According to Plan

The Good News is that Jesus has accomplished the perfect plan of God to destroy death and bring forgiveness of sins to everyone in the world who will repent and trust in him.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.  If you would like to volunteer to review and edit our sermon transcripts before they are posted, contact Gail Peterson, gpeterson@calvaryefree.church.

[00:00:01] Well, I want to welcome you all to our celebration of the resurrection here at Calvary this morning. Uh, special welcome to those of you who are visiting with us this weekend. We know this is the annual exchange of the young people. Uh, when our our young people leave town to go to church with their, their parents somewhere else, and they are replaced for a week by young people who traveled here to go to church with their parents. Uh, so if that is you, we are glad you are here. Uh, we hope that this service is a special blessing to you as we celebrate Christ together. Also, there are folks who visit church on Easter because that’s that’s part of their tradition or because it’s when their family goes or because it just seems like a good idea. And if that’s you, we are glad that you’re here with us this morning. We’re glad you decided to come to Calvary. Welcome. Easter Sunday, for the church is unique in a way, because it’s the Sunday when we focus very specifically on the resurrection of Jesus. It’s the day when we remember Jesus triumph over death, when he was physically restored, when his body breathed air again and he walked out of the tomb. So it’s unique in that way. But in another sense, this is not unique. All of our services here at Calvary are in some way a celebration of Jesus resurrection. And that’s because the resurrection is more than just the historical moment in history, documented by multiple ancient sources and attested by a hundreds of eyewitnesses.

[00:01:41] It is that but the resurrection of Jesus Christ is also the beginning of new life that we have in Christ. Every way that we are rescued and restored and healed and made new through faith in Jesus and the cleansing work of the Holy Spirit, is rooted in the fact that Jesus defeated death. So every week here at Calvary, when we look into God’s Word and we, we find that the good news that restores relationships. That heals marriages. That calms worries, that defeats sins. That gives us hope and gives us peace. Every time we look into the Word of God, we are celebrating the resurrection. So if you’re visiting with us and you and you live around here, you’re not from out of town. We wouldn’t expect you to come every week. But if you’re if you’re visiting and you live around here, we’d love to have you come back and and visit us again and come back every week and hear more about the good news of Jesus Christ, that there is hope and peace for you because there is new life in the resurrected Christ. I’m preaching through the Gospel of Luke right now. So we’re we’re learning a lot about Jesus. You can come join us for that. Next week’s passage has a naked guy living in a graveyard and a legion of demons and a herd of pigs.

[00:03:00] It’s wild. You’re not going to want to miss that. But the point of all of this is that there’s there’s no one who’s beyond Jesus power to heal and restore to new life. And again, next week will be another celebration of resurrected life. This morning, I want to take you to the streets of Jerusalem. Just 50 days after Jesus rose from the dead, Jesus was seen alive again by about 500 people. He spent 40 days with his disciples, teaching them the gospel, preparing them to take that gospel to the ends of the earth. Do you know? Do you ever wonder why there are Christians all over the world and churches all over the world, in many different languages and in all different cultures? Do you ever wonder why that’s the case? Oh, it’s because Jesus sent his disciples to share the gospel and to make disciples, and to plant churches among all people groups. See, salvation through faith in Christ is not just for one nation, it’s for every nation. The resurrection is for every nation. It’s for all people, everywhere. And that all people focus of the gospel can be seen very clearly. In the event that we’re going to look at this morning, 50 days after Jesus resurrection was a day called Pentecost. Jesus followers were out in the streets and the Holy Spirit filled them, and miraculously, they all began preaching about Jesus in a variety of different languages.

[00:04:39] The other people in the streets were pretty shocked because they were from many different nations, many different regions and people groups, and they were there to celebrate in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. And they were hearing the gospel of Christ preached in their own languages from back home, in their in their mother tongues. Some of the people wondered what it all meant. Uh, some of the people thought that maybe these guys were drunk. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure which camp I would have fallen in that morning. Apostle Peter stepped forward and he began to explain these. These guys aren’t drunk. It’s 9:00 in the morning, he says, and then he goes on to explain what’s taking place with our time this morning, I want to show you a very important part of that explanation. The good news is that Jesus has accomplished the perfect plan of God to destroy death, to bring forgiveness of sins to everyone in the world who will repent and turn and trust in him. We find this incredible news in acts chapter two, verses 22 to 36, which you’ve already heard read in our service. And as I mentioned this, this passage is Peter’s explanation to the crowd why they’re hearing the gospel preached in their own languages. The answer to that question is because Jesus rose from the dead. That’s why you’re hearing the gospel preached in so many languages, because Jesus rose from the dead.

