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Apr 19, 2019

Killing God

Preacher: John Repsold

Category: Good Friday Service

Keywords: death, gentiles, good friday, jews, killing, responsibility, sin, us

Summary:

Who is responsible for "killing God" that horrible, dark day when Jesus was tortured and crucified? The very question may both many. How can God be killed? Hasn't that question often been used to promote anti-Semitic attitudes? And wasn't God the Father "guilty" of killing God the Son? These and other questions are tackled head-on in this Good Friday three-part message.

Detail:

Who Killed God? 

Good Friday 2019

April 19, 2019

 

INTRO:  Tonight we are focusing our thoughts, our questions, our emotions and hopefully our whole beings—body, soul and spirit—on the death of…God.

            To say that “God died” is, in one sense, incorrect.  God, by his very nature, cannot be killed.  He IS life.  He IS the fountainhead of all life.  He is eternal and He is unchanging.  Nothing and no one can end the existence of God. 

            But in another sense, we are delving into a mystery when we talk about the death of Jesus Christ.  God’s word is clear: 

  • Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15)—the invisible God made visible perfectly in the human-divine being Jesus.
  • Hebrews 1:3 states it even more clearly when it says, Jesus “…is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.”

            How God managed to fit “all the fullness of the Deity…in bodily form” (Col. 2:9)… into the life, body and person of the fully human Jesus Christ… will be a mystery we will probably marvel at through all eternity.  This is one of…if not THE great differentiating quality… of Christianity from all other religions:  God came and lived among us, 100% God in 100% human being…but without ever sinning! 

            So, in one sense, God the Son was killed that dark Friday so long ago.  In His full humanity, God the Son experienced human death to the full… in one of the worst ways imaginable.  But just as our souls & spirits will continue living forever after our bodies die, so the life of God the Son never “skipped a beat” when His heart stopped beating as he hung on the cross. 

PART 1:  So we begin our time together tonight asking, “Who Really Killed God?”  Who all was responsible for the horrible, cruel, ugly and in many ways unjust death of the only human being who never should have died?   The first answer may surprise you even more than the question.

To the question, “Who killed God the Son?” the Word of God replies, “God did!”  And by God, I mean the biblical, Triune God—Father, Son & Holy Spirit. 

Romans 8:32 tells us that God did not spare his own Son but handed him over — to death. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? God the Father, the one Being in the universe who could have saved Jesus “gave him up for us all.”  All of God giving all of himself for all of us!

In Acts 2:23, the Apostle Peter informed the crowd of thousands he was preaching to that, “This Jesus [was] delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.”  

Isaiah 53:4 & 10 puts it even more bluntly in that amazing Messianic prophecy when he pulls back the curtain on God’s dealing within the eternal Trinity…with His Son, our Messiah:  “…we considered him [Christ] punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.”

(Vs. 10) “Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer… the Lord ma[de] his life an offering for sin….”

Just as Abraham lifted the knife over the chest of his son Isaac, but then spared his son because there was a ram in the thicket, so God the Father lifted his knife over the chest of his own Son, Jesus — but did not spare him, because he was the ram; he was the substitute. 

God could not spare his own Son AND save us.  He could not be just and holy and not judge our sin.  The only way for God to “buy us out of our sin” (redeem) was with the perfect, sinless, spotless, “coin” of His Son.  God, before He ever created this world which would be filled with such horrible human sinfulness, determined that HE would provide the ONLY possible solution to human sin at just the right time in human history.

Revelation 13:8 tells us that throughout all eternity we will see the Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world (John 1:29) as the One “slain from the creation of the world.”  Before God created a single part of our world, long before, He embraced the reality that He would have to experience something that would drive the nails of death so deeply into His soul that it would cost the Author of Life death. 

What do the worst kind of human beings… evil, vile, debased, homicidal and psychopathic murderous torturers… DO when they want to inflict the worst possible emotional and mental pain, suffering, anguish and distress on a parent? They torture and kill their children in front of them. 

Why is that such a universal reality?  Why is this kind of pain written on the soul of every parent who is forced to suffer that horrendous level of evil?  I do not know a single parent who would not freely and pleadingly trade their own life for that of their offspring’s. 

So while we may not understand HOW God could love us sinners SO much as to allow humanity to do just that—to torture, mutilate and destroy the person of His eternal Son with whom He had enjoyed constant, intimate fellowship and communion—what we cannot dispute is that God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit conspired together for the sacrificial and substitutionary death of God in Christ…for US! 

Listen again to Peter, this time in Acts 4:27-28.  He’s praying with the other believers in Jerusalem after just being threatened with bodily harm by the people who had days before killed Jesus.  Peter tells us in his prayer, “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. 28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” 

Jesus had made that clear to his Disciples in John 10:17 & 18 when He said, “I lay down my life…18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

When we come to the cross of Jesus Christ and ask, “Who Killed Jesus?” we cannot escape the confusing, amazing and astounding truth that, first and foremost in the eternal plan and purposes of God, it is God himself who brought death upon Himself.  And He did it all and only because He loved us even before the world began, before we were created and before we came to return in any fashion His loving, self-sacrificing embrace of us. 

