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Accepted in the Beloved – Eph 1:6

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

When a great king marries a begging woman, the world marvels. We can understand when the great infinite God shows pity and mercy to us, but for such an everlasting God, who fills all in all, to concentrate all the fullness of his love that is inside His big heart to love a mortal creature like man! For the infinite soul of the Most High to pour itself out on such a mean, worthless, sinful creature as man! This is a wonder we struggle to grasp here on earth. This is a wonder that, even after we have been in heaven for ten thousand years, will still make us amazed! It is an extravaganza of divine grace.

Paul takes our soul to the heavens, telling us we are blessed with every spiritual blessing. He takes us to the past and shows us the blessing of election and the blessing of predestination. When we are catching our breath, in our unbelief, selfish view, struggling to digest this, and wondering if these are really true, the Holy Spirit helps us grasp this by providing two reasons for why we are blessed so infinitely. The Holy Spirit wants us to relish, rejoice, and stand amazed at these blessings, because grasping these blessings again helps us live a gospel-worthy life—always rejoicing, gentle with all men, not anxious about anything.

We have seen the first reason in verse 6: the goal of these blessings is the praise of the glory of grace. The Holy Spirit teaches us that the way to enjoy these blessings is to turn our eyes from ourselves and look at the glory of God. Yes, we may not deserve or even fully grasp what God has done for us, but all this is done so we can praise the glory of his grace. We saw that the highest way even an infinite God can love is to love us for his glory—to stake his eternal glory on showering his grace upon us, as vessels of his grace. So the goal of these blessings is not merely our selfish happiness, but the universal manifestation of the utmost glory of the grace of God, where all the universe praises him. We are vessels chosen for that. See where we are caught. What words! “Praise of the glory of his grace.” We feel like rising above ourselves and blessing God like Paul. Our joy is supreme joy; this is a great blessing. Why? A Chennai church changed that phrase: not “in my small age,” but “before the foundation of the world he chose me; even when I went far, he found me.”

But we are still struggling to grasp and believe this, like Jacob who couldn’t believe that his son Joseph was still alive and now his sons were saying he was the prime minister of all Egypt. It says when he heard that, Jacob’s heart stood still, because he did not believe them. But when they told him all the words which Joseph had said to them, and when he saw the carts which Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived. Then Israel said, “It is enough. Joseph my son is still alive. I will go and see him before I die.”

These blessings give us such satisfaction. Like one lady, whom I had not even seen, said, “Pastor, I feel it is enough; I want to just die hearing these blessings.” Enough! What else do I need? I am blessed. To convince our unbelieving hearts to realize the reality of these blessings, the Holy Spirit gives another marvelous reason for how we are so infinitely blessed. Notice verse 5 and 6.

First, not only is there the future goal of these blessings (“to the praise of the glory of His grace”), but also the past meritorious cause of these blessings: “by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” So, to grasp these blessings, we not only have to understand the glory of God’s grace, but secondly, we have to grasp the infinite love God had for his son.

There are four wonderful words: “accepted in the beloved.” Oh, if the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see this blessing, the way we see ourselves and our whole Christian outlook will change. A glorious divine operation has happened to us in eternity. The name of that operation is called “acceptance.” This is the cause for all these blessings. Let us see five things:

The objects of acceptance.
The author of acceptance.
The cause of our acceptance.
The basis of our acceptance.
The glory of acceptance.

The Objects of Acceptance

The objects of acceptance: It says “made us.” Created by God in his image, I don’t have to preach long on this point, and each of you can ask in your own conscience: there is a deep human desire for acceptance in each of us. Everything we do in life is for this. We want to be accepted in our family, at our job, in our office, by our people, by society. We run and earn money, facilities, and education, and buy nice clothes, and achieve things, all for what? Acceptance. Think of all the online social media activity. 70% of the world is busy on social media—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube. People post thousands of videos, photos, reels, and statuses and are so anxious to see how many likes and comments they get. Early in the morning, that is their work. It is all for acceptance, but no matter what we do, a void and emptiness remain. Nothing can satisfy that need. We were created in God’s image to be accepted by God, but we, as fallen sinners, are rejected by God, and we feel that in our deep conscience. All our miseries can be traced to a deep desire to be accepted. We live and die with that desire. On one side, there is the sad reality of us: as defiled sinners, we cannot be accepted by a holy God. Everything in us calls out His rejection, hatred, wrath, and judgment. We can never have a one-in-a-billion chance to be accepted. On one side, that is the sad news of the objects: we cannot live without God’s acceptance, but we are in a state of sin and cannot be accepted.

On the other side: Think of the author of our acceptance. He is the jealous God. “Holy, holy, holy,” cry the seraphim unceasingly, and nothing that is defiled can ever enter His palace gates, nor can His heart endure the thought of iniquity. If angels sinned, he didn’t forgive them. The question of the ages is, “How can a holy God accept sinners?” What about his justice and righteousness? The wonder of this verse is that the author of our acceptance is that Holy God. He has “made us accepted in the Beloved.” It is a wonder of the universe. How? Why? When? On what basis? Impossible. We never made ourselves acceptable, nor could we have done so. How then? Do you see two words in English, “by which”? It was talking about the praise of the glory of grace. By which grace he did this. This was an act of pure grace. To the great First Cause we must always trace the motive for our acceptance. Grace reigns supreme. We blind sinners may not realize what a glorious thing this is. But this was the height of grace. Grace is stamped upon the whole thing. Acceptance comes to us entirely as a work of God. He is the author. From beginning to end, the work of our acceptance is God’s operation. He did a mysterious divine operation in eternity by which we are accepted. He alone is the author because no one else existed when it was done. Notice it is mentioned in the past tense. It is a work finished from eternity! Yes, grace is the primary cause of acceptance. But there is a meritorious cause of acceptance.

The Cause of Our Acceptance

Next, the cause of our acceptance: The Beloved Person. Who is this beloved? If you ask all the angels, cherubim, and seraphim, they will tell you for all eternity he was their beloved! Christ, by the highest heaven, is adored. If you ask all the Old Testament saints from Adam and Abraham, from Moses to David, all people under the law, all the kings, and all the prophets, they were waiting for one beloved. If you ask the New Testament saints, they challenged the whole universe to separate from the love of the beloved with a bold challenge: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Who is the beloved for us? The Lord Jesus Christ.

Why is that peculiar title used here? Paul could have said we are “accepted in Christ,” or “accepted in the Mediator.” Why does the Holy Spirit use this word “beloved”? I cannot imagine a title or name more appropriate for our Redeemer. This sweet, golden name is the one name that fully suits our Savior in all his relationships with the triune God, the angels of heaven, and his people in heaven and upon the earth. But our verse talks about him being the beloved of God. “Beloved” is used for people of God in many places, but Christ alone is called “The Beloved One” with a capital B. God has many beloved ones, but He has only one Beloved. Again, never was the term “beloved” so full of meaning, so well deserved, and yet so incapable of expressing all that is meant by it.

None of us can imagine how dear and beloved the Son of God is to the Father. Who can enter into that eternal relationship of the Trinity and grasp the fullness of that word? We cannot imagine the kind of love the Father has for his Son. It is incomprehensible love. If the Holy Spirit helps us grasp a little bit of that love, we will understand why we are so blessed.

Another glorious attribute God had in his heart was love. Great people have great love. Imagine God with his infinite, inexhaustible ocean of all his being, how much love is inside him! The world was created 6000 years ago, and no mind can estimate how many past eternity years there were; all the crores of billion billions of eons upon eons of when God was there. This infinite God was letting out all the fullness of his love directly and eternally upon his only begotten darling of his soul. There was no one other object. God loved Christ unspeakably, infinitely, for all past eternity. God was fully satisfied in that love. Christ was God’s greatest delight, supreme affection, adoring love, and the only entertainment of the great infinite heart and mind of God. He was so satisfied and enjoyed loving his son, without for a single second even blinking an eye; his love was set on his son. John says, “I was in the bosom of the Father,” very intimately loved. Proverbs says, “I was the fullness of delight; I was all his delights; I was his only delight; I was his delight itself.”

These two great and glorious persons of the Trinity, with an infinite essence, were delighting in one another, letting forth their fullest pleasure and delight, each into the heart of the other; their delight knew not a moment’s interruption or diminution. They were enjoying pleasures of fellowship unspeakable and inconceivable. Christ was the greatest darling and delight of God’s heart. He is called “beloved.”

The infinite God needed nothing but his Son for all eternity. His infinite measure, infinite capacity, and infinite abilities were fully satisfied and found a suitable object in the perfection of the divine Being, his begotten son. Christ was making him eternally happy. He was so beloved: “Without him was not anything made that was made.” In fact, everything was made for him; he is the heir of all things.

Do you understand anything I am blabbering about? I think I should stop. It would be foolish for me to try to dive into the awful depths of the love between the divine Trinity; it is an ocean so deep without a bottom, so vast without a shore. Even if I preach here until I die, we cannot grasp a drop of that love. We cannot imagine a love more intense, deep, or infinite than that between the Father and the Son. We have to make a confession of our ignorance and move to the next point. It is beyond our comprehension, and I hope you can see it is a great love. Do you see the term “beloved” is so divinely rich and full of meaning that the Holy Spirit uses that for the Father’s relationship with Christ? He is the meritorious cause of our acceptance.

The Basis of Our Acceptance

The basis of our acceptance is the word “in.” It talks about an eternal divine operation God did. God the Father put us in the Beloved, united us to him inseparably with an eternal bond by his sovereign decree. The small word “in” talks about the glorious doctrine of our union with Christ. Verse 6 says, “He made us accepted in the beloved.” It happened by God’s glorious operation. The basis of our acceptance is God uniting us to Christ.

When was this union done? It was not in time; it was a time before all times, when all things slept in the mind of God as a thought. Imagine the grandness of the concept of time. People study rocks and fossils, which tell us about ancient cultures thousands of years ago. This is a time so old, a time so far back that the wings of our imagination cannot fly. It was so long ago without a beginning. All these ages from creation to the end of the world will just be an invisible drop in an ocean compared with the deep and shoreless sea of the past eternity. Yet, when we fly back into that dreaded eternity, at that time, we discover God foresaw the creation of the world and the fall of man; he saw all the depraved sons of Adam; he saw you and me. And God not only elected us and set his eternal love on us, but do you want to know the measure and intensity of that love? He united us as one to his beloved for all past eternity, put us into the heart of his darling, and saw us in the heart of Christ, loving us like he loved his Son with infinite, intense love. Oh, can you think of this? My mind faints. God, who loved his son for all past eternity with such unspeakable intensity, loved me in the same way by uniting me with his son! What is this! Behold the wonder of God’s love: he united us to his most beloved darling and loved us. That is how he had such great love for us, even before we had a being or were formed. It is a work finished from eternity! We are accepted by uniting us to Christ, in Whom we are unconditionally ACCEPTED by the Father.

He made us one with his son. Oh, what can we say about this union? Someone said 1000 sermons are not enough to fully preach about the glory of our union with Christ. Can you imagine the blessed state of being eternally one with the most beloved of God! One with Him in every way. This union is more than a man and woman when married become one flesh; more than a vine and a branch having a vital organic life flowing union. It goes even beyond that. We are united to Christ as his body. We are seen as body members of Christ, so we are loved with the same intensity as Christ is loved—one with him in union. If I am one with Christ, though I am but as it were only the sole of His foot and exposed often to the dust of the street, because the glorious Head is accepted, the meanest member joined in living union to that Head is accepted, too. Is not this glorious? What shall we say about this union? Now, going beyond scripture, it even says in a mysterious way in John 17: “I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us…” Wow! This is the basis of our acceptance—not only our acceptance but all the blessings we receive in the beloved. The grace of election. What was it? Remember? “He chose us in Him.” The grace of predestination to Sonship. What was it? “He foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.”

The Glory of Acceptance

Next, can I blabber about the Glory of Acceptance? Webster says that to ACCEPT means to receive willingly, to regard with approval, to value, to esteem, to take pleasure in, or to receive with favor. The term “acceptance,” in the Greek, means more than that. There’s a play on words in the original. It can be translated as, “He graced us in the Beloved.” This word means we are “highly favored, laudable, praiseworthy.” When the angel Gabriel said to Mary, “You are highly favored,” it’s the same word. Now, we are not and never could be “accepted” before and by the holy Lord God, except in Christ the Beloved. But in him, in the Beloved, every believer, every sinner chosen, redeemed, and called by grace, is so completely and totally accepted of God that, even in the eyes of the holy, omniscient Lord God, we are highly favored, laudable, and praiseworthy! Oh, you creatures who yearn for acceptance, see the glory of our acceptance in the beloved. This is the highest acceptance God can ever give.

Let me say a few things about our acceptance. Our acceptance with God is only “in the Beloved.” God the Father is well pleased with his Son. And he is well pleased with us in his Son. He sees us in his son, as one with his son, and so he loves us with the same intensity as his son. All the infinite river of God’s love flows to Jesus and also flows to us who are united eternally to his son. God’s love to us is His love to His Son flowing in a hundred channels. Not for our sakes is this done, but for Jesus’ sake, so that it might be all of grace. This is the height of God’s grace. His perpetual acceptance with God is our acceptance, so that nothing legal, nothing of which we might boast, might be mingled with the work of sovereign grace.

In the Beloved, you are so near and dear to His heart that He also calls you His “beloved.” Do you believe that the Father loves you with the same love with which He loves His Beloved? Selah! (Pause and ponder your privileged position).

Our acceptance in the beloved doesn’t depend on us and our works. It depends only on his love for his beloved. Would you have liked any other way of acceptance? If I were this day accepted in myself, I should always live with the fear that I might lose my acceptance, for I am a weak, changeable, fallen being. Even unfallen Adam, while he was obedient, was accepted in his own works. But how soon he fell! And then his acceptance fell too. But if I am “accepted in the Beloved,” then the Beloved will never change, so God’s love for the beloved never changes, so my acceptance can never change. Again, the greatest and best way for God to accept me is through the beloved. If I am accepted in him, I always must and shall be accepted, come what may.

Our acceptance in the beloved does not depend on our experience. Aren’t you happy God doesn’t accept you because of our experience? One day we feel so high, so heavenly-minded, so drawn above the earth! But the next day, our souls cleave to the earth. Oh, if it depended on our experience, how sad it would be: today accepted, tomorrow rejected. No! Oh, praise God, I am not accepted because of my experience, but in the beloved. I can never be rejected until God decides to reject Christ, which will never happen. Oh, if we can see our acceptance, all our ups don’t make us higher before God, and our “downs” don’t take us down in the Father’s sight.

But we stand accepted in One who never alters, in One who is always the beloved of God, always perfect, always complete, always without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing. Oh, we need to have a blessed faith that walks above experience! A joyous trust, even in the darkest nights and clouds, to be assured of God’s love for us; in the midst of a consciously felt vileness, still boasting of a pardon bought with blood, of a righteousness complete and without flaw!

Our acceptance with God is thorough, complete, total, and absolute. It is complete acceptance. Can you see the amazing thing? It is given in the past tense: “I was accepted” even before I was born, in eternity. The measure by which God accepts Christ is the measure of my acceptance. Oh, how we should celebrate this. Now, see if you can measure it. How acceptable is Christ to God? Must it not be an infinite acceptance? For it is an infinite Being infinitely accepting an infinitely holy and well-pleasing One, and then accepting us who are in Him with the same acceptance. Oh, how acceptable is every believer to the eternal Father in Christ Jesus!

Do you see why? All our sins are forgiven and forgotten. Our unrighteousness is covered, and therefore we are free from condemnation. We are justified, adopted, and our persons are accepted. It does not require any oratory to set it forth. It needs only that your faith should fully apprehend it. Realize that you are forgiven, cleansed, justified, and adopted, and so you can be accepted in the beloved, as he is accepted. However you see yourself, God the Father sees you in the beloved without spot or wrinkle, washed whiter than driven snow, clean every bit.” He is so infinitely pleased in you that he has blessed you with every spiritual blessing. Rejoice in this. Anyone to be accepted should be perfectly righteous. You could not be accepted if He had not forgiven, cleansed, justified, and adopted you. God never accepts unclean sinners.

Our acceptance in the beloved with God is eternally immutable and unchangeable. Bless God, our acceptance not only does not depend on us. It did not begin with us. It is not maintained by us. And it cannot be altered by us. We were accepted before we had form, in eternity. Though we fell in our father Adam, yet we were “accepted in the beloved.” Though we came forth from our mother’s wombs speaking lies, we were still “accepted in the beloved.” Though we spent our days from our youth up in wanton rebellion against God and in league with hell, we were still “accepted in the beloved.” And though after the Lord God has saved us by his wondrous grace, we sin and fall many times a day, yet it stands in the Scripture that we are “accepted in the beloved.” What a glorious position this is! A song says, “Unchangeable His will, Though dark, cold, and dull may be my heart; His loving heart is still eternally the same: My soul through many changes goes, His love no variation knows.”

Someone said, “Is not this a word to die with?” We will meet death and face his open jaws with this word, “Accepted in the Beloved.” Will not this be a word to rise with amidst the blaze of the great judgment day? When you wake up from your tomb, lift up your eyes, and before you gaze upon the terrors of that tremendous hour, you say, “I am accepted in the Beloved.” What can fill you with alarm? Forever and ever, as the cycles of eternity revolve, will not this be the core and center of heaven’s most supreme bliss, that we are still “accepted in the Beloved”?

Our acceptance brings inestimable blessings. He who accepted us gives us access to all blessings. That is why in verse 3, we are blessed with every spiritual blessing. No blessing of the covenant is withheld from us. Grasp this; this can change your Christian life.

1. Right of access to the throne of God: Being ourselves accepted, the right of access to the throne of God is given to us. When a person is accepted with God, he may come to God whenever he chooses. We are like royal king’s children and can come to the royal palace anytime and are accepted. No chamber of our great Father’s house is closed against us. All is well between us and Him. We have access with boldness into this grace in which we stand.

2. Our prayers are accepted. Our prayers are seen in the beloved. God loves to hear and answer our prayers. Oh, if we sincerely believe this! Do you not sometimes pray as if you were beggars in the street, pleading with unwilling persons to give you a mere 5 rupees? That is why our prayer life is so poor. But when we know we are “accepted in the Beloved,” we speak to God with a sweet confidence, expecting Him to answer us. When we realize this acceptance, it should not be any surprise that our heavenly Father hears and answers our prayer. Has he not been doing so often and so generously? Every week we praise him for answered prayers. When unaccepted men pray, they pray unaccepted prayers. God never hears. They have to keep crying like the Baal worshipers. We, as accepted in the beloved, offer acceptable prayer; he always hears us. God loves to answer our prayers because they are accepted in the beloved. When people delight in someone, they love to give to them. Remember King Ahasuerus delighted in Esther and said, “Ask even half of the kingdom, I will give it.” When God delights in men, He gives them the desires of their hearts. Oh, the splendor of that man’s position who is “accepted in the Beloved!” To him, the Lord seems to say, “Ask what you will and it shall be given you, not only to the half of My kingdom, but My kingdom itself shall be yours; you shall sit with Me upon My throne.” Oh, the blessedness of being “accepted in the Beloved,” because the acceptance makes our prayers to be as sweet incense before the Lord.

3. Our worship is accepted as the most pleasing sacrifice. Even all the angels’ worship is not that pleasing, because of our beloved, our worship gives such pleasure to God. When unacceptable men worship, it is strange fire and brings spiritual curses from heaven, but accepted people offer acceptable worship. It is a sweet-smelling aroma to the living God; he is pleased, and the whole heaven is pleased. This brings inestimable blessings to us.

4. Our smallest good work is accepted as a good work in the sight of God. The Westminster Confession on Good Works says, “Amazing greatest biggest charity works, like Bill Gates, Azim Premji, or Tata, are not seen as good works in God’s sight because they come from unregenerate men without a heart of faith, but our small good works are accepted by the Father and are eternally rewarded.” Paragraphs 5 and 6 say that our good works, though defiled and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection, cannot stand in the perfect standard of God. Yet, notwithstanding the persons of believers being accepted through Christ, their good works are also accepted in him; not as though they were in this life wholly unblamable and unreprovable in God’s sight, but that he, looking upon them in his Son, is pleased to accept and reward that which is sincere, although accompanied with many weaknesses and imperfections. It is like my daughter’s coloring is the best, even better than Michelangelo, not because it is the best, but because she is my beloved. But you do not see it that way because you are so blind. I see it since love has opened my eyes. When we are cleaning our phones, you would delete even good pictures of others, but if it is our beloved daughter or son, we want to save every picture, even duplicates. That is my weak attempt to explain the glory of acceptance. So we see:

The objects of acceptance.
The author of acceptance.
The cause of our acceptance.
The basis of our acceptance.
The glory of acceptance.

Application

See, if you believe in Christ today, realize that:

Your faith in Christ is the gift of his grace, the fruit of being “accepted in the beloved.”
Your faith in him is the evidence of your being “accepted in the beloved.”
Your faith in Christ is the assurance of your being “accepted in the beloved.”

Rejoice, bless God, love the beloved, and feed on this truth. Let us rejoice and bless God; you are accepted in the beloved. Think of the contrast: if not accepted, but rejected. You would be the most loathsome creature of God in all the universe, seeing you, all your sins and depravity permeating your entire being, saturating your thoughts, making you corrupt and offensive in the sight of the Most High. He will deeply regret why you were created.

He will allow you to live a few years on earth to glorify his patience, justice, and wrath. He will leave you to the desires of your heart, blinded in vanity and worldly things. We would have either gone into the sinful world, going from sin to sin, reveling and rioting in it, or without knowing the true gospel of Christ, we would have gone into big false churches like so many running after Pentecostal prosperity preachers, blessing of money and health, offering strange fire, and their fourth and fifth generations punished. We might at this moment have been sinning with a high hand, finding even in the Sabbath Day a special opportunity for double transgression. Once the measure of our iniquity is full, then he will soon sweep you with the broom of judgment and cast you into the lowest hell, cast away forever into dreadful condemnation. You will lift up your eyes out of the thick darkness, a pit that is bottomless, “where their worm dies not, and their fire is not quenched.” For all eternity, by pain, screams, shouts, weeping, and gnashing, you would be glorifying God’s justice and wrath. All who see your pain will glorify, “Oh, how wrathful God is!” You would be vessels of wrath. Oh, God has saved you from all that, and by accepting you, the only meritorious reason for your acceptance is in the beloved. Oh, will you not rejoice in this! Is it not a joy that can make your spirits dance, like David before the ark?

Octavius Winslow encourages us: “Behold your present standing, believer in Christ! Turn your eye away from all your failures, the flaws that mark your sincere endeavors to serve Christ and to glorify God, and see where your true acceptance is found. ‘Accepted in the Beloved’ is the record that will raise you above all the fears and despondencies arising from your shortcomings and failures and fill you with peace, and joy, and assurance.”

Bless God. Let us give all praise, honor, and glory to our great God alone. I want you this morning to rejoice and bless God in this: you are accepted “in the beloved.” You look within, and you say, “There is nothing acceptable here!” Man, look at Christ, and see if there is not everything acceptable there. Your being, life, and acts depress you, but look you to Jesus and hear Him cry, “It is finished!” Will not that death-note reassure you? After becoming a believer, after being sanctified, even after being glorified, you are still accepted in the Beloved. Never accepted in yourself. That is the basis of your standing. Stand in that and bless God.

Bless God. Our laments might have been going up today amidst the wailings of the people in hell. Instead of wailing, he has chosen you to praise him. We lift the joyful song of praise unto our God, and bless and magnify His name in whom this day we are accepted. Oh, my soul, sing your own song to your Beloved.

Let us love our beloved! Do you not love that sweet title? We are seen in him and loved eternally as he is loved. God is so boundlessly pleased with Jesus that in Him He is altogether well pleased with us. Oh, the joy of this blending of our interests with those of the Well-beloved! Christ loved us eternally: “As the Father has loved me, even so have I loved you.” That is, without beginning, ever since there was a Father and a Christ. How much we should love Christ.

Chew and feed on this truth more. Can you get a firm hold of it? Unless you intelligently grasp its full significance, you will not heartily enjoy this unspeakable privilege. I struggled a lot to prepare this; there is so much in this, and I cannot cover all. But take this sweet truth like a chewing gum and keep chewing it all week. Chew it as long as you want; it always brings a sweet taste. Experientially enjoy the precious drop of honey: “accepted in the beloved.”

Chew on this. It has all the strength to overcome worldly worries and cares and to sweeten mortal life. Every believer can say within himself, “I have my sorrows, I have my pains, and weaknesses, but I must not be discouraged, for God accepts me.” Oh my! How we can laugh at all our troubles when this sweet word comes in, “accepted in the Beloved.” I may be poor, I may be despised, I may have much to put up with in many ways. You may have to go home to a miserable life or meal today, but then how rich you are, you are accepted in the Beloved. If you understand the glory of acceptance, really, these troubles of the flesh count for little or nothing to me, since I am “accepted in the Beloved.”

Yes, I have 101 weaknesses and imperfections, and there is never a day where I do not have to repent and ask God to forgive me. Yes, but I am “accepted in the Beloved.” Oh, I have been struggling with this evil and that. The devil is tempting you, never mind, he cannot destroy you, for you are accepted in the Beloved. I have just now been blaming myself for my shortcomings and mourning over my many slips and failures. Yes, but I am “accepted in the Beloved.” I want you to let this blessed fact go down sweetly with you, that whatever may be the trials of life, whatever the burdens that oppress you, whatever the difficulties of the way, whatever the infirmities of the body, whatever the frailties of the mind, yet still, as being “in the Beloved,” you are accepted.

Think of this: when you stand before God, made perfect with a deathless body and a sinless soul, before the throne, spotless, you will be accepted. Yes, but you will not be a bit more accepted then than you are now. Even the glorified souls are not more accepted than we are. In all this noise, strife, and turmoil of everyday life, you are “accepted in the Beloved” now. He loves you as intensely now as he would love you for all eternity. Is not this present grace in the highest perfection? What more can you have until you behold the unveiled face of infinite Love?

It is the eternal God accepting you. The world may not accept you. Family and friends may mock and reject you. Even our own heart may accuse you. The devil may roar against you. What does it matter? For He has accepted you. “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifies. Who is he that condemns?” He has made us “accepted in the Beloved,” and if that is so, we need not fear what men can do to us.

It assures the security of believers in this life. If we are accepted in the beloved, Christ came, lived, died, suffered, rose, ascended, and sits at the Father’s right hand, doing his heavenly ministry, showering all grace and blessings to persevere. Who shall defeat Omnipotence or pluck the sinner from the Almighty grasp?

This Word is full of soul marrow and fatness for the soul. It is food at once nourishing, delicious, satisfying, and strengthening. Those who feed upon it will be found, like Daniel and his companions, to be fairer in countenance and fatter in flesh than any others.

Rejoice, bless God, love the beloved, and feed on this truth.

Finally, if we are accepted by God, if our prayers, worship, and our good works are accepted, oh, how zealous we must be in prayer, worship, and good works. Oh, if He so treats our poor service, what shouldn’t we do for Him? What zeal, what cheerfulness should stimulate us! If we are accepted, our sacrifices shall be acceptable. If it is so that we are “accepted in the Beloved,” then let us go forth and tell poor sinners how they can be accepted too.

Unbelievers: Are you unconverted today? If you want to be accepted, you must accept. “And what,” do you ask, “must I accept?” You must accept Christ as the free gift of God. You must accept Christ as God’s way of accepting you, for if you get into Christ, you are accepted. The guiltiest of the guilty may be accepted in Christ. No matter how great and grievous their transgressions may have been, the atoning sacrifice can take all their guilt away, and the perfect righteousness can justify the most heinous sinner before God. You may be accepted.

Many people have been deceived into thinking they must somehow earn acceptance in the eyes of God. The message is simple: God accepts all who accept His Son by grace through faith!

