The Sign of His Reach

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From Genesis on to Malachi, as I’ve said so many times, there are pictures that point to what Jesus was coming to do. And even more than pictures, there are outright prophecies where these men of God, as God led them, they laid it out in detail, in great detail, how Jesus was going to be born, where He was going to be born, who He was going to be born to, what He was going to do, how He was going to live, how He would die, all of these things about the Messiah, and all of these things are fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ. And we’ve seen all of these things. And all of this is well and good as far as it goes, but it’s not much good for us if he came just to be the Jewish Messiah.

Another thing that I thought about on Black Friday was some of the sales that they have that they do different things. You know, they’ll advertise. We’ve got a, I don’t know, 65-inch.

That’s probably bigger than they make. But these huge televisions for five cents or whatever, they’ll have them in the paper. And, no, I don’t know where you can get a 65-inch television for five cents.

I’m exaggerating. But they’ll have these incredible deals in the paper. And you’ll look at the little fine print, and they say minimum eight in store.

So they’ll have, they say, that means we have at least eight. And I read that as we have eight. We don’t promise any more than eight.

They’ll have eight of them. So for eight people, they’re getting an incredible deal, and everybody else is just out of luck. You’ll go into some stores, and you’ll draw something on the way in.

You’ll pick out an envelope on the way in, and each envelope will have a card, and it tells how much you get off of your purchase at the store that day. And some people, I mean, get 75% off. Most people get 5%, which is better than nothing, but, man, they’re not getting the great deal that these people are getting.

And so for them, these Black Friday deals, that’s part of why I wouldn’t fight with people anyway, but I just don’t even try because I would be the one getting the 5%, and it’s just not worth it to fight with people over 5%. But some people are going out and getting incredible deals, and some people are not getting incredible deals, and they’re spending money they don’t have, and it’s just no good for them that these incredible sales are going on if they’re not benefiting from it. And we’ve done all this talking about the Messiah and the fact that the Jews were promised a Messiah.

For 4,000 years, God promised a Messiah to the Jewish people that they were looking for, and a small number of them saw the Messiah for who He was when He came. And the majority missed Him and still miss Him today. But what benefit is it to us if we don’t have the ticket, if He’s not the Messiah for us, if He’s not the Messiah for everybody?

What’s the benefit of going and standing in line for three hours for the sale if you don’t have the ticket saying that that sale applies to you? It’s of no benefit. And I’m not trying to compare Jesus too much to a Black Friday sale because He’s so much better than that.

But if He’s not the Messiah for us, what does all of this matter? He was promised to be the Jewish Messiah, or the Jews were promised a Messiah. But Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 2, and I’m not going to go into great detail in this, but I want to look at the whole chapter so you can see what he’s telling the believers at Ephesus here.

And you hath He quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins. People that were dead and trespassed in sins, he made them alive again. That’s what quickened means.

Wherein in time past you walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience, among whom also we had our conversation in times past, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. And were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. So he says, God has made you alive, who were once dead in trespasses and sins.

And he goes on to say, we were all this way. We were all dead in sin. We were all living according to the lust of the flesh.

We were all doing these things. He calls us children of disobedience and children of wrath. But God, some of the greatest phrases in the Bible start with the words, but God.

But God, who is rich in mercy for His great love, wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ. By grace are ye saved. So it said, God in His great mercy and the love that He loved us with, when we were dead in sins, He’s quickened us together with Christ. He’s raised us from the dead with Christ. And by grace are we saved. It’s not something we deserve.

It’s something He gives as a free gift because of how good He is, not how good we are. And hath raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. So he says, we’ve been raised with Christ, and we will sit with him in heavenly places.

And he says in one of the passages of Scripture that I think everybody should memorize, Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. That sums up the gospel right there. We were saved because of God’s goodness through Jesus Christ, that God loved us enough to have mercy on us even when we didn’t deserve it, and Christ died for us, and it has nothing to do with our goodness or our ability to earn it. Sums it up right there.

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. And He says on the basis of this salvation, then comes a requirement for good works. Not to be saved.

Remember he says in verses 8 and 9, it’s not because of your goodness, it’s because of God’s grace, but because you’ve been saved, now go and do good works. Not to get saved, but because you are saved. Wherefore, remember that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by that which is called circumcision in the flesh, made by hands, that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

So he tells the believers at Ephesus, and the majority of them would have been Greeks. Ephesus was located in what’s now the coast of Turkey, but there along the Aegean Sea where when the Greeks had taken over with Alexander the Great and all that several hundred years before, there would have been a big Greek population in that area now. And so most of these are not Jewish Christians, but they’re Greeks.

