If you read Ben Israel, it describes how
a German art teacher picked me up off
the side of the road, and in my
time with him, he recommended that I go
out of my way to see this painting.
And I was transfixed.
It's about eight or nine feet high.
I'd seen depictions of Jesus before, but never
as shocking as this.
So, this shows the grotesqueness of the cross,
and when you stare at it, you're looking
at a man or an animal twisted grotesquely.
We don't have the full length of this.
The feet are stretched out and misshapen.
The mouth is open, and it's pitiful.
You see the pieces of wood metal from
the flagellation actually in the skin, which is
becoming already gangrenous.
It's a real sense of the horror of
the death of Jesus.
The other side shows the resurrection, which will
hang at another time, and every place where
the body is perforated, in the resurrection, beams
of glory shine through.
So you walk around the painting, you're confronted
with the death, you walk around on the
back, you see the resurrection.
It's a remarkable, as I say, holy ghost
masterpiece of realism.
The only thing that's in question is this
little loincloth, whether indeed the victims were allowed
the dignity of having their private parts covered.
My own suspicion is that they died nakedly,
and that part of the suffering was the
humiliation, particularly as Jews, to be exposed like
that to the open gaze of anyone.
So, that's an appropriate backdrop for our considerations
today, and however long the Lord will keep
us on the subject of sin and atonement.
So, Lord, again, we're privileged to have the
leisure of such contemplation, and we invite you,
my God, to instruct us.
It's almost presumptuous for any man to think
that he can make any presentation of the
issue of sin and salvation, except you who
became sin and obtained salvation, and have the
wounds to prove it.
So, Lord, so much as you're incarnate in
me and in us, let that mystery of
incarnation find expression through this clay, this dust,
in which you are again willing to be
humbled and limited, contained, and give expression, my
God, to these very great themes of the
New Testament faith, lost even to the church,
let alone to the unbelieving world.
We thank you for this privileged time and
invite you again to be totally Lord of
it.
In Jesus' name, amen.
So, I'll begin by, I'm spread out here
this morning with all kinds of books and
things to cite, if the Lord is pleased.
So, here's an attempt by John Murray, the
same author of the commentary on Romans, on
a chapter in a little book entitled Justification,
in which he attempts to define sin as
that the essence of sin is to be
against God.
The person who is against God cannot be
right with God, for if we are against
God, then God is against us.
It could not be otherwise.
God cannot be indifferent to or complacent towards
that which is the contradiction of himself.
His very perfection requires the recoil of righteous
indignation and that is God's wrath.
How's my voice coming over?
I've got my old hearing aids.
I'm going to change it.
I'm not happy, but can you hear okay?
No problem?
So, wrath is a dirty word.
It's an ugly word, wrath.
It exceeds human anger and indignation.
It's divine and that God is capable of
it is a statement about God himself.
How can a benevolent God, who is synonymous
with love, righteousness, mercy, patience, kindness, all of
the attributes that we so admire and covet,
also be capable of wrath?
Is it unbecoming for him to have this
attribute also?
Or would God be God without it?
And what is it that justifies that holy
indignation of wrath expressed as judgment in hell
eternally?
What could take place in the earth and
with men that is that vile, that abhorrent,
that painful in God's own sight and consideration
that it justifies his wrath and the penalty
of his wrath?
These are the great questions and it compels
us to see as God sees.
We ourselves would not be that offended by
sin.
We would not think of Zacharias.
Why does he?
Because sin is against God and it's a
willful against.
It's not an inadvertent or accidental.
It's a calculated, willful opposition to God in
the form of apostasy, rebellion, iniquity, choosing those
things that are contrary to him that justifies
his wrath.
And there's nothing that more offends the world
than to be told that.
That God is angry with the sinner every
day.
That he who hath the son hath life
and he who hath not the son hath
not life and the wrath of God abides
upon him.
It's as if God is saying, what my
son has performed at so excruciating a cost
is my great gift to mankind in their
sin and to reject that is to deserve
the wrath which abides upon you.
The fact that you're not conscious of it
or it's not part of your subjective sense
of yourself does not lessen its truth.
In fact, the whole issue of sin, judgment,
hell, atonement rests upon what God tells us
about it and not what is revealed to
us by our subjective understanding.
