Truth For Life

Alistair Begg: Was Jesus’ death absolutely necessary? I mean, wouldn't the gospel be more accepted if Jesus’ hands were raised in victory like an Olympic medalist, rather than nailed to a cross? Today on Truth For Life, Alistair Begg takes a closer look at what Christ's death means for all who follow Him. We're in John chapter 12 today, beginning at verse 20.

Alistair Begg: Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish His work.” Now, they must have tucked that away in the back of their minds and said, “Oh, wow.” Because remember, they're tracking with Jesus but they don't understand a lot of what is going on. But Jesus is making it clear, and He now makes it perfectly clear by giving one of His simple illustrations.

Jesus is masterful at using simple things to convey profound truth. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Straightforward, I guess, seed has to be sown in the ground, needs to die in order to produce fruit. And if we can put it in the first person, Jesus is explaining, “I am the seed that has to die and be multiplied by my death because my death is the source of spiritual life for the entire world.”

That's what He's saying here. “The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” The point of glorification is not in His miracles. The point of glorification is not actually even in His moral teaching. The point of His glorification is in His death and in His resurrection, because it is in that that fruit would be born and would yield fruit for the entire world. That's why later on, He's going to send His disciples into the entire world because He has already told them that this is what will happen. Later on, He says, “And if I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men and women to me when I actually fulfill the work that the Father has given me to do.”

Jesus’ glorification is through death. Now, let's just pause and make a couple of observations. If you listen to a certain kind of teaching that comes from pulpits around our world, you will find that there is a tremendous emphasis on the moral teaching of Jesus, or His ethical teaching, and He did teach ethics and it was moral. Or that they will emphasize very much the miraculous signs that He did.

And often at the same time, that if there is ever any mention of the cross of Jesus Christ, it is mentioned along the lines of, “And look at what a wonderful example of selflessness that is.” And the sort of inference is, you know, why don't you become more ethical in your business, and why don't you become more selfless in your dealings? Not a bad suggestion. But that is to wrest the absolute center of the reason for the coming of Jesus Christ from the Gospel itself. Christ's death is absolutely necessary.

Because the Messianic reality which spread and has spread throughout the whole world, begins with His atonement for sin. He is the Savior, and it is in His death that His glory is seen, and it is in His death that the Father is glorified.

Now, if you think about this, the disciples themselves didn't get it. After Jesus on the first occasion, takes the disciples aside, after Peter has made the great declaration, “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asked, He gets the answer right, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” Well done, Peter. Go to the top of the class. And immediately, Peter began to rebuke Him. And to say, “No. It's not going to be about your death, Jesus, is it?”

He says, “Go to the bottom of the class. Get behind me, Satan, you do not have in mind the things of God, but you have in mind the things of earth.” So if they didn't get it, it's no surprise that others don't either. They wished Him not to die. But to wish Jesus not to die, to dislike the idea of His death, which they did, is as foolish as keeping a grain of wheat in a container and refusing to sow it and expecting fruitfulness.

Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat, unless I descend into the earth and die, everything will be a dead end street. But if I die, the fruit will be there to be seen.” This, loved ones, we need to make sure we understand, is the heart of the Gospel. This is the significance of communion. What we are actually doing here is taking physical evidence, if you like, a parable of the reality of what Jesus has done. It is because Jesus died, because His blood was shed, that we take these elements. That His body was broken. Why was it broken? Not as an example of selflessness, it was broken because we are broken. And we're so broken that we can't fix ourselves. And the way that God has decided to fix our brokenness is by breaking His only beloved Son.

Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that sinners might be brought to God. And God keeps all of His appointments at the cross. Now what makes this so striking, of course, is that the message of the cross is not a popular message. As I've said to you, it's not often heard in many churches. Many churches, you feel very little about the cross of Jesus Christ, except when it comes around to Good Friday or to Easter Sunday.

But by and large, the message of the gospel is a sort of self-help message. God exists to try and help us to be better people and so on. No notion of what is taking place here. Fascinatingly, is the Greeks who come with investigation, and later when Paul writes, involving both the Jews and the Greeks, in First Corinthians, he says, “Christ didn't send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.”

It's not our job to try and do something with it. It's our responsibility to set it forward. To say, “Here it is,” in the awareness of the fact that the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning, I will thwart.” So in other words, our preaching has to be marked by this. John Stott in characteristic clarity and brevity, helped me immensely with this quote. I hope you find it helpful too. So what he writes:

“To preach salvation by good work is to flatter people and so avoid opposition. To preach salvation by grace is to offend people and so invite opposition. All Christian preachers have to face this issue. Either we preach that human beings are rebels against God, under His just judgment, and if left to themselves, lost. And that Christ crucified, who bore their sin and their curse, is the only available savior.”

