Hello, you are listening to Second City Sermons,
a ministry of Second City Church in Midtown Harrisburg.
It's our hope that these sermons will draw you
more into the life of following God, Father,
Son and Holy Spirit. Please consider coming and
joining with us each Sunday morning at 10am in
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sermon. God Bless. Let me pray again for us,
Lord. God, we carry crosses around our necks.
We fold palm branches into crosses. We have them
before us often. And yet, It is our desire, Lord,
tonight to see it maybe more clearly, to have
our gaze fixed more intently. Not just on a cross,
but on you, the one who went to the cross for
us. God, would you do this tonight in us? Would
your Holy Spirit move among us that we might
wonder again, wonder afresh at the extent of
your love and your grace for us. Hear this prayer,
Lord. May the words in my mouth and the meditations
of our hearts be pleasing in your sight. Amen.
Many of you are probably familiar with the Dutch
Christian, Corey Ten Boen. She survived the horrors
of the concentration camp. She had been harboring
the Jews. She said, there is no pit so deep that
Christ is not deeper still. I suggest you tonight
that sin makes us less human. Sin is a dehumanizing
thing. Now what it does is sin promises us sort
of a godlikeness. What it does actually is it
makes us subhuman. It humanizes us. In 1943,
just months before Corey Ten Boom would be arrested
and forced into the Ravensburg concentration
camp, so right in the middle of World War II,
The great author C .S. Lewis, whom I hope also
you are familiar with, he gave a series of lectures
at the University of Durham. Those lectures became
one of his well -known books called The Abolition
of Man. Abolition, the doing away with man. His
argument, which is much easier to make in the
middle of war when your country is being bombed.
is that the world was losing its sense of what
it is to be human. Our technological advances
were, yet once again, as they continue to do,
being used to destroy human life, to depersonalize
others, to dehumanize. He begins the book largely
talking, if you've read it, about a British textbook
that was used in his day. because he was arguing
that the intellectual and the cultural movements
of modernity were a significant part of the problem
of this abolition of man, this dehumanization.
Modernity was dehumanizing. And of course, what
do we say of the origins of modernity? The father
of modern modern modernity philosophy is often
called Descartes. Of course had the famous phrase,
cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. And
of course that was replacing St. Augustine's
famous phrase, crede ut intelligis, believe in
order that you might understand, that you might
know. Which is to say that modernity is sort
of founded on this idea of the supremacy of humanity.
You can move God aside. We are enough. Sin promises
us to be like God, can replace him. But it makes
us less human, subhuman, dehumanizes. Think with
me back to the garden, our original parents and
their first rejection of God. The serpent comes
to them, right? And he promises them to be like
God. will not surely die for God knows that when
you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you
will Be like God And promises us this sort of
godlikeness But makes us less human What are
it what are its effects right initially its effects
are hiding Hovering up that's the most immediate
thing And then quickly, if you know the story,
it's blame shifting. But then just as soon as
they are out of the garden, what happens? If
children were filled with envy, rage, revenge,
and murder, sin is dehumanizing. And then you
may remember this a little bit. At the end of
the chapter four in Genesis, you have Lamech,
Lamech who takes two wives, and then he has this
song where he says, if Cain's revenge was great,
mine will be sevenfold. It will be more complete.
It will be more dehumanizing. Rejection of God
leads not to a God likeness, a subhuman reality.
And if we could go through more stories in the
scriptures, I'll just give you a couple kind
of quick ones. Think with me of the beginning
of the next chapter or the next book in the Bible,
the book of Exodus. Ancient Pharaohs were considered
divine, gods, replacements for the true God.
And what do we find that Pharaoh does with this
so -called divine reality, God -like reality.
He enslaves. We read he murders babies. He hardens
the workload on others. He treats others as though
they are subhuman. God -like thing that is promised
with sin dehumanizes. He enslaves. promotes violence,
dehumanization. If we went a little bit farther
along, one of the things that happens that once
these Israelites are saved out from that, and
they make the long journey, often rejecting God,
and the journey gets longer, and they're finally
brought into the promised land, having followed
Moses and Joshua, they're then there in the promised
land. And the book of Judges, one of the refrains,
the refrain of the book of Judges, tells the
story of them rejecting God and doing their own
thing. Everyone did what was right in his own
eyes. I am the arbiter. But what you find story
after story is the destabilization of the people.
violence again and again, dehumanization again
and again, as they lived into this dynamic that
they're just going to do what is right in their
own eyes. Sin promises godlikeness. I can decide.
I can do. But it makes us subhuman. Think of
the Ten Commandments with me. Historically, you
may know this, the Ten Commandments are kind
of broken down into two tables. oftentimes it's
thought of as the table that is God word and
towards our fellow humans. You can think of,
you know, you shall have no other gods, you shall
not worship idols, you shall not take the Lord's
name in vain, honor the Sabbath, orient your
time as God has instructed and God has oriented
His. All these have to do with our relationship
towards God, right? But then the commandments
that flow from these have to do with our relationships
with others. Honor your father and mother, but
also lying and stealing and adultery and not
coveting and all the rest flow out of this. And
what happens when you actually don't follow the
first ones is that you don't follow the second
ones because rejection of God is the dehumanization
of others. So again, sin promises us to be like
God, but makes us subhuman. And think about this.
The first one that's oriented towards humans,
murder. What does murder do, but make us believe
that we are the ones that decide when life can
happen or not, when somebody can exist or not?
