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Learn more at MidtownAustin.org.
- Hey, my name is Matt Tolander.
I'm the spiritual
formation pastor on staff
here at Midtown, which is an
incredible privilege for me.
And I'm really excited this morning.
We're continuing our
Psalms of Summer series.
And this morning, we are gonna talk about
the most important Psalm in the Bible.
And I have my friend,
Stephen Flowood, to read it for us.
So if you would, please, if you're able,
stand for the reading of our
teaching text this morning.
- The Lord says to my Lord,
sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
your footstool.
The Lord sends forth from
Zion your mighty scepter.
Rule in the midst of your enemies.
Your people will offer themselves freely
on the day of your
power in holy garments.
From the womb of the morning,
the dew of your youth will be yours.
The Lord has sworn and
will not change his mind.
You are a priest forever
after the order of Melchizedek.
The Lord is at your right hand.
He will shatter kings
on the day of his wrath.
He will execute
judgment among the nations,
filling them with corpses.
He will shatter
chiefs over the wide earth.
He will drink from the brook, by the way.
Therefore, he will lift up his head.
This is the word of the Lord.
- Thanks be to God.
Thank you.
You're like, wait a
minute, that wasn't Psalm 23.
Show of hands, how many of y'all
are familiar with Psalm 110?
All right, pretty good, pretty good.
Let me ask you this.
If someone came to you, like say like a
non-Christian person,
one of your non-Christian friends or
something like that,
if someone came to you and
they asked you to explain
like what is the message of the gospel?
What is the heart of Christianity?
But you can only use the
Old Testament to explain it.
Could you do it?
What passage would you go to?
You can't use the Romans
road, can't use John 3 16,
can't use Ephesians 2, 1 through 10.
Which Old Testament
passage would you go to
to communicate the heart and
the truth of the Christian faith
and the Christian message
that we call the gospel?
And this is the most
transparent opener of all time.
Because when the early
Christians did not have
the New Testament yet,
and they had to communicate
to a world that needed to
hear this gospel message,
when they turned to scripture,
they turned repeatedly and
overwhelmingly to Psalm 110.
Psalm 110 is the most
quoted Old Testament passage
in the New Testament.
There's at least 20
different explicit references to it.
At Pentecost, when Peter
preached the first sermon
in the history of the church,
he ended the sermon in Psalm 110.
Paul references this text
in some of his most important
passages, including
Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15
and Ephesians 1 and Colossians 3.
And the entire book of
Hebrews is based on this Psalm.
And all three gospel
writers include an encounter
in which Jesus makes a very strong,
very forceful use of Psalm 110.
And so I wanna use one of those passages
as a front door into the Psalm.
So let me set it up for us.
So at the time of this story
that we're about to jump into
this interaction, what's
going on is that the Judeans
had been under the
thumb of the Roman empire
for nearly a century.
And the Hebrew Bible that
we call the Old Testament
is full of these
prophecies about a descendant
of King David, who happens to be the
author of Psalm 110.
And they expected
this descendant of David
to be a warrior king, a political leader
who would deliver Israel
from their political enemies
and would establish
this era of God's peace.
And they were sure of it.
They were sure of this
based on their interpretation
of the prophecies in
places like Isaiah and Jeremiah
and Ezekiel.
This Davidic king in
Hebrew is called the Messiah.
Greek word Christos,
which is where we get Jesus
is not his last name.
It's his title, Jesus Christ.
It means the anointed
one, the anointed prince,
God's chosen agent to do this work.
And so in the midst of that expectation
for this Messiah, you
have Jesus of Nazareth
stepping into the scene
as this provocative rabbi,
and he's gaining popularity.
And it starts to alarm
the religious establishment.
And so they come to him and
they start to ask him questions.
And they ask him questions about issues.
I mean, you know us religious people
how we love to argue about issues.
And they come to him
and they ask him questions
about issues.
Should we pay taxes to Caesar?
Political issue.
What's marriage gonna be like in heaven
or in the afterlife?
A theological issue.
