Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching the clear Gospel of Grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: We'll be in John chapter 12. This is going to be the conclusion of our Subversive series. We've seen, hopefully throughout this series, that our enemy, declared enemy, the devil, is formidable. If you were able to sit in my seat and watch what I watch on a week-to-week, day-to-day basis as a pastor, you would see that he's very formidable.

You see marriages ending or marriages in conflict. You see immorality that goes on within marriages. You see people in the effects of addiction in people's lives and the impact of addiction in people's lives. You see the impact of violence in people's lives. It's amazing the heartache that you see that goes on just from a bird's-eye view of ministry.

A lot of folks, when you live your lives in ministry in the pastorate, you see everything sort of a bird's-eye view. You see conflict over here, a family issue over here, a problem over here, and maybe blessings over here. You see everything. So, after a while, I don't say you get desensitized to it, but nothing shocks you.

Sometimes folks will tell me these things, and this one man came in and says, "I want to tell you my life story." So, he made an appointment and he told me his life story, which was sort of sordid. It was a little bit interesting life story. And then when he was done, I think he was expecting me to go, "Oh!" I just said, "That's a pretty wild story and I'm really glad you're here. You want to go grab a cup of coffee?" because I really wanted a Macchiato at that time. And he just looked at me. He was a little confused. He told me years later, he goes, "I thought that would shock you." I said, "Nothing shocks me."

After you've done it for a while, nothing shocks you because I understand that we have an adversary seeking whom he may devour. And he influences people's decisions. His world system influences people's decisions. He wants to cause confusion, resentment, division within the local church. He loves doing that. He uses mostly the tongue, and that's another series all by itself, as his primary tool.

Christians, sometimes we don't employ godly communication principles, especially in the spirit of humility and meekness. We explode, or we think things that aren't true, we imagine things that aren't true, we create enemies that don't exist. What do you think that is?

Sometimes we get upset, confused, we feel victimized. Ever think a devil might be behind it? Ever think there might be a personal adversary that's stirring things up? Stirring things up, maybe in a local assembly, maybe stirring things up in our brains a little bit, thinking things that aren't true or imagining things that are truly just make-believe.

My friends, this has been going on forever and forever. He watches us. He watches Tim Kelley. He watches you guys. He knows you by name. He knows where you've come from. He knows how you were brought up. He knows what environment you lived in. He knows what's happened to you in events and trauma. He knows how you're wired, even though he can't indwell you. He knows all those things and based upon that information—he doesn't forget any of it because in Ezekiel 28:12, he has the sum of God's wisdom—he devises a plan for you.

So, when we try to portray him as a toothless lion, in one way he is, and I'll show you that today. In another way, he's very active, still roaring, still seeking, and still amazingly successful in damaging Christians' lives. This battle predates time. Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28, Luke 10:18. Jesus saying, "I beheld Satan falling as light from heaven."

The battle of the Garden of Eden, which was his greatest victory. Sin entered the human race. Death entered the human race. And probably bigger than that, there was a wedge driven between God and the object of His love, mankind. Genesis 4, murder entered the human race. Genesis 6, he polluted the human race through, as best as we can tell, through an angelic-human relationship.

If that's the case, what's the purpose? Simply to make the human race unredeemable. If he can pollute the human race that way, the human bloodline, then they would become unredeemable. But there was always one righteous family. Job, he accused man to God. Joshua the high priest, the other way around.

God, man would only serve You because You bless him. God, Joshua, your high priest, look, he has filthy garments. He loves to accuse. He'll accuse us to God and God to us. He lures David, who's in the Messianic line, into sin with Bathsheba. He set him up for it. You need to read the chapter before, and you can see exactly how it happened.

Then he provokes David to number Israel after he told them not to. 1 Chronicles 21. "Provokes" is a King James word. 70,000 people were killed because of that. There was a battle of Mount Carmel with Elijah, 1 Kings 18, for idolatry. Then we see him in the New Testament tempting Jesus Christ Himself in Luke 4 and Matthew 4. Well, when does this finally end?

Well, in a sense, it's already ended. It's going to be a final day when it'll totally end and it'll cease. But now I think we can show you that the victory and the battle that has raged on all these years was effectively won 2000 years ago. John 12, verse 27. This is the King James. "Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour."

