For Us

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. We're going to be focusing on this section of the Creed, which is extremely important. We're going to be in 1 Timothy 2 today. I urge then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession, and thanksgiving be made for all people, for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good and pleases God, our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed at the proper time, and for this purpose, I was appointed a herald and an apostle. I'm telling the truth, I'm not lying, and a true and faithful teacher of the Gentiles. So that's going to be our text, and I think that's one of the passages, not the only one by any means. Philippians 2, 5-11, which we went through last week, is also behind this section of the Creed. There's a lot of other passages. It's really encapsulating the life of Jesus Christ, but we're going to work through this portion of it today, okay, from 1 Timothy 2. And the three points that we're going to be making are this, kind of in reverse order of what the text says. First of all, that there is one God and one mediator. Secondly, what is God's desire? And thirdly, prayers for all people. That's how it works. So, one God and one mediator. This is how Paul wrote it here. He said, for there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus. You might read it and go like, yeah, well, that's great. This was extremely controversial in Paul's day and age, in the Roman world. It counter-cultural, actually subversive, even considered, I would say, treasonous by most people in Rome to say this. At the time, the Roman cult of the first century, they said the one mediator between gods, the gods, plural, and humanity is the emperor himself. Yes, Rome was formed in 510 BC as a republic, but that changed. By 27 BC, a man named Julius Caesar took over, and when he took over, he had the vestiges of a republic, but he was really the emperor. And as the emperor, he was basically the dictator, and he was considered to be divine, and expected that. Every citizen and every slave in Rome was expected to uphold this imperial cult. And so, why? Because that's the only way Rome would survive. If the emperor was doing well, and he was able to mediate to the gods what was needed, then the gods would bless Rome and keep Rome great. And without that, without everyone doing their part, the whole Roman Empire could collapse. That was the fear. Vijay Gupta, in his book, The Strangeness of Christianity, breaking into this, said this, Ancient religion played a crucial role in reinforcing power structures in society, from the gods on high, down to the peasants, slaves, and criminals. Everyone was expected to be in their place, and do their thing, and keep things the way they were. It was all for the people in power. And George Hayman explains it this way, Roman religion was not concerned with distinguishing true from false beliefs. It was more correctly understood as an existential category, discerning the proper actions that would ensure the success of the people in the state. Basically, you needed to follow this whole cult, to do all of these things to keep Rome how it was. And if you decided, no, you're not going to go and worship at the temples, if you decided the Roman emperor was not really the mediator between the gods and humanity, well, we need to deal with you. The emperor was that, right? And here, Paul's writing, there's really no there there in the Roman society. Do you understand that? There is no there there. There is no emperor who's divine, there's no emperor who can actually mediate between God and humanity, and there was no propping up of the imperial cult in order to keep things going the way they were. The emperor was not a god, and there was only one god and mediator, and Jesus is Lord and no one else. That was pretty, well, dangerous. Now, like I said last week, and I've said from the beginning, when the Christian church said the simplest form, Jesus is Lord, to a more elaborate form like Philippians 2, 5 through 11 about who Jesus is and what he did and why he is Lord, or a passage like this that talks about God being the one God and mediator and all of that, to the creeds, they were saying two things at once. They were first of all saying we reject all the stories and narratives of the culture that we live in, of what the good life is, where things are headed and what's important. And we are saying and being a part of this story, the God who created this world out of love, the God who redeems this world through his own son and the God who is sanctifying us by his spirit. There is...