Sin and People (Part B)

Believers, believing your believers, for you young attendees, when you come across all these names of false idols in the Bible, one thing you should come away with is that Satan has many brands of delusion for you. Various forms of idols from antiquity till now.

You don't have to have a statue anymore. You can just make up things about God in your head. That's a brand of idolatry, and it comes out of hell. The Old Testament got it right and is not obsolete in its charges against sin and its holding up of righteousness. More than 14 times in this little paragraph, he's quoting scripture.

He's saying, I'm not making this up. Christianity did not originate with people. It comes from God. All the other religions of the world, their origin is a human being. Islam. They tout Muhammad. It all comes from him. Christianity was 66 different documents compiled into a single book. These are different people over thousands of years, all moving in the same direction, all rowing the same way. You cannot say, well, a man wrote the Bible.

No, there were many men who scribed it. God is the author and the finisher, and you don't have a better plan. You don't have to take, we don't have to take the lies and the stupidity of Satan that he gushes out of unbelievers in their charge against the Christ. They are wrong, and they are wrong to death, and we are not friends with wrong beliefs. We can be, certainly, we are to be kind and hospitable and blameless before the Lord and men. We're not looking to be enemies of lost people.

We want to reach them. Now, some, of course, are so far out there, there's nothing you can do, but mostly in a civilized environment, hostilities are not necessary from the Christian. We are unrighteous and without Christ, that's how we will stay, but with Christ, we will, he will give that righteousness to us. This is Psalm 14 that he is quoting here in verse 10.

Now, some Jews objected to the claims that the Gentiles were of equal standing. I covered that, and so that's why he's taking them to their own Bible. We're all guilty, you too, you Jewish believers with scripture, you claim to love God and maybe you do, but you're guilty as a sinner nonetheless, and that is what the temple in the wilderness, when a Jew woke up, when the Jews were in the wilderness and the temple was up and running, and that morning sacrifice that you could smell out in the wilderness, you knew something was cooking. Your sin was cooking.

That animal should have been you. The innocent animal didn't do anything to be slain for Adam and Eve to have their nudity covered. The guilt is on the man. God has made a way. And so Paul affirms that the Old Testament already says what it needs to say about human behavior before God, and our fallen nature makes it impossible to always obey God. Ecclesiastes 7 verse 24, there is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin. Even the just sin, even the good people by people's standards, even by God's standards. Job was a good man by the standard of God.

He boasted about him. None like him. He hates evil.

He loves good. He's still a sinner. All of us are. The Bible is stacked against the sins of man, against yours and mine, and so what is our subject? It's more our topic. People and sin. You know it like the back of your hand if you've been walking with Christ, but do you forget to point that out when given the chance? I wish that all Christians would pray for more opportunity to preach Christ to ignorant people. I mean ignorant people and it comes to God's ways, not overall ignorant. No, that too.

We wouldn't want to leave them out, but that's not how I meant it. John chapter 3 verse 7, do you marvel that I said to you, you must be born again? Are you blown away by me telling you you're so messed up we got to redo you?

That's what that means. Standing before God, you're a train wreck. And if he doesn't get his hands on you, you're going to die that way regardless of what the human accomplishments you are able to achieve. To be righteous, one must overcome life in Christ and must overcome living without Christ.

I lived without him and by the grace of God, that has been overcome. This offends the humanistic man because it reveals defects which they're unwilling to accept. I'm not so bad. Maybe you've heard that.

I'm really not so bad. By who? According to who? So in verse 10, none are righteous. No, not one. In verse 11, no one understands.

No one gets this. Not without Christ. Not without Yahweh in the Old Testament revealing it from his scripture or his prophets. In verse 11, he also says, none seek after God. And then in verse 12, he says, none who does good know not one. People and sin.

That's what he's dealing with. Otherwise, who needs Christ? Who needs a gospel if I'm not so bad?

