Good to worship with you guys. Please open your Bibles to Ecclesiastes chapter 3.
Thank you, Gary.
We have been in the book of Ecclesiastes for the last four weeks or so, five weeks.
And now we're in chapter 3, verse 16, going to chapter 4, verse 3.
Let me pray for the reading and preaching of God's Word.
Heavenly Father,
truly there is no one righteous, no not one.
And we stand here before your holy presence
because of the merit of Jesus' righteousness.
So now, Lord, graciously speak to us as you always do from your Word.
Meet us here in the presence of your Holy Spirit.
Lord,
conform us to your Word.
Teach us how to live
with the wisdom of humility.
Surrender to your will.
So we might navigate this unjust world
without losing hope,
with great faith and love.
In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.
If you are able,
please stand and join me as I read this passage.
We stand to honor God's Word
that God has given us.
I'll read from chapter 3, verse 16,
to chapter 4, verse 3.
Moreover,
I said in my heart,
God will judge the righteous and the wicked,
for there is a time for every matter
and for every work.
I said in my heart,
with regard to the children of man,
that God is testing them,
that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.
For what happens to the children of man
and what happens to the beasts is the same.
As one dies, so dies the other.
They all have the same breath.
And man has no advantage over the beasts,
for all is vanity.
All go to one place.
All are from the dust,
and to dust all return.
Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward
and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth.
So I saw that there is nothing better than that
a man should rejoice in his work,
for that is his lot,
who can bring him to see what will be after him.
Again, I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun,
and behold the tears of the oppressed,
and they had no one to comfort them.
On the side of their oppressors there was power,
and there was no one to comfort them.
And I thought,
the dead who are already dead,
more fortunate than the living who are still alive,
but better than both is he who has not yet been
and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.
This is God's holy and authoritative word.
You may be seated.
A pastor friend of mine passed away last month,
and he was in his 70s.
He died of chronic lung disease.
And he used to say this often.
He used to say,
all you have to do to suffer is live long enough.
I think he is right about that.
Suffering in this sinful, broken world is inevitable.
You don't have to do anything special to experience suffering.
You just have to live long enough.
And one significant cause of suffering throughout the world is injustice.
Many people throughout the world have valiantly fought to eliminate evil
and to eliminate injustice in this world,
but to no avail, as you can see in the world around us.
Some prominent examples of people who have sought to form a utopia,
a utopian society, come to mind.
One example is John Humphrey Noyes.
I don't know if you guys have heard of him,
who founded the Oneida community in 1848 in Oneida, New York.
The community was founded on principles of communalism, free love, and equality.
Sounds good on the surface.
But the commune shared everything.
They shared all their income.
They shared all their possessions.
They even shared their partners.
Noyes instituted so-called complex marriages
where every man in the commune was considered to be married to every woman in the commune.
So if you think all this talk nowadays is about open marriages and polyamory is new,
no, it's not new.
There's nothing new under the sun.
The members of this commune called themselves the perfectionists
and believed that their practices would shape a man-made Eden.
But the experiment crumbled when Noyes was charged with statutory rape
and other sex crimes and fled to Canada.
Honestly, that result doesn't surprise me at all.
The communes stopped enforcing their idea of complex marriages after that.
No matter how hard we try to create a perfectly fair society,
a truly just society,
even the U.S. is that experiment,
there is no way we can hermetically seal ourselves from injustice
which always finds a way to warm itself in.
That was actually a point of the book
which title, the word utopia comes from Thomas More's book,
Utopia, written in 1516.
It describes a fictional island of utopia,
which is an ideal society.
And the word utopia is a combination of two Greek words,
utopos, which literally means no place,
because there's no such place as utopia.
Only some of us in this room have been victims of grave injustices,
but probably all of us have experienced some kind of injustice.
Maybe you were misunderstood or misrepresented.
Maybe you were discriminated against.
Maybe you were manipulated by a significant other
or backstabbed by a friend.
