Chapter Eight

THE “PRECIOUS” NEARNESS OF OUR SAVIOUR

When Peter foolishly tried to walk on the water and began to sink in the waves, he cried out, “Lord, save me.”¹⁷⁷ It’s terrible to know you are about to drown, but it’s comforting then to know that a lifeguard is very near to save you.

We are all Peter sinking in the waves of sin, and we all need a Saviour. We know only too well how strong is the undertow that sucks us into the maelstrom, and how dark are those depths. We just do not have the strength to save ourselves.

Evil passions, hatreds and lusts, lurk beneath the surface in all our hearts. We don’t want to say or do things that we later regret, but before we know it we are embroiled again, and deeper guilt poisons our happiness. Habits of appetite, drugs, tobacco, alcohol, illicit loves, mock us as unconquerable. These feelings, resentments, hatreds, lusts and addictions that we seem powerless to control, roll over us like ocean waves. Deep emotions that the commandment forbids when it says “Thou shalt not covet” are the uncontrollable urges that caused Saul of Tarsus to recognize the stark presence of sin in his heart.¹⁷⁸

Youth (and many adults) with raging hormones face problems with illicit sex. The devil rejoices to boast that Christianity hasn’t helped much, and the Islamic world in particular consider this as evidence of moral depravity built-in to Christianity A 1985 survey of 1,006 American girls concludes: “Religion-conscious girls are 86 percent more likely to say it’s important to be a virgin at marriage than non-religion-conscious girls. However, religion-conscious girls are only 14 percent more likely to be virgins than the non-religion-conscious girls.”¹⁷⁹

Each year more than a million American teenage girls become pregnant. If present trends continue, 40 percent of today’s 14-year-olds will be pregnant at least twice before age 20.¹⁸⁰ U. S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop says that 70 percent of American adolescents are sexually active—that is, practicing fornication. “If you tell that 70 percent to just say no, they laugh. And if they try to say no, they find it very difficult.” Such lack of self-control before marriage usually programs these youth to future marital infidelity.

This is the dark world we live in. Multitudes suffer in despair, as Paul did, for they don’t want to slide down into moral suicide. They don’t know how to handle temptation, peer pressure, hormonal urgings. Paul touched everyone’s raw nerve when he complained of himself, “I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do what I would like to do, but instead I do what I hate. … Even though the desire to do good is in me, I am not able to do it. I don’t do the good I want to do; instead, I do the evil that I do not want to do. … Evil is the only choice I have. … Sin … is at work in my body. What an unhappy man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to death?”¹⁸¹

Whether this is the converted or unconverted Paul is beside the point. Paul uses the corporate ego, referring to humanity in general “in Adam.” Here is universal mankind crying out for help. And help is much closer than we have thought.

Paul answers his despairing question himself. There is a Saviour who has come very near. But the problem is that the scandal of nearly two thousand years of apostate Christianity has removed that Saviour from us. If it were not for this terrible falsehood that has put Him far away, it would be impossible for Christian youth, Seventh-day Adventists, to say things like, “I have a lot of work to do if I want to be saved,” or “I wish I could be completely good, but it’s not always easy,” or “I want to serve God, but I find it very hard” (see statements in chapter two).

The Chicago Tribune of March 29, 1984 reported that a recent Gallup poll found that an upsurge in America’s religious interest was cancelled with a similar swing toward immoral behavior. “There is no doubt that religion is growing,” Gallup reported. “But we find that there is very little difference in ethical behavior between church-goers and those who are not active religiously. … Levels of lying, cheating, and stealing are remarkably similar in both groups.”¹⁸²

Can’t you hear Satan’s hosts cheering “Whoopee!” at news like that? When Jesus made His debut into the world, the angelic fanfare announced, “He will save His people from their sins.”¹⁸³ What has happened? Why doesn’t the world get to see some clear evidence that His people are indeed saved from, not in, their sins?

The reason is that “the little horn” power has “cast truth down to the ground” and developed a “transgression of desolation.”¹⁸⁴ It has hidden Christ from clear view while professing to worship Him, and substituted a far-away “Christ” who cannot save from sin. And billions do not know the switch that has happened.