And they were looked down on by the Jews throughout history because they were uncircumcised. They were unclean before God. And he says, remember that in time past, you were called uncircumcised by the Jews, that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

He says, unlike the Jews, you had no connection to God. You were aliens from the commonwealth. It doesn’t mean like space aliens.

It means in the other sense that we talk about somebody who’s not from here, that they were foreigners to God’s covenant. They were not part of it. When I say they, that includes most of us because most of us are Gentiles unless anybody’s got Jewish ancestry that we don’t know about.

And because they were foreigners from God’s covenant, from the covenants of promise, it says they had no hope and they were without God in the world. What a tragic way to live. What a tragic state of life to be without God and without hope in this world.

He says, but now, verse 13, But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. You who were far off are now made near. That’s what the word nigh means. We’re made near by the blood of Christ. You were brought into this.

He is our peace who hath made both one and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances, for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace, and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby. Now what that means is, as I said, the Jews look down on the Gentiles. Not to give them a bad reputation, the Gentiles also look down on the Jews, and still do.

But the Gentiles were not part of God’s covenant. The Gentiles were strangers to God, while the Jews were God’s chosen people, part of God’s family, this commonwealth of Israel. And so there was always hatred between the two.

There was always jealousy between the two. There was always conflict between the two. Even when they weren’t technically at war, there was always a rivalry there where each side looked at the other as they’re just not quite as good as we are.

And Paul says here that as Christians, and he says in other places too, I think of Galatians, that there’s now no difference because Jesus Christ has abolished the enmity, the enmity meaning we’re enemies. He’s abolished that. He’s broken down the middle wall of partition between the Jews and the Gentiles that He might reconcile both unto God.

Even the Jews who were God’s chosen people needed to be reconciled to God because they had sinned as well. And the Gentiles needed to be reconciled to God because they were completely without God. And it wasn’t that He said, okay, I’m going to reconcile you, and I’m going to reconcile you, Paul says that Jesus Christ took the wall of separation between the two, broke it down, and as one, reconciled us to God.

That there’s now not that division anymore. And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.

Gentiles, you who looked at the Jews like they were less than human, by the same Spirit we have access to the Father. To the same Father. Jews who looked at the Gentiles as they were unworthy of your respect, they were unclean, uncivilized, far from God.

We now have access by the same Spirit to the same Father. Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God. He writes to the Greek Christians, these Gentiles, no more are you strangers and foreigners from God, but your fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God, and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto a holy temple in the Lord, in whom ye are also builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

Paul lays out here for these Gentile Christians and the Jews among them, and at other times he tells predominantly Jewish Christians the same thing, that through Jesus Christ, the wall of separation between the two has been torn apart. That the Jews expected God would just always love them and they would be his favorite and the Gentiles were just out of luck. The Gentiles had no relationship to God and it was something they really couldn’t attain unless they became Jews.

And so there was this separation between the two. And Paul said Jesus Christ brought to an end the separation between the Jews and the Gentiles, reconciled both to God and made them together a building, a temple for the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit by which they both had access to the same Father. Now, why does that matter to us?

What does that have to do with what we’re talking about? What it has to do with what we’re talking about is here, Paul has written to these people at Ephesus and said, not only has Jesus come to be the Messiah of the Jews, but it applies to you as well. You know, it was a long time, it was relatively a long time, before anybody went and began to preach the gospel to the Gentiles.

It took longer than probably it should have. And even Peter, Peter was the first one, as far as I recall, that actually went out and made an effort to reach Gentiles. But when the Jews complained that, hey, he’s trying to give the gospel to the Gentiles as well, Peter backed off.

And Paul actually had to go and confront Peter and say, no, this is wrong. The gospel’s for everybody. And you know, some people have accused, I didn’t know this until recently reading and studying, that some people have accused the apostle Paul of changing Christianity, of changing Jesus’ message.

From what I can see in the scriptures, though Paul didn’t change Jesus’ message, Paul explained it to a whole new group of people that Jesus expected it to be explained to in the first place. Jesus said in Matthew 28, Go into all the world, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. He didn’t say, Go to the Jews in all nations.

