Can God die?

You may be seated. So my microphone battery is dead, so we're gonna live without one. So I'll try to speak up. This song is a very nice, pretty song. The tune is catchy, I think, and some of the words are really great. With joyful grief I lift my praise, abhorring all my sin, adoring only Him.

That's a beautiful line. But this song calls no small bit of controversy. Well, it was a small bit of controversy, I'd say. As we were discussing singing this song, there's two parts of the song I want to address right now. Because I am not opposed to singing a song where I think the author maybe didn't use the best possible words. at the same time I relish the idea that we can simply talk about it and we can teach why maybe this author is not we'll say confessional I would guess it seems like confessional people seem to be a little more in tuned with the doctrine of God and theology proper and speaking rightly about God but there were two parts of the song I want to address that maybe I wouldn't have worded this way, but I'm not an artist, and so I shouldn't judge the artistic part of it.

But if you look at the chorus, he says, oh, and I will say this, the words are by a man named Chris Anderson from churchworksmedia.com, and from, by all accounts, I looked him up, and the things that he's written, and he just looks like a great Christian brother, faithful guy. So I'm not trying to say this is a bad guy or anything like that. But he says, O love divine, O matchless grace.

And then he says that God should die for men. So I really want the kids to be listening in particular. Because one of our concerns this week was that if kids come to church and they sing a song, and hopefully we sing songs over and over, and we sing them at home, and you learn the song, that people are going to remember the phrase that God should die for men.

And, strictly speaking, that just isn't true. God cannot die. God cannot change. God is life, and God doesn't die. But, we can recognize that in the context of what the author of this song was trying to say, what he was referring to is that Jesus died for men, and Jesus being God, that is awe-inspiring. It would be one thing if God created some man to die for others.

That would have been nice to have a substitute. But for God to actually become a man, the second person of the Trinity, Jesus, to become a man in order to die is really mind-blowing. It's incomprehensibly great. but I don't want you to think wrongly about God proper. And so there's a phrase we use in theology called theology proper. And we talk about the doctrine of God.

And so there's certain things that we know to be true about God that are true about God, even though we don't have language to explain it. And so God cannot die. And so even though we will sing this, that God should die for men, we want you to know that, properly speaking, God didn't die. There was no change in God whatsoever. Ever. There's never been.

The creation itself didn't change God. And that's something that you need to understand. And it's actually incomprehensible, and it might feel a little lofty to you, but actually the most comforting truth of all is that God doesn't change. Because if God has set His love upon you, It meant he set his love upon you before you even existed, and it will never change.

And so it's to your great comfort that our God not only cannot die, but he can't change his mind. He can't do anything different than what he's already decreed, and he will be true to all his promises. And so we sing, and can it be that I should gain that song? and we say, amazing love, how can it be that thou, my God, should die for me? So it's another instance where we're using the word God and we're trusting not only that the author of that song meant the man Christ Jesus, but we're trusting that we know what we mean.

So even if that author turned out to be a bad person if we still like the rest of the song we might still sing a song that is imperfect in that sense Secondly I don like where it says in the fourth verse the second line it says The father grieved, which is another anthropopathism, it's called, where we attribute to God human emotions and human feelings that exist in time, which God doesn't actually experience because God doesn't experience things. He doesn't exist in time. God doesn't change from moment to moment.

He doesn't have states. He's eternally perfect in who He is. But yes, there is a sense that there's the wrath of God and that we grieve the Lord in various senses. But I just wanted to address the proper theology of that, that sometimes we talk about God in a way that God allows us to, even through the Scripture, that helps us understand and be able to even talk about Him because our imperfect, finite language can't begin to grasp the infinite.

But we need to be able to recognize when that imperfect, finite language, we need to be able to at least say, well, we know we're not properly describing Him, but it's the best we can do. Does that make sense? I realize this is just kind of out of the blue to everyone I'm just lecturing on a weird topic all of a sudden but I want you to kind of track with me here that when you talk about God you are always falling short of being able to describe who he really is but God knowing that in his infinite wisdom gave us the language we have so that we can apprehend what we can about Him.

