Let's now turn in God's Word to the book of Isaiah, the well-known chapter 53. Isaiah 53. Let's read the whole chapter. Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness. And when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men. a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who shall declare his generation? For he was cut off out of the land of the living. For the transgression of my people was he stricken. and he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death. Because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him. He hath put him to grief. When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. he shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied. By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he hath poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors. And he bear the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. This is the holy and inspired word of our God, on the basis of which is the teaching of the catechism in Lord's Day 16. Lord's Day 16. Why was it necessary for Christ to humble himself even unto death? Because with respect to the justice and truth of God, satisfaction for our sins could be made no otherwise than by the death of the Son of God. Why was he also buried, thereby to prove that he was really dead? Since then Christ died for us, why must we also die? Our death is not a satisfaction for our sins, but only an abolishing of sin and a passage into eternal life. What further benefit do we receive from the sacrifice and death of Christ on the cross? That by virtue thereof, our old man is crucified, dead and buried with him. That so the corrupt inclinations of the flesh may no more reign in us. but that we may offer ourselves unto him a sacrifice of thanksgiving. Why is there added, he descended into hell? That in my greatest temptations I may be assured and wholly comfort myself in this, that my Lord Jesus Christ, by his inexpressible anguish, pains, terrors, and hellish agonies, in which he was plunged during all his sufferings, but especially on the cross, hath delivered me from the anguish and torments of hell. How can the Son of God die? That's a pretty striking expression, isn't it? But the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism did not shy away from using that striking language. In Answer 40, they stated, satisfaction for our sins could be made no otherwise than by the death of the Son God. Probably most of us, if not all of us, would not have chosen those words. We would have worded that differently than the authors of the Catechism did. That seems suspect on first glance. Jesus is God, is he not? And he has a divine person, doesn't he? God can't possibly die. He is God. That's totally contrary to what it is for him to be God. And indeed, those are valid points to be made. So, how can we possibly understand this in an orthodox sense? Well, to do so, we only need to remember the reality of Christ's two natures. He is both fully divine and fully human, so that when he dies, it is not as though the divine person of Christ dies, nor is it that the divine nature of Jesus Christ dies. Rather, it is that the Son of God in the flesh, come down into this world, Jesus Christ, according to the human nature, died. And he did. Really, truly, he died. We need not wonder, then, if we really ought to get rid of this particular doctrine as it's expressed in the Catechism. We may keep it in confidence. And, in fact, We must, we must keep it, because apart from it, salvation as a whole crumbles. If Jesus did not die, he did not pay for our sins. It's of the utmost importance, then, to maintain this reality. Other confessional statements that we have allude to it. although not in sort of detail that the Catechism has here in Lords Day 16. There are other places in the Confessions that make reference to the fact that he saved us specifically by dying. One example is Canons 2.8, the well-known article on limited atonement, a very important article on that topic, states in the body of that article that all of our faith and all the blessings of salvation are given to us exactly because Christ died for us. And other examples could be given as well. Today, we have the privilege, the great privilege, of partaking of the Lord's Supper. And the Lord's Supper is a reminder to us of the perfect, perfect suffering of Jesus Christ. If He did not actually die, then the sacrament loses its profit for us because it no longer has any basis in abiding reality of true atonement in the broken body and shed blood of Jesus Christ. And so today, we hear a wonderful gospel that Jesus Christ, in all the humiliation of his death and of his burial, took our sins and the consequences of our sins, and by both, by his death and his burial, he gives to us blessed life. Paradox? Not to the believer. Through his death, we have life, now and eternally. Consider with me Lord's Day 16 with the theme, Confessing God's Son Dead and Buried. The necessity of his death and burial, its comfort for the hereafter, and its implication for life now. The death and the burial of Jesus Christ were necessary. Death from a general viewpoint, is the end of all earthly existence. In our experience, from our understanding, death is the fading away of all earthly vitality, all earthly strength and energy from our earthly body. And then the soul leaving that body and going instantly to its eternal destiny, whether it be an eternity of torment in hell or an eternity of bliss in heaven. It is not a natural process that all life must eventually experience. To call it that, to say