Listen. If you come to Christ now and trust Him, you will be accepted. Never did one come to Christ to be rejected. You shall not be the first. Try it, and though you came into this house condemned, you shall go out accepted. Come; do not despise the exhortation, for you will be accepted. This is the verdict today, tomorrow, all days, in the day of death, judgment, and for all eternity: “accepted in the Beloved.”

It is the eternal God accepting you. The world may not accept you; family and friends may mock and reject you; even our own heart may accuse you; the devil may roar against you. What does it matter, for He has accepted you? “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifies. Who is he that condemns?” He has made us “accepted in the Beloved,” and if that is so, we need not fear what men can do to us.

Rejoice, bless God, love the beloved, and feed on this truth.

Many people have been deceived into thinking they must somehow earn acceptance in the eyes of God. The message is simple: God accepts all who accept His Son by grace through faith!

Glory to the Grace of God alone – Eph 1:6

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

Sometimes, when thinking of these infinite blessings, my heart overflows with joy, but honestly, most times I think, “Is this all true?” Am I truly blessed with all (nothing left, all included, infinite) the highest spiritual blessings in the heavenly places? All blessings that even an infinite God can give have already been given to me. The first blessing raises us to such heights of heaven that we feel giddy. How can an eternal God value worms of a 70-80 year lifespan to love us from all eternity? He chose us even before creation. Why did he love me even before I had a being? Why such honor for me? Then he elected me, totally depraved, for the great goal of making us holy, as he is holy and blameless before him, so for all future eternity I can enjoy his beauty and glory unhindered forever. Before we can even digest this, he takes us higher, to that eternity past, when he planned his great predestination, and the central goal of his plan was to bestow his highest honor and adopt me as his child, an heir of God, and that too at such a cost—the slaying of his darling son, Jesus Christ. And he did all this how? Not grudgingly, not with hesitation, but with the good pleasure of his will, with infinite delight and joy, rejoicing so much that he sang. Is this all true? Are we dreaming this? Is it simply piling up imaginative blessings to feel good?

If we can just deeply digest, grasp, and believe the reality of all this, I will tell you this is enough to transform our lives. Our hearts can be filled with so much joy, peace, and satisfaction that nothing in the world can take it away. Moreover, all these blessings are not somewhere in the sky; God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts. We can feel this glorious, eternal, infinite love God had for us now; it can overwhelm us. Romans 5:4 says, “God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” But the question is, why do I not enjoy that love when I wake up every morning? Can I say that the great hindrance in our hearts to enjoying these blessings is our self-obsession, which comes from unbelief?

Unbelief keeps our focus on ourselves, always looking at ourselves, at our unworthiness. “How can God love me like this? I don’t deserve this.” Faith is looking away from ourselves to God. We think that if these false teachers taught us anything, we might deserve a good life on this earth—the best life now, a house, and good health. But all the eternal blessings seem superfluous, not needed for us. We didn’t ask for this; we don’t desire this. It’s good to know, but we cannot really digest, take in, and rejoice, relish it so much that it transforms our life and fills our heart with so much joy that we rise above our situation and worship God like Paul. It is all because of our stubborn, cursed self-orientation and self-obsession that hinders the enjoyment of these blessings.

Remember how Paul started? The term “blessed” teaches us to focus on God, not on us or his gifts; his focus is on God, not on himself. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ statement is that the most sad and miserable Christians are those who are always thinking of themselves, their situation, and their feelings. This is a subjective self-obsession. The secret of enjoying these infinite blessings is to forget yourself and look to God’s glory. By design, our catechism says God created us to glorify and enjoy him. Our true highest joy is in the glory of God. You will never be happy until you are happy in his glory. Oh, the importance of the glory of God.

The great re-discovery of the Reformation is that the central theme of Scripture is the grand truth of Soli Deo gloria—to God alone be the glory. The goal of all four other solas is this. Why Sola Scriptura—that Scripture alone is the final, infallible authority? If any other is the final authority, it is an attack on God’s glory. Salvation must be sola fide, sola gratia, and solus Christus—through faith alone, by grace alone, and on account of Christ alone. If we give 1% of the credit for our salvation to any other being, it is to rob God of His full glory. The Reformation is not just a doctrinal dispute and difference against the Roman Catholic Church and others; it is a great fight over whether man will get all the glory or God will get all the glory. To go wrong here is to go wrong everywhere. Romans 1 lists the horrible consequences of a religion that refuses to glorify God; it brings the wrath of God from heaven upon our heads. Romans 3:23 says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The essence of sin is to fail to glorify God. We have fallen from that.

The great distinctive beauty of the reformed faith is that it delivers us from self-obsession and brings our focus to God’s glory. It teaches us that God’s great reason and motivation in all he does is his own glory. God’s glory is our highest good; we will be most happy when we glorify God. There is nothing more important in our life than to grasp and live for the glory of God. For selfish beings living low, selfish, narrow lives, our greatest need is to grasp a glimpse of God’s glory. So we have to daily pray like Moses, “Show me your glory.”

Only when you have a high view of God, a towering view of God, when you stand before the infinite, monumental Grand Canyon mountain of the glory of God, do we realize how small we are, how small our worries are, and how small our lives are. Even our world, our generations, all generations, all nations, and all people are nothing compared to the great cause of the glory of God. Let all humanity and all angels perish and become nothing; let not a small stain be put on the eternal glory of God.

When you are lost in the shoreless ocean of glory and you have a heart burning for the glory of this God, it will not only lift us from our native self-obsession, but we will have all the stamina and energy to live an extraordinary life in the midst of a sinful and adulterous generation. The only anchor that will make you stand and not be swept by the temporary river of this fleeting pleasure, this passing world and its lusts, is your comprehension of the glory of God. The highest seraphim angel can have no higher or nobler end than this—the glory of God.

Men who have lived grand, joyful lives, achieving great things and leaving a mark on history, are men who lived for God’s glory. If our focus is the glory of God, we will live life to the fullest. We will be very holy, most happy, most wise, and most useful. Our lives will be valuable and count for time and eternity. See, what we are talking about is primary. Everything is small before this. Our whole generation, why, all generations, are nothing. This is the center of your life. This is why we are here on earth. The purpose of your creation, providence, and redemption, our chief end, our highest purpose is the glory of God. We live for the glory of God, or we do not live at all. Though we live, we are dead, living an empty, useless life, soon to be forgotten. When you come to the end of your life, all that matters is, “Did you live for the glory of God?” If you failed here, our life is a failure. We have wasted our entire life and wrongly invested our life. So, Soli Deo gloria is a monumental pinnacle purpose.

So Paul in Ephesians, after talking about glorious past eternal blessings, knowing we will stumble to grasp this with our self-obsession, brings our focus to this most important thing in the next verse, verse 6: “to the praise of the glory of His grace.” This has three headings: Grace, the Glory of Grace, and the Praise of the Glory of Grace. Paul reorients our focus from ourselves to God. In a way, he is saying, “You will not be able to believe or touch, or taste and enjoy these higher blessings, and rise like an archangel to bless God with sheer ecstasy like me, if you keep looking at yourself, your worth, or your state. You need to take your eyes off yourself, your needs, and your feelings and turn to the great doctrine of the glory of God.” You are so immensely blessed, not because you are worthy, or even because you need this, or you sought this, but all this is done for the glory of God’s grace.

Oh, may the Holy Spirit help us understand. Why should he elect us, predestine us, bless us with every spiritual blessing, and raise us to such heights of blessings? We were not only unneeded by the self-existent God, we were completely useless and irrelevant to him as fallen creatures. It has nothing to do with who we are. Don’t keep seeing yourself, your needs, or your feelings. Lift your eyes above to see the answer in verse 6: “to the praise of the glory of His grace.” This is the ultimate goal of election and predestination. The word “to” in Greek has the idea of purpose. Everything the Father did in verses 3-5 was for the sole purpose that he might be able to display and manifest his grace, and that, having displayed it, all beings might see it and render praise for the glory of his grace.

The Attribute of Grace

The glory of God is the revelation and manifestation of God’s attributes. We have studied the attributes of God. Grace is an attribute of God. Grace lay in the heart of God from all eternity since he is called in Scripture “the God of all grace.” Grace didn’t start in his heart after man fell. Grace was in the heart of God, an essential part of His being from all eternity. Now, what is Grace? Grace is a word you cannot fully define. It’s something you have to experience; it is the most amazing, sweetest experience in the universe. We keep defining it as God’s spontaneous, free, unmerited favor in action toward guilty, undeserving sinners. Grace is different from all his other attributes; it is different from mercy. Mercy is shown as a response to a need or suffering. But grace is shown not because of any need or suffering to whom it is given, or because someone is deserving or undeserving, but it freely comes from the giver according to the generosity of his great heart, and it is always shown to the worst, utterly guilty, and undeserving. Like I said in the amazing judge story last week, he not only forgave the criminal, justified him, and adopted the one who killed his own son. We cannot understand it; it is amazing. That is why it is called amazing grace.

The best picture of grace in the Old Testament is like the great King David. He brings the beggar, the handicapped Mephibosheth, who is a fugitive and the grandson of the previous king, who needs to be hanged according to the kingdom’s rules. He comes and stands like a pathetic, dirty, infected dog with one leg, before a king like a lion. The king sees this pathetic fellow and says, “I want to show kindness.” So first, he removes the capital punishment. “You shall live.” Oh, Mephibosheth is excited, thinking, “Enough, King; thank you.” Next, he says, “I give you back all your grandfather Saul’s palace, land, and wealth.” “Why? What will I do with all that? I have never seen a full 100 rupees.” Before he comes out of that shock, he says, “Then, I give you 70 servants for you.” “Ah, why? One is enough.” It doesn’t stop. He says, “You will eat at my table every meal.” “Ah, why? You will be respected as the king’s son.” “I am adopting you.” The guy faints from this; it doesn’t stop; it keeps coming. He’s wondering, “Why, why?” This is grace. David says, “I am doing this not because he is deserving, or out of pity to meet his need. No, he is the worst. It is not about him at all. But I want to show how much grace is in my heart. I want people to see, admire, and praise the grace of my heart. That is why I am doing this.” Spontaneous, unmerited favor in action toward undeserving, guilty sinners.

The word “grace” gathers at one burning point all the rays of God’s infinite, loving heart with which he stoops down to the lowest sinful creatures, lifts them from all their misery, heals them, delivers them, forgives all their sins, justifies them, and lifts them to the highest honor as his sons, making them rich, inheritors of his own boundless wealth. The motive spring of his heart for these acts is grace.

Now, how will he manifest this attribute that is in his heart for all eternity? His other attributes, his power and his wisdom, were manifested to an extent in creation. He created the vast universe out of nothing, just in 6 days, without any materials or tools, by the power of his word. “Let it be.” Wow! Astronauts like Sunita Williams have seen the vastness of space. They talk about billions of light-years, innumerable galaxies, and we’re just beginning to discover how many there may be. All this out of nothing, just in 6 days. When God said, “Let it be,” what a display of power! Everything works perfectly in its place, with accurate balance, like the intricate machinery of the universe. Whether you take a macroscopic look with a telescope into big things or a microscopic look at the tiniest things, what a display of wisdom! The Psalms sing of his power and wisdom in creation. His other attributes are more displayed in providence—his patience with sinners, his justice and holiness sometimes in history, like at Noah’s time, the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, his mercy when the Israelites were suffering, his power in the way he delivered Israel from Egyptian slavery.

God wanted to make a full display of his grace. Grace found no objects in a pure creation upon which to display its full glory. Grace in its true and deepest display needs undeserving, fully depraved, sinful creatures, and there were none such in the creation as it came from the divine perfect hand. God could not display grace in providence. So God decided to fully display his attribute of grace in redemption. Hence, we see his wisdom to allow the devil and sin to run their course in his world. Paul says, “Blessed be God, that He’s displayed His grace in redemption in a way that He’s not displayed it anywhere else.” This is a great revelation that the purpose and goal of redemption is the manifestation of His grace.

The Glory of Grace

Secondly, it is not just grace, but the Glory of Grace. Glory basically means the manifested excellence of an attribute. How excellent, how wonderful, how magnificent or splendid, how intrinsically beautiful is an attribute of God can only be seen when it is glorified, meaning manifested and revealed. You do not see or perceive the glory of the sun on a cloudy day. Now, there is glory in the sun, an intrinsic excellence and beauty. We see it when the clouds go away, and its excellence is manifested. Now, that’s what the word “glory” means here.

So, put the two thoughts together: the Glory of Grace. Grace itself is an undefinable, sweet divine trait. Amazing grace. God’s grace will be like him, infinite. Look, it says, “the glory of his grace.” He wanted to show his utmost grace, so creatures can see how beautiful, magnificent, wonderful, and splendid his grace is.

What does the “utmost glory of grace” even mean? God’s power at its utmost, who can grasp? All the power in creation and providence. Job says the drops that fell from his hand in a way hide how powerful he is. His word itself can create the universe. What can his hand do? When he comes and sits in judgment in Revelation 20, before his presence, all worlds do not turn to dust but dissolve, and the universe is annihilated. We don’t know where it went; it just disappears. In the same way, what must grace at its utmost be? The next verse talks about the riches of his grace, the height of his grace. What does it mean? Who by searching can find out God? It is not possible for the human mind to conceive grace at its utmost! What human intellect is gigantic enough to grasp the utmost glory of grace—the glory of his grace! If an infinite God shows grace, that itself is unbearable for us. Now he wants to show the utmost glory of his grace. So Paul says he chose and predestined us to show the utmost glory of his grace as vessels of his grace. Fainting! Wow!

Can I blubberingly say a few things about the glory of this grace?

Firstly, the glory of grace is sovereign grace. It is granted sovereignly by the absolute will of the Almighty God. No one can earn it; no one can claim it as a right. There is no reason in the creature, no reason known to us, but the good pleasure of His will. “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.” Absolute sovereignty is one of the glories of divine grace. We didn’t earn it; we didn’t desire it; we didn’t pray for it or ask for it; we don’t deserve it. It is sovereignly given to us, so come out of your cursed self-obsession and accept it as a sovereign gift. Only then will you rejoice.

Secondly, it is free grace. Man is not expected to do anything to earn or obtain the grace of God. If you do anything to get it, it is not free grace. God didn’t choose because of any good character—whether someone was rich, educated, or famous. He looks down on vast humanity and passes by kings and princes and riches to let His love settle on the poor. He looks on men and passes over so many who are good in common grace; his grace often selects the grossest transgressor and the chief of sinners, like you and me, so these should become eternal monuments of His grace. Think, if the utmost height of his grace should be glorified, he has to choose the lowest, most depraved creatures. That is how you and I were qualified to be elected and predestined!

Thirdly, it is the fullness of grace. Where God bestows His grace, it is no little grace. It is grace to cover all of a man’s sins, whatever they may be, however many they may be. He doesn’t just pardon and forget all our sins; he justifies, and not just justifies, but adopts, sanctifies, perseveres, and glorifies.

Fourthly, it is unfailing, continual grace. Where once the grace of God has fallen, it is never taken away. It is an eternal gift. He never revokes a pardon, justification, or adoption. “The gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” Grace is an inexhaustible river; it continues flowing for all eternity. It not only saves us but it is this grace that keeps us saved. Today you continue to be a believer because of this fullness of grace.

Fifthly, it is sufficient grace. It is sufficient for all situations in this life and eternity. We see problems and scream like Paul, “Lord, help,” and he says, “My grace is sufficient.” It is sufficient grace for all life situations.

Sixthly, it is God-satisfying grace. What I mean is that this grace is shown in such a way that it never interferes with any other attribute of God. God shows grace in a way consistent with all his other attributes. This is what shows how glorious this grace is. How can God’s justice be satisfied when he passes by and forgives so many sins of these people? He does that not by hiding their sins below some mountain where no one can see them. No, he does that by laying all their sins on the sacrifice, upon their Surety, and he exacted from Christ the justice due for their transgressions. In their Substitute, His justice has received the full payment of His demands. In the same way, it satisfies his holiness, his law, the demands of the law, and his wrath. There is no attribute of God that grace ever slights. This is the glory of grace: though grace works and reveals itself as if justice, wrath, and holiness are dead, yet it never violates any one of those bright attributes of God. God is holy, just, and also gracious now in salvation.

Finally, verse 7 uses an amazing word: “according to the riches of His grace.” Why am I blessed so much? My election and predestination are beyond my mind, beyond my temporary needs, and even beyond my mental grasp. See, it is not according to your need, understanding, or grasp, or even your capacity to enjoy. An amazing word: “It is according to the riches of his grace.” Whether you need it or not, the whole wealth of God is available for every Christian soul. God gives “according to the riches of His grace.” You do not expect a millionaire to give you 5 rupees as a gift, right? He gives according to his riches. In the same way, God gives royally, divinely. The measure of his grace is according to his abundance of His treasures, and he hands over infinite blessings with an open hand.

The measure of His grace is according to his riches. Now the question is that the measure of my reception is my faith. “According to thy faith be it unto thee.” There are all every spiritual blessings given; there is infinite, unrealized wealth. We are all living like beggars, while the potentiality of wealth is beyond our wildest, most greedy imagination. Alas, that when we might have so much, we do have so little. So, I hope you grasp the weight of the word “glory of his grace.”

Praise of the Glory of Grace

Not just the glory of grace, but verse 6 says, “to the praise of the glory of His grace.” The word “praise” is not just praise, but commendation with delight. Let me illustrate. An India-Pakistan match. We all watch. Just one ball, 5 runs needed. A tough bowler, 5 balls, no runs. On the last ball, the ball comes, our batsman hits a shot, it goes for a boundary, and India wins a nail-biting match. Oh, how the Indians praise the batsman! All on the ground are giving a favorable commendation with delight.

On the other side, the Pakistan captain comes to the team, wants to console them. “You guys played really well; we should have won the match, but that guy did some magic at the last minute.” He’s making an acknowledgment of that good hit, but he’s not praising him with delight. It’s a grudging acknowledgment of the accomplishment, but it’s not praise. Now you see the difference.

For example, God displayed his power so much with the 10 plagues of Egypt and the parting of the sea. What happened? All of Israel sang a song with women dancing: “Who among the gods is like you, Lord? Who is like you—majestic in power and holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?” They are joyfully praising God’s display of power.

So the word “praise” here, of the glory of grace, means that every creature that sees the glory of grace shown to us. God is not satisfied that they just acknowledge God has shown grace to us. The display of that grace should be so grand, so marvelous, the riches and height of his grace that it will fill every creature with so much wonder and delight that they will eternally praise God for His grace because of us.

Ephesians 2:7 says that by what God has done for us, “that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” In the coming ages, all intelligent creatures, all angels, and people who always praised God for his holiness, power, justice, and wisdom, and who never saw the glory of his grace, when they see what God has done to us by electing and predestining us, they will see the glory of the grace of God—the manifested excellence of grace. All for all eternity will praise the riches of God’s extravagant grace to us.

Here Paul says the purpose for which God chose you before the world began and predestined you to sonship, the ultimate goal of that is “to the praise of the glory of His grace”—the full manifestation of His grace, to display how much grace is in the heart of God!

So, if you and I have to digest these blessings and experience them, it will not be when we are self-focused, but when we are caught up like Paul in God’s glory. Then your eyes are opened to see this glory. Do you seem to digest it a little? The reason an eternal God can set his love on worms of creatures, the reason a holy God can elect unholy sinners to make them holy and blameless to make them stand before him, the reason the highest Most High God can predestine depraved sons to be adopted into his family… is all to display the grace of his heart. Not just the glory of his grace, not just to acknowledge his grace, but in a way that the whole universe is so thrilled and amazed that it praises his glory, excellence, and the height of his grace.

Oh, only eternity will show the full praise of the glory of God’s grace. We really don’t know what it will look like. When all the chosen ones shall be gathered together in heaven, made holy and perfect, God lifts them to the highest glory with his Son. When the universe sees that, then the whole universe will cry, “To the praise of the glory of his grace.”

Application

What shall we say to these things? It overwhelms our soul.

First: We have a call to bless God. Oh, brothers and sisters, we cannot grasp and digest this in one hour of service. Go home, sit all this week, sit down and contemplate this. Let your mind survey the whole plan of your salvation until your hearts burn with fire when you perceive the magnitude of the glory of grace, to be lost in praise.

God chose us, predestined us as sons by free grace, given into the hands of Christ to be His treasure—redeemed with the heart’s blood of the Son of God. Christ came and accomplished salvation. When you were running into sin, slaves of Satan, mad on your idols, He called you with that voice that wakes the dead, and endowed you with spiritual life, justified you, adopted you into the divine family, and made you a partaker of the divine nature, all by grace. These are wonders of grace. But remember… this is all just a foretaste. No human mind can grasp the full revelation of his grace at the second coming. 1 Peter 1:13 says, “Set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming.”

He is not just going to reveal the glory of his grace. God is not content simply to show it and say, “See, this is my grace; acknowledge it.” No, he will reveal it in such a way that the universe will overflow in praise. God has selected you to be a vessel of his grace, so all the universe and all of eternity will praise his grace to you. Can you not praise God and be mute? What? Be amazed, heavens and sun and stars!

Moses says to the old Israelites in Deuteronomy 4:32, “For ask now concerning the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether any great thing like this has happened, or anything like it has been heard. Or did God ever try to go and take for Himself a nation from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?”

How much more for us! Can I say for us, search all of history, search all religions, all cultures from Babylon, Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Indian, Islamic world, from east to west, north to south, all philosophies, search all of Google, all big data: was there any God who loved his people from all eternity, set his love, predestined them as sons, and made the greatest sacrifice to make them his own, to show his grace?

Let the truth of it be so understood and so absorbed into your spirit and mind and heart until you’re caught up in praise, and you with Paul say, “Blessed be God for such grace.” Oh, be lost in praise.

Is your self-obsessed mind not excited? Let me answer a selfish question and see if that excites you: Someone asked, “Why does God over and over again say he loves for his glory? He says stunning things about me, elected me, predestined me, made me his heir, loves me, cares for me, but all this is for his glory. Does he love me or does he love his glory more? Is he loving me so he can just get more glory? Then he’s not loving me, right?” What do we answer?

Oh, you stupid, selfish mind. How do I answer? If God has to love you with the greatest love, he has to love you for his glory. Because if he loves you for your own self, he can just give you an 80-year lifespan, good food, a house, and health, and finish your story. That is enough for you. That is all loving you means. It is only because God loves you for his glory that he has attached you to his highest eternal glory of his grace. He loved you so much he staked his eternal glory on you! He made the realization of his glory through you. By loving us this way, he makes useless, mortal worms so valuable, makes much of us as his greatest treasure for himself. He elects and sets his love on you and predestined you. It is this kind of love that bestows eternity’s worth, infinite value on you, because the goal of your salvation is his glory.

God loving us for himself is infinitely greater love than him loving us for ourselves. That is why he designed us to be happy by glorifying him. “You are so precious to God that he will not let your preciousness become your God.” He will not let your glory, which he himself creates and loves, replace his glory as your supreme treasure. Glory in this truth. Glory in, revel in, and bask in the fact that God loves you enough to say that he loves you for his glory. That way of loving you is the greatest way of loving you!

Oh, come out of your self-obsession; focus on God’s glory. That is how you enjoy these blessings! Will you worship God at the throne of grace for this message? This verse calls you to praise the glory of God’s grace you have so largely been made a recipient of.

Second, not only praise God for the glory of his grace, but will you let the people around you see the result of grace in you? Strive by God’s help to live a life others see what grace has done, so they praise the glory of God’s grace. That is the goal of saving. Our enemies slander us, saying the doctrines of grace make people careless and sinful, that you cannot see any good works in them. That is wrong. Our forefathers have shown how wrong it is. The most holy people have been those who believed in grace.

Now it is our turn, as receivers of such grace. We should strive to live by God’s help so we don’t bring dishonor but praise to the glory of God’s grace. We should do this by regular watchfulness, never neglecting the means of grace—prayer, the word of God, and church attendance. You are degrading the grace of God when you are not walking worthy of your calling. Holy living is “to the praise of the glory of his grace.”

And then, with such a credible life, become missionaries of the gospel of grace. See, the harvest is plenty; we have a great burden. Our land is filled with a cursed Arminian, man-centered theology. All preaching is about man’s part in salvation, man’s free will, man’s work, and man’s contribution, grandiose claims and schemes of men. No grace at all. Oh, how many souls are in bondage, groaning in a burden. Oh, how they need to hear this good news of God’s free grace! Salvation is all of grace, by faith in Christ alone. Only then does all glory go to God. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.” If we mix any of our merit, worth, or works with His grace, we pollute the gospel and rob God’s glory. It is a cursed devil’s gospel. This is the gospel people need to hear. You and I are called to be missionaries for that!

For those of you who are not believers here: This should give you great hope. Salvation is all of the free grace of God to all men. It is hope for all good and bad men. Suppose you are here as a bad man; however bad you are, however many sins you have committed, you can come to God. Your sins don’t stop him from showing grace. Grace is more glorified in sinners. “Him that comes to Christ he will in no wise cast out.”

If you are a good person outside, who has lived a decent life and didn’t commit any big crimes, good at a human level, but you also have to come because the only way to be saved from hell and go to heaven is by grace. Salvation never comes by works, good works. Salvation is not based on how good or bad we are. Therefore, you too should believe in Christ. If all is by grace, then everyone, both great and small sinners, needs to come. “Come unto me, all ye that labor.” “Whosoever believeth in him is not condemned.” “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” As an unbeliever, all you are doing is fighting with your creator. Enough of fighting with your creator. Put down your weapons, surrender, come to your Father’s house, and enjoy his grace.

Predestination unto Adoption – Eph 1:5

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, 5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.

God heard our prayers and blessed our family conference; it was convicting for all of us. We should be careful not to hear it and say, “Oh, it is tough, a very high standard; we can never change like this,” or, “It’s very humbling,” and then conveniently forget it as the days go by. If you try to forget like that, all the truths we learn in Ephesians will also bring us those practical applications in chapter 5 onward: wives subject to husbands, husbands love wives, children obey parents. Why should we strive for such a responsible family life? Because we want to glorify God, who has blessed us with such glorious blessings. We want to bless him through our lives. What will motivate us to overcome our native laziness, remaining sin, and selfishness and live such a high standard of family life, unlike worldly people? It is by deeply grasping how much God has blessed us and who we are in Christ. It’s these truths, by which we climb to the heavens and learn to bless God like Paul, that transform us by the renewing of our minds. These truths will reorient and change our focus. Instead of always looking at ourselves, our ego, and our selfishness, we start seeing life from God’s perspective: what God has done for us, what he is doing for us, and what he will do for us. It will make us worship him like Paul. It is the depth of personal and family worship that leads to such a lifestyle. These truths, with the help of the Holy Spirit, will give us the motivation and grace to strive toward such God-glorifying personal and family lives.

We saw the glorious truth of the seven wonders of God’s election, a thrilling truth that makes us realize God’s love for us didn’t begin when we believed him, not even at the cross of Jesus Christ, but that God the Father set His heart upon us from before the foundation of the world. This means that there has never been a time in eternity when he didn’t love us. The eternal God did not exist at any time when His love was not set upon you and me. It’s thrilling to realize how much God valued us. It’s something to fall down on your face and praise God for! As we forget ourselves, we feel like standing on the highest peak of eternity, blessing God that out of millions of people, he has elected us in eternity. We think there cannot be anything beyond this; this is the peak. Paul stuns us in verse 5 with another marvelous, in fact, a higher blessing than election, to intensify our worship and bless God: predestination to adoption.

