Introduction:

One of the great historical understandings of the works of Jesus is how he held 3 distinct offices (or functions) in his ministry:

• 📢 Prophet – Jesus is the ultimate mouthpiece of God, speaking the very word of God
• ✝️ Priest – Jesus ministers to us on behalf of God and brings us to God as mediator
• 👑 King – Jesus rules and reigns over all things as the king above all kings.

💡 Fun aside to help you sound like a scholar (click the little ▶ to read)

In today’s sermon, we’ll examine just one of these age-old offices that Jesus assumes: the role of priest. Note: For the purpose of this sermon, I use the terms Priest and Mediator interchangeably. Feel free to tell me if you think that was a mistake; I’m not perfect.

There are a couple of passages in the bible we’ll use to help us understand this central role Jesus plays.

1 Timothy 2:5

 5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, 

Why this subject?

Well, part of the answer is that we’re working together as a church through a series of sermons looking at the person and work of Jesus Christ.

We’re in a series called Worthy.

If you’re interested in the strategy behind this series, Adrian who leads our church wrote a fantastic blog about it here.

The overarching aim is that as we hold Christ up in our preaching, we’ll be able to see him.

• In His supremacy
• In His majesty
• In His beauty
• In His glory

And we will be bowled over by Him.

• Moved to worship him as our Lord and our God
• Motivated to follow him wherever He calls us to go
• Passionate to tell everyone we know about Him, entirely unashamed of Him.

That’s one reason why this subject this morning.

But mediation.

Why that?

To put it simply:

If Jesus didn’t meditate, between God and us there would be no salvation.

So, here are the three points I’ll make in order to understand Jesus as the God → man mediator.

1. God is angry with us 😡
2. We can’t solve the problem without very specific help 😣
3. Jesus provides that help in a once-and-for-all way ✝️

The key 🔑 passage for us this morning is Hebrews 9.

9 Now the first covenant had regulations for worship and also an earthly sanctuary.  2 A tabernacle was set up. In its first room were the lampstand and the table with its consecrated bread; this was called the Holy Place.  3 Behind the second curtain was a room called the Most Holy Place,  4 which had the golden altar of incense and the gold-covered ark of the covenant. This ark contained the gold jar of manna, Aaron’s staff that had budded, and the stone tablets of the covenant.  5 Above the ark were the cherubim of the Glory, overshadowing the atonement cover. But we cannot discuss these things in detail now.

1. God is angry with us

How does that statement make you feel?

God isn’t just angry with us generally, God is angry with you specifically.

How does that make you feel?

If you’re anything like me, you probably feel a bit uncomfortable reading that.

I get a pang in the pit of my stomach when I read that.

• Surely, I don’t deserve that
• I’m mostly a good person
• I’ve never killed anyone
• I’ve never done something that would put me in prison
• People like me, they tell me i’m a nice person

That’s the sort of thing I think.

I think that’s mostly why people feel a bit awkward when they hear God is angry with them.

“That’s a bit unfair God” ”I’m not that bad” ”Surely the good I do outweighs the bad”

Jonathan Edwards, famous American preacher puts it this way:

“Almost every natural man that hears of hell, flatters himself that he shall escape it; he depends upon himself for his own security; he flatters himself in what he has done, in what he is now doing, or what he intends to do. Every one lays out matters in his own mind how he shall avoid damnation, and flatters himself that he contrives well for himself, and that his schemes will not fail. They hear indeed that there are but few saved, and that the greater part of men that have died heretofore are gone to hell; but each one imagines that he lays out matters better for his own escape than others have done. He does not intend to come to that place of torment; he says within himself, that he intends to take effectual care, and to order matters so for himself as not to fail.” Jonathan Edwards – From a famous sermon: Sinners in the hands of an angry God (read it here)

So, I think that’s something I need to address because God is angry with us, and he’s right to be. I think we all know deep down we’re not as good or wonderful as we like to think we are.

Like, let me take the focus off of you and on to me.

I might object in my heart:

• I’m mostly a good person
• I’ve never done this or that.

But I also know in my heart how imperfect I can be.

I think back just on this week. In my life my heart and my actions have not been those of a generally good person. I’ve said, thought and done things that demonstrate a heart that wants to rebel against God.

God is justified in his anger towards me.

He’s perfect in every way.

Our moral shortcomings, however much we might want to minimise them, are an offense to our perfect God.

In his book, Knowing God famous Christian writer J.I Packer puts it like this:

God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil.

Famous evangelist Ray Comfort uses an excellent method to demonstrate our rightful place before a holy God – I’ll run through it in this sermon but, if you want to see it in action, this video is a great example (don’t play it now though, that would be distracting)

We are guilty. God has a right to be angry with us.

I think we tend to play that down in the church. Probably because we want to emphasise God’s mercy, compassion, and great love.

But you can’t understand any of those things without understanding how massive it is that we’ve sinned against him and he is angry with us.

We can’t solve the problem without very specific help

The second point I want to make is that if we want to feel right with God, if we want to avoid his anger, then we need to find a way to make it up to him. But that’s easier said than done.

We cannot solve the problem without very specific help.

And we try lots of things to be reconcile ourselves to God. but they don’t work.

Eventually a young man called Robert Browning – himself a talented poet, read Elizabeth’s poetry. The two fell in love. Her father disapproved, but eventually, the pair got married. Elizabeth Barret Browning’s dad disowned her.

She so desperately tried to be reconciled. She wrote him a letter every week for ten years in a row. Then, a year before her father died, she received a box in the post. Her excitement quickly turned to sadness as there, in the box were her letters to her father unopened. He had returned them all. If you’d like to read her letters, you can do so here.