[00:06:10] The answer is why we’re here this morning here celebrating Easter at Calvary. I want to frame Peter’s explanation using four statements about Jesus, and the first is that Jesus died and rose according to God’s plan. Every once in a while, you’ll hear someone describe Jesus death in ways that make it sound like it was only a tragedy that Jesus died. They’ll say that Jesus was a good teacher who’s who’s full of love, and his message of hope and peace got him in trouble with the wrong people. And isn’t it tragic that terrible people killed Jesus? Well, there is no doubt that Jesus is a good teacher. Certainly he was filled with love, and certainly he did die at the hands of lawless men, as verse 23 makes very clear. But this is no tragic surprise. From the beginning of human history, this was God’s plan for the world. When you put the whole Bible together and you read it cover to cover, you can see that it tells one big story of the history of redemption in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis chapter three, right after our first parents listened to Satan and made a a sinful mess of the whole world, you see God making a promise to clean that mess up himself. God tells Satan that there’s going to be a man who is going to come and crush him.

[00:07:40] Now you’ll remember in that account that Satan appeared as a serpent and God said, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. So this is the first illusion that we have in Scripture to a plan to destroy the enemy and to set right what sin has put horribly wrong. And we get more details of of God’s plan to redeem and save his people throughout the Old Testament. For example, God’s people are given a sacrificial system so that regularly they will see their they will see a picture of their sins being transferred to an animal. When God’s people are trapped at the edge of the sea and the Egyptians are behind them and coming bearing down on them, God parts the sea and provides a way through it. He saves them by providing miraculous grace to people who did nothing to deserve it. And I could go on. There’s so many allusions, so many pictures throughout the Old Testament. In a moment, we’ll look at King David’s words that he that told of the resurrection of Jesus a thousand years before Jesus even lived. And the point is, everything that we find in the Old Testament unveils the carefully laid plan where God Himself would would come and be our sacrificial lamb. He would be our way through the sea, and so on. So yes, on one hand, Jesus died at the hands of lawless men.

[00:09:23] He’s the victim of a cruel and unjust world. But that’s exactly what the plan was all along. See, Jesus laid down his own life. He chose to be pulled down to death. And that’s because Jesus knew something that the murderers didn’t know. He knew that he could not be held by death. In fact, Peter says it was not possible for death to hold him. See what what Jesus performed was the ultimate spiritual judo move. Are you familiar with judo, the Japanese martial art? See, in judo, you don’t throw punches. You don’t. You don’t throw your fists. Instead, what you do is you use the weight of your opponents and move against him, using his own weight. So your opponent might be bigger and stronger. And when he comes at you, you you leverage the momentum of your opponent and you can throw him to the ground with his own, his own weight. That’s why little guys in judo can throw big guys to the ground. And that’s what that’s what Jesus did to Satan on the cross. God leveraged the evil of sinful, lawless men who lied and cried their way to to Jesus death. And they threw everything at him. Everything that they had, they threw at Jesus. They used lies, political manipulation, crowd intimidation, bad theology, slander, everything they could think of to use. They threw at Jesus. Pilate.

[00:11:01] Pilate bent to their will. And they thought they had defeated Jesus. They put him in a in a tomb. They sealed the tomb with a stone. They put a guard outside the sealed stone to make sure that there was just nothing could get at Jesus. And they had one. And just when they thought they had thrown the final blow with his death, Jesus instead defeated death itself. Surprise! Fools. Look who’s on top! It’s basically what he said, right? He probably didn’t say it quite like that, but he flipped it. He flipped death on its head. He he took the momentum of death and sin, and he flipped it around so that he won. Jesus leveraged sin to enter into death and destroy death from the inside of it. That’s what Peter means when he says that the pangs of death could not hold him. This is referring to something like a trap or a painful snare of death. Psalm 17 refers to the cords of death. It’s a poetic way of picturing death as as something that you can’t leave, that you can’t get out of. You can’t. You can’t escape it. And here Jesus undoes the trap of death. He defeats it because it does not have the power to hold him. Now, why is that? Why is it not possible for death to hold Jesus in the way that it holds, quite literally, 100% of everybody else? Why? Well, the answer to that question is found once again when we when we go to God’s plan.

[00:12:40] Peter goes back a thousand years into the Old Testament, and he shows what King David had to say about Jesus. Now, you need to understand that King David was appointed by God to rule over his people and to be the representative of of God for his people. That’s what the role of the King was. The role of the king was of Israel was to embody perfect obedience to the Lord. He was supposed to be an example, so that the people would be able to look at David and see perfect love and perfect obedience lived out, and then they could emulate that. And of course, that’s not exactly what happened. David was a man who is described as deeply in love with the Lord. He’s described as a man after God’s own heart. But he was a sinner just like everyone else. And so while he did his role very well, he did it imperfectly. He was as much in need of God’s grace as any one of us in here. But God made a promise to King David that one of his descendants would always sit on his throne, on David’s throne, reigning over God’s people. Reflecting on that promise in Psalm 16, David wrote these words. I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken. Therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced.