So the way we say it sometimes is we can apprehend things about God. We can grasp, apprehend things about God, but we can never comprehend God. He's incomprehensible. We can't wrap our arms completely around Him, but we can kind of grasp on and we can understand things because He reveals them to us. So in the confession, in paragraph 7 of chapter 8 of Christ the Mediator, which is really a great paragraph, a great chapter.

I guess I can say that about every chapter, but in paragraph 7 the last paragraph described, oh no, there's 10, sorry. In paragraph 7, one of the last ones about Jesus, it says, Christ in the work of mediation acts, or acteth in the Old English, according to both natures. So it was just described as two natures. He's one person with two natures, a human nature and a divine nature.

So the fact that Christ has a human nature tells you one thing for certain, that sin is not part of human nature. Sin is actually an interruption into human nature. Sin is not part of human nature. You'll be human for eternity and you will one day be sinless. Praise the Lord. But Christ acts according to both natures by each nature doing that which is proper to itself.

So for example, Jesus Christ grew. He was a baby and he became a man. When Jesus Christ grew, he was growing as a man. God doesn't grow. He doesn't change. When Jesus Christ learned things as a little guy.

He had to learn how to talk. He learned as a human. I think we underestimate the amount of humanity that Jesus had to actually experience because sometimes I think we think he was like remember in Superman, like Clark Kent like when he's a little guy, he's lifting cars and throwing footballs real far. Jesus didn't do all that stuff. He was just a real person.

He had to learn how to go to the bathroom. He had to eat food that then made him sick and then he didn't feel good and things of that sort. He fell and cut himself, most likely. I don't like to go too far beyond what is told of us either, but there are certain things that are just common to humanity. But it says, yet by reason of the unity of the person, so one person, that which is proper to one nature is sometimes in Scripture attributed to the person denominated by the other nature.

What that's saying is like in Acts 20, 28, which is the verse they reference, that sometimes in Scripture, which I don't think necessarily gives us warrant to do this, which is why I'm not a huge fan of using God died in this song, but in Scripture sometimes when Jesus Christ is talked about he is talked about using a reference to one of his natures but then described in the other nature. So let me just read the verse that they reference, Acts 20, 28. Pay careful attention.

This is Paul speaking to some elders from Ephesus. He says, pay careful attention to yourselves. he says and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God so there's a whole sermon in there like listen to your elders okay these people are trying to take care of you but it says to care for the church of God right you have the word God in there and he says which he obtained with his own blood well God can't bleed so somebody could have just raised their hand and said yo Paul that's not good theology proper God doesn't bleed he can't change he doesn't even have a body how can he bleed right well Paul is teaching us the truth that Jesus Christ who did bleed and die is God and so Paul is allowed to do it because he was a prophet and Paul was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit all scripture is God breathed and is given to us and is profitable for teaching and correction and reproof and instruction and righteousness but that's why I'm very careful not to say things like God died or God bled especially in a culture filled with false religions and heresies most of the false religions that you encounter they're either completely pagan in which case it's kind of easy to identify it. But especially for some of you younger people, the false Christian religions that you encounter, they're going to do one of two things as a norm.

They're going to elevate man above what our real status is, which is just as sinful beings, in need of something outside of us to wash us clean. Pretty much all religions try to do that anyway. But the thing that Christian religions, in quotes now, that religions that call themselves Christian will do, but that are actually cults, or maybe even sometimes a sub-Christian sect it would be called, is that they will bring Jesus down from what he really is.

They will somehow claim that he wasn't truly God, that he didn't have two natures or two wills. They'll somehow combine Jesus maybe into one weird nature, instead of a divine nature and a human nature. Or they'll try to say Jesus wasn't really a man. You know, John said every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. And every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not from God.

He says this is the spirit of the Antichrist. So denying that Jesus really became a man makes you an Antichrist. So it sounds bad to say, well, Jesus wasn't really God. and we're all like, oh no, of course he's God. But the Bible says it's just as bad to not even confess that he became a man. And that's because for Jesus to have been an atoning figure for us, Jesus Christ absolutely had to be a man like we are.

