Where Were You Before Creation (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1)

So, they had a real idea about peace and love. I don’t know if things are getting worse, but we know there’s sin and darkness and demons and death and Satan and all of this stuff, and then we know our own sinfulness. We know how bad off we are, and more than anything else, we know how much we fight with our husband and fight with our wife and scream at our kids and fail, utterly fail as parents. If there are any kids in this room, you fail at being kids, too. We fail at work and we just do the most despicable things a human being could do. It gets worse and worse, and we’re tempted, we’re tempted, and sometimes we’re not tempted. Well, we just shoot right past temptation. Was it Oscar Wilde who said…I know you’ve heard the quotation, “The only thing to do with temptation is to yield to it.” I will yield to temptation. I know some of you don’t do that, but I have yielded to temptation. Therefore, what good can be said of me? What good can be said of you?

And so, we come to this incredible verse in Hebrews, which says, “Before He created the universe, He finished the universe.” Now, I don’t know…When I get through this…When I get through this, I don’t know how to help you any more than this, and I don’t know how to show you what limits God went to. But listen, and you will not understand, but trust me, the one who is here ministering Christ to you this evening does not understand either.

This is the greatness, the enormity of this infinite God that here He is, Master and Lord of space and time. And here is the beginning, and here is the end. Here is alpha, and here is omega. Here’s where it started, and there was nothing before it. And here’s where it ends, and there’s nothing beyond it except God. And what is the beginning? Christ is the beginning. And what’s the end? What’s the first thing cited when creation begins? What’s the last thing cited when creation ends? Christ. Do you know why that’s true? Why are both ends plugged up…forgive me, Lord…plugged up by Christ? Both ends of the bottle of time and space are plugged up by Christ, because He envelops creation. It’s not like He’s at the beginning and then runs to the end later. It’s that He is the Alpha while He is the Omega, and He is the Omega at the exact moment that He is the Alpha. That means that this creation, when it began, also ended from God’s viewpoint, because the front of creation was in Him and the end of creation was in Him. The beginning of creation was in Him, and the back of creation was in Him.

Therefore, you can turn this whole thing of creation around. Don’t drown, but you could say that He finished creation before He created it. You could even say, He did the end of creation before He did the beginning of creation. Have you ever thought that the Lord just might have created the last scene first? It is no more difficult for Him to be the Omega than it is for Him to be the Alpha. Well, He was the Omega, and He was the Alpha. He was the Omega, and He was the Alpha. No saints, He is the Omega, and He is the Alpha, and both of them are caught up in this incredible word “now.” He is the now, and now He is the Alpha, and now He is the Omega, and now He is the Omega, and now he is the Alpha. I want to go back to the point. He may very well have created the last scene before He created the first scene.

Now, let’s pretend for a moment that He created the last scene before He created the first. What do you have in the very last scene? You have the redeemed. You have the saved being gathered together into Christ. It would not be impossible for your Lord to create the last scene, put all the redeemed there going into Christ, when there’s nothing left but that which is in Christ, and look and see what your names are and go back to the beginning. Before the beginning. Alright? It’s just not impossible. You may not believe it, and I may not believe it. It may not happen that way, but never forget it’s not impossible. Okay?

Now, saints, we come to the front and before God creates, and don’t ask me to explain this, He walks into a creation that is not there, and He goes through it, and He sees creation, and He sees Adam, and He sees the fall, and He sees the cross. He sees redemption. He sees those who believe and do not believe. He sees those who are there at the end, and He finishes and completes the masterpiece before He ever paints it. He finishes all things before He creates. Now I’m going to tell you what He finished. He finished creation, and He completed and finished the fall. He finished death. He finished sin. He finished a fallen cosmos. And I’ll tell you what else He did, He put you to death and finished you completely, to the point that you don’t exist. And in His eyes, you disappeared. The you that was there, that has nothing to do with the you that’s in Christ, was put away with and totally annihilated, swallowed up in death, and then He killed Death, and death did die.

He cleansed you. He did away with your body. Your body that sins; He did away with it. He redeemed your soul. He redeemed your soul and restored it. He resurrected your spirit and caused your spirit to join with that which was picked out and chosen before the foundation of the world. Those are things He did, but I think the one that means more to me than all of those combined is that He finished my transformation. He transformed me. He did it before He created it, and if that is not enough, praise the Lord. Hallelujah. Well, do that. Why don’t you just sit there and clap? And then He glorified you. There was a man who once said right here on this fallen earth…He said He has not only sanctified and justified you, by the way, but also finished your sanctification. He has holified you completely. He has justified you, making you as just as Christ. He has made you righteous as Christ. And no, He didn’t make you as righteous as Christ. He gave you the righteousness of Christ. And He completed that, and He gave you the justification of Christ. That is, He gave you the same standing that Christ has. Praise God. Then Paul said that, on top of all that, He is going to glorify you…one day. No! He has justified you, sanctified you, and He has glorified you. Praise the Lord. He did all of that before He created. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord.

Now, Gene, do you believe that? Yes, I do. Gene, do you understand that? I do not understand that. I only get a glimpse that I have a Father who is outside of and Lord of space and time, who wasn’t kidding when He said, “My name is I AM. Not “I was” nor “I will be,” but I AM…in both directions and in all directions. I AM.” What a Lord. What a Lord. What a Lord. Well, saints, that’s not all. He hasn’t created yet. He has finished creating all things in creation, and then we come to the one last thing He did: just before He said “Let,” just the instant before. He took up a great scroll: the scroll of the Lamb, who was slain before the foundation of the world. That scroll belongs to the Lamb who died before the beginning. He wrote your name into that scroll just before He said, “Let.” Now, why did He do that? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this. When it’s all over with, He’s going to say, “You worried? What were you worried about?” Your name is right there. It’s been there before creation, and here it is at the end of creation. You read it. Praise the Lord. Amen.  Amen. Glory. Hallelujah. Praise his name and everything else. Amen.

Now saints, I have saved that which was before. I have one last thing to say to you. I want to come back to the slain Lamb. I want you to understand that as God is above creation, after creation, before creation, and under creation, or in other words, creation is in Him…creation is surrounded by Him…so, also, the cross is eternal. When that slaying took place, it took place above creation. That creation is “umbrellaed” by a cross. That one Abraham moved in space and time toward a cross, but from God’s viewpoint, that slain Lamb had already come to Abraham before He was born.

I’m here on the other side of 30 AD. I’m on the other side of the Roman Empire, and I’m looking back to something in space and time, but God is not. There is an eternal cross above that reaches all the way to the ends in this direction, and all the way to the ends in the other direction. That cross is outside of space and time. That cross breaks in anywhere, anywhere, anywhere, where there is a name written. Where there is a part of God marked off, that cross is preceded by that person and waits for Him. It just so happened that there came into creation a point where the eternal cross intersected with space and time, but that cross was not on Golgotha. That cross was above creation itself. That cross was there before creation, and that cross destroyed creation.