Oh, how blessed our lives would be if we just realized this blessing. There was an orphanage with 12 boys. All were always discouraged, fearful, and worst in studies. They were depressed. There was no love, no care, only cruelty and fear. They were regularly beaten with rods and had tissue paper put in their mouths and tied for days without food. They always lived in fear, in a spirit of bondage and guilt. A father adopted the 12 children and showed such love and care. The love of the adopted parents conquered all their fears. They grew in the assurance of that love. They began to do well in school, went to top universities in the U.S., and became great men in society. You have to multiply that by infinity to realize our spiritual state. We were in the orphanage of the devil, who only kept beating us with rods, filling our consciences with guilt, our hearts with fear, making us slaves to sin, filling us with worries in this world, and never allowing us to do anything for God’s kingdom. In salvation, God adopts us and gives us the supreme status of his children. He gives such an assurance of love and care that we rise up to face anything in this life, overcome any sin or weakness, and become more than conquerors through him who loved us. Predestination to adoption is an all-conquering truth.

In verse 5, we see six wonders of predestination. I couldn’t get seven this time.

The Act of predestination
The Goal of predestination
The Object of predestination
The Cost of predestination
The Manner of predestination
The End of predestination

1. The Act of Predestination

Verse 5 uses the word predestination, a big word. If you want to stop a heated discussion or argument, just throw out this word. “What do you think about predestination?” Everyone stares at you in hush silence. It is a high concept. In simple words, the two English words combined to make up the one Greek word mean “pre,” something before, and “to destine,” to mark or to appoint. Predestinated means to appoint beforehand.

This is a doctrine of enormous comfort for the Christian. The Confession of Faith, in its second chapter, talks about the decree of God. God has decreed in himself, from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably, all things, whatsoever comes to pass. From the smallest things to the biggest, everything is predestined. In that decree, paragraph 3 says, “He has predestined some to salvation to glorify his grace and some to damnation to glorify his justice.” He predestined the end of all his creatures. Paragraph 6 says not only the end but also all the means as to how that end will be achieved. Predestination is God’s plan for the ages.

Predestination includes all sinful acts. Amazingly, Acts 4:27-28 says, “For truly against Your holy Servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were gathered together to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose determined before to be done.” The NASB says, “purpose predestined to occur.” All the cruel, sinful acts that happened around the cross were all predestined by God. Predestination is an eternal act of God where he appoints everything that will happen. Everything in this life, good or bad, is all predestined by God. It emphasizes three things: the sovereignty of the activity of God (he predestined by his sovereign will), the certainty of that activity (being almighty, he will accomplish all he predestined), and the eternity of that activity. Oh, if you grasp the weight of the word “predestination,” if God predestines something, it is a done deal. Nothing in the whole universe can ever hinder that; it is his decree. The word “predestination” brings together God’s sovereignty, certainty, and eternity. It is an awesome, mysterious truth, just as on the cross, when the whole world seemed to be doing something against God and his will, God was able to use all that to accomplish his purpose. How? The Confession says, “in which appears his unsearchable wisdom of God in disposing all things, and power and faithfulness in accomplishing his decree.”

2. The Central Goal of Predestination

Predestination is an awesome, scary act of God in one way. How does that act make Paul cry out, “Blessed be God”? Because of the central goal of predestination. Notice it in verse 5: “having predestined us to adoption as sons.”

Amazing! Paul tells us God not only elected us. A king may elect servants; it is a big honor. But the Lord in heaven has not only chosen us, going beyond that, he has determined to bestow the highest eternal honor of the universe on us. Notice he predestined us to adoption as sons. Sisters, I am learning to reduce my male-centered chauvinism; we can add daughters. God predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters. This means that in this great act of his predestination, where he determined all acts that would come to pass, he not only wished, not only voted or elected, but he willed, and as the central act of predestination, he predestined us to adoption as sons. It is one thing for God to wish, will, or desire, but predestination means it is a done deal. No creature can ever stand against God’s predestination. The amazement is that this great God, in this great act of predestination, has lifted me to the highest honor of adoption. Oh, if you just understand the word, we will really faint. This idea overwhelms the Apostle John, who is amazed and cries out: “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!” May the Holy Spirit help us. When I say the word “adoption,” certain things register there in the computer called your brain. I want to reach into that computer and press “alt delete” to throw away all your preconceived ideas about adoption and infuse a fresh biblical idea of adoption. This biblical idea alone will make you stand back and be amazed in wonder and bless God.

The concept of God adopting us has no parallel in human experience. Nothing in human experience even comes close to this. One preacher says it is useless to look for human comparisons, for the adoption of which Paul speaks surpasses anything that takes place on earth. Humans adopt children to fulfill a need, but God had the most blessed, satisfying, eternally perfect, and fulfilling Son. There was no need for him to adopt. Yet he predestined us to be adopted. Let us try to grasp what made Paul rise to this height of blessing God. This is the crowning blessing of redemption, the highest privilege of God’s redemptive grace—to be called sons and daughters of God. Our catechism defines adoption as “an act of God’s free grace, whereby we are received into the number, and have a right to all the privileges of the sons of God.”

Adoption happens by two acts of God. There is an external legal act and an inward supernatural act. Adoption is a legal, external act. Just like justification, adoption is a legal or judicial act in the court of heaven. It is not a process; it is a one-time act. We are not progressively adopted. Once made a full child of God, I remain a full child of God forever, with irreversible legal status as a child of the living God for all eternity. After God elected me in eternity, God went a step ahead and signed my adoption papers, predestining me to adoption. In the order of my salvation, after God effectually calls, regenerates, and justifies, the highest blessing is adoption.

I become a legal heir of God, a joint heir with Christ. I am legally included as a family member of the Trinitarian God. It is one of the great climaxes of our redemption. It is a legal act. I may not feel it sometimes, I may doubt because of my circumstances, but whatever my feelings or circumstances, as a believer in Jesus Christ, I am a child of God. That is my status. It is not something I have earned; it is an act of God’s free grace. Just like justification, it is something God did to me and for me in the court of heaven. I am given all the privileges of the family of God.

Secondly, going beyond the legal external act, God also did an inward supernatural act. If I adopt a child, the child may legally be my child, but genetically may not be. God goes beyond that. He, through regeneration, implants his seed in us through the Holy Spirit, through which I not only have the same nature of God, but I experientially and subjectively realize I am a child of God. God has done what no human father and mother can do when they adopt a child: change the personality and nature of the child they’ve adopted so that it is like theirs. Galatians 4:6 says, “Because you are sons, He has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!'”

Look at this. God is not only interested in calling us his children objectively and legally and then telling us to believe that. But God wants us to fully and truly experience that reality. So he sends the Spirit of his Son into our hearts so we have the God-granted ability to experience what we really are—his children. We experience that not on a superficial level. The verse says we “cry out” Abba, Father. “Abba” is Aramaic for “Father.” It is not a formal title. It is a word of very close endearment, affection, and filled with love. With tears and emotions, you cry out in whatever language: “Appa,” “naina,” “daddy,” “Pithajee.” It is a word bursting out when the heart is filled with great love and affection.

My prayer life is sometimes so impersonally dead and dry. I groan, “Why can’t I go closer to God?” We have that natural hindrance, that strangeness created by sin and depravity. “How can I, a sinner, go to God?” The same God who sent his Son to redeem us from sins and make us his children, who clears not only all legal hindrances by atonement and justification but also provides an intimate access to himself and clears all positional hindrances—that same God sends the Spirit of his Son into my heart so all ethical, experiential, psychological, and emotional hindrances are removed. That Spirit comes into my heart, a heart with a million diseases of depravity and carnal enmity against God, that is always far from God, doubts God’s love, doubts his grace, and always has hard feelings and wrong thoughts and feelings about God. The Holy Spirit removes all that and makes me realize how much God loves me, how much affection is there in the heart of God for me, and gives me a sense of intimacy in my union with Christ, enabling me internally to feel the reality of an irreversible, eternal, unbreakable relationship of sonship established, not only objectively but also through subjective experience. I feel it so intensely, unable to bear it, that I loudly cry out and burst out, “Abba, Father!” That is the first purpose of the Holy Spirit’s sending into our hearts: to enjoy and experience and address the one true living God as Abba Father so we might have an internal, naturally reflexive conscious, filial disposition with God. The Spirit imparts a conscious, experiential, fatherly-related disposition. What a blessing! By a legal act, he assures us in faith that we have the rights and privileges as sons in the family, but by an inward supernatural act, he assures us experientially that we are his true sons and bear the nature and likeness of the household.

This is a high blessing in the order of salvation. Justification is a glorious blessing, but this is beyond justification. Adoption is different from regeneration; some confuse it with new birth. No, this is different and higher than regeneration. Both deal with different problems. Regeneration deals with our natures; we were dead in sins, those sinful hearts of ours that drink iniquity like water. God changes those sin-loving personalities of ours by the new birth. Adoption deals with our status. We are by nature children of wrath and children of the devil. Our status is one of alienation and condemnation; we feel a strangeness in coming to God. But because of the sin-removing work of Christ, our whole status has changed, and we can now be called children of God. In fact, the goal of God’s regeneration and justification is preparation for this crowning blessing of adoption.

That is adoption. What can I say about the blessings that flow from adoption? Not just me, but I have preached 10 sermons on this. Do you remember I preached 10 sermons on the blessings of adoption during COVID times? What comfort it gave us during that time. I can go on and preach all that and the sheer pure thrill, but we will not finish Ephesians. I will just mention seven blessings:

Eternal Status: It gives me an forever irreversible legal status as a child of the living God.
I have the profound and precious status of a brother or sister of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Promise of Fatherly Provision: God as our Father promises to provide for all our needs in this life. Knowing our unbelieving hearts, always worried and doubting his love, he gives an infallible guarantee of Father’s provision. Romans 8:32 says, “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” Arguing from the greater to the less, if you have any smallest understanding of what God has done through Christ, how shameful it is to question God whether he will meet my temporary needs. “How shall he not freely give us all things?”—a question, a reasoning. “All things!” How comprehensive the grant! All things needed to make us holy and blameless and bring us to glory. Every need—physical, social, psychological—God guarantees will be met. Just as all good fathers, my Father will supply all your needs. He wants you and me, in the struggles and doubts and trials of necessity in life, to use this argument: if he gave us his Son, how will he not give us all things? And to rebuke our own complaining hearts from worrying about worldly things.
The Promise of Fatherly Chastisement: We worry about two things: trials and pain, right? He promises all sufferings, trials, and pain that come in our life come from our loving Father’s hand, not as punishment, but as loving chastening to aid in mortifying our sins and sanctifying us, to make you holy and blameless.
The Gift of the Holy Spirit is an all-inclusive package of comfort, joy, and peace. Catechism question 36 says, “What are the benefits which in this life do accompany or flow from justification, adoption, and sanctification?” The answer is, “assurance of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, increase of grace, and perseverance therein to the end.” We will persevere until the end. What else do we need? Adoption blessings don’t stop there. There are adoption blessings at death, at the second coming, at the final judgment, and for all eternity in heaven. If I were to explain all that, I would need 10 sermons. If you want to hear them, go to the GRBC website, topical sermons, miscellaneous, COVID sermons. We have both English and Tamil sermons.

What a comfort here. Paul uses the scary word “predestination” to show the sovereignty, certainty, and eternity of our adoption. Wow! That means in eternity God predestined our adoption, and nothing in the universe can stop it. Wherever his children are, God’s providence will work to make them God’s children, and then once made children, everything in life will work toward making the adoption blessings effectual in their lives. That is the central goal of predestination. God has unshakably, immutably, and infallibly predestined us to adoption, the effect of all its blessings. You are settled! Blessed be God the Father for predestination.

3. The Object of Adoption

The object of adoption is “us.” This is the wonder of Paul; it makes him fall prostrate. God could have adopted holy, unfallen angels, but Mordecai adopted Esther because she was beautiful. What was in us? We were depraved, children of the devil. When someone adopts a child, they adopt the best child, right? One boy was feeling sad that he was an adopted child, not like his other friends. His parents said, “My son, your friends were born into their families. Their mummies and daddies had no choice at all, but we loved you so much we chose you to be our child. You are so special.” What is special about us? Sometimes, we jokingly say, “We brought you from the garbage.” It is very true of us.

See the graphic description in Ezekiel 16:4-5: “As for your birth, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water for cleansing; you were not rubbed with salt or even wrapped in cloths. No eye looked with pity on you to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you. Rather you were thrown out into the open field, for you were abhorred on the day you were born.”

You and I were born in sin, from head to toe. Not just handicapped or impotent, but dead bodies, with our whole bodies full of the leprosy of sin, with defiled sores. In God’s sight, we were most abhorrent and abominable to him. What did he see in us? Verse 6 says, “When I passed by you and saw you squirming in your blood, I said to you while you were in your blood, ‘Live!'” His eye of pity. The wonder of predestination is its objects.

What story can make this wonder dawn on us? Imagine a terrible criminal with many murders, who made families fatherless, a child rapist, who cruelly killed many small children. Many families are very angry with him. The whole nation is full of anger and wants to see justice, the worst punishment for him. He comes before a judge as a child of wrath, having broken all the laws of the nation and the judge’s court, a full criminal in person and act, with not a drop of regret for what he has done, deserving eternal punishment. Let us say in some mysterious way, the judge says, “I pity you and forgive all that you have done. Now you are innocent.” What a shock!

The judge goes beyond that and says, “Okay, you are not only forgiven but justified, as if you perfectly kept the law, all the laws of the nation all your life. You should be rewarded for that. Congratulations, righteous man. You will be treated as a noble person and awarded by the president for life and services. This court declares and signs that you are righteous forever.” Amazing grace. Let us say the judge goes beyond that and says, “You know what? In this same court, I will adopt you as my child and heir of all my wealth. So I am signing adoption papers also. All my 500-crore wealth is yours.”

See, this is beyond a human example. What grace! “That’s too good to be true.” Yet God, in his marvelous, bubbling, amazing grace, to show the height of the riches of grace, has done exactly that for us in adoption, infinitely. While the whole holy universe was angry with us, there is no heaven’s law we have not broken. The first great tablet, which angers God the most: we have not worshiped God, made idols, taken his name in vain, broken his Sabbath, or dishonored our parents. We have murdered in our hearts, with innumerable adulteries, lies, robbery, and covetousness in our blood. Such criminals before heaven! God elects, not only calls, regenerates dead, depraved sinners, forgives all their sins, justifies, and then adopts them to the highest status of heaven. Blessed be God for predestination unto adoption. For the objects of adoption, if you have any sense of your heart, this should make you fall prostrate. If this doesn’t make you fall prostrate, see the next point.

4. The Cost of Adoption

Verse 5 says, “having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ.” Imagine the cost he had to pay for adoption. Some may adopt by paying some money and signing legal documents for adoption. But God, to adopt sinners, oh, what a price he had! He signed a bond in eternity with the blood of his beloved Son. He adopted worms of dust at the most expensive price. What can we say? Imagine the same judge sees a criminal who has killed thousands of children, but he also killed his only beloved son and raped his daughter very cruelly, torturing her for hours. How much anger is in the father’s heart! Then the judge says, “You criminal, oh sinner, still I forgive all your sins, justify you, and will adopt you as my son.” That blows our minds! That is the cost God had to pay.

How could God accept into His family the likes of you and me? Being God and being holy, we lie below His wrath. How can God say, with open arms as the Father did to the Prodigal, “I welcome you into my family, I confer upon you all the privileges of the family,” when His righteousness and His justice called out for our judgment and for our damnation? Will his divine love negate the demands of divine justice?

NO. The only way he can do that is by paying a heavy, heavy cost, even to the infinite God. Just like with election, how can God predestine such unimaginable blessings for depraved, sinful creatures? A holy God can do this only—notice verse 5—by predestining us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ. The privileges of the adopted state, both legal and inward, are so bound up in the work of Christ as Mediator. It is on the basis of the person and work of Christ. It is adoption unto sons through Jesus Christ.

Galatians 4:4-7 says, “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters. Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba! Father!” Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.”

If Christ did not redeem, there could be no adoption. Why? The simple reason is that God’s love cannot negate God’s holiness and the demands of His justice. And His law has been broken by us. God has purposed that in Christ all the demands of that broken law shall be fully met so that when the Father adopts them, He doesn’t, as it were, close one eye to His law.

Imagine what a horror it would be in such an adoption where God closes his eye, forgets our sins, puts our guilt under some deep rocks or ocean, and adopts us. But what if sometime in the future eternity, some angel or devil opens it and shows all our guilt to God? “Behold what sinners these are! If you are a God of justice, by no means will you clear the guilty. What will you do with that man’s sin?” What a terrible, terrible state heaven would be if we always went about with the fear that some angel might open our past sins and show them to God.

Do you know what God did in His Son? God openly displayed the full weight of His wrath upon Him, bruised Him, cursed Him for our sins. Galatians 3:13 says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us,” so that there are no hidden unpunished sins in our account. And I can think of the future and all the privileges of sonship, never wondering if something will be discovered that will negate that privilege and force God to disinherit me. No, no. I can have the confidence that everything that stood as a hindrance to God adopting me from the legal standpoint has been fully removed. In Christ, when He hung upon a cross, He cried out, “It is finished.” And so He satisfied the demands of the law against His people that they might receive the adoption of sons. We can look into this God’s wonderful, smiling face and we can cry “Abba, Father.” He died, rose again, and said, “I go to my father and your Father,” and went and sat at his right hand and sent the Holy Spirit into our hearts, so you and I can experience the reality of our sonship and cry “Abba, Father.” So Christ not only procured atonement and justification by his life and death, but because of his continuing heavenly ministry as the ascended, exalted Lord, all the gifts and graces of the Spirit have been bestowed upon us.

Oh, blessed be our Savior Jesus Christ! Without him, God could not have only elected but also predestined us to be his sons. That is why someone said, “To the measure you feed upon Christ in the glory of His mediatorial office—Christ crucified, Christ exalted, Christ enthroned, Christ our priest—will be in direct proportion to the liberty of filial access that you enjoy as a son and daughter of God.” Otherwise, you will always come like a guilty slave. When we know such a high privilege we have, we will draw near, and then we shall know the liberty of the sons of God. Blessed be God, the Father of Jesus Christ.

5. The Manner of Adoption

The manner of adoption is “according to the good pleasure of His will.” This is a mystery we cannot fully grasp. What is the ultimate reason as to why such blessings should be conferred upon us with such a cost? Is the answer to be found in us as believers? Is the answer to be found in the world? Is it to be found in angels? Is it to be found in the devil or demons? No, no. He says the ultimate reason for which these blessings have come to us as believers is hidden and locked up in the activity not of our wills or the wills of angels or other men, but it is locked up in the will of God.

Verse 5 says, “having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will.” The ultimate source from which these blessings flow, he says, is locked up in the activity of the divine will. See, this is the great issue that divides all of Christianity into two: whether it is human will or divine will. The first word is God’s will. One’s will is one’s determination, purpose. Verse 11 says God works “all things after the counsel of his will.” The two words, “all things,” include everything that is done according to God’s will.

The reason I titled this “the manner of predestination” is to notice something peculiar said about the exercise of that will of God with reference to the acts of election and predestination that is not said in verse 11 when God runs the universe. The second phrase is “according to the good pleasure of his will.” Wow! It is a strong word, the same word as “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” God has determined in his will to elect and predestine us as sons, not just a mere determination and mere sovereign purpose, or because of no choice, some compulsion within himself, but he has done it with infinite sheer delight.

There is a great difference, you know. Suppose you have a stomach pain. You go to a doctor. The doctor says you have to get an injection and medicines, and you should eat only curd rice, no spice. You don’t like it, but realizing it is for your good, you make a will to do it. Or sometimes someone comes to help; you pity them, so out of compulsion you do it. According to what kind of will? A will of compulsion? “No other option”? A will of hesitation? Suppose you love traveling; you always wanted to go to Kashmir, a dream destination. Your boss says you have to travel to Kashmir for 3 months; only 3 days of work, 4 days of vacation. How will you do it? “According to the good pleasure of his will.” It is a delight and a joy to do this. Well, you see, you are exercising your will, but this exercise of your will brings pleasure and delight. In one, there is sheer determination; in the other, there is the good pleasure of your will.

Paul says, “How did God bless us with such a great blessing?” Verse 5 says, “having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will.” He didn’t do it grudgingly, “no other way,” but out of the good pleasure of his will. He did it with infinite sheer delight. So there is not only the note of inflexible, unchallenged sovereignty in this will, but there is the concept of ineffable delight. So when we think of God’s blessings, with these infinite blessings, the very appointment of those blessings was something God Himself found great delight in.

Finally, what is the end of this adoption? You notice a little phrase: “to Himself.” You are all thinking you are the focus of all this. Oh no. Romans 11:36 says, “For from Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.” God’s purpose for the creation of man is for himself: to glorify his image in man, a similarity of character, that he might have intimacy of communion.

Man was created for God’s delight, for himself, to give delight through fellowship with him. But men fell into sin. Scripture says all mankind became unprofitable; they are no longer profitable for the very thing for which they were made—to bring delight to the heart of God in intimate communion based upon a similarity of character. In the blessings of redemption, by regenerating, justifying, sanctifying, and adopting, God regains that purpose of man’s creation. This is all for his delight. We are caught in his delight.

Scripture talks of his delight in us in amazing, unbelievable words. Zephaniah 3:17 says, “The Lord thy God in the midst of thee, a mighty one who will save.” And what will be the result of His saving? Notice the God-centered perspective. “He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will rest in His love. He will joy over thee with singing.” Wow! How can we fathom this? Almighty God, so happy with what He gets in redemption, that He breaks into song.

So, brothers, here is the act of predestination, the goal of predestination, the object of predestination, the cost of predestination, the manner of predestination, and the end of predestination.

Application

To praise God properly for the glory of His grace in Christ, we must recognize the extravagance of His grace.

First: Realize the high status of being a child of God.

Again, this is another blessing to bless God. Do you realize how we should bless God again for this adoption? If election is glorious, this predestination to adoption is higher than that. Selection does not mean adoption, but the Lord in heaven has not only chosen us, he who has predestined what will happen in the universe has also predestined us to the highest status and privilege: son of God—something the angels themselves have never known, nor ever will. An heir of God, a joint heir with the Son of God, Jesus Christ. All the wealth of God is ours, an inexhaustible supply of God’s benefits. The Apostle Paul is saying that whatever your status may be in the world—you may be rejected, poor, sick, or hated by God—rejoice! You are an heir of an infinite God who rules over all things. You belong to his family. Your last name is God’s last name.

Surely this is the pinnacle point of grace and privilege. We would not dare conceive of such grace, much less claim it, apart from God’s own revelation and assurance. It staggers the imagination because of its amazing condescension and love. It is only as there is the conjunction of the witness of the revelation of God and the inward witness of the Spirit in our hearts that we are able to scale to this pinnacle of faith and say with childlike confidence and love, “Abba, Father.”

The marvelous blessings of adoption: the guarantee of God’s provision for all your needs. All suffering and pain are for your holiness and blamelessness. Blessings of death, the second coming, judgment, and all eternity. How blessed we should feel within ourselves! Do we cherish that? Do we realize that we are the most immensely privileged people in the world? I will tell you, it is such a realization that not only removes all complaining but makes us strive for a high standard of family life.

It has enormous consequences that the sons of God know they are God’s children. The way we see life—whether we will always be complaining and grumbling for small needs or thanking God for what we have and trusting him for our needs—depends on this. The Spirit makes us realize that the Father is very loving and kind, that he provides and cares. He protects them, and he is always on their side. We see all trials and sufferings coming from the Father’s hand and bear them patiently.

Secondly: Realize the great gift of the spirit of adoption.

The Spirit of adoption gives us an intimacy with God (Romans 8:15). Our prayer can become real by him. He gives the assurance and confidence that God is our Father, crying aloud, “Abba!” That cry is the mark of the strength of our new relationship with God.

The Spirit of adoption guides us in life, modifying and influencing the deepest recesses of our personality. He guides our thought processes habitually. He modifies our instinctive reaction to all kinds of circumstances so that our constant and habitual state of mind is like that of children of God.

The Spirit of adoption kills sin in our life. “If by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, because those who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God” (Romans 8:13-14). He gives us a hatred for sin and the spiritual energy and stamina to kill sin in our lives.

Unbelievers

If you are outside of Christ, do you realize what you are blessing? Your sins are not forgiven; there is no justification; no adoption. You don’t realize what you are missing in this life without becoming God’s child. Then, when you leave this world, yesterday we went to the hospital late at night; one man with low blood pressure suddenly died. Believers have adoption blessings; their souls go to heaven; their bodies rest for a future resurrection. But as an unbeliever, their souls are immediately cast into hell to experience unbearable torment, and their bodies wait in the grave for the coming resurrection and judgment. Let me give you some picture of your last day. You will have all your relatives standing outside. Death shall put an end to all the benefits and comforts that you now enjoy. Now you must say, “Honors, friends, pleasures, riches, credit, etc., farewell forever! I shall never have one more happy moment! Death will be an inlet to judgment, yes, to an eternity of misery!” No one will be with you alone in the ICU. The monitors will show weak signals. You will die sweating, filled with fear. It is like being dragged to the slaughter. Your soul is filled with terror. Black horrors and thick darkness gather round you.

How do you become a child of God? John says, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become the sons of God.” Oh, receive Him as He’s offered in the Gospel, freely, as an adequate, an able, and a willing Savior. It all comes by Jesus Christ. Just like Joseph was raised from a dungeon to the top position in the kingdom overnight, if you will believe these truths, you will be raised to the most royal status in the universe overnight in your spiritual experience from the dungeon life you are living. If you get to him, get into him, they are yours: full pardon, acceptance with a holy God. He will make you his child and send his Spirit so you can cry, “Abba, Father.”

7 Wonders of Election

August 24, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

Ephesians 1:3-14

Paul begins with a glorious benediction, not to men, but to God. Paul blesses God and the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. Verse 4 starts with ‘just as,’ meaning these are those blessings. He is going to list all those blessings non-stop until verse 14. These blessings are from the works of the Trinitarian God: verses 3-6 detail the Father’s work, 7-12 the Son’s work, and 13-14 the Holy Spirit’s work.

He makes us climb to the highest heaven, takes a right, and goes to past eternity, showing us the blessing of election. Then he brings us to the present, showing redemption, and goes to all future eternity, showing our inheritance. Past Election, Present redemption, Future inheritance—a whole panoramic view of spiritual blessings. As we make this journey, we will travel to incredible heights. These things will just explode on our minds; they will blow our minds. Are you ready for the journey? Amen.

In verse 4, Paul begins with the first spiritual blessing of God’s sovereign, free, and eternal election. If you know the world outside Christianity, more than 90% today reject this truth. Not only do they not believe in election, they hate this truth. I could take my expository machine gun and start shooting all of them, proving this truth from the Bible and answering objections, but I will not do that. This is because in the context, Paul doesn’t do it; he just declares it as a glorious truth that makes him burst out in rapturous praise to God. The focus of his mind is not on men, but on God. So, I want to show this truth in a way that will make your soul rise from clinging to the dust, forget yourself and your situation, rise to the heavens with Paul, and say, “Blessed be God who chose us before the foundation of the world.” That is going to be my goal. It is a high goal and a prayer, and only God the Holy Spirit can help us achieve this.

If you don’t believe in election, it is because of the poison of man-centered Arminian theology. You don’t know who God is, neither do you know the depth of your depravity, and you don’t know what you are missing. For the apostle Paul, as he thinks of all the blessings of redemption, the first and top blessing that comes to his mind is election. If you don’t believe in election, you should not believe and should stop reading all the New Testament books that talk about election. That is Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter, 1 & 2 John, Jude, and Revelation. But don’t worry, you have Philemon with 25 verses and 3 John with 14 verses. Only two books don’t talk about election. You will never be able to praise God like Paul, and I hope today’s message makes you realize what you are missing by not believing this blessed truth. So, the goal of my message is that, like Paul, we should be absolutely overwhelmed that God has chosen us and we should burst into praise. Every word in verse 4 will make you bless God. It talks about the wonders of election. Like the seven wonders of the world, this verse talks about the seven wonders of Election, so I have seven headings.

