Colossians 2:13-15

Colossians chapter 2 verses 13 to 15 for our text and study this morning. In you being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses, blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross. And having spoiled principles and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it. God blessed to us His sacred and holy word this morning. It was a young artist in Italy years ago who sculptured an angel. statue. And he was anxious for the great master, Michelangelo, to take a look at his work. So he hid in a place where he could hear what they said when they came and viewed his statue. Michelangelo studied the angel for a period of time, and then he finally said it lacks only one thing. And he moved on. The young artist was nearly brokenhearted until one of his friends went to the great artist and asked him what it was lacking. He said, it only lacks life. If it had life, it would be perfect. Friends, there are a lot of people who are very religious. They’re quite meticulous about the externals of religion. They carefully meet all the cruxernals of religion. They carefully meet all the cruxernals. criteria with regard to their religious checklist. They never miss a church service. They observe the church ordinances. They daily pray. They avoid any blatant outward sins. They perform what they consider to be good works. There’s only one thing lacking. They lack spiritual life. Paul states, as we studied last week, that you are by nature. dead in sins. You are devoid of any spiritual life or communion with God. That is the way you come into this world. You are a transgressor of God’s law, alienated from God. And being religious doesn’t solve that particular problem. But as he indicates to us this morning, the reason why that we are different than what we were in the past, is not because all of a sudden we got religion, is because we’ve been granted new life by Jesus Christ. God, through Jesus Christ, grant you spiritual life. You hath be quickened together with Him, with Jesus Christ. The word quickened here means to make a life. It’s associated with Jesus Christ. It’s a question. It’s a second. It’s a seconded here. The word quickened here. with Christ’s resurrection from the dead because we are quickened with him. If you will hold your place here and look with me to the book of Ephesians chapter 1, beginning with verse 18. Paul elaborates on this a bit. He says here, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened that you may know what is the hope of his calling and what the rich, of the glory of his inheritance and the saints. And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to Osward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in heavenly places. And then chapter 2. And you hath be quickened who were dead and trespasses and sins, 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 all had our conversation in times past, in the lust of the flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind and were by nature the children of wrath even of his others. 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 you saying? Now, you cannot quicken yourself. You cannot regenerate yourself. He quickens you. It is God’s work alone. Prior to being grained spiritual life, all the powers, all the faculties of your soul were dead. Whether we talk about your mind or your will or your affections. But in reality, generation and quickening, a principle of life is granted to you. You come alive spiritually. Every faculty of your soul is now alive. You are, as the scripture says, born again. You were to call Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha died. And you’ll recall that he was placed in a burial cave and it was sealed with a large stone. when Jesus came to Bethany four days later after Lazar’s death, Mary and Martha and their relatives and friends were still mourning his passing. Jesus declared to Martha, I am the resurrection and the life. When she said to him, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And then he says to the people to take away the stone. and he cries with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And the scripture says, He that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave clothes, and his face was bound about with a napkin. And Jesus said, loose him and let him go. The resurrection of Lazarus from death to life was an amazing divine miracle. Now, do you think Lazarus could have made himself alive? It’s impossible for a human being to raise himself from the dead. What we must grasp is that this is true spiritually as well. God must quicken you. You’ll be called forth from your spiritually dead state by the voice of Christ. Remember what he said in John chapter 5, verse 25, the dead. meaning the spiritually dead in this passage, shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that here shall live. That is why people come to life. All I can say about this quickening is that when the gospel was preached, the gospel that concerns Christ’s death and burial and resurrection, Christ calls forth people from a state of spiritual death and grants them life. Now with that in mind, the question must be asked, have you been made alive? Do you feel different than you were before? That there’s something that has changed within you by God’s grace. Can you imagine what