What's the greatest
commandment in the law?
That's a scriptural interpretation issue.
They wanna talk to him about issues.
And they're asking him
these very tricky questions
because they're, you
know how politics works.
I mean, they're trying
to make him look dumb
or they're trying to
get him to say something
that's in error
scripturally that they can pin on him.
Or they at least are
hoping that he'll say something
that would maybe
alienate some of his followers.
And, you know, sort of push
away some of his constituents
and maybe lessen his influence.
But that doesn't happen.
Each time he answers, he gives
them these slam dunk answers.
And finally, Jesus goes on offense.
And he goes on attack
with a question of his own.
And we see it in Matthew chapter 22.
It's also recorded in Mark 12
and also in the Gospel of Luke.
But here's what we got.
Matthew 22 starting in verse 41.
So while the Pharisees
were gathered together,
Jesus asked them, what do
you think about the Messiah?
Whose son is he?
And they would reply,
son of David, right?
Based on Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel.
They answer, he's the son of David.
And they're right.
They're right.
But Jesus takes them in
a different direction.
He said to them, how is it then
that David speaking by
the Spirit calls him Lord?
And then he quotes Psalm 110.
For he says, the Lord said to my Lord,
sit at my right hand
until I put your enemies
under your feet.
If then David calls him
Lord, how can he be his son?
And what he's done is he's
used their own interpretive
method to challenge them.
He's proved to them from the scriptures,
using their own method
that their understanding
of the Messiah was incomplete.
It was inadequate.
David doesn't say my son.
He says, my Lord.
And this whole interaction,
they've been peppering Jesus
with these questions,
trying to box him in
according to their preconceptions.
And he uses Psalm 110 to very
definitively break out
of these containers
that they're sort of trying
to put him in.
And it's a crisis moment.
It's a fork in the road.
Because when you start to consider it,
you realize none of these other questions
none of them matter if
they have the wrong answer
to Jesus' question.
The questions about
the issues do not matter
if you have the wrong
answer about who Jesus is.
And so it's easy for us
to read a passage like this
and kind of look down
our nose at the Pharisees
as though we were not the Pharisees.
And it's us and Jesus
against the Pharisees
when we read the passage.
But we are the Pharisees.
We do this to God.
We do this to Jesus all the time.
So let me ask, what kind
of box do you have God in?
What are the ways in
your life in which you try
to contain him or
control him or define him?
I think there's two
ways that we often do this.
Two subtle ways, kind of tricky ways.
And I do this and you do this.
And these are usually really
easy to spot in other people
and extremely hard to spot in ourselves,
which is probably just the
way it is with most things.
But the first way I think
people often do this to God,
try and contain him or box
him in, is through projection.
It's through projection.
Now, this was the critique
of a guy named Ludwig Forbach
in the 19th century.
He was a 19th century German philosopher.
And he surveyed the theological landscape
of continental Europe
in the 19th century.
And he looked around and his critique
of the Christianity at
that time was that God seemed
to be just a bigger version of them.
God was a projection.
God is just a bigger
version of your idealized self.
God is just this abstract
object upon which you project
your own values, your own
desires, your own wishes,
your own dreams.
And his criticism was extremely apt for
19th century Europe.
If you sort of look into
the theological development
of what was happening in the church,
this is an incredibly optimistic time
where they basically
believe that God had given them the
revelation of religion.
And he had given them a
religious system in a society
that would work together to just
Christianize the world.
And so all of the
theological thoughts started
to orient around our
feelings and our experiences.
It was all very positive and
optimistic about human beings.
And so Forbach starts to
look at this and he goes,
when they talk about God,
it's like they're talking
about themselves with a loud voice.
And that was his critique.
And it held out very
well until World War I
and World War II, but sort
of shattered this mindset
in continental Europe.
And so his criticism was
very apt for that time.
It was very apt for our
day to, especially I think
in our political climate.
You can turn on any cable news network,
not that I recommend
you do, but if you do,
you will see politicians projecting.
