They all found the promise that there was
a God, and that He was a living
God, and that wonder of wonder, in ages
till in time, He invaded the sea of
mankind, and was manifest in the flesh, and
that God came down and confronted sinful men
with Himself in the form of a man,
the man Christ Jesus.
But not only did He condescend to reach
down from the boat, but He condescended to
come down on our level and identify Himself
with sinful men.
We understand that to be the grace of
God, for grace came in and through and
by the Lord Jesus Christ.
And that, that was when we came to
the close of the broadcast by asking this
question, what then is the heart of Paul's
thoughts over his thinking about God and about
sinful men?
And we closed by saying that the fundamental
question that men face today and yesterday and
tomorrow is, what must I do to be
saved?
And that Paul's whole message here, as it
were, simply his thought for his good news,
starts from this question.
Paul faced the fact that man and his
freedom had become alienated from God, and that
man's direction instead of toward God was against
him.
And Paul frankly stated the fact that man
needed to be saved to be recovered.
And so this gospel tells you about what
God has done and is doing towards this
question, how can a man be saved?
What must a man do to be saved?
And then, of course, he talks about man's
response.
So we're not surprised that when the Apostle
Paul will be on a preaching mission to
the people over in Antioch of Bithynia, or
when he writes to the Christian people in
the pagan city of Rome, it is the
word salvation which Paul uses.
I'm talking to you, Paul will say about
God's salvation offered to men.
For instance, in Acts 13 and verse 26,
as he preaches the people to the people
in Antioch of Bithynia, he will say that
to us is the word of this salvation,
God's salvation sent forth.
To us is the word of this salvation
sent forth.
Or when he's writing to the saints at
Ephesus,
according to Ephesians 1 and 13, he'll speak
of the gospel of pure salvation.
The one big, all-embracing, all-encompassing key
word of all gospel was salvation.
Salvation, that's the subject of all gospel.
That's the heart of all gospel.
The salvation of God in Jesus Christ, for
he has offered the sinful man.
Oh, as I pause now before this microphone,
and as I think deep inside of my
own heart, and as I close my eyes
and picture America, and I picture the Piedmont
section, and I picture the world, a world
that can never be the same, because God
Almighty came here as a man, and God's
here now, and God has worked, and God
is working, as I picture such a world.
And I think of the glory of God's
salvation, the wonder of it, and then how
God sent us this almost so beautiful word
today, salvation, salvation, people talking about being saved
with no hole in it in their lives,
people talking about being saved with no power
in our ministry.
My soul, how dead we are, how without
divine life we are, how we must fight
over creeds with different interpretations of passages of
scripture, instead of how we ought to come
to the morning speech and recognize how little
we respect the grace of God that came
down to man for us men.
Oh, the powerlessness of your ministry and mine,
my friends and brethren.
You know that God's my judge.
We ought to face this thing.
There's no use worth the bargain about how
many we'll have in Sunday school, or how
many we'll have in training union, or how
many of us will walk past, or how
much we'll raise, or how big a building
we'll build.
I'm telling you, we're living in a pagan
America, and the isms are about daughters, and
we lack power.
When we pick up Paul's gospel, we're relieved
that he had power.
God came in power and authenticated his glorious
message by marvelous signs and wonders, and people
said, This is of God.
And I look you in the face now
through this microphone and tell you that the
one word we need to recover now and
to begin to experience some of its holiness
and its power and its zeal and its
tears and its transformation of character is this
word salvation, salvation, salvation.
Paul preached about salvation.
Oh, in America where everybody is a Christian,
one wonders if anybody is.
Oh, that's not just the words of a
crank.
I tell you there's some truth in that,
and I bow my head and get out
there on that old stump with Jeremiah and
weep over America, and weep over Winston-Salem,
and weep over this section.
Oh, for the salvation of God in Christ
Jesus, which was the heart of Paul's gospel,
and which is the heart of God's gospel
today.
It's not a word that they like the
hell to joke about.
It's the very heart of the whole business.
And so the apostle Paul in his age
did what we desperately need to do in
our day.
He preached God's salvation.
He proclaimed God's salvation.
He presented God's salvation.
He explained God's salvation.
He prophesied God's salvation.
And the apostle Paul preached not simply salvation
from sin, not simply salvation from Christ, not
simply salvation from death, but he preached salvation
through reconciliation and righteousness.
And may I add, he lied all night.
He had a full gospel and a whole
gospel for sinful men.
