Many in the body of Christ lack a clear understanding of all that Christ has purchased for them in His finished work. As important and as vital as Christ’s death is, there’s more to his finished work than his death. His death took care of the negative; His resurrection and enthronement took care of the positive. And they are two complementary poles of one finished work. If we just teach the death of Christ, the best we can have is forgiveness of sins. But we miss the full picture.
A lack of knowledge is one culprit. “Lack of Knowledge” is Pastor Joe McIntyre’s series introduction to his 16-part Finished Work of Christ audio series. Listen to this podcast episode here.
Mentioned in this Episode
The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments, CH Dodd
Additional Resources
The Finished Work of Christ – Full Series Audio
The Finished Work of Christ – Book
Full Transcript
Well, let’s pray and we’ll get started. Father, we thank you that the Holy Spirit is in us. The Greater One, the Revealer of Christ is in us, and Lord, we’re looking to you tonight to activate the ministry of the Holy Spirit within us, and to unveil Christ to us, Lord. We need a greater revelation of Jesus, Father, so we ask you to grant us that tonight. In Jesus name. Amen.
Well, as you can see, from the outline, we’re starting a new series tonight. A couple of weeks ago in prayer, well, actually, no, it wasn’t in prayer. It was while I was, yeah, I guess you call that prayer when you’re talking to God. The Lord sort of just dropped this in my heart. It’s something I’ve been working on in my mind for a number of years, with the intention of eventually writing it. I felt like the Lord gave me an outline for it, and said, to get on it with teaching and writing. And so tonight’s the first installment in that.
What we’re going to talk about is the finished work of Christ. Many in the body of Christ lack a clear understanding of all that Christ has purchased for us in His finished work. Now, sometimes you use the word finished work. And people say, “Well, why don’t you just say Christ’s atoning death?” Well, because one of the things I hope to open up in this series is the fact that as important and as vital as Christ’s death is, there’s more to his finished work, than his death. His death took care of the negative. His resurrection, and enthronement take care of the positive, and they’re two complementary poles of one finished work.
It’s important that we understand by revelation, because if we just teach the death of Christ, the best we can have is forgiveness of sins. But when we begin to understand the revelation, and the enthroning of Christ, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit from the right hand of the Father, then we begin to understand that we’re part of a new creation. That we’re part of the resurrection of the corporate Christ. Christ, head and body. And there’s so many aspects of that finished work that the church has not really taught very effectively that most believers, it takes them a while even to think in those terms.
So we want to take some time to look at that tonight, and probably for at least eleven more weeks. The way the Lord has led me to write is to write a chapter, after I do my outline. Then I write a chapter and further develop the ideas. So it has the effect of preparing me well to teach and share, and then also to accomplish the writing part of it as well. So it as it says, in the notes, many in the church, when they think of the sacrifice of Jesus think only of His death on the cross. When they plead the blood, they think of the bloodshed on the cross. Well, it is, of course, the bloodshed on the cross. But the book of Hebrews reveals that Jesus took his blood after His resurrection into the heavenly Holy of Holies and completed the reality suggested by the Day of Atonement in the Old Testament.
Let’s look in Hebrews chapter nine, verse 11, here, and we’re not going to go into a lot of detail on this tonight, but if you want to pursue it on your own, and… you know, what I always say to folks is, you don’t have to believe anything I teach if you can’t find it in your Bible. But if you haven’t bothered to look in your Bible, and you just don’t like how it sounds, well, then that doesn’t count. Because you have to look at the scriptures and look at them in their context, and be satisfied with your own mind and heart that what you’re hearing is right. Really any honest Bible teacher will invite you to examine what he teaches because if it doesn’t stand up to an examination of the scriptures, then then it’s worthy to be challenged.
But in Hebrews 9:11, it says, “But Christ came as high priest of the good things to come with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands that is not of this creation.” Now he’s talking about the heavenly tabernacle, now. “Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood, He entered the most holy place, once and for all, having obtained eternal redemption. “For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies, for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works, to serve the living God?”
