JESUS AND THE UNIVERSE OF MAN

Series: The Person of JesusLesson #6

2Cor. 12:2 I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.

Eph. 4:13 Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ:

Heb. 2:5 For unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the world to come, whereof we speak.

Man was created for dominion over this earth, and by your presence in this school you are saying that you know that God has a greater purpose in redemption than merely taking people to heaven. To fulfil that destiny you must know this truth of Christ, both as God and man. You must understand what now is going to be presented.

I. Man Was Created That All The Wonderful Thoughts And Realities Of God Could Be Expressed Through Him. That Is The Reason God Made Us.

1. Man has run off on many tangents, religion has produced a lot of foolishness, but God created man for this one purpose.

2. We have already demonstrated that had Adam, the first man stayed with God, then this earth would be full of the knowledge of God. He chose the devil, and instead has filled the earth with the knowledge of Satan.

I have been from South America to the South Pacific, Asia, Europe and Africa, I have never been anywhere that the devil wasn’t known. But I have never been anywhere where Christ was known except that a new creature had already been there.

3. The first creation, through Adam, failed in the testing.

4. In the fall, man became an altogether different creature. Man was created spirit, soul, and body. That was the order and function of his being. In the fall man’s spirit died toward God.

5. When he sinned, his spirit was so violated that it sank down into subjection to his soul. The order and function of his life changed. Man, as we know him, is no longer a spiritual being. Fallen man is a soulish creature living in the realm of what he can see, smell, feel, hear and taste. Because God is a Spirit, all communication with Him was lost. Man failed in the testing.

6. God never planned that fall.

7. The purpose of God was a straight line of fellowship with man through the ages. Though God never planned the fall, being God He knew that man would fall, so Christ was slain before the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). The fall broke that line.

8. Redemption bridged the gap, and with a new creation God set man back on the high road of His purpose, that through him God could be revealed in this universe. Redemption restored the purpose of God.

II. The Fall Of Man Brought About A New Intervention Of God In The Person Of His Son.

1. The incarnation of Christ into human nature accomplished several things.

a. It demonstrated the kind of man that God desires. Man is a generic term and it takes in both male and female. Jesus Christ is the One we are to be conformed to. He is what all of us are to ultimately be.

b. It removed the kind of man that God does not desire. We were buried with Him. We were baptized into His death (Rom. 6:3). The old man and his affections were crucified, but we just have to reckon that to be.

c. It brought into being the faculties and constituents of a new creation.

2. Hence, the creation of man represented the great mind of God to expressing Himself through man. This is what the new creation is all about.

3. It is a wonderful thing to think that God would make a creature called man, in order that by that means He might write for revelation to the universe, His own thoughts and mind. That will humble the heart of any human when they come to realize this is why I am saved. Not just to go to heaven.

4. You will go to heaven, but God has brought you into being, raised you from spiritual death, that through you there may be a revelation of the very thoughts and mind of the eternal God Himself.

5. In eternity past, God thought thoughts, desired desires, and willed wills. He then created man that, through man, He could reveal these thoughts, desires and wills.

6. All of God’s thoughts, desires, and wills, were comprehended in His Son. Every new creature in Christ has been predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son. For that to happen there must be death to all that I am naturally.

III. The Knowledge Of Man Is Still In An Imperfect Stage. After All This Time He Has Been On The Earth, He Still Does Not Know Himself.

1. “What is man?” is still a valid question to the natural man.

2. On the side of evil it is beyond comprehension what man is capable of.

3. Under grace, in union with God through Christ, the potentialities of redeemed humanity for good are also beyond human comprehension. This is the meaning of the Psalmist in the statement, “…we were fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14).

a. It is very important that we keep that chronologically right. When you were born the first time (of your mother) you were fearfully made. There was every possibility to sink to the low state of a Hitler, or a Stalin. The possibilities and potential for evil were all there.

b. When man is born again, he is wonderfully made. The possibility and potential is now there to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.