The 1888 message is unique in that it rediscovered the closeness of the Saviour, and how powerfully He can deliver from the tentacles of deep, deep sin. It’s a message that the world is literally dying to hear. Let us examine that truth more closely.

The Saviour Who Came All the Way to Where We Are

Even those who oppose it recognize that the outstanding essential of the 1888 message was a revelation of Christ as coming close to us. When Jones and Waggoner ministered to the teachers and students at South Lancaster in early 1889, Ellen White reported what impressed her about the message of her two young colleagues:

On Sabbath afternoon, many hearts were touched, and many souls were fed on the bread that cometh down from heaven. … The Lord came very near and convicted souls of their great need of his grace and love. We felt the necessity of presenting Christ as a Saviour who was not afar off, but nigh at hand.¹⁸⁵

The students were overjoyed with the message. It was as though they had turned a corner and come unexpectedly face to face with Jesus Himself. The experience expressed in Isaac Watts’ hymn came alive for these youth:

Forbid it Lord, that I should boast

Save in the death of Christ my God;

All the vain things that charm me most,

I sacrifice them to His blood.

We are told that “of all professing Christians, Seventh-day Adventists should be foremost in uplifting Christ before the world.”¹⁸⁶ The true context of that oft-quoted remark was Ellen White’s endorsement of this 1888 truth of the nature of Christ. Here are some samples of the 1888 messengers’ heart burden to lift up Christ as a Saviour “not afar off, but nigh at hand”:

It has been Satan’s work always to get men to think that God is as far away as possible. … The great trouble with heathenism was to think that God was so far away. … Then the papacy came in, … and again puts God and Christ so far away that nobody can come near to them … the false idea that He is so holy that it would be entirely unbecoming in Him to come near to us, and be possessed of such a nature as we have,— sinful, depraved, fallen human nature. Therefore Mary must be born immaculate … and … Christ must … take His human nature in absolute sinlessness from her. … But if He comes no nearer to us than in a sinless nature, that is a long way off; because I need … someone to help me who knows something about sinful nature; for that is the nature that I have; and such the Lord did take. He became one of us.¹⁸⁷

You and I would give a great deal to be able to act as wisely as Jesus did. Every time he knew the right thing to say, and the right thing to do, and when not to say anything. Was there a person in the world who was as keen of intellect, who knew just how to meet every emergency as did Jesus. You know he was wiser than Solomon. How did he get that wisdom? … How did it come to him?

(A voice) [someone in the congregation:] It was intuition.

Then he was not like us at all. We read that “it behooved him to be made in all things like unto his brethren”: that is, in every particular. We do not want to put the Lord off away from us, but he is one of us. … How did he come by his wisdom? … He studied God’s Word. … He was wholly given to the Lord, knowing that there is no other use for man in this world but to serve the Lord.¹⁸⁸

What influence led these 1888 messengers thus to present Jesus as “nigh at hand”? They studied the Bible itself in the light of the unique third angel’s message and the cleansing of the sanctuary. The clouds of many centuries that had darkened truth and hidden the Saviour were rolled away. They rediscovered Paul’s vision of Christ.

After he described his despair in Romans 7, he found joyful hope in the Good News of a Saviour who came all the way to where we are. “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. … For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.”¹⁸⁹ What does this mean? How deep and thorough is Christ’s deliverance from our compulsive habits of sin?

“No condemnation” means release from our inner sense of divine judgment which has hung over us all our lives. Although these feelings of psychic wrong and maladjustment are deep and penetrating, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” is even deeper and more far-reaching. A new principle delivers from tentacles of fear, guilt, and moral disorder that have enslaved our souls, even from our infancy.

