A Solemn Fact

Two Corinthians chapter 5. I’m going to read from the tenth verse through to the end of the chapter. It reads as follows:

“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

“Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience. We[’re] not commending ourselves to you again but giving you cause to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart. For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we[’re] in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ controls us, because we[’ve] concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

“From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Thanks be to God for his Word.

Father, our songs are in concurrence with our reading. Grant that our hearts may be ready to receive your Word. And we look away from ourselves. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Well, there is—in my mind, at least—a certain logic about moving from Jeremiah chapter 9 to 2 Corinthians chapter 5. I’m not sure that in the time at hand I’ll be able to convince you of that certain logic, but I take solace in the fact that this is a bright group, and therefore, you will be able to put the pieces together. Somebody told me this morning that they thought that I gave a terrific talk on Monday from Jeremiah chapter 5. And I said, “Well, at least you got the prophet right, even though you were off by four chapters.” And since there was minimal response from you, I’m assuming that you had as much of a grasp of the chapter as the person who mentioned it to me.

A Solemn Fact to Be Faced

But here we are in 2 Corinthians 5, and we are immediately confronted by a solemn fact to be faced. A solemn fact to be faced—namely, the affirmation by Paul that there is a day that is fixed when all of humanity will stand before the bar of God’s judgment. And on that day when judgment is executed, it will be absolutely fair, and the decision will be absolutely final.

Paul is making it clear that none of us are auditing the course of life. There is a test at the end. And it is because of this notion of destiny, about which we’ve been singing, and because of this intervention of God in the process of time, in the cross, about which we’ve been singing, that Paul’s great concern for those who are reading his letter in Corinth is that they might understand the nature of reconciliation. And so he says that “it is because of this very certain day that we seek to persuade men. And we seek to persuade them about the reality of all that God has done for them in Christ.”

The reason that he would have to make much of reconciliation is pretty obvious. There’s no need for reconciliation unless there is alienation. And the way the Bible explains our lot as human beings, by nature, is that all of the alienations that we inevitably experience—whether they’re social or material or personal or psychological—all of those alienations are simply the fruit of the great alienation which confronts us—namely, the alienation that we know separated from God on account of our sin. And that’s the significance in the lines that were quoted for us in prospect of singing that song. Because “on [the] cross [when] Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.”[1] We’re alienated from God on two counts: from his side on the basis of the fact that it is his settled reaction against sin to be wrathful towards it, and we are alienated on our side because it is our settled conviction that we would rather run from God than bow before him and know him. And so the message is absolutely clear.

None of us are auditing the course of life. There is a test at the end.

David Wells, in one of his books, has a wonderful little sentence where he says that God God “is outside the range of our intuitive radar.”[2] There is no intellectual road, ultimately, to God. The only way that a man or a woman ever comes to know God is by dint of his revelation. There is sufficient of the knowledge of him in creation to render us accountable, but it is not sufficient to put us in a right relationship with him. And therefore, we cannot access God on our own terms or in our own time. Therefore, we are entirely dependent upon God establishing the terms and choosing the time.

Now, as on Monday, I always assume that because the classes that I address—whether it’s my church class or this class—are sensible people, and they always want to check and see if stuff is actually in the Bible. So therefore, I’m going to assume that you will follow up on this on your own—that you will at some point take up 2 Corinthians 5 and see whether the outline of things I’m suggesting to you can be substantiated from the Bible itself. Because, after all, why would you ever take my word for it just because Ben thinks I’m a nice guy? There needs to be a far deeper reason than that.

The Marks of the Alienated

Now, when you read the text, you discover that Paul, in a kind of reverse way, identifies the marks of the alienated. And I just want to point them out to you. The marks of men and women as alienated from God—not entirely or exclusively or exhaustively but certainly—are these: that when we are alienated from God, we boast about ourselves; we commend ourselves; we boast about our outward appearance and not about what is in the heart.

Now, that ties in just a little bit, doesn’t it, with the notion of Jeremiah saying to the people in his day, “Now, whatever you do, don’t boast in your strength or your body. Don’t boast in your riches or your money. Don’t boast in your intellect or in your wisdom.”[3] The mark of the alienated, says Paul, is to operate on that very basis. That you will find in verse 12.