4. Man came from the hand of God, therefore all of his problems are theological, and all his answers are only in the knowledge of God. What a truth for us to grasp. I came from God. My problems are theological. The answer to every problem of my life is in the knowledge of God.

IV. With This Thought In Our Minds, We Will Look Let At Some Of The Departments Of The Sciences Of Man.

1. First, there is medical science. This has to do with the functions of the physical being.

2. After all the centuries man has been on the earth, we are still finding new complexities and complications, which are beyond man’s understanding.

3. Find a cure for one disease, and a dozen others come to take its place.

4. The human body and its maladies are beyond the comprehension of the natural man.

V. Then There Is The Science Of The Human Mind, Mainly Developed In Our Time. The World Of Psychiatry.

1. In this realm of science, the human mind is being probed, analyzed, and investigated, but it is still beyond the mental grasp of the experts.

2. The human mind defies and defeats the best efforts to solve its problems.

3. Natural man, in his efforts to solve the problems of the human mind, has resorted to the practice of the witch doctor.

a. Sorcery - drugs. The word “sorcery” comes from the same word from which we get the word pharmaceutical. When the Bible speaks of the harlot of religion and her sorcery, it refers to the use of drugs.

b. Psychiatry has resorted to hypnotism – deviltry in its lowest form.

c. Shock treatments and other devilish practices.

4. All of these have been brought into the investigation of the human mind, the science of the human mind.

VI. Third, There Is The Science Of Human Relationships, Called Sociology. This Is The Study Of Human Beings Living Together, Whether It Be Two, Or Whether It Be Communities Or Nations In What We Call Society.

1. This is a department of study into which multitudes are investing their lives, and billions of dollars are being spent.

2. It studies the problems of people coexisting, getting along together, and when you expand it to nations, the problems are perplexing.

3. The psychologist and counselors have come to the pulpit and replaced the preacher in dealing with the human relations problems of marriage, sin, premarital sex, etceteras.

4. The results have been disastrous.

VII. Then, There Is The Science That Has To Do With Human Races.

1. Racism has always been a major problem.

2. Billions of dollars have been spent in an attempt to understand the various races in an effort to reconcile their differences.

3. One race is characterized by certain things, another race by another set of things, and this has created a world problem.

4. Look at America for example, every day there is some new accusation of racism. Jesus knew the magnitude of this problem. In Matthew 24 He said, “wars and rumors of wars” would mark the final days, “nation against nation.”

a. The word which we have translated as “nations,” is “ethnos.” The real meaning is ethnic or race. Jesus said that race would rise against race.

5. At the end of World War II the great colonial powers began to withdraw from their colonial empires, after which ethnic wars of the end time began to break out. Race against race.

6. In Africa it is tribe against tribe. It is not race according to color but according to tribe, but it is the same thing, race against race, ethnic against ethnic.

a. We see it in Bosnia, in Armenia, Azerbaijan, around the world.

7. This racial problem is beyond the help of natural man.

VIII.Finally, There Is That Whole Realm Which Is A Complete Science In Itself, And Has To Do With Human Nature, Particularly With Sin In Human Nature.

1. This has occupied man from the beginning.

2. Sin in human nature, what a world that is.

3. Man believes that he evolved from a lower form of life, and that environment determined his evolution.

4. The science of human nature believes you can change man by changing his environment.

The first urban renewal in America was based on this belief. Its theory was that if you change the environment, you will change the man. The first experiment was in the state of Pennsylvania, in the city of Philadelphia. One billion dollars was spent in taking that ghetto and transforming it into a beautiful place, with everything new. I remember seeing on television the march of the people into the new paradise. What a day! All the criminals are going to be changed. We’re moving them out of the old environment, and putting them into a new environment. Surely they are going to be renewed.

Ten years later I was in the city of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. I asked a cab driver to take me to have a look at the Urban Renewal. Do you know what I found? Doors were hanging off of their hinges, windows were broken, plumbing had been traded for wine. The project was a ghetto again. The whole neighborhood had reverted back to type. It is not the environment, it is what the man is by nature that must be changed.