[00:14:16] My flesh also will dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption. You’ve made known to me the paths of life. You will make me full of gladness with your presence. Now again, this is roughly a thousand years before Jesus was born. Notice the first person singular pronouns I see the Lord before me. He won’t abandon my soul to Hades. We we might naturally think that David is talking about himself here, but sometimes in his Psalms, David talks about his own future descendant. And that’s what’s happening here in Psalm 16, David is speaking in the voice of his future descendant in the first person. So it’s a prophetic psalm. We also see him doing this very same thing, writing about his future descendant in Psalm 110. This time he writes it in third person. If you look down at verse 34 in chapter two of acts, you’ll see that Peter quotes David again. The Lord said to my Lord. David calls his future descendant his Lord, so he sees himself as subservient to, as a servant of, or underneath his future descendant. Let me tell you, that is not how it happens in my house. I don’t sit at the feet of my children to do their bidding, unless you count all the times I drive them everywhere to everything in all of life. So maybe they’re maybe they’re maybe they are in charge, actually.

[00:16:05] But David is prophesying here. David is prophesying about a future day when when his descendant, the the king who will reign forever, the Holy One of God, he calls him. He won’t be held by death long enough to decay. Now, this is going to get a little bit gross here, but I want you to stick with me for a second, okay? David, speaking in the prophetic voice of his descendant, doesn’t say that he won’t die. He says his soul won’t be abandoned and his body won’t decay. In other words, he will die, but not for long. Do you remember when the ladies come to the tomb? Do you remember the story? The ladies. They come to the tomb. Do you remember why they come to the tomb? They come to bring spices for Jesus body. For his dead body. That’s what they would do in their custom. They would go and they would wrap the body. They put spices on it, try to preserve the body of a dead person. Turns out Jesus body was never going to need those spices because it was God’s plan all along that His Holy One would never be in the grave long enough to see any corruption. Peter says David, a thousand years earlier was talking about Jesus. Now remember this on that day when Peter was out there preaching, they are standing in Jerusalem. This is the city where David is buried.

[00:17:36] Peter says, hey, you want to go down to David’s grave with me right now? We’ll open up the the ash where his bones are definitely in there. But right after that, let’s walk over to Joseph’s tomb where Jesus is buried. I’ll tell you what. You will find that one quite empty. David couldn’t have been writing about himself, Peter says, because because he died, he absolutely died and he stayed dead. But David knew that his descendant Jesus wouldn’t. Okay, so he was raised. But why? David tells us, you have made known to me the paths of life. You will make me full of gladness with your presence. So Jesus is the one who has forged the path to life. That’s why death can’t hold him, because he shows us the path to life. Here’s the plan. God the father will send God the Son to live a perfect life, a perfect life of obedience, unlike David or anyone else. You or me? Jesus will be unjustly condemned to die. But that’s okay because it’s all part of the secret judo move to defeat sin and and turn sin sin’s momentum onto itself. Jesus will go to the to the cross and become the substitute sacrifice for all of God’s people. And when they put Jesus in the tomb, it’s going to look like death has won. But then God the Father will raise God the Son before his body even starts to break down.

[00:19:17] So far from being permanent, death will barely be a long weekend for Jesus. And when he’s raised to new life, he will know the path to life. He’s actually going to be raised to life. He’s going to know the path to life. He’s going to show us how to be in the glad presence of the Lord. More on that pathway here in just a minute. So why are all these people in the streets preaching this good news of Jesus in foreign languages and all the nations gathered in Jerusalem? Well, it’s because ten days before this moment in the streets, the disciples watched Jesus ascend into glory. They watched Jesus ascend into the sky and disappear. And he told them before this happened, he told them that he’s going to sit at the right hand of the father, and that he would send them a gift. The Holy Spirit would come and fill all of God’s people, giving them the power to do all the work of spreading the gospel throughout all of the world. Ten days after that, ten days after that ascension, the Holy Spirit gave these folks the ability to preach the gospel in languages that they didn’t know, so that all the people who were gathered from many nations would hear the gospel and take it back with them when they went back to their homes. It’s a strategically brilliant move if you want to plant churches all over the world, teach the gospel in many languages, send them back to where they came and the gospel will spread.

