Good morning to you all on this, let's
see now, it depends how you look at
it.
It could be a threatening or it could
be a thrilling Thursday, right?
All depends on who you are and how
you look at it.
We had a sister in Cuba years ago
and she, she was the kind of person
that she never was glad unless she was
sad, never was happy unless she was mad,
she never was feeling well unless she was
sick, and she always had something to tell
you about her sad estate.
So, got a little bit difficult to handle
and I learned never to ask her, how
are you?
It was a fatal question.
And then another thing I would, she would
say to you, she would say to you,
Usted no es capaz de imaginarse como yo
tengo que sufrir.
You haven't any idea how I suffer.
So I thought, well now maybe she should
understand a little bit how I suffer, you
know.
So I tried it on her one day,
but it wasn't very effective.
She, she always was ahead of me even
in the suffering.
So I just learned to avoid the question
altogether.
Now this morning I want to continue our
morning subject of stewardship and we have considerable
territory to cover yet.
My wife says to me, if you wouldn't
take so long in the introduction, you'd get
to the heart of your message a lot
quicker.
Some of you said they'd like to meet
my wife.
Well, if you do, you get to meet
the better part at any rate.
I remember I went into Houston a number
of years ago to a Spanish assembly there
and there was an elderly gentleman and his
wife there.
They couldn't speak Spanish, but they had a
great interest in starting Spanish work and if
any of you know about that work now,
there are several assemblies, Spanish speaking assemblies in
the city of Houston and very large.
The one when I went, it was just
fairly small.
They had started in his garage, I believe,
this older gentleman and he used to go
along to their meetings, so he didn't understand
what it was all about.
And afterwards I went down and he said,
Brother Adams, I want you to meet my
better half.
And I said, certainly, delighted, you know.
He said, just a minute, you know why
I call her my better half?
And I said, no.
He said, because if you don't give them
a specific amount, they'll take the whole thing.
So, someday I'll introduce you to my five
-eighths or my three-quarters.
I'm not just sure exactly what it is
or what she is.
Let's turn to the Epistles of the Romans,
Chapter 1.
Now, that's a quantum leap.
I know for some of you from Adam,
where we were yesterday, and you're going to
say to me now, why did you take
this big jump?
Are there no stewards from Adam to Romans,
Chapter 1?
Yes, certainly there are.
There are a number of them.
In fact, the first time the word steward
is used is in Genesis, Chapter 15, when
Abraham was speaking with the Lord, wanting a
son and an heir.
And he said, I don't have any heir
except this steward of Damascus, one born in
my house, he said.
And I want my own son to be
my heir, to be my steward, to dispense
of my properties when I have gone.
And that's the first time you hear the
use of the word steward, or you see
the use of the word steward in the
Scriptures in the Old Testament.
Now, we have it in the New Testament
several times, as I expect all of you
will know and wonder why I haven't got
there yet.
Well, there's a lot of territory between Genesis
15 and Romans, Chapter 1.
I understand that.
But nevertheless, that same territory is covered by
Romans, Chapter 1.
And I want to look at the subject
of stewardship this morning in two aspects, two
divisions.
One is universal, and the other is national.
So we look at the universal first.
In fact, we're going to look at both
of them from the same epistle to the
Romans.
Let's read in Chapter 1 of the epistle
to the Romans.
Paul says that verse that we all know
so well in 16, I am not ashamed
of the gospel of Christ, for it is
the power of God unto salvation to everyone
that believeth, to the Jew first, and also
to the Greek.
For therein is the righteousness of God revealed
from faith to faith.
Like that, don't you?
That reminds you of John, Chapter 1.
From grace to grace, continuously.
So this comes out of faith, and it
continues to go unto faith, from faith to
faith.
It's a continuous thing.
As it is written, the just shall live
by faith.
You'll recall that that verse is quoted for
us from the Old Testament in Habakkuk, three
times in the New Testament.
Romans, Galatians, and the epistle to the Hebrews,
Chapter 10.
Verse 18.
For the wrath of God is revealed from
heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men
who hold the truth in unrighteousness.
Notice that expression.
Who hold.
Some have translated this retain or keep down
the truth in unrighteousness.
Now, they did have truth, you can see,
but they're holding that truth down in unrighteousness
because that which may be known of God
is manifest in them or amongst them, for
God hath showed or manifested the truth unto
them.
