R.C. Sproul

Don't you know I might address you?

And I was so eager to serve, and I was in the middle of nowhere.

And I had no idea what God had in store for me.

But the story that the Bible makes is that you have to be faithful in little things.

before you can ever hope to be faithful in the big things.

And so this is one of those cases where we can learn from a donkey.

I think we do that quite often.

I mean, people who learn from me can identify with that.

I've heard a million sermons about the nails and the thorns.

And granted, the physical agony of crucifixion is a ghastly thing.

But there's been thousands of people who have died on the cross.

But only one has received the full measure of the curse of God while on that cross.

I doubt if Jesus was even aware of the nails and the spear.

He was so overwhelmed by the outer darkness.

When we consider the cross of Christ, we see an event in history that stands out with so much importance and so much significance that it's easy to overlook the fact that the cross was not an isolated event in history that sort of sprung up spontaneously in a particular moment in time, sort of being

born full-grown like Athena from the head of Zeus, but the atonement of Christ is the culmination, the climax of centuries of redemptive history where God had set certain things in motion ages and ages before that then reached its acme with the death of Christ.

Now, to get a glimpse of one element of the atonement, I want to direct your attention for a moment way back in the Old Testament to the book of Deuteronomy.

where part of the terms of the covenant that God makes with the people of Israel are spelled out.

If we do a study of the elements of a covenant in the ancient world, we see that though the content of covenants may differ from culture to culture, there were certain elements and aspects of a covenant that were virtually universal.

Whenever a legal agreement like this was entered into, the sovereign one in the covenant would identify himself and give a historical prologue where he would rehearse the history of his relationship to the subordinates in the covenant.