Seven Headings:

Behold the glory of election.
Behold the author of election.
Behold the time of election.
Behold the object of election.
Behold the cause of election.
Behold the foundation of election.
Behold the goal of election.

I understand some of your stares, “Pastor, are you going to keep us until evening?” Just watch.

1. Behold the Glory of Your Election

Election. What election? The only elections we know are state and national elections. Let me use that as an illustration. When there is an election, there is so much activity. City-to-city election campaigns, all kinds of false promises made to get elected. Big gatherings, house-to-house campaigns. It is called the festival of democracy. The Election Commission monitors that election. Then the day of the election arrives; people cast their vote. Then the counting day starts. Oh, what tension as the counting begins. When the results are announced, in places like Tamil Nadu, there is an unspeakable celebration and stir—a festival. The counting is done; Mr. K. Marimuthu has received the maximum votes and can form the government. As soon as it is announced, oh, what crackers, what celebration, giving of sweets, dancing, drums. His whole street will be full of lights and celebrations. All the party workers receive big gifts, food, drinks. The great hero comes out; there is a big garland he cannot even bear; so many wishes from the whole country. Oh, what slogans: anjaa nenjam (fearless heart), Tamil singam (Tamil lion), purichi thalivan (revolutionary leader),… hail hail. Imagine a victory like Donald Trump’s. He is elected as President of the U.S. All the world, all business leaders in the world congratulate him, as do all celebrities, national leaders, international leaders, and international organizations: the United Nations, WHO, NATO. Congratulations will be pouring in. The whole day international TV will be showing his face. He gets the highest security: bodyguards, the White House, housing, the Oval Office. Whatever he says is now a world headline. Imagine the emotions of that man, if it’s the first time he’s elected. It cannot be expressed, right? On one side, an unspeakable sense of worthiness, pride, and joy. He will feel as if he’s on top of the world. And on the other side, disbelief. He can’t believe if this is true.

Apostle Paul says, “My brothers, you stand so amazed by this petty election. There was an election beyond all this.” The Trinitarian Election Commission participated in that election. That is not like a 5-year election, but an eternal election. Votes were not cast by a mass of fickle, changeable, mortal people, but by an infinite, immense, unchangeable, immortal God before whom all the nations and all people on earth are counted as nothing, less than nothing, less than zero. This God passed over billions of people, and his eyes fell on you. His heart’s love was fixed on you. The lottery fell on your head. Congratulations, you are an elect of the infinite God. You have been elected. Congratulations. The honor and glory of being an elect of God is beyond every imagination.

This is the greatest election. Not only in the world, there are other elections mentioned in the Bible: a national election of Israel, also called theocratic election, where God elects a nation to be his; there is a vocational/ministerial election, where God chooses someone to do the ministry of priest, king, or prophet. But all that is temporary and ends with this world. The highest and greatest election of God is soteric election: the election of a man or woman to shower all salvation blessings to reveal the riches of the height of this God’s grace. The Trinitarian Election Commission has validated the vote and confirmed your selection. Congratulations! You are an elect from that highest election. Rejoice!

See how simply Paul puts the act of election. The simplest sentence in English: subject, verb, object. Paul says in verse 4, “He chose us.” Subject is He, verb is chose, object is us. Author, Act, Object. The great doctrine of election is given in the simplest sentence; it cannot be said more clearly.

The word “chose” (eklegō) has two ideas: it means out of innumerable things, you pick one for yourself, just as a man out of millions of women picks one for himself to make her his own. Election always implies non-selection. If you are choosing something, you are rejecting others. In this election, think of this great God, when there were quadrillion, quintillion, googol, googolplex numbers of people before him—all the mass of humanity who will be born in this world until the end—all were before his eyes. Out of that vast humanity, he set his love on you and cast his vote on you and selected you. Paul says, “Congratulations, you are an elect.” God picked you and made you his own possession.

Election is the first great saving act of God. If you are a Christian today, you owe it to election. If your sins are forgiven today and you are clothed in the righteousness of Christ, you owe it to the divine decision. If you are adopted into the family of God today, you owe it to God’s selection. If you are going to heaven to spend eternity with Jesus Christ, you owe it to election. It is so important to get such a basic idea right. A proper understanding of salvation begins with understanding and believing in this blessed truth. If you don’t grasp or believe it, you know what happens when you put the first button on wrong—the whole shirt will be crooked. Your whole Christian experience will be distorted. You have to unbutton everything again and start thinking of your salvation from here. Blessed be God for the wonder of the glory of election.

2. Behold the Author of Your Election

Blessed be God even as he picked us out for himself. “He,” God the Father, chose us. Can you believe this? The almighty God—unchangeable, infinite, dwelling in the light which no man can approach, almighty, eternal, most wise, most loving, most just God—conducted an election and he chose me! He chose me! That is what makes this election stunning! If we have any sense of who this God is, this truth will make us stand in shock, speechless. Behold the author of your election.

You are not just chosen by the majority of men who may choose today and reject tomorrow, but you are chosen by the unchangeable, immutable God. It is called the immutability of the decree of election. This selection makes you the object of his love, and you become his. This status never changes for all the eons of eternal ages to come. Whatever comes in your life and goes, may all the devils gather to spoil this, it will not change. The immutable decree of election will stand. This election is not by men who live today and die, but by God who lives forever. It is an eternal election.

Do you know something by this election? I became God’s, the beloved of God, his own. I am his great wealth. It is so amazing to think; we were first God’s own, and we were given to Christ by God. John 17:6 says, “I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world. They were Yours, You gave them to Me.” We were first God’s, how? By election. And we were elected and given to Christ to do everything to safely redeem us. But firstly, we were God’s own by election. Allow that to sink in deeply. It will make you burst into praise: “Blessed be God and Father of Lord Jesus Christ.” Oh, believers who keep thinking of all the passing illusions and are discouraged, lift up your eyes and think about your election. Congratulations, you are elected.

So the author of election is God. Remember the perfections of this God. He is a God of inflexible justice. He never does anything that will contradict his attributes. Romans 9 says, all those who object to election as unfair, “Oh, what about man’s responsibility? Are we just robots?” Paul’s only response is a rebuke. “Who are you, man? How dare depraved dust find fault with God? Shut up.” Only people who don’t know who God is, and don’t know how depraved they are, try to judge God and reject election. Don’t take God’s sovereignty and man’s choice and try to find some middle ground, or you will have just destroyed both of them. The Bible reveals both. Leave them alone. Let the tension be there. God knows how to resolve it; we are not God. Let God resolve it in His infinite mind. You don’t understand, but that is how you can wonder and worship this God for election! Blessed be God for the author of election!

3. Behold the Time of Your Election

Every election has an election date. When did my election happen? Verse 4 says, “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world,” meaning before the creation of the world. When is this? Titus 1:2 says “before time began.” If it is within time, we can fix the date, but it says before time began. When was that? See if your minds can grasp. Let us get into a jet plane with Paul. We are in March 2025. Let us go up and take a left turn and time travel into the past in our mind. How long can we go back? Before you were born, not only you, but anyone here was born. Go back to the time of Christ in the 1st century. Go back to Moses, Abraham’s time, Adam’s time, then the creation of the world. Then keep going, going, going… where nothing was created. All the universe was sleeping in the monumental mind of God. Nothing was born. The eternal, self-sufficient God with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit lived alone with all blessedness, without any beginning. Keep going, going, going until you become tired, until you feel your mind will burst, until your lifespan ends. You can go no longer. A very far timeline where only the chariots of Jehovah alone can travel. You arrive at such a time, you see no other life, no stir, no air, no breath, in an awesome silence. Jehovah alone existed. We creatures of time, we struggle to remember what happened yesterday; you cannot grasp this.

Paul says at that time in all eternal past time, however many years God lived in the past, all those past years, Jehovah set his love on you and elected you. You were the object of his love from all the time in the past he existed as God in eternity. Oh, the wonder of this election! All the time God was God in the past without beginning: I was loved and elected by God.

Unimaginable blessedness. To be loved and selected by a nation as Prime Minister or President, to be garlanded and adored by the majority, to celebrate my victorious election—how many million times higher is the honor of this election? Oh, what a blessing for fleshly mortals! Creatures of time. I feel like looking down on Donald Trump and saying, “You are elected for 5 years by these people who are nothing less than nothing, but I am elected eternally by an infinite, eternal God.” Will this make you burst into praise? “Blessed be God and Father of Lord Jesus Christ.”

This time before the world began emphasizes that this election was done purely on the basis of God’s free, sovereign love and nothing based on me. Romans 9 says before Jacob and Esau were born, “Did anything good or evil,” God said he loved Jacob and hated Esau. Why? To show his sovereign election. So, before I was not even born, God sovereignly, freely, and unconditionally set his love on me. Can I ask you to stand back, amazed and blinded with the bright light of this glorious truth? Blessed be God and Father of Jesus Christ for the time of election.

4. Behold the Object of Election

The word “us.” He is talking about believers in Ephesians and including them. Who are these people? These were worshipers of the dirty goddess Diana, with all kinds of idolatry, adultery, dirty black magic, and all Gentile practices. In chapter 2, verse 1, “you were dead in trespasses and sins,” “in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience,” “among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath.” These depraved people were God’s object of election. That is the wonder. Even when he saw them so abhorrent and an abomination, he elected them, children of the devil like demons.

How does Paul know such people are the elect of God? In verse 13, it says, “who have heard the word of truth and believed.” Because all those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and repent of their sins, by the effect of their faith, prove they have been chosen by God. They live as saints and believers in the world. It is only because God chose them that they come to faith and live as saints. 2 Thessalonians 2:13 says, “But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.” How does Paul read their election? He reads their election as through the preaching of the gospel they were effectually called into faith and repentance, and the fruits of it flowed out in the sanctifying influences of the Holy Spirit. God’s eternal election comes to light in the effectual call of the gospel, evidencing itself in faith and the fruits of faith, namely a holy and sanctified life.

Blessed be God. What about us? Were we lovely? We were once dead in sins, children of the devil, walking in all lusts, wallowing, hating God. The deep reason for not believing or not being excited and standing in wonder and shock about election is because we don’t know the depth of our depravity. “Me! Elected by a holy God like this.” Oh, if we could just know the depth of our depravity, we will scream and bless God for choosing us. The Ephesians knew how dead they were, so they could bless God. Paul always carried with him this constant sense of his own sinfulness, depravity, and unworthiness. Remember how he was before; he said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief.” And such a heart is a heart into which the doctrine of election finds quick root and flourishes, always creating wonder and worship. If you cannot bless God, you need a sight of your heart.

Why did someone come and share the gospel? Why did you believe the gospel? Why did you join the church? Why are you still continuing in faith? Why did you come to church today? Were you smarter than others, seeking God? No, no, not at all. Oh, all this is not by any chance or accident, but the effects of the sovereign election of God. You were the object of his eternal election, even though you were wallowing in depravity. Blessed be God for the objects of election—sinful, depraved people like us.

5. Behold the Cause of Your Election

Why did God choose us? The end of verse 5 says, “in love.” The free, unchangeable, unconditional, eternal love of God is the cause of election. Oh, when this God loves, He loves like God. It is God’s love. Jeremiah 31:3 says, “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.”

The thrill of this truth is that for however many years God lived in the past, with no beginning, he set his love on you. Allow that to sink in deeply. “Me, a worm, may live 60-70 years and die. I am a creature of time. I don’t remember most things that happened yesterday. And am I valued so much by God?” Yes, congratulations, you are an elect of God. Before I had any being, any existence, I was loved so much. I feel like running like a mad fellow and asking every man, woman, tree, mountain… “Why me! Why me?” The heavens are silent; the scriptures are silent. The only cause existed in God. Behold how much God loved me. Oh, blessed be God for his free, unconditional love.

6. Behold the Foundation of Election

What is the foundation of this election? But He is a holy God, a righteous God of inflexible justice. How can he love us, who are so fully sinful and depraved, so much that he chose us in eternity and blessed us with every spiritual blessing? How can a holy God have such great purposes for sinful beings? What is the foundation or basis of election? Can you again see that small phrase, “in Him”? The foundation of the election was done in union with Christ. He chose us in eternity and united us to Christ in eternity. Every blessing comes to us through Christ, even election. God saw us in our fall and depravity and so united us to Christ.

What do you say about this love of God? He loved me so much. It’s not that he saw me in terrible sin, that I would burn in hell, so he pitied me and reacted and did something after he saw my need. But even before I was born, he saw me. He knew I would fall in Adam, would be a depraved creature, a child of the devil, not as a victim, but as a rebel hating God with all my heart and loving only sin, fully depraved, and justly deserving only his wrath. Though he knew what a wretched object I would be, even then he loved and chose me. His love foresaw that I would be so depraved, so helpless, and thought to save me in eternal past, in past eternity. And think of at what cost! To give his only darling of heaven to redeem me. Not in time, not after I was born and became a sinner, but even in eternity, even before mankind fell. He gave his son as a sacrifice for me. That is why the Bible says he was the lamb slain when? “before the foundation of the world” for me.

Oh mortals! Stand back and be amazed at the love of the eternal God! What love is this? I understand humans fall, they will suffer eternally, so God is doing something to save them. But here is God who chooses us knowing we will fall, and his love does not stop but pursues us to save us by uniting us to his most beloved Son, and slays him in eternity in his mind! Blessed be God for the foundation of election. Oh, God saw me in eternity. Will this make us rise to the heavens and say to that God with deep gratitude, “I see you”?

7. Behold the Goal of Your Election

Ephesians 1:4 says, “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.” The goal of election is to be holy and blameless. The verse talks about the immediate goal of election, because there is a difference between the immediate and the ultimate goal of God in election. The ultimate goal is stated in verse six: “to the praise of the glory of his grace.” That is the final goal. But the immediate goal by which that final goal is realized and accomplished is mentioned here. For example, a man saves money. You ask him why he is saving. To build a house. What is the house for? To make my wife happy. So his immediate goal is building the house; the final goal is making his wife happy. You see, it is only by building the house that his wife gets happy. It is only through the immediate goal of making us holy and blameless that the final goal of the glory of God’s grace is achieved. The immediate goal is an indispensable stepping stone for the ultimate goal.

First, we should be holy. This is not talking about justification; it is not that we are just declared holy, but that we should be holy. So it talks about sanctification. It is not imputed, but infused, experimental holiness. We should be separated from sin and everything that is against God’s holy character. Then, “blameless.” This is an Old Testament term for a sacrifice without any spot. We reach a state where there is no sign or stain of any sin or depravity. We reach a state where, seeing us, nobody should be able to say that we have fallen in Adam. None of the effects of the fall and depravity are to be seen in us. Holy is positive; we conform to all the character of God. Blameless is negative; there should not even be a small spot in us against God’s nature. So the goal of election is nothing less than to deliver us from all the effects of the fall and sin, to negatively make us blameless, and to make us like him, holy as he is holy.

Notice the glorious phrase: “before Him.” What does this mean? Jude 24 says, “Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, And to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.” The same phrase is used: “before the presence of his glory.” Wow! The Bible uses this phrase to speak of the glorious presence of God on his throne. So the goal is that we should become so holy and blameless, not just before men and externally, but that the all-piercing eye of Jehovah should see us, find no spot, and see us as so holy that he should delight and rejoice in us. Every atom in my being, my soul, body, heart, mind, conscience so cleansed from all the effects of depravity and sin. I am made so holy and blameless. Forget about a thought of sinning, but not even an inclination to think anything against God’s law. So holy and blameless, I can stand before the presence of His glory with “exceeding joy.” This presence, when most holy men stood, they fell like dead men. I can stand with exceeding joy. Wow! This is the goal of election.

If you ask what the goal of election is, the phrase “before him” and “his presence” also means to bring us to the most intimate, closest fellowship with God that a creature can know. Since God is holy and blameless, the only way we can go close to him and have the closest fellowship with him is by becoming holy and blameless. Sin has separated us from God; we cannot hold direct communion with God now. So God makes us holy and blameless as a goal so he might enter into unfettered communion with his creature.

One preacher said, “The end of his choosing to be holy and without blemish was that we might be in his presence, and that he might delight himself in us, and we might delight in him in the most intimate fellowship. He made this the goal so that every last barrier between him and us be removed.”

Isn’t this what we see in Revelation 21? When we see redemption’s purposes coming to their full culmination, what is the state envisioned? A great statement in verse 2, “And I saw the holy city, that’s the church, New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride,” Ephesians 5, “without wrinkle, without spot, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, ‘Behold the tabernacle, the dwelling place of God is with men and he shall dwell with them. They shall be his people. God himself shall be with them.'” That’s it. That’s what it’s all about. God shall be with us in close fellowship. That is heaven. And of course, the side effects: verse 4 says, “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” But we will be with God in close communion; that is heaven.

Revelation 22:3 says, “They shall see his face.” It is the beatific vision of God. Manton has said, “and I should spend millions of years in describing heaven to you, in simple words: Heaven is perfect holiness in God’s presence, enjoying and loving him, even as we are loved by him.”

So the goal of election is to bring us to a state of perfection, that we would be in a condition fit for intimate communion with God. So the goal is to take us to heaven so we can enjoy him and our inheritance forever. Blessed be God for the goal of election.

The Seven Wonders of Election:

Behold the glory of election.
Behold the author of election.
Behold the time of election.
Behold the object of election.
Behold the cause of election.
Behold the foundation of election.
Behold the goal of election.

Application

I hope as believers all these wonders make us bless God. Someone said every person in this world is craving for self-worth. All their life is to make everyone think, “I am valuable; I can achieve; I am worthy,” by their efforts, by money, dress, house, job. Some people take a religious turn and do self-righteous works to tell the world and themselves that they are something, important, valuable, to get a sense of value or worth. Do you realize the worth of being an elect of God? Is this value enough? The world was created for the elect; redemption was accomplished and is being applied for the elect. Providence runs for the good of the elect.

Yes, the world was created for the glory of God, but you know God will be glorified through his elect. If you are not elect, it is better not to be born in the world. In that sense, the world was created for them. God had them in mind when he created the world. Not only creation, but great redemption was accomplished for the elect. Jesus came into this world, accomplished salvation, ascended, seated, sent the Holy Spirit. For whom does he intercede? “I lay down my life for my sheep.” John 17:9 says, “I do not pray for the world, but for those whom you have given me.” “Keep them; sanctify them; bring them to heaven so they see my glory.” 2 Timothy 2:10 says, “Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.” How Paul suffered! He says, “I endure all that for the elect.” For whom is Jesus coming? Matthew 24:31 says, “And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” Ultimately, the end of Revelation shows all those whose names are in the book of life—the elect will safely land in heaven; not one will be lost.

Not only creation and redemption, but providence works for the good of the elect. Are you here struggling with problems? Sometimes you cannot even share your troubles. You think with all these problems, how can I read the Bible, pray, and serve the Lord? In 1 Peter, when he writes to terribly suffering Christians, whose own family members were burned by Nero, they have seen husbands, children, parents, and wives burned, Christians thrown to lions, put in jail, cut in two pieces, their properties taken. The government and people are against Christians. How can they live with faith? Who needs this Jesus? Who needs this salvation? Peter says in the midst of all these troubles, that what will give them hope and steadfastness is if they understand who they are. The first truth he teaches them to encourage them is that they are the elect of God. If you can just understand the glory of your election, this will fill you with great peace and joy in the midst of any situation. It is the most comforting truth of all truths.

See, providence may be difficult for us; you may be poor, sick, and have many troubles; the world may not select you. Rejoice, you are elected by God. Not only creation and redemption, but providence runs and works for the good of the elect. Romans 8:31-33 says, “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect?” Going back to verse 28, “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”

Amazing comforting truth. See, God not only chose us to go to heaven, but remember the immediate goal of election was to make us holy and blameless in this life. So when God chose us, he not only chose the end but also all the means. So everything that happens to us in our lives is chosen by God. Our birth, our lifespan, how our days should go, what experiences we should face, what we should face last, today. All these experiences, with providence working outside and his spirit inside, are working for the great good of making us holy and blameless before him.

That is why if I am elect, all things work for me for God. God not only chose me, but chose every single thing, every single experience, every single event, every single second of experience is chosen in eternity. Whatever you went through last week, what you are going through today, is elected by God. All things in my life are elected by God as a means to be holy and blameless. Oh, how it should comfort us and make us see life in a different perspective.

1 Peter 1:6 says, “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

You should rejoice in this, come what may in life. Suffering comes because it is needed. It is essential because of your depravity to make you holy and blameless. Oh elect, learn to see your life differently.

1 Peter 5:10-11 says:

10 But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. 11 To Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.

See, this is what is happening in your life as an elect. Unless you see yourself as an elect, you will not understand the trials in your life. Or you will always be grumbling. So, in this, greatly rejoice. “I am poor,” you may say, but you are an elect. “I am sick,” but you are an elect. “I have family problems,” you are an elect. “Struggling with sin,” you are an elect. All those things will change, but your election is rooted in the immutability of God’s decree; that will never change. This is a rare, unattainable blessedness. If you are a true believer, I should congratulate you. You are an elect. You have greater worth than the President of the U.S. Can you get this blessedness even if you give billions of dollars? No, it is the sovereign choice of God. The lottery fell on me. “Why me? Not my relatives, my forefathers, the millions of people going on, dumping in dirty water; they all didn’t get this blessedness… a rare blessedness on me.” In a way, in election, God elected people, put their names in the book of life, and said, “World creation is for them; redemption is for them; providence is for them.”

God wants you to leave this place rejoicing, blessing him that you were an object of his own eternal electing purposes. So brethren, will this truth not make us rise above our circumstances like Paul and bless God, the Father of Jesus Christ? How pitiable our faith is. We are not caught up and rising to the heavens; a temporary worldly situation removes all our peace and joy.

Arminians argue that election will make us carelessly sinful. But the verse says he chose us to be holy. He did not choose us because we are holy; he chose us to be holy. Left to ourselves, we would never be holy but would die with a death grip, loving our sins. The most holy people who lived on this earth are people who believed in election. The effect of election will result in us growing in holiness. Examine if you are growing in holiness. That is the fruit of election. Yes, God has chosen us, but Peter calls us to make our calling and election sure by living a worthy, holy life. Is the fruit of your life effectual? Examine yourself so you are not deceived.

For those who are unbelievers: If you are not elect, woe unto you. Whatever you have in this world—education, money, achievements, wealth—all will not only perish, but all this will take you to hell. Because if you’re not elect, it is better not to have been born. The non-elect are called vessels of wrath. Just as God elected some to show the height of his infinite grace, God has left others to show eternally how wrathful he is. Those sad people will eternally glorify his wrath. If you are non-elect, you are like a tender chicken. You’ve seen those videos in a shop: nice food, facilities, good health, careful; they clean them daily, but all that is done to fatten it and kill it. You are like that. All that you enjoy in this life, you are allowed to live, allowed to freely sin, freely disobey God, even live a long life. God is patiently with you, giving more mercies. Why? Romans says you are storing up wrath for you if you don’t repent. We should lament for you.

What should you do? You don’t have to climb to heaven to check if you are an elect, if your name is in the book of life. If you believe and repent in Jesus, you know you are an elect, because all the elect will do that. That is how we know they are elect. You can prove you are elect by believing and repenting. Or else, woe unto you.

Sin’s Freedom Is Slavery

August 22, 2025August 22, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

The work of the god of this world is to blind us to spiritual realities and keep us deceived. He twists things upside down, constantly deceiving with outward appearances. He lies to people about happiness, wisdom, and freedom. He constantly tells everyone that the rich and prosperous are the truly happy ones.

The work of Scripture is to undeceive us from his lies. Scripture tells us that it’s not the outwardly rich, but the poor in spirit, the mourners, the persecuted, the pure, and the meek who are truly happy people (Matthew 5).

He also lies about wisdom, suggesting the wisest are those who cheat, commit fraud, and become successful in this world. Scripture says those who gain the world but lose their soul are the greatest fools. The truly wise are those who are wise for their salvation, are rich toward God, and focus on the world to come.

In the same way, the devil also lies about freedom, which all people desire. This is the world’s great deception: that freedom is doing whatever we want without any limits. Obeying God’s law—walking with Him, reading His Word, and praying—seems like a prison and slavery.

Following rules or discipline… our children sometimes feel, “Oh, rules, rules, discipline!” They’re impatient with any restraint, seeing it as a chain that limits them. “When will I get the freedom to do what I want without control and to speak what I want?” They see discipline as a burden and want to break free from any control. The devil has made them think that is freedom.

Even we think freedom is having enough money, time, facilities, and health to do whatever we please. Isn’t that what most of us think? All who have gone in that direction have realized they’ve become more and more enslaved. Learn this well: carnal freedom without the control of God’s law is the worst kind of slavery.

Here are five reasons why it is the worst slavery.

1. It’s a Prison of Our Own Lusts

The worst punishment God can give us is His fearful and dreadful judgment. After long patience—teaching us again and again that our true happiness is in glorifying and enjoying Him—we keep running away from that toward the world. After much patience and trying to correct us, knowing we won’t listen and want to break His boundaries, He gives us up to the rule of our own hearts’ lusts, to do as we please and destroy ourselves without control.

As it says in Romans 2, we are given up to a depraved mind and the lusts of our hearts. Psalm 81:12 says, “So I gave them up to their own hearts’ lust, and they walked in their own counsels.” We are left to our brutish affections. You don’t know what a terrible tyranny our lusts are. They create a prison for us, putting different chains on us and dragging us in different directions. This fleshly liberty makes a person slavishly follow their depraved heart and destroy the great means for them to be happy—which is to enjoy God by obeying Him.

Worldly people may enjoy this “freedom” as much as fish enjoy being in their element of water, yet the reality is that they are still slaves. They are in a spiritual prison; this is a true and perfect bondage. They spend their whole lives chasing vanity, which will never make them truly happy, and live with a deep void within themselves. This is because we were created to be happy when we enjoy God and obey Him. Pleasures, honors, profits, and wealth will never bring true happiness until they are sought for the glory of God.

Pleasure, delight, and contentment of mind and body are meant to be a subservient help to make us happy only when we seek them to glorify God. These things are not to be desired for themselves but subordinately, in order to our great end. But when they entice and detain our affections, they become our idols, and we become their slaves. The more we serve them, the more we lose our liberty.

2. Carnal Freedom Creates a Disordered Soul

This “freedom” brings great disorder to our soul and makes us slaves. The proper order of the soul is for the mind and conscience to first decide what is right—what will glorify God and make me happy. Man was created to be ruled by the mind and conscience, which move the heart and produce right emotions, which then move the will and body parts to perform right actions. But this sinful “freedom” reverses the whole order, making a person like an enslaved animal.

In the body, if the head were where the feet should be and the feet where the head should be, such a dis-ordination is in the soul when worldly things are sought for our own selfish lusts and not for God’s glory. This slavery creates an inversion where this order is completely reversed. Outward pleasures affect the senses, which affect the heart, which then overpower the mind and conscience. Although the mind feels it is foolish and not right, the will is carried captive, and the person becomes blinded and goes on headlong to their own destruction. Lust takes the throne instead of reason.

3. We Become Slaves of Our Lusts

Consider the great tyranny and power of sin; it takes away all a person’s right and power to control themselves and their actions. Many times, they want to change and stop certain habits, but they cannot. The power of slavery draws them with compulsion to do things they know will destroy them. When sin commands, they obey and cannot say no.

This bondage is more noticeable to those who feel some remorse or guilt because of health issues, inconvenience, shame, or loss, yet they still cannot leave their lusts. So, in despair, they resolve to continue as slaves. Romans 7:14 says, “I am carnal, sold under sin.” The corrupt passions are like wild horses that do not obey the driver but pull toward destruction. Titus 3:3 says, “Serving divers lusts and pleasures.” When a man yields himself to his own desires, he becomes a proper slave. Romans 6:16 asks, “Do you not know that to whom you yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants you are whom you obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?” Therefore, Basil of Seleucia calls a carnal man a slave who is dragged by the chariots of his own passions and corrupt affections. He cannot sleep properly, think properly, or feel properly. He acts like someone mentally unstable.