Maybe you were abused by those who had power and authority over you.
Given the stubborn persistence of injustice in the world,
how do we find the faith and the courage
to keep fighting for justice?
How do we make sense of so much senseless injustice in this world?
Ecclesiastes 3, 16, 4 to 3 teaches us the answer to that question.
In this unjust world, this is the main point of this passage,
where life is breath and death is gain,
we should rejoice in our work and wait for God's time of judgment.
We're going to talk about that in two parts.
First, we'll talk about how to live is breath.
And secondly, we'll talk about how to die is gain.
In chapter 3, verse 16, it says this,
Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice,
even there was wickedness.
And in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness.
The repetition of this and the parallel structure of these lines
convey the preacher's horror and indignation.
In the very place where justice ought to be residing,
there in that place is wickedness.
In the very place that should be characterized by righteousness,
there is instead wickedness.
Imagine the horror of seeing in the temple of God an idol.
That's the kind of horror that you're supposed to feel,
the shameless blasphemy of it all.
The word justice here is also translated judgment in other places.
It's in the very place where right judgment should be rendered
and where the right verdict should be given,
where the right judgment should be executed,
there is wickedness.
Take Thomas Maloney, for example,
who served as judge in Illinois for 14 years.
One of the most corrupt judges in U.S. history.
He fixed three murder trials after taking bribes.
Or think of Timothy Evans,
a British man who was executed by hanging on March 9, 1950,
after being falsely accused
and wrongly convicted of the murder of his own daughter.
During his trial, the man insisted,
it wasn't me, it's my downstairs neighbor.
But the downstairs neighbor was a chief witness,
the star witness for the prosecution.
He was wrongly convicted and he was hanged
and then later it was discovered
that it was the downstairs neighbor who was the murderer.
In fact, he had killed seven other women in the same house.
He was a serial killer.
Imagine the pain,
not only of losing your daughter to murder,
and then being accused of killing her yourself.
You guys have probably read the book
or seen the movie, Just Mercy,
where a black man named Walter McMillan
was accused of murder and sentenced to death in 1988
despite the fact that he had an ironclad alibi
confirmed by dozens of witnesses,
including a police officer.
No motive for the murder whatsoever
and despite the fact that there was no physical evidence
and no corroborating circumstances,
he was still sentenced to death.
Thankfully, this story has a happy ending,
but still he was sentenced to death
because of the false testimony of one man,
a convicted criminal himself,
in exchange for a lesser sentence for him.
He testified against falsely Walter McMillan.
In the place of justice,
even there was wickedness.
However, this is no cause for despair
because it says in verse 17,
I said in my heart,
God will judge the righteous and the wicked
for there is a time for every matter
and for every work.
Remember I mentioned the word justice
is the same word that means judgment.
It's the noun form of the verb judge here in verse 17.
So there's a contrast between the two verses.
Humans in the world do not judge righteously,
but God does.
Under the sun,
we find wickedness in the place of justice,
but God judges both the righteous and the wicked
for there is a time for every matter
and for every work.
Now that should ring a bell
if you've been with us
through this Ecclesiastes series
because that phrase,
there is a time for every matter,
is a repetition of chapter three, verse one.
It said,
for everything there is a season
and a time for every matter under heaven.
So verse 17 is linking back to that poem
about time in verses two to eight
that we looked at last week.
And the main lesson of that poem,
if you missed it, was this.
Yes, God has made everything beautiful in its time.
Yes, God has put eternity in man's heart,
but God has made it so that we cannot find out
what he has done from the beginning to the end.
That's what it says in the Bible.
The times that verses one to eight speak of
are not our times, but God's times.
Eternity and knowing what is going on in this world
in the light of eternity
is God's unique prerogative and purview, not ours.
That's why it said in chapter three, verse 14,
I perceived that whatever God does endures forever.
Nothing can be added to it,
nor anything taken from it.
God has done it so that people fear before him.
