DEWITT TABERNACLE TEACHING SERIES
WHAT CHRIST ACCOMPLISHED
AT THE CROSS
By C.W. Wood
June/July
2013
QUOTE: ON THE WINGS OF A DOVE, NOVEMBER 1965, PAGES 8-9, “And
that’s the way with a real Christian. Did you know a real Christian doesn’t
have even any sin at all imputed to him? David said, “Blessed is the man who
God will not impute sin to.” When you’re washed in the Blood of the Lamb
(not by make-belief, but really the—the Blood of the Lamb), God does not
impute to you anything that’s done, because you’re under the Blood and He
doesn’t see it. There’s a Blood sacrifice; the only thing He can see you in,
is the way He saw you before the foundation of the world when He put your name
in the Lamb’s Book of Life. That’s all He can look at, because you are
redeemed from everything that was ever done, you’re washed in the Blood of the
Lamb. Therefore, there’s no gall in you, there’s no unclean habit in you,
because that the Blood of the Lamb has did this; and God cannot impute sin to
you after you’ve got a sin-offering laying there waiting for you.” (End of
quote)
Now, let’s take these statements to the scriptures and prove what the
Prophet said!
It is most important, and urgent, for the Bride of Christ to understand
what was accomplished at the Cross. The greatest victory that Heaven or Earth
has ever seen, or will ever see, was won there! The greatest battle that was
ever fought in the mind of a man was fought and won there. The man in whose mind
the battle raged was Jesus Christ! And when the battle was over, guilty sinners
were justified. But how can a just God justify guilty men? Paul gives us a full
answer in Rom.
23 For all have sinned, and come short of
the glory of God;
24 Being justified freely by his grace
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
You say He was a man? Yes! His God-part was held in check, while His
man-part met Satan head on! A man, a Kinsman Redeemer, defeated Satan! I wan to
go into the legal aspect of what happened at the Cross. God operates by His
spiritual laws. There was not only a physical victory won there by a flesh being
(a man), Jesus Christ, overcoming all the temptations of Satan, but there was a
legal victory won there, that leaves the Devil no ground at all! This legal
victory was won by God following His own rules of “Jurisprudence”. God
governs His entire universe by law! Our salvation is based on a system of rules,
by-laws, and regulations that God has set up!
God planned our Salvation by following His own set of Divine laws. I will
use the term that our earthly judicial system uses in connection with law
enforcement, and add divine to jurisprudence, referring to God’s Divine Rules
and Regulations.
Having gone through the New Mexico State Police training school, twice,
once in 1955 and again in 1958 (I have two certificates of graduation from their
law school), I learned at least a little bit about our judicial system that is
called Jurisprudence. The word simply
means a scheme of rules that our courts
have set up that must be followed by police officers who enforce the laws of the
land. And, they must also be followed by the lawyers and judges who rule
over our court trials. These regulations are made and enforced in an effort to
keep from violating the rights of individual citizens. But, now days, they have
gone far astray!
Now, I want to apply this jurisprudence
to what happened at the Cross and show that our great Creator, God, followed
His own Divine Jurisprudence when He won a legal victory at the Cross. Remember,
it was not only a physical victory of the mind of a man resisting all Satan
could do, it was also a legal victory! God could leave the Devil no kind of
ground at all to stand on after His death on the Cross! Jesus Christ followed
God’s Divine Jurisprudence in winning complete victory over our enemy.
To understand this, will greatly increase our faith as we see that God
has legally destroyed Satan, and then legally transferred that victory to His
Bride Church. God will leave no man and no Devil with any kind of a legal excuse
when judgment is passed on them at the White Throne Judgment. And, this includes
Lucifer!
Now, if you understand jurisprudence, let’s follow God’s Divine
Jurisprudence in the scriptures. God’s granting of authority and dominion over
the Earth to Adam was a gift from God to man. Since God had created it all, He
could legally grant authority to Adam to rule over it, as long as he followed
God’s Divine Jurisprudence. Adam’s authority was legally his! What he did
with it became Adam’s responsibility! Adam was, in every sense, a
free-moral-agent! If he chose to leave God’s by-laws (break some of God’s
rules), he would forfeit his legal right of dominion. But, God left it up to
Adam to choose! He would not only lose his authority over the Earth, but he
would lose his personal victory over our enemy. And remember, the enemy was in
the Garden, he was the Tree of Knowledge
of Good and Evil. God, Himself, placed the Devil in the Garden, because Adam
must choose. And, we well know Adam’s choice. By a wrong choice Adam became a
slave to Satan! Adam’s perfect nature fell and he took on Satan’s nature! He
hid in the bushes from God. Now here is where God’s Divine Jurisprudence comes
in. God had the power to step in and spoil the work Satan had done in Adam, but
this would have violated His own moral principles of government, His jurisprudence. If God had gone over Satan’s head and forcibly
repossessed the dominion of the earth for Adam, this would have been without due
process of God’s own Law. Why so? Because, God had made Adam a
free-moral-agent, and he was free to make his own choices! Not only was he free
to make his own choices, but God would set before him good and evil, life and
death, and tell him to make up his own mind what to follow! And Adam, by his own
free-moral-agency, gave it to Satan!
And so, we see that according
to God’s Divine Jurisprudence Satan had a legal right to rule over man and the
earth. If Satan’s rule and dominion was to be destroyed, there had to be a way
found that would not violate God’s universal principles of justice. In other
words, God would do it legally, and according to His own Divine Jurisprudence!
