The Hero of the Ages

Romans 8:31-39

INTRO:
Good evening. For this evening I would like to again venture into the sermons of the preacher I was named after, DeWitt Talmage, and present another to you with minor adjustments. I find the lessons in these sermons just as applicable today as they were in the 1800’s. They serve to show us that though the presentation may change, God’s word does not change and we can learn from it as clearly as they could over 100 years ago.

Our scripture for this evening is Romans 8:31-39 – “31. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32. He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? 33. Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. 34. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. 35. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36. As it is written: "For Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.'' 37. Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. 38. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, 39. nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In particular here I want us to notice verse 34; Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.

Paul flung his challenge of the text to the feet of all ecclesiastical and civil authority—synagogues and Neros. He feared neither sword nor lion, earth nor hell. Diocletian slew seventeen thousand under his administration, and the world has been full of persecution; but all the persecutors of the world could not frighten Paul. Was it because he was physically strong? Oh, no! I suppose he was very much weakened by exposure and maltreatment. Was it because he was lacking in sensitiveness? No; you find the most delicate shades of feeling playing in and out of his letters and his sermons. Some of his communications burst into tears. What was it that lifted Paul into this triumphant mood? The thought of a Savior dead, a Savior risen, a Savior exalted, a Savior interceding!

We all have had or still have heroes. People real or fictional that to us seem larger then life, able to do things that we find amazing. All the world has sung the praise of Princess Diana. To a great many she was a modern hero celebrated for her charity work and her support of the ban of landmines. Diana was involved with dozens of charities, many focused on children, and through her efforts and advocation raised awareness and help for people affected with HIV/AIDS, cancer and mental illness. The Princess developed an intense interest in serious illnesses and health-related matters outside the purview of traditional royal involvement, including AIDS and leprosy. In recognition of her effect as a philanthropist, Stephen Lee, director of the UK Institute of Charity Fundraising Managers, said "Her overall effect on charity is probably more significant than any other person's in the 20th century." She was the patroness of charities and organizations who worked with the homeless, youth, drug addicts, and the elderly. She was president of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, patron of the Natural History Museum, and president of the Royal Academy of Music. President of Barnardo's, a charity to care for vulnerable children and young people. Patron of the British Red Cross and supported its organizations in other countries such as Australia and Canada. She made several lengthy visits each week to Royal Brompton Hospital, where she worked to comfort seriously ill or dying patients. She was a patron of Headway, a brain injury association, and became the first patron of Chester Childbirth Appeal. She helped her friend Julia Samuel launch the charity Child Bereavement UK which supports children "of military families, those of suicide victims, [and] terminally-ill parents.” She was loved and cherished by many. Her efforts for those who were suffering made her a hero. But I have to tell you that when our race was suffering and dying the Lord Jesus stooped down and gave us the kiss of His everlasting love, and perished that we might live. “It is Christ that died.”