For the invisible things of him from the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being
understood by the things that are made, even
his eternal power and Godhead, so that they
are without excuse, because that when they knew
God, they glorified him not as God, neither
were thankful, but they became vain in their
imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
and they changed the glory of the uncorruptible
God into an image made like to corruptible
man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts,
and creeping things.
Now, that'll take you back to Genesis, Chapter
1, won't it?
Where we're noticing Adam's relationship to the creation,
and to God, and finally to his companion.
Verse 24, Wherefore God also gave them up
to uncleanness through the lust of their own
heart, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves,
who changed the truth of God, and notice,
please, the connection in which he says they
changed the truth of God into a lie,
that's the truth they had known, as we've
already noticed, and worshipped and served the creature
more than the creator, who is blessed forever.
Amen.
For this cause, God gave them up into
vile affections.
This is the fruit, now, of changing the
truth of God, and abandoning that which they
knew.
For even their women did change the natural
use into that which is against nature, and
likewise also the men, leaving the natural use
of the women, burned in their lust one
toward another, men with men, working that which
is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense
of their error which was meat.
That reminds me of the fact that I
was speaking in the Gospel one time on
John, Chapter 8, and there was a younger
brother who was accompanying me, and he came
to me afterwards, and he said, Mr. Adams,
do you really believe that you should preach
from John, Chapter 8, in a public service?
And I said, oh, yes, absolutely.
Well, he said, I understood, and I was
told we should never preach from John, Chapter
8, in a public service.
Well, it made me think of the time
that I was told that you should not
read 1 Corinthians, Chapter 7, in a public
service, or in this section of Chapter 1
of Romans.
So I took them back to the days
of Ezra, when the people were gathered together,
and they read the whole law, the whole
law, in the presence, and it says, of
men, women, and children.
And I said, the only thing that I
haven't come across yet in my New Testament
is the appendage, the explanation later on, at
the close of the book, now, these things
are to be read in churches, or in
public, except Romans, Chapter 1, and 1 Corinthians,
Chapter 7.
And, of course, it sounds ridiculous when you
say it like that.
Nevertheless, I was raised in an assembly when,
in our conversational Bible study, when we went
through 1 Corinthians and cut to Chapter 6,
at the end of Chapter 6, they always
took that quantum leap and landed in Chapter
8, and never would study or publicly speak
of Chapter 7.
Now, I believe that, in my early days,
was the product of an atmosphere, an ambience,
that we were raised in when certain things
were not discussed, even Biblical things.
But, if you look at what I've quoted
to you from the days of Ezra, from
the book of Leviticus, and also the reading
of the Scriptures in the New Testament, you
will understand that is not a true position.
There are no impositions put upon the reading
of Scripture, especially to the saints, in public,
or any sections of them.
Nevertheless, we do that at times, which is
most unfortunate, I judge.
All right, verse 28 says, And even as
they did not like to retain God in
their knowledge, you see, they had a knowledge
of God, but they didn't want to keep
that, retain that knowledge, God gave them over
to a retrograde mind to do those things
which are not convenient, being filled with all
unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of
envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whispers, backbiters, haters
of God, spiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil
things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers,
without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful, who, knowing the
judgment of God that they which commit such
things are worthy of death, not only do
the same, but have pleasure in them that
do them.
Now, this paragraph from verse 18 on to
the close of chapter 1, I want to
name it a universal stewardship, and we have
already learned in our study, if but briefly,
that a stewardship is when the property of
one is committed to another whose property it
is not, and authority is given for the
administration by this steward of that which is
not his own.
And you have some parables, as you know,
Matthew chapter 20, Luke chapter 19, and others,
Luke chapter 16, that speak of stewards in
that capacity.
A steward is one who has received authority
to administrate something, some property, some goods, some
kind of investment that belongs to somebody else.
And that's why Paul says, in connection with
the mysteries, as we may have opportunity to
see in 1 Corinthians chapter 4, that it
is required of a steward, regardless of what
the deposit is, regardless of what the trust
is composed of, it is required of a
steward that a man be found faithful.
He is handling the property of another.
So, I want you to look at this
from that light, because I think the understanding
of the passage is in keeping with that.
So, Paul says, in verse 18, "...the wrath
of God is revealed from heaven against all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men."
