The Sufficiency of Our Salvation in Christ, Part 2
Colossians 2:13–15
Introduction
We find ourselves once again in the very heart of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, where he is defending the supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus in and above all things! And he’s taken up that task, because this congregation, who has not long ago received the true Gospel from Paul’s fellow-servant, Epaphras, they had come under the assault of false teachers, who were now aiming to lure them away into error and heresy. Paul says in chapter 2 verse 4 that he’s writing “so that no one will delude you with persuasive argument.”
And what were they seeking to persuade the Colossians to believe? Ultimately, it boiled down to the claim that Christ was not enough. Which, I know, when we say it here, gathered together, having just been worshiping Christ all day, sounds absolutely ridiculous! “‘Christ is not enough?’ Good luck trying to peddle that nonsense!” But of course, false teachers are always a bit more subtle than that. It’s not quite: “You need more than Jesus to be saved,” but more like, “Hey, you say that you are partakers in the New Covenant, right? Well, the New Covenant promise in Jeremiah 31 is that the Lord will write His law on the heart, and that He’ll cause us to walk in His statutes. Circumcision, and the Sabbath, and the dietary laws—those are His statutes! Of course you need to trust in Jesus, but you also need to keep these laws.”
That’s much more of a fine-sounding argument. And then, they’d prey upon these young believers’ grief over their own sin, and their battle with the flesh. “Oh, friend: the reason you’re making so little progress in sanctification is because you haven’t yet found the key to true spirituality! But the secret to a real, exalted life of holiness is getting into these rapturous visions of heaven!” And these false teachers in particular were saying that such mystical revelations came from communing with angels—with the principalities and powers of the spirit-world.
And in addition to that mysticism, they also seemed to be advocating for some kind of asceticism. Verse 23 calls it “self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body.” “The key to holiness is depriving yourself of any pleasures, and even treating the body harshly. I mean, doesn’t Paul himself say he beats his body and makes it his slave? See? You need more of that. Deprive the flesh. Then you’ll make progress.”
And perhaps that’s something that we can relate to a bit more. We’re not likely to be duped by outright claims of the deficiency of Jesus. But is there any sense in which you are tempted to live in a way that indicates that Jesus is not enough? that the salvation that He brings is not enough? Legalism: Are there subtle ways that you seek to add to His righteousness as a ground of confidence before God? Are you tempted to view your religious performance—whether it’s church attendance or Bible reading or a thousand other things—are you tempted to trust in those things, even a little bit, for your righteousness before God?
Mysticism: Are you tempted to dissatisfaction with the Scriptures, thinking that what would really inject life into your devotional time is an audible word from God—an overwhelming impression that God is speaking to you, apart from the revelation in his Word? Or asceticism: Are you tempted to treat yourself harshly, to heap shame upon yourself for your sin—almost to do penance for your sin by feeling badly enough about yourself as a sort of self-atonement, rather than receiving the full and free forgiveness that Jesus earned for you?
All of these are ways that we can be tempted to treat Christ and His salvation as insufficient. And this is what Paul is battling against in Colossians chapter 2. He wants these believers, verse 6, to walk in Christ in the same manner in which they had received Christ. “You’ve received Him by grace through faith,” he says. “Now: live in Him by grace through faith. Don’t move on from the simplicity of trusting Christ alone, now to try to supplement Him with ceremonies, and visions, and manmade rules. No, fight for holiness not by moving on from Jesus, but by pressing intoJesus, because,” Paul says, “there is a fullness in Him that is to be found nowhere else.”
“The wisdom of the various philosophies of the world,” he says in verse 8, “are empty. They’re just empty deception. There’s nothing for you there.” O, but in Christ, verse 9: in Him “all the fullness of Deity dwells bodily”! All of the divine perfections exist in their fullness in Jesus. And He dispenses that fullness to His people generously. Verse 10 says, “And in Him you have been filled.” He fills us up, Ephesians 3:19 says, “to all the fullness of God.” Do you want spiritual life and sustenance? In the words of the Apostle John: “Of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.” And still more: verse 10 says that “He is the head over all rule and authority.” The angelic beings that the false teachers were pushing as the key to true spirituality—the “principalities and powers”—Christ is the Head of all of them! Paul’s saying: If you want fullness—if you want spiritual life and vitality and satisfaction—it’s all in Christ, and in Christ alone.