In fact, it throws us into an immediate
tizzy, a confrontation between to what shall we
defer our own natural human and rational sense
of things and observation or what God says
is the truth of the matter.
The issue of sin and the issue of
atonement is the issue of God.
It's the issue of scripture.
It's the issue of the word of God.
So if we don't have the word of
God as a foundational criterion and we just
go by our own assessments, sin is a
very light thing if it constitutes anything at
all.
In fact, the world is remarkably devoid of
sin consciousness and my Jewish people are foremost
in the absence of sin consciousness.
Even though, even among the Orthodox there might
be some reiteration of the use of the
word in the Yom Kippur season the word
sin has not penetrated the depths of real
consciousness.
So I'm remembering that in one of my
Brooklyn jaunts I went into a local synagogue
and they invited me to come back for
the teaching that precedes Yom Kippur, the day
of atonement, that was going to be given
by a chassid, a pious man, and when
he finished it was so trivial I said
you make it sound like some boy scout
outing.
You make it sound like some petty offense.
I'm not at all impressed with your presentation
that there's any need for a day of
atonement because you make the issue of sin
so trivial.
Like for example, one of the rabbinical explanations
for a terrorist attack years ago in Israel's
history where they came ashore in rubber dinghies,
commandeered a bus, went into a rural Israeli
settlement and shot up the nursery school.
There were about 20 children killed and teachers
and the explanation of the rabbis, it was
a judgment because the mezuzah, that little thing
that is nailed on the entry in the
doorway was not at its proper angle.
All of that betrays a failure to understand
sin as God sees it and to depict
it as men would assess it, which is
always something lighter and less than God as
God would have us to see it.
Man will always justify himself when he is
his own judge and makes his own assessment
of his own condition.
So what saves man from this kind of
subjectivity that is flattering and will be contradicted
in the day of God's wrath, that will
be contradicted in the day in which they
stand before the judge and suffers the penalty.
There is a day of reckoning, men will
stand before the judge and who is the
judge?
When Paul was at Athens he said, God
has appointed a day in which he will
judge all men by that man whom he
has raised from the dead.
So when they see the judge they are
going to see a man with wounds and
scars.
So if they got away with pretense, self
-justification, how many of you know that that
is a human propensity?
Now we can fornicate and call it love,
call it romance, call it a fleeting moment
that may not come again, that God knows
we deserve because we have worked so hard,
because we have been snubbed, because we have
been offended.
It is even a recompense for very God
himself.
Sinful man rationalizes justifies and dismisses the case
against himself when he is his own judge.
But when he stands before the judge who
has a complete book upon him, not only
his conduct but his secret art and there
you have to face the penalty, what will
be your defense then?
My wife says, I have never seen you
afraid.
I am so gutsy.
I go where angels fear to tread.
The only thing she said that I have
ever seen you frightened is when the red
light of a police car comes up in
your rear view mirror and you are required
to pull to the side of the road.
That is the only time I have seen
you afraid.
What am I afraid of?
That I am going to have to pay
a penalty of 50, 75 bucks, is that
it?
No.
Of course it hurts.
What I am afraid of is something instinctive
about being caught in the act, being confronted
with my misdeed on the spot in a
way that is not to be explained away
and there it is, the red light is
blinking on and off and you have had
it, you are guilty and you know it.
That terrifies me.
Not because of the financial penalty but the
idea of being guilty and caught without excuse.
You could believe that we are being opposed
today.
I am hearing from others that they also
had a 6 a.m. visitation of the
kind that I described.
Is that coincidence or is there a kind
of a concerted attack against members of this
body when the enemy knows, he is sensing
what is in store for today and if
he can in any way distract us or
counteract against it, it would be a significant
victory for darkness and a serious loss for
the church.
So if the enemy can defeat us here,
if he can persuade us that this is
a light question, if he can keep us
from the apostolic appropriation of the exceeding sinfulness
of sin, he has won a victory that
is incalculable for it keeps the church on
the ground of triviality.
Even if it maintains its vocabulary, it is
without substance and without gut.
It does not cut, it does not penetrate,
it does not bring conviction, it does not
bring repentance, it does not bring change.
It is a ceremonial thing because the church
itself does not believe its own message and
the evidence is that its own pastors are
out there fornicating with their secretaries or the
worship leader.
