Access by Blood-Good Friday | Andrew Gutierrez

April 14, 2017 Speaker: Andrew Gutierrez Series: Stand-Alone Message

Topic: Stand-alone messages

I’d ask you to open to Hebrews 9. We’ll get there soon. This isn’t a typical sermon. I just kind of want to give you some devotional thoughts about the cross.

Well, as I mentioned, if you can make your way to Hebrews 9, we’ll eventually be there, but I want to talk to you tonight about the access we have to God the Father by Jesus Christ, and specifically by the blood of Jesus Christ, by the death of Jesus Christ.

We just sang some lyrics that wouldn’t be on the top 40 radio station. We sang of the wrath of God. We sang of the blood of Christ. We sang about things that are really horrific. We sang of the cross.

We’ve got a cross up here. If you were in the first century, it would look as awkward to you as if we would have an electric chair up here tonight. That’s what we’re singing about. A means of torture and execution. Because we’re singing about and thinking about the one who died, and because we’re thinking about the one and singing about the one who died in our place. So it’s very appropriate to think of those types of elements, as uncomfortable as they may be sometimes.

I want to talk to you tonight about access to God through the blood of Jesus Christ. There’s something about having access to something. People in the intelligence community sometimes take pride in the amount of access they have to classified information. What’s your security clearance? Well, what’s your security clearance? Access is special to people.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a sporting event of a theatrical production where you get to sit in a special section where you need a badge to get into that section, and the rest of the peons don’t have that badge, but you have that badge. You have access. You’re important. Someone has given you the right to be in a special place.

Well, that’s similar to what we have in heaven with God. We have access to a relationship with God the Creator of the world, God the sustainer of the world, the Lord of this world. The access we have with God is the greatest access we can ever have in this life, and in the next. And it came because someone died a bloody, horrific death.

1. Embrace the language of blood and death

My theme for the evening, as I’ve mentioned, is access to God comes by blood. And I want to kind of give you two things to think about tonight. The first is this: I want you to think about the importance of embracing the language of blood and death.

In today’s culture, especially in twenty-first century America, we are an anesthetized culture. We don’t like seeing gruesome things. We don’t have to see death very often. We’re not a third world nation. We’ve kind of been removed from all things painful and bloody, in a sense. And even if you want to see some of those things and watch them on movies, they’re just that—movies.

So we’ve kind of distanced ourselves from talk of blood and death and things like that. Well, there are people who really call on Christians to stop talking that way also. Stop talking about the blood of the Bible, the wrath of God. Well, we can’t ever stop doing that, because the Lord has revealed those things for certain reasons.

We live in a day where Jesus has often been portrayed not as a crucified, suffering Savior on a cross, but more as a therapist and a life coach. That’s not who he is. He’s a Savior. He lived a perfect life and died a bloody, horrific death on a cross. And there’s reason that he died that way. We must embrace biblical terminology and biblical realities if we’re going to understand who Jesus Christ really is.

There’s a quote given by an author who’s talking about the Old Testament animal sacrifices, and if you ever want gruesome, horrific things to read, read the Old Testament and the animal sacrifices.

I think about priests in those days. You know, you didn’t grow up thinking, I want to be a priest one day, and I’m going to go into a room and study and teach the Bible. It wasn’t just that. When you were a priest in those days, you knew how to wield a butcher’s knife. You would daily be killing animals. Why? Why can’t we just clean that up? Well, because the Old Testament animal sacrifices are pointing to something deep and real.

This author says this: “In the modern world we have little conception of what animal sacrifice involved. It was, at best, a bloody and difficult affair. It is all but inconceivable that ancient Israelites could watch the painful slaughter of animals as their sin offerings to Yahweh and not come away with a profound sense of the wrath of God that had to be propitiated.”

If you read your Old Testament and read about the animal sacrifices, you learn some things about God. And by the way, that starts real fast in the Bible. Genesis 3—the first animal is killed for sin, because of sin, to cover up the shame of Adam and Eve.

