soft at first; but give it some time and it will eventually become a solid platform. Faith is more than just a one-time utterance; it is an ongoing, active hanging of the body on what the mind has agreed to and what the heart has responded to, with confidence that sustains the grip. To act in faith means to defy the circumstances and make up your mind you will live where God’s word rules. When you are acting in faith, one of two things will happen: You might die not having obtained the promise and wake up where God’s word is forever settled in heaven. Or, in God’s sovereignty, heaven’s rule will flow through you and change the things of time. The result, the thing promised, will be manifested on the stage of time. Saints are faithers. Paul wrote to the saints “and to the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace be to you…” That means unmerited favor to you from God. You don’t have to earn it. “Grace be to you, and peace,” which means God is not angry at you, and He is the only one who really counts. “According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him…” It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. “Wherefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all the saints, cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers...” Paul then goes on to give his greatest message to the church, starting with the condition in which God found us. He says that we were once dead in our trespasses and sins; we were all lost sheep in the grip of going our own way, which was leading us to certain death. The Bible is always right on target. The Scripture says that a day with the Lord is as a thousand years. It is significant that after the sin of Adam and Eve, not one person lived a whole day, if you count a day as lasting a thousand years. Everyone died before one day passed, as God counts time, and people have been living shorter portions of that day ever since. Our sins had separated us from God and destined us to death, but God could not arbitrarily rescue us and still remain faithful to His word. This leads us to the necessity of the cross for our redemption. God’s word is the foundation of the universe and the basis for our faith. God cannot violate His word. Most preachers preach that Jesus went to the cross as an act of love. It is true that love motivated His going to the cross. Paul said in the book of Romans, “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” But love was not the only issue. It was not love that made the cross necessary. The biblical definition of love is simple: it is an uncalculated, sacrificial giving of yourself because of an intrinsic value in the object being loved. God could have loved us without the cross, but the cross was made necessary because of God’s integrity to His word. Seen aright, the cross, the death of Christ, becomes the greatest basis for faith in God’s word. The cross was made necessary because God had said the penalty for sin is death. The basis of faith is truth and God’s faithfulness to truth. God’s word is truth and His word is forever settled in heaven. Faith hangs on the certainty that when God says something, He does it. Numbers 23:19 declares, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” God had said that the penalty for sin is death, and all have sinned. I am not concerned with what most of the church normally calls sin. Frankly, I think we are more guilty of leaving things undone than we are guilty of doing things we shouldn’t do. The word “sin” in the New Testament Greek is hamartia, which simply means “missing the mark” or “falling short.” The Bible says all have fallen short. That does not mean we have fallen short of some deacon’s standard or some church’s tradition; all have fallen short of the glory of God. Had the first Adam continued to follow God in his innocence, he might have been as perfect as the second Adam, Christ. But Adam sinned, and as some theologians say, Adam was the “federal head of the race,” the root from which all the branches have sprung. God drove Adam from the Garden of Eden and ever since then the deck has been stacked against us. Adam ruined it for all of us. The folly of perfectionist churchmen is that they try to convince us we have the ability to be perfect down here on earth. I have heard preachers shout, “There will be no sin in heaven!” while they themselves are gluttons. There is a story about Dwight L. Moody chastising Charles Spurgeon for smoking. Moody said, “That cigar is a sin!” And Spurgeon allegedly responded by putting his finger on Moody’s rather large belly and saying “That is a sin!” Ignorant churchmen preach on the Sermon on the Mount and try to make you think you can actually perform up to its standard. The whole point of the Sermon on the Mount was to prove what Paul would later declare: to understand God’s law is to know you have fallen short of it. The Pharisees paraded their surface performance. They would stand on street corners praying and giving alms to be seen of men. They thought they were keeping God’s law; but Jesus said, in essence, “You have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, if you hate someone in your heart, you might as well have killed them.” From God’s view, you are as guilty as a murderer. Do you realize we have all murdered someone almost every day of our lives? Jesus also said, “You have heard it said unto you, Thou shall not commit adultery, but behold I say unto thee…” Again, if I may say it using ordinary language: if you even think an adulterous thought, from God’s view you have already committed the sin. Now you may be able to fool your husband or your wife, but by Jesus’ definition, the church is full of adulterers. I am not condoning the sin, but it is about time the church quit lying to itself. Too many people in the church are sure that Jesus is talking about someone else, and they say, “Oh, not me. No, no, no!” All men are sinners, and you ladies too, because God set a standard so high that no one can reach it. Even when we gain a better knowledge of His standard, we still don’t know enough to know what He really wants. We have all been separated from God. From the moment Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden, there was a wall of partition between the sinner and God, which Paul speaks of in Ephesians 2. I wish the church would quit trying to reduce God’s standard down to its own peanut-sized view of righteousness. The