I recall the first time I noticed that
this is not what I thought it was.
This is not a dramatic, disastrous display of
God's wrath in a visible form.
But, when we read words like these, "...the
wrath of God is revealed from heaven," you're
thinking of a lightning flash.
You think of an earthquake, such as they
just had in Kobe, in Japan, or such
as many of the recent earthquakes that have
been experienced.
Floods, disasters, things like that.
I used to think that that's exactly what
it must be when it says, "...the wrath
of God is revealed from heaven."
And then, when you read down through the
whole passage, you say, well, that's not the
meaning of it at all.
He's not talking about cosmological, he's not talking
about earthly, physical, natural disasters.
He's talking about the wrath of God being
revealed against men who have given up the
truth, adhered to the lie, and taking pleasure
in all the vices that now the lie
reveals and permits in practice.
And, the wrath of God is revealed from
those who do these things by God giving
them up.
Now, it took me a while to see
that.
In fact, it generally takes me a long
while to see anything very much.
And, he says, this isn't a lightning flash,
this isn't a tremendous volcanic eruption, this isn't
an invading armies of the pagans, this isn't
an earthquake that reveals the wrath of God.
What is it that reveals the wrath of
God?
Him saying, if this is the way you
insist on going, then just go.
So, once it says he gave them up,
and the next time it says he gave
them over.
He gave them up to what they were
doing, and he gave them over to the
results of what they were doing.
That was the measure of the revelation of
the wrath of God.
Now, then he goes on to say this.
They hold the truth in unrighteousness, because that
which may be known of God is manifest
to them, for God has showed or manifested
it unto them.
Here is truth that has been committed, that
has been entrusted, that has been displayed to
mankind.
I judge this is the stewardship from the
days we're looking at, the early days, the
fall, right to the close.
This is a long period of stewardship.
God had deposited in them, he had given
them a treasure, he had made known to
them things about himself that were invisible but
very real, because they had said, and was
it?
Yes, it was Bertrand Russell, I believe, who
said, if after I die and go over
there and I meet God, I'm going to
tell him, or I'm going to ask him,
why did he not give us more evidence
of himself?
Why did he not give us more evidence
of what he does and who he is?
Well, I judge he never read Romans 1,
if he said such a thing, which he
is reputed to have said.
He's going to inquire, he's going to ask
God, why didn't you make yourself known more
clearly, more evidently than you did?
Why didn't you show us some proof of
your being, of your person, of your presence?
That's what the philosopher is going to ask
God, said he, when he should meet him.
But listen to what it says here.
It says here very clearly, that that which
may be known of God, verse 18, is
manifested amongst them, for God has showed or
manifested it unto them.
Now, there's a direct statement that God has
made himself known.
He has manifested himself to mankind, and this
is the way he has done it, and
it still stands from Genesis chapter 3 to
Romans chapter 1.
How has he done it?
Verse 20, The invisible things of him from
the creation of the world are clearly seen.
The invisible is clearly seen by that which
is made visible.
And then he goes on to detail exactly
what that was.
He says it is seen from the creation
of the world, and that which is seen
being understood by the things that are made,
and then notice this, even his eternal power
and divine nature.
Now, we speak about partial revelations of God.
We speak about intermittent views or glimpses of
God.
Here the apostle writing by the Spirit says,
this is a clear, clear manifestation of God.
It is something to be seen that reveals
something which could not be seen.
The invisible God reveals himself by what he
has done, by what he has made.
Long before papyrus was invented, or books were
written, or transcripts were made, or manuscripts and
so on, God wrote the first book himself,
and he wrote it in the creation.
That which is above us, and that which
is around us.
And this is one clear revelation, says the
writer, of God, and of a twofold manifestation
of God.
First of all, his eternal power.
That's the first thing that is seen.
And isn't it tragic that men who are
discovering constantly some of the hitherto unknown characteristics
of the universe in which we live, the
precision, the immensity of it, wait till they
get another telescope after the Hubble is outdated,
and we go on and on and on,
and these astronomers who tell us that there
is no limit, seemingly, to the ever-constant
outward motion of the universe which is ever
-expanding, they tell us.
And I recall reading when I was a
teenager, it was written in one of those
old books where all the S's were F's,
you remember?
Nobody nodded their head.
Nobody remembers when all the S's were F's.
