The Man in between

Listen Online:

Transcript:

1 Timothy chapter 2. We’re going to look at verses 3 through 7 tonight, but just for some context, we’ll read the verses around it. I’ve preached recently, I think, well, fairly recently, within the last year and a half, I know it was here, I’ve preached on the beginning of 1 Timothy chapter 2 and talking about praying for our rulers.

That’s not what we’re going to talk about tonight, but it is at the beginning of the chapter. Although, incidentally, I still stand behind that we’re to pray for our rulers, the ones we like and the ones we don’t like. 1 Timothy 2, verse 1 says, I exhort therefore that first of all supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings, and for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.

For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior. And he does tell us to pray for our leaders, not just for their sake, although there’s some of that as well, but for our sake, so that we can live in peace and quiet, a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. And it does go along somewhat with what we’re going to talk about tonight with the rest of the passage.

I was telling somebody just this last week who was facing a personal conflict in life, I was telling them one of my favorite verses of the Bible, and it hadn’t always been this way that it was one of my favorites, but one of my favorite verses in the Bible is, I believe, Romans 12, 18 that says, as much as lieth within you, live peaceably with all men. As much as the situation depends on you and your reaction to it, try, try your hardest to live at peace with other people. We need to live at peace with other people.

It’s not much of a Christian testimony if our lives and our relationships are always in an uproar. And I won’t stand here and tell you that I’m perfect, that I have no conflicts in my life. I get annoyed with people just as much as the rest of you.

I drive, I sit in traffic and have to be reminded of what it means to live peaceably and Christian response. Christian can’t figure out why I’m always listening to preaching when I’m in the car because that’s when I most need it. But we all have our conflicts.

We all have troublesome relationships. But it’s not the fact that we have conflict. What matters is how we handle it.

And do we try to keep things constantly stirred up or do we try to live at peace as much as it lies within us? I know it’s not always possible. But as much as it lies within us, we’re to live at peace with one another.

And he tells us to pray for our leaders so that we can live quiet and peaceable lives. And what we’re going to talk about tonight deals with making peace, but not us making peace, deals with Christ being the one who made peace. He says in verse 3, For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

And on the surface of it, this verse sounds like it teaches what we call universalism, that everybody will be saved. The Bible doesn’t teach that. The Bible and this verse doesn’t teach that.

It’s unfortunate because God does will every man to be saved. But as we’ve talked about, God has a sovereign will. God has a perfect will.

God has a permissive will. God, His perfect will for us is that every man be saved. That’s what God desires.

That’s what God’s best is for all mankind. He’s offered the gospel freely. But God, unfortunately, created mankind with this pesky free will that some people will look in the Bible and say, no, there’s no free will in there.

Folks, there is a free will. We were created with it. God didn’t say, go and sin in the garden.

And so He created us with this free will, and God knows full well that not everybody is going to take advantage of the free offer of salvation. And so this verse is not saying He will make everyone to be saved, but if you read into the grammar in the Greek, what He’s saying is He does will it. It is God’s will that everybody be saved.

And so what this verse tells us, it’s acceptable in the sight of God our Savior who does will all men to be saved, wants everybody to live in salvation, in peace, and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, who gave himself a ransom for all to be testified in due time, whereunto I am ordained a preacher and an apostle. I speak the truth in Christ and lie not, a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity.

What we’re going to talk about tonight, really, when we get down to the main subject of this message, is Christ as the mediator. If you’re anything like me, this is one of these verses that we keep in our holster for when we deal, especially with our Catholic friends. That this verse, I think, and I don’t see it as a proof text, that it’s just something we take out of context to support what we want to say.

All kinds of churches have their little proof text. They’re things that they can take out of context and make the verse say whatever they want it to say to prove their position. I believe the idea that we don’t have to go through human priests and human mediators is found throughout all of the New Testament.

You read the book of Hebrews and you get the idea real fast that Christ is the high priest. He is our priest. There’s no need to go through other people. There’s no need to confess our sins to a priest. Now, the Bible does tell us to confess our faults one to another, but that’s a different story. The idea of confession to another person so that then they can take that to God, They can be your mediator, your go-between.

It’s just not biblical. But if you’re like me, the extent of looking at this verse has always been just to keep that in the holster for when we talk to Catholics and anybody else that might go through a priest and say, no, see, the Bible says right there there’s one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ. And it’s true. We don’t have to go through a priest who goes through Mary, who then goes to Christ, who goes to the Father. The Bible says there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ. But to dig into that verse and to think about what it really means that Jesus Christ is the mediator is so important that we shouldn’t just look at that verse for the purposes of arguing with people.

