Propitation

This is an exegetical sermon from Romans 3:24-25 titled, Propitiation and looks how God put his Son Jesus forward as our final and sufficient substitute. This sermon was originally preached by Pastor Duane Smets on December 11, 2005 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA. Audio unavailable.

.
.

The Resolved Church | www.theresolved.com
(619) 393-1990 | contact@theresolved.com
All Rights Reserved © The Resolved Church

Permissions: you are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material provided you not alter the wording in any way and you do not charge a fee. For web posting a link to this document is preferred.

The Resolved
Sunday, December 11, 2005

“Propitiation”
Romans 3:24-25a

Duane Matthew Smets (elder)

INTRODUCTION

God, you are beautiful in majesty and might, the most glorious being we could ever conceive of. And this text is the blazing center of that beauty. In it our ugliness, your wrath, and the cross of Christ come together and give us reason for hope. And the hard thing about that is that you and that story have become too familiar to some of us here, especially me. And then it is also hard because there are some here who may not believe in any of this and perhaps for good reason. So what I ask of you God is for help. Help us with this text, to know it and understand it, and that through it may we see you and be extremely delighted and convinced of what we see. You have made us as beings that want to be happy and we look to you through the foundation that this passage lays in order to find the satisfaction that we long for.

Last week we studied Jesus’ teaching in Matthew about how being righteous or justified has to do with the affections. This week we look to the foundation of that which gives us reason to have God thirsting affections at all. D. Martin Lloyd Jones called this verse the Acropolis of all Scripture. the Acropolis, known as the “sacred rock” since ancient times has sat above the most important city in Greece, Athens and it sits today as some have said, as a symbol for the artistic, cultural, and philosophical foundations for the western world. and not only is it the centerpiece for Paul’s argument in Romans, which is why Martin Luther and many others have called it the most important verse in the bible, but not only that, but this verse has been the gateway through which many people throughout history have first come to begin to believe that there is something to this Christ, to this Christianity. People like William Cowper, who wrote that wonderful hymn we sing sometimes here called “there is a fountain.” William Cowper suffering an intense battle with depression and sin to the point that he was committed to an insane asylum and while he was there one day he was out in a courtyard and there was a bible and he opened it up and he read “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” It was after that that he wrote these words…

There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains. The dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day. And there may I, though vile as he, wash all my sins away. Dear dying lamb, they precious blood shall never lose its power till all the ransomed church of God be saved, to sin no more. Ever since, by faith, I saw the stream thy flowing wounds supply, redeeming love has been my theme, and shall be till I die. When this poor lisping, stammering tongue lies silent in the grave, then in a nobler, sweeter song, I’ll sing thy power to save.

Oh that God would grant us such a love for Him tonight. This text is a mountain, a Mount Everest, but it has streams of water that flow from its snow capped peaks that can fill our souls. A friend wrote me this week some words to encourage me and they have been ringing in my head over and over again. His name is B.J. Stockman, a good scholar and a good friend of Justin’s who lives up in Humboldt County. This is what he wrote, “Duane, the essence of Christianity is looking away from oneself to another. Christ bids us to look at ourselves and get disgusted and look at him and get happy.” And that is what tonight is about. Tonight my goal is to present Christianity to you, to present Christ to you, that we might see the glory of God and be happy in him.

So here is the plan. As I said in my prayer, this text is wide and it is deep. I could very easily preach on it for the next month. Every word is loaded with theological richness. It is like Paul, the human author of Romans, took all these huge, extremely significant things, and put them all together in one verse and tied them all together to the point where they are almost inseparable. This text is wide and deep. And then there is the difficulty that like most things that really matter, most things that have any real value or truth, there ends up being debate and strife over them. And there is much debate over the things that are said in this text. and then added on top of that there is the difficulty that since we preach through books of the bible, things are constantly building on one another and at this point in Romans, Paul assumes certain things that he as already talked about. So here is what I am going to do. rather than to take you down into the thick of each of the roads of controversy, I’m just going to point them out, tell you what we believe here at the resolved and then give you some quick reasons why we believe what we do and then we are going to go to Christ and his cross because that is the heart of this text and the ground of any hope for happiness.

