Breakthrough Light

[00:00:00] In Jesus Christ. We thank you for the forgiveness of our sins. We thank you for the resurrection that has begun in our souls and will be made complete in our bodies. We thank you Lord, for all the work that you are doing in us here and now, and for that which you have promised to come according to the immeasurable riches of Your mercy and Your grace. We ask that you would reveal these things even further to us now, that you would impress them on our hearts, that you would plant seeds in us that would spring forth into more fruit of the righteousness of the Holy Spirit. We ask that you would bless these things to us and that you would illumine our hearts and minds according to the Gospel of Christ and Your power in it. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. [00:00:49] Let's hear God's word now from two. Corinthians, chapter four. [00:00:54] Please remain standing if you're able. And will you turn to God's word as I continue to read and preach through this letter of Paul to the church at Corinth two, corinthians four, verses three through six. [00:01:19] And even if our Gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. [00:01:26] In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus'sake. For God who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Amen. Please be seated. [00:02:22] So, as we've considered in previous sermons on these passages in two Corinthians, Paul, the Apostle Paul and his preaching, his ministry are somewhat under attack. It's being doubted, various aspects of what he's doing and who he is are being made to be uncertain in the minds of the Corinthians who knew him well through people who do not mean well. [00:02:51] And Paul admits here in this particular passage that there are people who don't see and understand the Gospel, that there are times in which it would seem to be ineffective. [00:03:08] And he tells us why. And I want to focus on that with you this morning. What is it that he says here? He says it is veiled to those who are perishing. And he explains why in verse four. [00:03:23] In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, and he has a reason to keep them from seeing the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. [00:03:40] Let's begin by thinking about who the God of this world refers to. Some people do take it to refer to God himself, but most commentators expositors think it refers to Satan for a few reasons. [00:03:58] One is that Satan is called in the Scriptures a ruler and a prince of this world. One john 519 says, we know that we are from God and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. The whole world lies in the power of the evil one. You find similar expressions about the prince or ruler power of the world in John 1231 and in John 1430. [00:04:25] In the passage we just read in Ephesians chapter two. He is called the the devil is called the prince of the power of the air. [00:04:34] And one last reason is that this aim that he has here on this aim of blinding us to the light of God, to the light of God in the glory of Christ, on the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, and in this last phrase in particular who is the image of God? This has been the aim of Satan from the very beginning when he came as a serpent into the garden and sought to break apart the bonds between those who had been made in the image of God and God himself to keep them from seeing the light of the Gospel. The glory of Christ is similar to what he sought to do at the beginning. [00:05:19] Now, in the beginning there was no Gospel of Christ because there was no sin responding to that gospel. But he certainly was seeking to keep them from the glory of the Lord and his anointed one. [00:05:34] He sought to break apart the bonds between Adam and Eve and God and to keep man from entering into glory, entering into life, entering into communion and instead to plunge us into curse and death and sin and misery. [00:05:55] And that's what happened when Satan came into the garden using lies. He deceived man and man believed his lies and as a result were separated from God, separated from his glory, from fellowship, from communion. Before that happened, we read that God walked with man in the garden. There was joy and fellowship and communion between Adam and Eve, joy and fellowship and communion. Things were well and things were right. But when sin came into the world through the lies and deception of the evil one, this was all broken, all separated. [00:06:36] And what that means is that unbelief and this is key unbelief, whether total in a person or partial in a person is in connection with the work of Satan. [00:06:52] Satan works. The Bible says to keep us in the dark. This is one of his aims. He keeps us in the dark in a moral sense, right? In darkness and evil and sin in an intellectual sense, a sense of ignorance, of confusion, of deception. [00:07:13] He aims to keep us in the dark. [00:07:16] And he does this through influence in the external world and he does this through influence in the internal world of our hearts. [00:07:27] Consider a couple of verses. Two Corinthians eleven three says I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. [00:07:43] You see the connection between Satan and what I'm calling sort of the inner world or the heart or the mind that's inside of us, our spiritual selves. Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning and she was led astray. And Paul is concerned that in a similar way, the evil one, the serpent, the liar, would somehow lead the Corinthian Church astray from their heart, their sincere and pure devotion to Christ. He has influence, in other words, on our inner lives, on our interior worlds. And that has an effect then, on the exterior world, the external things that we see, the actions that come out of our hearts, right both as we act and as others act toward us. [00:08:34] So as an example of this, consider Acts 53 and the example of Ananias. [00:08:42] Ananias had lied about his wealth and about how much he was giving to God. And Peter says to him in Acts five three Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? [00:09:05] You see the connection then between Satan, who filled his heart and then out of that heart that was filled by Satan. Ananias then lied. He committed this action against God, against the Holy Spirit, in this very external way. It wasn't just an internal thing, it was an external thing. What was it he kept for himself? Some of the money received from some land that he had sold? [00:09:37] That's not getting into all of that particular situation. You can go read about that in Acts chapter five. But I want you to just notice the connection between these things, the influence of Satan in the interior and external world, in our interior world and the external world in which we all live. And that connection is, of course, between the internal and the external is obvious because the things that happen in our hearts flow into actions which affect us and other people. [00:10:11] Like we see with Ananias, there's another way in which we see the work of Satan in keeping us in the darkness, in his attempts to keep us in darkness, moral, intellectual and otherwise. And that's in his seeking to keep Christ the Messiah from coming in the first place into the world. [00:10:34] You remember that after the Garden of Eden there was a promise, a blessing, a gospel promise that the Lord would cause one to be born of the image of God, born of man, who would crush the head of the serpent, the one who had lied and caused all these problems in the Garden. One would come to crush on the head of the serpent. Well, guess who wanted not to have his head crushed? Guess who wanted not to be defeated? By God in all of his righteousness, well, the evil one. And so, throughout history, Satan sought to keep the Messiah from being born in all kinds of ways. [00:11:20] I've been preaching in the evenings through Esther, one of these moments in which the entire Jewish people were about to be destroyed. Guess who was behind that? There were external factors, of course, Ahasuerus, and others. There were all kinds of things going on, haman most directly. But in all of that there is one who is behind it. [00:11:46] Demonic powers that are seeking to break apart the bonds between the Lord and his anointed one, the Christ and his people in him. [00:11:56] And then we see. When Jesus was born again, there was an effort to destroy him through the work of Herod. Remember killing all of those baby boys throughout the land with much crying and anguish going up before the Lord. [00:12:14] This happens over and over again. And ultimately it climaxes, we might say, in the cross, in which people from their various hearts of selfish ambition, of evil, of striving after loving the things of this world, take the God who made the world and put him on a cross and sought to put him to death. [00:12:40] If Satan couldn't prevent him from being brought into the world, maybe he could kill him while he was here. And I'm leaving out so many other things, the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness anyway, on and on and on. [00:12:54] This is pictured for us in a prophetic form, in a form of signs and stories. In Revelation twelve, I'd like to read these four verses. First four verses for you, as these events and this history is pictured to John in this vision that he has, the apostle John. [00:13:16] Here's how God describes all of these things. [00:13:20] In Revelation twelve, verses one through four, we read this and a great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And another sign appeared in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns. And on his head were seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child, he might devour it. [00:14:01] She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. [00:14:09] But her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God in which she is to be nourished for 1260 days. [00:14:24] There's a lot there in that passage which we'll unpack at some point in the future. [00:14:29] But for now you see the core image here that is in connection with our passage, right? You've all seen, maybe not everybody, but many of you have perhaps seen scenes of women giving birth in the hospitals. And there's the midwife and the doctor, right, ready to catch the baby. [00:14:49] In our case, we had one of our children literally caught almost falling, but caught by a midwife. But here the image