Mark chapter 16. We’re going to start with the traditional Easter text this morning, but the plan is to look back through the Bible to see how all of these dots connect. And as we look to the reading of God’s Word, if you join with me in prayer.
Blessed are you, Holy God, in Jesus Christ. Your light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. Blessed are you, God of light, Shine in our lives with the light of Christ, that we may give you praise through him, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
Beginning in verse 1: When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome, brought spices so they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb? And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away. It was very large.
And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen. He is not here.
See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee, that you will see him just as he told you. And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The word of the Lord.
A crash is heard somewhere in the house. Followed by the sound of running feet towards you, and ahead of the feet comes a breathless, “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.” To be accused of something we didn’t do is unbearable, but really we don’t like it much better when we’re blamed for something we did do. And when we encounter almost any problem, the first thing we usually ask is, who’s at fault? What is it about human nature that is compelled to want to blame someone?
There’s good news though, because Jesus has taken our blame. We have been given right standing with the Father through him. Now there’s a difference between blaming and finding out who’s responsible. We know the police investigate crimes to make accountable wrongdoers, but I’m talking about blaming that strikes deeper to the core of who we are. I blame to feel superior to others, to feel better about myself.
I blame to attack others, to justify my own sinful actions. I blame because I want to punish. I want to hurt. I blame to avoid looking at my own faults, to hide my sin. And the opposite of being blamed is to be absolved.
To be absolved means to be free from blame, guilt. It’s to be pardoned from wrongdoing, exonerated, forgiven. And for believers, that is what Jesus has provided for us. He has absolved us of our sins. We’re gonna look then at, at how the Bible connects these dots to his death and to his resurrection, how we got there.
In creation, God provided everything for Adam and Eve, but by Genesis 3, this is in dispute. Adam and Eve rebelled and sinned against the Lord. And when confronted, what was their immediate response? Point the finger at somebody else. Adam blames his wife and God.
The woman you gave me, she gave me the fruit and I ate. And Eve, she blamed the serpent. The serpent deceived me and I ate. And so it all begins from there through history. And we see this all the time.
We even see it with the very youngest of children.
You can see a little child come and you can say, did you stick your fingers in the frosting? And that child can be sitting there before you with chocolate smeared all over their face and hand, shaking their head, going, uh-uh, and point at the dog. This is a part of the history of humanity in our fallenness with this. And when the Lord pronounced his judgment on the serpent, we also see the pronouncement of his mercy on mankind. He said in Genesis 3:15 to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and Her offspring, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.
This is called by many the first pronouncement of the gospel, because here we see the seed of God’s redemption planted into the soil of sin. The offspring or the seed of the woman culminates in the person and work of Jesus. Now in the Old Testament, the Lord provided the entire sacrificial system as a way of removing blame and absolving guilt. And many of course today wonder like, how does this work? How can a blood of an animal remove my guilt and my shame?
In Genesis 22, we’re given one of the most dramatic stories of the Bible. The Jewish people refer to it as the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. The Lord told Abraham to take your son. Your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I tell you. And in that whole passage, the word son is used 13 times in just a short few verses.
Your only son mentioned 3 times, the son whom you love, making sure we get the point, as did Abraham. Remember, Isaac is the miraculous son of promise given to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, a miracle of God. And up they go, and Isaac finally asked the question, Dad, where’s the sacrifice? And Abraham tells him, my son, God will provide for himself the lamb for the burnt offering. And then Abraham proceeds that you fear God, seeing you’ve not withheld your son, your only son, from me.
And Abraham looked up and he saw caught in the thicket by its horns a ram. And he took the ram and he offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. And Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide, Jehovah Jireh. And it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.’ Now we read that, we hear that, and we’re amazed and terrified at the same time. It’s hard to hold in tension the dark command of God along with his high promise.
Much more can be said about that we don’t have time for, but for us on this side of the cross, we see all this in reference to Jesus, the Son of Promise. But for Abraham, that promise was a very long way off. And jumping ahead then to the book of Leviticus, it’s all about the sacrificial system for Israel. And one of those, on the— it was the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Two goats were brought.
One is sacrificed as a sin offering for the priests and for the people. The other, the priest laid his hands on, a sign of a transfer of guilt. And there The Lord said, confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness. The blame, the guilt, the sin symbolically laid on an animal to bear it away.
Jesus is rightly called the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Some have even wondered why Jesus didn’t die on the Day of Atonement in September, but all of the sacrificial offerings are a picture of Jesus.
John reminds us that it was the day of preparation of the Passover. The Passover, the Passover was an instead-of offering. Think back to Genesis 22, the ram was offered instead of Isaac, and at the Exodus Death did not come to the firstborn sons of Israel. Instead, a lamb was offered. And in Genesis 22, Abraham, what he could not do, the Lord did.
