For the sake of simplicity tonight, I thought I would just read Lord's Day 5. I won't ask you to read with me, but I'll just read Lord's Day 5. In fact, what I actually thought I might do is read them serially, so one at a time. I think I can do it, the four questions. Bob has been challenging me for, I don't know, 35 years to do a whole Lord's Day at once. And I keep reminding him that when the catechism was written and divided into Lord's Days, the preachers had an hour for a sermon, and now we have a half hour, or in Reverend Gordon's case, 45 minutes to do the four. But I think I can do it. I did the math with Mrs. Clark last night, and I think it will work. So Lord's Day 5, question 12, according to God's righteous judgment, we deserve punishment both now and in eternity. How then can we escape this punishment and return to God's favor? And we answer that question by saying God requires that his justice be satisfied. Therefore, the claims of this justice must be paid in full either by ourselves or by another. So you'll see in the bulletin there, if you're reading it carefully, you'll see the sermon title somewhere. Oh, there it is. Liability, inability, inevitability, and then a made-up word, incarnatability. And I'll explain that in a bit. But I take comfort in making up words and knowing that we've been doing that for a long time, not that I'm among them, but some of the great writers of the English language, including Tyndale and Shakespeare, freely made up words when it suited them, and John Owen did too, so I'm just following them, and I'll explain why I'm doing that. Well, so here we are in the middle of what some have called coronatide. I know you're tired of hearing about the virus, and so am I, and I'm tired of talking about it and thinking about it, and every morning I wake up and I think, for a moment, you know, it's not there, and then as the fog clears, it's still there. And I'm sure you probably go through something like that as well. And at the same time, we're living through this corona season. We're also living through a social revolution in which things that we thought were sort of fixed in life are being declared by riotous mobs to be nothing more than purely human constructions and arbitrary so that news is, and I'm not saying it's not true, but news is said to be fake and everything else is said to be fake. Everything is said to be a construction. And if it's a construction, a human construct, then it can be deconstructed. And that is what, if you wonder why, prosperous young people are rampaging in the streets, right? What have they got to rampage about? Well, they're rampaging in the streets in part because they're angry, because they've been taught all their lives that nothing in this world is real. Everything is a game. Everything, it's a big con job. Everything is fake. Everything needs to be deconstructed. There's nothing fixed in the world. It's all arbitrary, including sexuality and gender. You notice, if you pay attention closely to the way people talk about things, they say that there are multiple. If you look at Facebook, and I don't recommend that you do, but were you to look at Facebook, you would see that they have multiple genders. Well, I'm told I'm not supposed to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. Where I'm from, if you come with me to my grandfather's farm or any farm, I'll take you out to Ramona. There are cattle and horses out there. I will show you two sexes, male and female. That's it. No, there's a small percentage of human beings that are sexually indeterminate. I'm well aware of that. Every college freshman, every time they hear me say that, they point that out. I'm well aware of that. But the exception tests the rule. It doesn't change the rule. Fundamentally, there are two sexes, but there are three genders in grammar, masculine, feminine, and neuter, and they're relatively arbitrary. Ships are not intrinsically female. That's relatively arbitrary, but we've switched sexes and gender, and now we talk about genders if it applies to humans, and doctors are said to confer gender on people. That's insane. I know you know it's insane. I know you think it's insane, and I'm telling you, it is insane. Don't believe the crazy people when they tell you otherwise. They are out of their minds. And they're out of their minds because they're under this delusion that everything is a construct. And you say, well, that's all very interesting, Dr. Clark, but what does that have to do with the price of eggs and Lord's Day 5? Well, it has everything to do with Lord's Day 5 because there are realities in the world that cannot be escaped. And judgment and death are two of them. This is what I tell my students now who've been taught this all their life, Christian students, right? And new converts, old converts, kids raised in Christian homes. They've been taught all their lives that everything is a construct, that nothing is real, everything is arbitrary. And I point to the clock tower on the campus, right? And my students can testify, this is true. And I say, now this is a thought experiment. Were you to climb to the top of the clock thought experiment, please don't do this. If you're thinking about doing this, come and see me or someone, right? It's an experiment, a thought experiment. Were you to climb to the top of the clock tower and launch yourself off. And if you could say, I identify as a bird, right? You've got about a second and a half. And certain natural laws will kick in and gravity will do what it does. That's not a construct. And there are lots of other things that are not actually arbitrary constructs. It's built, there's a givenness, there's a nature of things. And God is the one who created the nature of things, and he's part of the nature of things. And the inevitability of judgment and death is part of the nature of