30th March 2026

30th March 2026


Pray (ACts)


Read (Psalm 75)


Message (Alan Burke) 


This coming Lord’s Day, we, like many believers across the world, will join together as we do every Lord’s Day, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Since the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, God had appointed the seventh day, but ever since, it is the first day of the week appointed as the Sabbath, and will continue to the end of the world (WLC 116). But as we do that, I want to focus today on Psalm 75, a Psalm of Asaph, or rather what is in the hand of the LORD, the one who judges, and it comes in v8. 


“8 In the hand of the LORD is a cup full of foaming wine mixed with spices; he pours it out, and all the wicked of the earth drink it down to its very dregs.”


This is what will await the wicked when the judgement of the LORD comes; he has the final say. He brings one down and exalts another. This imagery looks ultimately to the judgement of God, a judgement that no one can escape. He is the one who has the final say, and this is what comes upon all the wicked of the earth. Who are the wicked? We are the wicked, as Paul summarised the teaching of Scripture in Romans 3. He says, “There is no one righteous, not even one; 11 there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. 12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”


There is not one righteous, not even one; by our very nature, we are not righteous but wicked. It means that I am wicked, and you, by your nature, are wicked! Yet it is through Christ Jesus that Asaph and all who look to God in faith are made righteous. It is an alien righteousness; it does not belong to us, but instead is given to us, imputed to us, as 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us: God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.


Christ Jesus was made sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God. He was regarded and treated as a wicked sinner, even though he himself never sinned. He did it for our sake; he bore our sins in his body on the tree (1 Pet. 2:24), acting as a substitute, taking our place, so that we might escape through him the wrath of God that awaits the wicked. Jesus drank of the cup of the wrath of God that was due to us; he drank of the cup of the wrath of God for us. For there is not one who is righteous, there is not one who deserves anything but his wrath. The night he was betrayed, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus went off to pray. Falling to his knees, the ground he prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Mt 26:39). Jesus faced, as He faced what lay ahead, as He would drink of the cup of the wrath of God, the horror of what lay ahead caused Him to sweat drops of blood, that such was the weight upon Him, angels sent from heaven appearing to Him to strengthen Him as He prayed to the Father (Lk 22:44). 


He who was True God and True man, Jesus Christ, as the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person; without conversion, composition, or confusion, he faced death in his manhood. Jesus, True God and True man, could not die in his divinity but could in his humanity, and he died for us. If that was the end, then Jesus was just another man who died, a death that in a sense was unremarkable, nothing that had not been experienced before, but it was not the end and it was not a death like any before; before he died to take the penalty of sin and he experienced the wrath of a Holy God, there he hung on the cross, experiencing hell for us so that we might become the righteousness of God and escape the cup full of foaming wine mixed with spices that he will pour out on all the wicked (2 Cor 5:21). 


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q28 Wherein consisteth Christ’s exaltation?
A. Christ’s exaltation consisteth in his rising again from the dead on the third day, in ascending up into heaven, in sitting at the right hand of God the Father, and in coming to judge the world at the last day.
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