“Barabbas, Part 16:” by Romans
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Tonight is Part 16 of our Series, Barabbas. He was a man whose name meant “son of the father.” He was guilty and worthy of punishment, but he was chosen, without merit, to be released without punishment. More than in name only, we are the adopted sons and daughters of God. We are continuing, this evening, on our third “rabbit trail,” namely the phrase, “ye are,” enabling us to examine how different we are from Barabbas.
We, as believers and members of the Family of God, experience a whole range of experiences and blessings that differentiate us from Barabbas. When Barabbas left that Judgment Platform, all similarities to us ceased. Unlike Barabbas, for us – in the present tense – “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:15). We are, now... right now, by and through Christ, renewed and transformed in ways Barabbas never dreamed of.
First, tonight, we will review and examine our first “ye are” declaration, found in 1 Corinthians 12:27: “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”
The Sermon Bible writes, “I. The Church is the body in which Christ dwells as the soul, lighting up the body with His Divine presence, the organisation of this tabernacle being the sanctified tabernacle of flesh and blood in which Christ shall dwell, from whose lips He shall speak, whose hands He shall employ, and whose feet shall bear the manhood and the influences of His life through the world around:
the organisation that He shall make use of to extend the interests of His kingdom, and from which the majesty and glory of His dominion shall be extended through the neighbourhood around. Christ dwells in the Church, the Fountain of its life, the centre of its power—"that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith."
II. If this be so, the Church as the body should reflect and manifest the expression of the Divine soul within. It should ever be prepared to respond to the Divine will. My action does not spring from the body, but from the mind and will within. It is from that action originates, that to which action is subordinate, and of which it is the manifestation.
And so it should be with the Church as the body of Christ, ever responding to the will of the Divine Spirit within, and offering all its powers to the service, adoration, and worship of the Divine power, to which it may well be contributory, and to whose glory it shall ever be subordinate. If the Church is the body of Christ, it is to do His bidding, to accomplish His purpose, to live to His glory.
III. The Church is the body of Christ, then: (1) There is her Divine safety; (2) her Divine blessedness; (3) her Divine honour and glory; (4) the activity by which she ought to be distinguished.
J. P. Chown, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 264.
The Christian Idea of Man. I. What is the nature, the meaning of our human life? The words of the text seem to give the answer which we need. We look upon our nature, borne heavenward by splendid aspirations, crushed down by a miserable load of failures, conscious of a Divine kinsmanship, conscious of personal transgressions, and it tells us: "Ye are the body of Christ, Son of God and Son of man."
We look upon our lives, fragmentary, imperfect, involved, with capacities which enjoyment cannot satisfy, with attainments which are only a shadow of our desires, and it tells us: "Ye are severally members thereof." But Divine connection is the revelation of our being, the interpretation of our partial service given to us first in the fiat of creation, given to us afresh out of the darkness and the glory of the Cross; fellowship with God, fellowship with man in God, through Christ.
We feel that we are a result and a beginning; we acknowledge the power of the race, and we treasure the gift of personality. We, too, share in a larger life; but that we may do so according to the will of God we use the individuality of our own life. We are a body—"the body of Christ, and severally members thereof."
II. As Christians, we believe that the contrasts which are represented by the thoughts of the solidarity of mankind and the individuality of each single man are harmonised in the Incarnation. As Christians, we believe that social responsibility and personal responsibility belong equally to each citizen of the Divine commonwealth and correspond with the fulness of His manifold life.
While we ponder the elements of our creed we realise little by little the promise which it seals of some revelation which interprets to us our nature, and our nature furnishes us also with a new rule and a new motive for action. The Christian idea of man brings us the sense of brotherhood, which is the measure of our efforts, the sense of brotherhood with the Son of man, which is their support.
Bishop Westcott, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxii., p. 177.
References: 1Co_12:27.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv., p. 388. 1Co_12:28.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii., No. 777. 1Co_12:31.—Homilist, 3rd series, vol. x., p. 330; Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 351; R. Tuck, Ibid., vol. xix., p. 248; H. W. Beecher, Ibid., p. 373; G. Salmon,
Sermons in Trinity College, Dublin, p. 55; F. W. Robertson, Lectures on Corinthians, p. 73; R. W. Church, The Gifts of Civilisation, p. 5.”
Our next “ye are” declaration is found in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Of this, the Sermon Bible tells us, “Unity in Diversity. St. Paul makes a threefold separation of the human race into two dissimilar classes. This classification is governed by (1) the great intellectual differences and antagonisms among men, (2) the chief emotional and constitutional differences of character, and (3) the prodigious distinctions effected by external circumstances.