Also, it is a mark of the alienated that they live for themselves. That’s what he says in verse 15: “And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves.” And so we know that if he comes to alter that condition, it is a condition that is in need of alteration. And the condition is that by nature, we live for ourselves. You are the folks, you are the proud generation that have introduced us to the selfie of all things. What a horrible word! I can’t stand the word. I can’t stand the concept. Every time somebody says, “Wait a minute; we’re going to have a selfie!” I say, “No, we’re not! You go ahead and have one all by your little selfie. But I am not having one.” You say, “Well, what are you talking about? Van Gogh did self-portraits.” You’re not Van Gogh! Mark of the alienated: that they boast about their outward appearance—“Look at me.”

They live for themselves, and they regard Christ—verse 16—from an earthly perspective. When someone mentions Jesus of Nazareth, they assess it on the basis of the common perspective, or whatever it might be: “Well, I like to think of him as this,” or “I’ve considered him as that,” or “I have included him in the pantheon of potential spiritual gods,” or whatever it might be. It is a mark of the alienated. Their view of Jesus Christ, your view of Jesus Christ will either reveal the fact that you have understood the reconciliation provided for you in Jesus or that you remain alienated from God. That’s what the Bible is saying. Those are the marks of the alienated. And the revelation and the implications of being alienated from God is seen in what we said a little of on Monday, and that is that our world is broken. Our world is broken.

Now, I’ve been unkind to you, and I don’t mean to be. After all, why should I be? But, so I’m a baby boomer. That’s a miserable terminology as well, but I guess I am one. And there are a lot of disgruntled baby boomers roaming around. You probably meet them on that little trolley you have here. The trouble is, we’re all living longer than we should have. And as a result of that, we’re having to work longer than we want to. And we’re a little bit annoyed about the way things have worked out. Sometimes you meet some of these people, you hear them saying things like, “Social security!” They’re going, “Social security!” It just means… I don’t really know what it is, but it’s not good, apparently, and they’re ticked off about it. They’re self-aware, they’re self-absorbed—we are—less self-fulfilled, and therefore, frankly, we’re full of self-pity[4]—a miserable little group. Why are we so messed up? Well, actually, it’s an indication of our alienation.

“Well,” you say, “but not the students from Westmont. Not the folks that got in here and managed to get through here and get out of here.” You’ll all be riding on the crest of the wave, won’t you? Not if you join your peers! In The American Paradox, a book in the last little while—where the writer says the dilemma of America is that we’ve never had so much, and we’ve never had so little. And then he identifies the fact that this notion has pervaded the millennials and the folks who’ve come out of a good enough family, had a good enough education, managed to get themselves a good enough job. These are the individuals, he said, who grew up being told that they could be anything they wanted to be. The problem is, they don’t know what they want to be. They’re unhappy, but there doesn’t seem to be any cause for their unhappiness. They’re more connected to more people in the entire world than could ever have been imagined possible through the social internet, and yet they have never felt more lonely. They want to be accepted, and yet they often feel alienated. That’s his word. They’ve never had so much; they’ve never had so little.[5]

Your view of Jesus Christ will either reveal the fact that you have understood the reconciliation provided for you in Jesus or that you remain alienated from God.

Now, the fact of the matter is that it reveals itself in so many different ways. And I don’t want to belabor the point, but let me just make it one stage further: that the notion of alienation as described in the Bible, for your consideration, impacts our world at a macro level. I was born in ’52. So, the Second World War ended in 1945. I’m not sure that was the war that was going to end all wars. I think the First World War would be the one to end all wars. But it didn’t achieve it. And nor did the Second World War, for that matter. And today, in terms of conflict in the world, there are more wars and have been more wars fought since 1945 than probably were ever fought in the history of humanity to that point. The world is broken.

