15:21-41 | The Curse of Sin & the Judgement of God

CALVIN!! 4

QUINN!!

INTRO

If you are new or visiting, over the last 18 months we have been making our way through the gospel of Mark - (Expository Preaching).

Now, we come to the end of the road that Jesus has been travelling and we have been following -  The road that takes us outside the gates of jerusalem, to stand upon a hill known as golgotha, looking up at the cross of Jesus.

As we begun last week, we are looking at this text that takes us from the roman palace where Jesus is mocked in vs 16 to his final breath in vs 41 - and we are dealing with this event over 5 weeks with each sermon looking at a different aspect or theme that Mark highlights in his account of our saviours suffering. 

RECAPS:

Christ is king

The Physical Sufferings of Jesus as a window through which we see the Love of God for sinners

This morning we are going to focus on two things Mark wants to make sure we do not miss:

the first is a seemingly unexplained solar event

and the second are the only words Mark has Jesus proclaiming whilst on the cross.

Read: Mark 15:25–39 (ESV)

25 And it was the third hour when they crucified him. 26 And the inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” 27 And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. 29 And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, 30 save yourself, and come down from the cross!” 31 So also the chief priests with the scribes mocked him to one another, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. 32 Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also reviled him. 33 And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. 34 And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 35 And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.” 36 And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” 37 And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. 38 And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. 39 And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

Hook

There is this thing that Parents do - Chaos - and duties and packing and shoes and baths and teeth. and in that there is discipline and distraction and imperfection and mistakes. and frustration. Then later, often when all is calm, maybe they are asleep or happily playing with thier siblings For me its often when Tessa and I are chatting about the boys in the evening or as I go to tuck them in late at night … - and as you think about or look down on - overwhelmed with the love that you have for that child - how did I ever get frustrated with this kid.

And that Love is so warm, it is so bright.

Isn't that an apt metaphor for love. Love, delight, adoration, it warms the soul and brings light to the darkest room.

Love is the fireplace that heats and gives ambience to the whole house.

It is the loving smile of the wife of your youth, that brightens any day.

One of fav. Father figures said, when speaking to a daughter about the loss of a loved one,

"I know it may be impossible to believe now, when everything is dark and broken, but you will survive this pain, little one. Pain is a memory. You will live and you will struggle and you will find joy. And you will remember your family from this breath to your dying days, because love does not fade. Love is the stars, and its light carries on long after death." Kavax au telemanus

Love, true love, is the smiling delight, the warm adoration, that embraces all of our being.

And it is this love, that we have from God, through Christ.

The love of a father, who looks down upon his child, with endless love, with the warmth of a thousand suns, and the smiling delight that illuminates all. The love of safety, and tenderness, the love that casts out all fear.

But we must ask, how can that possibly be. Because God is holy, and I am totally underserving of any such love.

and that is a very well founded question.

Because God is holy, and perfect, and we are not, in fact, all human beings

IN adam we all inherit a sinful nature - a nature that doesn’t want God, believe God, or trust in God,

And if you aren’t too sure about that, then we can find evidence of this, as we look at our own lives and we see Sin there, we fail to live according to the design that God created us with, we fail to live according to his standard.

Refer to kids catechism.

1st - to know God as the only true God = we want to be our own God

2nd - to avoid all idolatory = we are all idolotous

Honor you parents, murder, steal, adultery

Because of sin, we are all under the judgment of God.

or as, Ephesians 2:3 “lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and are by nature children of wrath,”

Wrath - God’s just hatred of sin… Because he is holy.

we have broken the law, and so we are under it. We deserve to be judged by it

No one - can look at thier own lives and say they are a good person, deserving of God’s love because we don’t live by our own standard, we live under God’s standard.

Now, Paul in Galatians describes this state as being ‘under a curse’.

Galatians 3:10 “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.””

Even if we try to live life as morally perfect as we can, we will find very quickly that we fall short of that.

Because we have been born into sin.

So we are under the curse of the Law.

Now just to connect some dots for us… what is the curse?

its not some voodoo witchcraft.

the curse is the judgment of God - he is judge, and all those who break his law will be judged

It is the wrath of God - God’s just, hatred of Sin - which is due to his holiness.

So the question we started with, is absolutely valid -

we are sinners, we are under the curse of sin, justly deserving God’s wrath - so how can we possibly be the recipients of God’s warm love and delighting adoration??

Christ Became a curse for us

Galatians 3:11–14 “Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”

Question: What did Jesus save us from?

our sin? Death

Satan?

Saved from God’s just wrath for Sin

Romans 5:8–9 “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.”

God is holy, and he must deal with Sin, and that is terribly bad news for every sinner.

Unless :

Gal 3:13

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”

In becoming sin for us, as we look at last week - jesus took upon himself the curse of sin.

He bore the wrath of God for sin!!!

Quoting Dueteronomy 21:23 - for a hanged man is cursed by God.

Christ hanging upon the cross is him bearing the curse of God! AND - he was crowned, not with Gold and honour but with thorns - one of the results of humanities sin in Genesis 3. He wore the curse on his head.

Which leads us to the only words that Mark leaves in Jesus’ mouth as he hangs upon the cross.