It'll work out. Hell's packed with people that had that approach. Verse 11, there is none who understands. There is none who seeks after God. Again, quoting scripture. The disinterested in Christ are disinterested in God and therefore they are lost. They don't believe that. Well, what are you going to do about that?

Well, the first thing I can do is be ready. The first call of the Christian is not to preach the gospel. It's to know the gospel. Because what can you preach if you don't know what you're talking about? It'll be heresy.

It'll be lies and falsities. To learn the scripture than to be used. God would flow through me, that his love would flow through me according to truth. With God, truth comes first, then love. Because what love could there be without truth? It'd be a flawed love. First Corinthians, the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God.

Why not? They're foolishness to him. Nor can he know them because they're spiritually discerned. Well, how do I get that spiritual discernment? Well, you must be born again.

How do you get people to be interested in their lost state? I wish it was simple enough to just say, well, I'll give you five points to do that, or one, or two. But it's a lot of work. Just be ready. That's the advice I would give because, you know, you can have this wonderful chance to share the Christ with somebody and they remain nonresponsive to their own detriment, including Ecclesiastes 3.15. God requires an account of what is past.

That's what we teach. Every idle word of man will be dealt with. Well, it's either going to be dealt with with the blood of Christ, or it's going to be dealt with at the great white throne of judgment, and by then it will be too late.

The choice is yours. A Christless man is unreasonable in his attitudes toward God. He doesn't understand that human intellect must be enlightened by God.

We have the age of enlightenment, and it's, you know, the man coming out of the dark ages. Oblivious to what God is doing, most of it. When Jesus walked on the road to Emmaus with the two disciples, he opened their understanding. They loved him. They were his people, and he still didn't get it.

Not enough to love him. He's got to open the understanding, and he breathed on them and said, receive you the Spirit of God. These things have to happen, or else you haven't made much progress, if any. There is none who seeks after God. In the natural state, no one says, you know what, I'm going to start looking for God, unless God has already been working in them. John, chapter 6, verse 44, no man can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.

He didn't say, captures him. He says, draw him. I believe no one comes to a Bible-teaching church unless God is drawing them. Even if they're obnoxious and it doesn't do anything that God drew them and gave them a chance. I also believe no one goes to an anti-Bible, I don't want to use the word church, assembly in the name of Christ without the devil drawing them. The devil draws people. Come to this church. The Bible's not here.

You'll love this. Oh, we use a snippet here too, like partially on a plate, but come here. Adam and Eve hid from God after their sin, and God sought them, and that's what Jesus is even pointing, that includes in his statement, no one comes to me unless the Father draws him. So, you know, wait a minute, what do you mean coming to you? Are you God?

Yeah, as a matter of fact. When someone says, well Jesus never said he's God, he didn't verbalize it according to your script. But the fact remains, he said it. The vox and the verba, well that's a different way, I won't go there, but I will go here.

If I could hint that I'm going to give you money and you'd get the hint. And God does, the difficulty of him coming out and saying it in a society where one God, that's what the Jews believed, one God. And it would have been difficult for him to say, I also am God.

See, it's just not that easy. So he packaged it in such a way, if you were listening to the Spirit, he who has an ear let him hear what the Spirit says, you'd get it. And the apostles got it. You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. He didn't say you are the Christ, the Son of Joseph, the Son of the living God. My son is human, his son is human.

God's only begotten Son is divine. God of course gives time to get this fixed. In the fiasco of the fig leaf, the fig leaf fiasco, was there time between their eating the fruit and God engaging them? Yeah, because they had time to sow these fig leaves. They had to go out and get the fig leaves and come up with a way. That doesn't work. In fact, there's a color clash now we've got.

You can't wear that leaf. So there was a little space of time there before God shows up. As he says in the book of Revelation, I gave them space to repent. That is something that we need to tell people.

You get space, but today is the day if you harden not your heart. God calls to many, but many do not receive, and some do not continue. Jesus giving the parable of the sower said, and some fell on the stony ground. These are they who believed, but did not continue.

They believed, but they did not continue. Stick that in your doctrine. Go with what the Bible says, not with what men say about the Bible. So we give you the verses as often as we can. We encourage you to bring your Bibles, to take notes, to be like the Bereans who had noble minds, to search the scriptures to see if these things are doctrinal.

No, to see if they are so. Jesus said, you'll know my doctrine, and that's what we want. Well, human choice, powerful, powerful thing we possess in the face of God. We can defy him or we can worship him. Jesus said, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one that kills the prophets, stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood, but you were not willing.

That not powerful? I wanted, you did not. I chose to come to you, you chose to resist me.

Now that wasn't every person, but overall, that was the story. And so human choice is powerful. Psalm 119, verse 155, salvation is far from the wicked, for they do not seek your statutes. When you say I want to learn more about God, I want more scripture, you're saying I want to seek his statutes, his commandments, his laws, whatever God has to say, I want to know.

Not only what he said, but what it means and how it applies, and I want to do it. Well, God has provided the salvation that people ignore, and it's difficult to get them to understand. Salvation is not rigged, it is repeatedly offered.

Make the choice, make the move. Luke chapter 19, verse 10, the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which is lost. So back to the Garden of Eden.

Adam, where are you? God's seeking to save that which was lost. So how can this be possible in view of the fact that there are so many false religions, so many pagans and idols, how is it that none are seeking God?

What is Paul saying? Well, the Corinthian letter, he tells us another part of this, he says the things the Gentiles sacrificed, they sacrificed to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to have fellowship with demons. Yeah, people seek false gods, they seek religion, but are they seeking the true God according to truth? Because behind the false beliefs, there is a God, He is the God of this world, Satan the devil. Now, especially for you young believers, believing your believers, for you young attendees, when you come across all these names of the false idols in the Bible, one thing you should come away with is that Satan has many brands of delusion for you, various forms of idols from antiquity till now.

You don't have to have a statue anymore, you can just make up things about God in your head. That's a brand of idolatry and it comes out of hell, 2 Corinthians 4, but even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the God of this age is blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel and the glory of Christ, who is in the image of God, pardon me, who is the image of God, should shine on them. There's power in mockery, mockery is a useful tool, we have so much sarcasm from God in scripture. Keep listening and not believing, keep on, noodle head, that's mockery. Your religion is vain, you draw near me with your mouth, but your heart is far from me, in vain you worship me, teaching the doctrines of men.

Well, there in 2 Corinthians, what I just read, lest they see the light of the gospel, there's mockery in that. When it comes to the choice that is given that matters most to a human being, it needs to side with God. John 6 29, Jesus answered and said to them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he sent, because there are those that tell you, well, you can't choose God because that's work, that's a work, then you're earning yourself, oh, wait a minute, Jesus just said, this is the work of God that you believe in him whom he has sent. So he says, I'll take that work, the work that you can do is believe God, you want to play with words, fine, have at it. The bottom line is, I have come, are you willing? Man, I love preaching this stuff.

Because I remember when I didn't have this, I remember when I didn't attend the church, and when God saved me, I said, Lord, I'll go to church if you make me the pastor. Of course not. That's so stupid. Like, that's pretty funny, but I'm kind of ashamed I even said it. I'm not really, it makes the point. Anyway, you know, you come up here and I want to remember the things that, that which I first received, I shared with you, I want to remember these points.

And there's a pressure to doing that, and so I look for these little pit stops, and I just had one. So, verse 12, they have all turned aside, they have together become unprofitable, there is none who does good, no not one. Now again, this is humanity without Christ, because when he says none seek God, well he seeks God, none understand God, well he understands, because he's saved now.

But before that Damascan Road experience, he was in this group. He never forgot it, and neither should you. A man turning aside from God in his rejection, and if he continues that way, he becomes irretrievable, unrecoverable. And yet, this is to me very powerful, putting it to myself this way. One outlaw went to heaven that day, the other went to hell that day. You see, it's immediate. Death is the great equalizer, it just flattens everything out.

And the only thing that either is sticking up or hanging down is one's confession or one's rejection. You know, it's more than metaphor, but metaphor nonetheless. The first animal named in the Bible was Leroy.

No, it wasn't. It was another pit stop. The serpent is the first animal that is singled out. You know, God made the birds, he made the cattle, but then he comes to this reptile, it's the first one named.

Well, what's the next one named? Sheep. Sheep are the next one. Sure, God, when he talks about Cain, the elder brother of Abel, he says Cain was a farmer, or he worked the field. But then right after that, he says Abel was a tender of sheep. The primary metaphor in the Bible for God's people is sheep.

Pastor, the word pastor comes from the Latin, it means shepherd. The lesson lies not in what sheep do, but in what sheep lack. Okay, what do I lack before God as one of his sheep? Well, sheep is an animal not known to be smart, not known to be swift, not known to be strong, and not known to be safe. Cannot protect itself.

That's me. Before God, standing before God, I'm not smart, nor am I swift and strong, or safe without him. Sheep have no inclination nor power to seek the shepherd once they stray. When the sheep strays out the flock, he doesn't say, now where was I a minute ago?

How do I get back? He doesn't look back, just keeps going to his own destruction. This is another blow to evolution of the species theory. The theory falls apart here. No sheep would survive without a shepherd. If evolution were true, there'd be no sheep.

They all would have died. Well, it's evolving into further era, but as we move forward, all we like sheep have gone astray. We've followed our own paths. We'll be getting that in Isaiah 53, Lord willing, Wednesday. So the point that we're coming to, that I'm trying to make, is they have all turned aside, which is what sheep do if there's no shepherd. They have together become unprofitable, and there's none who does good, no, not one. And from God's perspective, we are like those sheep. But long as we stay under the care of the shepherd, we are strong, we are swift, we are sensible, and we are safe. And there lies the lesson from the metaphor. They have together become unprofitable. Man in his natural state is depraved and really of little to no use to God whatsoever.

I'll develop that in a minute. There is none who does good, no, not one. Again, without God. Okay, so you fix your neighbor's flat tire. How does God benefit from that? He doesn't have a car.

Okay, you invent a cure for a dreaded disease. How does God benefit from that? He doesn't get sick. God has not benefited from what men do directly. But because of his love, it becomes an issue. Paul writes this to Titus, not by works of righteousness, which we have done.

That doesn't count. But according to his mercy, he saved us through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit. Okay, so now everything is spiritual. Everything I do in the physical has a spiritual value, or I am in deficit. It matters how I treat my neighbor. It matters what I do for society, that I behave myself for the good of others. It matters to God. But it doesn't make God better off directly. So this equation then cancels out any thought that man is okay without God.

He's not. It's not about people. It's about the Creator. And if it's about the Creator, it will be about people.

And if it will be about people, it will be about me. This is the order of the universe, how it should be. And when that falls apart, angels are cast out of heaven and people are cast into the hell that was prepared for the angels cast out of heaven. The Bible tells us hell was not made for people. It was made for the fallen angels.

But God says rather than start a new dump site, we'll just lump you all in together. We're putting it in a language that maybe they'll understand. Verse 13, their throat is an open tomb. With their tongues they have practiced deceit.

The poison of Asp is under their lips. So for Paul to be rattling off these scriptures, he must be giving segments of a sermon he's preached recently. He's got the verses there. These are probably points he was teaching in Corinth.

He said the Romans will benefit from this too. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross Reference Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.

We're currently going through the book of Romans. If you're in need of hearing this message again or want to listen to others like it, head over to CrossReferenceRadio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast too so you'll never miss another edition. Just go to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. On our website you'll be able to learn a little more about the ministry of Cross Reference Radio, so make a note of it, CrossReferenceRadio.com. That's all we have time for today, but thanks so much for listening. Pastor Rick will be back next time in the book of Romans here on Cross Reference Radio.