And then, last week, we came to verse 11, where Paul shifts, just slightly, from praising the supremacy of the Savior, to lifting up the sufficiency of the salvation that that Savior grants. We don’t need to turn from the path of grace because the salvation by which Christ saves us is so magnificently sufficient. These blessings of salvation are the fullness with which He fills us and makes us complete.
Let’s read our text again. Colossians chapter 2, verses 11 to 15: “And in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; 12having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. 13When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, 14having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. 15When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.”
I mentioned last week that in these verses, we find at least four spiritual benefits of our sufficient salvation in Christ.
Review I: Regeneration (vv. 11–13a)
And the first of those was regeneration. It was the spiritual circumcision of the heart—the spiritual heart surgery performed by Almighty God, in which He cuts away, as it were, the fleshliness of the heart, purifying the soul from its natural corruption, granting new spiritual life in place of depravity and death, and setting the sinner apart unto God for a life time of consecrated devotion to Him.
We were “dead in our transgressions and the uncircumcision of our flesh,” he says in verse 13. By nature, sinful man is a spiritual corpse. We are entirely unresponsive to spiritual truth, and the corruption of sin extends to every aspect of our nature. Our minds have been blinded, 2 Corinthians 4:4, “so that we might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” We are “darkened in understanding,” Ephesians 4:18. And therefore, 1 Corinthians 2:14 says we “cannot understand” spiritual things. Our affections are entirely disordered. Ezekiel 11:19 says we have hearts of stone.John 3:19–20 says we “love the darkness” and “hate the light.” We delight in the sin that is objectively repulsive and we’re repulsed by the righteousness that is objectively delightful. And our wills are enslaved to sin, Paul says in Romans 6:17. In our natural state, we always stubbornly refuse Christ and the glory of His Gospel. Jesus says in John 5:40: “You are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.” And so, mind, heart and will: man is born a captive to sin. We are slaves to our corruption, and we are entirely powerless to do anything about it.
But Paul says, precisely “when you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He [God] made you alive together with Him [Christ].” This spiritual circumcision is that cleansing from sin that creates spiritual life out of death. I called it, last week, a purifying renovation—the divine impartation of spiritual life into the soul of the dead sinner, wherein the Holy Spirit removes your sinful heart of stone and totally transforms you, from the inside out, so that your mind, your heart, and your will are entirely renewed.
Second Corinthians 4:6 says: God shines the light of life into the blind heart. He gives “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” He gives us new spiritual eyes so that we finally see sin for what it is—in all its objective ugliness. And we finally see Christ for who He is—in all His objective beauty and glory. And with our eyes finally opened, finally able to see and evaluate things as they actually are, we turn away in repentant disgust from the filth of sin and self, and we cling to our glorious Savior with the embrace of saving faith.
And that faith unites us to Christ, so that through faith we are baptized—or literally, immersed—into union with Him. So much so that we can say that we have died with Christ. In a way that transcends our understanding, Scripture teaches we were with Christ on the cross, that our old self was crucified with Him, that we died to sin and to self in union with our Savior. And then Paul says in verse 12 that we were also “buried with Him.” Our body of flesh isn’t just dead; it’s dead and buried! The One who bore our sins in His body on the tree carried those sins from the tree to the grave.
And then Paul says, when Christ rose from the grave, we were “raised up with Him through faith in the working of God.” Romans 6:4 says, “We have been buried with Him through baptism”—through immersive union—“into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” And so we are not only dead to sin; we are “alive to God in Christ Jesus.” We have been set free from the dominion of sin, and we have been infused with resurrection power to live a life of holiness.
And if this spiritual circumcision has been performed in your heart, then you are at no disadvantage for not having kept a single ceremony of the Old Covenant. Regeneration, the circumcision of Christ—performed by the sword of the Spirit of God—brings you into the fulfillment of all the blessings that all the ceremonies of the Old Covenant were designed to point to. So don’t turn away from simple faith in Jesus for the sake of signs and ceremonies. The fullness has come in Him.
II. Forgiveness (v. 13b)
There’s a second spiritual benefit that illustrates the sufficiency of our salvation in Christ. Not only regeneration, but also, number two: forgiveness. Full and free forgiveness! Verse 13 again: “He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions.” The ground of our spiritual resurrection in regeneration is our having been forgiven by God of all our sins through the once-for-all death of Christ on the cross.