You will see politicians using the
vocabulary of religion.
And here's what
projection looks like in practice.
God never disagrees with you.
God never challenges you.
God disapproves of all the
same people you disapprove of
and just as harshly.
And God can sort of, he
begins to function for us
when we're doing this.
He begins to function for
us like a card that we play,
just to justify ourselves and to
legitimate our beliefs
and our behavior.
He blesses our biases, doesn't he?
And so when we talk
about God, it starts to sound
like we're really just
talking about ourselves
with a loud voice.
It's projection, if Feuerbach is right.
But here's the problem.
Jesus is not a projection.
He is not a projection.
He is a person.
Listen to what W.H. Auden says, the poet,
when he's explaining why
and how he came to believe
in Jesus Christ, he says this, I believe
because he, Jesus,
fulfills none of my dreams
because he is in
every respect the opposite
of what he would be if I
had made him in my own image.
Why Jesus and not
Socrates or Buddha or Confucius
or Muhammad, listen to his answer.
None of the others arouse
all sides of my being to cry,
crucify him.
Jesus is not a projection.
Jesus is a projectile that
God fires into this world
to shatter all of our projections.
And so if we never find ourselves
confronted by Jesus,
if we never find
ourselves challenged by him,
if we never find
ourselves corrected by him,
then we would do well
to stop and ask ourselves
like if it's really
Jesus that we're dealing with
and that we're engaged with.
So that's projection.
The second way that we do this,
the second way that
we sort of contain God,
boxing man is through abstraction.
Abstraction, so we depersonalize God.
We depersonalize God.
We don't relate to God as a
person or Jesus as a person.
We relate to them as
something impersonal,
as an idea, as an
abstraction, as a topic for discussion,
as energy, as a force.
And the reason we do this is because we don't have
and the reason we do this
is because an impersonal God
doesn't have a will.
And an impersonal God is
never gonna make demands on me.
An impersonal God does
not have preferences.
An impersonal God is not gonna place
any kind of restrictions on me,
but the claims of Jesus
problematize this for us
because he comes in and
he says, I'm the Messiah.
I am the king, the
Davidic king of Psalm 110.
I am God's anointed king
and more than that, I am God.
And so he personalizes God in a way
that's rather
threatening to us when we're used
to sort of regarding
God as an abstraction.
Listen to the way C.S.
Lewis talks about this
in his book, Miracles.
I just pulled my
bookmark out and lost the page.
Here we are, okay.
So C.S. Lewis on this
idea of an impersonal God.
Here's what he says.
He says an impersonal God, well and good.
A subjective God of
beauty, truth, and goodness
inside our own heads, better still.
A formless life force surging through us,
a vast power which we
can tap best of all.
But God himself, alive, pulling at the
other end of the cord,
perhaps approaching at an infinite speed,
the hunter, the king, the husband,
that is quite another matter.
He goes on, there comes a
moment when the children
who'd been playing at
burglars hushed suddenly.
Was that a real footstep in the hall?
There comes a moment when
people have been dabbling
in religion, suddenly draw back.
Supposing we really found him.
We never meant it to come to that.
We're still supposing he had found us.
In other words,
if you've been relating to
God in a depersonalized way,
it's like you're playing a
child's game in your heart.
There's no stakes.
There's no consequences.
Like you go through the
motions of a religious life,
but you keep God at arm's
length by dabbling with him.
And at any moment, God could break in
and disrupt that dynamic
and disrupt that pattern.
And if he does that, then
it could be very sudden,
it could be very startling,
and he will become
very shockingly personal.
And this happened for
me when I was in college,
as it does for a lot of folks.
I mean, I had this experience in college
where the combination of
my own poor decision-making,
which was the start, it started with me,
and then other
people's graceless reaction
to my poor decision-making,
combined to produce this
guilt and shame in my life
that was new, it was
not something I dealt with
at that kind of level
and that intensity before.
And I did not know how to
deal with it spiritually.
It was like such a
shocking and disorienting time
and a dark time, and I
felt abandoned by a God
that I wasn't even
really sure I ever knew.