Again, it’s an important verse. It does prove a very important point, but there’s more to it than just, what can we call it, a soundbite or a cliche that we throw out. There’s so much depth to what it means for Christ to be our mediator, and that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight.

We know what mediators are. We see mediation all the time. One of my earliest memories is of Bill Clinton standing in front of the White House, and I don’t know how he did it, but a big three-way handshake with Yasser Arafat and Itzhak Rabin.

Anybody else remember that? The leader of the PLO and the Prime Minister of Israel? their little handshake when they did the accords and they signed a peace treaty that probably, looking back on it, wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

But nevertheless, he came in and sort of mediated this settlement between them that settled things for a few minutes at least. I remember also being young, a little older than that, but still a kid, and seeing Clinton there again on the, I think this was at an Air Force base this time, may have been at the White House, but remember seeing him standing there with Izetbegovic and Milosevic, the guys who were involved in the Bosnian War, and Clinton came in and mediated a settlement between them. And realizing that sometimes in our world, unfortunately, even though God tells us to try our best to live at peace with one another, there are some people that just can’t get along. There are some times that the gap is way too big to be bridged by any normal person.

And so, you know, the Serbs and the Bosnians hated each other so much, Bill Clinton had to come in and be a go-between because everybody seemed to like him. The Jews and the Arabs hated each other so much, Bill Clinton had to come in. And he’s not the only one, but through the older part of my childhood, he was president, so he’s the one I remember.

We all know what a mediator does because we’ve seen it. And yet we gloss over this verse not thinking about what it really means that Christ is our mediator. no, I’m not telling you that there’s a direct link between Bill Clinton and Jesus Christ. Don’t take that from this message.

But as far as the mediator, we all know what it means because we’ve all seen it. And we all know the kind of peace that we’re supposed to have in our lives. But again, we also know that sometimes it takes somebody getting in the middle.

I don’t always recommend it because despite what Bill Clinton made it look like, being a mediator is not always a glamorous job. I remember many times in junior high and high school, I would try to mediate between my friends. Most of my friends were girls, and that was a mistake to try to mediate, because you step in the middle of it and try to make peace, and then they get over being mad at each other and get mad at you.

Big mistake. I learned an important lesson early on in high school when I read, what was it, George Washington’s Farewell to the Troops, and he was talking about the wisdom of staying out of entangling foreign alliances. I thought, you know, I ought to try this in my life.

If it worked for Washington, it might work for me. And, you know, it’s pretty good advice. But sometimes somebody has to mediate.

Sometimes somebody has to get the two sides talking. It’s not always glamorous, though. Sometimes the mediator suffers.

Last night, as a matter of fact, my brother-in-law who was here this morning brought his dogs when he came to visit. My dog, my girl dog got aggressive with the other girl dogs and they kept fighting. We had to keep separating them.

And I got in between them and I got bitten really hard on my thigh, drew blood. Some of y’all saw me shifting around this morning. I wasn’t getting antsy listening to Brother Bill of.

It was hard to sit because of the dog bite. Sometimes mediating is not easy, as we see from the example of Christ. Sometimes it’s not glamorous. Sometimes it’s hard, dirty work that has to be done.

But sometimes there’s no other way to bridge the gap than for somebody to stand in the middle of it. And that’s exactly what Jesus Christ had to do for us. There was no way for mankind to bridge the gap between itself and God other than for God to send His Son as both God and man to bridge the gap for us.

And when it says He’s our mediator, and we just gloss over that, we forget the richness of this word for Him to be a mediator. We need to be reminded tonight of a few things that are involved with being a mediator because it applies not just in the world around us when somebody steps in and tries to make peace between two friends or even in a legal situation where they send people to mediators. And we see that on TV all the time.

I remember bursting somebody’s bubble telling them that people’s court and Judge Judy and all those weren’t real court. That those are, some of them may be real retired judges, but that’s just mediation. They’ve signed an agreement that they’ll abide by.

But people go to mediation all the time. All the time we see situations where somebody has to get in the middle and say we’re going to come to a fair and just settlement in this. And that’s exactly what Christ did for us.

But a mediator, folks, is only needed when there’s conflict. A mediator is only needed when there’s conflict. I’m not in conflict with my wife tonight, so I really don’t need any of you to run messages back and forth between us.

But you know what? When we do have conflict, sometimes we need a mediator. And I’ve told you all before, our mediator is text messaging.

I know it’s not a person, but it’s sort of a go-between because as those of you who are married, you know that when you have a difference of opinion, it can get heated, it can go from a small issue to a big issue just because you get defensive, you feed off of each other’s emotions, you say things without thinking. Text messaging, more difficult than talking, you have to think about what you’re saying. So that becomes our mediator and everything cools off.