distance between even the best man and God is so great that it diminishes all the relative differences between one man and another man to nearly nothing. When your God is so small that you think you can measure your performance by God’s standard using your own little measuring device, you have lost God in the process. It is like trying to measure the distance to the sun with a ruler. Paul sums it up: whether you are heathen or Jew, whether you have knowledge of God or you are absent all knowledge of God, all of us are wandering around lost, which is how Jesus described us. We are so far removed from God’s standard that we all are in the condition of sin. We are not sinners because we sin; rather, we sin because we are sinners. That is why I don’t waste time on the subject of sin. And that is why I mock some people’s peanut-sized view of what constitutes righteous behavior. I have heard people say, “If you come to God you must quit smoking your pipe!” I am tired of Christianity being reduced to such stupidity! Aren’t you? They tell women to wear longer skirts and let their hair grow long, and then they can be a Christian. None of that will make you a Christian; it may simply make you a long-haired sinner. They tell men to get haircuts like the Marines and then they can be a Christian. No, that will not make you a Christian; you can be bald and still be a sinner. That bunch of nonsense is not the problem. The problem is we have lost our connection with God. We can’t even know what is right because we are separated from God and are lost. It doesn’t matter whether or not you know you are lost. The state of being lost is a condition and doesn’t depend upon whether you know it or not. Salvation comes through the knowledge that you are lost. Our condition is one of ignorance. Henry Drummond gave what is perhaps the greatest definition of life and death that I have ever read. He said that life is the capacity to relate to one’s environment, and death is the loss of that capacity. God is the source of life. Sin separated man from the source of life and from that moment, man began to die. If man could be restored and reconnected to that source of life, he then could begin anew toward eternal life. The barrier between God and man had to be broken in order that God’s life might come to us. God wanted to do this because of His love, but He would not violate His own word. Suppose God were to arbitrarily say, “Okay, I know what I said, but I now regret saying it. And like a doting parent, because of My love for the family of man I created, let’s just forget about what they did and give them another chance.” If God were to do such a thing, then all security for faith would be gone in a stroke, because the universe itself is held together by God’s word and His integrity to that word. I might enjoy being a beneficiary of God’s mercy if I don’t have to do anything and God doesn’t have to do anything other than speedily come to my rescue. But what about His word that said the penalty for sin is death? If God just ignored His own word, how could I have any confidence that any other statement He made is settled in heaven? Because of Calvary and the death of Christ, I know the extent to which God will go to keep His word. God’s love made Him want to bring me back into connection with Him in order that His light might flow into me. His truth and integrity would not let Him do it without paying the penalty His word demanded. In the Old Testament, God had laid down the law of the kinsman redeemer. If anyone had lost his inheritance or was facing imprisonment or death because of some failing or because of having done something wrong, then only someone near of kin could redeem him. The book of Ruth is a love story that unfolds the law of the kinsman redeemer, who is called the goel in Hebrew. A man named Boaz was the kinsman redeemer who restored the lost inheritance to the family of Ruth. God had decreed that the penalty for sin was death. That was His word and He could not ignore it. If He were to ignore it, His word would not be forever settled. But God said a kinsman redeemer could restore the lost inheritance, remove the penalty of death and restore someone’s lost share in His kingdom. There were four requirements for the kinsman redeemer to achieve this. The first requirement was that he must be someone near of kin. The Bible says, “Be kind one to another.” Our English word “kind” is related to the word “kin,” which speaks of a familial relationship. Hebrews 2:16 says, “For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham.” In the King James Version, there are many italicized words in this passage, indicating words that were added by the translators and are not in the original text. Reading it without the italicized words, it says, “he took not on angels.” The Greek word for “he took” is a form of epilambano, which means “to take hold of with the intent of help.” The writer of the Hebrew letter was saying in amazement that God did not stoop down to help fallen angels, but He did stoop all the way down to help fallen man. Another Greek word that leaps out in this passage is koinoneo. It means “to hold something in common” or “to jointly participate in something.” The language of the New Testament is called Koine Greek because it was the language held in common or mutually shared in that day. Hebrews 2:14 says we are all born flesh and blood, and we didn’t have a choice. We all share flesh and blood in common, koinoneo. But Jesus had a choice: He didn’t have to take on flesh and blood, but He voluntarily took upon Himself flesh and blood that He might become kinned to us. That is the real meaning of Christmas. That is why Jesus had to come as a babe and be wrapped in swaddling clothes and put in a manger. He had to be born in a tent of human flesh and thus share our humanity to become our kinsman. As a second requirement, the kinsman redeemer had to have the means or the price of redemption. The price of sin is death; the price of life is righteousness. Only a perfect life could merit eternal life. The law not only said that the penalty for sin was death, it said if you could keep the law perfectly, eternal life would be your portion. The means of obtaining eternal life is living a perfect life. That is why Jesus said, “I have come not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.” He alone perfectly kept the law. He had to keep it. It