Jesus: King, Priest, and Judge

Transcript

If this is your first time with us, my name is Andrew. I’m one of the members here at Trinity Church, and it is my pleasure from time to time to get to open God’s word with you. We will be in Psalm 110 today, which is a wonderful and fantastic, beautiful psalm. If you don’t have a Bible, there should be one in front of you. Psalm 110 is on page 476 in that Bible. If you don’t own a Bible, we would love nothing more than for you to take that Bible and have it as your own and read it and find the words of life there within. So if you’d please stand with me for the reading of God’s word.

A Psalm of David. The Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your enemies. Your people will offer themselves freely on the day of your power in holy garments. From the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours. The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind. You are priests forever after the order of Melchizedek. The Lord is at your right hand. He will shatter kings on the day of his wrath. He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses. He will shatter chiefs over the earth. He will drink from the brook by the way. Therefore, he will lift up his head.

— Psalm 110 (ESV)

Please pray with me. King Jesus, as we come to this psalm that was written hundreds of years before your incarnation

but is so clearly about you, King Jesus, I pray we would see the good news that you are a different kind of king than the kings of the world. And the good news that you’re a new kind of priest who’s not just come as our priest but as our sacrifice and that you make us right with God. Jesus, I pray we would see the good news that you’re a different kind of judge, you are a new kind of judge, that you don’t sweep things under the rug, that you make us right with you. And that Lord Jesus, in this good news of the gospel, yes, we are sinners and yes, we are people made new, we are people set free. And so I pray as we get a clear picture of you today, Jesus, it would stoke our hearts for worship. That it would correct our lives

as we try and remake you in our image, Lord Jesus, that we would repent and that we would just embrace the reality that you’re remaking us in yours. And that’s way, way better. So Jesus, be with me as I open your word today. May the things that are just of me be forgotten but may the things of you and your gospel sing in our hearts. We pray for Portland that you’d release us as ambassadors here and that you’d save people in this city that we could love and serve it and that we do so in the name of the real Jesus, the Jesus of the Bible. And so Jesus, fill us with your spirit, guide us and lead us in all truth. Pray these things for your glory and for our joy in your name, Jesus Christ, amen. Y’all can have a seat. So for 2,000 years, since the incarnation of Jesus,

Reimagining Jesus

since Jesus came to save us from ourselves, people have tried to reimagine, co-opt and reorganize Jesus for their own purposes. We have a tendency, if we are not careful, to reimagine Jesus rather than coming to him as God but reimagine him in our own image. 2,000 years ago, the Gnostics, or if we’re being really technical, the Proto-Gnostics and the Gnostics and all these other Platonic thinkers, people who liked Plato, they didn’t like the idea that Jesus was a human being. They were very spiritual. They were much like our new age city. The spirit is good, the body is bad. So they reimagined Jesus as simply a spirit, as a spiritual being.

One of the great frustrations of missionaries to India is that Hindu people have traditionally heard about Jesus and said, yes, we like this Jesus and we’ll put him up in the Pantheon with all of our other gods. This is, by the way, the same thing we do in Portland where we say, yeah, Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad, they’re all pretty much saying the same thing, which, by the way, is categorically wrong. And any true Muslim or true Buddhist would tell you that, by the way. That’s not a controversial comment. One of my favorite, maybe my favorite folk singer, Woody Guthrie, perhaps the greatest folk singer of the 20th century, had a song called Jesus Christ. And in this song, he talks about Jesus Christ and his followers. Jesus is a carpenter, true and brave, who told the rich to give to the poor and he was crucified by the bankers.

He reimagines Jesus as sort of the proletariat, the hero of the Great Depression. We can do this. This has happened in mainline liberal Christianity. We just sort of tack onto Jesus every banner of whatever is cool or hip or immoral at the moment and kind of reimagine him as the champion of our own causes. Likewise, conservative Jesus is the same. We put the stamp on sort of politically conservative Jesus. He is into everything we are into if we are politically conservative and we never stop and come to Jesus and say, is this what you’re into, Lord? Is this your thing? It’s like the angel that approaches Joshua as they’re about to enter the promised land. We do this all the time. Joshua comes to the angel and he sees this angel and he says, are you on our side or their side? And his response, of course, is neither.