“My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me.” a quotation from the first line of Psalm 22

By the way - We know that Jesus said a whole lot more on the cross.

and says ‘father forgive them, for they do not know what they do… as he is being crucified

he has the conversation with the criminal crucified next to him.

he speaks to John the beloved and entrusts Mary to his care

We know he said more, but Mark chooses to leave only this in his account.

It’s like if you were asked how church was this morning: you might say… yeah it was good, I got to have a great chat with kristina and the sermon was a good C+. Thank you, ill take it.

Since you didnt mention the singing or the XXXX clothes I was wearing… doesnt mean that we didnt sing or that I was preaching unclad.

mark, does the same, he chooses to not leave those other details in…

So we should ask, why does he leave this cry of Agony in?

Mark wants to make abundantly clear, that the breadth of Christs suffering is not taken up by his physical afflications.

Instead these are all overshadowed by the true forsakeness of being abandoned by God as he bore our sin, and therefore God’s judgement.

John Piper puts it clearly I think:

“The judgment was to have God the Father pour out his wrath, and instead of pouring it out on us, he pours it out on him. That necessarily involves a kind of abandonment. That is what wrath means. He gave him up to suffer the weight of all the sins of all of his people and the judgment for those sins.

We cannot begin to fathom all that this would mean between the Father and the Son. To be forsaken by God is the cry of the damned, and he was damned for us.”

The Darkness and the smile of God

Which leads us to the second thing we are going to deal with this morning that Mark points out to us.

He says:

Mark 15:33–34 (ESV)

33 And when the sixth hour (12pm - noon) had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour (3pm). 34 And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

6th our from sunrise (noon) until the 9th 3pm - there is a darkness over the whole land - which ends, with Jesus crying out and dying.

Now, before we get to the meaning, those details alone are staggering.

darkness over the whole land for 3 hours in the middle of the day.

well you might go, thats just a literary device, setting the scene… no, Mark isnt writing a fairytale, he is giving us a historical account.

In fact, one that is attested, confirmed, by several other sources. In Ad 52, a guy named Thallus, a historian, wrote about this darkness.

Likewise

Phlegon, who was a Greek historian wrote an extensive chronology around AD 137, and he said:

In the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad (i.e., AD 33) … ‘it became night in the sixth hour of the day [i.e., noon] so that stars even appeared in the heavens. There was a great earthquake in Bithynia (referred to in Matthew), and many things were overturned in Nicaea.’

both of these guys, assume that this must be a solar eclipse. But it couldnt have been… 2 reasons:

eclipses don’t happen on a full moon, - which is when the passover always lands… thats how they know when to celebrate the passover.

the darkness of a solar eclipse only from a couple of seconds to a max of 7.5 minutes. Not 3 hours.

This is not some natural event.

BREAK

When we speak about someones expression or attitude towards us, we often use the images of light and darkness.

Love is warm and bright, love is the stars

In fact the bible does the Same when speaking of God, when speaking of hislove, his grace and salvation - it speaks of the light of his face:

Numbers 6:24–26 “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”

Psalm 4:6 “There are many who say, “Who will show us some good? Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord!””

Psalm 31:16 “Make your face shine on your servant; save me in your steadfast love!”

On the other side, to depict someones anger, or displeasure, we might say… to use a line from a story:

“as soon as the words left my mouth, his mood darkened, and I knew the ground upon which I stood was no longer stable…”

the Darkening of the mood is the conveying of the persons anger.

The Bible does the same, when speaking about God’s judgement

Judgment which is often described as an all consuming darkness in texts such as Duet 28:29 and Jeremiah 15:9

the supremem OT example of this is the darkness over Egypt which was the penultimate plague at the time of the first Passover (Ex. 10:21–23) - as God poured out his judgment upon Egypt.

But look at this

Amos 8:9–10 ““And on that day,” declares the Lord God, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on every waist and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.”

The Darkness over the land - is not some natural event.

This is the fulfilment of the promise of God that on the day of the Lord he will look down in judgement.

The darkness over the land, from noon, till the last cry of Christ upon the cross, is the judgement of God made manifest - as he pours his wrath for sinners out upon his Son!

How can we possibly receive the smiling delight, the warm adoration, the enduring love of God?

Becuase Jesus bore the darkness of his displeasure for us.

Freinds, if you do not believe in Jesus and his death in your place,

Then you are walking down a path that is cursed as it is covered by, and will always be covered by the darkness of God’s judgment.

It is, as John Bunyan put it in the famous Pilgrim’s Progress - that you are living in the city of destruction.

The only way off that path, to receive smile and God’s loving favour, is to freely receive by faith the one whom God put forth, to be a propitiation for your sins.

URGENCY…

Let him take the wrath of God, so you don’t have to.

For there is nothing worse than to come under the gaze of God’s anger - and nothing sweeter than to receive the delight of his smile upon you.

Friends - by faith, we trust… that

Jesus bore our Sin, so we might receive his righteoussness

Jesus Took upon himself God’s wrath for sin, so that we might receive God’s Favour

Jesus was Forsaken by God, so that we might belong to God

Jesus expereinced the darkness of God’s anger, so we might have him look upon us with the warm love and tender delight of a Father.