God -like action is dehumanizing. What does adultery
do? What does lust do? What does pornography
do but make others objects? Objects for our use.
Sin dehumanizes. Sin dehumanizes. What does stealing
do but make us the one who decides who has what
possessions? We can be like God. And yet it's
dehumanizes others. What does lying and deceit
and covening and all the rest do but make us
believe that we can control the narrative? We
can decide what others believe or not. A God
-like reality that is dehumanizing. Again and
again and again, again and again, we see this.
Sin promises this idea. You can be like God.
What it does is it makes us less than human,
less than ourselves. Is it any wonder that on
the first holy week, way back when, you know,
there's a lot of events in the gospels, of course,
that take place that we've recounted some this
week together. But in that week, some of the
Pharisees get some of their crew to go up to
Jesus and ask him about paying taxes to Caesar.
And the very coin that they would have shown
had both the visage of Caesar on it, but it also
would have had written on it, Tiberius Caesar,
Augustus, son of the divine, Augustus. to be
claiming to be like God. And it's in that context
where Caesar was the divine, where people would
literally have to offer incense to Caesar and
bow down and say, Caesar's Lord. It was in that
context in the world of the divine Augustus that
the instrument of torture was created. The most
dehumanizing instrument of torture came to be.
Form of torture that hung you for the world to
see as you died. And the cross is where people
hung, often naked, almost always publicly, slowly,
slowly dying. Cross. is where Jesus would go
after a throne, sorry, a crown of thorns was
pressed upon him. It wasn't a real crown. They
knew he was being mocked. They were treating
him as less than worth dignity, a subhuman. You
know that he was instructed to carry his cross
out. to the place of the skull, where all the
crowds were, treating him as subhuman, less than,
dehumanized, across where he would be nailed
to and raised up, for all to mock him, to laugh
at him, to scoff him. It was dehumanizing at
its best. If there's a death that epitomizes
the dehumanizing effects of sin, it's the cross.
Where man is enthroned as God, dehumanization
runs rampant. Because sin promises us a God -like
reality, it is actually a dehumanizing thing.
It makes us sub -human. But here's the wonder.
But in the providence, in the unbelievable thought
of God, that is how Jesus dies for us. The most
dehumanizing death, and that is what he went
to for us. That's where Jesus hangs. That's where
Jesus dies. Because Jesus does not just come
among us as one of us, which we celebrate wonderfully
at Christmas. He does not just come among us
and die some kind of way, but he dies the most
dehumanizing kind of way. He goes to the place
that epitomizes the effects of sin in the world
that he might bear our sin in his body on the
tree. He not only gives up the glory of heaven
to walk among us, but to the go to the place
that epitomizes the effects of sin. Our sin is
where we decide that we must be our own gods,
but it's God Himself who comes among us and dies
for us the very death that shouts the effects
of sin. You want to see the effects of sin, you
look at how we dehumanize others, how we decide
how we are God. And one of the greatest pictures
of this is a cross. And yet, Corey Ten Boon says,
there is no pit so deep that Christ is not deeper
still. If you were to swim off the coast of Italy,
just north of Portofino in the Bay of San Fruttuoso,
if I can say that right. and you were to dive
down 56 feet, you would find a bronze sculpture.
That bronze sculpture was submerged in those
waters on August 29th in 1954, 10 years after
Cory Ten Boom was arrested. And there, if you
drove down there, you would see this large sculpture
of Christ and his hands are reached up. His hands
are reached up like this. And I want you to think
of this, instead of this massive bronze sculpture,
life -size sculpture being installed in this
great church or a great museum, it's their submarine,
right? Below the water, below the surface of
the water, which is to say it's even below the
surface where we exist. In some ways, it's almost
subhuman. It's below our dwelling. And it's a
lovely picture because that is exactly what Jesus
does on the cross. He goes to the place where
we are sort of subhuman, takes our sin upon himself,
which dehumanizes others. And what he's doing
there in our subhuman reality is lifting us up.
As His hands are outstretched, that is exactly
what He is doing. It's going to the low place
that even there He might lift us up out from
our sin. There is no pit so deep. There's no
pit so deep that Christ is not deeper still.
And we see that wonderfully in the deeps off
that seacoast. But we also see it more clearly
and more wonderfully in what we celebrate tonight.
That Jesus goes to a cross for you. He bears
the dehumanizing effects of sin. He bears your
sin upon himself on that tree. Thin promises
us a god -like -ness. Brothers and sisters, it
makes you less human, subhuman. But it's where
the cross at the cross this place of dehumanization
where Christ's arms are outstretched that he
goes to deep place and he lifts us up May pray
for us Lord pray that we would hate our sin I
pray that we would see how it wrecks ourselves
and others And I pray that we would see how it
makes us less than what you intended for us.
That it dehumanizes not only those who we sin
against, but we ourselves. And so God, I pray
that we would throw it at the cross where you
took our sin upon yourself. God, that we would
rest in this reality that you, Christ, Lord Jesus,
you died for us. That though we rejected you
in the garden long ago, that we rejected you
right out of the garden, that we rejected you
time and time and time again. You came for us.
You died for us. There is no depth that you would
not go to. There's no shame that you would not
bear. There is no sin to grave. that you would
not lift us up as your hands were outstretched
on that cross. Just again, the wonder of your
death. Amen. Thank you for listening to Second
City Sermons podcast. We hope this sermon has
encouraged you to worship God and to celebrate
the gospel of Jesus. Please consider subscribing
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Sunday at 10 a .m. You can find us online at
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bless.