Nails

Colossians 2:13-15 – “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses;” “Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross;” “And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

l. INTRODUCTION – NAILS

-I dare say that probably every person in this room has had some encounter with a nail. I can remember being nine-years old and stepping down on a nail and it going through the sole of my foot. It was during on of those adventures that boys often find themselves being involved in while they are building “forts.” Even now, I can remember how bad the pain was and the wound that the rusty nail caused. It was the first time but it would happen again twice more that I would step down on a nail before I finally figured out that shoes were to be worn all the time.

-But when we think of nails, the majority of the time we think of construction, something being built to last. Nails hold things together. Nails stabilize the structure.

-Stephen Ambrose wrote a book in 2000 entitled Nothing Like It In The World. It is the story of the Transcontinental Railroad that was built from 1863-1869. In that book he describes what happens during the building of the rails that led West.

There were a series of wagons that were pulled by great horses. One wagon would carry about forty rails, another would be filled with the proper amount of spikes and railroad ties. From that wagon four men would grasp the rail and anchor it into place. At the command of “Down!” they would drop the rail into it’s place.

Every thirty seconds there came that brave “Down, down, down!” from either side of the track. The chief spiker was ready; the gauger stooped and measured, the sledges rang out. Two rails every thirty seconds, one on each side, four rails a minute.

As the rails went down, they were gauged by a measuring rod exactly 48 ½ inches. When the wagon was emptied, in about ten minutes time, covering a little over 80 feet further down the line, another horse drawn wagon was immediately settled into place to follow the same suit.

There were thirty men driving in the spikes, on the outside and on the inside, with three strokes of the sledgehammer per spike, ten spikes to the rail, four-hundred rails to the mile, and it was 1800 miles across Nebraska and into San Francisco on the Union Pacific Rail. Twenty-one million times those sledgehammers had to be swung. The pace of the rails going down was as fast as a man could walk at a normal pace. In the end, when the finishing touches had been placed on the track, an average of nine to ten thousand spikes had been placed in the rails per mile.

-But the spikes that helped wield that foundation of the railroad tracks pale in comparison to only three spikes that were used a little less than two-thousand years ago.

ll. COLOSSIANS 2:13-15

Colossians 2:13_15 – “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses;” “Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross;” “And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

-Paul left us with those words. It is those words that impart to us the hope and power of Calvary.

-The bond that was written against us had to be paid. It was something that every man owed and if not paid he would be thrown into debtor’s prison and could actually spend his entire life there.

-To understand this concept is to understand the amazing mercy of God. The substance of ancient documents were written either papyrus, made from a bulrush, or it was written on vellum which was made from the skin of animals.

-Both were fairly expensive and certainly not to be wasted. Ancient ink had no acid in it, it merely lay on the surface and did not bite into the material as does modern inks. Sometimes a scribe, to save paper, used papyrus or vellum that had already been written on. When he did that he would take a sponge and wipe the writing out. Because it was only on the surface of the paper, the ink could be wiped out as if it had never been. God, in His amazing mercy, banished the record of our sins with the nails at Calvary.