I. The first of these divisions was based on the great antagonism which was so admirably expressed in the Apostle’s day by the intellectual differences obtaining between the Jew and the Greek. The Jew was the type of all who in every age of the Church are by their education, mental habits, or dispositions, disposed to lay violent stress on the external sign, on the tangible symbol, on the sacramental test, on the old tradition.
The Greek was the type of the class of Christian men at the present time whose mental constitution, habits, and education almost lead them, in their hatred of superstition, to discourage faith and to denounce the letter and the body and the form of truth so harshly as to shatter the costly vase which contains its fragrant essence. If these two tendencies are left to themselves unchecked and unchastised, very distant will be the day when Jew and Greek shall be one.
II. The second of the classifications is the great constitutional and emotional difference of character expressed by the antitheses of male and female. III. The third is that great division due to differences arising out of external circumstances: the bond and the free. These three great divisions find in Christ
their true counteraction.
(1) There is now neither Jew nor Greek; they are both one in Christ Jesus. In like manner, if the Jew and Greek of these days will look on and up to the great uniting principle of holy life and truth in the person and sacrifice of Christ, they will clasp inseparable hands and antedate the harmonies of heaven.
(2) Christ is the mediating power between the masculine and feminine mind. Christ is the wellspring of the strong motives to right action and of the deepest passions of holy love. (3) The bond and free are one in Christ. The slave lifts up his fetters, and feels that he is the Lord’s free man; the free man is bold to acknowledge himself the Lord’s slave.
H. R. Reynolds, Notes on the Christian Life, p. 44.
I. When we look at the history of the world, we learn something, even from ordinary history, of the oneness of the human race. We are one with those who are very distant from us in time. When we read the history of the men of old, we see how like they were to ourselves in their passions, in their sufferings, in their desires, and in their rejoicing.
The old fathers looked not for transitory promises. If their family life was blessed, it was from looking forward in the same spirit of faith which unites us with our Saviour to the fulfilment of promises given from the very first and to the blessedness of union as children of one Father.
II. There are those who are separated from us in time and in place, and there are other separations more unchristian far and much more difficult to overcome than are even these physical separations. Old distinctions may have gone down amongst us which separated bond and free, but the gulf between the rich and poor remains.
How important that we should all impress upon our minds that we are one in Christ Jesus, and that this oneness can only be practically maintained by some vigorous efforts on our part to overcome the physical difficulties which are separating us from one another.
We are one in our sinfulness, one in our need of a Saviour to rescue us from our sin, one in the hopes which that Saviour gives, and, as one event is waiting for all, there is one hope in one Lord, for whom we are looking forward in the steadfastness of our one faith as redeemed by our one Lord.
A. C. Tait, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xvi., p. 65.
I. We are all one in Christ Jesus. In Him the dispensation is regathered. All things, St. Paul says, in heaven and in earth, are gathered together in Him. It seems as though angels who never fell are in some manner interested and concerned in that regathering. Certainly the dead, equally with the living, are so.
Each separately must put on, must invest himself with, Jesus Christ. Cast your burden, and sin, and sorrow, and conscious weakness upon Christ as your Friend. Then are you inside Him. He includes, He contains, you, and in the dread day of days, when the avenger of blood looks for you, he shall find only Christ—only Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, Him risen.
II. In the exercise of that incorporation, or that union, and that oneness, will our true fellowship henceforth be found. All minor differences of place and intercourse sink at once into nothing. Place and sight may make the difference of pleasure, of comfort, of expressed communion, of conscious unity; but they make no difference whatever as to the reality, as to the essence, of union. We are all one person in Christ.
III. In the face of such union, let us learn—it is a hard lesson—let us learn to despise and trample under foot all other. What is neighbourhood? What is co-existence? Men live next door to each other, and never meet; meet, and never commune; commune, and are never one. At last a call comes.
One goes forth at the summons of business, of necessity, of the Gospel, to a distant shore: seas roll between, they never see, they never hear of each other more; yet for the first time they may be one—one person—in Christ. The communion of saints is between them, and therefore the life of life, the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.
C. J. Vaughan, Last Words at Doncaster, p. 311. References: Gal_3:28.—Bishop Westcott, Contemporary Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 185; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 128; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. vi., p. 271; A. B. Evans, Church of England Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 253; A. C. Tait, Ibid., vol. viii., p. 65; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvi., p. 405. Gal_4:1-7.—Church of England Pulpit, vol. xx., p. 289.”
Our next “ye are” declaration will include two introductory verses for clarity: “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Galatians 4:4-6).
Of this, the Sermon Bible tells us, “Let us consider wherein consisted the preparation of the fulness of the time preceding the birth of Christ for a new turn in the history of the world and wherein consisted the special peculiarity of the coming of Christ which made it the germ of what there was to be in the ages following, and further see how this is really true of ourselves and of our own age.