And I want us in the days ahead,
and I'm going to be lifting up my
voice with what little brain power and heart
power I've got, crying in the wilderness whether
anybody hears us or not, we need to
get us a Bible.
And on our faces before God, crying to
the Holy Spirit to show us the truth
of the Bible, frankly recognize that if what
passes as salvation in western Salem today is
so, then the Bible is not so.
Oh, how we need some people to get
saved, saved not only from, but saved to.
And so the apostle Paul preaches the salvation
that has a crisis to it.
We call that past salvation.
And then he preached the salvation that has
a process to it, and we call that
present salvation.
And then he preached the salvation that has
a future to it, and we call that
the hope of glory.
The apostle Paul will say in Romans 8
and 24, we were saved.
We were saved.
That's a crisis, that's past, that's fact.
And then he'll say in 1 Corinthians 15
and 2, we are, b-e-i-n
-g, being saved.
That's something we don't pay much attention to
now.
And then he'll say in Romans 5 and
9, we shall be saved.
Now, that's salvation.
It has its past aspect, it has its
present fact, it has its future glory.
But there is one verse of scripture in
the apostle Paul's writing that I think sums
up all of this gospel and all of
its theology about this glorious word, salvation, that
we so desperately need to look at and
experience in its power today.
That verse of scripture is Romans 5 and
verse 1.
I want you to read it at your
leisure.
Romans 5 verse 1, Paul's whole doctrine of
salvation is found, and I quote that verse.
Paul says, Therefore, being justified by faith, we
have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
Christ, through whom also we have access by
faith into the grace wherein we stand and
rejoice in the hope of the glory of
God.
You see it?
That's all thanks to salvation.
He first looks back to the time when
by faith the believer received God's forgiveness in
Jesus Christ, and then he dwells on the
believer's present blessedness.
He uses the expression, the grace wherein we
stand.
And then in the third place, he looks
forward to the time when with sin and
death no more he, with all of God's
redeemed ones, will see Christ as he is,
with an undamned view of him, and praise
God's delight in him.
Did you get it?
Salvation has a past aspect.
There is a crisis.
Salvation has a present aspect.
It's day by day.
Salvation has a future hope when with undamned
view of Christ we shall see him as
he is and we shall delight in him.
Let me read that verse of scripture again,
Romans 5 verse 1.
Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace
with God as through our Lord Jesus Christ,
that's our past salvation, through whom we also
have access by faith into the grace wherein
we stand, that's present salvation, and rejoice in
the hope of the glory of God, that
future salvation.
Now, my friends, I want to talk with
the Lord today about the past.
I want you to listen to me.
Let Paul preach again.
Let's listen to it and see whether or
not we have experienced past salvation, or salvation
in its past aspect.
Paul preached salvation as a past event.
It is something that was told.
It was a fact.
And in this aspect that Paul's presenting of
God's salvation in Jesus Christ, he looks back
to Christ Jesus, our Lord, as having come,
and having lived, and having died, and having
been raised, and having been ascended, and our
sharing in his peace for us.
He is coming for us and to us.
He is living for us, he is dying
for us, he is rising for us, and
our sharing in his whole being, and what
he did and what he was.
That is salvation as a past event.
And when we open the word of God
and study Paul's epistles, we find that in
the name he uses three great words to
picture, to present past salvation.
He uses the word reduction, he uses the
word justification, he uses the word reconciliation.
Now, because I recognize that we live in
a day when Bible terms are not recognized,
I want to break up these words, and
line upon line, precept upon precept, and truth
upon truth, I want as the days come
ahead, come and go, I want to examine
as the Holy Spirit shall give me them,
these blessed words, redemption, justification, and reconciliation, all
of which are Paul's efforts not to lay
down some theology or prove a point, but
to present the different aspects of the work
in person of our blessed Lord, offered freely
to men in what we call the gospel.
Now, my friends, first the word redemption uses
a noun.
Paul uses the word as a noun, and
he uses it as a verb.
Let me just read perhaps one or two
places where the word is used as a
noun.
In Romans 3-24, Paul says, "...being justified
freely by his grace through the redemption."
That's our word, that is in Christ Jesus.
In Colossians 1-14, we have it as
a noun again.
It reads as follows, "...in whom we have
redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of
sin."
And then sometimes Paul uses the word redeemed,
or the word set free, for instance, as
a verb.
In Galatians 3-13, the word is used
as a verb.
Christ has redeemed us from the curse of
the law, being made a curse for us.