death is natural, which is something that you hear quite often in society and, in fact, even can roll off our own tongues at times without thinking about it, death is natural, to say that, is like saying that death always has been and that death always will be, but that is not true. Death is not how it always was. It's not how it was at the first, and in the end, it will not be that way either. In the new heavens and earth, there will be no more death. Instead, it is not natural, but death is rather God's punishment on human sin, an active punishment of God. Just as only God gives life, so too only God takes life. Man could not take Jesus' life away from him. He, he says, laid it down. He gave it up. The Bible tells us at the moment of his death that he gave up the ghost, he gave up his spirit so that there is a great difference between the death of God's Son and the death of any other person. He willingly laid it down. That tells us that he's God, doesn't it? If only God can give life and only God can take life. And we read that he actively laid his life down and gave it up. He willingly took death upon himself, not in a sinful suicide, but by the giving up of his life to God for the salvation of sinners. That shows us the deity of God's Son yet again. Heidelberg Catechism, in the language of this question and answer, is calling to mind Genesis 2 and 3. When we read this in question and answer 40, why was it necessary for Christ to humble himself even unto death? Because with respect to the justice and truth of God, satisfaction for our sins could be made no otherwise than by the death of the Son of God. That's directing us to see the truth of the fall and the consequence of the fall. The command came to Adam and to Eve in the garden, do not eat of that tree. And if you do that same day, surely you will die. And then we read on into Genesis 3, and we read of the fall and of the failure to keep that command of God and the judgment that therefore came upon Adam and upon Eve for that great sin. The judgment included multiple things, but especially what it included was exactly what God had promised would come on account of that sin, death. Immediately, in an instant, they completely died spiritually. And in that same instant, immediately, the process of physical death was begun. And it could never be stopped until they reached the grave. Question and Answer 40 says, that God is just and He is true. He's just, righteous to execute that judgment on sin, and He is true. He is no liar when He issues such judgments and declarations about judgment as that, so that He must punish with death, and therefore, indeed, satisfaction can only come. Satisfaction for sin can only come by way of a death. Death of Christ, then, had to be a true death. It had to be a real death. Mere bloodshed would not have been sufficient. Old Testament Israel was commanded not just to poke and stab the animals that they sacrificed so that they bled a little bit, but to kill them. They had to die so with Christ. He could not have stepped down off the cross after he had endured those three hours in which the darkness descended, even though at the end of that three hours he had taken the heat of God's wrath against our sins. He could not then come down from the cross. He actually had to die because he was still enduring the consequence of man's sin. And God, again, had promised that punishment of death so that Christ must truly die. It had to be carried out. That sentence had to be carried out in Christ. Answer 42 tells us that our death, our death is not a satisfaction for sin. That's because Christ's already was so that there is no need The death of Christ then puts a seal, a stamp on his atoning work. In his death, there is the completion of the satisfaction of God's punishment against Adam's sin. It comes to its close. And it displays also his grace, doesn't it? The death of Jesus Christ, because from beginning to end, it was a willing death. all the way through. It was a matter of perfect obedience to his father on behalf of others. Having died, he was then buried. You know the history well. That rich man named Joseph from the place Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus after Jesus had died. And then he, together with Nicodemus, the same Nicodemus who had come to Jesus by night and had confessed that Jesus was a great master, teacher of the scriptures, that same Nicodemus now no longer goes by night, but publicly joins himself to the cause of Christ by joining Joseph in the burial of Jesus. They prepare the body with myrrh and aloes, as John 19 tells us, and then hurriedly dress it up, wrap it in linen, and lay it in Joseph's own tomb, working quickly because the day was almost at an end and the Sabbath was coming on soon. They lay the body in the tomb and there the body remains from Friday night until sometime early Sunday morning when Jesus rises from the grave. That burial was necessary for the same reason, really. as was the death of Jesus Christ. It's evidence that he truly took the consequences of human sin, including even the consequence that is the grave. Because the grave is, in a real way, in its own right, a picture of hell. Even the words for hell in the scriptures can rightly be understood to mean the grave very often. have the same meaning. It was necessary that he be buried in order that he then destroy the power of the grave by rising from the dead. And just as with the death of Christ, so too with the burial of Christ. It puts an additional seal, an additional stamp on the atoning work of God's Son. In his burial, we