That is how light the question of sin
has become in the church itself.
So I am saying however men justify themselves
and get by and they will divorce or
be divorced and they will marry again hoping
for a more cordial arrangement and they may
succeed at that and blaming the spouse that
has been rejected as the cause for the
failure and then go on maybe to a
series of failures and go through a whole
lifetime of self-justification in sin and never
once acknowledge the truth of their condition, though
they have left by the wayside children with
that spouse, children without spouse, children with that
spouse, but they will have to stand before
the judge and suffer the penalty of his
wrath if they have not received him who
bore the wrath and has received their sin
and through whom they have obtained forgiveness and
the dismissal of the record against them by
his blood.
When you contemplate this picture you are seeing
the wrath of God visited upon the son
of God.
What he is suffering is that wrath.
Imagine if he had not suffered it and
that wrath would fall upon the guilty.
You would be wrecked, you would be devastated
both for time and in eternity.
So he is receiving the cumulative wrath of
mankind's sin, past, present, future, in a six
hour period of time.
Travail of body and soul that was mercifully
ended when he gave up the ghost because
no man takes his life, he lays it
down.
But until then, this is the picture of
wrath.
Now why did God not divert it away?
Why does God require it?
These are the great questions.
Can God be God who is righteous and
just and not deal with the issue of
sin in this way and not demonstrate his
abhorrence, horror and indignation at that which is
calculated against him as God?
Because if he takes it easy on the
issue of sin and plays patsy and condescends
and looks the other way, what would be
the consequence of that for mankind in the
kind of green light that will be given
it for further indulgence and for the failure
to apprehend God as God?
What would the world be?
What would mankind be if it's devoid of
any consciousness of God as holy, as righteous,
as just and that anything goes and that
there's no reprimand and no consequence either in
this life or the life to come?
What would such a world be is what
in fact the world is actually becoming.
It's called Sodom and Gomorrah.
There's no fear of God.
Sin is not just tolerated, it is celebrated
and when we'll look further into Romans chapter
one and two, Paul says not only do
they do these things, homosexuality and lesbianism that
is in God's sight abomination because he abandons
them to their own lust and to the
most vile expressions of it but that their
sin is condoned and applauded by others who
know that the very participation in that sin
obtains for the sin of death and yet
the sin is applauded and condoned by those
who observe it as being the final statement
of the degradation of mankind that it's not
only not chafed by sin or self-conscious
or even embarrassed but applauds and endorses it
though it knows that it's the way to
death.
That's the statement of human depravity and which
of you sweet characters would not be capable
of it given the opportunity and condition and
circumstance?
So long as you think yourself inviolate your
living a fool's paradise and you have a
presumption about yourself and your condition that is
contrary to what God's word says is the
truth of it for we have all sinned
in Adam and there's no man good no
not one and if God were to mark
iniquity who can stand?
If you'll not believe that for the word
of God he'll give you opportunity to experience
it to your humiliation.
So let me read the warning given by
this writer far too frequently we fail to
entertain the gravity of this fact of God's
wrath hence the reality of our sin and
the reality of the wrath of God upon
us for our sin do not come into
our reckoning.
This is the reason why the grand article
of justification does not ring the bells in
the innermost depths of our spirit and this
is the reason why the gospel of justification
is to such an extent a meaningless sound
in the world and in the church of
the 21st century.
We are not imbued with the profound sense
of the reality of God of his majesty
and holiness and sin if reckoned with at
all is little more than a misfortune or
maladjustment agree with that?
He is really nailing the church because if
the church has lost this reality what then
is its message?
What then is its presence in the world?
What is it communicating to sinners in the
world if it has lost the sense of
sin of wrath of judgment and of atonement?
So it behooves the church to be made
conscious.
What is God's provision against man's subjective self
-rationalization and self-justification by which sin is
made trivial?
What has God done to save man and
that he would be without excuse before him
in the day of judgment even if he
has never opened the Bible?
You are the church and you can't answer
that question.
Lord, we are in serious condition here.
What has God done that man would be
without excuse in the day of judgment?
Though he can say I never read the
Bible, I didn't know, nobody told me.
The very act of God in Christ, this
mangled wreck that took place in time and
history is God's statement of the severity of
sin.
For if it were not that real, not
that significant, this would not be necessary.