[00:20:48] In fact, it says, if you look down in verse 41, in chapter two there, you’ll see that at 3000 people that day alone were added to those who follow Jesus. The effects of preaching the gospel by the power of the Holy Spirit continue to ripple across time across the world today, for the last 2000 years. That’s why the church is everywhere. This this simple message. The simple message of the historical moment when the well-laid plan of God ripped the cover off of death and forged the path of life in Christ. The simple message continues to help the helpless. Those those who are searching for purpose and meaning in this life, who are trying to make sense of the world that we’re in. They will find help they need through faith in the resurrected Christ. It continues to heal the broken. Those who are hurting because they’ve been they’ve been misused and abused, who carry the hurts of the past in their mind and on their their shoulders. They’re going to find healing when they put their faith in the resurrected Christ. It continues to set the prisoners free. Those who are trapped in their in their addictions and compulsive behaviors, who who can’t seem to break the chains of of their destructive habits, will find freedom that they need through faith in the resurrected Christ.

[00:22:20] It continues to pardon those who are condemned by sin. All of us who are carrying around our own well deserved death sentence because of our rebellion against God and because of our sins against each other, we’ll find pardon and rescue through repentance and trust in the substitutionary death, burial, and resurrection of the triumphant Jesus Christ. I want to close this morning. With the same question that the crowd had for Peter that day. When he got done telling them about the resurrection and reign of Jesus. This crowd had listened to everything he had to say, and it says they were struck in their heart. And they turned to Peter and to the apostles. And they asked, brothers, what shall we do? What shall we do? See, it’s one thing to know that Jesus died according to the scriptures. According to God’s plan. But it’s another thing to know how you fit in that plan. See the plan of the cross and the resurrection was done for us. It was done on our behalf. And so it requires a response. And this crowd knew that. They had a hand in killing Jesus. They understood that they were at odds with God because of their their sin. And since Jesus died for sins, and because you and I, we are all sinners in a sense, we all had a hand in killing Jesus. Let me take a moment to describe the problem that prompted this question from the crowd, because it may be that you don’t yet see the problem of sin, and so it doesn’t really make sense when I say Jesus died for your sins, you don’t see your own sin, you don’t see your own problem of sin.

[00:24:18] And so the solution of Christ doesn’t yet make sense to you. And it might you might be saying to yourself, well, this doesn’t really apply to me, but it does. It does. The Apostle Paul described the problem like this. And this is from his his letter that he wrote to the Roman Church, the book of Romans. He wrote that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All people everywhere. It’s a universal human problem. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There’s no one who’s kept God’s good and perfect law. All of us are in rebellion against him. Sin steals the glory of the God who created you. That’s what sin is. You were. You were made to glorify God and enjoy him forever. That’s why God designed you. And what sin does is it spits in the face of God. You don’t tell me what to do. You don’t give my life purpose. I give my life purpose. That’s sin. Paul says the wages of sin is death. What we receive for producing sin is death. Wages of sin is a very interesting way to put that, don’t you think? It’s like we all work down at the Sin Factory.

[00:25:42] And let’s be honest, some of us are working harder than others, but we’re all work there. We all work there. We’re all there. We are all producing the product of sin. Every day we produce more and more sin and more and more rebellion. We’ve heaped up piles of sins, products, and you know you have because you can see it in the broken relationships that you have. You can see it in your pride and the envy of your heart. You can see in the lustfulness of your heart and all that that is wrought, and what we get at the end of the day when we check out, when we when we clock out the wage we receive, the paycheck that we receive says on it death. That’s what we have earned with our sin. Death and eternal separation from a holy and just God who created us is what we earn with our sin. It’s our wage. Jesus came and he produced no sin. He didn’t. He didn’t produce any sin. He so, so in that way, he didn’t earn any death. When he went to the cross. He did it to receive the wages we earned with our sin. And in return, he gave us what he had earned through his obedience. Eternal life. What what happened at the cross was the bank accounts were switched.

[00:27:14] Let me tell you, friends, you don’t want what you’ve earned. You want what he has earned for you. And that’s the drive behind the question. What shall we do? What shall we do? We know this is true. We know this is what we’ve learned. What shall we do? How do we get rid of this sin? How do we get on Jesus path to life? He’s forged the way to life. How do we get in to that pathway? And Peter says, simply repent. Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. It’s that simple. Do you do you want to be included in God’s plan of salvation to save you from your sins? Repent of those sins. Repent. Admit that you’ve committed them. Turn from them. Trust that Jesus, when he went to that cross, took your sins on his back and cancelled the wages of your sin and gave you his wages of eternal life. Trust that Jesus death paid for them and be baptized in the name of Jesus. That’s that’s the good news. You don’t earn it. You don’t deserve it. But you get it because Jesus bought it for you. God will forgive you your sins on the basis of what Christ has done for you. If you will trust in Jesus because of the cross and the empty grave, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Let’s pray.