God‘s moral law-code has said that it would have to be a kinsman of the
human race (a Kinsman Redeemer) that would come and take Satan’s authority
away from him!
The control of the earth had been given to a man and it had been lost by
a man! And, it could only be legally taken back by a man. But, where was there a
man to be found? All men born from Adam’s lineage were born slaves to Satan!
Back before the Civil War came, the slaves had no say in legal matters.
They had no vote, and no rights of their own! That’s what we are talking about
here. So, a member of the human race had to be found that Satan had no hold on.
A slave of Satan could not overthrow Satan. He had to be human, but not of
Adam’s descent! As far as man’s thinking was concerned there was no way for
a member of the human race to qualify for this job! But, the great mind of God
had formed a way! Let’s read it in the book.
Gal. 4:4-7, “But when the
fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made
under the law,
5 To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the
adoption of sons.
6 And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into
your hearts, crying Abba, Father.
7 Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an
heir of God through Christ.”
Since Jesus was placed in Mary by the Holy Ghost, God’s Divine Nature
was in Him. And, because He could live sin-free, Satan had no hold on him! But,
because He was “made of a woman”,
He was what we could call an authentic human being! If Jesus was not born of
Mary by a supernatural intervention (Virgin Birth), then He was just the son of
Joseph, or some other man! And, since only God could redeem the human race,
Jesus had to be Divine as well as human (truly the God-man), not just in words,
but also by actual fact, by a plan of God. If He had not lived a sinless-life,
He would have come under Satan’s control. So, in order to qualify legally, He
had to be truly human, and in order for Him to qualify morally, He had to be
truly God also.
And so, we are looking at God’s fool-proof plan for reclaiming the
earth and all on it who want to be saved! The legal plan was for a man to come
who lived a sinless-life and then faces every trial that Satan could bring and
overcome the tempter in it as a man!
God’s over-ruling power was not to be used in overcoming Satan. It
would only be legal in God’s mind when a man like Adam had been born, and who
was also God, came and did it! It would not be legal in God’s jurisprudence
until a man came that was un-fallen,
like the first Adam was before the fall! Then, this second Adam, Jesus Christ,
would meet Satan with only the same weapons that the first Adam had. Although,
Jesus had all the power of Heaven at His command, He met all Satan could throw
at Him as an un-fallen man. The first Adam had been an un-fallen man (before the
fall). And, Jesus was called the second Adam because He also was an un-fallen
man and He chose not to fall! “Know ye
not that I could call 10,000 angels to deliver me!”
Now,
in closing, we want to show that Satan is no longer a free-moral-agent. Satan
has had his power and authority destroyed! He is not yet annihilated, but will
be when God has no more use for him! All of his legal rights and claims on the
earth and its people have been cancelled. Here on Earth, a person who has had
the final sentencing of death has no more legal rights at all! It is the same in
God’s Divine Jurisprudence. The Devil has been notified of his death sentence
and he has no more legal rights at all! He can only take orders and wait for his
annihilation!
And so, I ask the preachers, who are you, and who are you lay people, and
who are you devils, who say that Lucifer is having himself a great revival and
with great success? Don’t you believe that Jesus, on the Cross, took all of
Satan’s authority from him and that now he is under God’s orders?
A Follow-up of What I Have Preached! A Personal Testimony: After I had been saved a few years, and had been often
thinking about my sinful past, I remember thinking that I deserved the worst
kind of punishment. I felt that the Great Creator and Judge ought to condemn
someone that had been as guilty as I had been, and that if He hadn’t done it
as yet, the ax was sure to fall sooner or later, because in my heart, I knew
that I deserved to be cast into the lowest Hell! I knew in my heart that it was
not enough for the Bible to say I was forgiven. That would not satisfy my
grieving conscience. I knew that somehow, the sins I had committed, had to be
punished! But, there was the question in my mind, “How could God remain Just,
and justify one who had been as guilty as me? How could He be just and not
punish me to the last degree?
For years, I was wearied and worried about this question. I could not
come up with an answer that satisfied my conscience. I had not yet had the
revelation of the Cross. I had not yet seen by revelation that the Great Creator
and Ruler and Judge, was going to die for the unjust rebels! This method of
doing away with sin could not have come out of the mind of man. Because, if we
could have believed that God wanted to suffer and die in our place, the question
remained, “How could God die?”
Only God could have made a plan by which He could die! He would become a
man, our Kinsman Redeemer, and the man-part would die, but the God-part would
raise up the man-part again.
I heard the Plan of Salvation in Sunday school classes from my youth up.
But, I didn’t know anything about it in my inner soul! The Light was there,
but I was blind, God Himself had to make the plan plain to me! And so, it became
clear to me that Jesus came to make a legal and just payment for the sins of all
who believe it. And in that way, God would remain Just and Holy and Pure! It was
God’s Righteous Law of Substitution that was first seen in
I can now see that He, that is called The Son of God, is in fact God
Himself. And that before the world was, the Plan had been laid for this Son of
God to suffer. He became a man, so that in that capacity, He could die and save
us sinners. He became our second Adam! The fall of the first Adam left a
loop-hole of escape, another Adam could undo the ruin of the first Adam.
I saw that before I had ever sinned I had fallen because of my first
father’s sin. But, because at first my fall was not a personal one, but came
on me by sexual birth, it became possible by God’s own Jurisprudence (moral
law) for me to be totally forgiven, because the second Adam took in His own
flesh and blood body, my terrible sins! I saw that my sins were laid on Him and
by His stripes I am healed.