wasn’t enough for Him to be kinned to us. As our kinsman, He had to do something that none of us have ever done or could ever do: He had to perfectly fulfill God’s standard. Jesus was the out-raying of God’s glory, and His disciples would look back and say, “We beheld His glory.” Jesus had to become our kinsman and demonstrate He had the price to redeem us. The price was a perfect life, so valuable that He could stand in for all of us. Leviticus 17:11 says, “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” That is why there were so many animal sacrifices in the Old Testament. Those sacrifices ultimately pointed to One who was worth enough to stand in for all of us, who one day would pay the price by pouring out His perfect life in our place. Jesus had the price, but He couldn’t save the world solely on the basis of His perfect life. That brings us to the third criterion: the kinsman redeemer could not be forced to perform this act; he had to voluntarily pay the price. And the fourth criterion is he must actually pay the price; the debt could not just be erased without the price being paid. The letter to the Hebrews portrays Christ as our Mediator, reconciling us to God by bearing every sin. God laid on His Son every sin, past, present and future, in order to remove any claim against our eternal inheritance. There is no sin you and I could ever conceive of or commit 10 years from now that wasn’t already laid on Him. Matthew 13 says He paid the price to buy the whole field, which is all mankind, in order to get the treasure out of the field. As our kinsman redeemer, He attained the means of our redemption, which was the perfect life, and He voluntarily laid down His life in the agony of Calvary. He actually paid the price and rose again as the firstfruits of our hope of what all who act in faith will become. The wall of partition that separated God and man was thereby broken, so that God might now come into us, with no one challenging His right to do so. Ephesians 2 ends saying we have become “an habitation of God through the Spirit.” Then in Ephesians 3, Paul prayed that we might comprehend the “breadth, and length, and depth, and height,” the full measure of His undying love for us, because He met the test and demonstrated His integrity to His word forever settled in heaven. That is why I know God will not fail to perform His word, because He would pay such a price to keep it. His love made Him do it and His integrity required that He do it. Oh, that we might know the full measure of His love! Paul goes on to say in Ephesians 4 that God gave some apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to shape us with knowledge. God calls these ministries “gifts,” using the Greek word domata. And we are to walk worthily, in His eyes. I don’t care what you think of me; I know what the Lord has done for me. I can bring Him some joy if I walk in an awareness of what He has done for me, and that walk is the walk of faith. When our circumstances make us feel like we are in a pressure cooker, that is when we have the chance to show God we really do believe Him and we will walk by faith. Paul says we are already seated in heavenly places with Christ, and he closes the Ephesians letter saying, “Stand therefore” and “be strong in the Lord.” Recognize we fight a real enemy: our adversaries are principalities and powers, not natural things. Satan is determined to break our faith. God has already done His part. All that remains is for us to grab hold of His word and say, “I will serve a God like that right through death, not just to death, but through death.” We are told to put on the whole armor of God, which includes the shield of faith, in the confidence that a God who would do all that for the sake of His word will keep the rest of His promises. On that ground, death holds no fear. We live with one foot in time and the rest of ourselves in eternity. And in that knowledge, we made it through this year! Reprinted with permission from Pastor Melissa Scott   WHY DID GOD ALLOW SEEMING CONTRADICTIONS?
From The Berean Call - December, 2014 QUESTION: You Christians seem to have a way of somehow coming up with a “reconciliation” of whatever contradictions and inconsistencies “unbelievers” are able to discover in the Bible. However, no matter how convincing the “reconciliation” may seem to be, I am left with a question: Why should there be so many problems that you have to work so hard to solve? It seems to me that the very fact there are so many inconsistencies (even if you supposedly solved every one) is in itself evidence that the Bible is badly flawed and therefore could not possibly be God’s Word. RESPONSE: On the contrary – the many seeming contradictions and inconsistencies constitute a very convincing proof of the reliability of the Bible. If three witnesses who claimed to have seen an accident each described it in exactly the same language, word for word, one would have good reason to suspect collusion and to throw out their testimony. However, if each described it in his own words and from his own perspective, one would tend to believe them. Moreover, if there seemed to be some conflict in their testimonies, but if that conflict were resolved by probing deeper into the incident, that would add significantly to the trustworthiness of their testimony. So it is with the seeming contradictions of the Bible. | December, 2019 Wingspread | November, 2019 Wingspread | October, 2019 Wingspread | September, 2019 Wingspread | August, 2019 Wingspread | July, 2019 Wingspread | June, 2019 Wingspread | May, 2019 Wingspread | April, 2019 Wingspread | March, 2019 Wingspread | February, 2019 Wingspread | January, 2019 Wingspread | | Year 2019 Wingspreads | August, 2016 Wingspread | 2016 Wingspreads | 2014 Wingspreads | 2013 Wingspreads | 2012 Wingspreads | 2011 Wingspreads | 2010 Wingspreads | 2009 Wingspreads | 2008 Wingspreads | 2007 Wingspreads | 2006 Wingspreads | 2005 Wingspreads | 2004 Wingspreads | 2003 Wingspreads | 2002 Wingspreads | 2001 Wingspreads | August, 2001 Wingspread | November, 2001 Wingspread | December, 2001 Wingspread | 2000 Wingspreads | 1999 Wingspreads | 2015 Wingspreads | Year 2017 Wingspreads | 2018 Wingspreads | Year 2020 Wingspreads | Year 2021 Wingspreads | Year 2022 Wingspreads | Year 2023 Wingspreads | | Return Home | Current Wingspread | Wingspread Archives | Contact Us | |
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