God has instilled in the heart of every human being
this inkling of eternity,
a longing for eternity,
but because we are finite and temporal creatures
that inhabit fleeting time,
we can't quiet grasp hold of it.
We can't quiet make sense of it.
We can't understand why everything happens in its season.
We can't understand why there is injustice in the world.
God, you are holy.
You are just.
You are righteous.
So why is there so much evil and wickedness
and injustice in this world that you've created?
Yes, of course, there are good, logical,
and biblical answers that we can give to that question.
But even the best apologists
cannot fully answer that question
because God has hidden it from us
because it stretches beyond our scope.
God has made it so that we cannot find out
what he has done from the beginning to the end.
As finite creatures,
we are unable to connect the dots
in this great chain of events in our lives
stretching to eternity.
We're like rats in an impossible maze.
The maze is too vast,
and our knowledge and our memory,
our experience,
too limited
so that we cannot connect
from the beginning to the end.
God has ordained the world to be like this
in order to instill the fear of God,
it says in verse 14 of chapter 3,
so that we might know how small we are
and know how big he is.
In the same way,
a parent might say to a child,
you can't quite understand this yet,
but when you're a little older,
I'll explain it to you.
My kids are probably tired of hearing that from me.
So when the preacher says in verse 17,
I said in my heart,
God will judge the righteous and the wicked,
for there is a time for every matter
and for every work,
he's assuring us that the ultimate time of judgment
and for justice
is God's time and not ours.
We want justice now.
We clamor for justice now.
Look at the George Floyd protests in 2020.
Millions of people demanded justice and got it.
Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison
for second-degree murder.
But many other times,
we don't see justice under the sun.
Take the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China.
The government,
the communist government,
the students protested against it.
A million people gathered in Tiananmen Square
to protest the Chinese government.
But it did not end with the overthrow
or the reform of the communist government.
It ended with a military crackdown.
300,000 troops sent into that historic square.
Killed hundreds of civilians.
No human judge presided over that atrocity to condemn it.
In the place of justice,
even there was wickedness.
But verse 17 reminds us,
God will judge the righteous and the wicked,
for there is a time for every matter and for every work.
Justice comes in God's time, not ours.
As Martin Luther King Jr. once said,
the arc of the moral universe is long,
but it tends toward justice.
That arc of the moral universe is in fact so long
that we cannot see it from the beginning to the end.
We can't quite make sense of it,
but we can trust that it bends
toward God's ultimate justice.
The preacher continues his musings in verse 18.
I said in my heart with regard to the children of man
that God is testing them
that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.
Notice that both verse 17 and verse 18
begin with this phrase.
I said in my heart.
The preacher's sayings in Ecclesiastes
often begin with a different phrase.
I saw.
You see that in chapter three, verse 16,
verse 22, chapter four, verse one.
I saw, I saw, I saw.
These are the observations,
his observations of the world and the way it works.
But the phrase I said in my heart
signals to us that these are his reflections
based on those observations.
And so these are key verses
for understanding what this passage means.
Verse 18 is connected to verse 17.
By reserving his judgment and justice
to his eternal timeframe
to which man has no access,
God is testing them
that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.
In other words,
the preacher is saying the same thing
that he said earlier in verse 14.
I perceive that whatever God does endures forever.
Nothing can be added to it
nor anything taken from it.
God has done it so that people fear before him.
Once again, God has made his judgments inscrutable to us
in order to put us in our place,
to humble us,
to make us revere him
and to put our hope in him
and depend on him.
And how does God remind us that we are but beasts?
Look at verses 19 to 21.
For what happens to the children of man
and what happens to the beasts is the same.
As one dies, so dies the other.
They all have the same breath.
And man has no advantage over the beasts
for all is vanity.
All go to one place.
All are from the dust
and to dust all return.
Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward
and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth.
It seems that there was in the days of the preacher
this popular idea, speculation,
that the spirit of man goes upward when he dies
but that the spirit of the beasts
goes down into the earth.
