C H A P T E R F O U R

JESUS CHRIST THE SAVIOR

Introduction

The word But could be the most powerful word a human being can speak. It’s small, but it has the
power to sweep away everything that has gone before it. Coming after bad news like what
we’ve heard last 2 meetings, it has the power to lift the eyes and restore hope. More than any
other word that can be spoken by a human tongue, it has the ability to change everything.
• The plane went down. But no one was hurt.
• You have cancer. But it is easily treatable.
• Your son was in a car wreck. But he’s fine.

Sadly, sometimes the but doesn’t come. Sometimes the sentence stops, and all we get is the bad
news. Yet those moments only magnify for us the times when the but does come. And they are
glorious.

Thank God the bad news of human sin and God’s judgment is not the end of the story. If the Bible
had ended with Paul’s declaration that the whole world will stand, silenced, before the judgment
throne of God, there would be no hope for us all. There would be only despair. But (there it is
again!) thank God there is more!

You are a sinner destined to be condemned. But God has acted to save sinners just like
you and me!

In our last 2 meetings, we discussed about the Holiness and Righteousness of God the creator
and that we are accountable to HIM. Then we talked about the sinful nature of man and that
nothing we can do and how hopeless we are to save ourselves from our fallenness. Tonight, we
will talk about JESUS CHRIST, the good news and our only hope,.

A Word of Hope
• Mark begins his account of Jesus’ life with the words, “The beginning of the gospel of
Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” From the very beginning, Mark and the other early
Christians knew that the coming of Jesus Christ was God’s good news to a world
destroyed and dead at the feet of sin. In the wake of sin’s dark devastation, the coming
of Jesus was his piercing, thundering announcement that now everything had changed!

• The rest of the Bible tells the story of how this tiny seed of good news germinated,
sprouted, and grew. For thousands of years, God prepared the world through law and
prophecy for his stunning coup de grace against the Serpent in the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Bible is the story of God’s counter offensive against sin.
It is the grand narrative of how God made it right, how he is making it right, and how he
will one day make it right finally and forever.

Fully God, Fully Man

• All the gospel writers begin their accounts of Jesus’ life by showing that he was no ordinary
man. Matthew and Luke tell the story of an angel coming to a young virgin named Mary
and telling her that she would be with child. Incredulous at the news, Mary asks, “How will
 this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel explains,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore
the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (Luke 1:34–35).
• John begins his story with an even more astonishing statement:
“In the beginning” (words that point back strongly to Gen. 1:1) “was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14).

• Put simply, the Bible tells us that Jesus is both completely human and completely God.
This is a crucial point to understand about him, for it is only the fully human, fully divine
Son of God who can save us.

• If Jesus were just another man—like us in every respect, including our fallenness and
sin—he would no more be able to save us than one dead man can save another. But
because he is the Son of God, without sin and equal in every divine perfection to God the
Father, he is able to defeat death and save us from our sin. In the same way, it is also
critical that Jesus be truly one of us—that is, fully human—so that he can rightly
represent us before his Father.

Hebrews 4:15 explains, Jesus is able “to sympathize with our weaknesses” because he “in every
respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

The Messiah King

• When Jesus began his ministry, he proclaimed a fantastic message: “The time has
come! The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news!”
• Word of this man preaching that the kingdom of God had come spread quickly
throughout the country, and excited crowds soon surrounded Jesus to hear this “good
news” that he was proclaiming. But what was so exciting about it?
• For centuries, through his law and his prophets, God had foretold a time when he would
once and for all put an end to the world’s evil and rescue his people from their sin. He
would sweep away all resistance and establish his rule, his “kingdom,” over all the earth.
Even more, God had promised that he would establish his kingdom in the person of a
messianic King, one in the royal line of the great King David.
And the prophet Isaiah said of this kingly son:

He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the
increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and
over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on
and forever. (Isa. 9:6–7 NIV)

• So you can imagine the excitement that greeted Jesus when he began announcing that
the kingdom of heaven had come. It meant that the long-awaited Davidic Messiah was
finally here!

• But this is not the King they were expecting all these years. The kingdom Jesus
inaugurated, though, looked nothing like what the Jews expected or wanted. They
wanted a messiah who would establish an earthly, political kingdom that would overthrow
and supplant the Roman Empire, the ruling power of the day. Yet here was Jesus not
at all looking for an earthly crown, but preaching, teaching, healing the sick, forgiving
 sin, raising the dead.
• Now all that is undeniably good news—. But then we’re back to the problem of our
sin, aren’t we? Unless something happens to remove the guilt of our disobedience and
rebellion against God, we are still separated from him and destined for the eternal
punishment of hell.
• But here is where the good news of Christianity gets really, really good. You see, King Jesus
came not only to inaugurate the kingdom of God, but also to bring sinners into it by dying
in their place and for their sin, taking their punishment on himself and securing forgiveness
for them, making them righteous in God’s sight, and qualifying them to share in the
inheritance of the kingdom (Col. 1:12).