Jesus praying to the Father prior to the cross. He goes, "My soul is troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. For this cause..." What was the cause? The cross. The cross. "For this cause I came into this hour. For this cause I came into the world." This hour, this moment, all to glorify His name. Jesus here was speaking at the very brink of the greatest day of human history.

Next week, we're going to have a Palm Sunday message. I already have it sort of in my mind. I won't be talking about Psalm 118, verse 24, "This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." That's not in the text for next week. But when you read Psalm 124, you'll find out the Palm Sunday is woven into that Psalm. I believe that's a Messianic Psalm in some place. And Palm Sunday's woven into that Psalm.

So, this is the day the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it. What was this day? Now, we like to sing that song, and it's not really wrong to take it that way and think this day, every day. The Lord has made every day, and it's true. And every day His mercies are new every moment. And we understand that.

But when you read that Psalm in a different light, you'll find out that he very likely there is talking about a day. Not just any day. And that truth, again, resounds strong. But he's talking about a day. This is the day. A day. This is the day of days. Dr. Logsdon, the ex-president of Moody, wrote a whole thing on this.

This is the day. And what was the day of all human history? You can see prior to verse 24, Palm Sunday, and it talks about the horns on the altar. The day was the day of Calvary. It was God's day of days. Day of days. He said, "This is my day. This day will be the pinnacle of human history. Everything will look forward to it, and after it, everything will look back to it."

"That's the day when my Son will become known forever on the face of the earth." Verse 31 of John 12. "Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world..." Who would that be? Satan. Be cast out. So verse 31, this is a coup de grâce of Satan. The end of an age-old conflict. The coup de grâce is a decisive finishing blow, a death stroke.

God promised this day in Genesis 3:15, but now he was talking about this day. This is the day when the death stroke, the final stroke, the final victory. When the sin of Eden is finally redeemed and paid back. When man's relationship with God is once again uncapped and unsealing so man can know God unhindered and unshackled any longer.

Albert Barnes says this, "Now is approaching the decisive scene." This is his commentary on these verses. "The eventful period. The crisis when it shall be determined who shall rule this world. There has been a long conflict between the powers of light and darkness, between God and the devil. Satan has so effectively ruled that he may be said to be the prince of this world. But my approaching death will destroy his kingdom, will break down his power, and will be the means of setting up the kingdom of God over man."

The word "judgment" is krisis. It's a judicial decree. In a sense, it's a divine gavel pronouncing the battle's about to end. And the prince of this world, as we just read, the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4), the prince and the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2), the rulers of darkness (Ephesians 6:10 and 12), is cast out. His reign is overthrown, his government is overthrown, and the sentence is active now for God's children. The entire earth will escape his dominion soon.

Now, I entitled the message "We Won." I was going to title it "We Win" because I want to end this series not talking about Satan, I want to talk about his demise. But I thought I can't do "We Win" because that's present tense. "We Won." We didn't win now. We won a long time ago. We won at the cross. That's when we really won. I think we win when we go to heaven. That'd be great. That'd be awesome. Let's go now.

But we won 2000 years ago when Jesus Christ died on the cross. That's when the victory was determined. His authority was broken. We are no longer children of the devil (1 John 3:10). Now we're children of God (Galatians 3:26). His claim to our past—I love this, we'll talk about this a little more later—was annulled.

The entire fallen state that he brought into the human race and the entire authority of that fallen state, the law of sin and death as Paul calls it, the authority of that has been stripped. It says this in John 12:32 and 33. He says, "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth..." continuing the same train of thought. "If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me. This he said, signifying what death he should die."

He's picturing back to the brazen serpent in the wilderness with the children of Israel. When they looked at the brazen serpent, they were delivered from the snakes. He says, "But if I be lifted up, I will draw all men to me. This he said, signifying the death he should die," on the cross. The cross, I forget who said this, but the cross was not only a place of death, it became an irresistible beacon.

What does this mean for us? Well, now we can elevate our thoughts. I don't have to think down here. Doing life with so many Christians through the years, I realize how low people think. They think down here all the time. They're in defensive mode all the time. "Defend me. Don't attack me. I'll fight you," not physically, but "I'm going to get mad, I'm going to get angry, I'm going to get defensive."

Always in defensive mode. Always in "don't hurt me" mode. And we put up our defense mechanisms, we keep people out, we keep them at arm's length. We have a veil of "don't come near me," my friends, because somehow we've been duped into thinking we haven't been redeemed.