But when you read about sacrifices and bloody sacrifices, you learn about the seriousness of sin. Someone sins; an animal must die. That seems like an overreaction to some people. Not if you understand the depth of sin.

Animal sacrifices show us the need for a substitute. Mommy and Daddy, why do we have to kill the lamb when we go to the tabernacle or the temple? Because we need a substitute. When we sin, we must die before a holy God, but God has made a way to satisfy his wrath, and for now, the picture is we have to slaughter the lamb, the bull, the goat.

When we see Old Testament animal sacrifices, it shows us the need for eternal acceptance. How often did they have to go back to the temple or the tabernacle? Over and over and over and over and over again. Won’t there be a sacrifice that will take care of it all? Yes. Yes. It would come.

Animal sacrifices show us the separation between us and God. The high priest, the priest of Israel, the high priest of Israel, could only go into the Most Holy Place in the tabernacle. The tabernacle is divided up into three sections, the outer court, the Holy Place, and the Most Holy Place, which was where the ark of the covenant was. God was giving his people a picture of the fact that he is dwelling there. He came to meet his people there. He’s not imprisoned there; he came and put himself there as a picture of holiness.

And so, no one could just saunter up to the ark of the covenant. You couldn’t go in. Even the high priest, the most privileged person with the most access in Israel, could only go in once a year. And before he went in, he had to wash for his own sins. He had to offer an animal sacrifice for his own sins. And then he brought in an animal sacrifice for the sins of the people and splattered the altar with blood.

That separation, that division between people and God that can only be accessed by blood showed something. We are separate from God in our sin.

So we can’t get rid of blood talk. We can’t get rid of sacrifice for therapy talk. We can’t get rid of blood talk and death talk for life fulfillment talk. We have to go where the Bible takes us, because it shows us the depth of sin.

There are people today—and I’ve read tweets even this weekend—there are people today with large public platforms in the Christian world who want to stop talking about blood and death and sin and wrath, and only talk about love. I would submit to you, we do not know the love of Christ until we understand the wrath of God for sinners. When we understand the wrath of God, the holy wrath of God, and that no one should be given a second chance if we really think about it, then we start to realize how much God loves.

Romans 8:32. Evidently sin is serious. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” Sin is so deep, sin is such a problem in this world, that God gave his Son to solve the problem. That shows a loving God, and that shows a holy God.

To minimize the discussion of blood and death is to trivialize the cross of Jesus Christ. It’s almost to act as if, did Jesus really need to die that way? Yes he did. There are people today who claim that God overreacted in appointing his Son to death.

I’m reading a book called Dynamics of Spiritual Life. It’s a fascinating book. It’s a book about revivals in America and revivals in the Bible. He studies what needs to be in place for a revival or a spiritual renewal to happen. And he’s writing to pastors, to Christians, just things to think about.

And he talks about the First Great Awakening in America. The First Great Awakening is when the holiness of God was preached, and people felt the distance between them and God, and they understood the love of God for the first time, and so it created at the beginning this depth of a fear of God and a terror of God that led to an appreciation of the love and forgiveness of God like never before, and those people took the gospel everywhere, fired up, with smiles on their faces, with joy, because they knew what they’d been saved from and who they had now been made to be.

It’s a fascinating book. But in that book, the author, Richard Lovelace, says this. He talks about the time of the Second Great Awakening. The Second Great Awakening is when the next generation looked to the First Great Awakening, the awakening of their parents and grandparents, and thought, that was amazing! That was dynamic. We need to replicate that. And they tried to make the gospel more palatable to people, diminish talk of the holiness of God, kind of elevate the goodness of man, and they tried to spark a revival that way. It wasn’t the same revival.