have an additional confirmation that he had done all God called him to do. And then this, too, displays God's grace and Christ's grace to us, because He went there, He went to that grave specifically so that He could then conquer it for the sake of His people. Isaiah 53 is one of the most well-known passages in all of Scripture relating to the death and the passion, the suffering of Jesus Christ. We're not going to take the time in this shortened Lord's Supper sermon to look at every individual phrase that speaks to these things. We restrict ourselves instead to the end of verse 8 through the beginning of verse 10. The end of verse eight, for he was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people was he stricken. Cut off out of the land of the living, meaning that his life itself was cut off, was brought to an end. He was separated out from all of those who are alive, who remain in the land of the living. As his earthly life comes to an end, other verses make plain the same thing, that he clearly, truly, He died. It was the fading away of all of his earthly strength, all of his earthly energy, all of his earthly vitality from his body. He was stricken, verse 8 says. That word points to receiving a stroke from someone else, being smitten even with something that is debilitating and reduces one to extreme weakness. And notice the passive. He was stricken. God the Father smites the Son in that He sends Him to die, even as that Son, having been stricken, willingly offers up His life to the Father. And He did it for the transgression of My people, the text says. He needed to be stricken with death exactly because of sin on the part of men for those transgressions. So that, once more, we see that the death of Christ was a final seal on the atoning work that he had done. Affirmation that it was true. Affirmation that it was complete for God's own people. On our behalf, the Father smites the Son. Then we have in verse 10 these words, yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him. He hath put him to grief. When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed and so forth. Similarly then to what we just said, it pleased the Lord to bruise him. God was pleased to crush his own son. That's what that word means, to crush him. He crushed him. on the cross, not pleasure in the sense of God having a sadistic streak so that he takes a sick pleasure in suffering, but pleasure in the sense that this was God's will. It was fitting, according to the will of God, to accomplish his own purpose, that his son be crushed. And then he put him to grief. He made him weak, the sort of weakness of an extreme sickness or extreme sorrow when a person can feel like they hardly have any life left in them, that sort of weakness, grief. Jesus experienced that at the hand of His Father. And then what life He did still have in Him, He willingly laid down. Regarding the burial, we have verse 9. And he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death, because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. He made his grave with the rich. That's again referring to the historical narrative of the burial of Christ. Joseph of Arimathea is described as a rich man in the scriptures. He made his grave with the rich because He had done no violence, and there was no deceit in him. The fact that he dies sinlessly, then, is yet another stamp on his having done all that was needed for the salvation of his people. From this death and burial, there is comfort for the hereafter. Regarding death first, that's what we find in question and answer 42. Since then Christ died for us, why must we also die? Our death is not a satisfaction for our sins, but only an abolishing of sin and a passage into eternal life. Negatively, it is not satisfaction. We don't need to fear that we have not done enough yet, and that when we come to the point of death, now We have to carry out the last part of atoning for our sins, and that death is a matter of God killing us in His pure wrath. That is not the reality. Christ's death was a satisfaction for sin, and so ours is not. Positively, then, instead, it is an abolishing of sin. It destroys all sin. There is no more of it. Isn't that a wonderful thing to think about? That at the moment of our death, there is no more temptation. There is no more sin. There is no more sinfulness within me. All of it is gone. It's done, destroyed. The body fades away and then decays, but the soul is perfected and given life with Christ. And then, in that same connection, death for us is a passage to life. That, too, is why we must die. It is the way by which we enter eternal life. Death is just the end of this life, the way of moving on to the next. It is still God's punishment for sin today, make no mistake. Death is God's punishment on human sin, but for God's people. Christ took that punishment in our place. That's not to minimize the trial that death really is for God's saints. It's real. It's an extreme trial. There's great trial for the aged saint in seeing the deterioration of their own physical body. There's great trial for the family members who see that in their loved one. There's great trial seeing the deterioration of the mind as the person draws nearer to the end of this life. And of course, there's extreme pain that comes with the finality of death, the cutting of all ties between family members and between friends and between church family. That's pain. That's suffering. We don't want to minimize that. And yet, what a comfort, that death. is at the same time passage into life in the face of death. What a