But I don’t have a conflict with her right now, so I don’t need somebody to go between us. Brother James and I are not in conflict as far as I know, right? Okay.

So we don’t need Judy as a neutral third party to get between us and mediate the conflict because there’s not a conflict there. But what the world doesn’t seem to understand, and a lot of people in church pews don’t seem to understand, is that when the Bible says that Jesus Christ is the mediator between God and man, He was only needed as the mediator because there was a conflict. The world looks at God, and much of even the professing Christian world looks at God and says, we have no problem here.

Yeah, I might feel like he’s distant, but he’s just this grandfather figure. He just loves and accepts everything, and he overlooks everything I do. Folks, there is a conflict between God and man.

There’s been a conflict between God and man practically since the time man was created. I wrote a tract when we lived in Norman called The Longest War. Some of you have seen copies of it.

And the premise behind it is that there’s a war that’s been going on for 6,000 years between God and man. And it’s not that God is a tyrant, but mankind, you could look at it as we are servants of a loving and generous king, and yet in spite of the fact of him giving us everything that we need and taking care of us and being a good king, we got together and decided we wanted to be rebels and do it our own way, and so we declared war on the king. And we’ve committed all sorts of atrocities in the middle of this war.

Folks, mankind fired the first shots in the war with God. These are not my words. The book of James, the book of Romans, I believe, talk about this very thing.

Talk about mankind being enemies with God. James 4. 4 says, Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God.

Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. Pretty strong words. but to love, and he’s not talking loving the world like we talked about this morning with the missionaries and going out and loving the people of the world.

We’re talking about loving the world system, the sin that we’re all in. Loving the world, being part of that is to be God’s enemy. Romans 8, 7 says, Because the carnal mind is enmity with God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

And so the Bible uses this language that mankind and God are enemies. And that sounds so harsh and so strong to say, but it’s the truth. And it’s not because God did anything wrong.

Folks, He’s God. He can’t do anything wrong. But it’s because mankind rebelled against our just and generous King and said, we’re going to do it our own way.

And essentially, we fired. . .

If you want to look at it this way, we fired on Fort Sumter. Now, we’re the ones who fired the first shots. When Adam and Eve said, you know what?

We believe we’d like to have that fruit. Folks, they fired the first shots in the war. And ever since then, man and God have been on opposite sides.

There’s been a gulf of separation between God and man. Folks, the mediator is only needed when there’s conflict. And the world thinks, and we have allowed the world to think they can just treat God however they want, that they can do whatever they want, and that He will just have to accept them because He’s so wonderful, and they don’t realize that they’re at war with God and it’s a war that they’ve started and continued.

And I say they, but folks, we can point the fingers at ourselves as well because we’ve sinned just as much as the world outside. Folks, we, before coming to Christ, we were in conflict with God. And the world needs to know that.

I’m not saying we should walk around and tell everybody, God hates you, you’re God’s enemy, I don’t want us to become Westboro. But too many times we try to tell people the good news. If we tell them the good news at all, we try to start with the good news and say Jesus loves you and He died for you.

And folks, that’s all well and good. but if the world thinks, oh, that’s nice, he died for me, that was sweet of him. And they have no idea why he died for them.

They have no idea of the danger, the peril of hell that they were in, the separation between them and God. It’s a pretty meaningless gesture. What do you mean he died for me?

It’s all abstract until we give them the bad news first. The world has got to have the bad news first as distasteful as it may sound. And Brother James talked this morning at the beginning of his song about hoping that we never take the blood out of things. That we never.

. . people are offended by the cross, they’re offended by the blood, they’re offended by talk of repentance and judgment.

But folks, these things are imperative. They’re integral parts of the gospel. To start by telling people, you know what, you’re lost, you’re in sin.

If you don’t want to be too harsh, maybe saying, we are all born sinners. Even if you don’t want to point the finger. Folks, if we talk about all of us being born in sin and God’s inability, yes, there are some things God can’t do.

God cannot just overlook sin and pretend it didn’t happen. But you want to talk about God’s inability to just overlook and ignore our sin. Folks, we all know, as Brother Bill said this morning, before we got saved, before the gypsies that he was talking about got saved, we all know stealing is wrong.

We all know lying is wrong, murder is wrong. There are certain things of the law of God that are written on our hearts. and if we would talk to people about the holiness of God, and if we would talk to people about the justice and the righteousness of God and the fact that sin cannot be in His presence, people will very easily, I believe, if they’re willing, if their hearts are receptive, they will very easily put two and two together, connect the dots and realize, hey, I’m a sinner too.