is not of a caring person, a doctor, someone to take hold and bring the child to safely. Here are the images of the great Evil One, a dragon, this mighty dragon, this serpent creature waiting not to catch the child and deliver unto safety, but to devour him. [00:15:17] This one who he is afraid of, this one who is to rule the nations with a rod of iron to take away the power of the dragon, to take away the power of the Evil One. The power of we might call the God of this world. [00:15:35] But he's unsuccessful. [00:15:37] He is unsuccessful because he is he the child, her child was caught up to God and his throne. [00:15:46] And the woman which represents God's people flees into the wilderness. Not a place of exile and curse, but a place that has been prepared by God where she will be nourished and protected for a time, a time and half a time until the Lord comes again, which we'll get to in a little bit. [00:16:11] But I want to return to our point that unbelief, the unbelief that remains in believers, the unbelief that defines unbelievers is not there because of some kind of cool, rational, modern vibe, a feeling, an intuition, a doubt that ought to be encouraged and fostered. No unbelief is connected with the work of Satan, that great enemy of all of mankind, whom we should avoid at all costs. [00:16:54] Satan is a liar. Satan is a murderer. And he does not aim for your good, as we've seen in the way that he fills people's hearts and minds with lies. [00:17:12] There's another way in which he exercises influence over us. Hebrews, or I say a specific way that he exercises influence over us that Hebrews two talks about. Hebrews Two tells us that the devil has the power over death. And in particular, he uses that power, he uses the fear of death to enslave us. [00:17:37] This is really helpful to understand, if you can understand it. He uses the fear of death to enslave us. [00:17:48] How does that work? [00:17:51] We do everything that when we fear death, what happens is we do everything and we can do in this life to avoid it. And we cling to the things of this world we cling to the things of this life because we don't want death either hoping to forestall it, hoping to avoid it or hoping to at least enjoy this life, right? Which is the opposite of death. [00:18:19] What happens when we fear death is that this world and its glory, this world and the world's glory become our chief end and our reason for existing, because we can't have that. So we must have this. What else do we have, right? [00:18:37] When we fear death, then this life is all that matters. And we enter into a kind of slavery, a frenzied life of pushing and shoving, of clawing, of grasping to get the things that we need, the things of this world, a strong body, a good family, a safe and prosperous job, all the things necessary for life, higher status, greatest, greater pleasures, more health. [00:19:13] But what happens when we can't obtain these things? [00:19:18] What happens when we can obtain them, but in a way that doesn't really fill us with the happiness we want from them? [00:19:26] We either push harder or we despair. [00:19:31] Here's a typical cycle. Day one, you push and strive to get these things, to get life, more of life. Day two, you fail for some reason, right? Usually a combination of interior things that are going on, ways that you're messed up and have problems, or things that in the world that block you and create obstacles from getting the things you want. Day three, you try to make yourself feel better by letting yourself go and giving up to sinful passions. Day four, you feel the consequences of your pain and the shame of what you've done. So day five, you try harder and you try again, pushing and shoving to get the things that you want, and around and around and around we go. [00:20:18] That's called slavery. You're in bondage to something that is evil, that holds you, and that you can't get out of. [00:20:28] That's what happens when we fear death and we cling to the things of this life to save us? [00:20:37] This is slavery under Satan and the way it ends, the way slavery is broken by God taking away the fear of death. [00:20:48] God takes away the fear of death. [00:20:53] How does he do that? Well, as Hebrews Two tells us, he comes as a man. Jesus, the Son of God, comes as a man. He comes in flesh and blood and becomes our representative. Okay? Jesus is our representative. He's like this hero that goes before us, representing us to defeat the enemy. [00:21:18] He's like David in David and Goliath. He goes representing Israel, representing God's people, representing the Church, against this great monster who's seeking to destroy the people of God. [00:21:33] And he slays the dragon. [00:21:36] He puts Goliath down, he defeats the enemy, and he does that by putting to death, death itself. [00:21:46] He takes away the fear of death by destroying death, by taking the power of death and giving to us something beyond this life, something beyond what's temporary and fleeting, something that is called eternal. [00:22:03] Eternal life. [00:22:06] Jesus comes into the world to give us eternal life. John 316 says, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. So, yes, Satan tried to separate us from God's glory. He