The fact that God bore this is God's
statement in itself of what sin is and
what is required to expiate it.
To avoid this picture and this crucified Christ
that is pushed into the face of mankind
in point of time historically and is available
for anyone's consideration unless they consciously and willfully
circumvent and avoid it, they are then without
excuse.
Just the awareness of this has got to
bring a man into a consideration like wow,
why was this necessary?
And set in motion those considerations by which
he can appropriate the benefit of that shed
blood.
Jesus is a piece of stubborn divine facticity,
excuse my language.
God has left mankind without excuse.
My Jewish kinsmen without excuse because what they
have done with this is to sweep it
under the carpet.
Jesus was a misfit.
He was a political presumer.
He jostled the Roman authorities.
He was presumptuous about his own credential.
He made himself a candidate of something he
need not have suffered.
But we don't have to occupy ourselves with
this.
It's a minor note in Jewish history.
He's just a megalomaniac, a presumer who suffered
the unfortunate consequence.
Now let's go on.
What Jewry has lost is not only the
benefit of the atonement, but the knowledge of
God as God.
Because in this one act we see the
son bearing the wrath of the father, offering
himself a sinless sacrifice by the eternal spirit.
So all three aspects of the Godhead that
constitutes God as God is caught up in
this one historic act for which all men
are accountable.
Something like this can't happen in history and
be dismissed.
To dismiss it is to be guilty.
To dismiss it is to be sinful.
To dismiss it is an unwillingness to understand
God's statement because one wants to continue in
the very thing for which this act was
provided.
Can you understand?
The issue of Jesus is confrontation.
It's the revelation of sin.
No matter what man has said about himself,
no matter how he justifies himself, there's this
stubborn fact that has taken place in time
and history which he cannot evade so that
the father can rightfully ask any man, what
have you done with my son?
How have you understood his death?
What did you think the crucifixion of Jesus
was?
A little mishap in history?
Who cried out, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?
It is finished that even a dumb centurion
at the foot of the cross, a gentile
dum-dum, professional murderer, witnessing this Jesus, giving
up the ghost, cries out, truly this is
the Son of God?
A gentile can say that and the Jewish
nation before whom he's made a public object
of humiliation can miss it?
That missing it is willful.
Sin is willful contrariness of God.
Against God and nowhere is it more mocked
and more repunctuated than the willful dismissal of
the crucified Christ.
Okay, so God's justice demanded this expiation, this
sin bearing, but God's love required this statement
because he knew man and he knows what
is in man and he knows man's self
-justifying propensity.
So what is God's provision?
The painful, agonizing, suffering death of his son
to confront us.
So for example, when Gibson's film came out
and the great hullabaloo that Jews will suffer
a fresh backlash of anti-Semitism, which never
happened, many Christians came to the defense of
the Jewish community and said, well Jesus died
for all men's sin so you don't have
to worry that this is going to mock
you in any significant way.
It took place, yes, in your time and
in your nation and your high priests and
your religious leadership and scribes and Pharisees were
instrumental and the crowd cried, give us Barabbas,
but he died for all men's sins.
Yes, that's true, but that does not absolve
the Jewish community for being instrumental in that
death.
To get them off the hook is to
rob them of the very thing by which
conviction for sin can come, that Jesus made
himself available as a victim at their hands
because he knows the Jewish community Jewish propensity
for self-justification and self-righteousness that would
excuse itself so that they have reason now
to be revealed in their implication.
Yes, though he died for all men's sin,
that does not absolve you as being the
willful instrument in that death and he made
himself available for you to be your victim
so that you can be convicted of your
sin by your implication.
The whole world lieth in the wicked one
who is the father of lies and the
greatest lie that he has perpetrated is about
the human condition itself, that there is such
a thing as a man who is good
and they were not all that bad and
it's not really sin, it's just adjustment or
some other way of understanding or dismissing.
He's a deceiver and his greatest power is
to deceive us about the truth of our
own condition as God sees it.
So God's answer is this statement as well
as the scripture, as well as the testimony
of the apostles, as well as the whole
history of Israel's redemptive sacrifices by the blood
of bulls and calves that was finally superseded
by one sacrifice that is for all time,
for all men and forever, this sacrifice.