And at the most endemic level, fundamental level, of society, it is broken. At the family level. The illegitimate births in America outpace births where they have a normal father and a normal mother for the first time now in the history of the United States. The historians and the anthropologists who analyze these things are very clear. J. D. Unwin—he studied eighty-six different societies spanning five thousand years, and he found an unexpected and direct correlation—notice this—between sexual continence and the ability of a society to grow and remain healthy. Now, he’s not saying that he found societies where the only sex that ever took place was in a heterosexual, monogamous marital relationship. He says every society has exploded those boundaries. But what he’s saying is that the societies that valued sexual continence, that had a framework for it—there was a direct correlation between that and between health. And when he meant health, he didn’t mean physical health; he meant psychological, social health, and so on. “In human records,” he says, “there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence.”[6] That’s his assessment.

You live in that society. You live in this generation. One generation rejects God; the next generation learns to live without him. One generation rejects the values of God; the next generation takes it as normal. He says, “Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in [right] now.”[7]

And you say, “Well, probably that would be a good time for somebody to step forward with a message of hope and of reconciliation.” Exactly! You see, Scripture must interpret history and culture and not the other way around. You’re not here to put your Bible to the test as much as you are here to take your Bible in the science lab, and in the anthropology department, and wherever else it is in the arts and so on, and in mathematics, and to bring your Bible to bear upon the context in which you live—which is a context in which, Paul says, alienation is in need of reconciliation.

The Means of Reconciliation

Now, the means of reconciliation are then pointed out, and pointed out so very clearly. It’s the gospel, he says, that deals with the problem. It’s the gospel that declares the problem. It’s the gospel that provides the solution.

The gospel—and let’s not just assume we know what we mean when we say that—the gospel, the story of good news, is what God has done for us in the Lord Jesus Christ to save us from sin and from the devil and from death—that what God has done, he says here, is to effect a great exchange. Because, he says, “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself … in Christ … reconciling the world to himself”—notice the phrase—“not counting their trespasses against them.” “Not counting their trespasses against them.” But why wouldn’t he count their trespasses against them, us? We’re the trespassers. Well, the answer is because he has counted their trespasses against him.

“Oh, that’s what we’re singing about: ‘In Christ alone my hope is found.’”[8] Because he has counted my trespasses against his dearly beloved Son—that he has taken my sins and put them to Christ’s account, and he has taken Christ’s righteousness and put it to my account. That’s what he’s saying: that the punishment that I deserve for all of my rebellion and my disinterest and my stuck-on-myselfness Christ has borne, and all the forgiveness that I don’t deserve he has provided. That’s why he’s able to say probably the “shaving mirror verse” of 2 Corinthians 5, if there is one: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has [gone and] the new has come.”[9]

The Marks of the Reconciled

So, there are marks of those who are alienated, there is a means of reconciliation, and finally, you will notice that he is able to point out the marks of the reconciled. What are the marks of those who’ve been reconciled to God—again, not exhaustively but straightforwardly?

Number one: Those who have been reconciled to God have an altogether different perspective of Jesus. From now on, we no longer regard Christ as we once did. We don’t regard him in that way any longer. I play golf with people all the time that invoke the name of Jesus Christ. Right? But they’ve got no notion of kneeling down before him and thanking him for his love and his compassion and his forgiveness. No, when a man is reconciled to God in Jesus, he has a totally different view of Jesus.

A totally different view of himself or herself: no longer regarding myself as the sum total of all that I am on the outside and my way of representing myself, whether by means of the things that we mentioned in Jeremiah 9—of the fact of my intellect, or of the social status out of which I’ve come, or my athletic ability, or whatever it might be. These things are not insignificant. God is the one who has given us all things richly to enjoy.[10] There is no advance in denigrating them. But it is when we are in Christ that we discover where they all fit together.

The gospel, the story of good news, is what God has done for us in the Lord Jesus Christ to save us from sin and from the devil and from death.

A different view of Jesus, a different view of myself, and a different view of other people. That’s verse 16. We no longer regard other people the way we once regarded them. So we look at people in the street, and we realize that they’re part of this alienated world in which we live, and they need a message of reconciliation.