things. All that to say that not everything is fake. Judgment is real. And I got more bad news. In fact, there are four points tonight, three of which are bad news. More bad news is that you and I are all by nature in very serious trouble, and we cannot get ourselves out of that trouble. I don't know. I actually don't speed much anymore. It's just not worth it to me. It gives me too much, gives me heartburn. It makes me uncomfortable. I mean, you know, when he wants to do 70, I do 70 because he's right on my tail and there's nothing I can do. but I mean, you let left to myself. I'm not doing 80 and 85 anymore. But you know when you're doing 80 and 85 because you're late and you get pulled over, you broke the law, it's a covenant of works, and the law has come for you, and you are toast. Now think of God that way. You've broken the law, you are toast, you've got nothing to plead, you're guilty, and there's nothing you can do. It's that way with God, except he, you know the state patrolman? If you're honest with him, maybe, or her, maybe they'll let you off. Maybe they'll give you a warning. There's no warning with God. There's no getting off with God. There's no getting out of it, right? God's word tells us that his justice is absolutely relentless, that we owe a debt to that justice. We created this crisis. We're all in trouble. We can't get ourselves out of it. It's our own doing. We owe a debt to justice that must be paid. We can't talk our way out of it. It can't be negotiated. You know, Donald Trump is supposed to be the great negotiator. But even he can't negotiate his way out of this. Nobody can negotiate their way out of this. You can't talk your way out of it. I talk my way into a lot of trouble in my life, and I talk my way out of some of it. When I was about seven, there was a kid that used to beat me up pretty regularly. and he wasn't very smart. One day I said, I think I hear my mom calling. It was a complete fabrication. But he was stupid and he bought it and he gave me the half second I needed to get away. I've talked my way into it and out of trouble. There's no talking your way out of this. There's no running away. If you study self-defense, one of the first things they teach you is, if you can, run away. It's the best self-defense tactic you can ever learn is running away. You can't run away from God. He's immense. He fills all things with all of himself all the time, everywhere. And he's absolutely righteous. He's absolutely just. He's absolutely just and absolutely holy. And his justice and righteousness is relentless. And that righteousness will be satisfied. It's not a construct. It's real, not fake, not arbitrary. It's the most real thing that is. Pharaoh thought he could negotiate with God. You remember that? Pharaoh thought he could negotiate. And how did that go? How did that go? Remember Reverend Gordon's sermons on the Exodus? Go back and listen to the sermons on the plagues. It just gets uglier and uglier and uglier. And Yahweh keeps saying to Pharaoh, negotiate with this. Finally, he takes all the firstborn sons of Egypt. We've been catching rats. Mrs. Clark has been catching rats and the dog. She's getting better. Catching rats. Nothing stinks like a dead rat except a million dead infant boys. That's the God who executes his wrath and his judgment relentlessly. Relentlessly. It will be satisfied. Cursed is everyone who does not continually fulfill all the demands of the law. You say, well, that was in the Old Testament. Well, it was. But the Apostle Paul quotes that in Galatians 3.10 to remind the Judaizers that they cannot obey the law and satisfy God. So you and I have a liability to the justice of God and to the holiness of God and the righteousness of God. And it began, that liability began the moment God said to us, the day you eat thereof, you shall surely die. He wasn't kidding. It's a covenant. That's why we call it a covenant of works before the fall. Not a covenant of grace. It's a covenant of works. Adam could have obeyed it. There wasn't anything wrong with him. He was created, we say, in righteousness and true holiness, that he might rightly know God as creator, that we might rightly know God, our creator, heartily love him and live with him in eternal blessedness. All we had to do was obey that command. All we had to do was love God with all our faculties and our neighbor as ourselves. And we refused. And we plunged ourselves, right? Adam plunged himself and us, we in him, into sin and death. And Adam died that day. Death entered. Corruption entered. And judgment came. God came in the spirit of the day, in the spirit of the day of judgment. What have you done? Where are you? Who told you you were naked? Those are the questions that a prosecutor asks. God says in Exodus 23, 7, I will not acquit the wicked. In Psalm 11, 4 through 7, God says the same thing. The Lord is in his holy temple. The Lord's throne is in heaven, his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. The Lord, Yahweh, it says, tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. And by the way, that's not that guy, that's you. That's not that guy or that gal, that's you, that's me. Let him rain coals on the wicked. Fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup because Yahweh is righteous. He loves righteous deeds, and the upright shall behold his face. And we could go all through the scriptures, and you'd see the same thing. Who can stand before the Lord? The one who is pure at heart, the one who is upright, the one who is righteous. We have a liability to the law of God. Question 13, we ask, can we make this payment ourselves? And we answer, certainly not. Actually, we increase our debt every day. I love my grandpa's, my grandpa on my dad's side was a devout Mason. And he really, he'd been taught as a Lutheran and he actually could talk like a fairly Orthodox