And is there any sound that is sweeter in the hearing of sinners who are sensible of the offense of their sin than the promise of forgiveness? Is there any news that brings peace and calms the troubled soul than the Good News of the assurance of pardon? The Lord God is our Creator and King. And we, by virtue of our being created in His image, are accountable to Him. We are obligated to obey the law of His mouth—His commandments being nothing more than the external expression of His holy character. And every single sin we commit—whether in thought, word, or deed—is a transgression of the holy law of God, a violation, an affront, to the holy character of God! And therefore, every single sin we commit not only defiles us, not only belittles the worth of this all-glorious God. It also amasses a debt that we owe to Him. We have violated holy justice, and therefore, a penalty must be paid, and so a debt is owed.
Scripture often speaks of our sin as debt. In Matthew 6:12, Jesus teaches us to pray to God: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” And in fact, the next verse in Colossians, chapter 2 verse 14, will speak of our sins being recorded in a “certificate of debt.” Sin amasses a debt that we owe to God. And like the slave in the parable Jesus tells in Matthew 18, our sin-debt is incalculable. It is a debt more than ten thousand talents—which was equivalent to 165,000 years’ wages! Ours is an infinite debt, a debt beyond measurement or tracing out.
Why? Because God is infinitely holy. He is infinitely worthy of all obedience and devotion. And that means: every single sin that any of us ever commits is a sin against infinite holiness. And a sin against infinite holiness is infinitely wicked. And an infinitely wicked act merits an infinite punishment. And none of us can pay that awful debt—not without our everlasting destruction. Eternity, without end, in the grip of omnipotent justice—fallen into the hands of the God who is a consuming fire! into the hands of a God so good that everything in His holy soul rises up in righteous violence against sin, so that He must punish sin precisely as it deserves. And it deserves eternal misery and torment. It’s almost impossible to think about the horrors of hell without being entirely undone.
But it’s when see clearly what our sins deserve that our hearts can soar in worship and in joy for the full and free forgiveness of our sins in Christ. Based upon nothing we have done—upon no work of our own, we who were dead in our transgressions and sins—our great God and King compassionately forgave our debt of infinite punishment. Romans 5:8: “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” “The Son of Man [who] came not to be served but to serve,” told His Father to lay the debt of His people on His shoulders, to demand it from His hand. And He gave “His life a ransom for many.”
O, how hopelessly indebted we were! And how freely we are forgiven! The word for “forgive” in Colossians 2:13 is the Greek word charizomai. And in many contexts, it just means “to freely give.” It’s translated that way in Romans 8:32, where Paul says that the God who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over to death to pay our debt, “how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” And so when this verb is used with respect to forgiveness, it implies that large-hearted, abundant, eager, free forgiveness. Ours is a not a God from whom forgiveness has to be wrung from His hands as if He were a stingy old miser, reluctant to part with a treasure. No, this is a God from whom mercy and compassion and forgiveness flow like an open floodgate! Psalm 86:5: “For You, Lord, are good, and readyto forgive, and abundant in lovingkindness to all who call upon You.” He demands no acts of penance—no ritual cleansing or self-atonement; nothing but a broken spirit and a contrite heart: an honest confession and genuine repentance.
And it’s not just free but full forgiveness. Complete forgiveness. Look again at verse 13: “having forgiven us all our transgressions.” He forgives us of our original sin—the guilt counted to be ours through our union with our father Adam. He forgives us of our inherited corruption—the depravity that is ours even from birth. He forgives us of the sins we committed before we believed, when we may have given ourselves to untold wickedness. He forgives us of the sins we commit after having believed, which is surely a greater offense to sin against a God whose grace we know so intimately. He forgives us of the sins we will commit in the future, which is just a staggering thought. Which of you is eager to promise forgiveness to the person whom you’re certain will sin against you again and again? He forgives our sinful actions, which are many. He forgives our sinful words, which are abundant. And He even forgives our sinful thoughts, which are incalculable. O, how we should sing with the prophet Micah: “Who is a God like You, who pardons iniquity and passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of His possession? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in unchanging love. He will again have compassion on us; He will tread our iniquities under foot. Yes, You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea”!