That’s what it looks and feels like to not be reconciled. Elizabeth Barret Browning’s dad wasn’t particularly nice.

God is different.

He is the source of everything that is good. To be unreconciled with him is tragic. But, there are no letters we can write that will change his mind. No act of religion. We can’t make it up to God; so great is his holiness, and so damaging is our sin. In the Old Testament, we read about the priests and the high priest. Because God is merciful and gracious, he provided a way for people to continue to relate to him.

But it was a broken system from the start. That’s what we read about in Hebrews chapter 9. God made a contract with humans, and as part of that contract, priests were to sacrifice animals in the place of themselves to get close to God. The High priest was, once a year, after a particularly bloody sacrifice, allowed to enter the most holy place, separated from people by a giant curtain. This is where God resided. The high priest would go into the presence of God and mediate between God and the people on their behalf. For the next year the people would be forgiven.

But, of course this wasn’t permanent. It needed to happen every year.

This ultra specific ritual to help reconcile us to God wasn’t perfect. But there was a promise to God’s people of a once and for all solution.

Jesus provides that help in a once-and-for-all kind of way

Jesus came as a once-and-for-all mediator between God and man. Let me read to you some of the spine-tingling concluding words of an ancient letter to explain how this works.

2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17 onwards:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!  18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:  19 God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  20 We are, therefore, Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.  21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Jesus in his humanity was like us in our humanity.

He knew what it was to be:

→ Tempted

→ Hungry

→ Thirsty

→ In pain

→ Tired

But consider those final words of that passage.

God made him who had no sin be sin for us.

Jesus had no original sin, no Adamic sin.

He didn’t have any actual sin either:

• In deed
• In word
• In thought

He never fell short of the glory of God.

He was perfect.

But God made him sin who knew no sin. God reckoned Jesus a sinner who had never committed any sin and wasn’t a sinner.

On the cross, in Jesus’ last minutes of life. He uttered the famous words:

“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”.

Of course he was quoting Psalm 22, and I know Jesus knew that psalm inside and out. But I think Jesus was also actually saying:

My God, my God, WHY have you forsaken me?

Because, in that moment, God transferred all the sins of all the world; past, present and future into Jesus’ pristine account.

God reckoned Jesus to be a sinner.

So much so that the father, in his absolute holiness, in the integrity of his being is unable in that moment to look upon his son. Jesus doesn’t say my father why have you forsaken me but my God, as though the consciousness of his native sonship and relationship to his father that he had known forever had been completely destroyed. All Jesus knows in that moment is the anger of God against him.

My God, my God why have you forsaken me.

As though he is in the place of the wicked.

As we heard, in the Old Testament, you got right with God this way:

1. Arrive at the tabernacle/temple
2. Bring an animal with you
3. Lay your hands on the animal and confess your sins
4. Cut the animal’s throat
5. The animal takes on your sin and the consequence of it in death
6. You walk away clean (until you sin again).

Why did Jesus die? Death is the wages of sin.

If Jesus is sinless, why does he die?

Surely, he’d just be taken straight up into the presence of God.

But no.

He dies in this brutal, violent and bloody way.

Nails driven through his wrists and ankles beaten, whipped, bloody and broken.

Why?

Two words.

Substitution and satisfaction.

Jesus SATISFIED the justice of God.

For God to be just and the JUSTIFIER of him who believes.

In order to reconcile us into a relationship with God, god’s justice must be satisfied to the full. Sin has to be dealt with. God cannot simply just forgive sin. He needs to do it in a way that lines up with his own being and justice.

Some people think the gospel is this:

God doesn’t reckon our sins to us.

That’s not the gospel. That’s only part of the gospel.

The gospel is this: God does not reckon our sins against us because he reckoned our sins against Jesus.

Jesus bore our sin, the consequence of our sin, as an act of substitution, satisfying the demands of God’s Justice. Substituting Jesus in the place of you and me.

Note: Some people criticise this idea, this doctrine that Jesus was a substitution for us. They say it’s an act of divine child abuse on the part of the father. Most notably, Steve Chalk who wrote a book called: The Lost Message of Jesus coined the term “cosmic child abuse” to refute the substitutionary atonement of Jesus.

Yes, Jesus bore our sins on the cross.

Yes he experienced the full wrath of God poured out on him.

The pain, agony and despair.

My God, my God why have you forsaken me?

But note this:

Jesus endured it willingly.

Phillipians 2:8-9 puts it like this:

rather, Jesus made himself nothing

Jesus wasn’t an unwilling victim. Nobody can take Jesus’ life from him. He lays it down.

That’s why he died uttering the words “it is finished” – he gave up his life.

Conclusion

The Great Reformation has given us so many wonderful insights into our Christian faith. By far my favourite are the 5 Solas. Which is a latin word meaning “alone”

Sola Gratia – we are saved by Grace alone Sola Fide – We are saved through faith alone Solus Christus – in Christ alone Soli Deo Gloria – to the glory of God alone Sola Scriptura – revealed in scripture alone This topic of Jesus as mediator highlights the 3rd sola of the reformation:

Solus Christus → Only Jesus.

• Only Jesus can restore us to God
• Only Jesus can satisfy God’s righteous anger
• Only Jesus can substitute himself for you once and for all
• Only Jesus can volunteer his blood and his life for you.

This is one of countless reasons why Jesus is worthy.

How should we respond?

I think the best response is recorded in the book of Revelation chapter 5.

John is taken in a vision to the throne of heaven. Seated at the throne is God. Jesus, the lamb is there at the right hand of the father.

The throne is full of worshippers. Angels. Elders. Living creatures. All who have been saved.

John records heaven’s response to Jesus’ mediation in verses 11-12:

Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders.  12 In a loud voice, they were saying:

Worship Jesus.