it changed it would be if someone was dead and was all of a sudden raised to life? What a difference between those two people. Between what he was laying there in the casket, and what he is walking about? A dramatic change. What do you know about being born again? What do you know about being a new creature in Christ? The things that you once despised that had held no interest for you all of a sudden, now interest you, it was a dull thing for you to sit through a sermon. But now you delight to hear about Christ and the work of salvation. Once the Bible was an unknown book to you, and as Spurgeon once said, you could take your finger and write damnation on the cover because of the dust that was collected. But now it interests you, and you’re reading the scriptures. You want to hear what God has to say to you. Augustine, before he was converted, lived with a woman in his ungodly days, and eventually they separated, and during the first, that time, Augustine was granted spiritual life by God. Years later, this woman met Augustine in the street and called out to him, Augustine, Augustine. He ignored her and kept walking. Finally, she ran up to him and grabbed hold of him and said, Augustine, don’t you recognize me? We used to be lovers. And Augustine said, well, I do recognize you, but I’m not Augustine anymore. I am not the person. person I used to be. And my friends, that is the way it is with one who has been regenerating. They’re not the person they used to be. Because God has changed them. Do you know anything about a changed life? God through Jesus Christ grant you spiritual life. Notice secondly here. That God through Jesus Christ grant you full remission of your sins, having forgiven all your trespasses. Now, friends, this is a gracious forgiveness that is provided for us by Christ. You don’t read anything here about earning God’s forgiveness. There’s no list of works for you to do in order to make yourself worthy of God’s forgiveness. Listen to Christ’s parable about forgiveness that he spoke. to Simon, the Pharisee, in Luke chapter 7. He said there was a certain creditor which had two debtors, and the one owed 500 pence and the other 50. And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. This is, of course, a portrayal of God’s forgiveness of the sinners that we find in this life. Now, some of them, are more notorious sinners. They have a bigger debt than the others, but they’re all sinners. And here we find the forgiveness that Christ forgives, grants. Now, what I wanted to focus is on that word, frankly, he frankly forgave them. This word as is charisma. It is a forgiveness as a matter of grace without regard any merits of their. without any regard of any conditions, any performance on their part. Purely a matter of sovereign grace that they were forgiven. This is the way God forgives sinners. The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, forgiven iniquity at transgression and sin, Exodus 34 and verse 7. We have to understand it’s very careful. carefully. There is nothing you have or can do that can procure you forgiveness of sin. You know, years ago, the Roman Catholic Church used to sell indulgences. By the way, they’ve never recanted on that. It’s still viable, evidently, today. These indulgences were pieces of paper that that were signed and sealed with the Pope’s name. indulgences declared that the person who bought it had all his sins forgiven, even the sins that he would commit in the future. And what’s more, these indulgences were supposedly able to save those who had already died as well. There was a popular rhyme among the people. When the coin and the coffer rings the soul from purgatory springs. and such was the way they raised money. Now friends, all of this is contrary to Scripture. For riches, profit not in the day of wrath. Proverbs 11.4. When God deals with people concerning their sins, all your riches are useless. You can’t buy your way out of it. And my friends, we see people with self-floggings and and carrying crosses through the street and building hospital wings or somehow paying for, you know, the church upgrades or whatever the case may be, none of these things can earn us forgiveness. We can’t perform a work that somehow or other will place us in a favorable position. The moving cause of forgiveness is not the misery of the sinner, not the merits of the sinner, the sovereign grace and mercy of Jesus Christ. My friends, the scripture says, have mercy upon me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies. Blood out my transgressions, Psalm 51. 