4. This Bondage Becomes Deeper by Practice

Sin becomes an unbreakable habit. The more we sin, the more we are enslaved by it. It’s like a nail; the more it is knocked, the more it is fastened in the wood. It’s like an incurable disease that gets worse with practice. We might know what’s right, but we can’t do it because sin has a total hold on us. This is the ultimate form of bondage—being unable to help yourself, even when you want to. Jeremiah 13:23 says, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good who are accustomed to do evil.”

First, a person yields themselves to sin as a servant through a partnership agreement. Then, they become a slave by conquest. “Lord, I am a slave; I gave my will to my enemy, and he made a chain of it to bind me and keep me from You. I can do nothing but sin against You.” Thus, we are enslaved little by little.

5. As Slaves, We Always Live a Life of Fear and Terror

Living in sin brings a constant, underlying fear. We are afraid of death, judgment, and the consequences of our actions. This fear is like a cruel master, always present and preventing us from having real peace. A life lived in constant fear is the opposite of freedom.

There is a fire smothering in the bosom of a sinner, and sometimes it flares up in actual moments of dread and horror. Living like that, a person cannot hear messages about death, hell, or judgment without trembling. They dare not seriously think about these subjects. They always live with a crushing conscience and fear. Small events in life—small vessels, thunder, news of an earthquake, war, some health problem—all send trembling into their soul. A cruel master will always keep them in fear.

Is this freedom? This is the condition of every “free sinner” without Christ. He is the worst slave: a slave to his sins, lusts, the world, and Satan. He is “subject to bondage all days,” living in danger of hidden fears. So, do you call this a free, jolly life? I call this a cursed life of slavery to sin.

The only deliverance for such a sinner is to realize his slavery and seek freedom from his sin through Jesus Christ.

Is protective sex within marriage permitted in Bible?

August 19, 2025August 19, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

There is no direct mention of “protected sex” or specific forms of contraception, such as condoms and other modern inventions, in scripture. Therefore, the issue is not a matter of a single, clear-cut command. To understand this topic, we must apply broader biblical principles, learn from historical theology, and consider specific circumstances.

Early Church and Early Reformers

I know some early reformers opposed protected sex, basing their stance on the command to “be fruitful and multiply” in Genesis 1 and their interpretation of the story of Onan in Genesis 38, and his deliberate act of “spilling his seed on the ground which angered God to kill him.

Later Developments

On Permissible Contraception: Over time, believers arrived at a general consensus by taking a more balanced biblical view. While Onan’s act of “spilling his seed” was part of his sin, it is not seen as the entirety of it. His primary sin was his rebellious refusal to fulfill the levirate marriage law and raise up a child for his deceased brother. He was using his sexual act for his own pleasure while deliberately and selfishly shirking his responsibility, which is a key distinction from a loving couple responsibly planning their family.

Consequently, non-abortifacient birth control methods, such as condoms and other barrier or hormonal methods that do not terminate a fertilized egg, were permitted. They emphasized a crucial distinction between preventing conception (contraception) and ending a life that has already begun (abortion).

On Children as a Blessing: While birth control is permitted, children are still considered a blessing and a gift from God. The command to “be fruitful and multiply” is viewed not as a demand for unlimited procreation but as a general principle to embrace and desire children as part of a family. The use of birth control can be a way to responsibly steward family size and timing, taking into account factors like the parents’ health, finances, and the well-being of the family.

Sex Seen as More Than Procreation: While procreation is a vital and God-given purpose, God also ordained sex in marriage for other purposes, such as mutual pleasure, companionship, and intimacy, as supported by passages like the Song of Solomon and 1 Corinthians 7:5. Sex is also a way for a husband and wife to express love and strengthen their bond. Our own confession lists the purposes of marriage as “the mutual help of husband and wife; for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and of the Church with a holy seed; and for preventing of uncleanness.” From this view, using contraception to space out children or for other reasons is not sinful.

Responsible Family Planning: Many Christians believe in exercising good stewardship over their bodies and resources. This principle can be applied to family planning, suggesting that it is wise and responsible to use contraception to ensure a couple can provide for and raise their children in a way that honors God. This perspective views protected sex as a way to plan a family wisely and in accordance with the couple’s circumstances. It allows parents to consider their health, financial situation, and capacity to raise and educate their children well rather than having as many children as possible without forethought. It is seen as a way of exercising God-given wisdom in family planning.

The Sovereignty of God: Many Reformed Christians argue that God is ultimately sovereign over the “opening and closing of the womb.” Contraception does not override God’s plan but is part of the means He has provided to His people for living responsible lives. The fact that no contraceptive method is 100% effective is seen by some as a testament to God’s ultimate control.

In summary: The use of protected sex within the confines of a marriage is not considered sinful. Instead, it is viewed as a permissible and often responsible means of family planning that allows a couple to balance the purposes of procreation, intimacy, and wise stewardship.

Two Goats Atonement – Lev 16

August 4, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

A statistics report says every person in Bangalore creates an average of one-half to one kilogram of garbage. The whole city creates 3,500 tons, and one ton is 1,000 kilograms, so that is 35 lakh kilograms of garbage in just one day. Imagine for a month, and for a year, that is 1,277,500,000 kilograms, more than 1.2 billion kilograms. That is just one city; imagine the huge amount for the whole nation of India. What a burden this would be for the nation. Imagine if every person and every family were asked to keep their garbage within their house and could only dump it once a year. What a huge burden it would be for every person, every family, and the whole nation. If the garbage van doesn’t come for two days, we get so tense, and it becomes a burden. For a year, what a burden that would be.

This is a dim example of the great burden every Israelite’s conscience felt. God had made them realize how holy he is, and on the other side, from Leviticus 11-15, he made them realize the burden and guilt of sin and the importance of maintaining a ritually clean life. The uncleanness from birth, the surrounding land, water, air, animals, leprosy of body, garment, and house, and continuous bodily discharges, meant every man’s household had accumulated tons and tons of uncleanness in the eyes of God throughout the year. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, every Jew and every family would have uncleanness accumulated through daily violations of divine commandments. If you could measure it by size and weight, it would be an infinitely big mountain, a vast, shoreless ocean.

All these accumulated burdens of moral impurity are big, immeasurable tons of garbage. We may even see in our mind’s eye a spiritually immeasurable, vast, vast amount of unclean garbage on each person’s conscience, burdening him, uncleanness that has been accumulated through the year. The whole nation was pressed with the burden of their guilt, the accumulated weight of sin, and their unworthiness to stand before this God of burning holiness.

This is not just a problem for Israel, but it is every son of Adam’s problem. Created in the image of God, every breath, every atom of his being, yearns for the face of his Creator. He was created to glorify and enjoy this God. The great hindrance from his side to come to God is his own guilty, burdened conscience. Today, each of our greatest problems is a guilty conscience. What does it do? The same thing it made Adam do. It is what makes you hide from God like Adam and Eve, and what makes you shift blame to everyone else for all the wrongs you do, like Adam blamed Eve and even God. The Bible describes the wicked as being like a “tossed sea, for it cannot be still”; it is the cause of all restlessness, constant inner turmoil, a persistent feeling of unease, anxiety, fear, regret, tension, and an inability to find peace or rest. A guilty person may isolate themselves from others, feeling unworthy, unable to have or maintain any proper relationships with others, and always irritable. They engage in negative self-talk and self-criticism, always grumbling, saying negative and harsh things about themselves, headlines like “no use trying anything,” which damages all confidence. They may experience despair, depression, boredom, loss of interest in activities, and difficulty concentrating. Insomnia and sleep disturbances make it difficult to sleep. Sometimes, it even leads to self-inflicted punishment in various forms, such as destroying their body with drugs or drinks. Even as believers, we suffer from those feelings of guilt and unworthiness. These are all symptoms of a guilty conscience that is away from God’s face.

How can you be delivered from a guilty conscience and enjoy God’s face? How, then, shall people come to God? They can try 1,000 ways, but they cannot solve this problem. The only solution is God’s appointed way. He himself devised the way, and He has taught it to us by a parable in this chapter. This is God’s appointed way of access to God for every person. God’s wise plan is to resolve this problem by two means: the High Priest mediator and sacrifice. The mediator and His atonement.

This is a great chapter in the whole law of Moses because it treats a matter that is of the very highest importance to all of us. Practically, even as believers, it teaches us how we can overcome the blocks that sin creates in our life to enjoy God. Grasping this truth can teach us a way to enjoy constant, unceasing fellowship with God. Oh, may the Holy Spirit open our eyes to learn this lesson, so that we may enter into the fullest fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ, in the only God-appointed way. Hebrews calls it “the new and living way.”

On this great day, if these people of Israel were to survive in the presence of holy Jehovah, all this one-year’s garbage must be atoned for and removed and put very far away. That is what happens on the blessed Day of Atonement. We saw the wonderful High Priest mediator, AHRAE—he was appointed, humiliated, righteous, atoned, and entered as the mediator. The amazing fact of the Day of Atonement is that all the work on this day should be done by the High Priest, he alone. Verse 17 says, “There shall be no man in the tabernacle of meeting when he goes in to make atonement in the Holy Place.” On other days, almost all the work of the temple was done by other priests. On this Day of Atonement, no one else was to do any work; all work was done only by the High Priest: sacrificing, taking blood, smearing it, all by him. This is a beautiful type that our High Priest, and He and He alone, will do the final work of atonement, alone and unassisted. He was alone in the garden, alone on the cross, with only two of the worst thieves who could not have helped him in any way. No disciple was crucified with him, no angel helping him. He was alone. “I have trodden the wine-press alone.” Oh, bow down and adore Him, then give all the glory to His holy name, for alone and unassisted, He made full atonement for your guilt.

Aaron, the priest, is a dim shadow and type of the perfect priest who will come, so he brings his own tons of sins to the tabernacle as he needed to atone for his own uncleanness accumulated throughout the year. So verse 6 says, “Then Aaron shall offer the bull for the sin offering which is for himself that he may make atonement for himself and for his household.” Now, having made atonement for himself, he is to turn away from the problem of his own personal defilement to turn to the heavy burden of the nation in their unclean problem. Aaron had to provide a bull for himself. The congregation gave Aaron for their sin problem two goats for a sin offering. When you read the chapter, it may look confusing because the bull and goats get mixed up. If you remember the bull is for Aaron and his household’s sins, and the goats are for the people’s atonement, things will be clear. So we will skip all references to the bull for Aaron and only look at what he does for the people, as that is what Christ fulfilled. What he does for the people is the two-goat ceremony. Notice verse 5: “And he shall take from the congregation of the sons of Israel two male goats for a sin offering and one ram for a burnt offering.”

Today, I want to focus on simply the two-goat ceremony. The two goats typify and emblematize the God-prescribed remedy for the terrible problem of a guilty conscience.

Selection and Casting of lots
Sacrifice of the first goat
Deportation of the second goat

Selection and Casting of Lots. Verse 7: “He shall take the two goats and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of meeting.” Two goats are selected. Where did they get these? They would buy them. These two goats will be purchased by the public treasury of the temple. So, Jesus Christ was purchased by the public treasury for “thirty pieces of silver,” which is what they had valued Him at, so they brought Him to be offered. Verse 8: “Then Aaron shall cast lots for the two goats: one lot for the Lord and the other lot for the scapegoat.” These two goats will have two strikingly distinct roles in the atonement. Which goat will take which role will be decided by casting lots. It is like writing on a paper, like a coin toss today. Why? They could just decide one for this and another for that. No, God says to decide by casting lots. Why? Proverbs 16:33 says, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” The people cast the lots, they put the toss, but who will decide the outcome? It is the sovereignty of God that will decide which goat will take which role. Lots are put by human means, but the result is always by an invisible hand. How marvelous we see in the Gospels who decided to put Jesus on the cross. We think it is the people who had the lots, as the historical drama is unfolded: the leaders, the Sanhedrin, Judas, came on that dark night in the Garden of Gethsemane, seized the Lamb of God, and put him on the cross. It is true it was all by the instruments of men, but it was God’s appointment and decree, as Peter says in Acts 2:23: “You nailed Him to the cross by the hands of godless men, but he was delivered up by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God.” Okay, the lot is cast. One is selected for a sin offering and is offered, and another as a scapegoat. It is told that to identify each goat and not mix them up, they would tie a scarlet cloth on the horns or forehead of the goat where hands were to be laid on its head, and it would be sent into the wilderness. A scarlet cloth would be tied around the neck of the goat that would be offered to God by cutting its neck.

Sacrifice of the Sin Offering. The first sacrifice is the sin-atoning goat. This sacrifice is a satisfaction of Jehovah’s justice. There are two stages. First: In verse 15, we see a bloody slaughter. Aaron will take the sin-atoning goat, and verse 15 says, “Then he shall kill the goat of the sin offering, which is for the people, bring its blood inside the veil, and sprinkle it on the mercy seat and before the mercy seat.” Imagine in your mind’s eye: Aaron would drag this goat, take a knife, cut the throat of the innocent goat. Blood would gush forth; it would immediately collapse, marking its agonies, struggling for life, a thrashing back and forth that would take place. It would be a very horrible, pitiable sight. This is a sin offering.

Brothers and sisters, behold your savior. Do you see Him there in your mind’s eye? Your savior arrested, sentenced to be sacrificed, casting lots, beaten, scourged, with a heavy beam placed on him? Do you see Him staggering and collapsing under the weight of the cross beam as He’s on His way to Golgotha? His body placed on the beam, and spikes being driven into His hands and into His feet? Rising at the pillar? Do you see Him suffocating as for hours He’s being outstretched on the cross? Do you see Him crying in dereliction, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” This goat dying on Atonement Day foreshadowed all of that.

The Father’s sword of justice must be quenched in one or two places. Either by you sinners being cut to pieces on the day of judgment or it being sheathed in the heart of His own Son. We see it here in this dying sacrifice, the sheathing of the Father’s sword in the heart of His Son. And behold, behold the blood flowing from His open side as the goat typically spilled His blood. So we see a sin sacrifice, we’ve seen a bloody slaughter.

Now the second stage is a bloody sprinkling. We also see that in verse 15. Then the High Priest, with his humble dress of a linen white tunic, imagine, he sacrifices the goat in the outer court, and then the High Priest goes inside the holy place, crosses the thick veil, and, holding his breath, enters into the Holy of Holies behind the veil, standing breathlessly inside the veil and sprinkling the blood on the mercy seat and in front of the mercy seat. The mercy seat, under which the tablets of the Ten Commandments lie, cries out in wrath because we have violated it all our life, all ten commandments, in billions of times every second in our mind and heart, words, and actions. Every second we have not conformed to that law, loving God with all our heart. Infinite wrath is boiling in God’s heart against our sins. Oh, praise God, but all wrath and judgment is appeased by this blood. This is appeasing blood. This is propitiating blood. This is wrath-satisfying blood as we have violated all the ten words in the two tablets below.

Blessed be God for the Lord Jesus Christ. We can see that our high priest, as our representative, the Lord Jesus Christ, did far more than going inside the veil. By offering himself and crying out “it is finished,” he hung his head down and died. Where did he go? Where he entered, he said to the thief, “Today you will be with me in heaven.” So he entered heaven and sprinkled his blood on the mercy seat and completely satisfied the justice and wrath of God against all sins and completely fulfilled all the demands of his holy law. That is why God didn’t wait until his resurrection, but as soon as he died, what happened? The earth shook, and the veil was torn wide open. And then there was the resurrection on the third day, all pointing to a perfect atonement. There was a public display of satisfied justice.

You see even that public display is shown in types here. So beautiful. What took place inside the Holy of Holies was between Aaron and God. How do people know? So we see verse 18: “And he shall go out to the altar that is before the Lord, and make atonement for it, and some of the blood of the goat, and put it on the horns of the altar all around.” Verse 19: “Then he shall sprinkle some of the blood on it with his finger seven times, cleanse it, and consecrate it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel.” What is he doing? He is making public a private transaction, what took place in the secret Holy of Holies between the High Priest and the Holy God, so the whole nation can grasp hold of the significance. There is a public spectacle then made for the burdened nation. Imagine the whole nation standing, holding their breath: our representative High Priest, bearing all our sins, went inside. Will he come back or die like his sons before the burning holy God? Oh, what joy when they see the High Priest coming back from the veil. They all watch him coming back from behind the curtain, out into a public stage where all the nation’s eyes are focused on him.

Notice: So we see verse 18: “And he shall go out to the altar that is before the Lord.” This is the altar in the outer court. Others can see this. “And He is to make atonement for it, and shall take some of the blood of the bull and the blood of the goat and put it on the horns of the altar on all sides.” The horns of the altar were like his pulpit, and four horns would come out of each corner. And these horns were a symbol of strength. This could be the altar of the golden altar of incense, which represented the prayers of God’s people, and the bronze altar of sacrifice. Incense was burned daily. What a wonderful picture. God’s people are able to see the transaction that happened inside the veil, that God has accepted the atonement sacrifice, and their sins have been atoned for by the smearing of the blood on these four horns of the bronze altar. Now, the blood on the horns of the altar of incense tells us that this blood is so powerful that it not only cleansed our uncleanness but it has cleansed even the most holy services like our prayers; sacred things are cleansed and accepted by God now because of the blood. God has not only cleansed us, but even our prayers are accepted by God. The blood purified the altar from the “uncleanness of the children of Israel.” Verse 19: “Then he shall sprinkle some of the blood on it with his finger seven times, cleanse it, and consecrate it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel.” How beautiful! How many times? Seven times. What does it mean? A complete, perfect, finished atonement and a complete cleansing by the blood from all uncleanness is displayed by the seven sprinklings. So we have seen the sin-atoning goat.

Now, the transfer to the scapegoat in verses 8 through 10. Verse 20: “And when he has made an end of atoning for the Holy Place, the tabernacle of meeting, and the altar, he shall bring the live goat.” Verse 21: “Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, confess over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, concerning all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and shall send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a suitable man.” Verse 22: “The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to an uninhabited land; and he shall release the goat in the wilderness.”

The word “scapegoat” in the Hebrew is called “Azazel.” You will find this in most English Bibles. It’s a puzzling word that has multiple interpretations. So many explanations are given; some strongly say this goat is given to Satan. Verses 8 they explain: “One goat offered to God and another sent to the wilderness for Satan,” giving the meaning of “desert demon, Satan who mostly lived there,” as Satan also had to be appeased because he held us captive. Some good preachers also explain it by saying Satan is an accuser, and the scapegoat announces to the accusing evil one that sin has been atoned for. The goat is sent out to announce to Azazel, the devil, that sin has been taken care of. But all this has no Bible basis. You will find many explaining it that way, but that notion is totally foreign to any Old Testament or New Testament theology. We find in both the Old Testament and New Testament that God alone is the offended party. God alone is the one whose wrath needs to be appeased and needs to be propitiated.

I believe it simply means a desolate place, a desert, as verses 21 and 22 say. Azazel is best understood as the place of cutting off, a wilderness, a far place from the camp. Far away from God. Far away from the people of God. Deep into the wilderness. Out of sight. Where there will be no return, a barren land beyond the camp of God’s people. The first goat put away sin by sacrifice. The second goat carries it away into oblivion, as if it never existed. The first goat satisfied God’s justice. But now the second goat shows another dimension, and that is the dismissal of sins.

It’s interesting that the first ritual was done inside the veil, but this sending away was fully done in public view. The whole nation, millions of people, stand and behold each and every element of this ritual. This ritual shows the outcome or fruit of the Day of Atonement. If you ask what is the benefit of the Day of Atonement, what is the effect? God says, “I’ll tell you what the effect of the atonement to come is.”

It is shown in two acts. The first act is hands on the head. We see it in verse 21a: “And Aaron shall lay both of his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the sons of Israel and all their transgressions in regard to all their sins. And he shall lay them on the head of the goat.” Hands on the head, we see here. The high priest who is the representative of that sin-burdened nation, those millions of people with heavy trucks of sin and uncleanness upon their backs. We see this representative takes both of his hands and presses them down upon the head of this scapegoat. And what does he do there? He confesses all of the iniquity of the sons of Israel and transfers everything onto the head of this scapegoat. It will not be just a few minutes, maybe a long prayer. You can even see as he would stand there and confess sin after sin, as he would confess sins of presumption, sins of ignorance, sins of uncleanness, sins of omission, heinous sins and more heinous sins, and ceremonial neglect. It’s almost as if you can see standing behind him, one by one, each Jew comes and drops off the heavy load, mountains of garbage, accumulated over one year of his sin, upon the back of that scapegoat. One after another, hundred after hundred, thousands after thousands, billions. “Lord, we have broken all ten commandments; been idolatrous. Lord, we have blasphemed your name. Lord, we have been Sabbath breakers. Not only have we been picking up sticks on the Sabbath, deserving to be destroyed by stone, but we have made a profit on the Sabbath. Lord, we have our children who have not obeyed their parents. Husbands have not loved wives. We have been murderous in hating. We have been adulterous in our lusting. We have robbed you of tithes. We have been deceitful in not telling the truth. We have been covetous in being discontent.” As he would go on and on, rehearsing the sins of a nation.

And you can see, brethren, the mountain of wrath-deserving defilement being stacked upon the back of that scapegoat. As the camp of Israel, because of their sin, what do they deserve? They deserve to be cast far away from God and not get any of his blessings, far away to destruction by fire and brimstone. Look at the face of the poor goat. The millions of trucks and barrels of iniquity, as it were, are placed upon that goat. And what do we say, brethren? Oh, what a beast of burden. What a beast of burden was this substitute, a poor animal. You should see its face. Just keep watching him. Suddenly in graphics, his face turns into the face of a man. Do you see the face of a man? Oh, what a beast of burden is our Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ. It says in Isaiah 53:6, “He has no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” He was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” His face was not like a human face at all. Why? God has “caused the iniquity of us all to fall upon Him.” “He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed.” It was all transferred to our scapegoat, Christ. He became our scapegoat, who bore not only a one-year truck of household garbage but all the life of infinite, dirty garbage from birth that kept flowing. It was poured on him one by one until he who knew no sin became sin for us.

And not only your sin. When you think of the weight of the guilt that was placed upon Him on Golgotha, it was a mountain range of the sins of the elect, barrels of sin from men and women from every age, from every tribe, from every tongue, from every kindred, from every nation. From Adam, the first believer, all the way to the last believer who will embrace the Lord Jesus Christ until he comes back. All of those heavy barrels of uncleanness placed upon the back of our Beloved. And as John the Baptist said, “I say to you, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Transfer on the scapegoat.

Now the second act: the sending away of the scapegoat into the wilderness. After transferring all this guilt, see the face of the goat. Will we feed and give water to the poor goat? No, most cruelly. And that’s in verses 21b and 22, where it says, “And He shall send it, the goat, away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who stands in readiness.” “And the goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities, all the oceans of garbage on its back to a solitary land, to the depths of the wilderness. He will go to a place of no return.”

Now what is all this? Brethren, this is a public visual aid for the burdened conscience of the ancient people of God. Burdened. They hear of the law of God. They hear of His moral law. They hear of His civil law. They hear of His ceremonial law. And they see they don’t keep the law as they sweep up day by day the sins of themselves and their families. They’re burdened by how much there is there, violating the law of God. And when they come annually at the Day of Atonement, they are burdened in conscience by their sins. But we see here, we see this visual aid as an appointed escort accompanies the goat deep out into the wilderness. It may be that a rope was tied around the neck of the goat and he carried him out miles and miles away to Azazel. He was to go so many miles that it was to be assured that the goat would never find its way back. He was to go to Azazel, a place of removal, cut off, where there will be no return, a barren land beyond the camp of God’s people. It is told they had different men placed at different places to take it very far, so it can’t be seen anymore.

All the people see the scapegoat carrying all their burdens, going, going, going far. After some time, they lose sight of it. A fit man goes with it, and they wait, and after a long time, the man returns back, waving, “The goat is gone.” And says, “He can no longer see it; it is gone so far, it will not return.” You should see that moment. There will be a celebration of clapping hands, blowing of trumpets, because all these burdens of their nation’s sins are all gone very far; they will never come back. All these sins have been carried into oblivion.

Leviticus 25:9 says, “Once every fifty years on the day of Jubilee, you shall sound a ram’s horn on the day of atonement; you shall sound a horn through all your land.” The sounding of the ram’s horn there on the Day of Atonement speaks of how the debts of God’s people have been canceled. Jubilee was a year of deliverance. Whatever debts you owe to someone, if you are a slave, if you sold your land, all will be returned to you every Jubilee year, every 50 years. Imagine what joy some people had gone into debt. They had to sell themselves into slavery. They lost their land. They lost their house. But on the Day of Jubilee, all debts were canceled. They were given back their land and their house.

When the flags came back and the report came back, “Our sins are gone,” there was rejoicing. Then was the horn to be sounded. Then was the celebration. “Now is Jubilee, for all the debts have been canceled.” And we can see the blessed blasts would be sounded, speaking of liberty. “Our sins are gone. Our debts are gone. Our sentence is gone.”

Do you see the blessed theological drama that is found in these old covenant shadows, depicting perpetual truths? Our scapegoat, the Lord Jesus Christ, has taken away our sins upon His head, just as the scapegoat, and he took it so far from us. All past, present, and future, it can never come back. He made it a non-entity in the eyes of God. Oh, soul, can you see your sins all gone? See that goat, keep seeing it until you lose sight. Rejoice, your sins are gone like that. They are utterly cast into the wilderness of forgetfulness, where they shall never be found anymore against us forever, not even on the Day of Judgment. But mark, this goat did not sacrificially make the atonement—it was a type of the sins going away, and so it was a type of the atonement. For you know, since our sins are thereby lost, it is the fruit of the atonement, but the sacrifice is the means of making it.

Think of that burdened scapegoat; it would go far, far away, with no water, no food, to burn in the hot desert, starve, alone, and die. Oh, what a picture of what our Lord went through. He was sent far away, to the utmost place, and suffered. So far away he had to cry, “My God, my God, why did you forsake me?” Billions and billions of miles he traveled, very far, carrying our sins to a place where they would never return. Praise his name.

Application Blessed be God the Father of Lord Jesus Christ for the Day of Atonement. Oh, suffering, guilty conscience sinners, even believers, may the Holy Spirit help us to grasp this truth. How can the burden of mountains and oceans of guilt that press us be removed? How can you be delivered from a guilty conscience? Behold the answer in these two goats. One by a suffering substitute that bears all punishment and wrath for our sins, and then the scapegoat that carries our sin far. Our Jesus Christ accomplished both these works.

How can you and I participate in that work and experience a cleansed conscience? By doing what the High Priest did: by our placing our hands on the forehead of God’s appointed scapegoat. That is the only way that our sins can be removed from our conscience. The only means appointed by God. We must rest the full weight of our souls upon Him, the Lord Jesus, the goat of God, the Lamb of God. There is nowhere else, sinner, nowhere else where you can unburden your guilt. It will not leave you all this life and even for eternity.

God’s sword of justice will pierce in only two places. It must either be plunged into Christ on crucifixion day or cut you to pieces on judgment day. Which will it be? There is no other place for the sheathing of that sword. This is the only means of the removal of our sins. What must we do? We must have faith in Him. That’s what the idea of hands are, hands of faith, grabbing hold of, placing weight upon. Faith is typified by the laying on of hands while confessing sin. “Lord, I am a wretched sinner. I have violated Your law. I have been ungodly in Your presence. I am unclean and unfit to be near You.” And then we have to rest the full weight of our hope. If we are to experience deliverance from a guilty conscience and enjoy the light of God’s face, for which our soul yearns, this is the divinely appointed means. And our hope rests exclusively on His work alone.