So here we see the picture of Jesus fulfilling the type of the earthly Day of Atonement by entering the heavenly Holy of Holies, and sprinkling His blood in heaven. So we have to understand that the redemptive work of Christ was not fully accomplished until He brought his blood into the heavenly Holy of Holies and He sat down at the Father’s right hand. And as we go through these lessons, I think that will become clearer and clearer. And what usually happens to believers, as they hear these things, and look in the scriptures is they realize that this has been right there, and they’ve read over it. And for one reason or another, they haven’t really seen it, but it’s right, it’s clearly there in the Word of God. So Christ’s victory over death is often overlooked in its significance for our redemption. And so we want to look tonight, at some considerations about this.
Tonight is very introductory, and it’s, although we’ll be applying it to the finished work of Christ, it’s a principle that has application to every area of Christian living. And that is our need of revelation knowledge from God. In Hosea chapter four, the prophet Hosea writes to God’s people, and he says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” “My people.” Not the heathen, not the idol worshipers, not the New Age movement, but “My people are destroyed, for lack of knowledge.” In Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah tells us that His people, people of God, are taken into captivity. Isaiah 5:13 says, “Therefore, my people have gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge.”
Now, think about this for a minute, here are the one people on Earth who have a greater revelation of God than any people on Earth. They know the one true God. Most of the other nations around them, in fact, all of them believed in a plurality of gods. None of them were monotheistic. None of them believed in the one true God, except Israel. Israel had a covenant with God. Israel had a revelation of God’s character in His many names. And there’s a magnificent revelation of God in the Old Covenant. Yet, here it says, “God’s people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”, or “they’re taken into captivity because they don’t have any knowledge.” Well, I want you to think with me about that, because the only meaning that can mean or one way we can understand that is that the knowledge that they had, was intellectual, but not vital, not life changing. It hadn’t reached the part of their being, where it revolutionized the way they lived. God’s people can lack knowledge.
Now, these are both Old Testament Scriptures, and someone could argue and say, “Well, that was under the Old Covenant.” But the Bible prays that we would have knowledge. The Bible in the New Covenant talks about having knowledge, that we need knowledge, and we need to pray for knowledge. And as we look at the scriptures tonight, you’ll see what I mean there. Many have embraced the ethics, and here’s another concept that we can consider tonight: many have embraced the ethics of the teaching of Jesus without understanding the Pauline way to attain to that teaching. In other words, they’ve looked in the Gospels and they’ve seen all that Jesus asks of us, but then they’ve struggled in the flesh to try to make it happen, and they’ve been miserable failures at it. So they live under a cloud of condemnation and guilt, because they have not been able to walk out their redemption. I want to suggest to you that it’s because of a lack of knowledge. And the kind of knowledge that I’m talking about is knowledge of the revelation God gave to all, unveiled by the Holy Spirit.
You see, what we find in Paul’s revelation is something we don’t find in the other apostles. There’s a book that was written, oh, I don’t know, in the 20s, or something. Trying to think of the exact title. It’s by C.H. Dodd, and something like the Apostolic Preaching of the New Testament or something like that. And in that book, he shows that all of the apostles taught the foundations, that Jesus was the Messiah that fulfilled the old covenant promises, that He had come, He had died for their sins, He’d been raised from the dead, and that He would return again, and judge humanity. And that basic gospel, all of the apostles preached that. And that’s what we might call a basic gospel. But this author points out but the apostle Paul, and the apostle John, while embracing that basic gospel, God revealed to them something beyond that basic gospel. And Paul’s epistles are filled with His revelation as are John’s.
Have you ever noticed how when you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they could, they’re just three different voices in the same things? But you read John’s gospel, and all of a sudden, it’s like you’ve entered this other world. All of a sudden, it’s mystical, and it’s the sayings of Jesus that are very difficult to understand. You find them in John, and you get over to the epistles, and He talks about, the one that abides in Him does not sin. And you start reading all these things, and they’re challenging, and they’re intriguing, and yet, they seem like they’re of a slightly different flavor than the other gospels and the other epistles except for Paul’s.
The Lord shows Paul and John to bring the revelation to the church that would bring it to maturity. Paul writes to the Corinthians, and they’re struggling with carnality, and he tells them what they need, so that they can be mature, and stop following man and start following God. Well, a lack of knowledge of who we are in Christ, and what that gives us, produces defeated Christians who long for victory, but cannot seem to find it. So God’s people can suffer from a lack of knowledge. They can even have right knowledge, but just incomplete knowledge. And we’ll see this here in a second.
