The Love of God, Part 2

Sodom was destroyed and unredeemed, Samaria unredeemed, Israel worse than both and God forgave her. Why is it that God would so forgive? Because He set His love on Israel and made Israel His own possession. Their mine He said. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. It's easy to understand why a child loves his parents and why parents love their children, the love you have for your spouse, and how you could grow to love a particularly caring friend. But how and why would you love someone who is ungrateful, unruly, and frankly unworthy of your devotion? The truth is, you and I would not love like that, but God would and does. So why does He love the very people who openly reject Him? Find out as John MacArthur helps you understand God's amazing love for you. The love of God, that's the title of John's current study.

And with today's lesson, here's John. To grasp the character of God's love in some manageable ways and to begin to understand it, I have offered to you three propositions. First of all, God's love is unlimited in extent. God's love is unlimited in extent. Secondly, God's love is limited in degree. And thirdly, God's love is ultimately directed at His own glory. Let's talk about this second love, that love which is unique to believers. Now when you try to grasp the uniqueness of this love, you're looking for an illustration to grab. And I want to share one with you this morning, and I'm not going to go beyond this, but it's going to take some time to develop it.

It's worth the time. The best way to illustrate the difference, the different kind, the different quality, the different degree of love that those who are His own experience is to go to the Old Testament and look at Israel because Israel was His own people. Now to see that pattern unfold in the most graphic terms of the whole Old Testament, go to Ezekiel 16. This is the longest chapter in Ezekiel's prophecy. There are 48 chapters. Chapter 16 is the longest. It is the most vivid, it is the most dramatic, and it is the most forceful chapter in Ezekiel and one of the most dramatic in all of Scripture. And what it does is explain to us this unique love that God has for His own.

He loves, so He chooses and He will redeem whom He loves and chooses. It is an incredible chapter. Let me give you some warning. It is very graphic. It is very distressing. It presents the nation Israel in such loathsome and sordid terms that rabbis within Judaism through the years have not permitted this chapter to be read in any public meeting. And you can go all the way back to the Mishnah and Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos and you find there a prohibition against reading this chapter publicly.

Why? Because it focuses devastatingly on the iniquitous character of Israel. Let's start at the beginning. Then the Word of the Lord came to me saying, Son of Man, that's a term for Ezekiel, make known to Jerusalem her abominations and say, Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem, Your origin and Your birth are from the land of the Canaanite. Your father was an Amorite and Your mother a Hittite.

Stop there. At this point in history, Jerusalem is God's city, Jerusalem the beloved. It belongs to the nation Israel. It is to be a place for the worship of the true God. A worship place is there. A temple is there.

But something tragic has happened. He says Jerusalem is full of abominations. He's referring to idolatry, the worship of false gods and idols. And He says to...the Lord says to Ezekiel, You've got to tell Jerusalem that I know about her abominations.

And here's what the Lord wants to say. You're going back to your roots because your origin and your birth were in the land of the Canaanites and your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. Amorite and Hittite are general names for the dwellers of Canaan. They simply scoop up all the pagan idolatrous tribes that were there when Israel arrived. Jerusalem once was in the hands of pagans. And He says, You've gone back to those pagan abominations.

You've gone back to being like it used to be. Later on in the chapter He'll say there's a proverb, like daughter, like mother. You've gone back to the way your mothers behaved, the Amorites and the Hittites. You've filled this city and you've filled this land with pagan idolatry.

And Jerusalem, of course, is a symbol for the whole nation. Notice verse 4. As for your birth, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water for cleansing. You were not rubbed with salt or even wrapped in cloths. No eye looked with pity on you to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you. Rather you were thrown out into the open field for you were abhorred on the day you were born. He's talking about Israel. Now this is the marvelous reality that God decides to set His love on that child, dirty, outcast, left to die in the midst of a pagan world.

He's talking about Israel's time in Egypt. They were scum. They were outcast.

They were waste material. And then in verse 6, when I passed by you and saw you squirming in your blood, I said to you while you were in your blood, live. I said to you while you were in your blood, live.

I came along and I picked you up out of Egypt and I gave you life. Why? Because I determined to love you.

Why? Because there was something lovable? No, you were ugly and bloody and dirty. Nobody wanted you.

There was nothing about you to elicit compassion. But I passed by and saw you squirming and I gave you life. And here He's talking about the early period of growth as the nation Israel comes out of Egypt and comes into the promised land and starts to form. And I made you, verse 7, like numerous plants of the field and you grew up and you became tall and you reached the age for fine ornaments.

Your breasts were formed and your hair had grown, yet you were naked and bare. This looks at Israel. They've sort of become a nation and they're starting to grow and develop, but there's no wealth and civilization is very limited.

It's a pretty wild group, nomadic. Then in verse 8, then I passed by you and saw you and behold, you were at the time for love. What does that mean? Marriage time. Israel had reached maturity and He said, so I spread My skirt over you and covered your nakedness. It wasn't proper anymore to be naked. You weren't a child anymore. You were an adult and you had reached the time of love and you couldn't be naked and so I covered you.