Or in Galatians 4-5, we read these
words, "...to redeem them that were under the
law, that we might receive the adoption of
sons."
Sometimes he uses the same Greek word in
Colossians, set free or made free.
For instance, in Romans 6-18, the apostle
Paul says, "...being then made free from sin,
ye became the servants of righteousness."
Or one other scripture, Romans 8-2, "...for
the law of the Spirit of life in
Christ Jesus hath made me free," that is
our word, "...from the law of sin and
death."
Now, this word in its noun form, or
in its verb form, signified originally the liberation
of a slave or a prisoner by payment
of a price in the scepter of good.
I'll get that directly.
The Old Testament translated into Greek was Paul
used this word, the verb or the noun,
for redemption.
It is used to describe God's deliverance.
That's from the Old Testament days.
It's used to describe God's deliverance of his
people from the Egyptian bondage.
And the apostle Paul uses the word to
express the deliverance of Christians from the bondage
of first S.I. in sin, from the
bondage of second S.L.E.S.H.
flesh, and third from the bondage of the
law, L.A.W. law.
Christ, the apostle Paul tells us, has delivered
us, that's believing sinners, from the cauldron of
these sin, flesh, and the law, which together
frames D.E.A.T.H. that eternal
and spiritual.
According to the apostle Paul, man is held
in a three-pronged pit.
He's broken the law of God, thus he
needs redemption.
He's a criminal.
He lives an unrighteous life before God, and
thus he needs justification.
And he lost fellowship with God because of
sin, and he needs to be reconciled and
to be restored to fellowship with a holy
God.
And so Paul, from different directions, pictures past
salvation as a man being delivered, being delivered
from the bondage of sin, and flesh, and
the law, and he tells us that as
we have broken God's law, we need to
be redeemed.
We need the cause of our unrighteousness to
be justified, and we need the cause, we
are wanderers outside the terror ship of God,
to be reconciled and restored within the favor
of a holy God.
So these three blessed words, redemption, and justification,
and reconciliation, or reconciliation, are the three great
Bible words that Paul uses to talk about
past salvation.
Now, Paul tells us that sin, and he
personifies sin, sin uses flesh as its tool,
and the law spurs the flesh off.
Now, we'll look at that more and more
from Sunday morning to Sunday morning.
Sin, that one bondage we're in, bondage of
sin, and sin uses the flesh, that man's
sinful nature, as its tool.
And the holy law of God comes to
man in the bondage of sin, using the
flesh as its tool, with its commands of
thou shalt and thou shalt not.
And the law serves to spur the flesh
on to more rebellion, lawlessness, and effort.
And therefore, according to the Apostle Paul, man
needs to be redeemed as a reference to
the broken law of God.
Man needs to be justified with reference to
his filthy garments.
Man needs to be reconciled with reference to
the fact that he's out of fellowship with
God, and they describe Paul's wonderful gospel of
salvation in its past as faith.
But now, my friends, my time's already gone.
Before I come to an analysis of these
great words, I want to lay down this
fact, and that'll have to do on this
program.
Man needs to be redeemed and justified and
reconciled.
But before we consider these three words that
describe God's way of deliverance for sinful men,
we desperately, in your dear mind, need to
study on our faces before God, first the
status quo of sinful men.
Now, that's a Latin term which, in the
words of an old country preacher, is the
Latin word for the fix that sinful men
and women are in all over this country.
And there's a Latin word to describe the
mess we're in, and to set the pattern
and lay a condition and a foundation for
somebody to be anxious to hear the truth
and the answer to why men need to
deceive and how they can deceive.
My time's up.
I'm going to start here next door.
See, this is all for the message this
morning.
Good morning, friends.
We'll roll this morning for the third in
the series of messages on the general subject
of salvation as preached by the Apostle Paul,
and we've been saying that this must be
the message of this hour, and that the
desperateness of the days in which we live,
and they are truly desperate, demand that we
not only proclaim God's salvation in all of
its fullness, but demand that men and women
shall respond to God's proper and shall experience
the salvation of Almighty God.
Last Lord's Day, we stopped having established the
fact that, according to Paul, salvation is the
word of the gospel, or the gospel is
the word of salvation, and that the Apostle
Paul considered salvation as being a past crisis,
a present experience, and a future hope.
And we began to talk last Lord's Day
about salvation as a past event, noting over
and over again the scriptures talk about people
as having been saved.