Well, this is an old book I got
out of the library in my lunch hour,
and I used to read it, and I
think it was a man by the name
of Arthur Whitehead, something similar to that, and
he visualized man being taken on a tour,
an exploratory tour by one of the angels,
and they're traveling through space.
Now, this is way back, you know, when
the S's were F's.
And he's taking them on through the universe,
and they pass star after star after star
long before they knew what galaxies were, long
before they ever dreamt of seeing that there
are more than a million galaxies, and that
our Milky Way is just merely a galaxy,
and long before they told us, the astronomers,
that the sun is just a spotted, spotty
little star in the backwaters in an insignificant
position of one of the smaller galaxies –
doesn't that make you feel important?
– of the universe, long before they knew
how to say that.
Well, the angel is conducting this man on
this voyage into the universe, and finally he
was so overcome, he says to the angel,
And is there none to the universe of
God?
And the angel answers, supposedly, Yea, and rather,
there's no beginning.
In other words, what he is saying is,
it is limitless, and that's what we're being
told now by the astronomers as they keep
on reaching farther and farther out into space.
We look at this, what do we see?
A manifestation of God.
A revelation of God.
And the first thing that we're to understand
by this is His eternal power.
The psalmist must have felt awed, and perhaps
dismayed, certainly confounded and confused, when perched on
one of the hills of Judea, keeping watch
over his father's sheep by night, he contemplated
this book of creation, this manifestation of the
unseen, this revelation of the invisible, and he
queries, and he gives us that wonderful passage
in Psalm 8 that is repeated in Hebrews
chapter 2, What is man?
What is he?
Thou hast made him a little lower than
the angels.
Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor.
Isn't that a remarkable statement to say?
Thou hast put all things in subjection under
his feet.
And what is he saying?
He's saying what Paul writes here to the
Romans, and he says, God has revealed Himself
and His eternal power, the majesty of His
being, and all the laws and all the
components of the creation.
I remember the first time I was kind
of baffled, you know, by discovering that wood
isn't wood, really.
I mean, it's not solid.
It's not solid.
It's just a bunch of atoms in constant
motion, and neutrons and protons and so on,
and they're revolving constantly.
And I used to look at wood and
say, now that's solid.
And the physicist says to me, no, you're
mistaken.
That's not solid at all.
That's just something.
And I said, how am I going to
understand that?
Well, you look at it, and you say
it's solid.
I think one of the explanations I read
was a boy with a bicycle, and he
has the spokes of his wheel have bits
of paper, whatever it is, wrapped to it.
Now, of course, they've got them solid.
I've seen that in erasers.
But anyway, and he puts several strips of
colored paper in the spokes of his wheel,
and as he drives along slowly, you can
see all these strips.
But then he gets faster and faster, and
he gets going so fast that you can't
see the individual strips.
All you see is what looks like a
solid blank, a solid mass of color.
And you know it's not a mass at
all.
You know it's not solid.
It's merely a whole bunch of strips of
colored paper in motion.
Well, says he to me.
Now, look.
You look at that, and you say, it's
solid.
That's not solid.
That's just atoms constantly moving.
And then, and then I read too, you
see that not only are these atoms, so
-called, in constant motion, and I say, well,
who understood that?
They said, well, we believe and we practice
fission, you know.
We explode them.
Well, we explode them.
Of course, we get atomic bomb or hydrogen
bomb, whatever.
And that's when we can explode them.
And they say, that's fission.
Well, then, I say, now, just a minute.
Who put them all together in the first
place?
Well, they call that fusion, you see.
And what are these atoms?
They tell me it's energy.
That's all it is?
I thought it was wood.
They say, no, that's not wood.
That's a lot of atoms of energy in
motion.
And I said, where did the energy come
from?
And they say to me, you'd better read
Colossians 1 over again.
So I go back and read Colossians 1
over again.
And I read, "...in Him were created all
things."
Not by.
That's not the first preposition.
There are three there.
The first preposition is, "...in Him were all
things created.
Without Him was not anything made that was
made."
This energy, where did this energy come from
in the universe?
It's like the girl who said, looking at
all the skyscrapers.
Now, this was in the city of Houston,
too.
She's looking at all the skyscrapers.
There they go, towering up into the sky.
And she said, they'd better not build anymore.
Why?
Because the weight's going to get so much
that the earth will sink under it.