Either we proclaim that, he says, “Or we emphasize human potential and human ability with Christ brought in only to boost them. And with no necessity for the cross, except to exhibit God's love and so inspire us to greater endeavor. The former is the way to be faithful. The latter is the way to be popular. It is not possible to be both faithful and popular simultaneously.”

So Jesus explains this at the very heart of things, that death is the key to life, and then He makes application of it in the life of those who become His followers. And He goes on to make the very same point in relationship to what it means to both become a Christian and to live as a Christian. It's there in verse 25 and 26. “Whoever loves his life loses it. Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life will find it.”

Jesus never put this in the small print. And when you go through the Gospels, you find this again and again, that Jesus is driving this truth home. “Whoever loves his life will lose it.” What does it mean then? What is He saying? What would it be to love my life? Well, it would be to say, “It's my life. It's my life. You go along, Billy Joel, go ahead with your own life. Leave me alone. Don't tell me when to come home, don't tell me anything. It's my life.” Okay, try that. You'll lose it.

It would be living for now with no prospect of the reality of then. And people say, “Well, I don't care about the idea of an afterlife. I don't care about the idea of heaven. All I care about is now, this moment and this night.” And you get that in so many songs that are supposedly called love songs, but they're not really love songs at all. They're about the greedy sexual propriety of individuals, more often than not. For example, “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” “I don't care what's right or wrong. I don't care who understands. Let the devil take tomorrow, because tonight, I'll take your hand.” You get a guy singing that to your daughter, run him out of town immediately. Immediately. He's an existential clown and a nuisance to everyone in his orbit of influence.

That's what it's like. Do that and you'll lose your life. Living as if it's only mine, living as if it's only now. And J. R. Philip, J. B. Philip paraphrases it, “The person who loves his own life will destroy it. Will destroy it.” Living for myself, to please myself, to promote myself is a self-diminishing process. Nibbling on sponge cake, there you go, watching the sun bake, all of those tourists covered with oil. And wasting away in Margaritaville. Some people claim, there's a woman to blame, but I know, it's just my own fault. That's a moment of realization.

Jesus says, “Live that path, you lose your entire existence.” From that perspective, freedom, of course, is found in denying the sovereignty of God, and living from an entirely this worldly perspective. The flip side, whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. So if going my own way, living within the orb, the whole of my existence is bordered on the north, south, and east, and west by me. No prospect of life beyond, like under the sun in Ecclesiastes.

But if you hate your life in this world, you'll keep it for eternal life. Well, let's just, let me give you a quote from Carson to help us with this notion of love-hate. “The love-hate contrast reflects a Semitic idiom that articulates fundamental preference, not hatred on some absolute scale.” Because after all, when Jesus says, “Unless you hate your father and your mother,” I never hated my father and my mother once. I've been following Jesus for a long part of my life.

But the real challenge is, is my love for Jesus such that the antithesis of it would appear to be like hate. That my love for then and the prospect of that and a treasure that is other worldly has such a hold that trivial stuff here would appear to be just hateful by way of comparison. It's a challenge. It's a huge challenge. And there's two ways to go wrong with this hate thing.

One is to become like a masochist, or to become the kind of person that Augustine warns against. Augustine says, “You must be careful of perverse people who in seeking to get to grips with the idea of this, taking it, quote, seriously, unlike other people. They give themselves to the flames. They choke themselves in the waters. They dash themselves to pieces.” They've got it completely wrong, but they think they're doing it right.

The other danger, which is probably a more prevalent danger for me and for us, I would wager, and that is to seek to dilute what Jesus is saying, and therefore to side step the challenge. “Well, he doesn't really mean that. I mean, hate doesn't mean hate,” and we go through that whole thing. We've already addressed that. We can go through that many, many times. But he then adds to it in 26, “If anyone serves me, he must follow me. And where I am, there will be my servant.” When Peter writes about that in First Peter, he talks about the suffering of Christ, and then he says, “And since you are followers of Jesus, since you're with Jesus, you're going to be with Jesus. Therefore, guess what, you're going to face suffering too.”