And that reminds us that the completeness of God’s forgiveness is not only expressed in its scope, but also in its finality. He does not resurrect your sins and throw them in your face; when they are forgiven, they are gone forever: “as far as the east is from the west,” Psalm 103:12. As Micah says: cast into the depths of the sea. So that God says of His believing remnant in Jeremiah 50:20: “Search will be made for the iniquity of Israel, but there will be none; and for the sins of Judah, but they will not be found; for I will pardon”—I will forgive!—“those whom I leave as a remnant.” That’s one of my favorite verses in all the Bible. Search may be made for your sin, but there will be no sins to be found, because He has forgiven us all our transgressions! O, what a sufficient salvation we have in Christ!
III. Justification (v. 14)
But as I’ve hinted at, that full and free forgiveness that we enjoy from God is not an unrighteous forgiveness. How can a holy God forgive sin? How can a perfectly righteous, perfectly good God, whose nature is to punish all sin and wrongdoing, simply not count trespasses against sinners? He can’t just sweep sin under the rug. When His character is violated by human sin, He must remain consistent with His own holiness. He simply cannot overlook it. The justice of His law must be upheld. There has to be a righteous basis upon which God can forgive our sin-debt.
And we find that basis in the third spiritual benefit that illustrates the sufficiency of our salvation in Christ—namely, justification. Look at verse 14: He forgave “us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.”
Jesus has satisfied the law’s righteous demand for justice against us! He has borne our sins in His own body. The debt of our sins was charged upon Him, our guilt laid upon His shoulders. And because He was perfectly righteous—because His blood was infinitely precious to pay what we owed—we may be justified even while God remains just. He is both “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus,” Romans 3:26. He may justly declare guilty sinners righteous, because He declared a righteous Substitute guilty.
And Paul uses two striking word pictures to illustrate this truth (cf. Moo, 208). The first speaks of a certificate of indebtedness—literally, “the against-us certificate of debt.” This was a term used to refer to a legal document that recorded debts one was obligated to pay (Moo, 209). Someone may have borrowed money from another, and he would pledge to pay it back by writing out something of a contract in his own handwriting, obligating himself to pay back the borrowed sum. We see something like this in Philemon verses 18 and 19, where Paul says that if Onesimus has cost Philemon anything, to charge that to his account. And then he says, “I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand; I will repay it.” It’s something like an IOU.
And Paul says that this IOU—this certificate of our debt owed to God—consisted in decrees. And this is a reference to the Old Testament Law. Down in verse 20, he uses the verb form of this same word: the false teachers were pressuring the Colossians to submit to decrees, such as “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch”—which refer to the ceremonial and dietary laws of the Mosaic Covenant. This is even clearer from the parallel passage in Ephesians 2:15, where Paul says that Jesus “abolish[ed] in His flesh the enmity [between Jews and Gentiles], which [enmity] is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances”—the same word for decrees in Colossians 2.
And so Paul viewed the Law of God as standing as written testimony against us! Certainly the Jews had contracted with God to keep the commandments of the Mosaic Law. Exodus 24:6: Moses sprinkles the blood of the covenant on the altar and reads the Law in the hearing of the people, and they say, Exodus 24:7, “All that Yahweh has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient!” They had bound themselves to obedience! And yet they did not obey. And so they incur the debt of disobedience.
But the Gentiles aren’t off the hook. That’s the whole point of Romans 1 and 2. The Law condemns the Jews who had received it by special revelation, but it also condemns the Gentiles who had received it only by general revelation—by the testimony of their conscience, because God had written the moral precepts of His Law in their hearts. Romans 2:15 says that the Gentiles “show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness.” And so by virtue of being God’s creatures, created in His image, we are accountable to Him, accountable to obey the Law of His mouth. And our sins prove that we have failed to do this, and our debt is recorded in this legal certificate, which is “hostile to us,” verse 14, because it obligates us to pay the debt of our sin in eternal hell. Paul speaks of that in Colossians 3:6, when he speaks of “the wrath of God [coming] upon the sons of disobedience.” The certificate of debt is against us, and it is hostile to us.
But God has canceled out that document! Exaleipho: it means “to wipe out.” It occurs in the Greek translation of Isaiah 43:25—another of my favorite Old Testament verses, where God says, “I, even I, am the one who wipes out your transgressions for My own sake, And I will not remember your sins.” Our sins are recorded in a book, and God comes along and, with divine whiteout, He blots out every record of our sins. And He says: He remembers them no more. Not that Omniscience becomes incapable of remembering, but that God commits Himself to refuse to call them to mind in His dealings with us. They no longer have any effect on our relationship.