It's a predictably prideful and man-centered idea.
Of course, our spirits cannot go to the same place
as these lowly beasts is the logic.
But the preacher pokes holes into that fancy notion.
He says,
We all have the same breath.
And man has no advantage over the beasts
for all is vanity.
All go to one place.
All are from the dust
and to dust all return.
Now, please don't hear what I'm not saying.
I'm not saying that human beings are equal to animals.
I remember getting into trouble
with one of my friends in college.
I was peeling a banana to eat it.
And as I was peeling the banana,
she told me,
You're opening the banana the wrong way.
And I said,
I didn't know there was a wrong way to open a banana.
I said,
What do you mean it's the wrong way?
And then she says,
Well, you're supposed to open it
the way monkeys open it.
This way.
And I,
you know,
being the,
back in those days,
I know I was a lot more prideful
and contrarian than now.
And I thought,
you know,
I'm going to ask you a philosophical question.
I said,
Why should a man
copy an animal?
Why should I learn
how to peel my banana from a monkey?
And then she got mad at me.
She said,
You're just an animal like all of them.
You're just a beast.
You're just like,
And then she got into evolution
and we had this long conversation.
And,
so that's not what I'm saying.
I'm not saying that humans are the same as animals.
In one sense,
she was right.
We are no different from the animals,
as the preacher says here.
But in another sense,
we're all also very different from the animals,
aren't we?
In Genesis 1.27,
it says,
So God created man in his own image.
In the image of God,
he created him.
Male and female,
he created them.
Human beings are the only creatures
that God creates in his own image.
In order that we might represent him
to the rest of creation
as rulers over creation
and so that we might resemble him
to be like him as his sons and daughters.
Only the human beings are created
in the image of God.
However,
with that said,
there is still one important sense
in which we are no different from the beasts.
We all die.
After forming the man
from the dust of the ground,
it says in Genesis 2.7,
that God breathed into the nostrils
the breath of life.
His nostrils,
the breath of life.
And the man became a living creature.
That's how we become living creatures.
The breath of God.
The spirit of God.
And this applies not only to mankind,
but also to the animals.
It says in Genesis 1.30,
and to every beast of the earth,
and to every bird of the heavens,
and to everything that creeps on the earth,
everything that has the breath of life,
I have given every green plant for food.
So then,
only mankind is created in God's image,
but all creatures have the breath of life.
We depend on it for life.
And the Bible teaches consistently
that when creatures die,
our bodies return to the dust,
but our spirits return to the God who gave it.
We see that in Ecclesiastes 12.7,
Job 34.14.15,
Psalm 104.29-30,
among other places.
And that's the point
that the preacher is making here.
In this sense,
we are all but beasts.
We have no advantage over the beasts.
This is what we call
the creator-creature distinction.
God is not quantitatively different from us.
He is,
but he's not merely quantitatively different from us.
He's not just a superlative form,
a bigger and stronger
and wiser and kinder version of man.
He is qualitatively different from us.
He is,
as one theologian,
Karl Barth calls it,
a holy other.
He is different from us.
No matter how advanced
or perfected
or wise we become,
we will never be God.
That's the creator
and creature distinction.
God is as different from us
as the potter
is to the clay.
God is as different from us
as the author of the book is
from the character
that's in the book.
God transcends time.
We are confined to time.
God is sovereign
and we are subjects.
God is the infinite creator
and we are finite creatures.
And this is why
we cannot grasp hold of eternity.
This is why
we can't make sense
of the injustices in life.
And this is why
we stand in awe of God
in worship
because we see that he is big
and then we are small
and we can't quite see
all that he is up to.
What then?
Do we simply despair
of justice in this life?
Answer is in verse 22.
So I saw that there is nothing better
than that a man should rejoice
in his work
for that is his lot.
Who can bring him
to see what will be after him?
Notice the same word work
which we saw in verse 17
where it said
God will judge the righteous
and the wicked
for there is a time
for every matter
and for every work.