I. There was a general sickness, so to speak, in the condition of the civilised world at that time. Look at the Roman empire. The most tremendous civil wars that ever were fought had just ended, leaving all their scars and sores behind.
"If ever we were to judge of God’s moral judgment," says a great Roman historian, "exclusively from the varying fortunes of good and bad men, there are few instances of successful wickedness which would more disturb our faith than that of the long and peaceful reign of Augustus Caesar, whose word rules the earth."
Look, again, at the dying and worn-out condition of the old pagan religion. Or look at the Jewish nation, with its sects of Pharisees and Sadducees, the religion of Moses and Isaiah falling away into a discussion of the most minute ceremonial of dress and food and posture, a fierce fanaticism taking possession of the whole people. It was in some respects the darkest period of the Gentile-Jewish world, the dullness before the dawn.
"God sent forth His Son." He was a Teacher unlike the generation from which He sprang, yet specially suited to the needs of the generation. "I dreamt a dream," says one of the most gifted writers of the last century, the famous Rousseau. "I saw the temples and altars of the ancient world in all their splendour.
I looked, and they had vanished, and in their place I saw standing a young Teacher, full of grace and truth. He had not attacked them; He had not destroyed them; but by His own intrinsic excellence and majesty He had superseded them, and there was no one to dispute His right." This is the true description of the aspect of Jesus Christ towards the darker side of the old world.
And what was His aspect towards the brighter side? Almost everything there was of good in it took courage, was revived and assimilated and strengthened by Him. The long-unexampled peace under Augustus Caesar, the organic unity of the civilised world under his sceptre, gave a framework into which the Gospel could fit and spread without hindrance or violence.
II. Such a fulness of time, such a craving of the empty human heart, such a providential preparation, as occurred on the first birthday of Christianity cannot be re-enacted, but in each successive age and in each individual there is in a certain sense a return of the fulness and a reproduction of the coming.
In each successive age, even in this age of our own, there is something like it. In every age the glad tidings of great joy is but the moral element of human nature as the true representative and vehicle of Divinity. Where this is to be found in any degree, there in some degree is the manifestation of the Godhead and a child of God.
Where it is not found, whatever else there may be, there the supreme Divinity is not. Where it is found in the highest degree, there is God incarnate; there is the true Son of the universal Father.
A. P. Stanley, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 851.
Reference: Gal_4:4-6.—G. Hester, Christian World Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 11.
Galatians 4:6 Trinity Sunday. I. God is our Father. Our Lord and His Apostles are constantly impressing this truth upon us. By doing so they bring the conception of God home to the very humblest and most ignorant of His creatures. They plant it firmly in the heart, in the seat of those affections of which no child of man is destitute.
As the Creator and Sustainer and Ruler of the world, God would claim our allegiance and reverence; but allegiance and reverence, if paid to mere power and wisdom, are sure to degenerate into superstitious terror. But let us be once assured of the love no less than of the power and wisdom of our God, and then we are privileged and drawn to love also, and love casts out slavish fear.
II. And then, with affections and instincts thus prepared, we are fitted to apprehend the goodness of the Father in sending His Son to teach us more about Him and to enable us to come nearer to Him. Christ came to draw away the thick veil which the inborn corruption of the human heart and the accumulated sins and falsehoods of centuries had interposed between man and God.
That we might understand God, it was necessary that we should see Him as one of ourselves, tried by temptations; victorious over temptations; suffering for us and suffering with us; bowed down, though not overcome, by the load of sin under which the whole world staggers. So, and so only, could our thoughts of God be at once adequate and clear, and permanently operative on our conduct.
III. It is the action of the Spirit of God’s Son on our hearts that encourages us to approach the throne of God and fling our cry before the Invisible One, "Abba, Father." We cannot enter into the Fatherly character of God without being animated by the same Spirit that animated His well-beloved Son, Jesus. We must be like Christ, we must be very brothers of Christ, if we would claim His Father as our Father.
H. M. Butler, Harrow Sermons, p. 298. References: Gal_4:6.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv., No. 1435; Church of England Pulpit, vol. xviii., p. 64; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. vii., p. 339.
Our next “ye are” declaration, is one that is, perhaps, the most familiar “ye are” statement: It is found in Ephesians 2:5: “Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)”
Of this Matthew Henry writes, “Resolved to show mercy. Love is his inclination to do us good considered simply as creatures; mercy respects us as apostate and as miserable creatures. Observe, God's eternal love or good-will towards his creatures is the fountain whence all his mercies vouch-safed to us proceed; and that love of God is great love, and that mercy of his is rich mercy, inexpressibly great and inexhaustibly rich.
And then by grace you are saved, and by grace are you saved through faith - it is the gift of God. Note, Every converted sinner is a saved sinner. Such are delivered from sin and wrath; they are brought into a state of salvation, and have a right given them by grace to eternal happiness.