We closed the broadcast last Lord's Day by
suggesting that we need desperately, before we offer
a remedy, to pronounce the proper diagnosis, and
to show this generation who have lost sight
of it, that they are in God's sight,
standing tremendously in the need of being delivered,
and being justified, and being reconciled to a
holy God.
We said that we need to study the
status quo, and we quoted the fact that
an old country preacher said the status quo
are the two Latin words to describe the
fix men are in today.
In other words, they set the foundation and
provide the occasion for preaching the gospel that
men do need to be saved, and that
man may be saved because of what God
has done, and what God is doing.
In other words, we want to look this
morning at this fact.
Why does man need to be saved?
Why does man need to be redeemed?
Why does man need to be justified?
Why does man need to be reconciled?
There's no use talking about present salvation unless
a man has experienced salvation in his past
aspect.
Now, this is tremendously important, and as we
open the word of God, and we study
what Paul taught, and what Paul preached, we
are dead certain that if he's right about
the condition men are in, then we may
well give heed to the remedy Paul says
is provided in the gospel.
If he's right about the condition, then it
stands to reason he'll be right about the
remedy.
Now, this proffers to us today something that
we must not neglect.
For the Bible is crystal clear that there's
something radically wrong with men, and that that
something radically wrong with men is of such
a nature that unless that condition is corrected,
and men themselves and all of their attitudes
and actions are changed inside and outside, that
there is no hope for them in this
life or the life to come.
Men need, according to the Bible, to be
altered.
They need to be radically altered and radically
changed.
When men, according to the Bible, have used
their free will to become, in the language
of the Bible, very bad.
Now, when the apostle Paul and the other
apostles preached, they could assume that even the
pagan hearers who listened to them as they
preached on the street or somewhere, that even
the pagan hearers were deeply conscious of deserving
the divine anger.
In Paul's day, men felt that they were
under God's condemnation, and thus against such a
background, the gospel as Paul would preach it,
appeared as God's good news.
It brought news of possible healing to men
who knew they were mortally ill.
Now, that isn't the condition today.
We're running around here trying to get people
to receive a savior, but they do not
need a savior.
They say, well, I'm all right.
My heart's in the right place.
I've never done anything against God.
I do the best I can.
Of course, I'm not perfect, but I think
that I'll make it.
I'm not disturbed.
Now, when Paul preached, and you can bet
this is sure, they preached against the background
of men and women who knew, brother, they
knew that they were mortally ill.
Now, I say that's changed today, and now
the diagnosis must be preached.
By that, I mean that before we preach
Christ in all of His saving, glory, and
work, that we must do once again the
job of taking the surgeon's instruments and opening
up to sinners their truthful condition.
In other words, western Salem and surrounding territory
is not full of men and women running
around begging doctors to operate on them for
cancer, but because they do not believe they
got cancer.
And this section's not full of men and
women running and catching hold of the coattails
of some child of God, and saying, say,
do you know any way on earth that
I could have peace for all the misery
I have, and I could have the sense
of my sins forgiven, and I could go
about my daily duties feeling that I've been
made righteous in the sight of God, and
that God has accepted me in the Lord
Jesus Christ.
That isn't happening, is it?
And the reason it isn't happening is that
people today do not know, like they did
in Paul's day, that they are mortally ill,
and we have to preach what is called
the bad news.
It's not good news to open up the
word of God, and let God tell us
the truth about ourselves, that we're hateful in
His sight, that from our mother's womb we'll
go about telling lies, speaking lies and hypocrisy,
that our feet are stripped to shed blood,
that if we open our mouths it's full
of venomous snakes, that there is none righteous,
no, not one, there's none that seek it
good.
Now, that isn't good news, is it?
But that is the truth that must be
accepted, for if a man has no sin
and no sense of sin, he'll not feel
any need or any desire to be forgiven.
If a man thinks that his garments are
all right, he'll have no desire to have
those garments replaced by the garments of the
righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And therefore, before we open up Paul's gospel
of how men can be saved, we need
to tell what Paul especially in this hour
was the bad news of the condition of
men, of the desperate condition of men, for
I say to you, the gospel will not
have a hearing among men unless those men
that need the cure that is in Christ
Jesus.
In other words, what I'm saying is, my
preacher brother, you listen to me now, we
need, and the preachers must take the we
need a recovery of the old sense of
sin, and the recovery of the sense of
sin is essential to the ongoing of the
gospel.
Now, the Lord Jesus Christ, when he was
here, clearly took it for granted that men
are bad.