No psychiatrist can accomplish such a profound catharsis of the human soul as can this “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.” Wrongs and anxieties that even our parents could not relieve find inner healing. “When my father and my mother forsake me [where they leave off], then the Lord will take me up.”¹⁹⁰ “He who takes God for the portion of his inheritance, has a power working in him for righteousness, as much stronger than the power of inherited tendencies to evil, as our heavenly Father is greater than our earthly parents.”¹⁹¹

A glorious reality is disclosed in Paul’s presentation of our nigh-at-hand Christ. He continues: “For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”¹⁹²

The word “likeness” in the Greek means identical, the same as. It cannot mean unlike or different from. Christ who was fully God now became fully man as well. He built a divine-human bridge that spanned the gulf of alienation that sin has made, with foundations that reach all the way to the deepest root within the nature of the most helplessly lost sinner on earth.

Paul’s intent is to present Christ as perfectly equipped to solve the problem of sin deep within our fallen nature. Here is the bastion where the dragon has made his last stand, and Christ confronts him there.

A fierce battle is being fought between Christ and Satan over this issue of whether that profound alienation can be resolved in “sinful flesh.” There is no problem with sin being conquered in sinless nature, different from our sinful flesh. That battle was won long ago in heaven when two-thirds of the angels overcame Satan’s temptations in sinless nature. For Christ to come to earth to fight that same battle over again would be redundant. The battle now is with sin having taken up residence in sinful human nature, in sinful flesh.

Satan arrogantly claims that his invention of sin has developed to the place where it now proves God is wrong: having taken root deep in fallen human nature, it cannot be overcome. And most Christians implicitly agree with Satan. Here is the slimy trail of the “little horn” power. This is the main reason why the Gallup poll is forced to record so little difference in moral and ethical behavior between Christians and non-Christians.

The bottom-line idea is that as long as you have a sinful nature, it is inevitable that you must continue sinning. Precisely Satan’s point that he has been contending for during six thousand years!

But Christ slew the dragon in his last lair, proved that human sin is willful, and, in mankind who believe, created a new abhorrence of sin that will lead to its final eradication. Thus He set the captive will of sinful man free to say “No” to sin, and to be pure and holy.

The Reason Why Christ Can Save Every Sinner On Earth

The 1888 message turns the spotlight on the book of Hebrews which tells us how Christ’s closeness qualifies Him to penetrate to these inner recesses of our psychic, sinful alienation:

We see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels … that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting for Him … to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.

For both He who sanctifies, and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying … “I will put My trust in Him.”… .

Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham [He took on Him the seed of Abraham, KJV].

Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to aid those who are tempted.¹⁹³

Let us examine the spiritual riches in this treasure chest of truth:

1. Christ has tasted our second death, the ultimate horror of our deepest despairs.
2. He was made perfect through His sufferings.
3. He is “one” with us.
4. He calls us “brethren,” that is, He is closer to us than family members are to one another.
5. Although He was always God in human flesh, He laid aside the advantages of His divinity so that He had to learn to “trust” in God.
6. He “took part” of the “flesh and blood” of the descendants of fallen Adam, not that of the sinless Adam. That “flesh and blood” included the appetites and hormones of our “flesh and blood.”
7. Specifically, He did not take the nature of sinless beings, but that of the “seed,” the genetic descendants of Abraham. Thus, in the strongest language possible we are assured that Christ “took upon His sinless nature our sinful nature, that He might know how to succor those that are tempted.”¹⁹⁴
8. With no exception, He was “made like” unto us.
9. Thus He has become a “merciful and faithful High Priest,” our divine-human physician and psychiatrist of our souls.
10. In every way that we are tempted, He is able to help us.

Was Christ tempted as the sinless Adam was tempted? Or was He tempted as we, the sinful descendants of Adam, are tempted? Hebrews reiterates the answer: “We do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.”¹⁹⁵

This is tremendous good news! No matter how deep or how strong your temptation may be, Christ was tempted that same way, “yet without sin.” And that’s not all! A powerful “therefore” follows verse 15: “Let us therefore come boldly … and find grace to help in time of need.” His “likeness of sinful flesh” gave Him perfect entrance to condemn that very sin—judge it, pronounce sentence on it, kill it. Be “bold” in Him; you deserve to receive the victory. Don’t hang back timidly as though you are doomed to defeat.