’Course, the story we have to tell them, this gospel message—let’s be honest about it—is absolute foolishness to those who are perishing.[11] I mean, if everybody thought this was just absolutely sensible, then we could just go out and move humanity directly along the line. But we can’t, because people say, “I never heard anything so ridiculous,” because it is an offense to their pride, both morally and intellectually. Because we’re going to them and saying, “The only way for acceptance and reconciliation with God was on the basis of what was done by a Galilean carpenter two thousand years ago when he died upon a cross.” And the people are saying, “You must be kidding me! Are you telling me—I’m a sensible person, I graduated—that the pivotal event of human history is outside of Jerusalem, in that strange backwater of the Middle East?” “Yes!” “Well, I never… It’s ridiculous! And furthermore, you’re telling me that I can’t do anything? I believe in God. I believe if there is a good God, he’ll reward nice people for doing their best. And I’ve been doing my best for my whole life. I’ll take my chances. Your story is absolute rubbish. It’s absolutely foolish.” And I wouldn’t be so naive as to believe that every person that has come as a part of the student body at Westmont has come to the conviction that it isn’t foolish and that you have actually faced up to the prospect of standing before the bar of God’s judgment.

You see, if the gospel is as I said—what God has done for us in Jesus to deal with sin and the devil and death—it is then that gospel that has to be believed if we are then to receive our reconciliation. And to believe is to place one’s trust and confidence in the person and work of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. It’s not the same as saying, “I’m kept alive on the spiritual buoyancy of the student body at Westmont. I have come from a nice family, and my grandmother always read the Bible to me.” How thankful you ought to be for that! I certainly am. But there has to be a point where you finally say, “This is mine. This is mine. This is my need. This is my Savior. This is my all in all.” And it’s because of that that Paul says, “Therefore, we are ambassadors, as if God was making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.”

Let’s say I never come back here again. Let’s say this is my only chance to ever be here, to ever address this group—which is highly likely, in terms of the configuration of the group. Then I want to be God’s ambassador. I want to say the same thing: “I beseech you, I implore you, on Christ’s behalf: Receive the reconciliation that he has granted to you through Jesus Christ.”

And when you don’t know how to finish—and this is a word for those of you who like to preach—then quote Calvin. So, here we are. This is Calvin: When a person has been brought under conviction of sin, he says, telling other ministers what to do—and since I’m one of the other ministers, he’s telling me what to do—he says this is what we then do. “Then we show”—once a person has said, “You know, I do need to be reconciled to God. I can’t even reconcile my head at the moment”—

Then we show that the only [safe] haven … is in the mercy of God, as manifested in Christ, in whom every part of our salvation is complete. As all mankind are, in the sight of God, lost sinners, we hold that Christ is their only righteousness, since, by his obedience, he has wiped off our transgressions; by his sacrifice, appeased the divine anger; by his blood, washed away our stains; by his cross, borne our curse; and by his death, made satisfaction for us. We maintain that in this way man is reconciled … to God the Father, by no merit of his own, [and] by no value of [his] works, but by gratuitous mercy.[12]

In other words, it is by Christ alone.

Father, look upon us in your mercy, we pray. We bless you that you have gathered us in this way and for this day, and as the day opens before us, we commit ourselves to you. Open our eyes to the wonder of Christ. Grant that we might live in the light of the reconciliation that has been accomplished for all who turn to him in repentance and faith.

And may the Lord bless us and keep us. May the Lord make his face to shine upon us and be gracious to us. May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon us and give us his peace, today and forevermore. Amen.

---

[1] Stuart Townend and Keith Getty, “In Christ Alone” (2001).

[2] David F. Wells, What Is the Trinity? (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2012), 11.

[3] Jeremiah 9:23 (paraphrased).

[4] Dan Barry, “Boomers Hit New Self-Absorption Milestone: Age 65,” New York Times, December 31, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/01/us/01boomers.html.

[5] David F. Wells,God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-Love of God Reorients Our World(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 22. Wells references David Myers’s The American Paradox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) in his discussion.

[6] J. D. Unwin, Hopousia, or The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940), 84–85, quoted in Christopher Ash, Remaking a Broken World: The Heart of the Bible Story (The Good Book Company, 2010), 48.

[7] Arnold Toynbee, quoted in Ash, 48.

[8] Getty and Townend, “In Christ Alone.”

[9] 2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV).

[10] See 1 Timothy 6:17.

[11] See 1 Corinthians 1:18.

[12] Calvin to Jacopo Sadoleto, Basel, September 1, 1539, in John Calvin, Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), 1:42.