PART 2:  Jews & Gentiles…Humanity…Killed God!

Throughout the last two millennium, one of the answers given to the question, “Who killed Jesus?” has carried a clear strain of anti-Semitism.  People looking for a reason…any reason…to persecute Jews have often responded, “Of course, the Jews killed Jesus.”  They are correct in thinking that certain Jews…a few Jews at a particular time in human history… certainly had something very directly to do with Jesus being killed. 

            But that is a very far cry from saying that “all Jews” or “the Jewish race” is somehow culpable or responsible for the death of Jesus.  Jews and Gentiles, Romans rulers and Jewish religious rulers were both responsible for killing Jesus.  In a very representative sense, we can say that ALL HUMANITY was responsible for killing Jesus.  After all, it was the sins of the world…HUMANITY’S SINS…that caused Jesus to embrace those nails on that cross long ago. 

            It was John the Baptist who announced when he saw Jesus, ““Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29)

            The Apostle Paul argues in Romans 3:23-25, “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. 

            The writer of Hebrews, 9:27-28 says, “Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, 28 so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

The Gospels make it very clear that BOTH Jews and Gentiles were directly responsible for the death of Jesus. 

GENTILES

  • Pilate tried to wash his hands of his part in Jesus’ death. He knew Jesus was innocent, yet he caved to the crowd’s demands that he prove his friendship with Rome by killing this self-proclaimed “king of the Jews.”  The Gospels are clear that Pilate and Rome considered Jesus guilty of sedition, of rebellion against Rome…though he knew Jesus was being falsely accused. 
    • The two people crucified with Jesus on either side of him were labeled “criminals” and “robbers.” Those were two titles used to convict people of sedition by Rome.
    • The fact that Pilate had the sign made and placed over Jesus on His cross, “King of the Jews,” is further proof that he was responsible for falsely charging him with sedition. (Luke 23:2, 5)
    • The fact that Pilate gave the crowd the choice of releasing Jesus or releasing the murderous seditionist Barabbas also shows he was placing Jesus in the same camp as Barabbas, a seditionist.
  • Gentile Roman soldiers were, as a whole, more than happy to engage in the murder of Jesus.
    • Matthew 27:27-31—“Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified. 27 Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. 28 They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, 29 and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand. Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him. “Hail, king of the Jews!” they said. 30 They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. 31 After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.”

33 They came to a place called Golgotha (which means “the place of the skull”). 34 There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. 35 When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots. 36 And sitting down, they kept watch over him there. 37 Above his head they placed the written charge against him: this is Jesus, the king of the Jews.

So Gentile were certainly most directly responsible for the actual death of Jesus.

            But the Jews, from their top leadership to the unnamed members of the crowd that cried for His crucifixion, were also responsible for the death of Jesus. 

John 1:11—John tells us that Jesus “came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”  That certainly can refer to his own race, the Jews…his own people, the Jews.  But in a broader sense it can also refer to every human being, the human race—that rejected Him during His lifetime on earth and still today. 

            It was the Temple guard…a Jewish guard…that first arrested and abused Jesus that night.  And it was the very religious-political leaders of the nation that both fomented and sanctioned that abuse.  Matthew 26 gives us the gruesome account. 

We’re told in vs. 57, “Those who had arrested Jesus took him to Caiaphas the high priest, where the teachers of the law and the elders had assembled.”

Vs. 59—The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for false evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death. 60 But they did not find any, though many false witnesses came forward. 

Skipping to vs. 65—Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. 66 What do you think?”

“He is worthy of death,” they answered.  [Remember, this is the religious-political leaders of the Jewish nation doing this…to their own Messiah!  And here comes the part that makes us all want to grimace.]

67 Then they spit in his face and struck him with their fists. Others slapped him 68 and said, “Prophesy to us, Messiah. Who hit you?”

Matthew 27:22 adds in many of the Jewish residents and visitors to the Jewish capital, Jerusalem.  They are certainly some of the bad actors in this dark drama.  As Pilate tries to escape his involvement and responsibility, here’s what unfolded.

22 “What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” Pilate asked.

They all answered, “Crucify him!”

23 “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.

But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”

24 When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!”  25 All the people answered, “His blood is on us and on our children!”

It is clear that not every Jew in Jerusalem took part in this lynching mob.  But enough did so that Pilate actually feared a riot might break out if he didn’t satisfy the mob’s lust for blood.

Luke records in Acts 4 that in Peter’s sermon explaining the death of Jesus, Peter placed the blame for Jesus’ death clearly and equally on Jews and Gentiles alike.  He declared, “For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” (Acts 4:27).

            Even the Christian-persecuting-Pharisee Paul, later-to-become-Apostle Paul, said in 1 Thess. 2:14-15 that it was his people, “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets” who went on to persecute their fellow-Jews like him who were trying to bring the Gospel of Christ to the Gentiles. 