And now I ask you, I ask you who are here sitting here, “Have your hands touched the scapegoat’s head?” If not, your loathsome load remains; your conscience will torture you all your life. There is no way to rid your back of the heavy load. No way. Stagger, stagger now with all of the weight of your sin to this Lamb and put your hands upon Him. “Oh, I’ve been there before, Pastor, I’ve done this. But why do I feel guilty again, not happy?” You have to learn how to deal with guilt as a believer. Every time you feel guilty, you have not learned to come back to this scapegoat and lay your hands, confess it, repent, and send all our guilt far away. 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

What a visual aid is found here for our spiritually disabled souls. We are mentally disabled children spiritually, so it is difficult to grasp theological truth. And then, once having grasped it, we have such a hard time remembering it. And therefore, God gives us visual aids here in the old covenant in dealing with His immature people. Every time you feel the burden of sin, don’t feel the light of God’s presence, remember the two goats. Put your head down, send your goat far away. You will experience what the Pilgrim Christian felt when a big burden fell off; how much joy he felt, he said, “glad and lightsome.” It rolled and was buried in a tomb, never to be seen again. “Come to me, you who are weak and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” How tranquil it is to muse upon and ponder these things.

Believe God’s promises. Psalm 103:12: “As far as the East is from the West, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” It is an infinite distance; you cannot go from East to West. Brethren, our sin is profoundly unretrievable. Isaiah 38:17: “Thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.” That means out of God’s sight. It’s behind His back. Jeremiah 31:34: “For I will forgive their iniquity; I will remember them no more.” My sins are banished from them, non-existent in the mind of God. God’s all-searching eye finds it no more. Isn’t that glorious? Micah 7:19: “He will again have compassion on us. He will tread our iniquities underfoot. Yes, Thou wilt cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.” As a scapegoat is sent out into the depths of the wilderness, sunken in the wilderness, never to be seen again. Oh, why does the Holy Spirit give such promises and pictures? To give assurance to a staggering, guilty conscience. May the Holy Spirit screw it tight into your conscience, so you won’t forget it.

What should be our response to the Day of Atonement? Hebrews 10 tells us that is the purpose of the great Day of Atonement. Hebrews 10:19-22 says, “Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”

The great achievement of the Day of Atonement is that we should draw near to God by a new and living way. How? With boldness, full assurance, and a cleansed conscience.

First, we should have boldness, freedom, and liberty to enter God’s presence. When we realize Christ’s blood has been sprinkled on the mercy seat, all sins are atoned for, and the law is satisfied; if we truly believe that, it gives us a bold access into the presence of God. Smearing the blood on the altar not only removes our sins, but all our prayers, worship, songs, and services are so pleasing and acceptable to God. Not because they are perfect; everything we do is unholy. Our poor prayer is an unholy prayer, for we have uttered it, and that which comes out of unholy lips like ours must be tainted. But, ah, it is a prayer that has been sprinkled with blood, and therefore it must be a holy prayer. It is the most pleasing prayer, the most pleasing worship.

It is so pleasing. I told you he comes with perfume, showing how pleased God is. So pleased. Do you know Aaron was alone in the Holy of Holies? God always has two other creatures always with him: two cherubim angels forged in gold. You see the presence of the cherubim in Revelation 4 and 5 always; four creatures who are ever surrounding the throne, worshiping the living God. You see, the cherubim are very delightful in the presence of God. God delights in the eternal and perpetual worship of the cherubim. No one else is allowed to come so close to God’s Holy of Holies than these beings.

Do you know something? When we as sinners, because of the sprinkled blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, can now offer up to God and his presence in bold access a worship that is delightful to God, as is the worship of the cherubim. Think of it. We, in our prayers, come into the presence of the living God. Our sin has been covered by the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus Christ. When we pray, our prayers are received as so delightful to God; praise like the highest cherubim. God delights in them. Oh, as delightful as the cherubim.

In the fullness of redemption, when we go to heaven, does God delight in our presence? It says he will sing and rejoice. Oh, yes. It will be as delightful as the worship of the cherubim. Why? Because of the blood. The blood of this beloved lamb. This goat who has been sprinkled on our behalf.

Secondly, you’re supposed to draw near with full assurance of faith. You’re supposed to draw near with assurance because your sins have been forgiven through the work of Jesus Christ. See, full assurance, not any doubt. Trusting God’s promise, we draw near.

Third, with a clean conscience. We should draw near to God with full assurance and a clean conscience. This enjoyment of a clean conscience should make us draw closer to God. In fact, it kind of automatically happens. As soon as the conscience is cleansed, there is a peace of God that transcends all understanding. He feels a strong pull to come to his satisfying creator.

So, the great achievement of the Day of Atonement is that we as creatures yearning for God’s face, now because of Christ, can draw near to God with boldness, with full assurance, and with a clean conscience.

Secondly (verse 23): “Hold fast without wavering.” If the Lord has done this for you, if He has shed the blood of His own Son, hold fast without wavering! Don’t turn back, keep on going! Persevere!

Thirdly, look at verse 24. Hebrews tells us to encourage one another to love and obedience. “Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works.” That’s what we’re to do. If Jesus has given this full and final sacrifice on our behalf, what should we do? Encourage one another to love, encourage one another to be like Him.

In verse 25, what are we supposed to do in response to this? “Do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together.” Isn’t that interesting? Don’t stop going to church! That’s the application that the author of Hebrews gives. Because of the full and final sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we’re not to “forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as is the habit of some, but to encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” Because you can experience drawing near to God with boldness, full assurance of faith, and a clean conscience and enjoy his graces only by these means. So, don’t stop going to church.

Glimpses of Mediator – Lev 16

August 4, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

When my son was small, I would mostly tell him Bible stories, but sometimes I would tell him history, stories about kings. I remember once telling him about the Mysore Raja and the great Dasara procession parade, describing how the king would come sitting on the Jumbo Savari elephant with a big procession of elephants, dancers, horses, different kinds of long colorful dolls dancing, chariots, and various depictions of palace life, forests with animals, and varied Karnataka history and culture. I kept describing the amazing sight. It created a big dream and desire in him to see the Mysore Dasara procession. Inevitably, we took him once, but you know how crowded it gets. His grandfather and I tried to get near, but there were four or five rows of people standing on footpaths and walls; the whole street was jammed. He could hear the dancing and music and maybe catch an occasional glimpse of the marching band or clowns, but he couldn’t see anything clearly. He was very upset, stretching to get even a momentary clear view of it all. Then I decided to stand on a small, tall stone and said, “See, John, Daddy cannot stand here for a long time. If I fall, you will also fall. So I will stand on this stone and you sit on my shoulder, and slowly you can stand up and watch the procession for one or two minutes.” So, for two minutes, I still remember the smile and joy on his face and him shouting as he saw the beauty and color of his very first parade. But it was just for a few minutes. At that age, it was the thrill of a lifetime. Now, he doesn’t even care.

Well, the Old Testament believers were like little John. They had heard so many things about the Messiah from their childhood. He would come and do marvelous things. Like little John, they yearned to get a clear glimpse of this Messiah and his work. But there were many centuries standing between them and the coming of Christ. They only caught a fragmentary glimpse, just a few glimpses, of the coming King of Kings through the old covenant types and shadows.

However, in Leviticus 16, the Heavenly Father compassionately lifts the Old Testament saint upon his shoulders and shows him a clear view of the Messiah’s work in these 34 verses. It’s to catch an almost clear sight of the coming Savior of the world on the Day of Atonement. Old Testament saints like Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and David would feel thrilled like John for those two minutes when they could see the glorious work of the Messiah in this chapter. We come to that chapter today. The sacred law of Moses attains its highest and supreme glory in this chapter. If Isaiah 53 is the highest Messianic prophecy in all the books of the prophets, Leviticus 16 is the highest Messianic chapter in all of Moses’ books of law. The coming Messiah and the great need for his work are pointed to us with a clear distinctness here like in no other place in the entire Old Testament. In fact, Leviticus 1-15 is preparation for us to come to this chapter. So we have come to a very high, majestic, lofty point in the book of Leviticus. This is the highest festival for Jews: Yom Kippur, the great Day of Atonement, the high point of the year in the life of Israel.

And this hour in our brief time together, with the limited strength of a Sunday evening, we are going to superficially gaze upon the glory of this chapter and maybe dip into this deep well of living water for another week or two to drink in the wonderful truths here.

Two headings: a dangerous flashback (1-2) and a glorious mediator of God.

Notice verse 1: “The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron when they had approached the presence of the Lord and died.” This takes us back to the shocking flashback event in Leviticus 10. When the people of God, joyfully after instituting the temple and anointing the priest, gathered to offer their first worship in Leviticus 10, these two priests, with all their eagerness and sincerity, came to worship God with a “strange fire” which he had not commanded, but what was right in their own minds. There was nothing wrong in the eyes of all the Israelites, elders, and other men; no one stopped them. Maybe men clapped and whistled for them when they smelled the sweet fragrance. They came with a casual, irreverent attitude to worship and fatally misjudged the holiness of God. What did God do? He did not break their legs or give them leprosy, but God killed them on the spot in a second, with a destruction by way of consumption.

On a good day, starting a wonderful chapter, what is this unfortunate flashback? I believe this is one verse that opens the door to see the glory of this chapter. The Holy Spirit wisely makes us realize that flashback of this event, but also all that God taught from chapters 11-15. Because if we don’t stop and realize the lessons from this flashback, you will never be able to see the glory of this day.

In my language, there are two lessons God wanted us to learn in all these Leviticus chapters. Leviticus 1-10 teaches us “Who is God?” Leviticus 11-15 teaches us “Who is man?” These are two amazing realities. The more we understand the depth of these two questions, the more we will be able to see the glory of the Day of Atonement.

Through all the five sacrifices, ordaining the priests, and tabernacle rules, what is God teaching? Again and again, almost 150 times, using the word “holy” in Leviticus, God is making them realize, “I am a holy God.” In Leviticus 10, when Aaron’s two sons died, remember how Moses interpreted that. Verse 3: “And Moses said to Aaron, ‘This is what the Lord spoke, saying: ‘By those who come near Me I must be regarded as holy; And before all the people I must be glorified.'” That is the sharp lesson. These men misjudged God’s holiness. “Realize who is God? I am not a god of your imagination, I am not one of the idols your father taught you to worship; I am one true, living, holy God of heaven and earth. I am a God of glory, a God eternally worshipped as holy, holy, holy. I have historically showed my holiness from the beginning. I banished sinful Adam from the Garden of Eden for only one disobedience. When I smelled the whole world corrupted in sin, smelled the hearts of men that were always sinful at all times, it became so unbearable that I destroyed the whole earth with a flood and had to control myself by a covenant with a rainbow. When I heard the outcry of the sin that came up from Sodom and Gomorrah, I buried it under a heap of fire and brimstone. Now I chose you, in infinite mercy, and I condescended, humbled myself to come and dwell among you in a most holy place. So, because I have humbled myself and am dwelling with you daily, have come closer to you, I know that anything with man that is closer and more frequent becomes common and is taken for granted. Familiarity can breed a casual contempt. But don’t do that with me. Don’t fall into casual thoughts about me and my worship; don’t become irreverent. I am holy. This means don’t get so used to me and take me and my worship casually. Remember, O Israel, the Lord God who dwells among you is holy.” Who is God? This is a holy God. We will be amazed by that reality of God dwelling with man if we grasp one side, that is, who is God, and secondly, who is man?

Who is man? Leviticus 11-15 taught deep lessons about man. Chapters 11-12 say man is not only born defiled and depraved, but he lives fully surrounded by uncleanness in the land, water, and air. Remember the unclean animals and foods that can defile a Jew anywhere he goes. Chapters 13 and 14 show that this birth defilement can get worse; a soul’s leprosy can break out in the soul, with outward traits, and in houses. Then the terrible chapter 15 gives a terrible picture of a continuous bodily discharge. Mark 7:21-23: “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man.” It is continuously flowing and defiling us. We are an ever-flowing stream of uncleanness in the eyes of God; this is the distressing vileness of our cursed nature.

Think of these two beings: on one side, this thrice-holy God, and on the other side, this unclean man. If you understand the distance between these two, the most universally impossible thing is to bring them together. Every man’s conscience realizes this: “I am a sinner, and God is holy. How can I come to him?” All the miseries of man are because of this distance.

How? When you again ask who is man, man was not created so sinful like this. He was created holy in the image of God. The bond between the Creator and his creature is the most profound, intricate, and powerful relationship conceivable. A dim example of that is the bond between a mother and child. Whatever pain or fever the child may have, if it can get into its mother’s lap, it can feel warmth and sleep so peacefully. That mother didn’t form the child in her womb, but this God formed every nerve, artery, and bone. This bond between man and his God is woven into the very fabric of existence, foundational to our being, and ultimately, our purpose. God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.” That bond makes every breath yearn for a bond with his creator. We do not just exist because God created us; we continue to exist because He sustains us every second. In him we live, move, and have our being. Our life force, our very animation, comes directly from Him. The image of God creates an inherent likeness that forms an unbreakable connection that no fallenness can fully erase. This indescribable bond was created for eternal communion, and no fall can erase this.

All souls listening to me, every soul breathing on earth now, all our restlessness in life is because we are living outside this great bond. That is what accounts for the restlessness of humanity. It is the cry of the human spirit for the face of God who created me, like a child separated from its mother. You can show it some toy or some entertainment and make it temporarily stop crying, but after some time, it will keep crying to see its mother’s face.

We can never be happy in life until we have a face-to-face encounter and satisfying communion with the living God. That kind of relationship alone fills every aching void of our lives. If God makes you see deep within your heart, you would find a hunger and a cry after that very thing.

The devil, through sin, snatched us from our Father from whose breath we came to live. Whatever we do, we can never forget the fact that we were made to walk in daily fellowship in the cool of the garden with a living God. We still long for that, and no human relationship can quite satisfy that yearning. We have all found that even the nearest and dearest to us can go only so far in meeting that desire. Then their efforts begin to fade, and a void is left unfulfilled. That void, that cry for something more than your dearest companion can give you, is the cry of your spirit for the face of God. “Our hearts are restless until they find Thee,” is a famous quote from Saint Augustine of Hippo.

But do you see the great problem of mankind? We cannot live without God, but we cannot enjoy face-to-face fellowship with this God because on one side he is so holy, and on the other side we are so sinful. If this is how holy God is, and if this is how defiled I am, with all this defilement from birth, inside and outside, continuously affecting me, with the shameful habits of our life, the memory of what we have done and been comes back to haunt us, completely clouds and veils us from the face of God and doesn’t give me any boldness or confidence. In one word, my greatest problem is that I have a defiled conscience, and I cannot come to see the one face for which I was created. Oh, this is the problem of all mankind. This is what every son and daughter of Adam is struggling with daily.

The great question is, “How can I come and enjoy his relationship that fills every aching void in my life?” The answer is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Here, beautifully, God shows in Old Testament types how God deals with the delicate matter of defiled consciences.

Even as Christians, is this not a great struggle? “I know that God has forgiven me, saved me. And yet I seem to feel so guilty all the time, my conscience is so haunted, and I feel ashamed to come to God. I feel that I am unworthy.” We wrestle with these problems and are troubled by thoughts even while we are trying to pray. Why? Because we have not grasped the glorious atonement. This is the great need God is dealing with on the great Day of Atonement. When we grasp this truth and grasp it with faith, we will be able to see the Father’s face clearly and enjoy his presence regularly and daily, and live with all the peace, joy, and love in his presence.

How does God bridge this vast problem between him and man? Ages were asking this question. Old Testament saints were yearning for a full understanding, like John wanting to see the parade. We will see five scenes of a procession that show how God deals with this great problem.

Five steps: Appointment, humiliation, righteousness, atonement, entrance of the mediator. (AHRAE).

First: The Appointment of a Mediator. Since a sinful man cannot come before a holy God, God’s great wisdom appointed a mediator between these two estranged parties. This mediator will stand between the two and bring full and satisfactory reconciliation for both parties. We see that mediator as the High Priest Aaron here. Imagine the drone view: a full desert, with all twelve tribes’ camps in an outer circle, then the Levites’ camps, and in the center, the tabernacle. It has an outer court, a Holy Place, and a Most Holy Place. The whole nation is trembling, “Who can go into the presence of God for us?” God says Aaron can come for the people. This mediator was not selected by the people; this was not Israel’s or man’s idea. God, in his great mercy, appointed and anointed this mediator as we saw in chapter 8. Hebrews 5:4 says no one takes the honor to himself. It is God who initiates and appoints a mediator.

Blessed be God for the Lord Jesus Christ. To accept us into his awful presence and solve our deep problem, to redeem us, Revelation 5 shows how impossible it is. An angel announces, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and to loose its seals?” the scroll of God’s salvation plan for the whole universe. Verse 3: “And no one in heaven or on the earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll.” John weeps unbearably. Verse 5: “But one of the elders says, ‘Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and to loose its seven seals.'”

Praise God. He didn’t choose a prophet, an angel, or an archangel. No, our problem was so deep; it needed someone infinitely great. The living God called his only beloved Son to do this wretchedly irksome task. God-man alone was capable for this great task of bearing all our sins, who alone can stand between the consuming fire of God’s wrath and our destructible sinnerhood. Praise God for this God-appointed mediator. 1 Timothy 2:5: “There is one God and there is one mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus.” He said, “I am the only way. No man comes to the Father except through me.” 100% exclusive! Because no one can do what he did. Christ alone! People in their arrogance question, “How can there be only one way?” May God make us realize the depth of our problem so that we are filled with amazement and praise God that there would be one way. He alone is that way. So we see the appointment of a mediator.

Second: The Humiliation of the Mediator. The mediator can come to God, but how should he come? Notice verse 4 says how: not wearing his royal dress. Remember we saw Aaron’s very expensive priestly uniform dress in chapter 8. What a description! Beautiful colored materials, intricate embroidery, gold rings, a breastplate with precious stones, shoulder stones, an ephod, gold and jewelry made him look like a king. On this day of atonement, he should remove all that glorious outer garment and come inside with inner white garments. Notice verse 4: “He shall put the holy linen tunic and the linen trousers on his body; he shall be girded with a linen sash, and with the linen turban he shall be attired. These are holy garments. Therefore he shall wash his body in water, and put them on.” A shirt, shorts, a sash, and a turban, all made of linen. He should remove his whole high priestly uniform. This simple four-garment white linen dress actually made him look more like a slave, even plainer than the vestments of the ordinary priests and even all the Israelites standing there. On this great Day of Atonement, the High Priest was humbled to the lowest level. In those days and even today, when someone is officially made to remove all their uniform and walk with only inner garments, it is a big humiliation. The Israelites may have gotten a glimpse of this at the time.

But today, what a beautiful picture of our Lord Jesus. How will this mediator redeem us? Not by coming with all his kingly royalty. No. Philippians 2 says, “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but He emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant and being made in the likeness of men and being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient, obedient to the point of death, even death upon a cross.” Oh, what a stoop. The King in history becomes a slave. God becomes a man. As Isaiah 53 sadly talks about the depth of his humility: “He has no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him… He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” So lowly. What a colossal stoop took place when the glory of heaven became a man and was even cursed on the cross. He became poor to make us rich.

Third scene: The Righteousness of the Mediator. Aaron’s linen garments were not only garments of lowliness, they were also garments of the purest white. Ask Google about the purest white dress; it is linen. It talks about glorious, majestic righteousness. Yes, we are by birth unclean, defiled by uncleanness in the world around us, defiled by our actions, leprosy from head to toe, defilement continuously flowing like an unstoppable gutter. But look at my mediator. Oh, wherever you look, it is all purity and righteousness. You see his birth; he was born pure and holy, not like us, as we saw in Leviticus 12, defiled with the curse of original sin. Luke 1:35: “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.”

Think of his inherent, spotless purity of nature and character. Personal righteousness, inner righteousness which only God can see, the righteousness of his thoughts, his attitudes, his reactions. Not like my heart proceeding with all evil thoughts. Not one single thought of lust, murder, covetousness, deceit, or pride. I am an ever-flowing stream of uncleanness in the eyes of God, but he was an ever-flowing stream of righteousness. What he thought, felt, and willed was all righteousness. In all the life of the Lord upon the earth, there was not one moment when that inner righteousness was not perfect. Not only negative sins; a catechism says sin is not transgressing law, but any lack of conformity. So our mediator not only did not negatively break the law, but he positively always conformed perfectly, every single second. He loved God with all his mind, heart, strength, and soul all the days of his life. He never fell short of the standard and perfectly met all the requirements of the law of God. So that all-piercing eye of God opened the sky and said, “This is my beloved son; I am pleased with him.” So spotless.

Though he lived with the same uncleanness and defilement everywhere—land, air, water—he was tempted in every way, but never once was there a yielding to the pressure to sin. He did not even allow the whole world to give him one sinful thought. Never an impure thought, or word, or act. Hebrews 7:26 says, “For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest: holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners.” We see Aaron had to offer a sheep and a bull for his sins and his family’s sins because he was a type, but he was sinful. Our high priest comes sinless from the virgin’s womb, unstained by Adam’s sin, unstained internally, unstained externally by the world. Pure, spotless, inherently. So Christ didn’t need any sheep or bull offering. He himself was the innocent, pure lamb of God.

We see Aaron wearing such a pure white dress, and then it says he has to bathe; he was preparing himself to enter the Most Holy Place on this great day. In the same way, our High Priest girded himself with white purity throughout his life. He prepared himself to enter the most holy place of heaven for 33 years, earning a perfect righteousness. He lived a perfect, pure life without committing one sin, preparing himself as spotless by putting on the linen of perfect obedience to the Father through glorious active and passive obedience so he could enter the true Holy of Holies which is heaven, and this tabernacle was just a model of that.

Fourth: Atonement of the Mediator. We see the atoning sacrifices of the mediator. Verses 5-6 talk about Aaron giving a sin and burnt offering for himself and his house. Here is the provision made for the fact that Aaron was not, like Christ, without sin. Hebrews 7 points out that Jesus needed no sacrifice for himself. Verse 7 talks about the highlight of the Day of Atonement with two goats. I want to see that in detail next week. It is a type packed with marvelous truths. Before he entered, he did the two-goat ceremony, sacrificing one and sending another away into the wilderness. It could never come back. This shows the glorious work of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross.

This work shows how perfectly the work of Christ satisfied God’s justice and holiness. We always see it from our angle—Jesus died on our behalf, which is true—but there are glorious truths from God’s side, and the cross of Christ glorified God’s holiness like nothing else can do.

Forgiveness is not an easy thing for God. He can’t forgive as many people seem to think he can—simply look at our evil and say, “Oh, well, that’s all right. Forget about it. I love you anyway. Just go on.” If that were the way that we are forgiven, then God would deny his character as a just God. His justice chases us away from his presence and drives us far away never to come back to see his face. We have to be forsaken, like the scapegoat driven away, and we have to be punished for all our sins. That is shown in the two-goat ceremony, both of which our mediator fulfilled. He took upon our sins and he was also driven away from God’s presence. He cried, “My God, why did you forsake me?” That was the great atonement Christ fulfilled.

Now since God’s justice is satisfied in the death of Christ, when he hung on the cross, God did not spare him a thing! He poured out upon him every bit of his wrath against sin. Every bit of his justice was satisfied in the death of his Son upon the cross. Thus God is vindicated. The whole world can now look at that event and say, “Yes, God is just—but through that work of atonement, God can show grace and accept us.” The death of Jesus freed God to show his love to us and welcome us. Apart from his death, you and I would never have known that he is a God of mercy, of compassion, and of tender, forgiving grace. We would never have seen that he is willing to suffer for us on our behalf, that he had that kind of heart. Thus, God himself is magnified, his character is glorified before us by the death of Jesus. It is the atoning work of this mediator that freed God to shower his grace and love on us and accept us as reconciled children.

Fifth: The Entrance of the Mediator. All this appointing, humiliation, righteousness, and atonement is all preparation for the mediator to enter the presence of God. The awesome event of the Day of Atonement is the High Priest entering the most holy place. Verse 3 says Aaron is allowed to enter. In the Old Testament type, Aaron was a type of Christ, the perfect High Priest, but Aaron was a sinful High Priest, so there were limitations. Verse 2 says he “should not come at just any time into the Holy Place inside the veil, lest he die.”

Think of the scene if we see it from a drone angle in that desert. The living God is among these people, yet he is separated from them. Our drone view shows a full desert and neatly arranged tents, with twelve tribes arranged neatly in the outskirts like concentric circles. The next circle is the camps of the tribe of Levi, as the first level of security. Then a circle of priests, the second level of security. With these different circles as a target, in the center of the concentric circles is the tabernacle. There is an additional layer of separation in the tabernacle compound. You enter the outer court and its bronze altar, and then you enter more inside, behind the first veil, into the Holy Place. Then, only after you cross the Holy Place do you have the Most Holy Place. No Gentile can enter the outer court compound. Only Jews are allowed in the outer court, and then only priests are allowed inside the Holy Place; no Jew can come. Into the Most Holy Place, no one, only the High Priest, only once a year on this Day of Atonement. He cannot enter presumptuously. Verse 1 reminds us of the flashback of his sons’ death, and verse 2 says he “should not come at just any time into the Holy Place inside the veil, lest he die.” He should come only when I summon him on this day and how I tell him to come with the right dress and sacrifices.

Though there was all kinds of noise outside, verse 2 talks about inside the veil, a wonderful phrase. Remember, “within the veil.” It is a very thick curtain between the Holy and Most Holy Place. The presence of God is inside that veil, a profound presence of God. Just like at the burning bush, a place of majestic and awful silence. No one can go inside the veil. There was the Ark of the Covenant, a rectangular box, on top of which were two cherubim with covering features. It was called the mercy seat. Inside the box were the Ten Commandments, the objective expression of the moral glory of God.

When they moved, the Levites would remove the veil and wrap those items; no eyes were to see the place and the Ark of the Covenant. This was the separation and barrier between the holy God and sinful man.

Aaron alone is allowed to come inside the place, once a year. It was like Aaron entering into another world, another higher dimension. No human eyes were ever to gaze directly upon the Ark of the Covenant inside, so notice verse 13. He “shall put the incense on the fire before the Lord, that the cloud of incense may cover the mercy seat.” It is like another veil, another screen to prevent even the High Priest from directly seeing the Holy presence. It says if he doesn’t have such smoke, he will die.

So Aaron comes, and in verse 14, where the blood of the bull is to be sprinkled on the mercy seat. And in verse 15, the blood of the goat is to be sprinkled on the mercy seat. This blood was sprinkled for the sins of the nation and propitiated them. Sprinkling it on top of the Ten Commandments indicates the satisfaction of the law’s demands through sacrifice. The law had been broken. The blood of sacrifice sprinkled on the mercy seat on which the ten commandments lay intercepted the condemning justice of God. The blood sprinkled by the mediator effected reconciliation between God and man. Remember, the High Priest is coming, representing the twelve tribes. The blood sprinkled satisfies the justice and holiness and intercepts the wrath of the living God. Notice verse 14 says seven times, which means perfect satisfaction. There is full atonement. There is appeasement. There is satisfaction for the vast mountains and oceans of sins of the entire nation, accumulated sins throughout the year, all atoned for at once on this Day of Atonement.

What is all this? Oh, what a wonderful type of the true mediator. Hebrews 9:24 says this tabernacle was a copy of the true holy place, heaven itself. This appointed, humiliated, righteous, atoning High Priest entering this tabernacle. I see a direct view of Christ’s redemptive work. Standing on his shoulder, we get a colorful picture of the work of our Lord Jesus. Our Lord Jesus Christ on the Day of Atonement in Jerusalem offered up Himself on Golgotha, and rose again. Hebrews 9:24-25: “For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us; not that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another.” Verse 28: “so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many.” Leviticus 16 is a shadow and a copy. But the Lord Jesus Christ entered heaven itself now to appear in the presence of God for us. For whom? For the elect.