The grace that saves them is the free undeserved goodness and favour of God; and he saves them, not by the works of the law, but through faith in Christ Jesus, by means of which they come to partake of the great blessings of the gospel; and both that faith and that salvation on which it has so great an influence are the gift of God.
The great objects of faith are made known by divine revelation, and made credible by the testimony and evidence which God hath given us; and that we believe to salvation and obtain salvation through faith is entirely owing to divine assistance and grace; God has ordered all so that the whole shall appear to be of grace. Observe,
II. Wherein this change consists, in several particulars, answering to the misery of our natural state, some of which are enumerated in this section, and others are mentioned below. 1. We who were dead are quickened (Ephesians 2:5), we are saved from the death of sin and have a principle of spiritual life implanted in us.
Grace in the soul is a new life in the soul. As death locks up the senses, seals up all the powers and faculties, so does a state of sin, as to any thing that is good. Grace unlocks and opens all, and enlarges the soul. Observe, A regenerate sinner becomes a living soul: he lives a life of sanctification, being born of God; and he lives in the sense of the law, being delivered from the guilt of sin by pardoning and justifying grace.
He hath quickened us together with Christ. Our spiritual life results from our union with Christ; it is in him that we live: Because I live, you shall live also. 2. We who were buried are raised up. What remains yet to be done is here spoken of as though it were already past, though indeed we are raised up in virtue of our union with him whom God hath raised from the dead.
When he raised Christ from the dead, he did in effect raise up all believers together with him, he being their common head; and when he placed him at his right hand in heavenly places, he advanced and glorified them in and with him, their raised and exalted head and forerunner.”
Our next “ye are” statement is found in Ephesians 2:19: “Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but {ye are} fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.”
Albert Barnes writes, “Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners - You are reckoned with the people of God. You are entitled to their privileges, and are not to be regarded as outcasts and aliens. The meaning is, that they belonged to the same community - the same family - as the people of God. The word rendered “strangers” means “foreigners in state,” as opposed to citizens.
The word rendered “foreigners” means “guests in a private family,” as opposed to the members of the family. “Rosenmuller.” Strangers and such as proposed to reside for a short time in Athens, were permitted to reside in the city, and to pursue their business undisturbed, but they could perform no public duty;
they had no voice in the public deliberations, and they had no part in the management of the state. They could only look on as spectators, without mingling in the scenes of state, or interfering in any way in the affairs of the government.
They were bound humbly to submit to all the enactments of the citizens, and observe all the laws and usages of the republic. It was not even allowed them to transact any business in their own name, but they were bound to choose from among the citizens one to whose care they committed themselves as a patron, and whose duty it was to guard them against all injustice and wrong Potter’s Greek Ant. i. 55. Proselytes, who united themselves to the Jews, were also called in the Jewish writings, “strangers.”
All foreigners were regarded as “strangers,” and Jews only were supposed to have near access to God. But now, says the apostle, this distinction is taken away, and the believing pagan, as well as the Jew, has the right of citizenship in the New Jerusalem, and one, as well as another, is a member of the family of God... The meaning here is, that they had not come to sojourn merely as guests or foreigners, but were a part of the family itself, and entitled to all the privileges and hopes which others had.”
Adam Clarke adds, “Ye are no more strangers - In this chapter the Church of God is compared to a city, which, has a variety of privileges, rights, etc., founded on regular charters and grants. The Gentiles, having believed in Christ, are all incorporated with the believing Jews in this holy city. Formerly, when any of them came to Jerusalem, being ξενοι, strangers, they had no kind of rights whatever; nor could they, as mere heathens, settle among them.
Again, if any of them, convinced of the errors of the Gentiles, acknowledged the God of Israel, but did not receive circumcision, he might dwell in the land, but he had no right to the blessings of the covenant; such might be called sojourners - persons who have no property in the land, and may only rent a house for the time being.
Fellow citizens with the saints - Called to the enjoyment of equal privileges with the Jews themselves, who, by profession, were a holy people; who were bound to be holy, and therefore are often called saints, or holy persons, when both their hearts and conduct were far from being right in the sight of God. But the saints spoken of here are the converted or Christianized Jews.
Of the household of God - The house of God is the temple; the temple was a type of the Christian Church; this is now become God’s house; all genuine believers are considered as being 'domestics' of this house, the children and servants of God Almighty, having all equal rights, privileges, and advantages; as all, through one Spirit, by the sacred head of the family, had equal access to God, and each might receive as much grace and as much glory as his soul could possibly contain.”
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “Barabbas, Part 16”
This Discussion was originally presented “live” on July 27th, 2022.
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This concludes this evening's Discussion, “Barabbas, Part 16.”
This Discussion was originally presented “live” on July 27th, 2022