Lutheran. But when push came to shove, he had come to believe that his good works as a Mason were going to balance the scales with God. He was very sadly mistaken. I trust, I hope, I pray that in the last moments of his life he saw more clearly than he did in talking with me that he needed the righteousness of Christ to cover for his sins and that is good deeds, however good they may have been, raising money for the Shriners, hospital and the like, would not balance the scales of justice with God. So we need to satisfy the law of God, the justice of God, but we can't do it. That's what we say in Heidelberg 13. Why can't we do it? Well, Ephesians 2, 1 through 4 tells us why we can't do it. We are dead in sins and trespasses. Ephesians 2, 1 through 4 says, And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit, that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. I really don't need to read. I could read, and I have a number of passages listed here, but it seems redundant. Paul couldn't have been any clearer. You've probably heard me talk about the cadaver I saw in high school, so I won't tell you that again. But just to say that if you've ever seen a cadaver, the reason you can do what you do with cadavers is because they're dead. There's no life left in them. And it's very important that you grasp that because the inclination of judging by church history, the inclination is to downplay the effect of the fall and to say, as the medieval church did for most of a thousand years, well, we're like the fellow lying on the side of the road. He's wounded, but he's not, and he needs help, but he's not dead and he can cooperate with the help when he gets the help. And the help, they said, was grace, and you have to cooperate with grace. And what we relearned in the Reformation and what we have to keep learning What the Synod of Dort did, and I'm not getting paid for this. If you haven't read Bob's book on the Synod of Dort, you should do that. At the Synod of Dort, the Reformed churches really did save the Reformation. And one of the things we did at the Synod of Dort was to save this wonderful biblical doctrine of human inability. If you don't understand human inability, you won't understand the glory of the gospel. You can't do it. It just struck me as I was thinking about this. You know, Jesus turns to those who are with him in John 11, and he says very plainly, Lazarus is dead. It's an extraordinary thing for God the Son incarnate to turn to those around and say, Lazarus is dead. Jesus was facing the reality of death, and he was making those around him face the reality of death. And of course, during the corona season, we're facing the reality of death this week. We faced, again, the reality of death. Some of you are grieving as you rightly ought to be and rejoicing at the same time, right? Your joy is mixed with sadness. Again, facing the reality of death. This congregation has experienced a number of deaths, hasn't it? Experiencing the consequences of the fall and the reality of death. We are born spiritually dead. We are depraved. It doesn't mean we're as wicked as we can be all the time, but it means we are sufficiently wicked that we can't do what needs to be done. Not even with the help of grace. We cannot do what needs to be done, even with the help of grace. We are utterly unable to save ourselves. And that gets us to question 14. Well, what about another creature? What about bulls and goats? Can they pay this debt for us? I'm paraphrasing, but that's what's in view here. And we say, no, to begin with, God will not punish any other creature for what a human is guilty of. Of course, we read that in Hebrews 10, didn't we? Furthermore, no mere creature can bear the weight of God's eternal wrath against sin and deliver others from it. Bulls and goats were just pictures of what was to come. Bulls and goats were just pictures of what was to come, and they were only satisfactory to the righteousness of God, the justice of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, insofar as in the mysterious providence of God, they participated by anticipation that final once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus. But of themselves, the blood of bulls and goats is nothing. And that's why Scripture says you don't desire the blood of bulls and goats. And at one point, God says to his people, get away from me with your stinking offerings. It was all a big, long-lasting, bloody, smelly, messy, graphic sermon illustration. It was a long, bloody, graphic sermon illustration pointing to the reality that had yet to come. It is appointed, Hebrews 9.27 says, for humans to die once and then the judgment. We are not capable, you and I, but we did it. There is a real judgment and there is a real hell. In Matthew 6, our Lord Jesus said, Amen, it would be better for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment. There is a judgment coming, but we can't turn it away, you and I. But we owe it. We owe it. Matthew 12, 36, Jesus said, But I say that every careless word that people speak, they will give an account for it on the day of judgment. Hardly anybody in Scripture talks about judgment as much as Jesus. And don't you think that to some degree it was because he knew why he had come, he knew what he was there to do, and he knew what lay before him. And, of course, the disciples were always trying to turn him away, trying to deter him. And when Peter did it, Jesus said, get behind me, Satan. I came for this. And I'll tell you just for a moment a little bit of the back story. The back story is that God the Son, before he became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin, for us, agreed with his Father that I will go. I will be their representative. I will be their mediator. You know why we don't ever call on the Blessed Virgin? And she is blessed, but she can't