Transferring Guilt onto Christ — Genesis 3-4

0:00 Glad to be here this morning. My wife Rona is with me if she'd like to stand in case you hadn't met her before. She's the sister of Roger Meng and, we have been married about a month. And, I grew up not too far from here, just North of Grand Rapids in Michigan, in a small town of 3,000 named Sparta, and went to Western Michigan University in electrical engineering and then to what was then Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary, now Grand Rapids Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids. And with my first wife moved to the Southwest because of her health, she dying four and a half years ago, and we spent, have spent time in Las Cruces since 1980.

1:09 I'm in my fortieth year as pastor of the Evangelical Free Church there in Las Cruces, having been, how would you say, appointed pastor emeritus, as we transitioned to a younger senior pastor. And God has given opportunity to travel and teach and preach in different areas of The United States and also primarily in Mexico and Central Or South America. And one of the things that God has given me opportunity over the years to do is work, in areas of conflict resolution, particularly among Christians, and I'm certified with Peacemaker Ministries as a Christian conciliator. And one of the most helpful verses along those lines comes in Philippians two where it talks about not only listening out for our own interests but also for the interests of others. So I'm here this morning because you've invited me and really the Lord has appointed me to speak his word and to help each of us to not only be able to articulate our own interests but also to be able to draw out of others their interests whenever we have a difference of opinion, or a conflict so that we can walk in the unity of Christ that he has prayed for in John 17 in the high priestly prayer and fulfill the promise that he made that he would build his church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it.

3:36 So Cain was very angry. The Lord said, why are you angry? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door, its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. Go ahead.

5:02 That second aspect is probably one that you have not thought much of but as we will focus on from Isaiah 53, it is not only important that our sins be placed onto Christ but also the sins of others. And I will remind you that we read together that the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Now we could spend a lot of time discussing the atonement and what it means that all of the iniquity of all of us have been laid... Has been laid on him. And, of course, the significance of the fact that each of us has to make a decision to trust Christ as our Savior and ask God that he place our sins on Christ.

6:04 But there's something about the fact that all of our iniquity has been placed on Christ that we need to think about when we think about conflict and forgiveness and reconciliation. Let's look first at Genesis four and the things that we're told about transferring sins to a substitute. Sin was to be transferred to a substitute right from the start. As you remember, Abel, having learned from his parents, as God killed the animals and dressed Adam and Eve in the skins of those animals to show that their sin was placed on the animal as a substitute. And even there in Genesis three, we are told that the seed of the woman would be coming and that seed, of course, was the Messiah and he would crush the enemy.

8:23 Cain placed the idol of acceptance in place of God, and he's the one that determined and chose to determine what would be done for his acceptance. He set aside God's word, and he put his word in place and he said, this is the way it's going to be, and of course God showed him otherwise. But in the meantime he showed anger when he didn't get that acceptance from god and he retaliated against Abel as if Abel had done him wrong. In fact, it was Cain's anger against Abel that was the only wrong done. He went as far as to kill his brother Abel, and it was due to the idol of his heart that demanded acceptance.

9:36 And when someone else appeared that exposed his own idol and his grabbing ahold of his own right or claiming his own right to acceptance on his terms, that exposure drew out anger and that anger brought the death, the first death of a human being, the death of Abel by Cain. Abel had done nothing wrong And yet Cain was angry with him. God had warned him. God had warned him. And at most, Abel had exposed Cain's idol.

10:36 God warned him to rule over sinner or would rule over him. And yet he ignored that. And he went after his brother who exposed his idol. You may write this week or certainly in the last year, have experienced anger coming up in your heart against someone else. Did you ask yourself why is that anger there?

11:08 Was it because somebody exposed something about you, either something that made you envious or perhaps jealous? Was it the conviction of the Holy Spirit that you wanted to set aside? Since this time back here in Genesis, we as human beings have had that tendency to put on others the responsibility for our own sin and to have anger against them when they expose it. Anger is a tool given by god to overcome obstacles to biblical action. Sometimes, we can use anger in a constructive way to remove the obstacle and do the right thing when we lack courage.

12:10 Anger can move us to courage. When God calls us to defend someone that needs to be defended, anger can help us overcome those obstacles. But when anger chooses to overcome an obstacle that we believe is an obstacle but is actually a protection for someone else, we're taking God's role into our own hands. And often in conflict that's what happens. We begin to take God's role and our anger goes out to remove a barrier that was put there to keep us in line, and we step over it, and we violate God's law, and we violate other people.