Ultimate judgment
is God's work
which will occur
in his own perfect time.
But there is still work
for us to do here on earth
which is our lot
it says here.
Yes, there is no ultimate justice
here on earth
but we are still required
by the Lord
in Micah 6.8
to do justice
and to love kindness
and to walk humbly
with our God.
Yes, there is no ultimate justice
under the sun
but we are still supposed
to long for that justice
and pray for that justice
as the psalmist does
in Psalm 82
verses 3 to 4.
Give justice to the weak
and the fatherless.
Maintain the right
of the afflicted
and the destitute.
Rescue the weak
and the needy.
Deliver them
from the hand
of the wicked.
But when we learn
the wisdom of Ecclesiastes
it radically alters
the way we go about
doing justice
in our work.
it enables us
to rejoice
in our work.
If we think of
doing justice
if we think of justice
as something
that is within our grasp
and something
that is ultimately
up to us
as human beings
then we're going to
try to make it happen
in our time.
We're not going to
wait for
or hope for
God's justice.
We're going to
become impatient.
We're going to become
triumphalistic.
We're going to
become sinfully angry
and we're going to
take things
into our own hands
and then that's going
to create new
miscarriages
of justice.
And then the pendulum
swings back and forth
back and forth
back and forth.
And then when we're
faced with setbacks
which is inevitable
in this world
we will be plunged
into cynicism
and despair.
that's what
pursuing justice
apart from God
looks like.
But if we recognize
that God's ultimate
justice is coming
then we can rejoice
in our various
works of justice.
Is our work
to bring about
justice
futile?
Yes.
In an ultimate sense
yes it is
in this life
under the sun.
Will we ever
eradicate injustice
from this earth?
No we will not.
But it is still
the right thing
to do.
We are obeying God
and we are honoring God
and we are imitating
God who is just
and who is righteous
and that's why
there's pleasure
and joy
to be had there.
Knowing that the arc
of the moral universe
and the arc
of human history
is bending
toward God's
ultimate justice.
We can do justice
not out of desperation
or frustration
or anger
but out of faith
and hope
and love.
Then in chapter 4
verses 1 to 3
the preacher returns
to the theme
of oppression
and injustice.
He says,
again I saw
all the oppressions
that are done
under the sun
and behold
the tears
of the oppressed
and they had no one
to comfort them.
On the side
of their oppressors
there was power
and there was no one
to comfort them
and I thought
the dead
who are already dead
more fortunate
than the living
who are still alive.
But better than both
is he who has not yet been
and has not seen
the evil deeds
that are done
under the sun.
The phrase
no one
to comfort them
is a common feature
of lamentation
and mourning
in the Bible.
It occurs repeatedly
for example
in the book
of Lamentations.
It is meant
to evoke great pity.
At least
most of us
have shoulders
to cry on
in times of sorrow.
But there are
some people
some oppressed
people in the world
who have no one
to comfort them.
How pathetic
is the person
who has no one
to comfort him
or her?
Have you beheld
these tears
of the oppressed?
Maybe you think
the preacher
is being a little bit
overly dramatic.
Oh, it's still
definitely better
to be alive
than to be dead.
Let's consider
some of these
examples.
First one
is a fictional one.
I recently watched
one of my favorite shows
Les Miserables.
So it has been
on my mind.
In the show
the details
are sparse
but if you look
at the book
which is the original source
Victor Hugo's novel
Les Miserables
Fantine
is a young
naive girl
working class girl
with bright future
ahead of her
but then she's
impregnated
by a rich student
who then
abandons her
leaving her
to raise her daughter
Cosette
by herself.
Needing child care
in order to work
and provide for her
she entrusts
the care of Cosette
to the thenardiers
who are innkeepers
not knowing
that they actually
abused her daughter
treat her as a slave
and then lied to her
in their letters
to extort her
of more money.
Fantine sinks
further and further
into the moral
mire of society
in order to provide
for her daughter.