Lovelace says this: “During the time of the Second Great Awakening, the church started shifting away from the unpleasant topics of sin and God’s wrath. The whole church was avoiding the biblical portrait of a sovereign and holy God who is angry with the wicked every day and whose anger remains upon those who will not receive His Son. Walling off this vision into an unvisited corner of consciousness, the church substituted a new God who was the projection of grandmotherly kindness mixed with the gentleness and winsomeness of a Jesus who hardly needed to die for our sins.” Listen to this: “Many American congregations were in effect paying their ministers to protect them from the real God.”

We must embrace biblical language about the blood and death of Christ to truly know ourselves and to know God. When we start here, understanding our own sin and its due penalty, we start to see the amazing love of the Father and the Son for us.

2. Access given by Christ’s bloody death

So the second thing I want you to think about tonight. Not only the importance of embracing the language of blood and death; I want you to think about the access given by Christ’s bloody death, the access that we have before God because, specifically because, Christ died for us.

I told you about the tabernacle worship. I told you about the Day of Atonement, the one time a year the high priest could go into the Most Holy Place. He would wash. Two goats would be brought to him. He would cast lots to choose one of them. One of them would be known as a scapegoat.

He would lay his hands on the scapegoat, and in that picture he was laying on the goat the sins of Israel, and he would let the goat loose, and that showed the people of Israel that they could be free from their sin. But the other goat was the one that was slaughtered and whose blood was put on the altar to show, but there still needs to be a substitute of death for sin. Both of those goats preached a message to Israel that Israel needed to have preached. He would enter into the presence of God by going into the Most Holy Place, and there atonement would be made for the sins of Israel.

Now, that sacrificial system had some glory to it, according to 2 Corinthians 3. There was some beauty to it. God was willing to dwell with his people. God will meet with his people. But there seemed to be some frustration still in that system. They had to do that year after year after year after year, and by the way, those sacrifices did not do something that the death of Christ actually does for us. Those sacrifices did not change anyone on the inside. Those sacrifices just pointed to a later sacrifice, Christ’s sacrifice, so that the people can say, okay, I’ve had my sins atoned for until the coming one comes. But they didn’t change people from the inside out.

The sacrifice of Christ—we’ll see this in Hebrews—changes us from the inside out. Now we have a clear conscience. We’re free, and we’ve been changed and can live lives that please the Lord.

You’re at Hebrews 9 I hope still. Look at Hebrews 9:11. Listen to this in light of the Old Testament sacrificial system.

“But when Christ appeared as a high priest [okay, now Christ is the high priest] of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all [once for all; not every year] into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh [outwardly], how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (Hebrews 9:11-14).

Now go to Hebrews 10. Hebrews 10, verse 11. “[E]very priest stands daily at his service [with a knife in his hand, blood on his clothing], offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God”—it’s done; it’s finished. He’s resting, in that sense.

Verse 13: “[W]aiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us; for after saying, ‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds,’ then he adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.’ Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:13-18)

Do you see what God has done here in the new covenant? The old covenant—little boys and little girls would go with their families to the tabernacle, to the temple, and they would slaughter the lamb that maybe they raised or slaughter one of their own bulls, and they would ask questions about that. Why did we need to do that? It’s because we need to atone for our sins. We’re atoning for our sins. We’re atoning for our sins. Every year, every year, every year atoning for our sins. But they didn’t change anyone from the inside out.

But here, we’ve had our consciences purified from dead works to serve the living God. When you understand that your sin put Christ and my sin put Christ on the cross, and he died for us, that changes someone from the inside out, and that’s one of the means that God uses to cause us to be born again. We change. It’s not just that he forgives sin; he changes us when we think about the cross. He changes us.

God has given us unhindered access because of his Son’s blood. You heard Dave read these words from Matthew 27. As soon as Jesus Christ died in Matthew 27, what’s the next thing we learn about? Matthew 27:50-51: “And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.” Jesus dies. Very next words that Matthew writes: “And behold [listen], the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”

God preached a sermon when Christ died. The Father preached a message when Christ died. No more animal sacrifices. When he dies, when his blood is shed, the Holy of Holies is open to you. Not once a year, not after you’ve slaughtered an animal, but when the perfect Savior has shed his blood, you have access to God all the time. Makes you want to pray, doesn’t it? Because we can, in a new sense. Before him, spotless before him.