I’m on God’s side. Now, what’s amazing about Psalm 110 is I think there is a corrective here for us. This is the most quoted Old Testament scripture in the New Testament. That should tell us there’s something important here. Now, this text is deeply messianic, meaning that God made everything good, human beings broke it, but God early on in the Old Testament makes a promise to send someone to fix it, and the Old Testament saints looked at this text and said, clearly, this text is talking about this person who’s gonna come and make things right, this person that Isaiah’s talking about who’s gonna make all things new and deal with sin. It’s that guy, it’s this Jesus. Now, the Old or the New Testament saints read this text through the lens of the good news of the gospel, through the life of Jesus. They understood through the life, death,

and resurrection of Jesus that this was clearly the way to go. This was clearly talking about him. And if you are in here today and you are not a Christian, the thing we need you to know more than any other thing is the good news of the gospel, that you and I are sinners saved by grace if you are a Christian. If you’re not a Christian, this is who we are and what is fundamental to us, that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, that we’ve all rebelled, we’ve all rebelled against God, but we’ve also done right things for the wrong reasons, and we’ve left so many good things undone, and that God is holy and beautiful and perfect, and the gap between that holy, beautiful, and perfect God in me is immense, and so that the God of the universe

had to enter into human history to live the life I should have lived in the person of Jesus, in the incarnation of Jesus, and that he dies the death on the cross to save me from myself and from my sin and to make me alive together with God, and that gap is too wide. I can’t meditate or good work or work my way across that gap, but that God himself had to come and get us, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we understand that we lack compared to such a holy God, but he’s gracious and merciful. We can’t earn his love. He’s poured it out on us in Jesus, and so what makes us Christians is not that we’ve cleaned up and put on our Sunday best, but that we’re sinners saved by the grace of this God, that we’ve reached out to this God

and received his salvation. Now, in light of this life, death, and resurrection, the New Testament saints read Psalm 110 and said, Jesus, this is Jesus. This is why it’s the most quoted text, and so what I hope for us to do today is this corrective. We’re going to look at this and see what it says about Jesus, and in a sense, what the Old Testament has in like a coloring book, it’s like the lines, and we’re going to use the New Testament to fill in the colors, and so we’re gonna see three things. We’re gonna see that Jesus is a new kind of king. We’re going to see that Jesus is a new kind of priest, and we’re going to see that Jesus is a new kind of judge, so here we are. We are in Psalm 110. The Lord, so whenever you see in your Bible, by the way,

A New Kind of King

capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. I suppose I could’ve just said one capital there, but let’s be redundant. This is the proper name of God. It’s not just Lord. It’s not just a title. It’s his name, and next it says to my Lord. Now, this word, my Lord, is used for human beings all over the place, but in at least three places in the Bible, Exodus 34, 23, Deuteronomy 10, 17, and Psalm 8, 1, it refers to God. Now, clearly, in light of the life of Jesus, they saw this meaning God. Now, the thing about this text is that we kind of miss it. We miss what’s happening here because we’re Americans. Americans don’t have kings. We’re individualists. We do our own thing. We are our own authority, and so what we miss here is that David, the figure who’s writing this thing,

is in a sense, and I’ll use a fun phrase, he’s the king par excellence. That’s all my French. There it is, but he is, and I mean this. Don’t report me to the elders. Give me a second to finish talking. He is the king of kings, but little k’s on both of those. He is the example of what a king is supposed to be in the imagination of God’s people. When they think of who is the great king, David is the great king, but here’s the problem even with the great king. One, well, for starters, he’s a sinner. Even my kid’s story Bible has to mention it. He’s sinned so much and done things that are so out of bounds, right, because he’s a human being, but this is the problem. God said to his people when they came to him and said, we need a king, and he said, I’m your king,

