Access Obtained

This transcript has been automatically generated

One short notice and say to those of you who were here last week and those who read the card that our subject for the month of October is one word. And that word is access, a fairly familiar word in many people’s wallets and on many people’s lips, I suppose, as a result. Access, getting into a position perhaps where we couldn’t otherwise get. Finding a way in through a closed door. All these things come into mind as one thinks of this word access.

And I’m using it to describe the very central fact of the Christian gospel, the storey of how God has planned that sinful men should find access and entrance and welcome into his holy presence. Last week I did the bad news and I did promise that there would be no more bad news, that all the other Tuesdays this month would be good news. And so they will be. Let me summarise the bad news, however, just for half a minute and say that the bad news was that when we come to knock at the gate of heaven, when we try to pray, when we try to get through to God, there’s no answer. I’m sure that’s why many people become unbelievers, as I said last week.

Just from time to time I may be in my flat there on a Saturday afternoon maybe and nobody’s around and there hasn’t been a church watcher and the church is closed and there comes a knock on my front door. Usually I rather hope that I won’t have to open the church and I go down with my heart sinking as I see a little party there. I wonder how long they’ll want to ruminate amongst the tombs in the church. Only to be told rather pathetically that they’ve come all the way from, where shall we say, the Christmas Islands and that they’re in London only for another 24 hours and that the lady or the man of the party wants to find their ancestor who was buried here in 1643 and a half or whatever it was. Well now, how can you possibly keep the church door shut in the face of someone who’s come so long and that’s one of the top things on their shopping list for their visit to London, to find their name written on one of these black stones in the floor or on one of these monumental brasses or whatever it may be.

So obviously they have to come in. But supposing I was not in the flat and they went on ringing the bell and knocking the door for about a quarter of an hour and then had to give up They would explain it to their friends by saying, well, we went there and we knocked on the door but the door was shut unfortunately and there was no one there, there was no one there.

And so it is that when people pray and try to turn to God in some crisis in their lives, try to get his help, they knock on the door and nothing happens. They ring, they knock again, they wait. And they go away and they say to themselves, if not to their friends, well, there was no one there. And they become, if not agnostics, at least people with very fragile convictions.

Alas that there was no one near to teach them the simple truth that it wasn’t that there was no one there the other side of the door, but that God will not open the door to sinners. He will not open the door to sinners.

And that he has gone to infinite pain in the sending of his only Son into the world to send someone to become man who will be strong enough to go to that door and open it. But when I say strong enough, of course I’m choosing the wrong word, aren’t I? Look at our hymn again, verse 4. What is the actual word? No other good enough.

Now that’s the word. Obviously no sinner can knock at the door and get into a holy God’s home. We should make it so filthy if we went in. So no child of Adam can enter that wonderful kingdom of light and peace and love. But Jesus was good enough, that’s the storey of the Bible, to win a way into the presence of God so that now we know there is somebody there and we, he will welcome us however sinful we are in the name of Jesus.

So let me summarise this because I did say at the beginning that I felt this word access gave me an opportunity to put the basic Christian message in a word. That’s a very bold thing to say, I know, but it does. That basically Jesus did not come to teach. I mean, nobody has ever taught such wonderful things as he did, but it wasn’t the basic reason for his coming. Jesus did not come primarily to live an example before us, though of course the example of his life is unique in the whole history of the world.

Puts the whole philosophy of progress in great problem, doesn’t it? That if you want to find the person who lived the best life, it’s not in the future, it’s in the past, 2,000 years ago.

He didn’t come primarily to do, though he did the most wonderful things that have ever been done.

No, he came primarily to obtain access, a phrase the Bible uses from time to time. To obtain access for the sons of men into the presence of God. Quite simply, to open the door.

Now today I’ve chosen the shortest, most concentrated, most luminous passage in the whole Testament explaining how Christ did it. I hope in the very short time I have that I’ll be able to explain it to you. They are in fact some sermon notes. Some of you will have been present when we’ve done it before, well, I think it’s still worth going over again in Mark chapter 15 verse 33 and on the back of your hymn sheet. I’ve entitled it Two Loud Cries and I’ll explain why.

This gospel of Mark is known famously as an eyewitness gospel. It’s very possible actually that young John Mark was present on this occasion, though no one can be certain. His mother was a well-to-do person, she had a fairly large house in Jerusalem. Where the early church regularly found refuge and hospitality. And it seems very likely that young John Mark was around in Jerusalem during these days.