He, until we really feel that Christ's assumption
that our condition is desperate and our character
is bad, until we really feel that he
was right in his assumption of this and
that he was true, though we are part
of the world he came to save, we
are not part of the audience to whom
his words are addressed.
Now, we need to cap here.
There's a good deal of friction now in
what we call evangelism, and I would lift
up a note again and say that in
God's name, and for Christ's sake, and for
soul's sake, and for our home's sake, and
for America's sake, and for sinners' sake, we
need to quit skipping over so lightly the
desperate character and condition men are in before
we try to put a poultice on something
to ease wounds that men do not feel.
We need desperately to take the word of
God in the power of a holy spirit
and lay open to this generation again its
awful putrid stickiness in the sight of a
holy God.
You know, this generation, I know I speak
the truth, lacks the first condition for understanding
what my Lord is talking about, for that
first condition of understanding the gospel is the
fact that we have come to the place
of despair of any of our efforts, and
that we feel that we are actually Lord.
C.S. Lewis, that great, challenging, provocative writer
of England, has this to say.
He said, God may be more than moral
goodness.
He is not less.
The road to the promised land runs right
past Sinai.
The moral law may exist to be transcended,
but there is no transcending the law for
those who have not first admitted its claims
upon them, and then tried with all of
their strength to meet that claim, and then
fairly and squarely have faced the fact that
they have signaled a fail as they face
the claims of almighty God.
In other words, we need to take the
holy Lord God again and wield it in
the might of the holy spirit that the
slain of the Lord may be many, and
that once again in America we may hear
the cries of men and women, What must
I do to be saved?
Now this is important, and I tell you
when we come to Paul preaching, we find
out that there's something present here in this
world, and that something is S-I-N,
sin.
Men are sinners.
It's here.
Sin is a fact.
It's here.
It's here on this earth.
It's here in our homes.
It's here in the atmosphere.
Sin, S-I-N, sin with the hiss
of the serpent has corrupted this world.
Tell us that Frederick the Great, the great
Prussian emperor, commented as he listened to a
preacher who was discounting on the natural goodness
of man, and the great emperor said, That
preacher does not know the perishing human race.
That's right, my friends.
He's not talking about how good people are
now.
He doesn't know people.
I say to you, man is a sinner.
Man is a sinner.
Man breaks God's law.
Man doesn't break God's law involuntarily, merely, but
man deliberately seeks to break God's law, and
so he incurs God Almighty's condemnation.
We are told by the apostle Paul that
mankind is sold unto sin, S-O-L
-D, sold unto sin, and that sin, like
slavery, is a state.
It's not simply an incident without cause and
result.
It's a radical wrongness in our lives.
It's a turning away from the one true
and righteous God.
It's a depravity.
It's not merely a series of wrong choices
or moral missteps which a man may stop
if he's aligned to.
My friends, it's a positive and a destructive
principle in Paul and man.
Sin is here.
Now, when the apostle Paul comes to talk
about how sin came to be, or rather
the origin of sin, we may get into
some difficulty.
At least two ways are used by the
apostle Paul to talk about how sin came
to be.
The classic passage of scripture in the apostle
Paul's writings and preaching of what we call
original sin is in chapter 5 of Romans,
beginning at verse 12.
And there, in some ways that we may
not be able to understand, our condition and
our depravity and our awful heritage is linked
up with the first man Adam.
In the first chapter of Romans, verses 18
to 32, in that awful indictment of mankind,
in that catalogue of the progress of sin,
the apostle Paul seems to see the sin
as its root in man's turning away from
the true knowledge of God as revealed to
him.
I'm not here to go into those passages
this morning.
I know that there are a thousand different
interpretations of them.
I simply say that whatever your view, as
you seek to interpret these passages, the fact
remains that whether we can understand clearly how
sin got started and how it made its
appearance and all of that, there's one thing
dead certain, and saying that is that sin
is here.
The apostle Paul, one concerned so much in
trying to tell us how it came to
be as in telling us that it's here
and proving his point, and then when the
point was proven and accepted by him, he
preached the wonderful salvation that a redeeming God
has provided in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Whether then we can understand the origin of
sin, we dead sure know that it's here.
It's everywhere.
It's a universal state.
It's something which affects every man.
If without the fact of the disease, men
are sick with sin.
Men are sick with sin.
Sin is in man.
Sin is in the human race.
Sin is in the world.
Man is wrong.
The race is wrong.
The world is wrong.
And all are under the divine condemnation of
a holy God and need to be saved.