He said, Teach all nations. And so some have theorized, though, that Paul changed it and made Christianity more of a Gentile religion. No, Christianity was never supposed to be exclusively a Jewish religion.

And if it sounds like I’m picking on the Jews, I’m not, because the point of this message is that there is not a difference between us and them. And there are even some who call themselves Christians today who still hold a grudge against the Jews for things that happened in the Bible and things that have happened since in history. And the point is, if we’re Christians, there’s not room for that wall of separation between Jew and Gentile.

There’s not room for that wall of separation between ethnic groups. In Galatians 3. 28, Paul says, For 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.

So those who say Christianity does not represent the faith in the true Messiah because he was a Jewish Messiah, they’re incorrect. They’re wrong. Paul didn’t make this up and say, hey, Jesus died and I want to go win a bunch of converts and the Jews aren’t listening, so I’m going to make it into a Gentile religion.

The way it was supposed to be all along was that the gospel was for everybody. Isaiah, 700 years before the fact, before Jesus was born, before Paul went and ministered to the Gentiles, before the Gentiles began responding to the Jewish Messiah in a way that the Jews never did, it was foretold that he was to be their Messiah as well. that this isn’t something new that happened in Ephesians chapter 2.

This was not some new doctrine. This was based on what Isaiah said was supposed to happen. Turn with me to Isaiah chapter 49.

Isaiah chapter 49, starting in verse 5, and we’ll look through verse 7. It says, And now saith the Lord that formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob again to him, though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord, and my God shall be my strength. And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldst be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel.

I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth. Thus saith the Lord, verse 7, The Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth, to a servant of rulers, kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship. because of the Lord that is faithful and the Holy One of Israel, and He shall choose thee.

This has been recognized as a prophecy of the Messiah. Not only by Christians. The Jews recognized that this would be the Messiah He’s talking about.

That He would raise somebody up who was formed from the womb to be the servant of God. That sounds so funny. Jesus was the Son of God, and here we’re talking about Him like a servant.

Jesus came to do His Father’s bidding. Jesus, being God in the flesh and the Son of God, was still a servant of the Father. And He was formed from the womb to be a servant, to bring Jacob again to God.

It says in verse 6, I want to read that again. And He said, It is a light thing that thou shouldst be My servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel. I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be My salvation unto the end of the earth.

That sums up what the Messiah’s work was, what the Messiah’s message was. And if we say, well, Jesus couldn’t have been the Messiah because all of these Gentile things came from it, from His message, that the Jews didn’t respond and the Messiah was supposed to be a Jewish Messiah, Isaiah said differently. Isaiah said that the Messiah was there to reach Israel, was there to reach the Gentiles.

And folks, there’s been nobody else in history who has come and done the other things we’ve talked about. the other prophecies that we’ve talked about, who has fulfilled those perfectly and has come to reach and has reached not only Jews, but the Gentiles as well. If Jesus didn’t come and reach the Gentiles, folks, thank God He did, because none of us would be sitting here today.

None of us would be saved this morning. I’m thankful that the reach of the Messiah was not just to the Jews, but was to the Gentiles as well. And that’s what we’re talking about this morning and just the time we have left is the sign of His reach.

That the Messiah was never intended just to be the Redeemer of the Jews, but was to be the Redeemer of all mankind. And it’s said so very clearly here in verse 6 of Isaiah chapter 49. First thing that we need to understand about the Messiah is that the Messiah would bring restoration to the Israelites.

The Messiah came to bring restoration to the Israelites. What does that mean? The Israelites were part of God’s covenant from the beginning.

God looked on them and chose them as His chosen people. And He said, you’ll walk with me and I’ll be your God and you’ll be my people. And there was always a special relationship that existed.

And yet, generation after generation of the Jewish people gave in to their sinful nature, as did the Gentiles, and walked away from God. The Jews constantly broke their covenants with God. I don’t mean that to sound anti-Semitic.

That’s there in the Jewish Old Testament. The book of Judges. Folks, it was a vicious cycle in the book of Judges that they would walk with God at the beginning and then they would grow complacent.

And then they would wander away from God and say, I’m going to do my own thing. We hear that so much in our society today, people wanting to do their own thing, follow their own way. They decided, hey, we’re going to do our own thing.

And they rejected God’s laws and God’s principles. And so God, trying to get their attention back and also punish them as a loving parent would punish and discipline them and try to get their attention back and get them back on the right path, would send in another country to oppress them so that they would realize their need for God. And after a while, their stubbornness would be broken.