And so I had this
moment where I was like,
oh, I have to face reality.
And the reality was that I
had a depersonalized God,
and I had been a Christian all my life,
all of my conscious
life, and grew up in church.
But in many ways, I was a
21-year-old baby Christian,
and I didn't look like
it, I didn't talk like it,
because I knew my Bible,
and I was at university studying
theology, learning Greek,
leading in three different ministries,
but God was impersonal to me.
My God was an abstraction, and the
problem that I discovered
is that an abstraction could not help me.
An abstraction could not
help me resolve the guilt
that I felt for these
things that I'd done
that I could never justify.
And so my impersonal
God was useless to me.
Absolutely useless.
Couldn't love me, couldn't comfort me,
couldn't help me, couldn't forgive me,
couldn't heal me, couldn't change me,
couldn't do anything for me,
because he was an abstraction,
because I had depersonalized him.
And for the first time in my life,
I was just truly desperate to know Jesus,
and I knew that I needed more,
I needed more than the
abstraction, and so do you.
You need more than an
impersonal God, and you need more,
I mean, it's not enough to
just go through the motions
of the Christian life and
not know Jesus personally.
It's not enough to just have the
vocabulary of Christianity
and the grammar of religion
to verbalize your own experiences.
We need God to speak into our world.
And so in that spirit, I
want us to look to Psalm 110,
because Jesus said this
psalm was about himself.
He used it to challenge these Pharisees,
and I hope that he uses it
to challenge us this morning.
The main figure in this
psalm embodies three paradoxes,
three sets of these seemingly
contradictory characteristics.
And so I wanna look at what they are
and then talk about
how Jesus fulfills them.
So looking to Psalm 110,
we see that this character, Jesus,
is both human and
divine, both human and divine.
In verses one and two,
says the Lord says to my Lord.
Now, the English word
Lord is used twice there,
but it's two different words in Hebrew.
The first one, the first Lord is Yahweh,
referring to God, the
covenant name of God,
I am that I am.
The second Lord is
the Hebrew word Adonai,
not Adonai, which you
recognize from Josh's talk
a couple of weeks ago, but Adonai,
which is the singular form of Adonai,
and the overwhelming
majority of uses of Adonai
in the Old Testament
refer to a human being.
So David's Lord is a human being,
and yet Jesus' point to the Pharisees is
if this character is a
human descendant of David,
then David would have
never called him my Lord.
Never, he would have
never called him my general.
He would have never
called him my king, my Adonai.
He would have called him my son.
And so we have the human and the divine.
God also says to this
Lord, sit at my right hand.
The sitting at the right hand indicates
that David's Lord,
Jesus, has a unique privilege
and a unique
position, because human beings
do not ascend to heaven to
sit at the right hand of God.
Angels do not sit at
the right hand of God.
Only someone equal with
God, only someone divine,
could sit at the right hand of God,
because he is above all
angels and all earthly beings.
And so that's why
Jesus has this privilege.
So we see that this
character is both human and divine,
and if you're a Christian person,
the idea that Jesus is
both human and divine
is probably not something
you're tripping over, right?
You're like, I think I knew that.
We covered that in the intro class.
But let's keep going.
We also see that because
he is human and divine,
he is equal to God, but
also different from God.
Equal to God, but different from God.
So David's Lord is divine, equal to God,
but at the same time distinct.
So look at this, in verse two,
he shares equally in God's ruling power.
He's at the right hand of God,
and then it says, "The
Lord will extend your scepter
"from Zion, saying, rule in
the midst of your enemies."
Now, the scepter is
symbolic of authority,
and in this case, the scepter is shared.
It's God's scepter,
which is then extended
to the human divine king,
and so it is a distinct action
from one character to another.
So they're distinct people.
And then in verse
five, David addresses God,
the first Lord, in the second person,
and refers to the
Messiah in the third person,
saying, "The Lord,
David's Lord, the Messiah,
"is at your God's right hand.