First, the word “whom” refers to “Christ Jesus” from the end of verse 24. So Christ Jesus is the subject of this verse. which is significant because Paul hasn’t said anything about who Jesus is or what he did since the beginning of the book and he is about to make some huge huge claims about him that made a lot of people uncomfortable back in his day and they continue to make people uneasy today. Paul makes four uncomfortable claims: here they are: 1 God put forward Christ Jesus; 2. God put him forward as propitiation; 3. this propitiation is by Christ Jesus blood; 4. the benefits of this propitiation are received by faith.

God put forward Christ Jesus
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this because Justin will be addressing it in depth next week. But I will make some brief comments. The overarching issue that stands over this text is God and his glory. Romans is a book about God and his glory and there is a reason for why God did things the way he did in Christ Jesus. So that is next week. For this week, notice this phrase, “God put forward.” What this does is set up the whole scene. Paul is about to talk about the death of Christ and its significance and he sets that up by saying, God did it. God put him forward; he put this whole thing together. And this is the first area of contention, because automatically it makes people uncomfortable for a number of reasons. If God did it, if the one who killed Jesus was not necessarily the Romans, or the Jews, but as Is 53 also says, that it was God himself who “crushed him,” then is this divine child abuse? What about human free will? How can this be true or good? And the questions and challenges and debates start rolling. And I could preach a whole sermon on this. But I’m not going to; we will get into the thick of it once we get to Romans 9. but this is what I will say, the picture of God throughout Romans and throughout the entire Bible is one that views him as the ruler over the universe and its inhabitants and that one of the things that makes God is his unique ability to govern the decisions of men for his purposes. You ask how? Think about it…every decision that you make is influenced, or we could even say controlled, by a slew of past experiences and decisions. So much so that when you make a decision or an act of the will, there is no way that it is free but rather determined by all that has come before it. And what the bible universally teaches is that God orders both the circumstances of our lives and the affections of our hearts that cause us to make the decisions that we do. Now you may question whether he is good or does what is right in the way that he orders things, but that is for Justin next week.

I’m going to move on and trust that what I’ve said does the text some justice, but if you want to read more on this go to the resolved website and read Jonathan Edward’s book, “the freedom of the will” and if you want I wrote an interpretive outline because it is considered by most all philosophy departments across the world as the most significant philosophical work to come out of America, and it is hard reading. if you want something a little easier, there is a book on our book table, called “beyond the bounds” which specifically responds to the concept of open theism, the idea that humans have a free will and therefore God cannot know the future, it is open, because human “free will” decisions have not yet been made. Now if in the last five minutes you have been scratching your head and are like, “what?” That is okay don’t worry about it. This is the point, Romans 3:25 begins by saying that God set up and purposed the death of Christ.

God put him forward as a propitiation
So God put Christ forward. But forward to what? If you have an NASB or ESV translation bible, like the ones we have here, and then it says God put him forward as a “propitiation.” If you have an NIV it says, “atoning sacrifice.” Here is the deal. Nobody ever uses the word propitiation. I don’t think I have ever heard it or read it in any conversation outside of the bible. There are probably only a couple of you here that if I asked you if you knew what it meant that you could give an answer. There are some words that we can do without, we can do away with them, like thee and thou, and shant, and speaketh, and then there are words worth fighting for. Words like justification, sanctification, and propitiation. We, the leaders here at the resolved, want you to know and love this word “propitiation.” The NIV translates the Greek word hilasmos here as “atoning sacrifice” in large because they know that most people don’t know what propitiation is. And the problem isn’t that Paul doesn’t have a concept or a picture of sacrifice in his head when he is writing this. There are relevant historical/cultural backdrops concerning ancient sacrificial systems and the behavior of Greek gods, but the main issue here is what hilasmos means. I could launch into the thick of another debate here and preach a whole sermon on this as well, but again I am not going to do that. Most of you would be bored out of your minds if I started talking about the issues of expiation and the hilak cognates and the Septuagint usage and C.H. Dodd’s theory and Leon Morris’s refutation. So I’m not going to do that, if you want it go read Leon Morris’s or Douglas Moo’s commentary on Romans.