14:16 When someone dismisses you or, as I think all of us have experienced, young people who have been slighted by a friend often get angry and act as if they don't value that friendship and, oh, I don't need that anyway. And that's the kind of thing that we see here with Cain and the kind of thing that goes all the way through the human race. That is our tendency. Over the forty years that I have been associated with the congregation in Las Cruces, I have experienced from time to time people's anger and hurt over things that do not merit the kind of anger or, how would you say, cry for justice that they are bringing. I can recall a situation where a young Christian had fallen down in his responsibility and, in fact, owed completion of work as a contractor that he was finding difficult to attain.

15:38 The challenge, though, was that the people who had given him the money got angry and cut him off from being able to complete the job. And so there we had not only the responsibility of the young Christian but also the responsibility of the Christian, the older Christian, who then came to the leaders of the church and cried out for judgment against the young Christian, in fact cried out that they go to the courts to punish that person and even desired that that person go to jail for an offense that was at best partial and not nearly as complete as those that should have known better were claiming. When the leadership of the church, including myself, did not respond to their demands they got angry at me and worked within the church, I would say, to unseat me as pastor. Now over the years if a person is in a congregation for two, three decades or so there are things about that pastor who, which may be offensive and may, how would you say, build up in people's minds so that they could desire that God move them on to some other place, but that does not justify a a plan to unseat a pastor over the conception of a particular person who's in a situation where they're trying to do as Cain did to Abel and claim that it was, in that case, Abel who had the problem and he needed to be judged to the point of death.

17:55 And so that is a situation that I personally have gone through and many situations of lesser seriousness and lesser overt anger. But I bring that to show that in most congregations from time to time we have those same kinds of issues going on and we need to look back in the scriptures and look at the principles that the scriptures teach us and the situations and try to match them to what we experience. And principle number two that I see here in this passage in Genesis four is as follows: when we refuse to transfer the guilt of ourselves and the guilt of others to Christ, we try to transfer it to those that we judge and even try to silence or neutralize them. In that case that I've described in general terms in my history, that is what was going on I believe. But often just even in our own hearts and our own families in much more, much less noticeable ways, we do the same thing.

20:44 And so transfer whatever the situation was. Perhaps there was a slight on my part, perhaps I missed something that I should have understood as my responsibility as a husband, or perhaps she saw something in my eyes that was like what she saw in her stepfather but as we discussed I was not her stepfather and we could move beyond that. But it had to be a choice to transfer the sin of that previous situation to Christ and off of me so that there would not be a barrier between the two of us. Let me ask you, have you learned how to do that? First, have you learned how to identify when something you're going through that produces hurt in you is not about the person that you are in communication with or in relationship with right now but it's about a previous situation that has not yet been resolved.

21:55 It's about a situation that was including you and someone sinned against you or maybe you sinned against somebody else and that hasn't been resolved. And now a situation comes up and like Cain your idol of a desire for acceptance in spite of perhaps action on your part that wasn't proper, desire for acceptance, you're demanding that acceptance. And when someone doesn't give it you move to punish them by withdrawing affection or withdrawing your presence or by speaking in anger towards them or by speaking to somebody else about them in that situation rather than resolving it with you? When we when we've used to transfer that guilt to Christ and we try to transfer it to those that we judge, we can try to silence them or even neutralize them. There are many other places in the bible that that occurs, but this one with Cain and Abel is certainly the first one and gives us all the principles.

24:55 Do we realize that it says here in Isaiah 50 three:six, And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Not only my iniquity, the things in my heart that no one else knows, but also the iniquity of the person that would hurt me or the person who has hurt me. And if the Lord has laid on Christ the iniquity of us all, should we not also learn what it means and practice laying on Christ the iniquity of us all? I think so. You see, this is a call to transfer our guilt and others' guilt to Christ After, of course, discerning if there is real guilt.