51.1. So it’s a gracious forgiveness. Notice it’s a full forgiveness. All thy transgressions. All trespasses here are forgiven according to Scripture. Now, consult your memory. Think of all the transgressions that you have committed from your youth up. Maybe there’s one particular sin that stands out of your mind more than any others that particularly troubles your conscience. But at any rate, you heap up all those sins, and you’ve got a whole towering mountain of sins. You’ve sin every day. You sin every hour. Your transgressions are numberless. They’re like the sand of the sea. And yet meditate a moment on the Lord’s blessing of our text because you see that the pardon of God is full. Whatever your sins may have been, if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, if God has quickened you together with Christ, all your trespasses are for. forgiven. God says their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more. If God doesn’t remember them, then they must be most effectively removed. Consult the scriptures and be assured that God’s forgiveness is such that not one single sin is overlooked. Scripture says, and I will cleanse them from all their iniquity, whereby they have sinned against me, I will pardon all their iniquities. Jeremiah 33-8. My friends, it doesn’t accord with divine majesty to give a partial forgiveness and then require the other part from you. My friends, partial forgiveness would be useless to you. If God says, well, I’ll forgive half your sins, you have to take care of the other half, it’s not going to do you any good. Even if God said, I’ll take care of 90% of your sins, and you have to take care of the other 10%, that is not going to do you. there is no way for you to somehow or other gain forgiveness of those sins. Remember the two debtors that I mentioned in Christ’s parable, the 500 pence and the 50 pence debt. What did Jesus say? They had nothing to pay, and that’s the way the sinner is. We have nothing to pay. We have nothing to pay. We have no way that we can pay the debt. partial pardon leaves us doomed, but the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin, according to 1 John 1.7. So God through Jesus Christ grant you full remission of sins. It is a gracious forgiveness, it is a full forgiveness. Notice thirdly, God through Jesus Christ grant you a complete pardon. Verse 14, blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against, us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to the cross. What is this handwriting that is against you? Well, handwriting implies some type of record is being kept of your transgressions. Some charge is being written down, an indictment, if you would. That will, of course, be brought before a judge in a courtroom setting. And you’re going to have to answer for these things. And against every person, there is something written by God, for he keeps a book of works, the scripture tells us, in which all the activities, the wickedness of men, is recorded. And it’s accurately kept. You look at the Ten Commandments. and you look at them in light of what the scripture says about them, you look at the first table and the duties that we have to God. Have you put someone or something before God? Can you honestly claim you’ve always put God first in your life? What gods have you made which have taken God’s rightful place? Have sports, have pleasures, have pursuit of money? ever used God’s name in vain? Used it lightly. Used it in a joke. Use it in a curse. Do you always remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy? We look at the second table of the law, and our duties to our neighbor. Do you honor your parents? Or more generally, do you honor those in authority over you, whether it be government rulers, bosses, church leaders, or wherever the case may be? Have you ever had unjustified anger toward someone? For that is, of course, the principle behind thou shalt not kill. Have you ever committed adultery or sinfully lusted after someone in your heart? Have you ever stolen everything? anything? Have you ever bore false witness and told a lie? Did you ever covet anything which belonged to your neighbor, his spouse, his possessions? There’s plenty of things. of evidence against us. There’s plenty of reason for us to be cast into hell. So what is this handwriting against us? It is all the sins we’ve committed. And what Christ has done to pardon you as a believer is that he has brought to bear these issues and dealt with them. 1779, there was a British patrol ship that ordered an American ship. into port because they believed that the Americans were carrying contraband. And the British suspected that the American ship certainly had things on it that they shouldn’t have had. But before reaching the harbor, the captain of the American ship decided he’d throw overboard all the contraband, and he would get rid of the cargo list. So he tosses it all into the sea. At the trial, it appeared that no one would be convicted because a falsified list had been presented and there was no evidence of contraband on that list of cargo. The proceedings however took a dramatic turn when Lieutenant Michael Fitton of the British ship Ferret produced the genuine cargo papers that had been thrown overboard. Listing all the illegal goods earlier his his crew had harpooned a whale or excuse me our shark and what was in the shark stomach it was the cargo list and so you can imagine the Americans thought they had covered up their wrongdoing and they were going to get away with it but it came back to haunt them and so they were condemned in court now what Paul is telling us here is we can be assured that our sins are forgiven and they’re not going to come back and haunt us Paul uses various this idea is to convey this idea of a complete pardon. He says your sins have been blotted out. This Greek word here literally means to obliterate to erase, to expunge, to wipe away, to remove, is actually interpreted, destroyed with regard to the seven nations of Canaan in Acts 13 that the Israelites defeated. It is used of blotting out someone’s name from a book, like expunging