The Strange Opposition to the Nearness of the Saviour

Some tell us that Christ could not have been tempted as we are, for there were no TV’s in His day, no ice cream parlors, no vodka, no sport cars, etc. But that superficial judgment fails to appreciate what the Bible says. Every temptation to sin that we can experience is directed at our primal love of self; and He knows every avenue of that sin’s appeal. Knowing how strong the temptation is, He sympathizes with us, but even that is not all. Mere sympathy and pity would not help us. His full-time job is saving us from yielding to those temptations. We “come boldly,” not timidly, in a prayer of faith to obtain that help.

Note the clear insistence that although Christ came close to us, taking our sinful nature, He was “yet without sin.” Not even by a thought would He yield to the tempter. “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me,” He said.¹⁹⁶ He always remained “that holy One.”¹⁹⁷ The struggle against sinful temptation was so fierce and so dangerous that He sweat drops of blood in His agony.¹⁹⁸ That was a more terrible ordeal than any of us have known.

The struggle to yield your will to be “crucified with Him” may be painful, but it is easier than your being crucified alone. And living the life of resultant resurrection “with Him” is easier than wearing yourself out in continuing to fight against the Holy Spirit.

A Magnificent Promise Especially for These Last Days

The Lord has something special for His people living in the very end of time: “To him who overcomes I will grant to sit with Me on My throne,¹⁹⁹ as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne.” The Lord offers this special privilege now when sin and temptation seem stronger and more alluring than ever before. When we humans are still weaker and more susceptible to falling, here comes this assurance that we can overcome! But not on our own; “even as I also overcame” is the way.

This means that in these last days Christ’s taking our fallen, sinful flesh becomes a more precious truth than ever before. Christ’s overcoming is not only an example to us (an example is useless if you don’t know how to follow it!). Our Example becomes our training-Exemplar. Christ identifies with you and you identify with Him. Your temptation becomes His temptation; your success is His victory, and your failure becomes His concern. You are joined in a yoke with Him, and He does the pulling of the heavy weight. Your job is to stay with Him and to cooperate with Him, yielding your will to Him. Don’t ever leave the happy yoke that binds you to Him.²⁰⁰ That’s the best place to be, forever.

Christ knew that in these last days Satan would lead multitudes of human beings into drug addiction, alcoholism, crime, lust, child abuse, homosexuality, pornography, fornication, adultery, bulemia, and many other temptations that seem irresistible because we have a sinful nature. The lost sheep has strayed further from the fold than ever before, but the Good Shepherd goes further than ever before “until He find it.” This means that as a divine Psychiatrist He probes ever more deeply into the why of our last-day weaknesses, and provides full healing. Sin abounding calls for grace much more abounding.

Frequently Ellen White referred to the 1888 message as “the message of Christ’s righteousness.”²⁰¹ This significant phrase implicitly requires the understanding that in His incarnation Christ took the fallen, sinful nature of man. The reason is obvious.

“Righteousness” is a word that is never used of created beings with a sinless nature. We read of “holy angels” or “unfallen angels,” but never of righteous angels. We read of Adam and Eve before the fall that they were “innocent and holy,”²⁰² but never do we read that they were righteous. They could have developed a righteous character if they had resisted temptation, but righteousness is always a term that means holiness that has confronted temptation in sinful human nature and has overcome.

The word itself means justification, and something that is sinless can not need justification. The innate meaning of the word is straightening something that is crooked.

Righteous is a misnomer for one who has only a sinless nature. Such a being would be holy, but cannot be said to be righteous. Christ was sinless, but He took our sinful, crooked nature and in it lived a perfect life of holiness. This is His righteousness. If Christ had taken only the sinless nature of Adam before the fall, Ellen White would refer to to the 1888 “message of Christ’s holiness,” not to “the message of Christ’s righteousness.” The fact that He perfectly “condemned sin in the flesh” of all fallen mankind gives Him title to that glorious name “Christ our righteousness.”