Whether or not that is so, what is much more certain is that Mark gets this information from someone who was there, namely Peter himself, and that the information is given through Mark here not simply in the form of a description line by line but of an explanation, the kind of explanation that Peter would have given as he opened his mouth to preach the gospel in many parts of the world of his day. Now I said it’s an eyewitness account, but when we look at verse 33, we come straight across an interesting fact, that there was darkness over the whole land until the 9th hour. Some people have tried to find there an eclipse, but that’s been shown to be impossible. Because of the time of the month. Some people think it was a black sirocco, such as comes still in that part of the world, and blowing up sand and so on and darkening the atmosphere.

But I prefer to see here a supernatural sign from God, for what we’re going now to enter is a very dark tunnel, the darkest moment in the history of the human race, also paradoxically the brightest moment. But the point I’m making just at this very moment is that it was so dark that an eyewitness would see very little. It’s therefore all the more telling, isn’t it, showing the credence of these early storeys that we can put in them. It’s all the more telling that we don’t get an eyewitness account. We get what I can only call a ear witness account.

Here is someone who’s in the crowd and it’s dark, and he hears through this darkness the cry from the voice, that he’d loved and known so well, if it’s Simon Peter listening, and there’s this first loud cry of agony followed by another loud cry when he dies. Never forgot those 2 tremendous cries that came through the darkness. Of course he didn’t understand them at the time but when he came to understand them afterwards under the teaching of the risen Christ, it seemed to him that these 2 great cries pinpointed the significance of what Jesus was doing. The first then is in verse 34. It’s a cry of agony: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Now we may assume here, and I’m not going to stop on this, that at that moment the bottom of Peter’s world dropped right out because that is the very question that he’s been asking for 3 years: Why, Lord Jesus, should you die? Jesus has been so confident that he should die in the purposes of God and now comes the question from the cross. Why?

And yet, as the commentators realise from this, it’s not a cry of despair because it is in fact a quotation. And though, if you’ve got a Bible near you, you may like to look at Psalm 22, but most of you haven’t, so I’m just going to read one or two verses from this Messianic Psalm. Psalm 22, which is a long Psalm of someone who is suffering the most, in the most appalling way, begins like this: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer.

Now those are the very words that Jesus has on his lips. It is clear, isn’t it, that he is meditating on that messianic psalm. He is in full possession of his faculties, he knows what he is saying, And he cries out so that the world may know where his thoughts and his heart are. Let me go on reading verse 6, for these are the words that went through his mind. They’re so unbelievably close to the reality that they make one almost shiver to read them.

I’m a worm and no man, scorned by men and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me, they make mouths at me, they wag their heads. Quote, he committed his cause to the Lord, let him deliver him, let him rescue him, for he delights in him.

Verse 14, I am poured out like water, all my bones are out of joint, my heart is like wax, it has melted within my breast. And people say that those are exactly the feelings of someone undergoing the appalling experience of crucifixion. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, my tongue cleaves to my jaws. Thou dost lay me in the dust of death. Do you remember that great cry, I thirst, not recorded by Mark?

Thirst, one of the chief symptoms of this kind of death. Yes, dogs are round about me, verse 16. A company of evildoers encircle me, they have pierced my hands and feet. I can count all my bones. They stir and gloat over me.

They divide my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots. Isn’t that quite remarkable as a messianic prophecy? Those are the very words that are going through the mind of Jesus as he suffers for mankind. But it doesn’t answer the question, why?

Sometimes when people die or suffer, you hear people say, don’t you, it’s very, very, very common, they say, it doesn’t seem fair. It’s so unjust. And that’s what Peter had felt and that’s what we feel. Here is the one man who obeyed God, the Son of Man, the true man, and he is suffering. And you will know, I’m sure, if you’ve been coming to St. Helen’s for any length of time, if you’re a Christian who knows your Bible, that the apostles after the resurrection found that there was only one answer that fitted the facts.