And all these things they’re talking about, all these things that we’re talking about that affect us, the sin that separated us from God, in their mind, whether they’ll admit it or not, they’ll connect the dots and realize I’m a sinner too. Whether they, again, whether they say it out loud or not, they’ll realize it without us ever having to put them on the defensive by saying, you, you’ve done this. Let me list all the things that you’ve done.

Sorry for pointing at you, Ms. Edna. Just right there in my line of sight.

I’m not the kind of person either to look at somebody and say, let me tell you all the things you did wrong. But folks, I can very easily tell somebody what Christ did for me. Tell them about the sin in my own life.

You may not want to go into details with them. Tell them about the sin in my own life. That Christ had to save me from sin because I was born a sinner.

But people need to realize the bad news first. That we’re born in sin and that there is judgment coming on sin. And the judgment is sure. The judgment is not something that they’re going to enjoy or be able to easily deal with.

People think, I’ll be in hell with all my friends in the party. Folks, people need to realize the bad news first, that there is a conflict, there’s a separation between us and God. Christ didn’t just die for us in some abstract way.

Christ died for us because there was a penalty, there was a separation. And the world has got to hear the bad news first. And so we should tell people that Christ loved them and died for them. But before we can get people to realize, before we can get people to accept Christ as their Savior, we might try explaining to them why they need a Savior, is my point in this.

There is a conflict between God and man. That’s why a mediator was needed. Mediator is only needed when there’s a conflict.

This is sort of where it’s spelled out in an explicit way in the other verses that I’ve mentioned from James and Romans. It’s sort of alluded to in this passage where he talks about who will have all men to be saved and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. God wills that men will be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.

The fact that it says it as He wills it to happen, He wants it to happen, means it hasn’t happened yet. If all men were saved, if all men were in right standing before God, if all men had perfect understanding of God and His truth, it would say that. It would say who willed it to happen or who made it happen, but instead it says as though it’s on God’s list of things He wants to see happen.

Because we’re not all saved. We’re not born in right standing with God. The world is not by default in right standing with God.

By default, we’re lost. By default, we’re separated from Him in conflict with Him. And so a mediator is needed. So first of all tonight, a mediator is needed when there’s a conflict.

Second of all, a mediator is used to stand in the gap between two parties. The world, and again many professing Christians, would also be equally surprised to realize that not only is there a conflict between us and God, but we have no right to approach Him to fix it. We have no basis on which to go to Him and say, hey, let’s make this right.

We are not equal partners in all this. You know, if I say something stupid, and I have, and I will, men, you can probably identify with me in that. If I say something stupid to my wife, after a while, after she’s cooled down a little bit, I can go to her as an equal and say, you know, I was wrong.

Can we fix this? And by then she’s usually forgotten about it. What are you talking about?

So that works to my advantage. But I can go to her and say, I was wrong and I’m sorry. Can we fix this?

Can we work it out? But folks, we are not equals with God the way that I’m equal with my wife. the way that we’re equal with each other.

And the basis on which we can go to each other and approach each other as equals, we don’t have that with God. And yet a lot of the world, probably because the world likes to put itself in God’s position and worship itself, worship self, and worship other things like God, feels no qualms at all about saying, yeah, if there’s something to be made right, we’ll just deal with Him then. I hear that attitude all the time of, oh, He’ll let me in, we’ll be all right, God will let me into heaven.

Folks, we have no basis, no right on our own to go to God the Father and say, let’s work this out. Let’s come to some kind of arrangement, some kind of understanding. God is so holy and so just, and we are so sinful.

And I don’t tell you this to make you feel bad and say you’re just the most wicked group of people. When I say we’re sinful, I don’t mean we’re as bad as we possibly could be. I’m continually amazed.

You would think I would have learned by now, but I’m continually amazed at how bad people can be, only to find out later on there’s something worse going on. I’m not saying that people sitting in this room or even the people that we run across are as wicked or as evil as we could be. But when we get down to the character of our hearts, we’ve got sin there.

And on that basis, as created beings who’ve rebelled against Him and who’ve wallowed in the sin of the world, we have no right to approach God. much like the prodigal son, who had no right to go back to his father and ask to be taken back as a son. Think about that story.

He realized his father’s servants, the guys who fed his father’s livestock, he’s eating there out of a pig trough and realizes that the guys who take care of his father’s animals eat better than he does as his son. And he realized, he was right in that. We look at the story and say, See, the father accepted him back, and that’s true.

That was within the father’s power and right to do. But the son was right in the fact he had no right. He was correct in the fact he had no right to go back and ask his father, would you treat me as a son?

