Sermon Tone Analysis

What's So Unique about Jesus?

What I want us to do is to think about one main question.

What’s so unique about Jesus?

There are a lot of religious teachers and leaders across the history of humanity.

What’s so unique about Jesus?

And I want to show you four characteristics of Jesus and who He is.

And, I believe when we see those characteristics we will also see four reasons why Jesus is worthy of our ultimate devotion; worthy of our entire lives.

I want you to dive into it with me.

1. Jesus knows the ultimate problem

What is so unique about Jesus?

I want you to see that Jesus knows the ultimate problem.

Jesus knows the ultimate problem and this sets Him apart from everybody else.

Look with me at Revelation 5:1.

Now obviously we don’t have time to study the whole book of Revelation this morning even these chapters that follow to see what’s unfolding in this scroll, but I want to give you a picture basically to summarize what is written on both sides of the scroll in Revelation 5 is God’s purposes, final purposes for all of His creation.

We know that way back in the beginning of this book Genesis 3 sin entered the world and it marred God’s creation, as a result of sin, which all of us are guilty of.

I know there are a lot of people here, but every single one of us has sin in our lives.

And because of that, we see the effects of that on the world in suffering, in pain, the things we experience as a result of our sin or even when we are trying to do good we still experience suffering.

So that’s the picture we’ve got from Genesis 3 all the way to this point.

Now we’ve got God’s final purposes.

How he’s going to bring an end to that, bring an end to suffering and pain and evil for His people.

How He is going to pour out His blessing on His people in all of eternity as well as His judgment and that’s what contained in this scroll—the final purposes of God for all of creation.

So, this is a pretty huge deal.

Your eternity, my eternity; bound up in what is written on that scroll in the hands of God.

Now, some of you might be thinking, “Well Dave, why didn’t God just open the scroll Himself?”

Well, I want you to realize what that would mean.

If God, who was completely holy and has so sin in Him, were to open a scroll that would unfold the purposes of His character for all of creation and if all of us stand before Him with sin in our lives having being disobedient to Him, the only option for us in all the eternity is what?

Judgment and condemnation.

That is clear throughout the Bible.

As a result of the fact that we all have sin in out lives, we are separated from a holy God and the ultimate problem in the universe, please don’t miss this, the ultimate question in the universe is, “How can sinners like us be made right with a holy God.

a.

Because of sin, we stand before a holy God...

1. Hopeless

2. Helpless

We talk about heaven almost flippantly.

We got to realize, in order to spend eternity in the presence of God there’s a sin problem that has to be dealt with in order for that to happen.

So we don’t want God to open the scroll without a mediator between Him and us that takes care of that problem.

So, I want you to see that because of our sin we stand before a holy God two characteristics that I think we see in this passage.

You see, what happens is, verse 3 says, “No one in heaven or on earth or under the earth could open the scroll or even look inside it”, and verse 4 says, “[John] wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside” (Rev.

5:3–4).

Because of our sin we stand before a holy God.

Hopeless, number one.

Now I want you to imagine with me; this scroll, if it holds the end of suffering, the end of pain, God fully bring His blessing on His creation restoring it back to what He created it to be.

Imagine reading this in the first century.

These were a people who were experiencing a pretty deep persecution because they were Christians.

They’d experienced a lot of suffering in their families.

Some guy’s wives had died, husbands had been killed, and then murdered, they’d been martyred.

They’d seen their children taken away from them.

They’d experienced pain and at this point John sees that, that which brings an end to all of this.

God’s blessing is for restoring things the way they should be, an end to the suffering, the pain and he sees that at the right hand of God but nobody is able to open it.

That’s why we see John, not just weeping but it says he wept, and he wept, and emphasized it.

This is huge because the hope of something different is gone in this picture.

It's the same kind of questions we ask today.

If you've suffered, there may be times when you've been close to losing hope.

Is this ever going to end?

Is it ever going to get better?

There is a hope that there is going to be a difference one day that something is going to change and everything is going to be made right.

That's the hope we hold onto.

But if nobody's able to open the scroll, it takes hope away completely.

I want you to see the gravity of this situation.

Not only hopeless, but because of sin we stand helpless and everyone looked around and no one was able to help them out of this situation.

Nobody is able to go into the presence of God.

Who's got the credentials to go right up to God and grab the scroll?

Pretty bold move.

This is important, because you have to remember what's at stake.

Our very eternity.

So they look around.

How about Abraham?

After all, he was the father of the people of God.

He looks down and says, "nope, I'm not able."

What about all the prophets?

Not them either.

What about John the Baptist.

Nope.

Paul?

Peter?

No one?

What about any one of us?

Nope.

We all have that pesky sin problem.

But there's hope because Jesus knows the ultimate problem.

2. Jesus pays the Ultimate price

I want you to see what happens next.

We’ve got the stage set with this problem.

Now look at what happens in verse 5

John is just weeping...he can't handle the hopelessness.

Now we see an extreme paradox...

a.

The extreme paradox

1.

He is a conquering Lion

2. He is a suffering Lamb

Now we see a pretty extreme paradox at this point and we can’t miss it here.

On one hand we see a conquering lion.

That’s the picture that the Bible has given us here, of a Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

I want to show you something really cool.

This is not just a thing that kind of appears here in Revelation 5.

This is something that was talked about thousands of years before that.

Hold your place here and turn back to the very first book in the Bible.

Genesis 49.

Turn with me back there to Genesis 49.

I want you to read how this whole thing got started.

Way back in the first book in the Bible.