Thank God man can be saved.
We praise God for that.
I say to you that sin is not
just ignorance to be erased or cured by
education.
I say to you that sin is not
acquisitiveness.
That's the communist view that's sweeping the world,
and therefore that sin as acquisitiveness can be
cured by the abolition of private property.
I say that sin is not good in
disguise or the soul's growing pains to be
remedied by wise doses of sweetness and light.
I say that sin is evil.
It's evil.
And all of these that I've mentioned have
been suggested in your day and life, and
they've been tried and found wanting.
No, sir.
Sin is malignantly evil.
It's evil.
It is as to its nature.
Sin enslaves men and women.
Evil is not due simply to external causes.
Evil is not a mere negation.
Evil is not a not yet or a
hangover from our so-called animal ancestor.
No, sir.
Evil is not humanity's growing pains all destined
to pass away as man goes upward.
And all that we've heard so much about
that in a day gone by.
No, sir.
None of these, with their suggested remedies, have
been able to make bad men good.
And that's exactly what the gospel talks about,
how God makes bad men good in his
sight.
No, sir.
Sin and evil are in the human heart,
and man does evil because he is evil.
In a gospel, therefore, that just puts mustard
plasters or poultices on the wrong actions of
men and leaves the man still evil, is
not the gospel of God's great salvation.
My friends, I wish you'd believe me, not
for your neighbor but for yourself, that there
is a radical wrongness present in the very
structure of our individual and corporate lives.
And judgment, that's what Paul calls the wrath
of God, God's holy love reacting against evil.
That judgment, that wrath, falls on all—that's you
and me—who forsake the living God to live
according to the world's self-deifying pride and
egoism.
And if we'd have preached Paul's gospel today,
we must begin with the reality of sin
and the fact of a fallen world.
Dr. Alexander White of glorious vivid memory said,
if a Pauline preacher in our own day
were preached to all men's hearts the all
-forgiving grace of God, he must first bring
home to all men's consciences the all-condemning
law of God.
If he would offer alike the gift of
God, he must charge home the wages of
sin, aye, and that not in a large
and general and rhetorical way, but in a
close and a personal and a homecoming way.
Some writer has said that one of the
five things which is scandalous to modern man
is original sin.
But whether we understand it or not, it's
so.
We are fallen creatures, whether we like it
or not.
Sin is here.
We can put our heads under the sand
like the ostrich, but it's still here.
We are fallen creatures.
Sin is everywhere.
Sin is crime.
Sin is rebellion against God, and it'll not
do to try to hide our faces.
Sin is very much a fact.
We are sinners.
Men must be faced with this fact—the fact
of indwelling sin, the fact of the corruption
of man's heart.
That is what is wrong in this whole
world.
And thus before the Apostle Paul, we'll talk
about the grace of God and God's remedy.
Salvation—wonderful, wonderful thing.
For he talks about that.
He deals with the fact of sin and
the fact that God Almighty is not indifferent
about sin.
Sixteen times the Apostle Paul refers to the
wrath of God.
He shows wrath, Paul says.
Wrath is being revealed, Paul tells us.
Some people are vessels of wrath, Paul tells
us.
He speaks of the day of wrath.
Christ is our deliverer, according to Paul, of
the wrath to come.
Wrath, God's wrath.
In the Bible, wrath is a personal activity
of God.
Paul found the divine reaction to evil, an
awful reality.
It is God's holy displeasure at sin.
It is the eternal wrath reaction of a
holy God against evil with which God would
not be the moral governor of the world.
It is both present and future.
It is that divine aversion to evil which,
although active now, will reach its climax at
the judgment of a holy God.
According to Paul, when men rebel against God,
God gives them up, even in this life,
to their sins, to the suffering of the
body, to the hardening of their hearts, to
the dulling of their spirits.
God gives them up, and this goes on
today.
Oh, sin is everywhere.
Sin is in man.
The awful fruits and results of sin.
Go out, John, and look at a graveyard.
Sin is that.
Sin is back of sickness.
Sin is back of heartache.
Sin is back of all the tragedy in
this whole world.
That sin is sucked into me.
And sin is the reason my Savior hung
on a cross.
Men with sin in them, with evil hands
and evil hearts, met the Lord God in
Christ, by with wicked hands, laying hands on
the Son of God, and doing Him to
a murderous wickedness on Calvary's tree.
That's what sin in action.
Sin with its gloves on.
Purity, sin, murder, and the Son of God.