He didn’t take all the sins of one year, but what a high, what a broad, what a wide mountain range of sins of all the people of God the Lord Jesus Christ swallowed up in the sea of His mercy by absorbing the wrath of God on our behalf. He took his blood and sprinkled it seven times, satisfying all the demands of the law that we broke, and perfected us before God eternally by one sacrifice and once entering heaven for us. Hebrews 10:12: “He offered one sacrifice for sins for all time. And He sat down.”

That is when he said, “It is finished,” and died. Matthew 27:51: “the curtain of the temple inside which Aaron went was torn from top to bottom.” What does this mean? The barrier between sinful men and the Holy God is removed by our High Priest.

All those for whom Christ died come to God without any hindrances or barriers. They are broken now. At that time, even a Jew entering the presence would die, but now even Gentiles can cross the Jewish camps, the Levites, the priests, and enter the outer court, the Holy Place, and even the Most Holy Place.

Men and women, boys and children, your greatest need is to come back to the Father and see him face to face. God has removed all those hindrances objectively in the work of his son. The great hindrance for us to come to God today, even as believers, is a guilty conscience. Satan complicates the problem by accusing us constantly with “fiery darts of the wicked one” (Ephesians 6:16), all those little suggestions to us that we really aren’t accepted and loved by God. Evil thoughts even before we pray. We come to pray, but some filthy thought, some hostile reaction, anger, a welling up of anger or impatience comes in. All the haunting memories of our past shame, our feelings of unworthiness, our filthy thoughts, and the flashes of fear that come upon us. What do you do with that? Your immediate temptation is to say, “Good night, what’s the use? I am not coming to God today.” We live far away from our greatest need of seeing his face. Now, what do we do?

Well, we are simply to imagine putting them right on the head of Jesus and say, “Like that goat took away my sins, you have taken all my sins. You have atoned for all these things.”

You know how you can come to God today and see him face to face? Don’t listen to Satan. Accept and receive the truth that the blood of Christ not only completely satisfies God about you, but it completely cleanses your conscience.

Believe God welcomes you into his presence not on the grounds of your works, devotion, the depth of your knowledge, or victory, but on the ground of the blood of the Lamb. This discovery of this glorious secret has enabled saints not only to overcome an accusing conscience and Satan but to enjoy close communion with God; to enjoy free access to the throne of grace, and full liberty in their service. They believed that God fully accepted them.

The passage in verse 13 says Aaron has to come full of sweet incense. This is the first deodorant used in Scripture! When we come to God trusting in the righteousness and sacrifice of Jesus, God smells the sweetness of Christ and does not smell any of our defilement. This is the way by which the evil odor of our own failure is eliminated and the sweetness of Jesus Christ is sprayed completely on us. This is what we are to remember when we come before God in prayer at any time.

So, on the basis of the great work and life’s work of this great high priest here on earth and his continuing ministry in heaven, my greatest need is met: coming to God anytime and seeing him face to face. I can boldly come before God’s presence with a clean conscience. Our deep, dark, scarlet past sins are all covered and have become as white as snow. Here I am, Lord; I present myself. I want to serve with liberty and a clean conscience. That is the purpose of the great Day of Atonement.

Hebrews 10:19-22: “Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”

This is the great goal of the Day of Atonement. It teaches that as we come before his presence, we are to come clothed with the righteousness of Jesus Christ, based on his blood. We are fully accepted and loved. We will experience the full satisfaction of his presence only through this.

Bodily Discharges – Lev 15

August 4, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

Some people advised me not to teach Leviticus, and I understand why now. Because in doing so, the Lord touches on a very sensitive and private topic: discharges from the body for both males and females.

You may be appalled at first glance. We may all feel uncomfortable listening to this, and may even wonder why we came to church today, especially with family. You may even get angry that I am preaching this. I also initially felt that way, wondering why I started Leviticus and what this chapter was doing here. I questioned if it was appropriate for public reading and preaching with women and children present. Should I skip this? Many people are actually ashamed that this chapter is in the Bible.

But I realized, “If this chapter should not be read, the Holy Spirit should never have written this.” We should not just nominally or verbally say that Scripture is infallible and “every word of God is pure.” We should believe and practice that, so I emboldened myself and decided to preach this. I encourage you to embolden yourself to listen.

We always see that when the Bible talks about sensitive things such as sexual matters, it does not talk to us like the world does, but in a way that promotes holiness. If we avoid those passages, we will only have a wrong understanding of those things and go wrong in life. The Word of God ought to judge and correct us, and not the other way around. Remember, this is God’s word, and we should not think we are wiser than God. Oftentimes, the way we have been raised makes us overly sensitive in this area. The Bible looks at the human body with a wonderful frankness. It is never vulgar, never obscene, and never descends to disgusting bad language.

In our society, children are facing many problems because they lack sex education and age-related guidance. Children do not know how to handle their body changes and hormonal changes. They struggle with these questions, and parents do not educate them. They learn all the wrong things from friends and media and end up doing wrong things. In an age when sexual perversion and pornography are rampant, we need to have some open and frank talks about these things. Small children, you may not understand many things I speak; do not worry, your parents will explain these things to you at the proper age.

When we finally apply this passage spiritually, you will see that what was an ugly chapter is filled with wonderful spiritual truths that we can realize in no other way than for them to be expressed as they are here. So, please bear with me as I explain this most sensitive chapter in the Bible.

Let us zoom out and see from a bird’s-eye view where we are in Leviticus. After discussing personal sacrifices (chapters 1-7), God ordaining the priesthood, and temple worship (chapters 8-10), chapters 11-15 are where God is talking to his people about holiness. A sense of holiness always starts with a sense of sin, just as only when we know uncleanness will we seek purity. So, God is making his people sensitive to their native depravity and sin with many examples. He started with unclean foods, childbirth, and the disease of leprosy. Now, he is getting to the very deeply impacting bodily discharges. All of this is really preparation for the great chapter 16, the great day of atonement. All this uncleanness will make them see the glory of God’s atonement for sin in chapter 16. So, Leviticus 16:16 says the high priest “shall make atonement because of the impurities of the sons of Israel, and because of their transgressions.” If God had taken them directly to the day of atonement without all these chapters, they would say, “What impurities? We are so good, so holy.” So, he prepares them through chapters 11-15. These chapters show us how sinful we are and how holy God is. How difficult it is for a holy God to allow sinners with so much impurity into his presence. Food can be unclean, we are impure from birth, our bodies, garments, and houses can be impure with leprosy, and now we come to this sensitive yet important part in which God wants us to be holy. It is related to the organs of reproduction which profoundly symbolize impurity in the eyes of the living God.

There are three main headings: the impurity of male discharges in verses 1-17, the impurity of the bond between male and female in verse 18, and then the third section is the impurity of female discharges in verses 19-30.

The Impurity of Male Discharges in Verses 1-17

There are two particular flows they are speaking of here. The first would be diseased issues in verses 1-15, and then involuntary issues in verses 16 and 17.

The first, diseased issues; first, its identity. Verses 1-2: “When any man has a discharge from his body, his discharge is unclean.” The Greek translation of this Hebrew word for discharge is called “gonorrhoeus.” Known in our day as a venereal disease called gonorrhea. A sexually transmitted infection. A man who engages in sexual activity or with their own sex organs before marriage and outside marriage gets this disease and a continuous discharge. Romans 1:24 says, “Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves.” Verse 26: “For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.” Verse 27: “Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”

They lusted for one another, fantasizing. Leaving the natural use of these organs, they use them wrongly for self-gratification through masturbation and homosexuality, men with men and women with women, and they “received in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”

You may see your friends talking about engaging in sexual acts and with sex organs at a young age. Scripture says God’s judgment comes on their secret parts, which makes them diseased and weak. Here is one discharge due to infection that flows continuously. So we see its identity.

Second, its contagiousness. There are secondary pollutions that come from the individual who has this particular disease. Verses 4-12: “Every bed is unclean on which he who has the discharge lies, and everything on which he sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches his bed shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening. He who sits on anything on which he who has the discharge sat shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening. And he who touches the body of him who has the discharge shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening. If he who has the discharge spits on him who is clean, then he shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening. Any saddle (today, a bike or car seat) on which he who has the discharge rides shall be unclean. Whoever touches anything that was under him shall be unclean until evening. He who carries any of those things shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening. And whomever the one who has the discharge touches, and has not rinsed his hands in water, he shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening. The vessel of earth that he who has the discharge touches shall be broken, and every vessel of wood shall be rinsed in water.”

Wow! His bed, chair, and saddle are all unclean. Anyone who sits on what he sat on, even if he spits on someone, his saliva, all become unclean. The person needs to be washed, and he too is unclean until evening. Now, it’s interesting that in the case of this individual with this disease, unlike leprosy, he is not quarantined. He is allowed to continue through his daily paces in the camp. He is not banished from the people of God.

So we see its identity, its contagiousness, and thirdly, its purification in verses 13-15. We notice here that the infectious secretion stops. Generally, these diseases do not get cured like leprosy, but in case there is miraculous healing, the gonorrhea flow stops.

Verse 13: “And when he who has a discharge is cleansed of his discharge, then he shall count for himself seven days for his cleansing, wash his clothes, and bathe his body in running water; then he shall be clean.” A seven-day wait. Why a seven-day wait? Well, it seems one reason was so that there would be a certainty that the infection had indeed departed.

Then, again in verse 14: “On the eighth day he shall take for himself two turtledoves or two young pigeons, and come before the Lord, to the door of the tabernacle of meeting, and give them to the priest.” Verse 15: “Then the priest shall offer them, the one as a sin offering and the other as a burnt offering. So the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord because of his discharge.”

So we have seen diseased issues: its identity, contagiousness, and then cleansing. Next, secondly, involuntary issues. Involuntary issues are in verses 16 and 17.

Verse 16: “If any man has an emission of semen, then he shall wash all his body in water, and be unclean until evening.” Verse 17: “And any garment and any leather on which there is semen, it shall be washed with water, and be unclean until evening.”

This is not related to disease or to sexual intercourse. This could be from unnatural, deviant sexual activity. This is the starting stage for him to go to the previous diseased state. Involuntary nighttime emission is due to uncontrolled wrong thoughts, lusts, fantasies, dreams, or masturbations.

“Oh Pastor, am I in church? What is this for you and us? Did you come to torment us?” This is God’s word; we cannot tell him he should not talk about our secret things. God is talking and showing that he is concerned about these sensitive, secret aspects of your life. So this is unnatural sexual activity not because of disease or a man-woman relationship. God is very concerned about that. You know how much. Deuteronomy 23:10: “If there is among you any man who is unclean because of a nocturnal emission, then he must go outside the camp. He may not reenter the camp. But it shall be when evening approaches, he shall bathe himself with water, and at sundown he may reenter the camp.” This man has defiled himself. God will not allow uncleanness in the holy camp because he walks in the midst of his people.

An emission from the bodily activity of a man, which can take place even in a semi-conscious, sleeping state. But even then, the man is considered to be responsible for it, as he himself is unclean. No atonement is needed for this. So that is the impurity of male discharges.

After male discharges, verse 18 talks about discharge that comes in the relationship between a man and a woman: “they shall bathe in water, and be unclean until evening.”

The Bible does not say sex is sinful. There is nothing sinful, there is nothing ungodly. This is happening in a fallen state, an accursed world. God then uses this as an occasion to symbolize impurity. They just need to bathe in water; both are unclean until evening, though again, there is no atonement sacrifice necessary.

The Impurity of Female Discharges in Verses 19-30

So we’ve seen the impurity of male discharges, we’ve seen the impurity of sexual intercourse, and now the third heading, the impurity of female discharges, in verses 19 through 30.

Again, there are two kinds of discharges. First of all, there are involuntary issues, things the woman cannot control, in verses 19 through 24. Then, there is a diseased flow in verses 25-27.

Involuntary issues in verses 19 to 24 describe the normal monthly menstrual blood discharge. When this takes place, a woman is unclean for seven days. During these seven days, verse 19 onwards says anything that she sat upon or lied upon was unclean. And all who touched her or anything she touched are unclean.

You may wonder, “Oh, these old rules are absolutely impossible to live in that era, under that old covenant.” Yes, these ritual rules do not apply today. However, these cleanliness rules had their great benefit in a time with no vaccination, no medical facilities, and rampant infections. I remember in old days in our villages they followed such rules. We have to recognize that God was teaching something by giving these laws to a particular people at a particular time, in a particular culture. Its relevance is not necessarily as tight as we might think it to be today. But we don’t have this today as a ritual.

Also, verse 24 says if a man has any relationship with a woman at this time, he “shall be unclean seven days; and every bed on which he lies shall be unclean.” There was no atonement sacrifice necessary, no turtle doves. During those seven days, we see there was a restriction in the woman’s movement as she was not to go near the tabernacle.

Next, verses 25 through 30 talk about a disease discharge of a continuous flow. Verse 25: “Now, if a woman has a discharge of her blood many days,” now notice this next phrase, “not at the period in her menstrual impurity.” This is not a temporary, short-term problem. This is an extended problem.

We find a woman with this same problem in Mark chapter 5, verse 25. A woman who had had a hemorrhage for twelve years. A “many days” problem. She had endured much at the hands of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was not helped at all, but rather had grown worse. After hearing about Jesus, she came up in the crowd behind him and touched his cloak. And she thought, “If I just touch his garments, I shall get well.” And immediately, the flow of her blood was dried up for the first time in twelve years. And she felt in her body that she was healed of her, literally, her scourge. And immediately, Jesus perceived in himself that the power had proceeded from him. He asked, “Who touched my garments?” And the disciples said to him, “You see the multitude pressing in on you, and you say, ‘Who touched me?'” And he looked around to see the woman who had done this.

But the woman, fearing and trembling, aware of what had happened to her, came and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be healed of your scourge.”

So this is the problem that’s being identified here: a hemorrhaging woman who has an extended uterine disease or infection. Can you imagine the stigma for such a poor woman? Anything that she touched, anything she sat upon (bed, benches, clothes), she was unclean. She was, practically speaking, an outcast for twelve years. And that’s why she was so hesitant to approach Jesus in the crowd. She was not supposed to be in that crowd. She was unclean. The reason she had to come secretly to Jesus was that she was unclean. She could not enter the community, and more so, how could she explain her problem to Jesus publicly? And if Jesus touched her, he would be unclean. So she planned a strategy to secretly come and touch him. She was desperate. No physician could help her. Only this great physician could. Her desperation made her seek out her only hope.

So we see such a woman in Leviticus 15. Verse 28 talks about her cleansing if she is healed. She “shall count off for herself seven days and afterward she shall be clean.” You can imagine the euphoria. It almost makes us think of the leper. Clean! A seven-day count to ensure the reality of the cure and the end of the infection. And notice in verse 29, here it is again: on the eighth day. The eighth day, as I mentioned before, is an important day in theological symbolism. On the eighth day, then, she shall take for herself two turtledoves or two pigeons, and she is to then go to the tabernacle, offer up a sin offering and a burnt offering as the priest makes atonement, and then she shall be restored to all of her community and all of her relationship privileges.

So those are the three main headings of the passage: two man problems, a man-woman problem, and two woman problems. Oh, what rituals, what nonsense. “I will not follow all this.” The chapter ends with a terrible warning. Verse 31: “Thus you shall separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness, lest they die in their uncleanness when they defile My tabernacle that is among them.” The phrase “my tabernacle that is among them” is key.

There’s a death warning. Notice, “lest they die because of uncleanness.” It reminds us of Nadab and Abihu, who were consumed by the fire of God’s holy presence. This really leads us to the threshold of the day of atonement just around the corner in chapter 16. God will strike not only when we worship wrongly and offer strange fire, but when we live with uncleanness. Not only a priest or pastor, but even a layman. If they were to approach the tabernacle in an unclean state, they were vulnerable to being struck dead by the living God. So this little epilogue puts a skull and crossbones warning, saying, “Don’t dare violate these regulations and approach the tabernacle in a way that I have not prescribed.”

So that’s our exposition.

Yes, these physical rules of separation and sacrifices do not apply today, though bodily cleanliness and sanitary precautions are still advised by most doctors to avoid infections. God wisely gave some of these rules thousands of years ago to people without vaccination or antibiotics to prevent diseases that were rampant in the ancient world. It is these kinds of restrictions and regulations, cleanliness rules in reproductive organs and processes, that saved the nation of Israel from many dangerous plagues that destroyed whole nations around them. These gracious rules are a major reason that Israel has been preserved as a nation through all these centuries.

Today, we do not have them as religious ritual rules. But the principles are applicable today.

The first principle for small children, young people, and even married people is that a superficial reading should make it clear that God is commanding sexual restraint and avoiding any kind of sexual deviation. Remember that the culture of the Canaanites, where they would go and live, had all kinds of abnormal sexual activities that were actually part of their worship. Sexual celebration was seen as a divine act, worshipping the fertility goddess, Asterah. They thought it was divine love. God is saying any sexual abnormal activity and any physical contact between a man and a woman outside of marriage is not divine love, but horrible uncleanness that not only separates you from God but will bring God’s judgments.

Imagine in that culture, these rules in those olden days were a great means to put a brake on youthful passions and desires for hasty sex before marriage or outside of marriage. God warns here that whether as an individual having these discharges by masturbation or that leading to some weakness and disease, if you come to the temple in that unclean condition without realizing your sin and repenting, you may face God’s judgment and die. See the threat, not that he will remove skin or break bones, but kill you.

Today’s young people, the outside world is full of filth and dirt. There are no rules for anyone. Media, pornography, and sexual perversion are everywhere, and everyone is out of control. You will face peer pressure and media influence, “Oh, everyone has a boyfriend or girlfriend. If you don’t, you’re abnormal.” And your own hormones will all make you hasty in this area. You need sex education. I do not know who will do that.

I hope parents will not get upset with me. Let me say a few things, and if I say something wrong, please correct me. Sex is a beautiful gift from God. You do not have to feel ashamed; it is a gift from God. After a certain age, you will have hormonal changes, and you will have desires and attractions toward the opposite sex. It is part of your growth. It is a gift from God. Every gift God gives, he wants his children to enjoy to the full. It is Satan who wants us to abuse that gift and destroy that gift. He is doing that with sex in many lives. You know God’s will for your sex life is that he wants you to enjoy it purely and to the fullest extent all your life. Yes, how can we enjoy sex to the fullest extent?

When you learn to control yourself, control your desires, allow your organs to mature, not play with them, save it as a precious thing for the right relationship at the right time, within the security of the marriage bond. That is why a good God commands you to control your desires temporarily, and you should not see this as burdensome, but as great love and care, so you can enjoy his gift fully.

There is nothing so joyful as sex within the intimacy of truly knowing and loving the whole person, not just their body, but their character, personality, and enjoying sex with the safety and commitment of marriage with a deeper emotional and spiritual connection. Nothing is like it.

If you allow your stupid friends to pressure you, if you do not learn to control your hormonal urges and you follow them, become hasty, play with sex and organs when they are immature before the right time within marriage, there will be terrible consequences, and you will destroy this wonderful gift for a lifetime. I have to state a few R-rated things now because we live in a pornography age.

The Bible says sex is actually a divine gift. Two shall become one flesh. Before your marriage, if you are involved, that mysterious union will haunt you all your life, even if you end the relationship. For example, playing with sex organs, fantasizing, lust, masturbation, and sex outside of marriage not only defiles the temple of God that is your body, our Lord said you commit adultery in your heart, which destroys your soul. But it also has horrible physical consequences and God’s judgments. As we saw in Romans 1, God’s judgment will come in their secret areas. Sexual energy is a powerful force designed for marital intimacy and procreation. When directed in the wrong direction, there are horrible psychological, emotional, and spiritual consequences in the soul. Such a body makes them unfit for proper married life. I read that one of the primary reasons for increasing divorce is this. No one will say this openly. Why?

Playing with sex organs before marriage leads to intensified lust, sex addiction, and isolated pleasure. It completely twists God’s design and purpose of sex. It brings invisible, secret judgments of God in your soul and body. A soul full of shame, guilt, and regret, which loses all self-respect and confidence in yourself, and a deadness of soul. A body with a secret, addictive, and compulsive habit that loses all self-control and delay gratification. It can also lead to reduced sensitivity and strength. The mind has a distorted view of sex, is addictive, and feels the wrath of God.

Such a person becomes fully unfit for God-designed sex and a satisfying married life, making it harder to experience true, selfless intimacy in marriage. It can lead to reduced interest and even impotence, and previous wrong sins can make sex a completely bitter experience in marriage. Apart from weakness and impotence, like in the passage of gonorrhea, today there are several sexually transmitted infections: Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Chlamydia, Trichomoniasis, Hepatitis B, HSV, and HIV. Some of them may take four to five years to show symptoms.

That is why a loving God tells us in 1 Corinthians 6:18: “Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.” Deuteronomy 22:21 says one who participates in sex before marriage will be a fool in this life and will live with shame and guilt. Hebrews 13:4: “Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge.” It should be kept pure.

In reading a chapter like this, we can recognize its intense value on the physical level to prevent the contagion of infectious diseases. But it has primary significance on the spiritual level.

The second application is that this passage also teaches us sin’s ubiquity, or universality. “Ubiquity” is a new word to help you remember the meaning. It means sin is everywhere. From chapters 11-15, we see the ubiquity of sin in land animals, water animals, birds, and even flies. It starts from birth, it spreads and destroys the whole body as leprosy, and now, secret discharges. God shows us how he sees us from his holy eyes. We are nothing but full of sins and uncleanness. The prevalence of sin among Adam’s race in the eyes of God. Imagine how difficult it is for a holy God to walk among us and have a relationship with us. A rich, delicate princess who has never seen anything unclean walks among the worst slum toilet areas: “Filthy! Filthy!” So too is the three times holy God, brethren, walking among us as the prevalence of our sin is manifested in these lines.

So, depraved, we live in a defiled world, depraved from birth, lepers, full of unclean discharges that come from us. What do these discharges mean spiritually? Our Lord interpreted this passage in Mark 7. “The truly dangerous defilement that can defile a man is not from outside, but what comes out of a man is what defiles him” (Mark 7:20). Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness, and blasphemies. These things which defile the human spirit. The word “proceed” is like those discharges. These proceed from man.

Notice there are some things we avoid externally because of the police and government, but there are continuous discharges we cannot avoid. They keep coming whatever we do: covetousness, lying, pride, conceit, hurtful, sharp responses that hurt others, thoughtless foolish actions. These come without our thinking sometimes. They come without planning, unpremeditatedly. And they represent the fact that our evil, fallen nature is so subtle, so close to us, so silken that it slips out sometimes without our being aware. Daily I say things to my wife that hurt her. It automatically comes out. I had not meant to offend. How many arguments in marriage? All because of these discharges of evil thoughts. We try to justify ourselves: “All I said was…” “Yes, but how did you say it?” Thus, offenses can occur, and defiling, injurious, hurtful relationships can ensue. And these discharges from life come all the time, especially when the passions are aroused, as in anger or sex. It is these discharges from within that defile.

They not only consciously come from us, but we are so unclean from head to toe that they come from us involuntarily without us knowing, like bodily discharges. How many sins of ignorance, sins beyond the conscious purpose of the will, flow involuntarily? It is all a picture of unknown sins.

One said, “Just as physically a man or woman contracts uncleanness, during unconsciousness of sleep, in dreams, so morally we find sinful issues coming forth from the evil heart and nature even in dreams. Oh, so unclean, we sin even in our dreams.” That is why great saints like Jonathan Edwards were careful and even analyzed their own dreams and confessed for sins in their dreams. Because we have such a depraved nature. Even in our dreams, even in our subconscious and semi-conscious states, we are sinners through and through.

And you compare this uncleanness with the uncleanness of leprosy in the 14th chapter. Not only was the ancient Israelite to guard against public impurity, like leprosy, something everyone would know about, but also secret impurities seen only in private places by him. Our secret lusts, adulterous thoughts, lustful impulses, or fantasizing; envious thoughts against a neighbor’s wife, or the opposite sex; our murderous thoughts; our deep resentments against a brother or sister, only you know about it, but God sees it. And the hours or minutes we may spend brooding over our hard lot, thinking to ourselves, “Why does God bless those people with so much riches? I am so poor. He doesn’t have sense.” We are envious of this. Secret, bitter envy against the advancement or prosperity of another.

Brethren, God sees it all with this penetrating eye. How deep is our sin into the most private sections of our lives? We cannot escape, even if we go as monks or nuns, where no one is there. Because it comes from inside. The secret flow of sin does not cease. However moral the outward life may be, out of the heart will flow the secret pride, unbelief, lust, and evil thoughts, which defile the soul and burden the conscience with guilt.

Do you see the benefit of this chapter, brethren? The book of Leviticus, if all these Arminians, self-righteous religious people who do not believe in the total depravity and sovereignty of God in salvation, this “stupid Calvinism,” “the dignity of free will”… if they would just read and grasp the depth of our depravity displayed here. Do you see how in this chapter we can clearly see the distressing vileness of our cursed sinnerhood? We are an ever-flowing stream of uncleanness in the mind of God. Oh, can you imagine what a smelly and deep gutter of sin our soul lives in in God’s eye? There is a continuous flow, and the intensity increases as we grow and get more opportunities. How polluted we are.

Oh, do we understand how difficult it must be for a holy God to commune with us, slum dogs! Like a delicate England queen comes and lives in the worst-smelling slum next to a city gutter! Can you understand that verse in Genesis 6:5-6: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”

You Arminians, how foolish to talk about free will, what occasion is there for any to glory in the flesh? To boast in the dignity of man, of human nature. But brethren, here we see through the spectacles of God the revolting side of sinful man. God shows the depth of the depravity of man, so every mouth is stopped and all become guilty before the living God.

And when we understand our sin as God would see it, the white and pristine and pure God, then we say, “What a wretched man. Who will rescue us from this body of death?” Do you see in this passage a theme of sin’s ubiquity, its everywhere-ness, how high it is, and even how deep it is into our own sinful natures?

What are we to do about them? Are we merely to ignore them? Are we to go on our way and think nothing more of them? No. If we do, we are in trouble. Do you realize why man is always miserable? Because all this gutter flow will add up against us. They will start stacking up in our subconscious. Guilt will begin to increase, and restlessness will come into our spirits. Shame, peacelessness, deadness of soul, a sense of defilement that makes us unfit to come to God, and even hide, and strangely hate God sometimes, his presence. It is this defilement.

I do not want to end with sad news, but there is good news of the gospel. For such dirty creatures, instead of throwing them into burning hell, behold the provision of spiritual purification. Blessed be God. Brethren, this melancholy view of our sin gives us a majestic view of our Savior and his work. We will see that more clearly in the next day of atonement. Atonement becomes gloriously bright for sinners who realize their vileness.

Even in this chapter, God provides a remedy. Verse 13 talks about washing in water, washing his clothes, and bathing his body in running water. To be separated from the temple for seven days, all of this talks about the process of repentance: realizing your sin against God’s word, realizing you are cut off from God’s presence because of all this defilement and sins, and realizing how sinful he is and how he is defiled. Get the sense of sin. Acknowledging sin is the first step of cleansing. All is repentance.

Then it talks about faith: “On the eighth day he shall take for himself two turtledoves or two young pigeons, and come before the Lord, to the door of the tabernacle of meeting, and give them to the priest. Then the priest shall offer them, the one as a sin offering and the other as a burnt offering. So the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord because of his discharge.”

All this points to our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. God never once sets aside the requirement for the blood of an innocent substitute to be shed in the place of one who is defiled, showing that human nature needs to be dealt with by blood, by life poured out. It is a deep and complicated problem. It cannot be solved by a mere rearrangement of surface symptoms.