5. When man sinned against God, he became a sinner by nature. It isn’t what he does it is what he is. He is a sinner, to change him he must be born again.

6. The behavioral engineers say a man is wicked because he is poor. But the only difference between sin in ghettos, and sin in high places is, the high places cover the stench with cologne.

7. What a sin to say a man is a criminal because he is poor. I, and millions like me resent the teaching that man is a criminal because he is poor.

I grew up in a world where poor folks called us poor. We never stole anything. We were not criminals. We never hurt our neighbor. It isn’t our environment that causes us to sin.

8. God says man is born in sin. Sin is in his nature. Religion cannot change him; he must be “born again.”

9. Wherever you find the “old man” he is the same. It doesn’t matter if it is in Africa, Europe, or in Asia.

10. Man acts like he acts because that is what he is. Sin is a state of being. By one man’s sin all were made sinners (Rom. 5:19). This truth has been lost in much of the Gospel preaching today.

11. We tell ourselves that some people are naturally better than others. The works of the flesh, murder, fornication, adultery, emulation, strife, hatred, sorcery, wrath, sedition, heresies, drunkenness, and revellings are all in every man and every woman, born of a woman. The possibility of you being a serial killer is there.

12. I don’t know why we, who know God, are surprised at the terrible atrocities that man commits against himself. The Bible told us that this is what man is. He is totally depraved in his affections, in his conscience, in his thinking, in his action. That is man.

IX. There You Have Five Great Worlds Forming A Universe All Related To Man, Mankind.

1. All of this came in with man.

2. The more man has labored with these problems, the worse they have become.

3. God tells us in His word that man’s problems are with perplexity; they are beyond him.

4. Man in himself is hopelessly caught in a web, and cannot extricate himself. The leopard cannot change his spots.

5. Is there an answer? (I ask you because you are going to go forth from this school to preach a Gospel that is the only hope of this generation, or any generation. I look at our time, the rapes, the drive-by-shootings, the terrible disregard for human life, and it is easy for you and I to think that this is the worst time history has ever known. It is the worst time I have known in my seven decades of being here. But I can tell you

it’s not the worst of history. It’s just the bottom of the barrel where man always arrives when he forgets Christ, the Bible tells it, and history proves it. There is only one answer. Only one! “If any man be in Christ there is a new creation” (2Cor. 5:17).

6. In the new birth, God remakes man, and all God makes is good.

7. Whenever a man is born again there is no racism in that man. God will deal with all that is not Christ. Whenever a man is born again there is in him the nature of God, and wherever you find this new creation he is always the same.

8. Some have progressed further than others, they have been a Christian longer, or they have had more opportunity to be influenced by more true preaching of the Gospel, and they have advanced further. But all by nature are the same. This is the answer. There are no racists in the family of God.

I have preached in a lot of countries of Africa. Some of the greatest friends I have are there. We find racism by color, “black against white, white against black,” and racism by tribe.

9. But if any man be in Christ there is a new creation, old things, old prejudices, old racism, all of these things pass away. God becomes the center of the affection, then we become color blind.

10. It doesn’t matter what language we speak if we are birthed of God we all have the nature of God.

11. The sickness problem is solved in Christ. “…by His stripes we are healed” (Is. 53:5). There is not a sickness know to man that wasn’t comprehended in Christ at Calvary. Jesus Christ is the answer, the only answer to all the perplexities of life.

12. In America we have a program that has spread to many parts of the world called “Teen Challenge.” It deals with drug addicts and such the like. The government of America made a five million dollar study of that program and they found that it was 86% successful.

13. Thus, 86 out of every 100 drug addicts that came there to know Christ, and were taught of Christ, were delivered and stayed that way.

14. The government program has 1%. Less than 1 out of 100 remained. They saw the answer was one thing, “Jesus Christ.” The difference in the programs was Jesus Christ.

15. The government disregarded the program. But you and I must preach and preach it strong, there is an answer to these perplexing problems and that answer is one, “The Lord Jesus Christ.”