I. Can you tell me how tender-hearted Paul could find anything to rejoice at in the horrible death scene of Calvary? We weep at funerals, we are sympathetic when we see a stranger die; when a murderer steps into the execution chamber we pray for his departing spirit; and how could Paul—the great-hearted Paul—find anything to be pleased with at the death of Jesus? Beside that, Christ had only recently died, and the sorrow was fresh in the memory of the world, and how in the fresh memory of a Savior’s death could Paul be exalted?
A. It was because Paul saw in that death—his own deliverance, and the deliverance of mankind from still worse disaster; he saw the gap into which mankind must plunge, and he saw the bleeding hands of Christ close it. The glittering steel on the top of the executioner’s spear in his sight kindled into a torch to light men the way heavenward.
B. The persecutors saw over the cross five words written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; but Paul saw over the cross of Christ only one word—“atonement!” He heard in the dying groan of Christ his own groan of eternal torture taken by another. Paul said to himself, “Had it not been that Christ volunteered in my behalf, those would have been my mauled hands and feet, my gashed side, my crimson temples.”
C. Men of great physical endurance have sometimes carried very heavy burdens—three hundred pounds, four hundred pounds—and they have still said, “My strength is not yet tested; put on more weight.” But after a while they were compelled to cry out, “Stop! I can carry no more.”
1. But the burden of Christ was unlimited. First, there was his own burden of hunger and thirst and bereavement, and a thousand outrages that have been heaped upon him, and on top of that burden were the sorrows of his poor mother, and on the top of those burdens the crimes of the ruffians who were executing him. “Stop!” you cry, “it is enough; Christ can bear no more.” And Christ says, “Roll on more burdens; roll on me the sins of this entire Jewish nation, and after that, roll on me the sins of the inhabited earth, and then roll on me the sins of the thousands of years past, so far as those sins have been forgiven.”
2. The angels of God, seeing the awful pressure, might cry, “Stop! He can bear no more.” And the blood rushing to the nostril and lip seems to cry out, “Enough! He can endure no more.” But Christ says, “Roll on a greater burden—roll on the sins of the next thousands of years, roll on me the sins of all the succeeding ages, roll on me the agonies of hell, ages on ages, the furnaces and the prison-houses and the tortures.” That is what the Bible means when it says, “He bore our sins, and carried our sorrows.”
D. “Now,” says Paul, “I am free; that suffering purchased my deliverance; God never collects a debt twice; I have a receipt in full; if God is satisfied with me, then what do all the threats of earth and hell amount to?” “Bring on all your witnesses,” says Paul; “show all your force; do your worst against my soul; I defy you; I dare you; I challenge you. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died.”
E. What a strong argument that puts in the hand of every Christian! Some day all the past sins of our life come down on us in fiery troop, and they pound away at the gate of our soul, and they say, “We have come for your arrest. Any one of us could overcome you; we are ten thousand strong; surrender!” And we open the door, and single-handed and alone we contend against that troop; we fling this divine weapon into their midst, we scatter those sins as quick as you can think it. “It is Christ that died.” Why, then, bring up to us the sins of our past life? What have we to do with those obsolete things?
F. You know how hard it is for a salvage company to bring up anything that is lost near the shore of the sea; but suppose something be lost half-way between Liverpool and New York; it cannot be found, it cannot be fetched up. “Now,” says God, “your sins I have cast into the depths of the sea.” Mid-Atlantic! All the machinery ever fashioned in foundries of darkness, and launched from the doors of eternal death, working for ten thousand years, cannot bring up one of our sins that is forgiven and forgotten and sunken into the depths of the sea. When a sin is pardoned, it is gone—it is gone out of the books, it is gone out of the memory, it is gone out of existence. “Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” (Hebrews 8:12)
G. From other tragedies men have come away exhausted and nervous and sleepless; but there is one tragedy that soothes and calms and saves. Calvary was the stage on which it was enacted, the curtain of the night falling at mid-noon was the drop scene, the thunder of falling rocks the orchestra, angels in galleries and devils in the pit the spectators, the tragedy a crucifixion. “It is Christ that died.” Oh, triumphant thought!
H. If you go through a museums picture gallery year after year you will find changes there. I once said to a friend who had been through the galleries of Versailles, “Are they as they were before the French war?” and I was told there was a great change there; that all that multitude of pictures which represented Napoleonic triumphs had been taken away, and in the frames were other pictures representative of Germanic triumph and victory.
1. Would that all the scenes of Satanic triumph in our world might be blotted out, and that the whole world might be a picture-gallery representing the triumphant Jesus!
2. Down with the monarchy of transgression! Up with the monarchy of our King! Hail! Jesus, Hail!
II. Allow me to give you the second cause of Paul’s exhilaration. If Christ had stayed in that grave we never would have gotten out of our graves. The grave would have been dark and dismal as the Paris City Prison during the Reign of Terror in France, where the carts came up only to take the victims out to the scaffold. I do not wonder that the ancients tried by embalmment of the body to resist the dissolution of death. The grave would be the darkest, deepest, ghastliest chasm that was ever opened if there be no light from the resurrection throne streaming into it; but Christ stayed in the tomb all Friday night and all Saturday, all Saturday night, and a part of Sunday morning. He stayed so long in the tomb that he might fit it for us when we go there. He tarried two whole nights in the grave, so that he saw how important it was to have plenty of light, and he has flooded it with his own glory.
A. In my mind I see it is early Sunday morning, and we start up to find the grave of Christ. We find the morning sun gilding the dew, and the shrubs are sweet as the foot crushes them. What a beautiful place to be buried in! Wonder they did not treat Christ as well when he was alive as they do now that he is dead. Give the military salute to the soldiers who stand guarding the dead. But hark to the crash! an earthquake! The soldiers fall back as though they were dead, and the stone at the door of Christ’s tomb rolls away.
1. Come forth, O Jesus! From the darkness into the sunlight. Come forth, and breathe the perfume of Joseph’s garden. Christ comes forth radiant, and as he steps out of the excavation of the rock, I look down into the excavation, and in the distance I see others coming hand-in-hand, and troop after troop, and I find it is a long procession of the precious dead. Among them are our own loved ones—father, mother, brother, sister, companion, children—coming up out of the excavation of the rock until the last one has stepped out into the light, and I am bewildered, and I cannot understand the scene until I see Christ wave his hand over the advancing procession from the rock, and hear him say, “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” And then I notice that the long dirge of the world’s woe suddenly stops at the angelic proclamation of “He is risen”! “go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead”!
2. My friends, if Christ had not broken out of the grave you and I would never came out of it. It would have been another case of John Brown attempting to free the slaves, himself hanged. It would have been Death and Christ in a grapple, with Death the victor. The black flag would have floated on all the graves and mausoleums of the dead, and hell would have conquered the forces of Heaven, and captured the ramparts of God, and Satan would have come to coronation in the palaces of Heaven, and it would have been devils on the throne and sons of God in the dungeon.
3. No, no! When that stone was rolled from the door of Christ’s grave, it was hurled with such a force that it crashed in all the grave-doors of Christendom, and now the tomb is only a bower where God’s children take a siesta, an afternoon nap, to wake up in mighty invigoration. “He is risen.” Hang that lamp among all the tombs of my dead. Hang it over my own resting-place. Christ’s suffering is ended; His work is done. The darkest afternoon of the world’s history becomes the brightest Sunday morning of its resurrection joy. The Friday of bitter memories becomes the Sunday of glorious transformation and resurrection.

Ye mourning saints, dry every tear
For your departed Lord.
Behold the place: he is not here;
The tomb is all unbarred.
The gates of death were closed in vain,
The Lord is risen, he lives again.

III. I give you the third cause of Paul’s exhilaration. We honor the right hand more than we do the left. If in accident or battle we must lose one hand, let it be the left. The left hand being nearer the heart, we may not do much of the violent works of life with that hand without physical danger; but he who has the right arm in full play has the mightiest of all earthly weapons.
A. In all ages and in all languages the right hand is the symbol of strength and power and honor. Hiram sat at the right hand of Solomon. Then we have the term, “He is a right-hand man.” Lafayette was Washington’s right-hand man; Marshal Ney was Napoleon’s right-hand man.
B. Now you have the meaning of Paul when he speaks of Christ, who is at the right hand of God. That means He is the first guest of Heaven. He has a right to sit there. The Hero of the universe! Count his wounds; two in the feet, two in the hands, one in the side—five wounds. Oh! you have counted wrong. These are not half the wounds. Look at the sever wounds in the temples; each thorn a wound, look at His bloody back, scourged with cruelty.
1. If a hero comes back from battle, and he take off his hat, or roll up his sleeve, and show you the scar of a wound gotten at Ball’s Bluff or at Fredericktown, you stand in admiration at his heroism and patriotism; but if Christ should make conspicuous the five wounds gotten on Calvary—that Waterloo of all the ages—he would display only a small part of his wounds.
2. Wounded all over, let Him sit at the right hand of God. He has a right to sit there. By the request of God, the Father, and the unanimous suffrage of all heaven, let Him sit there. In the grand review, when the redeemed pass by in cohorts of splendor, they will look at Him and shout “Victory!”
C. The inhabitant of heaven never saw a grander day than the one when Christ took the right hand of God. Hosanna! With lips of clay I may not appropriately utter it, but let the martyrs under the altar throw the cry to the elders before the throne, and they can toss it to the choir on the sea of glass until all heaven shall lift it—some on point of scepter, and some on string of harp, and some on the tip of the green branches. Hosanna! hosanna!
IV. Yet let me declare a fourth cause of Paul’s exhilaration. Oh! my friends, there will be so many things going on in heaven, I have sometimes wondered if the Lord would not forget you and me!
A. Had I been in Paul’s place I would have thought sometimes: “I wonder that God doesn’t forget me down here in Antioch and in the prison and in the shipwreck. There are so many sailors, so many wayfarers, so many prisoners, so many heart-broken men,” I would think, “perhaps God may forget me. And then I am so vile a sinner. How I tried to destroy those Christians! With what vengeance I dashed down to Damascus! Oh! It will take a mighty attorney to plead my cause and get me free.”
B. But just at that moment there comes something mightier than the surges that dashed Paul’s ship, swifter than his trip to Damascus. It is the swift and overwhelming thought of Christ’s intercession.
C. My friends, we must have an advocate. A poor lawyer is worse than no lawyer at all. We must have one who is able successfully to present our cause before God. Where is he? Who is he? There is only one advocate in all the universe that can plead our cause in the last judgment, that can plead our cause before God in the great tribunal.
1. Sometimes in earthly courts attorneys have specialties, and one man succeeds better in patent cases, another in insurance cases, another in criminal cases, another in land cases, another in will cases, and his success generally depends upon his sticking to that specialty.
2. I have to tell you that Christ can do many things; but it seems to me that his specialty is to take the bad case of the sinner and plead it before God until he gets eternal acquittal. Yes! We must have him for our advocate.
D. But what plea can He make?
1. Sometimes an attorney in court will plead the innocence of the prisoner. That would be inappropriate for us; we are all guilty! guilty! Unclean! unclean! Christ, our advocate, will not plead our innocence.
2. Sometimes the attorney in court tries to prove an alibi. He says: “This prisoner was not at the scene; he was in some other place at the time.” Such a plea will not do in our case. The Lord found us in all our sins, and in the very place of our iniquity. It is impossible to prove an alibi.
3. Sometimes an attorney will plead the insanity of the prisoner, and say he is irresponsible on that account. That plea will never do in our case. We sinned against light, against knowledge, against the dictates of our own consciences; we knew what we were doing.
4. What, then, shall the plea be? The plea for our eternal deliverance will be Christ’s own martyrdom. He will say: “Look at all these wounds. By all these sufferings I demand the rescue of this person from sin and death and hell. Constable, knock off the shackles—let the prisoner go free.” “Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.”

CONCLUSION:
Why all this gladness on the faces of these sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty? I know what you are thinking of. A Savior dead, a Savior risen, a Savior exalted, a Savior interceding. “What,” say you, “is all that for me?” All! It is all! Never let me hear you complaining about anything again. With your pardoned sin behind you, and a successful Christ pleading above you, and a glorious heaven before you, how can you be despondent about anything?

“But,” says some man in the audience, “all that is very good and very true for those who are inside the kingdom; but how about those of us who are outside?” Then I say, Come into the kingdom, come out of the prison-house into the glorious sunlight of God’s mercy and pardon, and come now.

We know that a dictatorship is a form of government characterized by the absolute rule of one person or a very small group of people who hold all political power. The dictatorship often maintains power by employing oppressive methods. It is an old form of government with origins in ancient Rome. Recent examples include Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, Stalin and the Communist Party in Russia and Benito Mussolini and the National Fascist Party in Italy. Once a dictatorship is in power it often uses unlawful methods to cement itself in power. It may imprison, exile or assassinate political opponents, change any constitution that exists, manipulate the press, and subvert the rule of law. A dictatorship closely aligns itself with the military and is often seen as a high general, the commander.

My friends, sin is the worst of all Dictatorships; it is the tyrant of tyrants; it has built a prison house for our soul; it plots our death; it has shorn us for the sacrifice, but, blessed be God, this morning we hear the sounds of God’s gracious deliverance pounding against the door of our prison. Deliverance has come. Light breaks through all the wards of the prison. Revolution! Revolution! “Where sin abounded, grace does much more abound, that whereas sin reigned unto death, even so grace may reign unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” What a glorious truth! A Savior dead, a Savior risen, a Savior exalted, a Savior interceding!

Would that He be your savior too! If you have heard the gospel message and it has led you to believe in Jesus, then you need to repent of your sins and confess that belief and be baptized for the remission of your sins. God is faithful and if you do these things He will wash away your sins and add you to His Kingdom, His church. If perhaps you are a Christian and somehow your foot has slipped, you may become right with God by asking for forgiveness. If anyone has this need or desires the prayers of faithful Christians on their behalf, we encourage them to come forward while we stand and sing.
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Reference Sermon: DeWitt Talmage