There's a whole history of the shedding of
blood through a priesthood to impress upon the
nation that is called to be holy what
the issue of sin is that requires expiation
through the shedding of blood for they're told
in Leviticus without the shedding of blood there
was no remission for sin.
Sin does not need to be explained to
them as a principle and that by which
they will be persuaded that it's true because
they know sin.
What man who lives with any degree of
reality is not conscious of sin?
What man and when he sees the blood,
the continual sacrifices, the rivers of blood, the
high priest once a year atoning for the
nation having first atoned for himself and going
into the holy of holies with a rope
tied around his ankle so that if he
dies within the holy place because he has
missed an adequate atonement for his own sin
the bells have stopped tingling at the hem
of his garment and they know that the
act has not been consummated.
The nation is still in its sin and
they drag the corpse out by the rope.
They held their breath when the high priest
went in once a year into the holy
of holies with the blood of bulls and
calves to sprinkle it on the mercy seat
for the forgiveness of the nation in its
unconscious sins they were steeped in those practices
that prepared them for this.
That Jesus was crucified on the Passover at
the very hour when the lambs were being
slain having been on view for three and
a half years in the same way that
the first lamb in Egypt they were told
to take a lamb for the house on
the 10th of Nisan and slay it on
the 14th.
Why?
To keep it four days on observation so
that if there be any defect any blemish
it would be forfeited it cannot be used.
It had to be a perfect lamb in
its maturity so that Jesus coming five thousand
years later is before his nation for four
years, forty years or three and a half
years of his public ministry and when he
is apprehended he says to these men which
of you can convict me of sin?
When John the Baptist sees him coming into
the waters of the Jordan he says behold
the lamb of God who has come to
take away the sins of the world.
These things are written for your admonition about
whom the ends of the age have come.
We are the inheritors of Israel's history and
preparation.
We ought to have an appropriate comprehension of
that whole biblical background of which this is
the culmination but if we miss it and
I want to tell you this we are
missing it to the exact degree of our
own sinfulness.
If you are dull now it's not because
you are dull.
It's not because you didn't get a full
night's sleep.
You are missing it in the exact proportion
to your own sinfulness.
It has dulled you.
You are non-compensamentous.
You cannot hear.
You cannot follow.
You are untouched, unimpressed, and unaffected.
It is the issue of sin in your
life.
It has found you out.
That's why you are unresponsive.
That's why you are unperceiving.
It's to the degree that there is in
you sin negates the issue.
We need to inquire why is it that
others who were at the foot of the
cross or observing did not come to the
same conclusion as the Roman centurion.
Truly this is the son of God because
that acknowledgment was salvation.
What about the Jews that were there?
Instead of saying that they said if you
be the son of God come down and
we will believe you.
They mocked and taunted watching the writhing painful
victim on the cross.
They saw the same thing as the centurion
but they spoke in a totally other way
observing the same phenomenon and the answer is
their sin forbade it.
Their sin of pride, their arrogance, their contempt,
their disdain blocks out God's message but something
in that centurion, God bless him, was free
enough to get what God was saying and
cry out in a way contrary to the
Jews who should have been the first to
see and the first to recognize seeing that
they were groomed and trained out of a
whole history of sin and sacrifice and expiation
by blood.
That the centurion when he saw that Jesus
had given up the ghost he cried out
truly this is the son of God.
Something happened when he watched how Jesus departed
this life that was different from all the
other previous victims whose death he had observed
as a professional executioner.
There was something in this death and suffering
uniquely different from all of the others who
had writhed on the cross, who spat out
their curses, who defamed those who were abusing
them.
This one is forgiving his executions for their
sin, lay not their sin to their charge.
He's acting with a certain composure, even a
calm and a magnanimity and a grace and
his legs don't have to be broken.
The other two had to have their legs
broken to shorten their agonizing death span because
the cross is a form of suffocation.
Because of the unusual posture your chest fills
up with blood or fluid.
That's why the water came out when he
was speared and in order to avoid suffocation
they stretch their feet but when they break
the legs they can't stretch they suffocate they
die.
Jesus died in fact when Pontius Pilate was
told that Jesus was dead he was surprised.
How could he be dead so early?
Because man did not take his life he
gave it up.
He cried with a loud voice unto my
father unto you do I commit my spirit
and that was it.