blessed thing for the child of God to know. And therefore, there's also comfort regarding eternity. And that's question and answer 44. Why is there added, he descended into hell, that in my greatest temptations I may be assured and wholly comfort myself in this, that my Lord Jesus Christ, by his inexpressible anguish, pains, terrors, and hellish agonies, in which he was plunged during all his sufferings, but especially on the cross, hath delivered me from the anguish and torments of hell. Christ has delivered me. so that I won't go to hell. That's the main thrust of answer 44. Because Christ did, I won't. That's comforting and that's assuring. And in fact, the Catechism says we can comfort ourselves and assure ourselves with this reality in our greatest of temptations. The greatest of our temptations relate to this. It's when the devil comes, and he gets into our thoughts, and he begins to convince us that maybe Christ didn't die for my sins, or maybe he didn't die for every single one of my sins. Maybe there still is something hanging out there that still needs to be paid for. Maybe, maybe I still do need to satisfy. And so, where will I go when I die but the fires of hell? In those greatest of temptations, we can comfort and assure ourselves of this. I won't go there because Christ did. He took it so that I won't. all the anguish and the torment of hell, there is not some of it that still has a claim on me. And the reason is that Christ delivered me by taking that hell. He descended, He endured it for me. And as answer 44 puts it, by His inexpressible anguish, the pain, the terror, the hellish agony, by that I am delivered. especially that which he suffered on the cross. And that's why he utters those heart-rending words, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? That's an indicator of the hell that he was bearing for you, child of God. We won't be forsaken because he was forsaken. Isaiah 53, 10. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him. He hath put him to grief. When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed. It was God's pleasure to bruise, not us, thank be God, but to bruise his son. And he does this. He lays himself up as an offering for sin. with an eye on his seed, verse 10 says. He shall see his seed. That's us. As he's there on the cross, as he's there enduring God's wrath, as he's there taking hell, his eye is not on himself. His eye is not on his own pain. His eye is on us. He sees his seed. The whole time, he's looking at us, his people. He's enduring it with a view to us because he loves us. He delivered me, we can say, with the catechism, by his inexpressible anguish, pains, terrors, hellish agonies. That he endured all his life and especially on the cross. Think of that when you look at that piece of bread in your hand. And when you look at that little cup of wine this afternoon. The inexpressible anguish of Jesus Christ enduring hell for us unto death. The Lord's Supper form notes that in the preparatory section. The second part is examining my heart, whether I truly believe that all of my sins are forgiven only for the sake of the passion and the death of Jesus Christ. Because he did this, because he endured this greatest shame, this greatest suffering in soul by taking hell and in body by his death and by his burial, we have confidence that we will not ourselves be put to shame. And with that in mind, we can come. We can come to the table received in mercy and counted worthy partakers of this heavenly meat and drink. And that really brings us to the third point, the implication for life now, because the supper is itself a matter of our present life. And it is an encouragement then onto godliness, which is where question and answer 43 goes. What further benefit do we receive from the sacrifice and death of Christ on the cross, that by virtue thereof our old man is crucified dead and buried with him, that so the corrupt inclinations of the flesh may no more reign in us? but that we may offer ourselves unto him a sacrifice of thanksgiving." Our old man is crucified right alongside of Jesus Christ. The old man is not dead, not ultimately. In fact, his power is not even weakened in us as we presently live. But he is dead from a different point of view. He is dead in a beginning way. Because now, alongside of him in the heart, there is the new man, the power of Jesus Christ, out of which we live by God's grace. And that power of Christ, the new man, wrestles every day with the old, so that there is that constant warfare. And because that's true, we can also say what the Catechism says there, that the inclinations, the sinful inclinations, no longer reign. They're there, they're strong, they're powerful, but they don't rule us. We truly have the desire to walk in holiness, and we truly do it by the grace of God. Verse 10 mentions that his soul was an offering for sin. And if that is true, if he died to save us in body and in soul, then that means that he dies to take care of the old man too. and gives the new man within our hearts. So that we are then able, as answer 43 says, to offer ourselves as thankful sacrifices all our lives long. More on that this evening and more on that next week with Lord's Day 17. We're enabled to do so. And he has enabled us to do so, so that we would. Let's do that then. offer ourselves as thankful sacrifices. But first, let's go to the table together, which is itself a matter of thanksgiving as well. The thanksgiving meal for the death, even for the burial, and for the descent to hell of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.