The record of our debt is wiped clean! “He has,” look at it: “taken it out of the way.” And that reminds me of Isaiah 38:17, where King Hezekiah says to God, “You have cast all my sins behind Your back.” He says, “My sins had been before God’s very face, so that they stood as a barrier of communion between us. But now He has forgiven me! He has taken my sins out of the way! He has put them behind His back, so that He can look upon me with favor, and so that I can look upon Him with peace (cf. Martin).
And why can He do that? Because He nailed that certificate of debt to the cross. O, what a picture! As we said a moment ago: because our guilt was imputed to Jesus—because He bore our sins—the certificate of our debt was charged to Him. Galatians 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us.” “Upon Me, Father, be all their debt!”
That document was, as it were, the statement of legal charges against us. And do you remember what Mark 15:26 says? It says, “The inscription of the charge against Him read, ‘The King of the Jews.’” The Romans nailed to the cross the charges against Jesus. In the same way, Paul says God nailed to the cross the charges against us, because Jesus paid for them. The Law we had broken—that stood hostile against us—was fulfilled by the Son of God our Substitute, upon whom the wrath of God came as if He were a son of disobedience.
And so we can sing: “My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! / My sin, not in part but the whole! / Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more! / Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”
IV. Cosmic Conquest (v. 15)
Our sufficient salvation in Christ includes the greater, heart circumcision of regeneration, full and free forgiveness, and the satisfaction of the law’s righteous demand for justice in the imputation of our sins to Christ. But Paul’s not finished. He speaks of a fourth spiritual benefit in verse 15: namely, cosmic conquest. “Having disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.”
It is not only that our hearts are made new, that all our sins are forgiven, and that our legal debt is wiped out by the blood of Christ! On top of all of that: all our spiritual enemies—the spiritual forces of wickedness that only desire our ruin and destruction—are utterly triumphed over! Stripped of all their powers, and publicly shamed as the captives in the victory march of our conquering King (cf. Davenant, 1:468)!
“The rulers and authorities” refer to those angelic beings that Paul also mentioned in chapter 1 verse 16. Ephesians 6:12 refers to “the rulers” and “the powers” as “the world forces of this darkness,” “the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.” And so these are the demonic forces—Satan himself, the accuser of the brethren, along with all of his servants, who rebel against the authority of God in Christ.
And Paul says, “He has disarmed them.” Apekdúomai. Literally, “He stripped them.” It’s the same word used in Matthew 27:28, where the soldiers stripped Jesus of His clothes and put a scarlet robe on Him. Paul is saying that Christ has stripped the demonic forces of their weapons and armor, just as a conqueror does to a defeated enemy! Hebrews 2:14 says that the devil “had the power of death,” and that he enslaved sinners through the fear of death because of their sin! But by wiping out our certificate of debt and nailing it to the cross—by taking away our sins—Christ despoils the forces of darkness of any power they had over those who are forgiven through faith in Him.
And he goes on: “he made a public display of them, having triumphed over them” through Christ. “Triumph” is the Greek word, thriambeúo. It was a technical term that pointed to a very interesting cultural practice in ancient Roman society. The Roman triumph, or triumphal procession, was a lavish victory parade that celebrated significant military conquests of Roman generals. The victorious general would be featured in a parade through the capitol city of Rome, which anybody who was anybody throughout the empire did their very best to attend. This was a kind of a World Series Champion ticker-tape parade through the heart of Times Square.
And to be honored with a triumph was the highest honor that could be given to a Roman general. His victory had to meet particular standards in order for him to qualify for one. One commentator explained, “He must have been the actual commander-in-chief in the field. The campaign must have been completely finished, the region pacified and the victorious troops brought home. Five thousand of the enemy at least must have fallen in one engagement. A positive extension of territory must have been gained, and not merely a disaster retrieved or an attack repelled. And the victory must have been won over a foreign foe and not in a civil war” (as in MacArthur, 2 Corinthians, 69). So this was not exactly an everyday occurrence. Among the thousands of battles fought by the Roman Empire, ancient literature makes mention of only 350 triumphs.