And then somebody asked her, well, but where
did the cement come from that they built
these buildings with and the steel?
You mean they went out and brought it
in from Venus?
Or wasn't it here in the first place?
Well, have they added anything to the weight
of the earth because they built some things
vertical?
It was all there anyway in the first
place, wasn't it?
Sure, the weight was all here.
They just used it and changed it into
another form.
Where did the energy come from that has
made the universe what it is, that has
fused all these atoms?
It's all energy, and if you can explode
it, that's what it's going to go into,
and there won't be any matter.
There'll just be energy.
Well, it was all in Him.
In Him were created all these things.
And think of the eternal power that was
resident in the person that we know as
our Lord Jesus Christ.
That He took this energy, which came from
Himself, and He fused it, and He made
atoms.
He made what we call material, but it's
just energy in motion.
Some people are built that way, by the
way, you know.
You can't keep them still.
They're constantly energy in motion.
I'm not sure what kind of atoms they're
formed of, but anyway, that's what the world's
made of.
And says Paul here, here was a stewardship
that was imposed, that was entrusted to mankind.
It was the knowledge of God's eternal power.
But that's only half the story.
Here's the other half, as it says here.
His divine nature.
When you look, when I look, when we
look at the creation in which we live,
can we see anything of God's nature in
it?
Yes.
It's right there to be seen.
I have some neighbors up home, some friends
of ours, believers, and the lady was telling
us one day, not long ago, she said,
you know, it was a cold, blustery, one
of those not good nights at all.
You know, not one of, this is the
days, you know, not one of those.
And she said, I heard a noise at
the back door, and I went to the
back door, and here's a cat.
And it's not our cat, I don't know
where it came from.
And it's meowing pitifully there.
So I opened the door and let it
in.
And it came in and arched its back,
you know how cats do, and looked all
around and settled for a little bit.
And she thought, well, I'll just leave it
in the back porch a while, and then
it'll go away when the weather gets a
little better.
So I went and got a box, a
cardboard box, and I put it on the
floor, put a little rag in it, and
the cat hopped in to the box and
to the rag and settled down quite nicely
and purred away for a while.
And then she said to get up and
went to the back door and started to
meow.
And she said, I just let you in
out of the weather, now why do you
want out again?
But it was very insistent.
This cat could be, can be, we have
one at home.
I learned I'd never seen a cat and
a dog if you give a dog a
kind attention and you love it and you
stroke it and you pat it and you
feed it and so forth.
And after it's nice and happily contented, it
lies there on the floor and it looks
at you and it says, he must be
a god.
But if you have a cat, and we
have, and you give the same kind of
attention to a cat and you love it
and you pet it and you feed it
and so forth, and after you've done it,
it walks away and starts pruning itself and
says, I must be a god.
Yeah, they tell me that's the difference between
a dog and a cat.
Well, the cat went to the back door
and it started to cry.
So the lady says, I know what you
want out for.
But she opened the door and let it
out.
Away it went.
She didn't know where.
And after a while, she said, I heard
it meowing again at the back door.
And she says, I thought you wouldn't stand
alone out there.
So she went and opened the door and
here it's standing there with a kitten in
its mouth.
So she said, Oh.
And it came along and it deposited the
kitten in the box.
Then it went to the back door again.
And it started to cry to get out.
You know what it was doing, don't you?
Disappeared.
Came back with another one.
When it came back with another kitten, it
decided, this isn't a very good place.
There's a lot of traffic here.
So, there was another door leading downstairs to
the cellar to the basement there.
So she said, it went to that door
and cried.
So it opened that door and down it
went.
The cat went downstairs and it wasn't gone
very long before it came running back up
again, picked up the first kitten and took
it downstairs.
It came back up and picked up the
second kitten and took it downstairs.
Then it went to the back door again.
And it's gone.
It wasn't long before she heard it again.
And the process went on until she had
five kittens in the box which she'd taken
out of the back porch and put it
down in the basement.
And she said, you know, I just couldn't
hardly believe my eyes.
She said, when I saw the care that
this cat had for its little kitten, it
wasn't even content to leave them in the
back porch because there's too much traffic there.
So it took it, put them all down
in the basement and raised them all in
the basement.
You know what that is?
It's a display of His divine nature in
creation.
Who put it into the heart of a
cat to go to all that trouble to
look after its kittens?