"He will crush kings on
the day of his wrath."
So we have these two discrete actors.
We have the Lord, we
have David's Lord, God,
and the Messiah, the Father and the Son,
equal and yet distinct.
And so, so far in this psalm,
we've covered some things
that you're probably expecting
in a talk about Jesus.
He's human and divine.
He is equal to God, but also distinct.
And Jesus claimed to be this Messiah,
and the earliest
Christians proclaimed him as such,
and so this was Jesus'
whole point to the Pharisees.
The Messiah is not
just a human warrior king
who's gonna come in to deliver you
from your political enemies.
He is human and divine.
He's God in the flesh.
And so the enemies that he will conquer
are not necessarily flesh and blood.
He didn't just come to overthrow
their geopolitical enemies.
I mean, he didn't just
come to overthrow Egypt
or Babylon or at this point, Rome.
He came to wage this
all-out relentless war
on sin and evil.
But what that means then
is that every human empire
is on a road to
disillusion, including ours.
But there's still one
more paradox to see,
and it kind of
demands our full attention.
The last thing that we see,
when we see that Jesus
is both human and divine,
we see he's different than
God, and also equal to God.
Jesus is a king, as we've established
in the first couple of
verses of this psalm,
but he is also a priest.
He's a king and a priest.
Let's talk about this.
So in verses one to two,
we have Jesus sitting
at God's right hand,
and he's been given this scepter
to rule in the midst of his enemies.
So he is sharing prestige with God,
sharing power with God.
He's sharing in God's authority,
he's sharing in God's rule.
And in verse three, we do
see that he's a warrior king.
It says, "Your troops will be willing
on your day of battle.
A raid and holy splendor.
Your young men will come to you like dew
from the morning's womb."
In other words, he won't
have to conscript anybody.
He's not gonna have to
force anybody to fight for him.
He's gonna be this beloved king.
People are going to
be eager to follow him,
eager to serve him,
eager to sort of be with him.
And David uses this incredible picture
of dew from the morning's womb.
And so I think of it this way.
I used to work at a golf course,
and I had to get to work like real early
before the sun came up.
I was always the first person in there.
And if I got
everything set up fast enough,
then I could get it done before sunrise,
and I could sit, and I
could watch the sunrise come up,
and like the back of this
country club faced east.
And so I could watch the sunrise come up
over three different fairways
that had all had the sprinklers running,
and they had the dew and
stuff, and they were wet,
and I would see the
glistening of the water droplets,
like a billion little
knights in shining armor.
And that's what David is
kind of drawing upon here.
This king priest, he's a warrior king.
He's gonna lead this army into battle,
and yet he's also a priest.
He's also a priest.
Verse four, "The Lord is sworn and will
not change his mind.
You're a priest forever in
the order of Melchizedek."
Now, to be simultaneously a
king and a priest in Judah
was essentially
impossible in David's time.
Here's why.
The priesthood was
restricted to the descendants
of Aaron and the Levites.
So they were the only
people who could be priests.
David and his
descendants could not be priests.
And the kingship was
restricted to David and his house.
So Aaron and his
descendants couldn't be king.
And so because these two offices,
these two roles and
functions have been reserved
for these two specific family
lines, they don't cross over.
You don't ever have one person occupying
both of these roles.
In fact, kings were forbidden
from performing priestly functions.
They didn't have any
priestly prerogatives.
And so you see multiple
times in the Old Testament,
kings getting themselves in trouble
because they try and act like priests.
So for example, David's predecessor Saul
did all kinds of things
that made the Lord angry.
But the final straw was that
he offered a burnt offering
on his own without a priest.
And that is the last
thing before he's removed
from the throne and rejected by God.
King Uzziah, who is David's descendant,
David's seventh great grandson,
he went into the temple alone
to offer an incense offering.
And the priests saw him going in there
and they followed him in.
And they were like, "You
can't do this, your grace.
Please don't, this is not your role.
We have to be the ones to do this."
Uzziah became angry with them
and he was stricken
with leprosy on the spot
and had to give away the
throne to his son Jotham.