What’s our response to this? What’s our response? I think Hebrews 10:19 gives us the proper response. “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence”—what a word, by the way. You didn’t want your little son or daughter to have confidence to walk into the Holy Place or the Most Holy Place when you were in ancient Israel.

“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (Hebrews 10:19-22).

You know what God is saying here? Because Christ died for your sin, go to God. You’re right before him. Have full assurance of that. Be confident of that. Not because you are wonderful, not because you are great, not because I’m great, not because we’ve gone to church so many Sundays in a row—none of that. Because he went and shed his blood so that we could walk in boldly to the throne of grace. Not casually, not flippantly, but boldly because we come by his blood and his righteousness, not our own.

A lot of people today are uncomfortable with this kind of talk. I recently heard Tim Keller preach a message from Galatians 6 about boasting in the cross. And he talked about a story that he had heard from a pastor named Dick Lucas in England. Dick Lucas told a story about a series of meetings that Billy Graham had, a series of sermons he preached in Cambridge in 1955—yes, the same year Disney Land opened, just for the record.

Keller told this story, relayed the story that Dick Lucas told, and he kind of sets the stage, and he says that in 1955 when Billy Graham came to Cambridge, the London press was highly critical and basically said, why do we need this backwoods American fundamentalist to come and teach our best and brightest?

Well, as the story goes, Billy Graham was anxious over these meetings. He studied up on his philosophers, and he brought philosophical quotes and arguments, and Lucas noted that the first few nights of the meeting did not go very well. Billy Graham was not very persuasive, helpful. He was trying to impress the elite.

On the last night, he decided to preach about the blood of Christ. Dick Lucas writes this: “I’ll never forget that night. I was in a packed auditorium sitting on the floor with a Regius Professor of Divinity sitting on one leg, and the chaplain of a college who was a future bishop on the other. Now both of these were good men in many ways [note], but were completely against the idea that we needed salvation for sin by the blood of Christ. And that night dear Billy got up and started in Genesis and walked through the whole Bible and talked about every blood sacrifice you could imagine. The blood was just flowing all throughout Great St. Mary’s everywhere for three-quarters of an hour. And both my neighbors were terribly embarrassed. This crude proclamation of the blood of Christ was everything they dreaded. But at the end of the sermon, to everybody’s shock, about four hundred young men and women stayed and gave their lives to Christ.”

Lucas remembers meeting a young Cambridge grad a number of years later. They were having tea together, and Lucas asked this young Cambridge grad, when did Christian things begin for you? Cambridge, 1955. When? When Billy Graham came. Which night? The last night. How did it happen? The man said this: “All I remember is that I walked out of St. Mary’s that night thinking, Christ really died for me.” Lucas said it was unbelievable to the dons and professors that a man like that, preaching a sermon like that, could have totally changed the life of a person like that.

Christ’s death was a bloody death. I’ve said this before: You will not appreciate the fact that Christ died for you until you appreciate the fact that Christ died because of you. I will not appreciate the fact that Christ died for me until I appreciate the fact that he died because of me. My sin put him there.

So when I think about the cross, I think about his justice and his love on my behalf. It’s after thinking about these truths that perhaps in a more deep and meaningful way we can say what Paul says in Galatians 6: “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14).

May we be a people who boast in the cross, because we know what it means. Let’s pray.

Lord Jesus Christ, we are talking to you, the one who shed his blood because of us. You hear us. You’ve given us access to the Father, not just access, but reconciled access. We have nothing to fear before the Father because you suffered, because you died.
God the Father, you are to receive credit and glory for your plan of salvation through your Son. We’ve been predestined because of your love for us in him, the Beloved.
Holy Spirit, you opened our eyes to the beauty of the cross.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we adore you for your justice, your love, and the access that we have to you. May we boast only in the cross of Jesus Christ. Amen.