Those two birds suffering remind us of the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, how deep and wide then is his love. Do you see the great depths that our Savior plunged into in order to bury the vastness? Think of it: he not only died for our original sin and actual conscious sins, but also for the unconscious, constant flow from our depraved hearts, an unending flow of that gutter. It goes beyond all our conceptions. It is infinite. It is infinite upon infinite. That is the vastness of the height and the depth of my sin. Oh, may God open our eyes to see the colossal depths of our Savior’s suffering on the cross to bury all those defiled oceans of discharges. Yes, our flow could have created an ocean of discharge, but his love and grace and blood covered all those oceans of gutter in the sea of his atoning love. And we are made clean. We are made clean.

Oh, who are hemorrhaging sinners? You see this bleeding from your soul, even when you sleep, just sitting, a continuous flow comes out in evil thoughts. Like the woman in Mark 5, she tried all methods and doctors, but nothing helped. Always flowing, flowing. But one day she believed that if she just touched the hem of his garment, the flow would stop. Wherever God’s word is preached, Revelation shows Jesus invisibly walks there in his church. He walks about the little flock. The Lord Jesus walks among us.

Can I tell you there is no other physician in the world who can cure you of your cursed scourge? None other. He alone. You may feel that you are so unfit, like that woman was. So unworthy to enter into his presence. There is one qualification you need that makes you fit: desperation and being fed up with your sinful flow. You want to stop it. A qualification that says there is none other, no other physician who can heal me. It is only him, the Lord Jesus Christ, who can make me clean and allow me to enter into the presence of the living God. If Christ is your last chance and your only hope, then I invite you to come to him.

Come and just touch him once with the hand of faith. You don’t need great faith to come and hug him with both hands. All you need is faith that can make you raise your small, weak index finger and touch not even his body, but the hem of his garment. That is all you need to do: make a connection between you and him through faith alone.

Through the channel of faith, you will feel his power entering your soul and body and immediately sense his healing and cleansing power. You will sense that the flow has stopped. You will sense that reigning sin is dead. Sin cannot have dominion over you. You will feel the cleansing and joy of deliverance and forgiveness. He will speak to your soul, “Sinner, don’t fear, your faith has healed you.” You don’t need great works. Come with all your uncleanness, unworthiness, and oh, hemorrhaging sinner, touch him today.

As believers, we saw today that we are not saved and gone once we come in faith. Yes, when we come, our reigning sin is cleansed and we are delivered. But we have remaining sin, so we keep coming in faith to him. We need constant cleansing and reviving from our great High Priest. Keep coming back to our Savior to be cleansed. Conscience cleansing is necessary to maintain fellowship with the God who dwells among his people. For believers with remaining sin, this idea of the flow stopping is an emblem of sanctification. This is how, when a man has become cleansed before the living God, there is not the chronic flow of the sinful symbol.

Worship of a Leper – Lev 14

August 4, 2025grbcindiaLeave a comment

One reason why many people are not saved is that they do not realize the horror of sin. Similarly, many saved Christians are not living for God because they have forgotten the horror of the sin from which they were saved. Therefore, the most important realization for both the saved and the unsaved is to understand the horror of sin.

We are seeing why, at the beginning of his revelation in Genesis, God uses the picture of leprosy to make us realize the horror of our sin. Isaiah says that from head to toe, not one part is healthy; all are infected and damaged by leprosy. Sin has permeated our whole being, like ink saturating a whole glass. We are born unclean in sin. Not only are we fully leprous, but everything we do is sinful. Everything comes from impure, selfish motives and a sinful heart. We constantly break God’s law, and everything we touch is unclean and defiled before God. Romans 3:12 says, “All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” Their “throat is an open grave” (Romans 3:13). What a horrible sight and smell. They may hide their heart, but when they open their mouth, it reveals a bitter, unclean, rotting, and smelling heart. “With their tongues they deceive; the venom of asps is under their lips” (Romans 3:13). “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness” (Romans 3:14). What a picture! Ephesians 2 shows those who were “dead in trespasses and sins,” a sad condition of being controlled by the devil. As a leper is an awful, hateful sight with rotted flesh, unbound, untreated, and dying, a picture of death itself, so every sinner is hateful to God.

Why don’t people realize that? If they did, they would run to the Savior. Our pride and love of sin blind us and refuse to believe God, who alone knows our true condition. The god of this world blinds people in many ways. False religion blinds people with an external show and external morality. People see others who are worse than themselves. Some of you may see friends who are drug addicts and do bad things and think you are righteous in comparison. We always see people worse than ourselves in the world and take comfort that we are better, but that is a very false standard. We should measure ourselves not by looking at others, but by the law of God because that is what God will use to judge us.

Only when a man sees himself in the mirror of God’s holy law in its purity does he see how leprous he is. That is why our Lord, in the Sermon on the Mount, used God’s law to strip away all our outward covering and make us see our leprosy by showing heart sins of lust as adultery and anger as murder. After his sermon, in Matthew 7:28, “the crowds were amazed at his teaching.” This is very interesting. The first miracle he does in chapter 8 is healing a leper. In Matthew 8:2, “a man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, ‘Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.'” Verse 3: “Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. ‘I am willing,’ he said. ‘Be clean!’ Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy.” Verse 4: “Then Jesus said to him, ‘See that you don’t tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.'” It is interesting that in Acts 6:7, when the apostles preached, “Many of the priests also believed.” I wonder if, while they were doing all these two-bird rituals for leprosy, they saw how Jesus wonderfully fulfilled all that.

In our study of Leviticus, we have seen the horrible plague of leprosy, and we saw leprosy not only affecting our body, but our garments and houses. We can see how sin, like soul leprosy, can affect our soul, and we become so unbearable to see ourselves. It can spread even to our outward behavior and affect others, making us unbearable to them, and it can even bring down and destroy our houses fully if we don’t do something.

We saw the wonderful cleansing of the leper in the two-bird ritual. How the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are depicted in those two birds, and also the cleansing of the leper is depicted there. Just as the priest goes out of the camp to meet the healed leper, our Lord Jesus Christ came out of God’s holy place to the defiled leper colony of this world. Just as the first bird depicts the leper’s horrible condition, the cutting off of life, family, and community, it will die. So the first bird’s head is turned under fresh, running water. Its blood drops along with the clear, living water; two streams now meet in the pot—blood and water! A “heavenly” being (like a bird) dying in an “earthen vessel” depicts a divine person dying in the earthen vessel of a human body.

As you see fresh water and blood flowing, it should remind us that to save us, our Lord Jesus poured out himself. As fresh, living, running water, his life was poured out in perfect obedience, an unsinning life to fulfill all righteousness for us, and then the blood reminds us how he poured out himself to satisfy the demands of the broken law, even unto death. So now, by the river of that life and death, water and blood, we sinful lepers are cleansed.

The living bird, dipped in the blood of the slain bird and then released, symbolizes Christ’s resurrection and ascension. He rose again, bearing the marks of His death, carrying the power of His atoning blood to heaven to apply and set us free from the bondage of sin. The cedar wood, like teakwood, is rot and decay resistant, and symbolizes strength and durability. Jesus’ body did not see decay (Acts 2:27). The scarlet thread represents the precious blood that ties our redemption. Hyssop is the instrument of applying purification. The seven sprinklings signify a complete, perfect cleansing. Through Christ’s one sacrifice, we are perfectly and eternally cleansed. So we see his cleansing.

Today, we will see two things:

Acceptance of the ex-leper in the temple on the eighth day.
Worship of the ex-leper.

Acceptance of the Ex-Leper in the Temple on the Eighth Day

We see his acceptance into the temple on the eighth day in verses 8 and 11. Verse 8 says: “He who is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean. After that he shall come into the camp, and shall stay outside his tent seven days.” Verse 9 says: “But on the seventh day he shall shave all the hair off his head and his beard and his eyebrows—all his hair he shall shave off. He shall wash his clothes and wash his body in water, and he shall be clean.”

You see, after the two-bird ritual, the individual was allowed to go into the camp. But he wasn’t allowed to go into his own tent and, most importantly, he wasn’t allowed to go into the tent of the living God. For seven days, he could roam around the camp, but not into his own tent, nor into the tent of the living God. And only on the eighth day was he admitted into his own tent and the tent of God.

Consider, then, this eighth-day admission. When else have we heard of the eighth day in the book of Leviticus? It was in Leviticus chapter 12 when on the eighth day we noted that a boy child was to be circumcised. And we said the unclean boy child would come and receive the circumcision, a cutting away of the flesh which in the New Testament emblematizes new birth. In the same way we see here, God is told to shave his head, beard, and eyebrows on the seventh day, wash thoroughly, and enter the temple on the eighth day. What does this show? Again, this is the washing of regeneration. He gets a new heart. Why would God make them do these important things on the eighth day, which is not their Sabbath?

The seventh-day Sabbath was celebrating the old and first creation. God created everything in six days and rested on the seventh day. Christ fulfilled all these types and rose again on the eighth day as the inauguration of a new creation. So the eighth day was clearly pointing to the coming new creation and the start of the Christian Sabbath. I showed that the eighth day is a rich theme in these Old Testament types. The seventh day is Saturday for them, the eighth is Sunday. You see, the Christian Sabbath was changed from the seventh day, Saturday, to the eighth day, Sunday, which was not merely haphazard. There were rich Old Testament roots and theological relevance. The eighth day, Sunday, is the day of new creation by the resurrection of Christ. The Old Testament pointed that all those who are newborn were circumcised and admitted into the temple on the eighth day, pointing to the fulfillment of all those who will be born again, united with Christ’s resurrection day, and as new creatures, enter the temple and gather on the eighth day. 2 Corinthians 5:17, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone and the new has come.”

Just as every Jewish baby boy is circumcised and admitted into the temple on the eighth day, so we see every leper was considered unclean and dead. He was banished from the holy congregation. But now, he is alive again, like a new birth. Like a newborn baby, 2 Kings 5:14, talking about Namaan’s healing, says “His flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child.” Now as a born-again man, he is allowed to come inside the temple on the eighth day to present himself before the Lord. From the death of leprosy, he is beginning a new life, entering the camp and temple of God. Notice the cleansed person washes clothes, shaves all hair (head, beard, eyebrows), and bathes in water on the first and seventh days before entering the temple on the eighth day. This complete washing and entrance on the eighth day depicts the washing of regeneration and the necessity of new birth. Who is allowed into the new covenant community of God’s people? Only those who have been regenerated. Only those who have been given a new heart, circumcised not merely in the flesh, but in the heart. For a leper to enter the temple of God and commune with God, not only do his sins have to be forgiven, but his heart needs to change by regeneration.

Though all this happens at once when Christ saves us, we have to realize there is a big distinction in different aspects. Forgiveness and justification are two sides of a coin: one negative, to forgive our sins, and one positive, to impart righteousness. Both may be two sides of the same coin. But there is a difference between justification and regeneration. Justification delivers us from the penalty of sin, but regeneration delivers us from the power of sin. Justification legally admits us into God’s presence, but regeneration experientially and enjoyably admits us into God’s fellowship. There is a difference. Let me give an example.

David had a son, Absalom. He killed another of David’s sons, Amnon, and he was banished. After Joab pleaded, David decided to forgive his crime, but said he cannot come to my palace or see my face. David’s idea may have been that I will forgive his crime, but until his heart changes and he realizes his crime, he cannot come to me and enjoy my fellowship. His arrogance should change to humility, his rebellion to submission. Until that happens, though I forgave him, the son must still keep his distance. He cannot have my fellowship. In the same way, a man cannot have true access and enjoy fellowship with God by merely claiming, “My sins have been forgiven. I am justified.” His heart has to change by having a circumcised heart, a sensitive heart that realizes his great crime against God and loves God with a repented heart.

This is actually an inseparable evidence of true salvation. The evidence that someone is justified and saved from the penalty of sins is that they will be delivered from the power of sin. What is the evidence of the man who was a thief, that his sins have actually been forgiven? It is that he no longer steals, but rather that he works with his hands so that he will be able to provide for himself and for others. The fact that he has been delivered from the penalty of sin is manifested by his life, that he has been delivered from the power of his sin. A man breaking God’s law by dishonoring his parents, not listening to them, and bringing a bad name for them before the world, the evidence he is saved is that he will start obeying his parents.

Think why those seven days, he is allowed to move around the camp, not to enter even his tent or temple. Why should he be around people? So that people can watch him. He has been ceremonially cleansed, but for seven days, the whole camp will watch if the power of leprosy is truly broken in this man. In the same way, people complain, “Oh, we are so legalistic in our membership process.” No, we are biblical. If there would be someone who comes among us and says, “I have been justified,” is it not appropriate for the people of God to make sure that the man who claims he has been delivered from the penalty of sin in his life manifests that he has been delivered from the power of his sin? That the stronghold of the disease of sin has indeed been broken. He no longer has leprosy or is spreading leprosy; otherwise, the whole church will be infected. So they were careful about physical leprosy. But when we do it spiritually, they say we are legalists. So we see not only cleansing but also the eighth-day admission which symbolizes the regeneration of the leper. Now he is cleansed, forgiven, regenerated, and adopted into the family of God. Next we see his worship.

Worship of the Ex-Leper

Note the five elements of the ex-leper’s worship. There are four groups of activities in worship: Presentation, Offerings, Blood Smearings, and Oil Anointing.

First, Presentation. Verse 11 says he is “Presented before the Lord, at the door of the tabernacle of meeting.”

Second, the priest gives different offerings. Verse 12: “And the priest shall take one male lamb and offer it as a trespass offering, and the log of oil, and wave them as a wave offering before the Lord.” Verse 13: “Then he shall kill the lamb in the place where he kills the sin offering and the burnt offering, in a holy place.”

Third, Blood Smearings. It is the smearing of blood on the strategic body parts. Read with me, for example, in verse 14: “The priest shall take some of the blood of the trespass offering, and the priest shall put it on the tip of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed, on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot.”

Fourth, Oil Anointing. Verse 15: “And the priest shall take some of the log of oil, and pour it into the palm of his own left hand.” Verse 16: “Then the priest shall dip his right finger in the oil that is in his left hand, and shall sprinkle some of the oil with his finger seven times before the Lord.” Verse 17: “And of the rest of the oil in his hand, the priest shall put some on the tip of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed, on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot, on the blood of the trespass offering.” Verse 18: “The rest of the oil that is in the priest’s hand he shall put on the head of him who is to be cleansed. So the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord.”

What does all this whole ritual indicate? We keep scratching our head, saying again, “Why these boring tables?” No other normal Jew is told to do this. When you go back and re-read, do you know the only other person who has to perform all these rituals? The closest parallel to this ceremony in the book of Leviticus is the priestly ordination in chapters 8 and 9. When a man is dedicated, consecrated to serve God fully, ordained into that very high office, as Aaron and his sons were able to serve in the Tabernacle of the Living God? Remember his elaborate, grand dress, and then there were long rituals, a maze of rituals we saw. Only he has been made to go through all this.

You can see exact copies of those rituals here: the list of different offerings (guilt, wave, sin, and burnt offerings), and then the same smearing of blood on the right ear, right thumb, and right toe on strategic body parts, and the anointing of oil that were anointed back in Leviticus 8:23 and 8:24.

Question: Why are these priestly rituals done to the leper? He is not going to serve as a priest inside the tabernacle. Why all this for him?

Because only the leper, who knows the horror of his gruesome state in the leper colony, experiencing a living hell, cut off from family, people of God, and the temple of God, and dying a slow death, when God provides glorious deliverance from his wretched condemnation and leprosy, he has been delivered. God expects the heart of a cleansed, re-admitted leper to be filled with so much gratitude to God for his grace. If he has any sense of gratitude, he should commit all his remaining life, his energy, his powers, and his strength to serving the living God with the same commitment as a priest.

Last week, I called you “fellow lepers.” Now I call you as “fellow ex-lepers.” If you have any sense of the horror of the soul leprosy of sin, how you were born a leper, head to toe all leprous, everything that comes from you is impure, everything we touch is unclean, you lived constantly breaking God’s law, and you were defiled before God. As a leper is an awful, hateful sight with rotted flesh, unbound, untreated, and dying, a picture of death itself, you were so hateful to God. “Dead in trespasses and sins,” as Ephesians 2 says, “wallowing in your own leprous lusts and gutters.”

But I ask you, fellow cleansed, regenerated, adopted lepers, what inspiration and enthusiasm does the wonderfully restored leper know that we don’t know? Isn’t it even an argument from the lesser to the greater? Isn’t his restoration much less of a restoration than our restoration as eternal lepers and sinners? He may die and be delivered from his body’s leprosy. But oh, who could deliver us from eternal leprosy that is stuck like a spot on a leopard?

If you have any sense of your former condition, my fellow cleansed lepers, nobody has to tell you. You will have all the zeal and energy as a cleansed leper to serve God with all of your heart, mind, and strength. How inspired; how filled with enthusiasm he will be to serve the living God, much more than all other normal Jews. Can we learn how to worship God with the four elements of the ex-leper’s worship?

First, presentation. Verse 11 says he is “Presented before the Lord, at the door of the tabernacle of meeting.” Think of the leper with tears in his eyes. These ears, hands, and legs should have rotted and been covered with blood and pus, but now, by an impossible, gracious miracle of God, all of that has disappeared, and they are healthy. “I should have died in a grave for lepers, but here I am sitting in the temple of God, pronounced clean. So I present myself as a sacrifice to God.” Can you see him standing there with tears?

Does this presentation remind us of Paul’s words? In Romans, after telling us for 11 chapters about our leprous condition in sin and what God has done, what does he tell us? Romans 12:1: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.”

If you have any sense of God’s mercies shown to you, if you have any reasonable sense, you will do that. As cleansed lepers, we are obligated to give every ounce of energy to our Savior, who, in a way, became a leper to cleanse our leprosy.

What is the second aspect of the trespass offering, the wave offering, the sin offering, and the burnt offering in a holy place? The cleansed leper should never dare approach God with any arrogance of his own purity or self-righteousness, but always through the Lamb of God. That is the right way to approach. Doesn’t the writer of Hebrews call us in 10:19-22: “Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” No other way. It is by only one perfect sacrifice alone that I, as a cleansed leper, will always come with a broken and contrite heart.

There is a fine flour offering of a grain offering. Remember it is the giving of our labor of our hands and ourselves to God. Do you think he will grumble and struggle to tithe to God? No. So the leper, now in gratitude, offers the labor of his hands to God not grudgingly, but as Paul says, he will cheerfully.

Blood Smearings: It is the smearing of blood on the strategic body parts: the right ear, right thumb, and right big toe. What does this mean? Just as for the priest, the symbolism was that this is a cleansed, consecrated man who should devote the strength of his ears to hearing God’s word, the strength of his hands to perform works of righteousness, and his legs to walk in God’s ways. The right thumb and big toe indicated the strength of the hands and feet. You know that if you cut the thumb and big toe, the strength in the hands and legs is gone. In Judges 1:6, Adonai-bezek in Judges, they wanted to make a man helpless, so they took off his thumbs so he could no longer grasp things, and they cut off his big toes so he hobbled around with much instability. So we see then that the big toe and the thumb involved physical strength that is depicted in the touching of these lobes. It was done to the priest, indicating that as High Priest, Aaron was to be a man whose life was to be dedicated to the Lord’s service in all of his faculties, with all of his strength. His life was to be given to serve God.

Think of the leper with tears in his eyes. These ears, hands, and legs should have rotted with blood and pus, but today they are healthy, so I give them to God. “I should have died in a grave for lepers, but here I am sitting in the temple of God, pronounced clean.” I devote my bloodstained ears, hands, and legs to God.

Again, Paul, continuing to tell us to offer ourselves, tells us in Romans 12:2: now, if you realize what God has done for you, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” If you have any sense of your former condition, my fellow cleansed lepers, nobody has to tell you. You will have all the zeal and energy as a cleansed leper to serve God with all of your heart, mind, and strength.

What does this mean? As a true worshiper, first, devote your bloodstained ears to hearing and reading God’s word. You don’t come to church and allow your mind to go around the world, or not sleep properly and sleep here. No, you come with a prepared heart. Devote your ears to discern the good will of God. Oh, how much when we see ears were full of leprosy, only loved to hear the filth of the world, a mind was demon-possessed and tortured. Like Saul, to calm that mind, we kept hearing the demonic songs of the world. We kept giving our ears to the lies of the devil and the world and hated God’s good word. Now God has cleansed my mind to hear. My ears are dedicated to hear and grasp God’s good and perfect will.

Once you grasp your good and acceptable, perfect will, these hands, which were full of leprosy in actions, are now cleansed to do God’s will. And these leprous legs should have walked in the path of the devil and the world and rotted in hell, but now these cleansed, bloodstained hands and legs are dedicated to do his will and to walk in his ways. Ears, hands, and legs talk about our actions, walk, lifestyle, and direction of life. All should be to do God’s good will. All his right side should be given to God, meaning all his strength should be given to God. That is the call of God when he cleanses a leper, pointing in these rituals.

Not only presentation, offerings, and blood smearings on the ears, thumb, and toes, but fourthly, Oil Anointing. We see oil put on the same three locations: ear, thumb, and toe. Verse 18: “The rest of the oil that is in the priest’s hand he shall put on the head of him who is to be cleansed.” If you read the whole chapter, oil is given a very high profile. It is mentioned twelve times in the passage. Now, what is oil? Oil in the Old Testament is a symbol for the joy produced by the Holy Spirit. It was a joyous anointing of the Holy Spirit to serve Christ with joy and gratitude. It’s a symbol for gladness and thanksgiving. Like it says in Psalm 45:7, “The King has been anointed with the oil of joy.” And isn’t that what this whole occasion is marinated in? Great joy. This whole occasion is dripping with a theme of joyous gratitude to God. The leper is filled with joy because now he has access into the presence of God.

Someone with tears told me, “Boy, imagine what it would have been like for a leper in that condition to have been healed. I can’t even imagine the kind of thankfulness and joy that would have been in his heart.” What words would you use to describe it? How about rhapsody? An effusively enthusiastic or ecstatic expression of feeling. How about euphoria? Good words for what he experienced. There was thankfulness. There was gratitude. There was deep indebtedness. That’s the enduring thankfulness.

Again, fellow cleansed leprous sinners, having been cleansed, above all, brethren, we must be a colony of enduringly thankful people. Above all. All of our thinking, all of our relationships, all of our activities ought to be marinated and soaked in this gratitude and joy. Again, ex-lepers, if you know your former condition, what you deserve, and what God has done for you, you will be like 1 Thessalonians 5:18: “give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” Ephesians 5:20: “giving thanks always and for everything to God.” Philippians 4:6: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”

It is this overflowing gratitude of ex-lepers through which God builds his kingdom. It is oil-smooth, voluntary service to Christ, not like grudging Pharisees. It is like the woman who broke costly perfume and wiped his feet. See Paul’s way of pouring his costly perfume to Christ.

Paul, as a cleansed leper, with gratitude says in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15: “For the love of Christ constrains us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died, and he died for all, that they who should live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died and rose again on their behalf.” What does “the love of Christ constrains us” mean? If you know what Christ has done for you, you cannot keep quiet in his service. You will not live for yourself, but for him who died. He explains how it constrains him in 2 Corinthians 11:23-28: “I am a more zealous laborer, more beaten, more often in prisons, and often in danger of death. Five times I received forty lashes minus one from the Jews. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a day and a night in the open sea. I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers at sea, dangers among false brothers.” “I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.” Why, Paul? Because as a cleansed leper, the love of Christ constrains me. What was he doing when he was absorbing all these blows? He was spreading the name of his Savior across the world, serving his master with all of his heart and strength and soul. Paul! What is it that inspired you to enlist all of your faculties in serving the cause of the kingdom? “I was a leper, and I was cleansed. And therefore, the love of Christ constrains me to enlist every strength of mine to his service. My ears are bloodstained to hear only his word, my hands in blood to do his will, and my legs to walk in his ways and service.”

Let me ask you about the leper who’s just been delivered, and then his right thumb and his right ear and his right big toe get the touch of blood, committing him to a life of devotion and dedication to God, enlisted in the army of Christ. Do you think, brethren, that such a commitment was a tedious drudgery to the cleansed leper? Oh no, brethren. It was a joyous soaring for him. It was like the bird flying. “This is what I want to do. This is what I delight to do.” And so too it is for the cleansed saint, brethren. All of our faculties in serving our Savior with the oil of joy.

So ex-lepers, God expects from us four groups of activities in worship: Presentation as living sacrifices; coming to him through Christ alone with offerings; blood smearings, our ears, hands, and legs dedicated to doing God’s will; and oil anointing, serving Christ with joy and gratitude. How will the Lord see us when we don’t live like that?

When the Lord was so grieved and pained when he healed ten lepers and only one came to thank him, oh, we should have seen the grief in his face, but his voice was shocked at the ingratitude. Luke 17:17: “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give thanks to God except this foreigner?” How the heavens must have been shocked! How his heart must bleed even now when so many of us, cleansed from the horror of soul leprosy, a thousand times worse than physical leprosy, still live with ingratitude, not presenting, worshiping, and living. Some of us among us, I really don’t understand how you can claim you are a saved believer and even join church membership and give excuses to come to services. “Oh, the evening service is so difficult.” Is this a living sacrifice? Aren’t you grieving him every week? We joke, saying, “Ten healed, where are the others in the evening?”

Are you a cleansed leper? Is there blood in your ear? Is your heart dedicated to eagerly listen to God’s word? Sometimes your pastor goes on for a long time. Sometimes it’s intense. Sometimes you have to gird up the loins of your mind. Your right ear, you should use all the strength of your ear to listen carefully, long, and grasp God’s word. But you can listen to every dialogue in stupid ten-hour web series, but for a one-hour sermon, if the sermon is difficult, is there a bloodstain in your right ear? No, you switch off and allow your mind to go around the world. How is your Bible reading at home? “Oh, it’s so difficult to read the Bible daily, so busy with life. So difficult to meditate, so busy with eating, drinking, wearing clothes, working.” Doesn’t that lifestyle show blood in the ear, hands, and feet is missing? If you have blood there, you will use all the strength of your right ear to listen to God’s word daily.

Our right hands, we use them to sacrificially assist His sheep and build His church. If you love me, don’t come weekly once and run away and call yourself a saved leper. Show me with your actions that you love me by serving one of these little ones.

Our right feet, we use them to run in the ways of righteousness, even to run fast and catch up with straying sinners and deliver them by bringing them back into the camp or snatching them by the oil that is poured upon the head. We use all of our intellectual powers to the glory of the living God for the advancement of the kingdom.

Ask your conscience: Is this Christian life, or is this what we are living? How long will we continue in this lukewarm Christianity? Christ says, “I will spew you if you don’t repent.” How did Christ serve and cleanse us? Look at the bird: its head was wrung from its body, and every drop of blood from its soul was poured out to cleanse our soul. He spared nothing for us. Therefore, brethren, we must spare no pains to serve our Savior. We must withhold no energy. We must leave no skill unused. We must bury no opportunity as we labor as priests dedicated to his service.

Fellow leper, could it be that it has been a long time, and you have become a Pharisee, one of the nine lepers? Imagine that one grateful leper, it says in Luke 17:14, “And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan.” Oh, may God give us gratitude like him. Can you imagine the furious way he ran back, waving his hands to catch the Savior? Jesus was not in one place. Maybe he kept going to different places until he saw him. Oh, what joy! Waving his hands, screaming, “Lord, I am cleansed,” and falls at his feet. “Thank you, Lord Jesus, thank you!” Oh, some of you come to church like those nine ungrateful lepers, like it’s no big deal. Oh, may we come like the tenth leper and prostrate ourselves before the Lord Jesus every week with gratitude, with a loud voice, with songs in our mouth.

Those of you who still don’t realize your leprous state, if you realize it, just ask him, “Lord Jesus, have mercy,” and he will cleanse you.