here is what I want you to get, hilasmos, “atoning sacrifice” in the NIV, “propitiation” in other translations means this here, “the turning away or the removal of wrath.” Propitiation means “the removal of wrath.” Wrath is the issue here. as we have taught over and over again, that the Bible is to be treated like you treat any other book in that you read things in context of what comes before and what comes after. You can’t rip out a sentence or a paragraph and not consider what has been said before and what is said after. And the most important thing for us here in Romans, is that ever since chapter 1 verse 18 until now, the issue has been God’s wrath.

Let me summarize the last seven months of studying Romans for you. There is a God. There are reasons and evidence to think he exists and that he is a magnificently beautiful and good and glorious being. And there is us, human beings he made to enjoy him in his wonder and goodness and glory. And all of us rather than doing that have refused to be happy in him. Instead we have wanted glory for ourselves, we have wanted and tried to find other things to make us happy than him. And in doing that we have offended this God and in response his wrath stands over the human race. And since this offense comes from a deep down wickedness inside us, we can’t stop offending him and could never do enough good works to satisfy the infinite debt we owe. So all there is, is his just wrath standing over us. Every person in here is ugly in their core and deserves the hellish unleashing of God’s horrendous wrath. That is the last seven months in a paragraph. then we come to Romans 3:21, follow along with me, “but now the righteousness of God, to be right, to be happy in God, has been manifested apart from the law, or we could say the way to be right or happy in God has been made known to us not because of doing any good works of the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it – to what? The righteousness of God, that getting right or happy with God, that comes through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. for there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, meaning this is available for everyone and everyone needs this, we are all jacked, and are justified, or made right with God, by his grace as a gift through the redemption, redemption is the price or the cost, that is in Christ Jesus, what price? What cost? How does this work? What about God’s wrath we deserve? Listen, vs. 25. Well, God put him, Christ Jesus forward as propitiation, as a thing to turn away his wrath.

Do you get it? The issue is God and his glory and us and our messed up selves and the wrath we deserve because of it and the price God paid in putting forward Jesus Christ as a propitiation. So this is what you should get, Jesus Christ is our propitiation. He turns away God’s wrath, he does something about God’s wrath. We have a problem with God and God does something about it in Jesus Christ. Do you see why we love that word? I don’t want wrath. Nobody wants wrath. That is why people try to get it away from this passage and get it away from the idea of God. They only want to think of him as this teddy bear in the sky that just loves everybody and everything and doesn’t care when people refuse his love and despise everything he is and does for them. I don’t want wrath, but I don’t want some pansy God who just sweeps wrong doing under the rug and doesn’t care about when people wrong him. That’s not a loving God; all he is then is a whore who prostitutes himself away to his creatures. And that is the beauty of Christ. That he is a propitiation, wrath is dealt with but not at the cost of sacrificing the goodness and love and justice of God. But how? How is Jesus Christ a propitiation? How does God in Jesus Christ turn away his wrath?

This propitiation is by Christ’s blood
The answer is by his blood. Christ is a propitiation by his blood. And when Paul says “by his blood” here it is a direct reference to the whole crucifixion event wherein Jesus Christ suffered and died. I am going to return to the crucifixion story in a couple of minutes. But first I want to explain Paul’s logic here. He says Jesus Christ is a propitiation; he takes on the wrath of God, by his blood, his death. There are two things Paul says in Romans that make this work. First, in Romans 1:4 he says that Jesus was “declared to be the son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.” So first, Paul argues that Jesus Christ is divine. He is a God-man. in his letter to the Philippian Christians Paul explained it this way, “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even on a cross.” So the first thing that makes Paul’s logic work is that he claims that Jesus is divine. Second, is that Jesus never sinned; he obediently glorified God for the entirety of his life. Romans 5:19 “by one man’s obedience (Jesus Christ) many will be made righteous.” So the second thing is that Jesus, the God-man, never wronged God, so he never deserved God’s just wrath. Now the idea that Jesus is a God man and never did anything wrong may seem really far fetched to you. And that is fine, it is something to think about and look into. Again, a major point of debate. I would submit that if there was evidence that Jesus did in fact raise from the dead then this could be sufficient ground to consider these claims. If you want to look into this you can download a work I did on the resurrection of Jesus Christ that addresses this issue and provides numerous other sources to look at.