and they said, no, we need a king like the nations have. He said, you know that’s gonna go really poorly for you, and they said, well, we want one of their kings, and he said, fine, I’ll give you a king, and it actually goes really, really poorly from them, David being the best, but it rolls on out poorly from there. What’s unique about this is we have this idea of God saying to this person that David then, so again, the king of kings, little k, little k, imagine like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or whatever we have in the American imagination that is sort of this huge looming figure that we put on money, right, that’s David, and this David says, my lord. Well, why is that significant? The only time a king says that someone else is their lord, any time a king in the ancient Near East

bows a knee to somebody else, it’s because some other king has come in and made them do it because they have crushed them and said, I’m taking over here, and I’m in charge, so David, this cat who would never bow a knee to anyone, says of this figure here that there is lord, that God says to his lord, this is a Trinitarian reality, that the father is saying to the son, this is how the New Testament sees this, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. Jesus has sat down at the right hand of God the father on high because in the good news of the gospel, Jesus has actually done everything that needs to happen for us to live our lives in God.

We have this new kind of king in Jesus. If you go with me to Philippians chapter two, starting in verse four, you know, you don’t have to be, you know, a 1500s British person to understand that the king’s in charge, right? The king gets what he wants, that’s the big message.

But here we have something different in Philippians chapter two, verse four, it says this. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interest of other, having this mind amongst yourself, which is yours in Christ Jesus. There’s a whole sermon we could preach there, but what he’s going to say is that you all who love Jesus, brothers and sisters of Trinity Church, have an obligation to one another to give of our lives to help other people, follow him. But he doesn’t just say, be nice. You’re a Christian, be nice to each other, because that is the greatest motivational structure a parent has ever given to a child. Be nice, I’m wagging my finger at you, and I said so. Yes, I said so, just really helps enliven us to listen and to hear that wisdom, but he doesn’t do that.

He tells us about the sacrificial life we are to live together and bases it in something. Something I think is just phenomenal and is just totally different than any other politician you would ever imagine, right? When you imagine the politicians of the earth, this is not what you see. Here we go. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. So it’s Trinitarian, so the Father and the Son and the Spirit are making the plan before the foundations of the earth to save you and me from ourselves and from our sin, and the Father and the Son and the Spirit have this great thing they are doing, and Jesus, never in there, says, why don’t you send the Holy Spirit to do it?

So the deal is I’m going to go and drink the cup of wrath so they don’t have to. I’m gonna go and deal with their sin even though I’m God. Do I have this plan right? Why do I have to go? Couldn’t somebody else go and get that and take care of that? So does not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, made himself nothing, taking on the form of a servant. Pastor Thomas has been taking us through Mark 10, 45, and a couple of weeks ago he noted this great line in Mark 10, 45, the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many. This is the cornerstone of Christian leadership. As many of you know, Pastor Thomas and Pastor Christian and myself got to go out to Washington D.C. for a training last weekend and the big takeaway,

this is the sort of big takeaway from this whole thing was the observation that one of the people teaching observed and that is that in the world we use authority for our benefit. I use my authority to play king of the mountain and be on top and take what I have to get what I want in the world if I’m doing it the world’s way. But authority God’s way in the church and in the kingdom is one in which those in authority use their authority to bless and for the flourishing of those whom are under their authority. Authority then is not how do I be in control, I use authority, we use authority to take cuts in line for the worst jobs, to be servants, to wash other’s feet, to give of ourself because our model is Jesus. This is our king, friends, but made himself nothing,

taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. The king of kings laid down his life to make us free, to make us alive, to give us new life, to make us his own and we did nothing to earn it or deserve it, this is our king. This is why it says, therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name. So the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Now, of course, this king who we’ve heard about in Psalm 110, every knee will bow. So there are those of us who’ve been saved by his grace

that when he arrives, we will bow and we will sing for joy that he has come finally, Jesus, to wipe the tears from all the eyes. And those who will be caught off guard, realizing though they’ve mocked the gospel and Christian people who have tried to tell them the truth for a long time, that Jesus is real, that this is true and he’s actually come. As one preacher said it, there are in fact many paths up one mountain, but they all lead to Jesus where we’ll be judged, those who have had their sins paid for and those who have not, that the reality is that either Jesus Christ has paid the price for our sins or we’re going to have to, and at the same time, the reality is his arms are open wide to save sinners from death to life.