He had to be made in the likeness of sinful flesh so that he could suffer the penalty that was due to humanity because of the curse brought on us by Adam. before you get too hard on Adam you all would have fallen just as fast as he did if not faster if you were in the garden so he was our representative he was the best of us and praise the Lord that now we have a new federal representative and a new covenant Jesus Christ and so on the night he was betrayed Jesus took the bread and I'll go down there and I'll walk down and continue this so I can do the bread Jesus took the bread and he broke the bread and he gave thanks for it and he said to his disciples, this is my body which is given to you. He says, do this in remembrance of me. He says, my body is going to be broken for you.

So Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, gave him a picture. Right? What do you do with your little kids? You give them pictures in school, right? You have them color pictures, and you show them pictures of things to teach them. And Jesus Christ, knowing how actually dense we all really are, and in a sense, sort of dumb, he gives us pictures to help us.

And it a very loving thing for him to do It not insulting when God who has all knowledge and perfect wisdom thinks of you as basically kind of dumb I don mean that as an insult It's just the difference between us and God. It's just how it is. And so he broke the bread and he said, this bread will be, it's my body that's given for you. He said, do this in remembrance of me.

That's why the table says, it's not our table, but he says, do this in remembrance of me. he wants us to remember him and again I've said this before you can't do that online you can't be in a room where you see the bread smell the bread, touch the bread, taste the bread and hear the guy talk about the bread you can't do that online you can't be in communion community union common union with other believers if you're at home you can't do that you can sing songs over zoom I guess it probably sounds terrible you can listen to a guy preach over the internet that stuff happens but if God intended for those kinds of things to be the way the church grew then I'd really, I'd probably just get up here every week and just read a Spurgeon sermon and we'd all just chalk it up to well it's probably better than anything I'd come up with anyway and we'd just do that but God has ordained the preaching of the word live through the man he selected in each individual a local church to be the means of grace that's going to bless you and that's going to grow you. And even if the guy at your church at the time doesn't say it as well as another guy or he's not as loud or he's too loud or whatever it is, that's how God works through people. It's through the preaching of his word in a live way.

That's why when I go on the street I don't read sermons. I've had people go on the street and read sermons and stuff and I think I don't like it. I like reading sermons. I think when I preach, I should preach live. Then Jesus took the cup and he gave thanks for it. And we assume he used red wine.

That's why we use red wine, because it resembles blood. Because it's a symbol of something different from what it actually is. That's what a symbol is. He gave thanks for it and he said this is the blood of a new covenant. It should be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. He said do this in remembrance of me.

So Jesus Christ, the night he was to be betrayed by one of his own friends, took the time to give us this example and he said that we should do this until he comes. Do you believe he's coming? I said this to my wife the other day. I said, he's more certainly returning than you're sitting in that chair right now. I don't think we grasp that sometimes. God is more certain in his promises than we are in our perceptions of things that are going on.

You can be mistaken about a lot of things. But we can't be mistaken about what God has promised. We simply believe it by faith. And so I call on you today to consider what the sacrifice meant. that God didn't die but God became a man Jesus Christ did we read it at the beginning that he humbled himself to the point of death even death on a cross and so that God would exalt him lift him up one day he was raised from the dead he was ascended into heaven and he has a name that is above every name and I want you to consider that sacrifice of Jesus Christ I want you to consider that this wasn't Superman who couldn't feel any pain coming into the world and just doing some stuff and they shot bullets at him and the bullets bounced off so it was really no big deal other than his feelings were hurt that they wanted to shoot him that's not what happened Jesus Christ suffered more physical pain and agony than, Lord willing, anyone in this room will ever have to endure.

Even some of you who I know have suffered greatly in a lot of ways and different afflictions you've had. And then Jesus Christ suffered what we talked about in the sermon. He had iniquity counted against him, although he had done no wrong. The very thing Jesus Christ hates the most, he basically drank a cup of for you. and so I invite you to come up and eat the bread the body of Christ we call it and to drink the wine the blood of Christ we call it and to partake and ingest of Jesus Christ so come on up