When those conditions were met, this is what a triumphal procession looked like: “First came the state officials and the senate. Then came the trumpeters. Then were carried the spoils taken from the conquered land. … Then came pictures of the conquered land and models of conquered citadels and ships. There followed the white bull for the sacrifice which would be made. Then there walked the captive princes, leaders and generals in chains, shortly to be flung into prison and in all probability almost immediately to be executed. Then came the lictors bearing their rods, followed by the musicians with their lyres; then the priests swinging their censers with the sweet-smelling incense burning in them. After that came the general himself. He stood in a chariot drawn by four horses. He was clad in a purple tunic embroidered with golden palm leaves, and over it a purple toga marked out with golden stars. In his hand he held an ivory scepter with the Roman eagle at its top, and over his head a slave held the crown of Jupiter. After him rode his family; and finally came the army wearing all their decorations and shouting [‘Hail, triumphant one!’]. As the procession moved through the streets, all decorated and garlanded, amid the cheering crowds, it made a tremendous day which might happen only once in a lifetime” (Barclay, as in MacArthur, 69). Finally, “as the procession ascended the Capitoline Hill, some of the leading captives (usually royal figures or the tallest and strongest of the conquered warriors) were taken aside into the adjoining prison and executed” to demonstrate the glorious power of the triumphing Roman general (Harris, 2 Corinthians, 244).
Paul says: this is what the Lord Jesus did to the forces of darkness by His sin-conquering death. He beat the forces of hell out of the field! He wiped the floor with them! “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law,” 1 Corinthians 15:56. But Christ nailed the record of our lawbreaking to His cross, which means our enemies have nobasis to terrorize us! He “gives us the victory” through faith in Him! And He demonstrates His victory by publicly disgracing and shaming Satan and the demons through the streets, marching them as conquered captives and despoiled enemies bound in His victory parade, as He, the great Champion of heaven, rides through the capitol city of the heavenly places in the triumphal chariot of His cross.
And don’t miss that wonderful display of irony. Christ conquers the captain of death by His own dying. The cross, which Satan had designed to be the instrument of Jesus’ shame and humiliation and defeat, becomes the very instrument by which He conquers all the enemies of righteousness and humiliates them, and displays the glories of His majesty at their highest pitch. John Calvin said, “there is no tribunal so magnificent, no throne so stately, no show of triumph so distinguished, no chariot so elevated, as is the gibbet on which Christ has subdued death and the devil, the prince of death; nay more, has utterly trodden them under his feet” (191). O, this is the glory of the Gospel! The crown of thorns becomes a crown of precious stones! The criminal’s cross becomes the victor’s chariot of triumph!
Conclusion
Dear sinner, you who are outside of Christ this evening, you whose certificate of debt has not been erased by the blood of Christ, because you refuse to bow the knee to Him in faith, because you keep clinging to the very sins that sentence you to eternal punishment—look upon this conquering, debt-cancelling Savior with the eyes of faith tonight. Turn from your sins in repentance. Cast them away from you. Repudiate yourself and your sin. Confess to God that you want nothing to do with them anymore, and that you want to receive regeneration, and forgiveness, and justification, and the victory of Christ’s triumph over sin and death.
Turn away from trusting in your own goodness to be saved. You could never be good enough. But Jesus was good enough. His life of obedience fulfilled every one of the demands of God’s law. And His substitutionary death has done all that the law requires for lawbreakers to go free. If only you trust in His works alone for your righteousness before God. Come to Christ in faith, this evening!
And to my brothers and sisters who have come to Him: the salvation that you enjoy in Him is so perfectly sufficient. There is no amount of legalistic, religious rituals you could keep, no amount of mystical revelations you could attain to, no amount of self-atoning penance you could perform, that could do more for you than what Jesus has done for you. He performs the spiritual heart surgery of regeneration and births new life in you where there had only been death. He unites you to Himself, so that His death and burial was your death and burial, and His resurrection was your resurrection. He freely forgives us of all our sins, and buries them on the ocean floor. He satisfies the law’s holy demand for justice against us by bearing our curse in Himself, and blotting out the record of our transgressions with His own precious blood. And He has triumphed over every spiritual force that would seek to do you harm. The heart is renewed! Sin is forgiven! The law is satisfied! and Satan is conquered!
When you have Jesus, you have all that you need—a perfectly sufficient Savior who brings a perfectly sufficient salvation. Cling to Him. Be satisfied in Him. And as you have received Him, so walk in Him.