The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Now this is an image of when he comes and he restores all things. The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your enemies. Your people will offer themselves freely on the day of your power and holy garments that will respond to this reality by worshiping and loving our God, and one of the great dangers is we love the ideas of the kingdom. We have a tendency to really like these ideas. We read Psalm 2, or pardon me, Acts 2 as sort of this Christian, hippie, commune thing, which by the way is not what Acts 2 is actually saying for the record, but we don’t want the king.

Jesus says stuff that like really makes us prickle as like North Americans. He says things like if you love me, you’ll obey me, and the reality is we don’t like that because we’ve had a lot of people tell us to obey what they’ve said who are unjust people, who are people you shouldn’t actually obey, and so our impulse then is to automatically throw that off, and the thing that we miss is that it’s a kingdom, but the good news of the kingdom is because we have such a good king. We have a king who’s come to save us from ourselves and actually in his life on earth show us how to live, not because we deserve it, but because he’s gracious, and the reason we can trust him and obey him is because he’s the God who made absolutely everything, and he actually knows how life works best.

He actually knows how everything we have are to be used for joy, and when we obey him, we’re actually trusting him and saying, Jesus, I might not have everything figured out, big surprise. Take one drive with me in Portland trying to get a coffee shop, and you’ll know I don’t have everything figured out. I insist on not using the map so I’ll learn, but we just get lost, and it’s horrible. Jesus actually knows how life works best. I mean, how are we doing it, the experts of our own lives, as the authority in our own lives? When we’re being honest for just a moment, it doesn’t actually make our lives better, but Jesus knows. He’ll save you, he’ll guide you, he’ll lead you into his grace. He goes on, the Lord is sworn and will not change his mind. You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

A New Kind of Priest

What the heck does that mean? This is a uranium-dense, tightly-packed verse, by the way. So Melchizedek is this cat who shows up in Genesis 14, and in Genesis 14, Melchizedek shows up after Abraham has come to rescue his knuckle-headed nephew, Lot. So when you get to Genesis, and you’re reading Genesis, and you hear about Lot, what you just need to hear loudly is Lot is a knucklehead and don’t do anything he does ever. It gets really bad for him, by the way. But Abraham comes and he rescues Lot, and then this cat shows up called the King of Salem, or the King of Peace, and his name’s Melchizedek. And he shows up, basically out of nowhere, and this wild thing happens. Abraham gives him a tenth of everything he owns, and then he pulls out bread and wine, and they have this sort of proto-communion experience,

this proto-Lord’s Supper, I mean sort of a pre-Lord’s Supper, and then he just disappears until we get to Psalm 110. Now, if you read Second Temple literature, as I know you all love to do, you’ll find that lots of people had lots of theories about this Melchizedek cat, but other than that, in the Bible, in the Old Testament, the first 78%, we have nothing. And then all of a sudden, in the New Testament, we pick it back up, and the author of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is a priest after the order of Melchizedek, and Jesus is this new kind of priest. And with this new kind of priest, we have these wonderful realities. You see, in the Old Covenant system, and I do think this is grace from God, the Old Covenant saints lived in such a way that God, by his grace, revealed himself to them

and gave him this thing called the Mosaic Covenant. Now, the reason this is a gift of grace is any time the God of the universe reveals himself to you and tells you how to live and how life works best, this is a gift. This is a gift, by the way. Read your Bible. But I digress. So in the Old Covenant system, God shows them how to live, but not only that, knowing that they’re going to fail at perfection, he gives them the sacrificial system. And the sacrificial system, which is a foreshadow of the cross of Christ, he says, okay, if you fail, this animal will die in your place so you don’t have to. This animal will die so you don’t have to. Sound like anybody else we know, right? Now, here’s the problem. So I go in, talk for my turtle doves for doing something wrong

because I disobeyed the covenant, and I got out of whack, and I go out the door, and a chariot runs over my tunic, and I flash them the universal sign of disapproval, and then I have to go back into the temple to pay the price for sin once again. The real price I will have to pay will be when Jan tomorrow at work tells me that they didn’t have chariots or tunics or something at that point in time.

Or that I got the turtle doves wrong. But the illustration stands. The author of Hebrews tells us the problem with this system is that we have to keep going back in. We have to keep paying the price for our sins. And that was the Levitical priesthood. And what the author of Hebrews tells us is that we actually have a new kind of priests. So if you go with me to Hebrews, I just condensed the whole letter of Hebrews into like a paragraph, but it stands. If you go with me to Hebrews chapter two, verse 14, we hear about this priest, this order of Melchizedek priest, King Jesus. Chapter two, verse 14 says this. For we have come,

sorry, that’s 13, 14. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold to our original common three. Nevermind. Why don’t I go to one of the hardest passages in all of the Bible to exegete for a quick illustration. Wrong, go with me to two. Now I’ll read it correctly. Verse 14. Since therefore the children share in the flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things that through death he might destroy the one who has power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. Apart from Christ, we are slaves to sin. We are slaves to the world in which we live and death is coming for us all. Not often do I get to use two Woody Guthrie references in one sermon. But friends, the little black train is coming.

The one thing we all share whether you’re saved or not and you’re in here is that we are all going to die. That’s a fact. That’s real and we try and put it off. There are those who right now who are doing everything they can, believing that if they can just get a little further out into medical technology, medical technology can extend their life maybe even indefinitely. The fact that anyone thinks about cryogenics, sci-fi stuff once upon a time and now something people are actually trying to do. If I could just freeze myself, then I can get to a time when I guess I can live in like a robot body or something weird like that. That doesn’t sound fun to me. That sounds really scary, but that’s a whole nother sermon for a whole nother day.

But in Christ, we are secure. To be apart from the body is to be at home with the Lord. Death, where is your sting? We’re safe. We’re secure in Christ because of our priest. Listen to this. Listen to this. This is true of you right now if you’re in Christ. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore, he had to be made like his brethren in every respect. So he might become a merciful, he’s a merciful priest, a merciful and faithful high priest.

In service to God, to make propitiation. This means to deal with wrath. Wrath is the business end of God’s justice. And we’ll talk about this in a minute. It’s what we deserve for doing wrong that Jesus drinks the cup of our wrath so we don’t have to. He appeases God so he doesn’t look at you as a sinner. He looks at you as a son or daughter of God most high. This is what our priest has done for us. He was made like us in every way, but knew no sin. So that he might become a merciful, faithful high priest in service to God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able, listen, to help those who are being tempted. This is our priest. This is our priest. He knows what it’s like to be you.

You can even look at me and my life and say, that’s nice for you to say, but you don’t know what it’s like to be me. And to that, I would say, absolutely correct. Absolutely correct. But Jesus has this thing going on where he’s omnipotent, omniscient, omnipotent. He actually knows the life you’ve lived and has lived a life himself. Suffering. Religious leaders said he was demon possessed. His mama and his brother said he was crazy. He was rejected by religious leaders. He was left out in the cold by his friends. He was betrayed by somebody in his inner circle. And then he was scorned and crucified by the very people he came to save, the very people he created. He knows what it is to suffer. And some of us bring suffering in here today. Some of us have suffered in life, but we have a faithful high priest

who can actually sympathize with us in our weakness, and he can be right there with us. Hebrews chapter five, verse five says this. In my Bible, it’s just right here. Chapter five, verse five says, so also Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him, you are my son, today I have begotten you. The author of Hebrews is saying Psalm two is about Jesus. And he says in another place, just to prove the point of my whole sermon, you are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. But listen, in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death and was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he had suffered.