And they’d turn to God. They’d cry out to God and say, Rescue us. And God would raise up a judge who would come and rescue them, deliver them.

And they would serve God out of gratitude and out of joy for years until they would grow complacent again and the cycle would begin and repeat itself over and over and over. And it’s shown so clearly and so repetitively through the book of Judges, but it’s not just in the book of Judges, it’s throughout the whole Bible. And so God had this covenant with the Israelites that He would be their God, that He would love them, that He would deliver them, and yet they were never holding up their end of the bargain.

Yet God was faithful through all of this. And He tells the Messiah in verse 6 here that He would raise up the tribes of Jacob and restore the preserved of Israel. Those that were left in this day of Israel, those that were still listening to God, He was to restore them to fellowship with God.

There were some in this day who still had an inclination to follow God. They weren’t perfect, and that’s why they needed a Savior. They still had sinned, but they had an inclination to follow God.

I’m not talking about the entire Jewish nation, because there were some that were just bound and determined that they were not going to accept Christ as the Messiah. That they had just chosen this is not what we’re going to do. Most of the Pharisees and Sadducees, it’s like they had made a pact not to.

I don’t see any evidence that they did, but it’s like they all agreed together. We’re not going to do this. Because they were more concerned with their traditions and their religious system than actually listening to what God said and God’s Word.

And many of the people were the same way. The ones who cried, crucify Him. They had no evidence that He had done anything wrong, and yet they wanted Him destroyed.

But folks, there was always a remnant of people among the Jewish nation who were listening to God, whose hearts were sensitive to the work of the Holy Spirit. I can’t remember the names right now offhand, but I remember the two people that when they talk about taking Jesus into the temple on the eighth day to be dedicated to the Lord, there were people there who were advanced in age and who had prayed to God that God would not take them until they lived to see His salvation come. And they recognized when they even saw Jesus brought in there as an eight-day-old baby, they recognized this was the Messiah of God.

They were paying attention. All this time, they were paying attention to what God’s Word said because they wanted to hear from God. They knew about their need for God and they wanted desperately to hear from Him.

Folks, there was always a remnant left of people in the Jewish nation that were listening to God. And the Messiah was told those who were preserved, those who remained, would be restored to God. The Messiah came to bring restoration to the Israelites.

But it didn’t stop there. Thank God for us. It didn’t stop there because he says also in verse 6, I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles.

He didn’t come to restore the Gentiles because the Gentiles had no covenant with God at all. The Gentiles were the people who from the beginning of creation ever since the family trees had split after Adam and Eve and before Abraham. The Gentiles were the ones that what they knew of God from their forefathers, they ignored.

They disobeyed. And the Gentiles, folks, our ancestors were a bunch of savages. When he describes the way the Gentiles lived, it’s awful.

Some of the Gentile nations that lived around the Jews would even sacrifice their own children in these bloody, fiery ceremonies, trying to placate their gods. Folks, it was just awful. You think about how far somebody’s life gets off track when they wander away from God.

You think about some of the things that we get involved in or that people we know get involved in when they wander away from God. Then you take an entire civilization and let them wander ever farther from God over the period of 4,000 years and see what kind of depravity you end up with. The Gentiles didn’t need restoration.

The Gentiles needed light because the Gentiles lived in complete darkness, in complete spiritual darkness. The Gentiles had no knowledge or connection to God. They had what the Bible calls the light of creation, the light of conscience, but they had long since ignored those things and let them fall by the wayside.

And the Gentiles needed somebody who was not only going to show them how to be saved, but they needed someone who was there to show them that they were lost in the first place. And if you’ll remember, I talked last week about how we focus so much on the wrath of God I’m sorry, on the love of God that we almost never talk about the wrath of God. A hundred years ago, it may have been the opposite problem, that we focus too much on the wrath of God and not enough on the love.

But today, we’ve got a problem where we focus so much on the love that we don’t even talk about God’s wrath. And folks, we’ve got a generation of people that we can’t figure out why we tell them the gospel. We tell them how to get saved, and they don’t get saved.

We can’t figure out why we’ve got a generation of people who don’t get saved when we share the gospel. it’s because they don’t know that they’re lost, that there’s something to be saved from. And the Gentiles living in complete and utter darkness, that’s all they knew.