He provided the lamb for the sacrifice instead of Isaac. The Lord provided his own son, his beloved son. Jesus is the scapegoat who bears our sin, our shame, our guilt. Jesus takes all of that on himself. But unlike all those animal sacrifices, Jesus did not remain dead.
What they symbolically took away, they could not ultimately change. And the sacrifices were repeated continually. The book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus was offered only once. It said Jesus entered once for all into the holy place, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood. Securing for us eternal redemption.
And he was raised to life as the giver of life. Paul in Romans, we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. Thanks be to God. This means something incredible for us.
‘Cause Paul goes on in Romans 8 to say, the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you. He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through the Spirit who dwells in you. Sin and death conquered in Jesus, the benefits we receive. So going all the way back to where we started, Adam and Eve were totally guilty and they blamed someone else. Jesus was totally innocent and he bore our slain.
Where? On the mount God provided.
We’re told in 2 Chronicles that King Solomon built the temple on Mount Moriah, the very same name told to Abraham in Genesis 22.
On that mount and that place of death, God provided life. God pulling all these strings together over thousands of years And Paul tells us that Adam brought death to us all in his sin, but that Jesus, the second Adam, his act of righteousness leads to justification, to life for all. In Christ Jesus, we are justified. We are counted righteous. We are pardoned.
We are forgiven. We are absolved.
And now then, the so what part. What has God provided you? Because of Jesus, we don’t have to play the blame game any longer. We have received our peace. Puritan minister Thomas Goodwin, he wrote, Christ died to make his enemies his friends, even though he could have created new ones cheaper.
It was a cost, and that cost brought reconciliation. That’s the heart of the gospel story, restored relationship. And because Jesus bore our blame and has been raised from the dead, we no longer have to blame others to justify ourselves. And that relationship can be restored first to God and then to one another.
Well, why is this so tremendously difficult? Because we’re fault finders. For some, it’s a compulsion. A question we can ask ourselves is, is why am I so angry and needing to assign blame to somebody? Because the world is always looking for a scapegoat.
Foreigners are blamed for ruining a country. Countries are blamed for ruining the world. We blame presidents, prime ministers, political parties. Husbands blame wives, wives blame husbands, children blame their parents, and on it goes. In all of this, there’s fear and anger.
Everyone running around trying to play Pin the blame on the donkey. People desperately trying to find a scapegoat, but what will it do us if you do? Because nothing changes. Even if you put a label on somebody, nothing is different. But God has provided a scapegoat.
Jesus, the Son he loved, bore our sin and shame. He was offered instead of us. He was raised from the dead. He conquered. He’s victorious.
That’s the good news.
And that changes everything for us. We now have a Christ-centered reality in how we see to live. A Christ-centered reality that changes how we think and how we pray. Consider from Ray Ortlund, I’ve put this in your bulletin, I’ve read it before, but it’s a very good statement. There he says, stop praying, Lord, I want you to make my life better.
Stop praying, I want you to make my husband or wife better. I want my children to behave. I, I want an ideal job. When you pray that way, you only end up frustrated because God will not subordinate himself to any human agenda. Start praying, Lord, I just want you to be God to me.
I want my life with my problems to show the world that you save sinners. See, like Abraham, we hold on to the promises that only God can provide, which means surrendering our vision of what we think that should be.
How often we think or say, I deserve to have a better life, better kids, better spouse, better education, more respect. I shouldn’t have to put up with this stuff. God, where are you? Why are you not providing for me the promises that I have made myself in your name?
No, Easter tells us that we subordinate our agendas to him to show the world that he saves sinners like us. What Isaac could never bear, Jesus takes on himself and he fulfills the promise. He descends down to us so that we could ascend to him through the work of his Spirit now dwelling in us. The author and the finisher weaves together a story that spans thousands of years, and into this beautiful plan of redemption, he has woven you into of that fabric. He has called you by name before the foundations of the world, that you would be the wonder and the joy of his creation.
It’s not a mistake, but a well-laid and thought-out plan of redemption that he has provided. And yes, we carry the tension of those dark moments of our lives with these high promises, and it’s a challenge often to our faith. I don’t know how they all fit together, but I don’t have to know. I am simply called just to follow my Savior, the righteous one. And I can let go then of finding fault with everyone else because through Jesus my own fault has been removed.
That is the glory and the joy that we celebrate on this Easter morning. The love of Christ is ours in him. The tomb is empty and he is risen, and these promises are true and sure.
Pray with me. Father Almighty, we do thank you for all that you have given to us in your son Jesus. We thank you, Lord, that in him, not only the dots of scripture, but the dots of our lives come together. Father, we thank you for the mercy that we have received, the transformation that is ours. And Lord, we would pray and ask that you would continue to enable us by the power of your spirit.
To be faithful followers of your Son, your only Son, whose name we bear. And this we pray and ask in his mighty name. Amen.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.