And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. So all of a sudden, Jesus isn’t just the one showing and telling us how to live as we had in the old covenant. He’s not just the priest who sort of organizes the whole thing. He’s also the sacrifice who dies in our place to make us right with God. This is the priest we serve. He’s shown us all three of these things. He’s shown us the terms of how we live. He’s been the priest who walks with us in our weakness and temptation, but also our atoning sacrifice for our sin.

A New Kind of Judge

Not only is Jesus a new kind of king and a new kind of priest, he’s also a new kind of judge. The Lord is at your right hand. He will shatter kings on the day of his wrath. He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses. He will shatter chiefs over the wide earth. He will drink from the brook by the way. Therefore, he will lift up his head. There’s a lot of sort of hot stuff in there. Like, let’s just be honest, right? There’s some big ideas in there. But I propose that the key to unlocking them all is understanding this idea of wrath. Now, I’ve been preaching in the Pacific Northwest for some time. This is what we’d call a defeater belief. This is something that if you’re new to Christianity, you may even hear that word and say, whoa, I’m gonna get some coffee

and I’ll go out the back door, right? I would propose, friends, that we need to understand that we actually live in a time and a place where wrath is something we like. So here’s what I mean by that. You’re like, what is he talking about? So wrath, as it’s described in the Bible, is the business end of God’s justice. It’s the execution of his justice as he operates in the world. Right now, everyone loves criticizing cancel culture. But I would argue that cancel culture, in and of itself, is a wrathful culture. It’s the democratization of justice in which we cancel someone as the business end of that justice. We try them on Twitter and then we cancel them and then they’re done. And we’re in many ways for this as a society. A cake baker here in Oregon some years ago, did not want to participate

in a particular religious ceremony and he was fined $140,000. By the way, I don’t know what kind of bakery he was running, but all the bakers I’ve ever known, finding someone $140,000 is intended to destroy them. It’s intended to ruin them. Now, he had a choice. He could go along with the program or he could go along with Jesus. He chose Jesus, he got the fine. That’s wrath. That’s the business end of justice. The problem with so much of that justice is it’s unjust justice. But I would posit in the wake of that, that wrath is not something we’re actually afraid of. We just don’t like the word.

But we have a different kind of judge. If you go with me to Romans chapter three verse, starting verse 21, this is our judge. This is the judge of the gospel. This is the judge who is Jesus. Romans chapter three verse 21 says this. But now, the righteousness of God has been manifest apart from the law. There he’s talking about that Old Testament covenant and that old Mosaic law that we were talking about a minute ago. Although the law and the prophets, now when we see capital L, capital P, we’re talking about the Old Testament, the first 78% of your Bible, which I would argue, therefore, is good to read given that it’s the first 78% of your Bible and Jesus tells us it’s all about him, Luke 24.

Although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction, for all have sinned and all fall short of the glory of God. All of us. Again, the point of Christianity, if you’re in here for the first time, this is the first time hanging out with Christian people, this is not where we say, here’s the rules to follow, be like us and get right. We say, we’re sinners saved by grace, be like us and run to Jesus for refuge. But listen to this. This is why we can run to him for refuge. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace. That word justified means we’re made right. We’re made right by a gift from Jesus, not from the things that I do.

I cannot make myself right. I need Jesus to make me right through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation, there’s that word again, dealing with God’s wrath, dealing with the business end of God’s justice, the propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness because in his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier for the one who has faith in Jesus. Here’s the thing about the gospel, it isn’t fair. It actually isn’t fair that Jesus died in my place. I actually deserve the business end of God’s justice, but he’s both just and justifier. That means he sweeps no injustice under the rug. What a horrible God if he didn’t actually deal with the horrible evils of our world.