Christ will be successful in rescuing those who are sinking in these last-days waves of temptation. Jude says He “is able to keep you from stumbling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.” Revelation corroborates this promise by displaying a people who stand “without fault before the throne of God.” At this time it can be said of His people, “The marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready.”²⁰³

The secret of their overcoming is not a special works program of trying harder than ever before; it is the recovery of a purer faith than any former generation have attained. The 1888 message is prophetically declared to be the “beginning” of the recovery of that faith. The essence of that faith is a previously unrealized intimacy of sympathy with Christ, a heart-appreciation of Him, a “surveying” of His cross with all the melting of frozen hearts that follows. Nothing else but that contrite concern for the honor of Christ can “keep you from falling.” Selfish concern, fear of hell, hope of reward in heaven, will fail.

The Third Angel’s Message and the Cleansing of the Sanctuary

Our addiction to sin stems from a sense of alienation from God and from one another with its profound loneliness. How has Christ abolished this darkness? Those who were “aliens, … having no hope and without God in the world … have been made near by the blood of Christ.” He has “abolished in His flesh the enmity, … that He might reconcile them … to God … through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity.”²⁰⁴

Even many within the church go on day after day “having no hope, and without God in the world.” But this alienation was endured by the templed Jesus as He hung on the cross in His last hours. No one has ever felt so bereft of hope and joy as He when He cried out, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

It was in that final hour of total darkness of soul that Jesus drank our bitter cup to its dregs. That was when He tasted real “death for every man.” Do you feel as though the heavens were brass above you, the earth as iron beneath, that no one cares, that Heaven seems to have slammed the door against you, that nothing lies before you but darkness? That is precisely how Jesus felt, for that is the essence of “the second death.” He “tasted” it so that you might not have to feel that way. You can thank Him for enduring that cross for you.

Appreciate His closeness to you. In His closing ministry on this great Day of Atonement He is working hard night and day to complete that reconciliation in the hearts of all who by faith sympathize with Him in that special work.

We can find the most intimate portrayals of Christ’s humiliation and excruciating personal pain and victory in what seems an unlikely place. At the 1895 General Conference Session Jones gave a series of studies on Christ portrayed in the Psalms.

Christ was in the place, and he had the nature, of the whole human race. And in him meet all the weaknesses of mankind, so that every man on the earth who can be tempted at all, finds in Jesus Christ power against that temptation. For every soul there is in Jesus Christ victory against all temptation, and relief from the power of it.²⁰⁵

On page 300 he discusses the fortieth psalm, showing how it is a self-written diary of Christ:

“Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more in number than the hairs of mine head: therefore my heart faileth me.”

Who?—Christ. Where did he get iniquity?—Oh, “the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all.”

Were they not more than the hairs of his head? … Oh, “my heart faileth me,” because of the enormity of the guilt and the condemnation of the sin—our sins that were laid upon him. Now return to the first verse of the fortieth psalm:—“I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.” Who?—Christ; and he was ourselves. Shall we, then, say the word: I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry?”—Assuredly. What, laden with sin as I am?—sinner as I am?—sinful flesh as I have?—How do I know that he hears my cry?—Ah, he has demonstrated it for a whole lifetime in my nearest of kin. He has demonstrated it in my flesh that he inclines,—leans over,—to listen to my cry. O, there are times, you know, when our sins seem to be so mountain-high. We are so discouraged by them. And Satan is right there ready to say, “Yes, you ought to be discouraged by them; there is no use of your praying to the Lord; he will not have anything to do with such as you are; you are too bad.” … Away with such thoughts! Not only will he hear, but … the Lord is listening to hear the prayers of people laden with sin.

In that dark hour when He suffered alone on the cross, He built that glorious bridge over the chasm of alienation that sin has caused. His magnificent achievement is called “the atonement” the making at-one of those who were separated—you and God.
That alienation is the fundamental reason why so many youth seek illicit physical intimacies, now more than ever before. Their souls are hungry and empty for the reality which at-one-ment with Christ alone can fill. Frightening them with warnings of pregnancy, VD, AIDS, abortion, or hell, does nothing solid to help them resist temptation, for its roots are too deep. With AIDS becoming rampant, the world is at last realizing that sin is suicide. But fear of hell is powerless to save from sin.

