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. 3:21 -26, But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets;

            22 Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:

            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:

            25 Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;

            26 To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in 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 Eden when God killed the lamb instead of Adam and Eve. I came to understand that full Salvation is possible through this substitutional sacrifice. You might ask, “How do you know that is true?” We know it because the Bible teaches it! (God said it.)

        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.