their name, so they’re not recorded anymore in that book. It is used to wiping away our tears when we get to heaven. All these phrases are connected with this idea. So the idea of all the charges written down against you have been obliterated, erased, wiped away. So they will not come back and haunt you. Your sins, he says, have been taken out of away. Now, sin lies upon the sinner. You remember Mr. Christian with that big burden on his back, he’s carrying it around, and what Christ does is he takes the burden off of you. He carries it away. The Lord have laid upon him the iniquity of us all, the scripture says, as the people have gone. Christ takes your great burden of sin, and he bears it. himself on the cross. He removes it from you as far as the east is from the west, so that if it’s sought, it cannot be found. Your sins have been nailed to the cross, it says. Just as Jesus was fastened the cross by those dreadful spikes, so he has nailed up all the sins of his people that could be laid to their charge, and there’s a sense in which they’ve been put to death or removed. and many years ago, banks used to have boards with large spikes up in them and when they got a note, they would push it through that, and that way that note could never be used again against someone. Christ has driven the nails right through the charges of his people, and they can never be used against us anymore. What better way can there be of abolishing your sin debt than by paying for it? As we find, did for us. See, of all this assurance here that your sins have been destroyed, they’ve been carried away, they’ve been blotted out, they’ve been wiped off the slate, so to speak. So you are granted a complete pardon. That’s why you multiply all these phrases here. And lastly, God, through Jesus Christ, grant you victory over all your adversaries. Notice verse 15. and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it. We’ve already looked from chapter 1 in verse 16 at the text here that talks about principalities and powers. We said, this refers, it seems, mostly to angelic forces here. And in this particular case, Satan and his demonic forces. Satan is the accuser of the brother. Satan is the one who would bring up all the charges against us. He was the one who would accuse us and say, hey, Jack Worth is guilty. These forces of Satan are called the rulers of this world, and they hold people captive, as the scripture tells us, they tyrannically rule over men. They are enemies of your salvation. They would like to keep you in the dark about the gospel of Jesus Christ, but Christ has vanquished all our enemies by the cross. He provides a complete victory. The word spoiled here alludes to the custom whereby conquerors would take the goods and the possessions of those they’ve defeated. We call it plundering. He has plundered. See, did you remember the story about the strong man and the gospel? The strong man has these goods, but someone stronger comes a lot of, and takes his goods away from him. Christ is the stronger one. Satan has his captives, but Christ comes along and takes away. He plunders what Satan has. We’re taken out of the kingdom of darkness. We are transferred into the kingdom of God’s light, as we saw in chapter 1. He makes a show of them. When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive. Satan once held us but now Christ leads Satan and his principalities here captive. You know, the Roman custom of parading through the streets of Rome, in chains, the chief leaders of their enemies that were defeated is the picture that we have here of Christ. Do we not read in the book of Revelation that Satan is bound for a thousand years so that the gospel can go out to the Gentiles that they might believe the truth? Yes. Christ has bound him and triumphs over them to Texas. Here we think of the triumphs of the Roman emperors and the generals as they went down the streets of Rome in a victorious parade, if you would, with great pomp and ceremony and magnificently robed. The army would march before. them, they would be in their chariot riding down the street, and behind them would be all the treasures and all the plunder they took, and then behind that, of course, would be all the captains. That’s what the triumph is in Roman times. And we see, and the picture here is that Christ is the victor. And his people applause him and redact. and rejoice in what he has accomplished. So Paul can confidently declare, as the scripture indicates to us, who can lay anything to the charge of God’s elect. It is Christ that died. Yea, rather, there’s risen again. And so by his death and his resurrection, all our sins are taken away, our enemies are defeated, and he grants us victory. Well, that young artist statue only lacked one thing life, according to Michael Angelo. There are a lot of religious people in the world. But sadly, what often is missing, and lacking, if you would, is spiritual life. When Paul talks about these believers, and hopefully about us as well, is that we’ve been transferred from death to life. There’s been a change made in a by God’s grace. You are granted spiritual life, you are granted a complete pardon, you are granted full remission of your sins, and you are granted victory over all your adversaries. That is what Christ is accomplished for us as his people. Well, let us bother us.