            So, did the Jews kill Jesus?  Clearly they did.  Did the Gentiles kill Jesus?  Yes, they did.  On that grim and dark Friday, Jews and non-Jews/Gentiles together beat, whipped, spit upon, slapped, punched, tortured, tore, bruised and bled the body of God-in-human-flesh, Jesus Christ. 

            As the prophet Isaiah predicted 8 centuries before in Isaiah 53:7-8,

“He was oppressed and afflicted,
    yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
    Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
    for the transgression of my people he was punished.”

Drama:  Eric

That Dark Friday long ago was a day filled with accusations against God in human flesh.  To help us feel what it is like to be the accuser of God that we all tend to be, Eric has written a short monologue drama.  May it help each of us feel the loving patience and kindness of God in the face of…US.

PART 3

The crucifixion of Christ can seem so…removed.  After all, it happened thousands of years ago…in a part of the world most of us have never been to…in a culture very different from ours. 

But before we can hope to answer what that death so long ago has to do with our lives today, we need to ask a different question:  So what do WE have to do with the death of Jesus?

Some of you in this room have known the weight of having to live with the knowledge that you have been personally responsible for someone else’s death. 

  • It might have been in a war where you were told to fight for your country and your life.
  • It might have been in a drunken or drugged stupor where you awoke to discover the horror of what you had done.
  • It might have been in the privacy of a clinic, pressured by life and others to deny the humanity you or someone you knew carried.
  • It might have been in a hospital where someone lay fighting for their life…and lost…because of something you did or didn’t do…but never intended to happen.

Sad as those scenarios are, every one of us in this room, when we come to the cross of Jesus Christ, must confront the reality that WE are the ONE who did this to God.  We…every one of us… because of our sinful rebellion against Him every day, were the ONE there…

  • shouting “Crucify Him!”…
  • showing the intensity of our rage and hatred of what He had not done for us by spitting on His face…
  • slapping Him with the back of our hand…
  • punching Him in the stomach…
  • weaving that crown of thorns and driving it into his head with that rod-mockingly-made-scepter.
  • WE were the ONE scourging him with that cat-a-nine-tails.
  • WE were the ONE blindfolding him, throwing the blow to his face as hard as we could and telling him, “King Jesus, prophecy who threw that punch!”
  • WE were the ONE loading that terrible cross onto his torn and shredded back.
  • WE were the ONE to wield the whip as he stumbled up that bone-dry and hot road to the Place of the Skull.
  • WE held the nails…we swung the sledge hammer…we held down His arms and legs as His wrists and feet were nailed to that wood… and He screamed in agony.
  • WE were the ONE who ripped his cloak off and exposed Him to a mocking world.
  • WE lifted the cross and dropped it into that hole in the ground.
  • Ever accused God of doing wrong? Ever been so angry at him that you cursed Him?  Ever been so disappointed with God that you gave him the silent treatment?  WE in our sinful disappointment were there at the cross, hurling insults at him, “He saved others.  Let’s see if he can save himself.”  We were the ones turning our backs to him and walking away from Him in His moment of greatest love towards us. 
  • And WE dipped the sponge into the sour vinegar and pressed it to His bloody, cracked lips.    

Listen to what God says about OUR sin and OUR responsibility for Jesus’ suffering and death because of that sin:

Romans 4:25-- He was delivered over to death for OUR sins…. 

I Corinthians 15:3-- For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for OUR sins according to the Scriptures….

Galatians 1:3-4-- Grace and peace to you from…the Lord Jesus Christ,4 who gave himself for OUR sins to rescue US from the present evil age….

Colossians 2:13-14— When you were dead in YOUR sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all OUR sins, 14 having canceled the charge of OUR legal indebtedness, which stood against US and condemned US; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

1 Peter 2:23-24-- “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.  He himself bore OUR sins in his body on the cross….

1 Peter 3:18-- For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring YOU to God.

1 John 2:2-- He is the atoning sacrifice for OUR sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.

1 John 4:10-- This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for OUR sins.

Revelation 1:5-- To him who loves US and has freed US from our sins by his blood…to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.

WHO killed God that Friday long ago?  I did…YOU did.  Our sins…OUR’S is THE reason He willingly went to the cross.  And he spoke those amazing words over each of us:  “Father, forgive THEM for they know not what they do.”

In just a moment you are going to have the opportunity to make this very personal.  If you acknowledge that it was YOU by YOUR sin that tortured and killed God in Jesus Christ that day 2,000 years ago AND you wish to receive the forgiveness of sins that Jesus offers every human being when we simply agree with Him, turn from running our own lives and surrender our lives to Jesus, then I invite you to get up, come up to the cross from either side, and either take communion right here or take the bread and juice back to your seat and consume it there. 

            By doing this, you are saying, “I need the broken body and shed blood of Jesus for MY soul, MY life, MY sin, MY brokenness.”  And as you crush that cracker between your teeth and swallow that juice in the cup, thank God that though YOU were the one who killed Jesus, HE is the one who forgives, saves and redeems you by the sacrifice of His perfect, sinless life…for YOU.