And the centurion is seeing this, this is
different from all previous deaths.
There's something exhibited here of the majesty of
the victim not just because of his suffering
but through his suffering that all the more
illustrates that he is the king of a
kingdom and that's probably a glimpse of what
the criminals saw.
So all of this needs to be factored
in.
See there's something in the suffering Christ that
reveals the ultimate truth and condition of men
and what they say in those final moments
and how they view is the ultimate statement
of the truth of themselves as they're confronted
with this truth.
And my frustration is why aren't we as
students being confronted?
What is keeping us from the recognition?
Would we be any more moved if we
saw the live thing?
See what I mean?
Is there a statement of us that is
impeding the breakthrough in consciousness that God is
wanting?
Because this should be an everlasting testimony.
It's a statement once and for all in
time and history can't be repeated.
But the magnitude of that statement should resonate
throughout all time and all places.
It's a once and for all given of
God and that somehow it's not registered on
the church and I'm wanting to know why?
What's wanting?
Is it some apostolic commentary?
Because evidently the criminal who was saved and
this day will be with me in paradise
did not hear it.
The centurion did not hear it.
Something was available right there and then with
the suffering Christ that made it or broke
it for the one or for the other
that should be equally as valid and available
for us.
That we have a certain concept of our
own self-righteousness that in, what's the word,
not nullifies, it's inures us, that's the word,
I-N-U-R-E, inures us from
the reality that just as it served to
inure the Jewish critics, it inures us even
as Christians to the degree that we share
with them some degree of a self-righteousness
which is sin.
While the centurion was devoid of just that
thing and saw what he needed for his
salvation.
So what if, I made the blunt statement
before, if you're not touched, if you're indifferent,
it's not a statement that you're dull this
morning or you're lacking sleep, it's a statement
that sin itself is clouding your ability to
perceive the enormity of what this represents and
sin in the form of self-righteousness probably
is the point at issue that we need
to recognize.
Don't forget to factor in not only the
grief of the son, the agony of his
own suffering physically and morally, the absence of
the father, but the grief as we mentioned
the other day of the father himself.
The father is suffering with the son in
this painful death.
Maybe it's all the more excruciating for the
father because he's hearing the cry of the
son, why have you forsaken me?
And it tears his heart out because the
father's deepest impulse is to relieve the son
of such an excruciating suffering but he cannot.
He has to turn a deaf ear to
the cry of his own son about abandonment
and that, what is that for a God
who is holy?
What is that for a father who is
righteous and moral, who is the epitome of
what is moral to be unable to relieve
his son from the excruciating death for which
he's crying out, why do you abandon me?
So that the father is suffering in a
unique agony of his own kind that has
to be coupled with the suffering of the
son to get a sense of what God
in the Godhead has paid for the atonement
for sin which raises the question how hideous
is sin that it required that magnitude of
suffering both from the father and the son
and why is it that we can be
indifferent and just note it as a kind
of a fact of the faith and a
doctrine to which we're obliged to subscribe but
have no pang, no inward registration of the
enormity of this and are left devoid and
untouched as Christians.
I think we need to go back to
the garden.
We need to examine the first classic prototype
of sin that we all share in the
calculated rebellion and defiance against God who had
made of them but one request of any
tree in the garden you may eat except
this one tree and they violated that simple
requirement as an obstinate willful act as if
though God had said that we are at
liberty to disregard that because in the eating
of that fruit we ourselves will be made
wise and as God and he probably sought
to discourage our eating because he didn't want
to share his deity with us in his
jealousy to keep it to himself so we
bought the snake's lie, the serpent's lie.
I mean we have to devote an entire
session just to examining the anatomy of sin
in its very first expression because the first
is always the classic statement and we don't
have to go far to go from there
to Cain and Abel where the Lord warns
Cain that sin is crouching at the door
and he does not heed that warning and
kills his brother out of envy because the
brother's sacrifice was consumed by fire accepted by
God while his was neglected and then when
God says and where is your brother?
How should I know?
Am I my brother's keeper?
As if God did not see that murder
in a word as if God is not
God as if he can be ignored with
impunity is the statement of human arrogance, conceit,
self-will, rebellion, complete indifference against God mocking
him about being God who can see and
judge even though he has warned and to
be indifferent to that warning and having performed
the murder to make oneself as if how
should I know and when God makes him
a fugitive he says this punishment is too
much for me.