She's unjustly
fired from her work
by a meddlesome
supervisor
forcing her
to work at home
which earns her
a meager sum
barely enough
to support her daughter
let alone herself
which leads to her
overworking
and then which leads
to her becoming sick
with a fever
and a cough.
The thenardiers
lie to her
saying that they need
10 francs
to buy Cosette
a woolen skirt
and then
so Fantine
having no other way
cuts off her
long beautiful locks
of hair
sells them
saying to herself
my child
is no longer cold
I have clothed her
with my hair
not realizing
that Cosette
will never
get to wear
those woolen
coats
or the woolen skirt.
Desperate
Fantine
takes on a lover
who uses her
beats her
and abandons her
again.
Then comes
another letter
from the thenardiers
who demand
40 francs
to buy medicine
for Cosette
claiming that
she has fallen ill
in order to make
the money
Fantine has her
two front teeth
removed and sold
and her woes
still don't end
and in order
to keep up
with the thenardiers
ever increasing
demands
she eventually
prostitutes herself
sacrificing her
dignity and self-worth
and hitting rock bottom
and in that role
she is still
again harassed
by a man
and when she retaliates
she's the one
who is arrested.
With John Valjean's
interpretation
she's freed
but still in the end
Fantine dies
of tuberculosis
not knowing
whether Cosette
is going to be
taken care of
after she dies.
and then her body
is unceremoniously
tossed into
a public grave.
Can anyone
tell Fantine
it was better
for her
to live
than to die?
And I thought
the dead
who are already dead
more fortunate
than the living
who are still
alive.
Yes,
she's a fictional
character
but things like this
happen to real people
in real life.
Why is power
so often
found on the side
of the oppressors?
There's some people
in the world
who have known
such deep suffering
and injustice
that they think
death more fortunate
than life.
Take the example
of Job
from the Bible.
Job 3,
3-5
he says this
Let the day
perish
on which I was born
and the night
that said
a man is conceived
let that day
be darkness.
May God above
not seek it
nor light shine
upon it
let gloom
and deep
darkness claim it
let clouds
dwell upon it
let the blackness
of the day
terrify it.
How bleak
does your life
have to be
for a man
to say something
like that?
Jeremiah 20
14-17
Cursed be the day
on which I was born
the day when my mother
bore me
let it not be blessed
cursed be the man
who brought the news
to my father
a son is born to you
making him very glad
let that man
be like the cities
that the Lord
overthrew without pity
let him hear a cry
in the morning
and an alarm at noon
because he did not
kill me in the womb
so my mother
would have been my grave
and her womb
forever great
why did I come out
from the womb
to see toil
and sorrow
and spend my days
in shame?
Most of us
are desperate
to live another day
longer
because we haven't
experienced
such suffering
is anyone
in our society
more weak
and vulnerable
more than children?
Earlier this year
a 16 month old
toddler
named Jalen
died in Ohio
because her mom
left her in the crib
and took a 10 day
beach vacation
with her boyfriend
in that jail cell
of a crib
she was dehydrated
she died of dehydration
and starvation
she whimpered
and howled
through the night
but nobody heard her cry
there was no one
to comfort her
she was found
emaciated
with sunken eyes
with fecal matter
smeared all over her
dry lips
and between her fingertips
physical pain
is one thing
but can you imagine
the psychological
and emotional pain
of a child
a toddler
at the peak
of separation anxiety
being abandoned
like that?
According to
the Guttmacher Institute
66 million children
have been aborted
in the United States
since 1973
Roe v. Wade
66 million
and we like
to pretend
that we are
civilized
that we're better
than those people
who lived
in the ancient world
behold
the tears
of the oppressed
and they had
no one
to comfort them
on the side
of their oppressors
there was power
and there was
no one
to comfort them
who comforts
those unborn children
who are aborted
by their own parents
who are meant
to care for them
who wipes away
their tears
did you know
that infants
in the womb
babies in the womb
cry?