hear your prayers. You know why we don't call on saints? They are saints, but they can't hear our prayers. They're not mediators. That's why we don't call on them. We only have one mediator, and that mediator is Jesus. Because he alone is able to hear. He alone is able to save because he is the God-man. And you engineers are thinking, well, how does that work? And I say, I couldn't possibly tell you. All I know is that it's true. You just have to accept that it's true. that god is powerful and able to take on true humanity and to be the representative of all of the people whom the father gave to the son and whom the son for whom the son willingly came for whom he obeyed here's an important truth he didn't come to obey for himself to qualify himself that was a mistake that anselm a great medieval theologian by the way whose outline we're basically following in the catechism here. But that was a mistake that he made in his wonderful book, Why the God-Man? This is a marvelous study of the incarnation and the death of Jesus, the satisfaction and the atonement of Jesus. But the mistake he made is that he thought, well, Jesus had to qualify himself. And some folks have followed that mistake and said, well, Jesus had to qualify himself. And then they divided up his work into two phases. And they said the first one is for him and the second part is for us. And then you're kind of on the hook ultimately to finish, sometimes they say. Not always, but sometimes. Listen to me, it's much simpler than that. God the Son became incarnate and he was born under the law. Jesus was born under the law for you. This is the good news. This is the last part. This is the incarnatability. God the Son, only the Son could become incarnate. The Father didn't become incarnate. The Holy Spirit didn't become incarnate. But God the Son was able to become incarnate and did become incarnate and he did it for you. That's how much he loved you. All of his life. Children, Jesus came for you. He entered history for you. He loved you. He knew you. He came for you. It wasn't pretend. It's not a story. It's true. I mean, it is a story, but it's not a made-up story. It's a true story, and we know it's a true story because the women went to the tomb, and it was empty, and they saw it with their eyes. The world's not an illusion. The world was made to be known, and you were made to know it. And we can see things, true things, with our eyes, and they saw with their eyes the truth that the tomb was empty. And the angel said, the fellow for whom you're looking, he's not here. And Mary wanted to hang on to Jesus, and Jesus said, you can't hang on to me. I have to go to be with the Father. All that's really true. It all really happened, and it all really happened for us. It all really happened for you. It's not a convention. It's really true. He is the last Adam. Paul says that in 1 Corinthians 15, 22, and 45. In Adam, all die. So also in Christ, we'll all be made alive. In Christ, right? He is the first man, Adam, he says in verse 45, 1 Corinthians 15, 45. The first man, Adam, became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. This is a metonymy. It's one thing for the other. Because he was crucified, because he obeyed, because he was crucified, because he was dead and buried and raised and ascended, he's poured out his Holy Spirit on us and he gives life. God the Son gives life. If you're alive tonight, it's because God the Son became incarnate and He was raised and He's ascended and He's ruling over the nations and over the church as the sovereign Savior. Nothing happens that Jesus has not decreed or permitted. The corona is all in His sovereign plan. Governors and mayors and public health officers can say what they will, but Jesus sits in his heaven. Nothing they do can prevent his sovereign power from accomplishing his decree from all eternity. He is the sovereign Savior. Paul says, his son who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, Jesus is true man, true God and true man for you. Therefore he had, Hebrews 2.17 says, he had to be made like his brothers in all ways that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God to make propitiation. That means to turn away the wrath of God. To turn away the wrath of God for the sins of the people. Incarnatability. That's just a made-up word. Here I started off talking about making things up and I'm making things up. but that made-up word signifies a reality that God the Son really became incarnate. And I'll stop with this. He's still incarnate. He understands your griefs. He understands your fears. He understands your struggles. He understands your struggle with sin. He knows more about struggle with sin than you do because He didn't give in. We take the easy way. He didn't. He sweat great drops of blood. But he understands, he sympathizes, he hears, he helps. That's real. That's not pretend. We have a lot to give thanks for tonight, and I'll stop with that. But above all, the things for which we have to give thanks is the truth that we're not in this world alone. That we're in this world with a sovereign, Savior, Helper, God-man, who hears your prayers and makes them known to the Father. And he saves, and he'll never let you go. Let's give thanks. Father, we bless you and praise you tonight for the reality of the God-man, Jesus, who has done what we could not do and what we would not do. We have a mediator and a deliverer who is true and righteous man, who really met the terms of the law, who fulfilled it all for us, who's more powerful than all creatures, and also true God. Able to save because he is the God-man, who has saved because he is the God-man, who hears because he is the God-man, who's coming back because he is the God-man. We bless you and praise you tonight for the God-man. Hear our prayer, accept our thanks and our praise. For Jesus' sake, amen.