How Great a Salvation!

• The following message by Aleister Beg is made available by Truth for Life. For more information, visit us online at truthforlife.org. Just a brief prayer. Speak, O Lord, as we come to you to receive the food of your holy word. Take your truth, plant it deep in us, shape and fashion us in your likeness. and we ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.
• I’ve never quite understood uh why it is that people who like myself enjoy murder mysteries or detective stories um go to the expense of purchasing a book and then out of impatience or curiosity or whatever else it is, they then go to the back of the book and they find out who done it. Um, as a Scotsman, that is a dreadful waste of money and time.
• But, um, if you’re one of those people, perhaps you can explain to me afterwards what motivates that. Um, however, that being said, one can make a fairly good case for taking that approach to our study of the Bible. And sometimes I say to the congregation, you know, we need to learn to read the Bible backwards.
• So for example, if we go to the book of revelation for um our encouragement, we know that the kingdoms of this world have become ultimately the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ and he will reign forever and ever. That’s a wonderfully reassuring and helpful um understanding of how everything ends. um in a different way but similarly John in his gospel helps us when uh towards the end of chapter 20 he explains that although there were many more things that Jesus had said and done that could have been recorded uh these have been written down he says in order that you might believe and that by believing you
• might have life in his name and interestingly and helpfully I found it that uh Peter does the exact same thing. And if you turn in your Bible just to the 12th verse of chapter 5, you realize how helpful it is that he tells us exactly what it is that he sets out as his plan and course of action in the course of these five chapters.
• And as I turn to it myself, uh you find that it is clearly there. um uh the God after you’ve suffered a little while uh the God of all grace who has called you to his glory and so on. And then as he brings it to a close in his final greetings, he says, “I have written briefly to you exhorting and declaring that this is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it.
• ” So he lets us know that everything that precedes in this uh disciplehip manual we might say is in order that the readers are aware of the grace of God about which we sang in our opening song and it reinforced it for us very very very well.
• He does the same thing interestingly in his second letter where he ends up by saying I want you to take care that you do not lose your stability. And Peter himself who is the writer of the letter uh we know him because we have seen him in the gospel records. We know that Peter was essentially a hotheaded fisherman from the northshore of Galilee. He was the kind of individual who wanted to try things first.
• Uh whether it was walking on the water or falling into the water. Uh he was the kind of person in your class who always put his hand up and uh volunteered something and um he managed to put one foot in his mouth and then take it out so he could put his other foot in when he said something else. One moment in that amazing encounter in recorded in Matthew 16. One moment he is the recipient of the father’s revelation.
• Jesus says to him, “You didn’t come up with this yourself. Uh God the father has made this known to you.” And then from being the recipient of the father’s revelation, he immediately becomes the object of the devil’s deception. And by the time we get to this particular point in history where he’s writing this, he has, if you like, grown into his own name, grown into the name that Jesus gives him when he encounters him, as we find it at the beginning of John. And so we’re introduced to him and to the readers. First of all, he
• introduces himself as an apostle of Jesus Christ. In a matter of just a few words, he identifies himself not in an individualistic way but as part of a larger company. Um we read in the gospels that Jesus had ordained uh the 12 that they might be with him and that then they may go out and preach the gospel.
• And Peter is identifying himself in that way sent by the Lord Jesus in order that they might be proclaiming the good news of Jesus. And the word that they were delivering was God’s word. That word which they then spoke preserved for us uh in the scriptures so that the written word is the very word that we were singing about in the previous song. It’s important, I think, for us to recognize, especially in these days when all sorts of people call themselves apostles, that uh what we’re dealing with is a unique identification of these individuals. And the message that they proclaimed was not their own.