Welcome to Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, Pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. We make a grave mistake when we put our hope and trust in anything other than our sovereign creator. In this message from Isaiah 41, Pastor Rich points to a God who is the Lord of history and yet deeply and intimately involved.
May our hearts be drawn to him as we look into his character today. You're listening to the second part of a sermon that was first preached on March 24, 2013 at Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. And I thought it puzzled me so long. Why would somebody fashion something and create it and then bow down to it and worship it as if that's what they trust? See, we're no different from people who do that.
And it goes on in so many places around. And we might think, well, we're Westerners, we're logical, we're intellectual. Yes, but we still have our own gods. And we can be pagan, too, by creating our own systems of trust and trusting our systems. Just as these pagan nations had to create their objects of trust before they could trust them, we can be guilty of doing exactly the same thing. I want you to consider a few of them this morning.
Here's the first one. Routines. Routines. How many people today, particularly after a tragedy strikes, you know, I just want life to get back to normal.
Why? Because our system of routine, we find in it comfort. We like it to be predictable. We find in it our security. And everything's fine as long as everything's going my way. John Oswald, in his commentary on Isaiah, said this, perhaps the greatest curse of well-being, whether physical, material, emotional, or spiritual, is that it lures us into believing we are self-sufficient. And how true that is. As long as everything's just, you know, I go through my daily routine and everything's comfortable, everything's normal, everything's nice. You know, the idea of trusting God just gets pushed way back into the recesses of our mind.
And we can trust our system of routines and slip into the rut of pagan idolatry. Here's the second one. I'm trying to be kind.
I'm beginning them all with R's this morning. Rules. Rules or laws. What do laws mean? What does a rule mean?
A law means an established, unchanging order. Now that can be very similar to routines, can't it? Because some people like everything to be just exactly so.
Why? Because I'm in control of it and I know exactly what I need to do and it's predictable. And that can happen in one's daily life. It can happen in areas of science and academia, as long as there are established, unchanging order. And this is what has happened with the naturalists.
The naturalists in the scientific arena. Science wonderfully has discovered so many profound things of how the created order works. And they've led themselves to believe that because we know how it works, then we know everything we need to know about it.
Really. Just because we know how it works, does that tell us how it got there and why it's there to begin with? You see, science can't do that. That is beyond the realm of science. Physicist Paul Davies says this. Listen to this.
Listen to his words. There's no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins of the universe or of life. I have never liked the idea of divine tinkering. For me, it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being. Did you hear what he said?
What is he doing? He is ascribing intelligence to mathematical laws. They are the effective cause of what has happened. There's a problem with that. A law cannot be an efficient operative cause.
Can't do it. It is simply a law. It doesn't have choice.
It doesn't have purpose. Let's take the laws of mathematics. And the laws of mathematics can teach me that if I put $1,000 in the bank, and if I put another $1,000 in the bank, I'm going to have what? That's not a hard question, is it? You see, those are the laws of mathematics. And even if you compound onto that all the interest and how that can accrue and build up and all the yield that can come from that, the laws of mathematics can teach me that. Here's the problem.
Before any of that can be true, what has to happen first? You've got to put money in the bank. Of course, today it's not the bank, is it? It's something else, but you're not going to gain anything by putting it in the bank.
You understand. But John Lennox says this. If I ever put any money, if I never put any money into the bank myself and simply leave it to the laws of arithmetic to bring money into being in my bank account, I shall remain permanently bankrupt. Some of you operate your finances that way. You need to learn from this. Your money's not going to grow if there's no money in the bank to begin with.
You see, a law cannot be an efficient operative cause. It is a false god if it is an object of trust. Here's a third one. Riches. Oh, here we go again.
But it's so common, isn't it? And it's so easy. The god of riches says I can afford whatever happens. Isn't that what the rich fool said in Jesus' parable?
He built bigger barns and he went to bed feeling secure. You can take your rest because I can afford whatever happens. And what did God say to him?
You fool. Tonight your soul will be required of you. And then who will all this belong to? And so it is for the one who is not rich towards God.
Riches can be very easily a system of false trust, of false god. I'm reading Mark Twain's autobiography, Samuel Clemens, but he was Mark Twain when he wrote it. And he tells us in his autobiography that his father purchased a plot of land in eastern Tennessee close to 100,000 acres.
From what I gather in reading his autobiography, he bought it for $400. Wouldn't that be great? And this is what he said about it. This is Mark Twain's father saying this. Whatever befalls me, my heirs are secure. I shall not live to see these acres turn to silver and gold, but my children will.
And so, writes Mark Twain. Thus, with the very kindest intentions, he laid the heavy curse of prospective wealth upon our shoulders. He went to his grave in the full belief that he had done us a kindness. It was a woeful mistake, but fortunately he never knew it. Well, what happened?
After his father's death, the family knew that the only thing they could do with the land is sell it. And so they tried to sell it and they tried hard. Mark Twain says this. Whenever things grew dark, it rose and put out its hopeful seller's hand and cheered us up and said, don't be afraid.
Trust in me. Wait. You see what he's doing? He's giving properties of intelligence and personhood to the land that they were going to sell. You see, Mark Twain recognized that and he's confessing that right here. He says, it kept us hoping and longing during 40 years and forsook us at last.
We were always going to be rich next year. It's a system. You can't trust a system.
Here's the next false god, the next system. It's rulers. Human authorities will protect me. Human authorities will fight for me. They will take care of me. You mean human authorities like Nebuchadnezzar?
What happened to him? How about human authorities like Belshazzar, who in one night was out of power just like that without even a fight? You see, God plants rulers and he uproots them. You can't trust the rulers. That's a system.
They're not trustworthy because we see the unshakable Babylonian empire was shaken to its roots by the breathtaking suddenness of Cyrus's victories and it was all a god thing. It is a false system of trust. It's a system.
You can't trust a system. Here's another one, relationships. It's interesting. I have my message prepared long before the weekend comes and there it is. Notes all printed out and I look at USA Today, the paper yesterday, and one of the headlines of USA Today says, relationships are the new religion. There it is. So I feel very affirmed this morning.
Thank you very much. Relationships are the new religion. I have to arduously craft the relationships around me that will keep me secure and happy and satisfied. And it is that system that I am going to trust because I surround myself with people who like me, who tell me I'm somebody and or do what I say.
And that system is my system of security and satisfaction. It is a pagan idolatry and we can be so good at it, can't we? If you look at verses six and seven, it's exactly what he's talking about.
All flesh is grass and all is, oh I'm sorry, that's chapter 40. Verse six and seven, everyone helped his neighbor and said to his neighbor, be of good courage. So the craftsman encouraged the goldsmith, he who smooths with his hammer inspired him, strikes the anvil saying it's ready for the soldering and he fastened it with pegs that it might not totter.
What is that? He's describing pagans busy creating their objects of trust, the complex arduous task of idol making and we can be so good at it too, can't we? The Lord challenges us this morning.
The Lord challenges us because you know what God does later on if you look at verse 21, begin at verse 21 to 24, God says this, hey, let's have a conversation. You and me, come here. You have your systems of trust. Let's have a conversation. You sit down right here, okay? This is God. I'm going to have a talk with you.
Here we go. This is your system of trust. This nice crafted, created thing.
This is your system of trust. Thanks for joining us here at Delight in Grace. You've been listening to Rich Powell, the lead pastor at Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. The Delight in Grace mission is to help you know that God designed you to realize your highest good and your deepest satisfaction in him, the one who is infinitely good. We hope you'll join us again on weekdays at 10 a.m.