25:58 Remember in the part of Abel, there was no guilt. The guilt belonged to Cain. Sometimes, there is no sin against us and it is simply our hurt. It is simply us transferring the guilt of a person in the past who has hurt us onto somebody else in the present who by their behavior has triggered those memories and we are ready to back away from them, we are ready to ignore them, we're ready even to judge them and sometimes speak against them to other people when it is simply something that we have experienced before, and we may be so convinced of that because we feel just as bad as when we were hurt in that earlier situation when there was sin against us. Those in that situation that I described earlier in the church that I served, those that demanded the justice and that that young Christian be taken before the law and go to jail went so far as leaving the church because they did not get what they believed was justice in dealing with that situation.

27:30 And yet here, probably five to six years after that, I saw them out in public and they came to me and acted as if nothing had ever happened, and they treated me warmly, and you could tell that there was some nervousness there because they probably had realized how much they had overstepped them their bounds in that earlier situation and yet they could not bring that out. Had they not transferred sin? Yes, that real sin that that young Christian had done against them onto Christ. Had they not had the courage to say, you know, we realize that there were many things that were bothering us during that time and we heaped them all together and we put them on him and we put them on you and we put them on the leadership of the church because we didn't know what to do with it. It would have been great had they been able to do that but they came and wondered how I was doing and acting as if nothing had happened.

28:56 And if they continue to go in the future how likely is it that that will happen again in some other case? Because what will build up in them is that residue from all of those offenses and hurts and lacks of carrying out of justice that they wanted to see and someone else will get the whole load. And so we're called in this passage to transfer our guilt and others' guilts after discerning if there really is guilt. On the other hand I have learned over the years to realize that being in a fallen world and being a fallen person myself, there are times when I offend someone not knowing that I have done that, not intending to offend them. And I will say that I was raised with the idea that if you didn't intend to hurt someone that you haven't hurt them but that's not true.

30:12 Even when we don't intend to hurt someone we in fact can hurt them. And so I've learned that I can go to someone and say, please forgive me, I didn't realize that what I did hurt you, but in fact you are hurt and I'm sorry. Different people need to hear it in different ways, but we can work on that with each individual. Not only do we have the illustration of Cain and Abel, but also David and Saul. Remember that Saul was angry at David even though David had done no wrong to Saul.

31:06 He had just showed up Saul's sin and Saul tried to silence David and he craved the honor that was going to David. What was Saul's idol? Saul's honor, idol was honor or respect, and he demanded that David bow down to that idol and give the honor that was going to David to him. He demanded it. The man that stood up to the giant, Goliath, when no one else would do that, was now the target of the spear of the king because of the king's hardness of heart, because of the demand for respect or honor.

32:11 We know from Ephesians five that the husband is to love the wife as Christ loved the church and present her complete before Christ. And we know that the wife is to respect her husband. And many of the conflicts in marriage happen when there is either lack of respect on the part of the wife or love on the part of the husband. And the key is who's going to move first to love or to respect? But sometimes a husband can demand respect without loving his wife.

33:01 Doesn't mean that the wife cannot respect him, but a man who would demand that is missing the point of Ephesians five and his role to present his wife complete in Christ and to love her like Christ loved the church. And so we pick up idols as well. And of course, yes, wives can maybe having been raised in a situation where they are idolized, demand that their husbands idolize them as well. So all of us have ways in which these idols can creep into our lives. These issues are deep issues, but let us call on the Holy Spirit to enable us to stop transferring guilt to people that do not deserve it and to transfer that to Christ.

34:09 And let us learn how to transfer to Christ the guilt of others as well. Again, my first wife came to me one day and said, I am not able to release your brother. My brother had done something offensive because as we were moving to the Southwest he would lose the presence of his brother. This was, wow, 1978. And things have greatly changed since then.

34:49 But at that time that was an offense to him that I would that my wife would take me to the Southwest because of her health. Rather than talking about that, he said something that was offensive. And so two, three years later she came to me and said, I'm not able to release him from that. And so one of the roles of a husband is to pray for his wife and to help her to be able to put on to Christ even the sins of other people. Again, it's one thing to ask Christ to forgive us for our sin.

36:11 But it was a deliberate choice and a deliberate request. You may be here this morning and as I am talking what comes to your memory is someone that you have not been able to forgive. Maybe the offense was real but perhaps that offense was something that you have transferred from somebody else onto that person, whichever it is. You can right now transfer that guilt of that person onto Christ and I like to think about it like a great big sink. Here in Ohio there are a lot of farmhouses with these great big farmhouse sinks.