And they needed light not only to show them the way to salvation, but to show them they were lost in the first place. So He didn’t just send the Messiah to restore Israel, but He sent the Messiah to be a light to the Gentiles. Folks, without Christ, each and every one of us is in spiritual darkness.

And we need to understand that we’re in darkness. And we can’t see. .

. If all we ever knew from the time we were born was darkness, We wouldn’t know that there was anything wrong with that. Wouldn’t know that there was something else.

But when we see the light, we know the contrast. And they got to see the light for the first time with Jesus Christ, to know that they were lost and needed to be saved from something. So the Messiah came to bring light to the Gentiles, to point out their lost condition before God. Finally, in verse 6, not only does he say that he came to restore the preserved of Israel, and I will give thee also for a light unto the Gentiles.

He says these things, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth. He came to restore the Israelites to their knowledge of God. He came to be a light to the Gentiles to point out their need for God and their lost condition.

And in so doing, he came to be God’s salvation, not to the Jews, not to the Gentiles, but to the entire world. He said, you will be my salvation. This is God speaking to the Messiah, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.

Folks, that it wouldn’t matter whether we were Jewish or whether we were Gentiles, whether we’d come from a good upstanding family or we’d come from a bunch of savages running around in the backwoods, engaged in all kinds of debauchery, that everybody has the same need for God’s forgiveness and the same opportunity to receive it through Jesus Christ, through the Messiah. The Messiah came not just to be the Jewish Messiah, but to be God’s salvation to the end of the earth, to the end of the earth. If you’re sitting there this morning and you’re thinking, Well, he’s talking about being saved and all these things and thinking, I don’t need that.

I’m good enough on my own. Folks, don’t kid yourselves. Do not kid yourself this morning.

If you’re thinking you don’t need God’s forgiveness because you’re good enough, I’m sorry if it offends you, but you’re wrong. Some of the most righteous people from man’s perspective were the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. And when it came to understanding what God was really saying and their need for forgiveness, they didn’t get it.

But they were lost. Folks, the Jewish people as a nation were very, very, for the most part at this time, very meticulous in keeping up the ordinances and the laws and following the appearance of godliness. They looked like good people on the outside, and yet they needed a Messiah, somebody who was going to come and purchase their forgiveness from God. So if you’re sitting there and thinking, I don’t need forgiveness, I don’t need salvation, because I’m good, I’m all right with God, don’t kid yourself.

The Bible says, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All. It includes me.

It includes you. It includes Billy Graham, the best person you’ve ever known. It includes everybody.

If you’re sitting there this morning and thinking that won’t work for me, I’ve been too bad. Folks, read sometime the list of things when Paul especially talks about before we’re saved and talks about the condition that especially some of these Gentile Christians had been in, the wickedness and the perversion in their lives and the fact that all of that had changed. Folks, they needed a Savior.

The Gentiles, once it was pointed out to them, these Gentile Christians, they knew they needed a Savior. And folks, fortunately, they found one who was powerful enough to save them even when they thought they were beyond salvation. And I’m here to tell you today, just as there’s no way you can be good enough for God, there’s no way you can be too bad that you can’t be forgiven by Jesus Christ. Because He came to be a light unto the Gentiles, these wicked, depraved individuals.

Every one of us has sinned against a holy, just, and righteous God. And a God who cannot allow sin to go unpunished, cannot ignore it, can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, because if we asked Him to pretend it doesn’t exist, we asked Him to ignore it, to let it go, we’re asking Him to stop being God. I gave you the example last week of the judge, and I want to repeat it again, that if there was a judge here in town who was holding court and was supposed to be trying people for their crimes, and people were brought in before him, and the evidence was they had them dead to rights, that these people had been out raping and murdering and stealing cars and beating old ladies and burning houses down and all of these things.

And each of these cases, they had the evidence, they had them dead to rights. These people knew they were guilty. Everybody knew they were guilty.

And the judge just wanted to be nice and let everything go. And criminal after criminal after criminal came in before this judge, and he just pounded his gavel and dismissed the case and let them go and said, be nice to each other, do better next time. Folks, we would look at him as the most wicked and corrupt judge in the entire state, and the public outcry would insist that he be turned out of office.

Folks, if we expect justice from our judges, from our human judges, why can we not expect justice from the living God? And folks, he is just, and he is righteous, and he is holy, and he can’t let sin go. We’ve broken his laws, each and every one of us, and it’s hateful and it’s repulsive to him and it

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