Tell me, where did that come from?
What Paul is saying here, it's not only
His eternal power that you can see in
the creation, you can see His divine nature.
Who is God?
He is God that in addition to the
immensity of His power out there has a
heart that cares, that preserves, that watches over,
that feels for the needy and the small
and the insignificant.
We look out through the telescope and we
see His eternal power.
We look down through the microscope and we
see His divine nature.
That's the stewardship of the truth, Paul says
here, in connection with God's display of Himself.
And you watch the animal world, watch the
birds around here and even that one that's
bothering our good brethren, I see, the one
that's using his head all the time and
drilling holes in poles and houses.
You look at these little things and you
see past the creature, you see the heart
of the Creator.
My friends, God is love, as well as
God is light, God is tenderness, as well
as He is the God of power.
And Paul said they knew that, they knew
that, but they refused to believe in that,
and they took the truth, the stewardship of
the truth that God had given to them
and they turned it into a lie.
And they reduced the stature of the Almighty
God and they brought Him down to the
likeness of His creature.
And they actually worshipped and served the creature
more than the Creator.
What were the consequences of that?
The consequences of that were, instead of looking
out and seeing God in His divine nature,
as well as in His eternal power, all
they concentrated their interest on was that which
was made.
And they worshipped themselves and they fell into
the corruption and the result of that failed
stewardship was we have the vile world in
which we're living today.
Why when we see such explanations or such
details given to us here about homosexuality, about
sexual perversion, that you read in detail over
in the book of Leviticus.
Why do we see that around us today?
Because this country, our countries were founded on
the Judeo-Christian faith for the knowledge of
God.
And I haven't been living very long yet.
Not nearly as long as some of you.
Please keep that in mind, won't you?
But I can remember when the Lord's Day,
in obedience to the constitutional act which is
called the Lord's Act, everything was quiet and
everything was subdued and none of the stores
were open and there was no joyriding and
there was no display of sports and all
that kind of thing.
My young days, I remember that.
We used to walk twelve miles at least
to our services on Sundays.
Never thought we were hard done boys.
Never thought at all.
Back and forth, back and forth, four times
a day, two miles each way.
And that's how we went all the time.
And to take the car out and go
for a little bit of a ride was
a tremendous obstacle to overcome.
Now, what do we have?
Divergent interests, the means to indulge them with
the result that the Lord's Day, and I'm
not sure what your constitution says here, but
in Canada it's called the Lord's Day Act,
becomes a time of frivolity, of sin, of
pleasure, of corruption and perversion.
Why?
Because having left the truth of the revelation
of God which He gave to us, and
even in the foundations and the constitution of
our countries, having left that, we've gone into
the vile state that we see detailed for
us here in Romans chapter 1, and we
see displayed for us all around us every
day.
It was a failed stewardship.
That which was universal.
Now turn to chapter 9 please, and I'm
going to take a quick run into chapter
9, and just look briefly at a stewardship
that was national.
A stewardship that is national.
Chapter 9 of Romans.
The world having had corrupted itself, you recall,
in the days of Noah, then God brought
the flood upon the face of the ground.
And all that perversion momentarily was ceased, though
it grew again.
Paul says in chapter 9 that there was
such a thing as a national stewardship.
The first one from chapter 1 was universal.
This one is national.
He says in verse 1, I say the
truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience
also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost,
that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow
in my heart.
For I could wish that myself were accursed
or separated from Christ for my brethren, my
kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites.
Now we're going to speak about a specific
body of people, a national stewardship, to whom
pertains the adoption or the sonship.
We don't have time to go into some
of these things in detail, but then nevertheless,
let's just notice them briefly as we read
them, one after the other.
The first thing he says, these who are
Israelites, they received the adoption or the sonship.
Now that will take you back to Exodus
chapter 3, when God met Moses in the
wilderness and he displayed something of himself, something
of his nation, something of the church even
as well, but that's projecting it away ahead.
And he saw this thorn bush burning in
the wilderness.
And as he saw this mystery, because it
did not burn up, it was not consumed
or destroyed, it just kept burning, he drew
near to see it.
And the Lord spoke to him out of
the bush.
And he who spoke to him out of
the bush, please remember, said himself that his
name was I Am.
Because Moses, having received the commission to go
into Egypt, what was the commission, by the
way?
The commission was this, Let my son go.