I learned this
this week
they don't have air
in their lungs
so they can't make
sound
but apparently
they mimic
everything
that a born infant
does
when they are
subjected to
certain stimuli
they cry
in the womb
but even
they are better
off than Jalen
because they
were never born
and I thought
the dead
who are already
dead
more fortunate
than the living
who are still alive
but better
than both
is he
who has not
yet been
and has not
seen the evil
deeds
that are done
under the sun
as the English
philosopher
Thomas Hobbes
famously said
life is nasty
brutish
and short
this is the condition
of this fallen world
ravaged by sin
we work in a cursed ground
that produces thorns
and thistles
reducing all of our labor
to futility
Genesis 3.18 says
as Romans 8.20 says
the creation was subjected
to futility
so that it presently
groaning together
in the pains
of childbirth
that word futility
in Romans 8.20
is the Greek equivalent
of the Hebrew word
hevo
the same word
that's translated
vanity
of vanities
all is vanity
in Ecclesiastes
chapter 1
verse 2
and the new
obituaries
that get written
every single day
remind us
that we still live
under this futility
all of us
who live under the sun
experience this futility
whether you're a Christian
or not
and in this kind
of unjust world
life is breath
and death is gain
but is there an end
to this?
is there any hope
for us?
by God's gracious
intervention
this seemingly
endless cycle
of life and death
will come to a decisive end
when God brings
the new heaven
and a new earth
when God redeems
our mortal bodies
in the resurrection life
and that's when
this cycle
will finally end
and that's why
for us
those who have repented
of their sins
and trusted in Jesus
for salvation
to live is Christ
and to die is gain
in a far deeper
and greater sense
in this world
where in the place
of justice
there is wickedness
and in the place
of righteousness
there is wickedness
that is true
but there was one time
and only one time
in human history
all of human history
when in the place
of wickedness
there was justice
and in the place
of wickedness
there was righteousness
and that's on the cross
of Jesus Christ
for the Greeks
and the Romans
crucifixion
was torture
and execution
wrapped in one
reserved for the lowliest
of slaves
and criminals
the most shameful
kind of death
you can die
and that's where
Jesus
the son of God
the holy one
the righteous one
the perfect one
the unblemished
lamb of God
died on that cross
in the place
of wickedness
there was righteousness
hanging there
there was justice
hanging there
why?
he did not deserve
to be there
I deserve
to be there
he's the only man
who did not deserve
to be
on that cross
every single one
of us
deserve to be there
that's what Romans 3 says
no
there's no one
righteous
not even one
because if you're
honest with yourself
and you examine
your own heart
in all of us
there is this
heart of darkness
there is this
thing that the Bible
calls pride
of self glory
and self love
and self righteousness
and self centeredness
which is at the root
of every evil
and every injustice
in this world
and so
in every single one
of us
resides in seed form
the very thing
that grew into
Hitler and Nazi Germany
that's us
we deserve
to be on the cross
but Jesus
died
on the cross
he took
our place
to pay
the penalty
for our sin
because God
loves us
and he wanted
to save us
that's the one
place
in history
where righteousness
took the place
of wickedness
and that's why
we read
in our assurance
of pardon today
in 2 Corinthians 5
21
for our sake
God made him
Jesus
to be sin
who knew
no sin
so that in him
we might become
the righteousness
of God
so now
if you renounce
yourself
you repent
of your sins
you turn
from your sins
you renounce
yourself
and you
pledge allegiance
to Jesus Christ
as your Lord
and Savior
then here
in our hearts
in the place
of wickedness
now there is
justice
and here
upon our lives
where there is
wickedness
in the place
of wickedness
now we are clothed
with the righteousness
of Christ
that's what we were
singing about today
our sins
they are many
his mercy
is more
praise the Lord
his mercy
is more
stronger than
darkness
new
every morn
our sins
they are many
his mercy
is more
that's mercy
only people
who have received
mercy
can rejoice
in the work
of doing justice
in this unjust world
so