A Suffering King
• “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” That’s what John
the Baptist, said when he saw Jesus coming toward him (John 1:29). What did he
mean? The Lamb of God? Taking away the sin of the world?
• Every first-century Jew would have known immediately what John meant by “the Lamb
of God taking away sin.” It was a reference to the Jewish festival of the Passover, a
memorial of God’s miraculous deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt some
fifteen hundred years earlier.
• The Passover feast—and especially the Passover lamb— became a powerful symbol
of the idea that the penalty of death for one’s sins could be paid by the death of another.
This idea of “penal substitution,” in fact, grounded the entire system of Old Testament
sacrifices.
• It took time, but eventually the followers of Jesus realized that his mission was not just
to inaugurate the kingdom of God, but to do so by dying as a substitutionary sacrifice
for his people. Jesus was not just King, they realized. He was a suffering King.
• Jesus himself knew from the very beginning that his mission was to die for the sins of his
people.
The angel had announced at his very birth that “he will save his people from their sins” (Matt.
1:21), and

“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for
many.” Mark 10:45

• Taught by the Holy Spirit, the early Christians also understood what Jesus had
accomplished on the cross.

Paul described it like this: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for
us” (Gal. 3:13–14).

And in another place he explained, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that
in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21 NIV).

Peter wrote, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring
us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18).
And, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to
righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Pet. 2:24).

• Do you see what these Christians were saying about the significance of Jesus’ death? They
were saying that when Jesus died, it was not the punishment for his own sins that he endured.
(He didn’t have any!) It was the punishment for his people’s sins! As he hung on the cross
at Calvary, Jesus bore all the horrible weight of the sin of God’s people. All their rebellion,
all their disobedience, all their sin fell on his shoulders. And the curse that God had
pronounced in Eden—the sentence of death—struck.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).

• God his Father, who is holy and righteous, whose eyes are too pure even to look on evil,
looked at his Son, saw the sins of his Son’s people resting on his shoulders, turned away
in disgust, and poured out his wrath on his own Son.
• Jesus was not afraid to die, he was born for this. His grief is that his separation of the
Father. That’s when Jesus said in the garden of gethsemane “Father, if you are willing, take
this cup away from me. Yet not my will but yours.’ (Luke 22:42)
• Do you see the significance of this? Ultimately, it means that I’m the one who should have
died, not Jesus. I should have been punished, not he. And yet he took my place. He
died for me.

The Heart of the Gospel

• Sadly, this doctrine of substitution is probably the one part of the Christian gospel that
the world hates most. People are simply disgusted at the idea of Jesus being punished for
someone else’s sin. And yet to toss substitutionary atonement aside is to cut out the heart
of the gospel.
• To be sure, there are many pictures in Scripture of what Christ accomplished with his
death: example, reconciliation, and victory, to name three. But underneath them all is the
reality to which all the other images point—penal substitution.
• The heart of the gospel is found at the cross of Calvary, in Jesus’ substitutionary death
for his people. A righteous and holy God can justify the ungodly because in Jesus’ death,
mercy and justice were perfectly reconciled. The curse was righteously executed, and we
were mercifully saved.

He Has Risen
• Of course, all this is true—and good news—only because King Jesus the crucified is no
longer dead. He rose from the grave. All the doubt that crashed in on the disciples as
Jesus died was erased in a moment when the angel said to the women,
“Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen” (Luke 24:5–6).

• If Christ had remained dead like any other “savior” or “teacher” or “prophet,” his death
would have meant nothing more than yours or mine. Death’s waves would have closed
over him just as they do over every other human life, every claim he made would have
sunk into nothingness, and humanity would still be without hope of being saved from sin.
But when breath entered his resurrected lungs again, when resurrection life electrified his
glorified body, everything Jesus claimed was fully, finally, unquestionably, and
 irrevocably vindicated.
• Paul exults in Romans 8 over Jesus’ resurrection and what it means for believers:

Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ
Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who
indeed is interceding for us. (Rom. 8:33–34)

• What an amazing thought—that the man Jesus now sits in splendor at the right hand
of his Father in heaven, reigning as the King of the universe! Not only so, but he is even
now interceding for his people, even as we await his final and glorious return.
• But all this raises one more question, Just who are “his people”?
• That’s for your to find out next month as Julius will unpack the next topic about Jesus’
people.
•

Let’s end in this prayer of Jesus for All Believers

20
“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their
message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they
also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory
that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they
may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved
them even as you have loved me.
24
“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the
glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
25
“Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you
have sent me. 26 I have made you[e] known to them, and will continue to make you known in order
that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
1. Jesus is fully God and fully man, what are some ways that this encourages you?
2. Why was it necessary for Jesus to come and live a perfect life on earth?
3. Why was it necessary that Jesus die? Could He have saved us in some other way?
Jesus Christ the Savior 6