If someone serves me, they follow me. And where I am, there they will be. In other words, our commitment to Jesus Christ is an expression of allegiance. That the boundaries of my expectations are not simply this oriented. And the promise is the promise of His presence, and the prospect is the prospect of honor. “You'll be with me, and if you serve me, the Father will honor you.”

This is tough, isn't it? This is really hard. I mean, we can all go down the line of people that we have admired who have apparently done this. By, you know, like going somewhere, like Jim Elliot. You know, he's born in 42, he's dead at the age of 28 because he took this seriously. He's the one who wrote in his journal at Wheaton, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

What he felt like on the night that he put it in his journal at Wheaton, we will never know. But certainly we know what happened to him as he was martyred in Ecuador. We understand that. We understand what happened to Helen Roseveare when in the Congo, she was brutalized by the guerrillas and so on. And how her life was disrupted and how she was a very clever girl from Cambridge University and a graduate in medicine and so on. And yet she went all the way out there and look what she did. And we get that and we say, “Well, that must be what it looks like.” But what's hard as you work in a lab, you, you, you take your children to school, you do all these things. What does this mean in real terms? It has to mean something. It has to, it has to ground itself in some way, at least little by little.

And the trouble is that the idea of loss for gain and death for life, that notion dies real fast in our thinking. George Matheson was born in Glasgow in 1842. He became blind in his youth. He graduated from university when he was 20, and he had a fiancée. And when his disability began to take hold and he became entirely blind, his fiancée said she did not want to be married to someone who was blind, and so she left him.

He had a sister, and he had been ordained to the Church of Scotland Ministry. And his sister lived with him, and his sister looked after him in all kinds of physical ways, and also provided for him in in in reading to him passages of the Bible which he would then memorize in order that he could proclaim them. And all was fine until his sister fell in love and she got engaged. And so she told George, “I'm going to have to leave you because I have a husband now.”

And history records that on the night that the family left for the celebration of that wedding, George Matheson was alone in his house. And he sat down and he wrote these verses. He said, “I wrote them as if I had never imagined them. I wrote them as if they were given to me.” So presumably, aware of the emptiness represented in the absence of his sister, and reflecting on what had been his experience all these years before, this is what he wrote.

“O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee. I give Thee back the life I owe that in Thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be. O Light that follows all my way, I yield my flickering torch to Thee. My heart restores its borrowed ray that in Thy sunshine's blaze its day may brighter, fairer be. O Joy that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to Thee. I trace the rainbow through the rain and feel the promise is not vain, that morn shall tearless be. O Cross that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from Thee. I lay in dust life's glory dead and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be.”

I think Matheson got close to what it really means to take seriously what Jesus is saying here. That it is in losing our lives that we find our life in Him. And the more we experience loss, disappointment, pain, hardship, the more the more the clouds descend upon our experiences. The more we realize that the deepest joys and the lasting realities are not found underneath this canopy, but they're found beyond. And it is in that realm that we live. Because remember, we have been seated with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Alistair Begg: You're listening to a series called, “Truly, Truly I Say to You,” on Truth For Life with Alistair Begg. In this study, we're learning that those bold statements from Jesus are both trustworthy and true. And to go along with this teaching, we've selected a book that explores another statement Jesus made, “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” In fact, the title of the book is, “Come, You Weary: Enjoy Christ's Comfort.” So if you find yourself in a season where you're feeling anxious, maybe worn down, or you know someone who is, this is a book that will help relieve you of the weight you're carrying. You'll be encouraged to pour out your fears and your struggles, to give them to Jesus. Each reading in this book draws from Scripture to remind you that Jesus calls us to come to Him to ease our burdens.

As you read the book, “Come, You Weary,” you'll be reminded that no matter what you're going through, you can trust Jesus to be your source of strength, endurance, and peace. This is a must-have book whether you've recently come through a trial, you're in the midst of a challenging season, or you're just preparing yourself for what may lie ahead. Ask for your copy of the book, “Come, You Weary,” when you donate today. You can give your gift online at truthforlife.org/donate, or you can arrange to set up an an automatic monthly donation when you visit truthforlife.org/truthpartner. Or just call us at 888-588-7884. Now, if you request the book along with your donation and you'd like to purchase extra copies to give to friends in need of comfort, you'll find them in our online store at truthforlife.org/store. They're available for purchase at our cost of just $1 while supplies last.

Thanks for studying the Bible with us. Tomorrow we'll see how one simple, humble act demonstrated Jesus' great love and expectation for His people. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth For Life, where the learning is for living.