And that was that Jesus on the cross was not bearing his own sin. And taking responsibility of that before God but that he was bearing the sins of the whole wide world. 1 Peter 2:24, just listen to this: He himself bore our sin in his own body on the tree. Galatians 3:13, these are the great statements of the New Testament writers: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us, for it is written, cursed is he that hangeth on a tree. The explanation of the Bible then, put there in very short language, it takes a long time to get to grips with it, is that God is laying to Jesus’ account the sin and guilt of the world, that Jesus is opening his heart to bear your shame and my shame and that therefore he is opening himself to the wrath of God and that God is going to treat him as you deserve to be treated and I deserve to be treated and God is going to burnish him.

From his presence. For the Bible is quite clear that no one will be banished from God’s presence unless they hang on to their sins and refuse to repent.

This then is the awful cry of agony. What kind of response did it have at the time? Well, amongst the Jews, complete and total misunderstanding. Someone said, hmm, he must be calling Elijah. There’s an old tradition that Elijah might come back and help people in need.

So somebody put some vinegar up in his mouth and just said he’d live a little longer, saying— and it probably was in words of mockery, though we can’t tell, of course, not having heard it— probably he’s saying, well, we’ll keep you alive to see if Elijah wants to come and rescue you. Doesn’t seem much hope of it. You can imagine the wits, can’t you, on the way to the pub saying, some help he’ll get from Elijah. Total lack of comprehension, total lack of sympathy. Total lack of concern amongst his Jewish bystanders.

Now we get a second cry recorded here. This is so short, isn’t it, that we go straight to the second cry in verse 37. And that in itself is obviously regarded by the writer or the speaker as a matter of extraordinary interest. At this stage, when he is coming to the end of his life and is about to dismiss his spirit, you’d expect him simply to groan, wouldn’t you? I mean, we have expectations, don’t we, of what people are going to say.

I went very early this morning with my dustbin from my own kitchen and threw it into the dustbins over there, only to get a fairly blood-curdling cry from somebody who’d been sleeping all night under the dustbins. We made it up after a bit.

But you know, when you’ve upset the whole of your kitchen on somebody, you’re going to expect a certain reaction, can’t you? And we come— we’re used to certain reactions. It’s quite clear that at this moment you’d expect no reaction except a groan as his life is torn from him. But instead of that, there’s another loud majestic cry.

Now we know from the other writers of the Gospels that this cry was one of triumph when he said, it is finished. But rather than tell us what was said on this occasion, the writer gives us an explanation in the next verse, verse 38. And I want you to notice that this verse is not descriptive. So far it has been descriptive, descriptive that is of someone who was listening to what was going on, could see figures moving around in the gloom but that is all. Now he gives us a clear description, not of what is happening here, But what is happening inside the city and inside the temple?

He takes us into the holy place and in front of us there is that great curtain which guards and keeps out people from the holiest of holies. And on that curtain you might very well read the words, no access, no entrance.

And Peter preaching, you see, you can imagine him preaching and making this point. He says, at the very moment that Christ uttered that loud cry of victory and triumph and dismissed his spirit and returned to his Father, God did a second supernatural act. He had brought darkness over the whole scene to cover people’s eyes from seeing his Son bearing the sins of the world and now God does another very simple thing. He tears down this enormous curtain. Down it comes to do something that anybody can interpret.

It is saying in effect, isn’t it, the way into my presence is now open. Nothing stands in the way. The door is locked no longer. Come in, you are welcome.

What is the response that Jesus gets to that? Look at verse 39: And when the centurion who stood facing him, you see he’s got this little group of soldiers, he’s in charge of it. He’s probably a tough, hardened man. He’s certainly a pagan, certainly no Christian. He’s standing facing and watching these things.

As the centurion saw that he thus breathed his last, saw the way he did it, saw the climax of the whole thing, he said, truly this man was the Son of God.

Now of course Mark is not meaning by this that the centurion was suddenly converted and could say that he is the Son of God. In the way that a well-instructed Christian today could say the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. But you see that Mark is, or rather Peter is, making a very vivid preacher’s point.

What he is saying is the response to Jesus from his fellow Jews was total misunderstanding. He thinks Elijah is going to come and help him, does he? The response from the pagan, on the other hand, the Roman, someone who had no privileges, who was not religious, is to say, well, this, this is a righteous man, this is a man from God, this is a Son of God.