It wasn't too much for him to kill
his brother but to suffer a mild consequence
it's too much for me.
Self-pity, self-righteousness, self, self, self and
we have inherited that Adamic cane taint and
it's a moot question whether unless we have
really appropriated this to what degree does it
yet remain to blunt even our consideration that
God is wanting to press upon our consciousness
even now.
To what degree are we superseding God?
Are we making our own independent judgments?
Yes God has said but I don't know.
It's how you look at it.
I'm not impressed.
I'm the arbiter.
I'm the one who's really assessing.
Yes though God has said but I don't
really believe in my inward heart that that
is necessarily so.
We're still performing an elevation over God as
his creation over the creator which is why
God abandons men to their lust.
That it works itself out in the most
abominable forms.
Maybe one of the vilest forms of that
is turning the truth into a lie by
making the truth a truism.
We have sanctified the truth.
It's kosher.
It's an article of faith.
It's a doctrine to which we subscribe but
it's not alive in our spirit, our consciousness
or our concern but we will mouth it
as a platitude.
When you turn truth into truism you have
turned the truth into a lie and you've
hindered the truth by subscribing to that and
commending it to others as something light.
So we want to keep from the blood
and from the cross so we'll have a
fig leaf that has the form of the
truth but not its essence or its power
and what is so sinful is we inwardly
know that and continue in it and subscribe
to it and are participant in it as
the church in disseminating it for the problem
that it has become so that the sin
of men is not only his unrighteousness but
also his righteousness and in fact his righteousness
is yet a more deadly form than his
sin of unrighteousness which is much more visible
and discernible but the sin of our righteousness
is what keeps us from the realization, the
appropriation of this so great provision.
Is there in me a post-Christian self
-righteousness that is yet operative, more tenacious, deep,
pervasive and continuing than ever I imagined and
is my dullness today toward this subject the
very evidence of its existence that I have
never imagined because I thought I was a
proper Christian?
Why then was your self-righteousness not dealt
with in your conversion?
How deep was your conversion?
How much was it a disgust with your
natural man and a willingness to forsake all
unto death and a coming to the cross?
How much was your baptism a burial of
that natural man because you know that there
was no good that could come from him
and that you believe there would be a
resurrection to notice of life or how much
was it just a religious requirement to which
you submitted but you never went into it
as a death nor a burial and therefore
your self-righteousness remains, therefore you are obdurate,
therefore you are insensitive and even offended if
a suggestion is made that what blocks your
comprehension and your aliveness to this issue is
your yet prevailing sin and the sin is
the sin of self-righteousness.
It could not be true of me because
you will be the last one to know
it because you are full of self-justification
and self-celebration.
You can't see it until this reveals it.
It's being revealed this morning.
You ask the Lord is there a deep
tenacious self-righteousness yet alive in me that
has not been submitted to the cross that
inures me to the reality?
If so I repent of it, I forsake
it and I bring it into death and
it's a death that will be total or
we're still playing a game with the cross
and just verbalizing something without its actualization and
therefore we'll be hindering the righteousness of God
by hindering his righteousness by our unrighteousness and
making it pablum rather than a message for
a dying world.
Got the idea?
Well all the while we're students seeking to
grow in the knowledge of the Lord.
So long as there's a place of admiration
and even hope to serve God by the
natural man and to be spiritual by the
natural man we're not bringing anything to death.
We're just bringing verbal categories into the water
and we come up the same as we
went down.
It was not a going down into the
Jordan of death because we still want to
retain the original life and see it improved
and even employed in the service of God.
Until you despair and agree with God that
in man there's no good thing at all.
Why call us only good?
There's no man good but God.
Until you believe that your baptism is a
fake.
So Lord we don't want to go any
further.
We don't want to be guilty of hindering
the righteousness of God by holding it in
unrighteousness as a platitude and so we're asking
Lord your deepest dealing with us today or
else we have come to a loggerhead where
we're backed up and it would be pointless
to go on.
We would just add confusion and embarrassment rather
than understanding.
Lord help us at this juncture we pray.
You brought us to this impasse and we
ask for the mercy that will bring us
through it in truth in Jesus name.
Amen.