There's the adoption.
Let my son go.
God had made a covenant with Abraham, as
you know.
God had made a covenant with Isaac.
God had made a covenant with Jacob.
In fact, he goes so far as the
epistles of the Hebrews tells us that he
wasn't ashamed to take upon himself a surname
which was the God of Abraham, the God
of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
It's just not too long ago in performing
some marriages, which I have to do every
now and then, and then wait long enough,
and live long enough, and bury someone, and
make them married.
At any rate, that wasn't my fault.
I noticed in the license application that we
were filling out, a section that I had
never seen in all the years I'd been
performing marriages.
I'd never seen it, but I noticed that
if the bride wishes to retain her own
surname, please fill out the following section.
I said, what's this?
I never saw this in a marriage license
before.
Oh, the bride now may not want to
assume her husband's surname.
So, instead of being Mary Brown White, she
can stay Mary Brown Black as she wants.
Well, this was an innovation.
I never saw this before.
And it reminded me of the fact that
God said he was not ashamed to be
surnamed by calling himself the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob.
All right.
Having done that, now we move on to
the national relationship.
And we come to the days of Moses,
as already mentioned, and we discover that God
is going to give them the adoption nationally.
Individually, in family way, they had been given
the relationship with God by covenant, the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Now, he's going to send Moses down into
Egypt.
He's going to tell them when they ask
you, as you say, who sent you?
You'll say, the I Am sent me.
Well, they won't believe me.
Who will I say?
Tell them that the I Am that I
Am, if you want a development of the
title, says God, tell them the I Am
that I Am sent you.
And don't say, I Am what I was
not.
And don't say, the I Am which shall
be what I am not.
No.
Just tell them the I Am that I
Am.
For I always was the I Am.
I am, and I always will be the
I Am.
But when you get down to talk to
Pharaoh, say to Pharaoh, Thus says Jehovah, Let
my son go.
There's the adoption now that Paul talks about
here being introduced.
And it's going to be a national adoption.
God has chosen a people nationally for himself.
And I worked with a Scottish girl one
time.
I shouldn't have said Scottish, should I?
I can't believe in racial discrimination, can I?
Well, anyway, I worked with her one time
in a large factory.
And she said, I think it's totally unfair
that God should have chosen the Jews.
No.
Whom should he have chosen?
You know, of course.
Who else?
But anyway, I said, well, why do you
think it's so unfair?
Well, she says, Aren't we just as good?
I said, it wasn't a question of being
good, you know.
God made man in the first place.
A man corrupted himself so sadly and so
badly that he sent the flood and destroyed
them all.
And it says about them, what is not
said about anything else, that God repented.
He was sorry he had made the man.
If you understand that, tell me what it
means.
It repented the Lord that he had made
man on the earth.
He never repented of making a lion or
a tiger, a hippopotamus or a warthog.
But it did repent him that he had
made a man on the earth.
Here's the one that we were looking at
the other day, who was made in the
image of God and in the likeness of
God.
And now, God says it repents.
I am repented that I ever made him
on the earth.
I want to destroy him.
So what did he do?
He destroyed him with the flood.
And then what happened?
He started all over again.
And what happened?
They went into Romans chapter 1.
They corrupted themselves again.
They fell into misery and the mire and
the morass of human corruption again.
So what does God do now?
He chose a man in the first place,
Adam.
He chose a man in the second place,
Noah.
So he's going to start all over again.
But he said, I won't deal with the
flood, but I'll choose another man.
So he chose Abraham.
And he said, I'm going to make a
great nation of you.
What's wrong with that?
What's unjust about that?
Well, the girl wasn't sure.
But she still thought that north of the
Pics and Scots line there were far better
people in the highlands than there ever were
all the way down in the plain of
Shinar.
So, he should have chosen another.
But it pleased God to choose another man.
This is the third time he's done this.
And out of this man, he's going to
develop a nation and he's going to call
that nation his son.
And by the way, I mentioned to you
the other day and I didn't clarify it,
but that's not the first time I've made
that mistake.
I'm making it all the time.
Remember I said to you that we were
taught that Scripture had one interpretation and many
applications?
I was taught that and drilled into me
with a jackhammer until I didn't believe anything
else.
Scripture only has one interpretation and it has
multiple applications.
That's not true!
Even if I did believe it for 40
years.