But there’s two ways he deals with it. He either drinks the cup on our behalf of that wrath on the cross to make us right with God, or we have to. Our problem, I think, or one of our problems at least, is that we actually want wrath, we want justice for everybody else and we want mercy for ourselves. Here’s what I mean by that. You’re driving on I-84, maybe you’re driving on 205, maybe it’s Gleason, maybe you’re late for work and you’re speeding. You’re in your Honda Odyssey, maybe it’s Toyota, I don’t know, but you’re going as fast as you possibly can and you see a police officer and you begin to pray. King Jesus, you know what I’ve been through, you know what my insurance is like, and you know that if I get one more ticket, I won’t be able to drive my Honda Odyssey anymore.

Please, Jesus, spare me, give me mercy. You’re going 40 in a school zone, you don’t deserve mercy, you could’ve killed some children. But the cop lets you go as he sees you lift up the gas and he shows you mercy. Then you turn, you’re on 60th, you need to get to work, somebody cuts you off, and what do you say? Where’s a cop when you need one? Why? Because you want them to have wrath. You want mercy for you, you want wrath for them.

But Jesus is the just and the justifier, meaning he wouldn’t be a just God if he just said, oh, Andrew, that was cool. He actually says, that was wrong, and I will pay for that so that you can be free and so that you can live. I think this is a helpful corrective for us. This prevents us from being legalists who sort of approach Jesus and say, me and Jesus are holy, we’re not going to do this, and say, me and Jesus are holy and right and you are all horrible and you need to change. We actually don’t do that, we come under Jesus and say, I need his grace and I need his forgiveness, and so do you, and there’s room here for us all. Repent and believe the good news of Jesus.

So if you’re in here today and you’re not a Christian, I have good news for you. I have good news that Jesus is a different kind of priest and that Jesus is a different kind of king and he’s a different kind of judge. He’s the kind of king that uses everything he has for your flourishing and for your joy and for his glory, and you can know this king today. And he’s not a distant, far priest, but he’s the priest who actually has come and lived on planet Earth and knows what it’s like to be you and has paid the price for your sins so you can be right with God. And he’s a different kind of judge. He’s actually the kind of judge that knows absolutely everything wrong you’ve ever done, which is hard to swallow when we’re honest with ourselves. And he says, here’s what we’re gonna do.

I’m going to die on the cross on your behalf, and this is what Martin Luther calls the great exchange. I’m going to get what you deserve and you’re going to get what I deserve, not because of anything you’ve done, but everything I’ve done. He suffered so we could have life and joy and peace. And if this is us, we need to, if you’re in here today, brothers and sisters, and you are in Christ, this is our great corrective to remember, hey, it’s not about us reshaping Jesus in our image, but us being reshaped in his. And that we have great hope that there’s power in this message. There’s truth in this message. And this is the message that Portland needs to hear. And this is the message that Portland needs to hear. This is the message we take as ambassadors to this place. And this is the message that sets us free

and gives us life. Let’s pray. King Jesus, I pray we would just do that. We would see you in your glory and your beauty. We’d see you for who you really are. We’d see you as our king. We’d see you as our priest. We would see you as our judge.

That you would work in our lives and transform us by your truth. That this would light us up for a worship and an enjoyment of you. That we would live in your freedom and in your grace. I pray for us that you’d bring people into our lives you wanna see. That we wouldn’t tell them about some fake Jesus we think they want to hear about. But the real Jesus who can actually save sinners from death to life. And so Jesus, help us to live. Help us to have great joy. Help us to walk in this city that can seem so dark sometimes with the joy of this gospel. With the joy of this truth. As blood-bought sinner saints who go on your behalf. King Jesus, I pray we would see you in your glory and on your behalf. King Jesus, we love you and pray these things

for your glory and for our joy. In your name, Jesus Christ, amen.