Would you restore me to my position? Would you act like none of this ever happened? He had absolutely no right to go back and expect that his father would just pretend like nothing ever happened.

We have no right to approach God on our own. A mediator was needed. And fortunately for us, God wanted this separation ended.

Mankind hadn’t really, for the most part, hasn’t cared whether the separation was ended. Mankind, for the most part, still rejects God on a daily basis. But God wanted the separation ended.

And God sent His Son to be the mediator. And because of Christ, because of His standing, folks, we now, the Bible talks about we have the right to go boldly before the throne of grace. It talks about having the spirit of adoption and being able to call out to Him, Abba, Father, which I shared with you a few weeks ago, that word Abba is just about the most intimate thing you could call a father.

It’s like when Benjamin looks at me and says, da-da. Don’t let just anybody call me that. It would severely creep me out if somebody on the street walked up to me and called me that.

But he’s my son and I let him call me that. I like it when he calls me that. Folks, we can call God Abba, Father.

We can call him by the most intimate of names, but we make a mistake if we think it’s anything to do with how good we are. It’s because Christ stood in the gap. Christ paid the penalty.

Christ made peace between us and God the Father. Where there’s this conflict and this separation, Romans chapter 5. I haven’t written it down, but I want to turn there real quick just to make sure I quote it to you correctly.

Romans chapter 5, verse 1, says, Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. The peace was made by Him. He had to be the one to come and stand in the gap between us. He was able to do that because He’s God.

And He, as God, has every right to approach God the Father. He’s equal with God. But He also, according to Philippians chapter 2, made Himself of no reputation.

He condescended to become like one of us where He could approach us as well. And as I shared with you when we talked about the book of John chapter 1 and Christ, the power and the authority and the holiness and the eternality and all these things, all these characteristics of God being squeezed down into a human being. I don’t pretend to even completely wrap my mind around it, but I believe it’s true because it’s what the Bible teaches.

And he was able to approach God and able to approach us as equals. And he’s the one and only person in all of history who was able to bridge the gap because he’s the only person who was able to meet both sides where they were. And that’s why he tells us, that’s why Paul wrote to Timothy in verse 5 that there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ. Timothy needed to be reminded, not that I think he forgot this, but needed to be reminded to teach the people he was dealing with because they served millions of gods.

That there is only one God, there is one true God, and a mediator was needed, and for that one true God, there was one mediator. There weren’t millions of gods and all these priests that would go between us. There’s one God and one who was able to stand in the gap between us.

So a mediator is needed when there’s conflict. A mediator is used to stand in the gap between two parties. And a mediator is called to bring reconciliation and make peace.

A mediator is called to bring reconciliation and make peace. It’s not the job as the mediator just to represent the parties and to relay communications. Christ is not the phone company.

If we just needed somebody to open the lines of communication, that would imply that we’re able to approach God on our own, that we’re able to deal with Him as an equal, and we’re not. Just like it wasn’t, just like from what I understand of the Bosnian War, when the Americans came in and tried to mediate, still don’t know if we did a good job or not, but when we came in and tried to, the Americans came in and tried to mediate, they didn’t just sit the Serbs and the Croats and the Bosnians down at a table and say, now, we’re going to lock you in this room, y’all hash it out. Folks, they were carrying messages back and forth.

They were dealing with the different parties saying, what’s it going to take on your side? You’re willing to give up this city over here. Okay, they don’t want to go past this river.

Well, you’re going to have to release so-and-so from prison. They were doing everything that they could to try to bring these people to some sort of peace and understanding. It was not just their job to make everybody sit down at the table.

And folks, it was not Christ’s job simply to get the lines of communication open between us and God the Father and say, okay, you take it from here. If that was His job, if that was His job, that would have been incomplete. It would have then been up to us to make reconciliation between us and God.

And we couldn’t do that because we’d still have to pay for our sins. It was His job not just to stand between us, not just to convey the message back and forth. It was His job to actually bring peace and reconciliation.

And He did that by His death on the cross. There’s one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ, who gave himself a ransom for all to be testified in due time. Christ is our mediator, went to a length to bring peace and reconciliation that no mediator has ever gone to before or since.

He gave his life to make peace between the two parties. There was only one way that there could be peace, that there could be reconciliation between us and God, and that was for the sin debt to be paid. Because there was this massive issue hanging over the whole thing, and that was our sin against God.

It was not something that we could deal with, and it was not something that God could overlook. And Jesus Christ, as the one person able to mediate between us, stepped in and also was the one person who was able to make that issue go away. And He gave Himself a ransom for all.

He gave Himself to pay for us, to buy us, and to be testified in due time. And Paul says, whereunto I am ordained a preacher and an apostle for this, to share thi