And so we see that the
king and the priest's role
are both incredibly
important in ancient Israel.
They're incredibly important.
And at the same time,
they're sort of
contradictory and mutually exclusive.
And nevertheless, God makes an oath
with this divine human king.
He says he'll be a priest forever
in the order of
Melchizedek, forever the way to God.
It will be you.
Now who is Melchizedek?
Melchizedek is like Jack
Nicholson and a Few Good Men
or Anthony Hopkins and
Silence of the Lambs.
Like he's like barely in the movie,
but he makes a huge impact.
So he shows up in Genesis 14.
It's the only other Old
Testament mention of Melchizedek.
He shows up in Psalm 110
and he's gonna show up in the New
Testament a little bit.
But Melchizedek,
we're told in Genesis 14,
Abraham meets him after
defeating the king of Sodom.
And Melchizedek's name
means king of righteousness.
And he's described in the
text as the king of Salem,
that is Jerusalem.
And Salem means peace.
So he's a king,
but the text also describes
him as a priest of El Elyon,
God the Most High.
And so Melchizedek blesses Abraham
and he gives him bread and wine.
Now some interpreters
do think they insist
that Melchizedek is actually Jesus Christ
making a cameo in the Old Testament.
I don't think that's the case.
But the author of Hebrews,
who like I said, the
entire book of Hebrews
is based on this Psalm,
the author of Hebrews
interprets Melchizedek
as being what's called a type.
Sort of a forerunner, a
foreshadowing of Christ.
And so here's how this works.
Melchizedek was a priest long before
Aaron and the Levites.
They're not gonna come
around until much later.
He's a priest and a king all
the way back in Genesis 14.
And Jesus is not a descendant of Aaron.
And so he doesn't come
from the priestly family,
but he is a priest in the order
that predates Aaron's order.
And that's part of why
Jesus is a superior priest.
So here's the rub.
King and priest,
they're mutually exclusive,
they're contradictory roles.
And even if they were
embodied in the same person,
they have different functions.
They have different functions.
They're contradictory roles with
contradictory purposes.
And the contrast is made very clear
once we jump into the following verse.
Cause right after we
have this priestly oath,
right after God swears to David's Lord,
to Jesus, to the Messiah,
that he'll be a priest forever
in this order of Melchizedek.
David in the Psalm begins to address God
and refers to the Messiah.
And it goes pretty dark.
He says, "The Lord is at your right hand.
He will crush Kings on
the day of his wrath.
He will judge the nations,
heaping up the dead, heaping up bodies,
heaping up corpses,
and crushing the
rulers of the whole earth.
And he will drink
from a brookle on the way
and so he will lift his head high."
I mean, that doesn't
sound very priestly, does it?
Based on everything
you know about priests
from the Old Testament,
it doesn't sound like a priest at all.
Here's the problem.
The king is meant to
represent God to the people.
The priests are meant to
represent people to God.
In some ways they're
opposing agendas, right?
The king has to rule and
judge and enforce the law
and go to war and kill people.
The priest serves and advocates and heals
and offers sacrifices and
removes sin and preserves life.
And so in these two roles,
we have this classic tension.
I mean, the classic tension.
It's justice and mercy, right?
Law and grace, Javert and Valjean.
And so we see this paradox
in other places in the Bible
and especially in one
very important place
that Josh also
mentioned a couple weeks ago
and that I talked about
the last time I was up here,
but it's Exodus 34.
Exodus 34.
And in Exodus 34, what we have is that
Moses has asked God,
he wants to see God's glory.
And God's like, "Well, here's the,
if I show it to you, you'll die.
And so I can't do that.
So I will pass by and then
you can look at the place
where I just was.
And that like just the
glowing spot where I used to be.
I mean, that's all we can do.
And so he's gonna, he says to Moses,
he says, "I'll make all my
goodness pass before you."
And in this text, we're
gonna see this paradox,
this contradiction in
the very heart of God.