36:56 Think of Christ's life as a great big sink and the guilt and the sin not only of you but also that other person is poured into that sink and with the water is drawn down into the drain and it's gone. That's what we need to learn to do. Let's try to put some of these thoughts together from both Genesis four and Isaiah 53. First of all, let's recognize that attempts to rescue or restore our own idols by transferring our guilt to someone else we feel threatened by is not the way to go. Stop yourself when you see that happening.

37:52 Saul tried to rescue his honor by transferring to David the guilt that was really on him. Cain tried to transfer to Abel the guilt that was on him, neither recognized those attempts, neither the idol nor the attempt to rescue that idol. And often the conflicts that we get into are over someone having exposed our idol, the idol of acceptance, the idol of love, the idol of honor, the idol of power, many other things, idol of things, someone getting in your way so that you didn't make as much money on this particular project as you thought you deserved to make, and that becomes an idol, it comes between you, you need to recognize it as such, and instead of defending it you need to expose it yourself and give it up, and learn to recognize the progression of idolatry. First, it starts with the desire. It was okay for Saul to desire the honor of the people of Israel, but he moved from that desire to a demand that they honor only him, that they respect only in him, and when David received honor as well, Saul moved to judge David as if David was guilty of taking something from him and then he moved to punish him as well.

39:44 How many times is your anger against someone else due to the fact that they haven't cooperated with you in obtaining the idol that you have lived for? And they have disappointed you and they do not assist you in obtaining that idol, or maybe even have exposed the fact that it is an idol, have you moved to demand of that person that they do that for you? Have you started to judge them and criticize? Listen to yourself when you're criticizing someone else and ask yourself, why would I be doing this? What is behind the attitude that I am feeling coming up inside of me?

40:39 And is my tone of voice an attempt to punish them? Is my withdrawing from communication with them an attempt to punish them for not doing what I believe that they should do to help me with this particular thing that's so important to me that has become an idol, maybe something that's totally legitimate, but if you demand it and you see others as the route for which you or through which you can gain that, have you not put yourself in the place where Cain was and where Saul was? We need to learn to resist the temptation to transfer that blame to another and to transfer it to Christ. Maybe they have, in the past, missed something that's dear to you, that they should have done, that they should have helped you with. But do they deserve the degree of anger that you are demonstrating towards them?

41:55 Put whatever that is of true guilt onto Christ and let them go. Take them off the hook and let them go. I'm accountable to a couple of guys that I meet with on Sunday afternoons. One of them brought up a situation in which he was not able to forgive his boss for. He was not able to forgive his boss for not showing him respect for the work that he did.

42:36 And as we had talked over the years, it was clear that his first of all, his mother, who had left the family for another man, and then his father, who was not able to get into graduate school because he came along, that he had received great harm and hurt as a young man from that. But he was going around demanding of people like his boss affirmation that would not only fit with the work that he was doing but also wipe out some of that residual pain and hurt that he had from that relationship that he had with his parents. And so one afternoon, we went into one of the rooms in the church, and I said to him, I spoke his name, how about if today we transfer over to Christ the guilt of your mother, the guilt of your father, and the smaller but real guilt of your boss onto Christ and let your boss go and realize that he can't give you what you're asking for, that that would be an idol and a demand. And the bitterness that will grow up in your heart will cause you to do against him what he does not deserve.

45:03 Amen. Let's pray. Dear god, we come in the name of the lord Jesus Christ and we are grateful that Christ, when he went to the cross, took our guilt. On him. And as you have told us, the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

45:25 Give us grace this day, oh God, to see the idols that we have in our lives. And to see when we have transferred to others the guilt that either belongs to us or somebody else. And whatever amount of real guilt there is to transfer that onto Christ and be free and take the other off the hook as we take ourselves off as well. Thank you that the gospel is real and can affect us each day no matter how long we've been Christians because we need the work of Christ in our place today as much as the first day that we trusted Christ as our savior. And so give us that grace.

46:15 Open our eyes to see the idols that we have put in our lives. Open our eyes to see the ways in which we have attempted to punish others for not worshiping our idol along with us and helping us keep it. Give us courage, oh god, and the right kind of biblical anger to overcome the obstacles to biblical action that we need to take both individually in our families and in our congregations. We pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen.