Acting on What God has Revealed (Part B)

You take a man that goes to a doctor and the doctor says you have a serious condition and I'm going to give you a medicine that can beat this thing.

If you follow its instructions, you will be made well. But he scoffs in his heart at the doctor and he goes home and he doesn't take the medicine and then he drops dead. Whose fault is it? It's his fault and on spiritual issues it is much more severe than this. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Hebrews.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. And now here's Pastor Rick with part 2 of his study called Acting on What God Has Revealed in Hebrews Chapter 2. And every transgression and disobedience received a just reward. We could stop right there. It's not complete. The thought is not complete. But it begins complete. Because he says if, if and that if as we know it is built upon what he's been saying and that's enough. We understand it.

But of course there's more to it to be brought out. For if the words spoken through angels. Now these are the angelic messengers. These are those who are spiritual beings. They have not gone through sin like we have.

That matters. It matters much for our destiny and the plan that God has for mankind, that man that is saved. There's no indication in Exodus at the giving of the Ten Commandments and the law of God that angels were active in this. But the scripture makes it clear that they were without detail. It just tells us. It simply makes it clear. We see it in Acts.

We see it in other places in the book when it's outright just explicitly stated. God's word to man. Frequently delivered by messengers, angelic messengers. Sodom and Gomorrah. How did Lot know the place was going to go up in smoke?

Likely within hours, if not minutes. How did he know? The angels came.

They told him. How did Daniel get these incredible visions of the future, much of which has been fulfilled to the letter and much which remains to be fulfilled? Angels. Then there was Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. There was Zacharias, the father.

There was Mary. God uses his angels. Where the writer is going with this, if God used those angels to speak a word and the consequences of those words were severe, how much more important coming from Jesus Christ himself who is the Son of God? That's what he's trying to tell these Jews who are in danger of slipping. And so he says, if the words spoken through angels prove steadfast and every transgression and disobedience received a just reward.

And so here is the point. Again, if the message of created beings who were dispatched to speak the mind of God proved to be sure and reliable and devastating, how much more when it comes from God himself better not neglect it? I don't know what his audience was doing in their heads when they were hearing this document read. You notice I keep referring to it as a document because as we did in the introduction, it has a feel of a letter, though it does not have, it's not addressed to anyone as a letter would be as other letters in scripture are. It has the feel of a letter nonetheless, but it also has the feel of a theological statement, a doctrine, an exposition.

It is both. It is quite powerful. And here he's telling them these very things. When God warns, be it through angels or prophets, it's serious business that he started out in the beginning, God in various ways spoke at various times to the fathers by the prophets, as in these last days spoken to us through his son. You better watch it. Now the righteous who love the Lord, when we hear that, you better watch it. We don't cower.

Oh, God's gonna get me. We know him. We know his love and his kindness. We know that watch it is severe.

It's always there, but it's not something we tremble at unless we begin to mess around with it. And then it becomes very serious in that sense. And I have to point that out because I want to encourage the saints. That's what this document does. It is intended to encourage. But you cannot courage people on the battlefield without warning them of the dangers on that battlefield.

And pretend that everything's going to just work out just swell. When it might not, if God's word is tampered with, it will not. Sodom and Gomorrah, Jesus put it this way, remember Lot's wife. You see, don't neglect the scripture. Ask Lot what happened to his sons-in-law and the daughters that married them. Genesis 19, 14, Lot went out and spoke to his sons-in-law who had married his daughters and said, get up, get out of this place, for Yahweh will destroy this city. Now here comes the punchline of this one verse. But to his sons-in-law, he seemed to be joking. They laughed at him. Oh, Lot, good one, you're such a character.

You're a card, Lot. There needs to be more people like you to bring laughter to us all. And they perished. How many people laugh at you when you share the message of Christ or mock you in some way or smirk? Same tragedy is being acted out.

These different characters are on the stage. Verse three says, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord and was confirmed to us by those who heard. Him, the pronoun is added, rightfully so because it's talking about the Lord. But here is a question, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? It is a question that God himself cannot answer.

Reverently you say that. In other words, God, how is anyone going to escape if they neglect your son? Well, that's when he said, you know, I'll forgive anything to a man except he blaspheme the Holy Spirit.

Well, what is that? What is the role of the Holy Spirit? He comes alongside the soul and he leads them to Jesus. He points them to Christ. He ministers to their heart.

He gets them to listen to what Jesus is saying and who he is. And if you laugh at him in the end, if you leave this life mocking him as Lot's son in laws mocked him, you perish. There's no solution. You have sealed your own doom and you have no one to blame for yourself. And it's worse than getting nothing. You get an eternity. A misery, you may think that's harsh, but you've been warned. You take a man that goes to a doctor and a doctor says you have a serious condition and I'm going to give you a medicine that can beat this thing.

If you follow its instructions, you will be made well. But he scoffs in his heart at the doctor and he goes home and he doesn't take the medicine and then he drops dead. Whose fault is it? It's his fault and on spiritual issues it is much more severe than this. Four times in verses one to three we have the word we and once we have the word us. The writer has Christians in mind. He's writing to believers, those he considers brethren. This is for us, for we who believe. Peter will go on to say if the righteous are scarcely saved, what do you do with the unrighteous?

How serious is their predicament, is their perishing going to be? And so he says how shall we escape if we neglect whether you be one who turns away or one who has never turned to? Hebrews 12 verse 25. See that you do not refuse him who speaks.

The him, the pronoun there is Jesus Christ. He says for if they did not escape who refused him who spoke on Earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from him who speaks from heaven. I have to put it that way because there is a brand of Christianity that insists that you have nothing to worry about once you have accepted Christ. It's all going to be automatic pilot. Your responsibilities in your salvation are done with.

Now he takes up the whole cause. I don't find the Bible teaching that a lot of Christians don't like that. I think the more insecure ones don't like it. They're afraid that somehow they're going to now go to hell. There's something they're going to do that's going to mess it up. You are saved eternally so long as you want to be.

It is that simple. You have no more to fear as a Christian of going to hell than you do of running, standing up and jamming a screwdriver into one of the outlets. Any of you afraid of doing that? You go to bed fretting about that. Who I hope I don't get up in the middle of life and jam a screwdriver into the outlet.

No, you know better. And while the danger exists and you're not going there. And so it is with your salvation. God does not strip us from our free will when we come to him. He strengthens it. He develops it. He uses it.

It is remarkable. Human choice is not made invalid when you come to Christ. Even before, Jesus looked at Jerusalem and he said, I wanted. And then he said, but you were not willing. But when Peter and the twelve, keeping in mind Judas, of course, were asked by Christ, are you going to leave me too? Peter said, no way.

I'm not jamming that screwdriver in that outlet. You have the words of life and I'm not going anywhere. And that is the declaration of the righteous. It makes us bold as a lion when we can lay hold of it.

And when we can't, we become timid and relatively useless if we're not careful. So God treats you like a soldier. He treats you like an adult. He treats you like someone who has a brain. He says, come with me and we come and then we find out we've got this carnal nature. And he says, that's OK, I'll deal with that long as you deal with it with me. There were the foolish virgins that he spoke about. He said, remember what happened to them, the five of them?

They neglected their responsibility and there was a consequence for that. And I don't want you to fall to that consequence. If I stood here and told you that you have nothing to worry about now. You're Christians, you can let your guard down. You can neglect.

There's no consequence for any wrong you do. If your flesh gets the upper hand, it's OK. Jesus loves you. I'd be lying to your face and through my teeth. I'd rather tell you there's an enemy out there and we are called upon to engage him. Time without end in this life. And we will prevail even if we lose and we hold the sword, we win. Because that's how great our salvation is.

Satan cannot defeat our salvation. This word for neglect in the Greek, amelaio, it is pronounced. And it means to make light of, to be careless with, to not regard. It is the same Greek word used here in Jesus speaking, Matthew 22 verse 5. But they made light of it and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his business. This is when he used the parable about inviting them into the to the meal, to the supper. They made light of it. It's that same single Greek word, amelaio. They neglected.

They shrugged their shoulders at it. Peter uses it in the reverse. Peter says in 2 Peter 1 verse 12, he says, For this reason I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know and are established in the present truth. He's saying, yeah, you might get tired of hearing me repeat this, but it's intention because you need it.

We all need this. And so he uses that word for this reason. I will not be negligent. I will not amelaio. I will not be careless with these things.

Serious. That is the message. And that is something that Satan does not want you to get. He wants you to neglect these things.

He doesn't want you to hear. How many of you have heard anyone ever speak on this before? Not that I'm saying others don't, others do. But how many do not? Satan loves people who neglect the truths of God, and he especially loves them when found in people who claim to be Christian.

He can do so much more with that. But what is the remedy? And we know it.

Here is the remedy. John 1 verse 12. As many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God to those who believe in his name.

That excites action, not negligence. When you first got saved, go back in your head to that time. Were you not excited? Did you not feel, I've got to tell somebody? What do you think they did at the cave of Lazarus, the tomb, when Jesus said Lazarus, come forth, and he came forth? Do you think those people were saying, I got to tell somebody this? I can't keep this to myself.

These things should be invigorating. Not looking at them from the negative and saying, yeah, but you said you can, you know, lose your salvation. You see, that's the negative. It's got you.

You're running around with your screwdriver in your hand, panic stricken. I'd rather run around with the sword of the word in my hand. I struggle too. There are many things that I don't have that I want, righteous things. Do you not know that sometimes welling up in me, there's almost this insistence before God that I have them because they're so right and correct? I don't yield to them, but they're there in force. I have to fight them. I have to still deal with the longing in my heart for them. But I have found Christ is worth it. He happens to be worth whatever trouble I go through. And this life is the only time that I'll have to do these things. The day is going to come when I cross that Jordan. I will not have to swing a sword ever again. And no one's going to take that from me because he, because he is the one that keeps me so long as I want to be kept.

And how long is that? Or ever, which at first began to be spoken, he says, by the Lord, the recorded words of the public ministry of Christ. Matthew four. Here are the first words of his public ministry. What did when Jesus entered public ministry?

What is the first thing that came out of his mouth that we know of? Repent. Deal with the sin. When you look at a cross, when you when you dangle one around your neck, when you when you find one and you hang it on the wall anywhere, whenever you deal with the cross, you are saying sin is dealt with and I'm a sinner and my sin is dealt with in Christ Jesus and no one alone.

No one else. Matthew four seventeen. From that time, Jesus began to preach and to say, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He echoed the ministry of John the Baptist, the forerunner, the herald that stood before and said, make way for the king because he is coming.

That's John the Baptist. And when the king came, what did he say? He said what his servant was saying because his servant got it from him. He said, repent. He went on to tell John's disciples that the poor have the gospel preached to them.

Go and tell John the things that you have seen and that you have heard. And he went on to talk about the lepers being cleansed, the deaf hearing, the dead being raised and the poor having the truth preached to them. The gospel is the truth and that's why it is the good news because of the remedy that is the truth of Jesus Christ. And so all the New Testament was revealed by him, at least in its foundation. Everything that came after in the New Testament was built on Christ. All that he said and did, he was the truth in flesh and blood, living it out in front of all who saw him in his day. And he offered men salvation in exchange for belief. In exchange for trust in exchange for accepting the truth concerning himself. He breathed life into the Old Testament. He revitalized it.

He gave it more life than it had previously. And so when the writer says here, which at first began to be spoken by the Lord, these are the things he's talking about. And if those who received the message delivered through angels were punished for refusing it, how much more of a problem you will be faced with if you refuse the words of Jesus himself.

This is what he's telling them. Now here he says also, by those who heard him. I used to believe this disqualified Paul from being its author. Now this is not an essential, but you can't escape it if you're a Bible student. These things, they hold your attention as all the Bible does because we want to see it flow and fit real life. Before I came to Christ, I didn't think the Bible was really, I just thought it was a bunch of men writing poetry or something.

It wasn't until I opened it up and began to realize that this was God speaking to me, directly to me. And here where he says by those who heard him, I've since changed my view of course. I happen to hold that Paul is the author, probably co-author. But this does not eliminate him by saying there are those who heard him. Paul heard him too.

And he can include himself in this statement. Acts 13, this is what Paul says. He has seen, he was seen for many days by those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are his witnesses to the people.

Now Paul met him, he was one of those. 1 Corinthians 9. I am not, am I not an apostle?

Am I not free? Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? Are you not my work in the Lord?

I'm pausing here because I'm reading it. This is to the 1 Corinthians. And this man Paul had to put up with so much junk from unworthy Christians. Now when I say unworthy, we're all unworthy in one sense, made worthy by Christ. But in another sense, we behave in such a way towards others that they don't deserve that from us. Paul did not deserve what he got from many of those Corinthians.

Many of them loved him and were solid, but there was enough of them there to break his heart time and time again. We know he tells us about it. And so as I'm reading it, he's saying, am I not an apostle?

He has to defend himself. It's like me saying, am I not a pastor? Did not God use me to lead you to Christ, if that were the case, to a person that was now, you know, turning against me?

And he's appealing to them. Later he writes again in 1 Corinthians. He says, last of all, he was seen by me also by one born out of due time. He was seen by me who was a train wreck, who was persecuting Christians, who had no right to be born again.

And yet here I am. We read those words and it includes me, includes you in spite of our carnality, in spite of our failures. Christ says, I'm not going to let you go. David could not break free, sinned egregiously with Bathsheba and numbering the people and in other ways, even ways not recorded. And yet, the returning Jesus associates his kingdom with David. The apostle Paul will have his name inscribed in heaven, one of the twelve apostles. 2 Peter chapter 1, for we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

We saw the king as king. And we're not going to let it go for anyone. I don't care what the world says.

I don't care what their experts say. I care what we know to be true. We have, we have Jesus. Acts chapter 1 is one of the most beautiful introductions in scripture. Luke was just such a writer. Even in Luke, in his gospel according to Luke, he uses the word that he has researched.

It is the word we get our English word autopsy from. He said, well, I've cut into these things and I have looked in them. That's his introduction to Luke, but his introduction to the book of Acts, speaking of Jesus, to whom he presented himself alive after his sufferings. He presented himself. What an understatement of the Bible when Jesus rose again, he didn't go, ta-da, here I am. We think of presenting himself. He went boom, never stopped booming. Whether he could, to whom he was also, sorry, I got a little carried away.

Let me just bring it down. We're almost done. To whom he also presented himself alive after his sufferings by many infallible proofs being seen by them during 40 days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. We can't tell how wonderfully glorious the kingdom of God is going to be when we are boots on the ground.

When we are there. You've been listening to Cross Reference Radio, the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. As we mentioned at the beginning of today's broadcast, today's teaching is available free of charge at our website. Simply log on to crossreferenceradio.com. That's crossreferenceradio.com. We'd also like to encourage you to subscribe to the Cross Reference Radio podcast. Subscribing ensures that you stay current with all the latest teachings from Pastor Rick. You can subscribe at crossreferenceradio.com or simply search for Cross Reference Radio in your favorite podcast app. Tune in next time as Pastor Rick continues teaching through the book of Hebrews right here on Cross Reference Radio.