Hope of reward is equally ineffective, hence the large percentage of “religion-conscious” girls and boys who yield to temptation. Abounding sin needs much more abounding grace—a revelation of the closeness of the Saviour, an awareness that passes through the mind and penetrates to the inner heart. Only those who have received the atonement can be successful in ministering that grace to youth. The glorious message of Christ’s righteousness is at last beginning to come into its own to meet the need.

The Practical Value of Truth

Many are asking, How can I get close to Jesus? The first step is to believe how close He has come to you. Then the next step follows naturally: the honest heart that appreciates the cross of Christ identifies with Him there. Paul said (according to the original Ianguage) that his ego is “crucified with Christ.”²⁰⁶ That is, his selfish pride, his selfish will that has been contrary to the truth of God, his prideful ambition, his glorying in his own achievements or abilities or personality—this is his ego:

When I survey the wondrous cross,

On which the Prince of glory died,

My richest gain I count but loss,

And pour contempt on all my pride.

This does not mean that the one who believes in Christ grovels ever after in the dust of self-depreciation. His sense of self-respect is never shattered. To be “crucified with Christ” means also to be resurrected with Him; “it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” Now one finds his truest self-respect: “He pulled me out of a dangerous pit, out of the deadly quicksand. He set me safely on a rock and made me secure.”

And with pouring contempt on all our pride comes the utter repudiation of all “holier-than-thou” feelings. The closer one comes to Christ, the more sinful and unworthy he feels himself to be. We are never to judge ourselves, or give ourselves grade-points. We are never to claim to be sinless for “if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” It is only when we continually “confess our sins, [that] he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”²⁰⁷ We are never to direct attention to our own selves but to Christ. The proud and arrogant heresy of perfectionism can never rear its ugly head where the truth of Christ’s righteousness is appreciated, for the song of every heart will be to glory alone in “Christ our righteousness.”

Read Chapter 9 — Glorious Good News: The New Covenant

NOTES:

177. Matthew 14:30.
178. Romans 7:7-11.
179. Leslie Jane Nonkin, I Wish My Parents Understood, NY: Penguin; emphasis supplied.
180. Time, December 9,1985.
181. Romans 7:15-24, TEV.
182. Quoted in Passing on the Torch, by Roger Dudley (Review and Herald, 1986), p. 39.
183. Matthew 1:21.
184. Daniel 8:12, 13.
185. Review and Herald, March 5, 1889.
186. Gospel Workers, p. 156.
187. A. T. Jones, General Conference Bulletin, 1895, p. 311
188. E. J. Waggoner, General Conference Bulletin, 1897, p. 266.
189. Romans 8:1, 2.
190. Psalm 27:10.
191. Waggoner, The Everlasting Covenant, p. 66.
192. Romans 8:3, 4.
193. Hebrews 2:9-11, 14-18.
194. Medical Ministry, p. 181, emphasis added.
195. Hebrews 4:14, 15.
196. John 14:30, KJV.
197. Luke 1:35.
198. Hebrews5:7; 12:3, 4.
199. Revelation 3:21.
200. Matthew 11:28-30.
201. MS15, 1888; Through Crisis to Victory, p. 294; MS 24, 1888, Selected Messages, Book Three, pp. 168, 169, 170, 171, 172; Review and Herald, July 23, 1889, May 27, Extra December 23, 1890.
202. Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 48; Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary, Vol. 1, p. 1083.
203. Jude 24; Revelation 12:17; 14:5, 12; 19:7, 8.
204. Ephesians 2:12-16.
205. Bulletin, p. 254. Cf. Psalm 22:1-24; 69:7-21: Isaiah 53:4-6.
206. Galatians 2:20.
207. 1 John 1:8, 9.

Read Chapter 9 — Glorious Good News: The New Covenant

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