tried to separate us from eternal communion with him in the garden. He tried to do it again and again and again, but he keeps failing. And ultimately he has totally lost the war. Because of what Jesus has done and because of the total victory of Jesus, we don't have to fear death or the devil anymore. And that's why James says in James Four seven, submit yourselves then to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you. [00:23:02] In Revelation Twelve Nine, going back to John's vision, we read that the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to earth and his angels were thrown down with him. [00:23:20] As he is thrown down out of his place of power, he is made furious and he tries to destroy the people of God. He pursues that woman in the wilderness. He seeks to destroy God's people. And in some ways he seems to succeed. As with the death of Christ, there are deaths of the people of God, martyrs who shed their blood and suffer under the persecution of the evil one for the name of Christ. [00:23:49] But the Bible tells us through all that God preserves us, that Jesus reigns from his throne, protecting, keeping, and bringing more and more and more and more people out of that slavery. [00:24:05] Until one day when all the sheep are brought in and the Lord comes in glory, and he tells us in Revelation 20 that the devil will be cast into the lake of fire and sulfur to be tormented day and night, forever and ever. [00:24:21] Praise God. [00:24:23] No more molesting us, no more murdering us, no more lying to us, deceiving us, tricking us, no more causing us to lose heart and fall into temptation. [00:24:37] All of these things call us to trust in the greater glory of Christ and the Gospel, Paul. Despite the fact that not everybody is coming to faith, paul is not giving up on the gospel, and neither should we. [00:24:57] When we proclaim Jesus Christ to our doubting, selves and to others, what happens? [00:25:06] What does God do? Two Corinthians Four tells us that the light shines in the darkness. [00:25:14] The light shines in the darkness. Freedom comes in the midst of slavery. The truth is revealed in a cloud of lies. And we come to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, who saves us. And as we bred before in two, Corinthians transforms us by this glorious gospel, by this communion with God, by this vision of God that we see in Jesus. Instead of being turned in on ourselves, instead of living in a cloud of lies, instead of looking at this world like it's all that there is. [00:25:58] Our eyes are opened, we are unblinded. And we are able to see things as they are and see a hope that will never be put to shame. [00:26:13] If you do not know Christ, if you feel in yourself any degree of blindness or doubt or unbelief, consider this passage an invitation from God himself to believe and to be saved. [00:26:34] Be encouraged to read and to search the Scriptures. Jesus says in John 539 that the Scriptures bear witness about him, and by them we have eternal life. [00:26:49] If you have doubts, if you have concerns, if you feel in yourself blindness and unbelief, search the Scriptures. [00:26:59] Find the light and let Psalm 43 three be your prayer. [00:27:06] It says, Send out your light and truth. Let them lead me. Let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling. [00:27:18] I'll read it again. Let this be your prayer. [00:27:22] Send out your light and truth. Let them lead me. Let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling. [00:27:32] And then, my friends, simply follow the light. [00:27:36] Give yourself to the Lord and let him lead you to green pastures and still waters and paths of righteousness. [00:27:45] He will restore your soul. Let's pray. [00:27:56] Our Father, thank you for letting us see you. [00:28:02] Thank you for not keeping us away from your presence forever. [00:28:09] Despite the mighty work of Satan, despite the sin which we so freely chose, despite the curse that we so greatly deserve, you have entered into this world, taken on human flesh and blood, become like us and have saved us from our sin, have rescued us out of slavery, have delivered a conquering blow to death. [00:28:41] And one day we'll cast Satan, the great evil, one liar and deceiver, into a lake of fire. [00:28:53] Lord, we look forward to that day. We look forward to a day of perfect peace and safety, a day when every tear will be wiped from our eyes. [00:29:06] Until then, Lord, keep us following the light. [00:29:10] Keep us focused on Christ, who is the image of God, who is the One, that glorious One, who came in such a humble way to lift us up to glory. Help us to keep our eyes fixed on Him and to follow him every day of our lives. Proclaiming not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as the Lord, to ourselves and to the whole world. [00:29:42] We do not deserve these things. Like the apostle Paul, we were bound in our sins, bound in our wretchedness. [00:29:51] But you have shown in our hearts, you have enlightened our minds. You have given us faith that we might believe and be saved. We praise you for this. We thank you for this. And we ask for your continuing work among us and in this world. It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen.