salvation

The New Birth’s New Nature

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God Leave a comment

Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. -John 1:13

Now, brothers and sisters, we were by nature, as many of us as have been saved, the heirs of wrath even as others. It does not matter how godly our parents were, the first birth brought us no spiritual life, for the promise is not to them which are born of blood, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but only to those who are born of God, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh”; you cannot make anything else and there it abides, and the flesh, or carnal mind, abideth in death; “it is not reconciled to God, neither indeed can be.” He who is born into this world but once, and knows nothing of the new birth, must place himself among the seed of the serpent, for only by regeneration can we know ourselves to be the true seed. How does God deal with us who are His called and chosen ones? He means to save us, and how does He work to that end? …He comes to us in mercy. That is the very first work of grace. There was peace between us and Satan once; when he tempted we yielded; whatever he taught us we believed; we were his willing slaves. But perhaps you, my brethren, can recollect when first of all you began to feel uneasy and dissatisfied; the world’s pleasures no longer pleased you; all the juice seemed to have been taken out of the apple, and you had nothing at all. Then you suddenly perceived that you were living in sin, and you were miserable about it, and though you could not get rid of sin yet you hated it, and sighed over it, and cried, and groaned…The Lord, in infinite mercy, dropped the divine life into your soul…Ah, then you saw how sin could be overthrown, did you not? As soon as your heart understood Christ then you saw that what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, Christ was able to accomplish, and that the power of sin and Satan under which you had been in bondage, and which you now loathed, could and would be broken and destroyed because Christ had come into the world to overcome it. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1326.cfm

 

 

Glory Be to Christ! For Satan is Foiled!

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation Leave a comment

…He shall bruise thy head… -Genesis 3:15

Though Satan is not dead, my brethren, I was about to say, would God he were, and though he is not converted, and never will be, nor will the malice of his heart ever be driven from him, yet Christ has so far broken his head that he has missed his mark altogether. He intended to make the human race the captives of his power, but they are redeemed from his iron yoke. God has delivered many of them, and the day shall come when He will cleanse the whole earth from the serpent’s slimy trail, so that the entire world shall be full of the praises of God. He thought that this world would be the arena of his victory over God and good, instead of which it is already the grandest theatre of divine wisdom, love, grace, and power. Even heaven itself is not so resplendent with mercy as the earth is, for here it is the Saviour poured out His blood, which cannot be said even of the courts of paradise above. Moreover he thought, no doubt, that when he had led our race astray and brought death upon them, he had effectually marred the Lord’s work. He rejoiced that they would all pass under the cold seal of death, and that their bodies would rot in the sepulchre. Had he not spoiled the handiwork of his great Lord? God may make man as a curious creature with intertwisted veins and blood and nerves, and sinews and muscles, and He may put into his nostrils the breath of life; but, “Ah,” saith Satan, “I have infused a poison into him which will make him return to the dust from which he was taken.” but now, behold, our Champion whose heel was bruised has risen from the dead, and given us a pledge that all His followers shall rise form the dead also. Thus is Satan foiled, for death shall not retain a bone, nor a piece of a bone, of one of those who belonged to the woman’s Seed. At the trump of the archangel from the earth and from the sea they shall arise, and this shall be their shout, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” Satan, knowing this, feels already that by the resurrection his head is broken. Glory be to the Christ of God for this! ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1326.cfm

Oh, the Triumph of That Hour!

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, The Father Leave a comment

…and thou shalt bruise His heel. -Genesis 3:15 

You know how all His life long His heel, that is, His lower part, His human nature, was perpetually being made to suffer. He carried our sicknesses and sorrows. But the bruising came mainly when both in body and in mind His whole human nature was made to agonize; when His soul was exceeding sorrowful even unto death, and His enemies pierced His hands and His feet, and He endured the shame and pain of death by crucifixion. Look at your Master and your King upon the cross, all disdained with blood and dust! There was His heel most cruelly bruised. When they take down that precious body and wrap it in fair white linen and in spices, and lay it in Joseph’s tomb, they weep as they handle the casket in which the Deity had dwelt, for there again Satan had bruised His heel. It was not merely that God had bruised Him, “though it pleased the Father to bruise Him,” but the devil had let loose Herod, and Pilate, and Caiaphas, and the Jews, and the Romans, all of them his tools, upon Him whom he knew to be the Christ, so that He was bruised of the old serpent. That is all, however! It is only His heel, not His head, which is bruised! For lo, the Champion rises again; the bruise was not mortal nor continual. Though He dies, yet still so brief is the interval in which He slumbers in the tomb that His holy body hath not seen corruption, and He comes forth perfect and lovely in His manhood, rising from His grave as from a refreshing sleep after so long a day of unresting toil! Oh the triumph of that hour! As Jacob only halted on his thigh when he overcame the angel, so did Jesus only retain a scar in His heel, and that He bears to the skies as His glory and beauty. Before the throne He looks like a lamb that has been slain, but in the power of an endless life He liveth unto God. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1326.cfm

 

The Peerless Champion

Sherry Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, prophecy, salvation Leave a comment

Of the woman’s Seed it was henceforth said,

Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness: therefore God, Thy God, hath anointed Thee with the oil of gladness above Thy fellows. -Psalm 45:7 

The Seed of the woman by promise is to champion the cause, and oppose the dragon. That seed is the Lord Jesus Christ…As soon as He publicly came forward upon the stage of action, thirty years after, Satan met Him foot to foot. You know the story of the temptation in the wilderness, and how there the woman’s Seed fought with him who was a liar from the beginning. The devil assailed Him thrice with all the artillery of flattery, malice, craft and falsehood, but the peerless champion stood unwounded, and chased His foeman from the field. Then our Lord set up His kingdom, and called one and another unto Him, and carried the war into the enemy’s country…Yea, and He made His own disciples mighty against the evil one, for in His name they cast out devils, till Jesus said, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.”

Then there came a second personal conflict, for I take it that Gethsemane’s sorrows were to a great degree caused by a personal assault of Satan, for our Master said, “This is your hour, and the power of darkness.” He said also, “The Prince of this world cometh.” What a struggle it was. Though Satan had nothing in Christ, yet did he seek if possible to lead Him away from completing His great sacrifice, and there did our Master sweat as it were great drops of blood, falling to the ground, in the agony which it cost Him to contend with the fiend. Then it was that our Champion began the last fight of all and won it to the bruising of the serpent’s head. Nor did He end it till He had spoiled principalities and powers and made a show of them openly.

“Lo, by the sons of hell He dies;
But as He hangs ‘twixt earth and skies,
He gives their prince a fatal blow,
And triumphs o’er the powers below” 

~C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1326.cfm

 

 

The Conflict and the Conquest

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit Leave a comment

And I will put enmity between…thy seed and her Seed; He shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel…. -Genesis 3:15

There was evidently to be in the world a Seed of the woman on God’s side against the serpent, and a seed of the serpent that should always be upon the evil side even as it is unto this day. The Church of God and the synagogue of Satan both exist. We see an Abel and a Cain, an Isaac and an Ishmael, a Jacob and an Esau; those that are born after the flesh, being the children of their father the devil, for his works they do, but those that are born again-being born after the Spirit, after the power of the life of Christ, are thus in Christ Jesus the Seed of the woman, and contend earnestly against the dragon and his seed. Here, too, the great fact of the sufferings of Christ is clearly foretold-“Thou shalt bruise His heel.” Within the compass of those words, we find the whole story of our Lord’s sorrows from Bethlehem to Calvary. “He shall bruise thy head”: there is the breaking of Satan’s regal power, there is the clearing away of sin, there is the destruction of death by resurrection, there is the leading of captivity captive in the ascension, there is the victory of truth in the world through the descent of the Spirit, and there is the latter-day glory in which Satan shall be bound, and there is, lastly, the casting of the evil one and all his followers into the lake of fire. The conflict and the conquest are both in the compass of these few fruitful words. They may not have been fully understood by those who first heard them, but to us they are now full of light. The text at first looks like a flint, hard and cold; but sparks fly from it plentifully, for hidden fires of infinite love and grace lie concealed within…Over this promise of a gracious God we ought to rejoice exceedingly. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1326.cfm

A Stronger Foundation than Merit

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God 1 Comment

 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her Seed; He shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel. -Genesis 3:15

These words were not directly spoken to Adam and Eve, but they were directed distinctly to the serpent himself, and that  was of punishment to him for what he had done. It was a day of cruel triumph to him such joy as his dark mind is capable of had filled him, for he had indulged his malice, and gratified his spite. He had in the worst sense destroyed a part of God’s works, he had introduce sin into the new world, he had stamped the human race with his own image, and gained new forces to promote rebellion and to multiply transgression, and therefore he felt that sort of gladness which a fiend can know who bears a hell within him. But now God comes in, takes up the quarrel personally, and causes him to be disgraced on the very battle-field upon which he had gained a temporary success. He tells the dragon that He will undertake to deal with him; this quarrel shall not be between the serpent and man, but between God and the serpent. God saith, in solemn words, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, between thy seed and her Seed,” and He promised that there shall rise in fulness of time a champion, who, though He suffer, shall smite in a vital part the power of evil, and bruise the serpent’s head. This was the more, it seems to me, a comfortable message of mercy to Adam and Eve, because they would feel sure that the tempter would be punished, and as that punishment would involve blessing for them, the vengeance due to the serpent would be the guarantee of mercy to themselves. Perhaps, however, by thus obliquely giving the promise, the Lord meant to say, “Not for your sakes do I this, O fallen man and woman, nor for the sake of your descendants; but for My own name and honour’s sake, that it be not profaned and blasphemed amongst the fallen spirits. I undertake to repair the mischief which has been caused by the tempter, that My name and My glory may not be diminished among the immortal spirits who look down upon the scene.” …The divine sovereignty and glory afford us a stronger foundation of hope than merit, even if merit can be supposed to exist. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1326.cfm

The First Gospel Sermon

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God Leave a comment

-And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head,and you shall bruise His heel. Genesis 3:16

This is the first gospel sermon that was ever delivered upon the surface of this earth. It was memorable discourse indeed, with Jehovah Himself for the preacher, and the whole human race and the prince of darkness for the audience. Is it not remarkable that this great gospel promise should have been delivered so soon after the transgression? As yet no sentence had been pronounced upon either of the two human offenders, but the promise was given under the form of a sentence pronounced upon the serpent Not yet had the woman been condemned to painful travail, or the man to exhausting labour, or even the soil to the curse of thorn and thistle. Truly “mercy rejoiceth against judgment.” Before the Lord had said “dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return,” He was pleased to say that the Seed of the woman should bruise the serpent’s head. Let us rejoice, then, in the swift mercy of God, which in the early watches of the night of sin came with comfortable words unto us.

“Now is the hour of darkness past,
Christ has assumed His reigning power;
Behold the great accuser cast
Down from his seat to reign no more.”

~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1326.cfm