But right now what I want you to get is Paul’s logic. So think with me…God is glorious, mankind trades away this glory, an offense against the eternal God, thus deserving an infinite or unending outpouring of His wrath. but Paul says here in verse 25 that God puts forward Jesus Christ, who is both man, really human, and God, fully divine and thus of an infinite worth, and he puts him to death. Death is wrath for those who do wrong. And then, since Christ did no wrong and yet died, he is sufficient to suffer death in our place. And since he is God he can satisfy the demands that the death be of an infinite or eternal quality. Do you get the logic? So Christ death is sufficient both for mankind, in his place, and for God, and his just wrath. And this leads us to the final uncomfortable claim. How does mankind receive this great gift of God, the propitiation of Christ Jesus?

The benefits of this propitiation are received by faith
We have explained before that faith has three elements: 1) an intellectual element. 2) An emotional element; and 3) a volitional element. The intellectual element is that you have reasons to believe what you believe. It is a widespread thought today that faith means believing something that there is no reason or evidence for it to be true. But faith in the bible is the exact opposite. If you have not been convinced in your mind of certain essential truths then you do not have Christian faith. The emotional element is that you feel it. Faith is more than just a philosophical position. There is a love and adoration and feeling of thanks toward God that constitutes biblical faith. And lastly the volitional element. Volitional means act of the will, it means that when you believe something it has an effect up the decision of the will that you make, the way you live your life. If I believe I can fly I will go jump of a cliff and if I really believe in any of this stuff it will affect the way I live my life.

Maybe that kind of scares some of you. It scares me sometimes. And it is okay to doubt whether you have faith. In fact the bible commands us to doubt our faith. I don’t know where all of you are at with God and this whole Christianity thing, but I am guessing that there is at least one of those areas that every person here is lacking in.

Let me get more specific. Vs.25 says “faith in his blood.” That means I must be convinced in my mind that Paul’s argument is true and that Jesus is God and never sinned and that he died in my place satisfying the wrath of God that I deserve. It means I should have an emotion of thanks and love for that blood that grants me such a wonderful gift. And then it means that I must live my life always looking to and counting on his blood for my righteousness, for my happiness in God.

Conclusion
There are four claims that give us a foundation for joy:
1. God put forward Christ Jesus
2. God put him forward as a propitiation
3. This propitiation is by Christ Jesus blood
4 The benefits of this propitiation are received by faith

Here is how I want to conclude tonight’s sermon. I quoted my friend earlier that, “the essence of Christianity is looking away from oneself to another.” Christ bids us to look at ourselves and get disgusted and look at him and get happy.” And that tonight my goal was to present Christianity to you, to present Christ to you, that we might see the glory of God and be happy in him.

So here is how I want to conclude. I want to tell the passion story. The movie, the passion of the Christ made much of the human suffering of Jesus. But thousands and thousands of men in the first century were beaten and crucified. The only thing that makes it significant is if Jesus was God and if he never did anything wrong and if he propitiated the wrath of God for us in our place. I want us to see the beauty and the brilliance of the gospel in the face of Christ. I need to see the lines on his face as he writhes in agony. I need to hear the mighty hush that booms when he whispers his name. I need to feel the sores from where the flowing blood scarred his body. I need to smell the smoke of sacrifice that pleased and appeased the one to whom the debt was owed. I need to taste the richness of what is freely given until I am left with nothing but thanks. I need Christ again for he has become too familiar to me.