Our second point is that revelation builds the church. If you’ll turn with me to Matthew chapter 16. This is really an intriguing truth when you see it, because it’s kind of obvious, but then again, unless somebody calls our attention to it, we can bypass it. In Matthew 16:13, “When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples saying, Who do men say that I, the Son of man am? And so they said, Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. And He said to them, But who do you say that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said to him, Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father, who is in heaven.”
Do you realize that none of us would know Jesus if the father hadn’t drawn us to Him and revealed Him to us? John talks about that in His Gospel. “No man knows me except the one to whom the Father reveals me.” You couldn’t come to him, He says, unless the Father drew you. So the father had to draw you to Christ, then He had to reveal Christ to you for you to be saved. And that’s what we might call the initial step of Revelation.
As you know, our revelation of Jesus is progressive. After we know Him as our Savior, we can discover Him as our baptizer in the Holy Spirit. We can find Him as our healer. We can find Him as our deliverer from demonic oppression. We can discover Him as the One who meets our needs. There’s so many ways in which we can discover Him because we can never exhaust the fullness of the revelation of Christ.
Well, the Apostle Peter here, has discovered who Jesus really is by revelation from the Father. And Jesus commends him and says, “Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven”. Then He says, “And I also say to you, that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” Well, we don’t all necessarily read Greek, but if you read the Greek, you’d notice that Peter was Petra, a little rock. But the rock was the big rock. And so Peter’s a little rock. Actually, the way the Catholic church got the idea that Peter was the rock was that they took a Latin translation, which didn’t distinguish between the rocks, but the Greek actually does. But the rock upon which the church is built (I’m going to say something to shock you) is not Jesus. Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever. The rock that the church is built on is the Father’s revelation of Jesus. You see, the church does not exist where the father hasn’t revealed Jesus.
So if you follow with me on that, then the church is built by the father’s progressive unveiling of His Son to the people of God. And where He is more fully revealed, the church is more powerful and more effective. Where the revelation of Him is less, then the church is less powerful.
It’s an ironic thing to think about, but here we live in America, and we have this tremendous teaching available to us. And some years ago, both in Russia and in China, there was very little Christian teaching. And people would finally get in to see these Russian or Chinese Christians, and discover them laying down their lives being martyred for their faith, standing up in the face of cruelty and being imprisoned and punished for their faith. And yet, many of the missionaries that came discovered that they’d never heard they could be filled with the Holy Spirit, and operate in the gifts of the Spirit, and were wonderfully overjoyed to find out about the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
You can see where, in a situation like that, God’s people were destroyed for a lack of knowledge. You see, it wasn’t that God didn’t want to fill them with the Holy Spirit. But they didn’t know there was a Holy Spirit to be filled with in that sense of the word. And so knowledge, in the true spiritual sense of that word, is the key to the church’s advancement. As one brother said, that revelation from the Father concerning Jesus is God’s greatest gift to mankind.
And so now, here’s the thing, though, even at this important stage of Peter’s walk with the Lord. Over the years, I’ve really come to appreciate Peter. I mean, Peter is an interesting man. He’s bold, and you know, just jump right out of the boat and then sank, you know, and yet you know, the Lord was less displeased with Peter’s lack of faith than He was for the disciples. Peter at least got out of the boat. You know, he stepped out. And so Peters an interesting character, but here we see that he has a revelation from the Father concerning Jesus. And he declares that and the Lord commends him for that. But notice, well let me just comment before we move on.
“Upon this rock I will build My church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” The key to the church’s victory over the forces of Hell is a great revelation of the Son of God. And He says, “And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Now it would appear that in the mind of Jesus, the revelation of Himself to the disciples would be a key to exercising spiritual authority as well. So that’s rather important to note.