Because why?
Because the Spirit of God interprets the same
passage in multiple ways sometimes.
There isn't only one interpretation to any given
passage of Scripture.
We must leave the Spirit of God free
to interpret a passage as He wishes.
We can't put any restrictions on Him.
That's what you're doing.
We're just putting restrictions on the Spirit of
God, He who wrote the book.
Now we say, now you've said that.
Now, you can't make it mean anything else
but that.
You can't do that, you see.
You just can't do it.
Joel chapter 2 is the prophecy concerning the
day of the Lord.
But Peter interprets it in Acts 2 as
the coming of the Holy Spirit.
Hosea chapter 11 God, referring to Israel, says,
Out of Egypt have I called my son.
The Gospel by Matthew interprets that passage to
mean that the Lord Himself unabated was carried
down into Egypt so that the Scripture might
be fulfilled which said, Out of Egypt have
I called my son.
Isn't that two interpretations for the same passage?
Why do we say Scripture only has one
interpretation and multiple applications?
So, when we come to this passage, God
said to Pharaoh, Let my son go that
he may serve me in the wilderness.
And Pharaoh says, I won't let him go.
You know the result of that.
They got the adoption.
That's the first thing they got.
What else was their stewardship?
They got the glory.
And what was the glory?
The visible presence of God amongst them.
Not only in the pillar cloud, over the
tabernacles, but the Shekinah.
We were talking about the other day.
Beneath the wings of the Cherubim and over
the top of the ark, over the propitiatory.
They had the glory of the presence of
God given to them.
That was part of their stewardship.
What else did they have?
They had the covenants.
Notice the plural.
There was more than one covenant.
There were various covenants that God made with
the nation of Israel.
This was a part of their stewardship.
And what else were they given?
They were given the law.
And they were given the service of God.
And they were given the promises.
And they were given the fathers.
And finally, they were given the Christ.
What is not mentioned here, but is mentioned
somewhere else, is maybe the two main features
are the law and the land.
God gave them both.
He gave them the law.
That series of statutes and judgments and covenants
that God made with them that no other
nation in the world ever received.
That was their stewardship.
And in addition to that, He gave them
the land.
And He's called it to this day, My
land.
My land.
So, the land of Israel, with the boundaries
given to Abraham in Genesis chapter 15, way
to the other side of the nation of
Iraq, from the north to the south to
the river of Egypt, God promised it all
to Abraham.
That was part of the stewardship.
So, they've got the law.
They've got the land.
They've got the adoption.
They've got the glory.
They've got the fathers.
And it's all been entrusted to them.
And finally, they've got the Messiah who came
after the flesh of the seed of Abraham.
Could there be a greater, a higher, a
more sublime stewardship than this?
This national stewardship that Israel enjoys?
And what happened?
Another failed stewardship.
Another failed trust.
And the nation lost it all.
They lost it all.
They lost the effect of the law in
their midst.
They lost the visible evidence of the sonship.
The glory is gone.
The covenants have been forgotten.
The Christ who came, the Messiah who was
given to them, was rejected.
And as a result, what?
The law and the land and the Lord
have lost it all, haven't they?
And what a sad story of thousands of
years.
Kneaded as the dough for the bread, kneeded
with tears and suffering and blood and sorrow.
And when they rejected the Messiah whom God
gave to them, then from then on, it
was the wandering foot of the afflicted Jew.
The stewardship was violated.
The land was lost.
The law was forgotten.
And the Messiah is gone.
And that sad story we are seeing fulfilled
around us even today.
But God is faithful.
He will fulfill His covenant with this people.
And this national stewardship will come into play
because of the faithfulness of Him who was
Israel's highest glory.
He was the Christ Himself.
And everything is secure for Israel in Him
as it is secure for us, as it
is secure for the world yet to come
in the Messiah, in the Christ, the faithful
steward in all things.
Shall we pray?
Our Father, we thank Thee this morning for
Him who is the source of our peace,
our consolation, and our confidence.
We rejoice that Thou has taken us out
of self and placed us in the Savior,
out of failure into faithfulness, out of despair
to hope and gladness.
We thank Thee He never fails.
God is faithful by whom we are called
unto the fellowship of His Son.
Bless our hearts, bless Thy people and all
the activities.
We do pray as we commend us to
Thee once more this morning in His name.
Amen.