So when the Lord
reveals his glory to Moses,
reveals his goodness, it says,
"Then the Lord came down in the cloud
and stood there with him
and proclaimed his name,
the Lord," and listen to the name.
"He passed in front
of Moses, proclaiming,
the Lord, the Lord, the
compassionate and gracious God,
slow to anger, abounding
in love and faithfulness,
maintaining love to thousands,
and forgiving
wickedness, rebellion, and sin.
And yet he does not
leave the guilty unpunished.
He punishes the
children and their children
for the sin of the parents
to the third and fourth generation."
Now, I don't wanna get
too off track on this,
but punish is kind of a
weird translation here.
Essentially the idea is
that sin, if it goes unchecked,
it perpetuates itself
generationally, okay?
What you live with, you learn,
what you learn, you
practice, what you practice,
you become, what you
become has consequences.
That's how this works.
So Jesus is not just
arbitrarily punishing kids
because their parents
did something wrong.
Jesus is talking about
a generational transfer
of a destructive habit or a
pattern or emotional pattern
or a sin pattern, something like that,
but it perpetuates
through the generations.
Now, getting back to the main point,
did you see the
contradiction in the heart of God?
On one hand, he is so
compassionate and gracious
and so abounding in love and faithfulness
that he will forgive
wickedness and rebellion and sin.
And yet at the same time,
he is just and righteous
and does not leave sin unpunished.
He does not leave the guilty unpunished.
And so this is the
paradox of God's goodness.
And unless we learn to
appreciate both sides
of this paradox and
unless we learn to hold them
in tandem and intention together,
be really hard to engage
fully with the goodness of God
in our lives.
And so we had this issue.
He's so good that he wants to
forgive all sin and wickedness,
but if he gives sin
and wickedness a pass,
then he's not good.
Because no judge who
looks at evil and says,
"No problem," is a good
judge, and all of you believe that.
So at the same time, though,
he doesn't leave the guilty unpunished,
but if he only ever
punished and was never merciful,
he wouldn't be good either.
So he is merciful.
But how does this work?
How does all of this get resolved?
The paradox is resolved in Jesus Christ.
The paradox is
resolved in the priest king,
in David's Lord.
Here's how.
Jesus resolves this
contradiction in the heart of God,
in his own body, in his own life,
and he does it by becoming the judge
who is judged in our place.
He is the judge who
is judged in our place.
Here's what it says in Colossians 1.
Paul writes this.
It says, "Once you
were alienated from God,
enemies because of your evil behavior,
but now he has reconciled you
through Christ's physical body,
through his death, to
present you holy in his sight,
without blemish and
free from accusation."
Now you see, Jesus, on one hand,
he proclaims our guilt.
He proclaims our guilt.
He judges our guilt, but
also he became our sin.
And so he is at the same time,
he is the judge, the just
judge, the righteous judge,
but he is so gracious
and so compassionate
that he will become sin
and he will place himself
under God's righteous judgment.
And this is how Jesus the priest king
destroys his enemies.
He reconciles us to God.
He makes us friends,
which is the ultimate
destruction of an enemy.
He judges our wickedness,
but then he takes the
responsibility on himself
to make us holy.
And then when the hand
that holds this scepter
that's been extended from Zion,
when this hand deals
the final killing blow
to sin and evil, all it
does is hang there and bleed.
That's our priest king.
And I'd like for us to contemplate that
as the band comes up and
as the communion service
distribute the elements.
I'd like to encourage you just to take
a couple silent minutes and pray.
And consider our priest king.
Consider David's Lord,
the human and divine Messiah
who comes to wage war on sin and evil
and in fact has done it.
And that is why he is now
seated at the right hand of God
awaiting the final
surrender of all of his enemies
when they become his footstool.
Just take a couple silent moments,
just to pray and reflect and have a moment with God.
- Thank you for
listening to the Midtown Church
Sermon podcast.
We invite you to
practice the way of Jesus
in Austin with us because
as we become more like Jesus, Austin will become more like heaven. (upbeat music)