When you realise that this gospel of Mark was almost certainly written to the Christians at Rome who were going through a bad time, it’s very telling, isn’t it? You see, he says, you can tell them this gospel and you will find, yes, that your Roman neighbours will believe, they’ll believe much more, much more likely than my Jewish friends. See what Mark is saying? He says, it’s like battering against a brick wall to get my Jewish friends to listen, but your Roman friends will listen. Remember what happened at the cross.

Now I want you to put in these final minutes these 2 loud cries together. I want you to imagine that you’re standing and Peter is in the middle of his sermon and he comes to tell you why he’s described it in this way. He says to you, my friends, I want you to put that loud cry of Jesus alongside the loud cry of triumph, the agony and the achievement, And I want you to read that lesson for it’s writ very plain. In that first cry we see someone who did not deserve to be banished from God’s presence, the only man there’s ever been who deserved to be welcomed into God’s presence and he is in fact banished and he is banished because he stands in your place, in your shoes. He goes where you deserve to go, he who did not deserve it.

Is forsaken for you. Now look at the second cry of achievement. We who did not deserve it, we who are sinners, we who dare not go into the presence of God because of our failures and faults and sins, we are welcome. God says, come in. You don’t deserve to come but I welcome you.

There has been, you see, a royal exchange. My place has been taken by Jesus, his place has been taken by me. He is banished, I am welcomed. He ought to be welcomed and I ought to be banished. What a marvellous substitution.

That’s the very essence of the Christian gospel. I wonder if you understand it. I wonder if you’ve done anything about it.

Well, I’m going to go on to explain this a bit more, but in the last couple of minutes let me just think of certain people here. There are those who’ve forgotten all this. They were told it perhaps when they were young and they’ve just forgotten all about it and done nothing. Have you ever had that terrible experience of forgetting an invitation to a meal? And then maybe you meet your host in the city the next day.

You think, my, I was meant to be at dinner last night with him. His wife cooked 13 courses, the children were all scrubbed and neat, And I and my wife failed to turn up. We never came. How you grovel, don’t you? Yes, you grovel all right as you’ve never grovelled before.

To be invited to such a feast, to be invited to the supper table groaning with good things and then not just to come, to forget all about it because you were listening to, uh, Morecambe and Wise.

I can’t believe that anybody would want to meet God in the last day having been told all about these things when they were young and put their hands to their mouth and say, I forgot. You told me to come and I never came. You opened the door and I never walked in.

There are some who forget, there are some who just treat it lightly. I was so sad in a sense and yet it’s so characteristic of our life in the city, isn’t it? When somebody said to me after the early lunch hour, he said, my friends who usually come with me are not with me today.

I said to them when I asked them to come today, I said, you remember that Dick promised that all the bad news was last week and it’d be good news in future.

Well, said one, I’m afraid it’s pub day today.

It’s a pity, isn’t it? There are hundreds of hours in the week to go to the pub. You can do it anytime you want to. But it may be those people won’t hear this invitation again, clearly put. How do we know that they will?

The door was open, but they were treating it lightly.

And then there’s the person, and I understand this person so well. I’ve met him many times. He’s the person that I’ve tried to lead to Christ and he’s been going to kneel down and surrender his life to God in Christ’s name and then he says, well, I couldn’t do that because I just feel I’m not worthy. Yes, I know that feeling so well. We go there, we want to pray, we want to come to God through Christ and then we see the sword of our own conscience pierces us.

I can’t walk in.

It’s then that we need to remember that this is gospel and the gospel is a gospel of grace and when the angel at the door, so to speak, he says, you can’t come in, I have to do what? I have to point not at myself but I have to point at Jesus and I have to say, he died in my place and therefore I boldly claim my ability to come because he’s unlocked the door.

Well, you’ve sung this very often in your lives, haven’t you? He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in. And that door is unlocked today. You don’t have to wait until the end of life. You can enter God’s presence this very day if you’ve never done so before in the name of Jesus because that door was opened 2,000 years ago.

And ever since then God through his servants has been saying to people, come.

Let’s pray.

O God, we thank you for sending Jesus Christ. We thank you for the everlasting gospel.

We thank you that he was good enough to unlock the gate. Heaven and let us in.

And we ask that some today for the first time may boldly approach your throne in the name of Jesus and find access. We pray that this may be a blessing to them individually this very day and to their children, to their homes, to the people they meet. May each one of us who knows that wonderful access, on the good news to others. We ask it for Jesus’ sake. Amen.