But notice as we move on in the chapter, verse 21, “From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders, and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.” Now, how many know that when Peter on the day of Pentecost, preached about the resurrection of Christ, he quoted Psalm 16? So he quoted the Old Testament scriptures, where he came to see the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. But at this stage of his understanding, he knows who Jesus is, he has true knowledge of Jesus, but his true knowledge of Jesus is partial. He cannot see why a Messiah would be crucified. He cannot see why a messiah would die. His understanding, like the Jewish understanding of the day was that when Messiah came, He would overthrow the Romans and throw the yoke off of Israel, and Israel would be exalted to the head of nations. That was the Messiah they expected. They didn’t expect a Messiah that would die.
And Paul said in First Corinthians one, he said, “I preach Messiah crucified, to the Jews a scandal, but to the Greeks foolishness. They just couldn’t relate to a crucified Messiah. “So then Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him saying, Far be it from you, Lord. This shall never happen to you.” And so here we see someone with a true revelation of Christ fighting against a deeper revelation of Christ, with the best of motives, but not really understanding the fullness of God’s intention for His son in His redemption for us.
Now, what I want you to draw from this, how many know that people who are genuinely born again, love God, can be just as militant against the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit, particularly speaking in tongues, as Peter was against Jesus? And probably Jesus’s attitude isn’t that much different about it. And the same thing is true about divine healing, about deliverance, about so many other issues, that saints can be genuinely born again, have a genuine revelation of Christ, but it’s an impartial revelation. Therefore, they actually end up fighting against the furtherance of the gospel, because they don’t see enough of Jesus to understand that He is interested. For example, in the area of divine healing, a lot of the Church says, “Well, that’s not for today, it’s more important that we go to heaven. God’s more interested in souls than he is in bodies.” And they take a partial truth for a whole truth.
Just because God is more interested in our eternal destiny than our physical comfort, doesn’t mean He isn’t interested in both. It’s a distorted view of Jesus that makes us think he doesn’t want to heal, when he spent three and a half years of His earthly ministry going about healing the sick and delivering those who are oppressed by the devil. I like what what Bill Johnson says, he says, Jesus is perfect theology. If you want to know good theology, just look at Jesus and see what He does. And if He doesn’t do it, then God isn’t doing it because He only did what God did. So if you want to know what God’s like, look at Jesus. If you want to know what kind of ministry God wants to see in the earth, look at Jesus. That’s the model.
So Peter here, he rebukes the Lord. “And so the Lord turned to him and said to Peter, Get behind Me, Satan, you are an offense to me. And you are not mindful of the things of God, but of the things of men.” You know, it’s very possible for us to have a mixture of revelation, and human concepts and men’s traditions. And I have come to the conclusion after 40 years of walking with the Lord, that you don’t know what traditions you have until the Lord shows you. Because we just accept things that we’ve heard all our life as though they were Bible truth, and then we discover that some of them have no basis in Scripture. And so all of a sudden, we can be hit over the head by by a scripture truth, and go, “Oh my gosh! That’s not what I used to think.” And realize that we have had ideas that are not biblical concepts that are men’s traditions. And actually, as Jesus said, It is the traditions of men that make void or ineffective the Word of God.
And so, as we look at some of these truths in this series, I want you to examine the Scriptures. For some of you I may not be saying things that are all that new or startling, but if you hear something that you’ve not heard before, I want you to say, “Well, I’m gonna examine that in the scriptures and see if that’s right, because I’m…” When I tell people, that Christ’s death was not the full atonement, I mean, you can sometimes, you can see the smoke coming out their nostrils, they’re so angry. You know, “How dare you say that! Jesus said, It is finished?” Well, one of the nights in this series we’re going to look at it is finished and what it what it means and what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean the atonement was finished, because Paul says in first Corinthians 15, “If Christ is not risen, you’re still dead in your sins.” So His death alone could not accomplish what God wanted accomplished. And we have to come to an understanding of that, because we’ve limited the Gospel’s power by not believing more in the resurrection.
Alright, so revelation, we see in this passage about Peter is progressive, you can have a true revelation, but that revelation can be impartial, and that impartial revelation can lead you to fight further revelation. And most of us have experienced people in the church who you just can’t talk to them. Don’t remind, don’t show them what the Bible says. Their minds are made up. And probably all of us would have to plead guilty to being that way at some point in our Christian life. But hopefully, we got over it.
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