I spread My skirt. That was a custom, by the way, which signified a spousal to a marriage. You can read about it in Ruth, chapter 3, verse 9. I not only picked you up out of the field when you were a bloody, dirty infant, but I carried you until you grew and then when you became mature enough, I deemed it proper to marry you and I swore to you and entered into a covenant with you so that you became Mine, declares the Lord God. This is the marriage of God to Israel. He just determined in His sovereign will to love Israel. That's all there is to it.

Nothing lovable about her. And then He says in verse 9, look at this, and this all describes what the wealthiest king would do for his bride. I bathed you with water, washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil.

It's like picking up a wild woman out of the most uncivilized kind of culture. And I anointed you with oil and then in verse 10, I clothed you with embroidered cloth and I put sandals of porpoise skin on your feet. And I wrapped you with fine linen and covered you with silk and I adorned you with ornaments. I put bracelets on your hands and a necklace around your neck. I also put a ring in your nostril. I know some of you don't like that, but it's biblical.

I don't think it went in the middle with a rope around it. It was on the side. I put earrings in your ears and a beautiful crown on your head. The love here is incredible, isn't it? This is just lavish, absolutely lavish. And you were adorned with gold and silver, verse 13 says, your dress was of fine linen, silk and embroidered cloth. You ate fine flour, honey and oil and so you were exceedingly beautiful and you advanced to royalty.

This is what we would call today a makeover of major proportions. This is what God did when He brought Israel to full bloom. And there came David and the kingdom flourished and it was magnificent and it was powerful and it was revered. And then came Solomon and it was the greatest kingdom in the world. And the queen of Sheba came because of the wonder of it, just to see it all and the beauty and the royalty of it was all because of the goodness of God. And then verse 15, but you trusted in your beauty and played the harlot because of your fame. Yeah, you got widely known and you started having all kinds of opportunities to interface with all kinds of nations and people and you became enamored with your beauty and how great you were. And you started to have relationships with all these others and you poured out your harlotries on every passerby who might be willing, shameless. This wife had been picked up as a baby, nurtured until she was marriageable and then espoused to God and then wed to God and then adorned with royalty. And now all of a sudden she's out in the street and she will commit adultery with any person who passes by. This, of course, has reference to her harlotries, her spiritual harlotries in the worship of idols.

Israel embraced all kinds of idols. Verse 16, you took some of your clothes, made for yourself high places of various colors. In other words, you took your own clothes and turned them into shrines to the false gods and you played the harlot on them, which should never come about nor happen. You also took your beautiful jewels made of My gold and of My silver, which I had given you and you made for yourself male images that you might play the harlot with them. And you know, when they were wealthy and God had given them silver and given them gold, they used it to buy idols, to form idols, to build alliances with pagan nations. Verse 18, you took your embroidered cloth and covered them and offered My oil and My incense before those idols and My bread...notice how many times He says My?

It all was from Him. My bread which I gave you, fine flour, oil and honey with which I fed you, you would offer before them for a soothing aroma. So it happened, declares the Lord God. Moreover, you took your sons and daughters whom you had borne to Me and you sacrificed them to idols to be devoured. In other words, they took their little babies and they put them on a fire to the god Moloch and let the fire burn the little baby to appease the deity.

Were your harlotries so small a matter? Verse 21, you slaughtered My children and offered them up to idols by causing them to pass through the fire. And besides all your abominations and harlotries, you didn't remember the days of your youth when you were naked and bare and squirming in your blood.

You forgot what I had taken you from. And it came about after all your wickedness. Woe, woe to you, declares the Lord God, that you built yourself a shrine and made yourself a high place in every square. You built yourself a high place at the top of every street and made your beauty abominable and you spread your legs to every passerby to multiply your harlotry.

Literally the whole land was completely engulfed in idols. You also played the harlot with the Egyptians, your lustful neighbors, and multiplied your harlotry to make Me angry. Behold, now I've stretched out My hand against you and diminished your rations.

And indeed their days of greatness descended. I delivered you up to the desire of those who hate you, the daughters of the Philistines who are ashamed of your lewd conduct. Even the pagans can't believe how lewd you are. Moreover, you played the harlot with the Assyrians because you were not satisfied. You even played the harlot with them and still were not satisfied. You also multiplied your harlotry with the land of merchants, Chaldea, and even with this you were not satisfied. It's an insatiable lust for spiritual adultery. How languishing is your heart, declares the Lord God, while you do all these things, the actions of a bold-faced harlot.

And then he says something that's just amazing. When you built your shrine at the beginning of every street and made your high place in every square in disdaining money, you were not like a harlot. In other words, you didn't even want money for it. Harlots do it for money.

You didn't even want money. You just wanted the harlotry. You, a delverous wife who took strangers instead of her husband, men give gifts to all harlots, but you give your gifts to all your lovers to bribe them to come to you from every direction for your harlotry. Here the harlot is paying the person seeking harlotry. Thus, verse 34 says, you're different from those women in your harlotries in that no one plays the harlot as you do because you give money and no money is given you, thus you are different.

You see the degree to which they've gone? Therefore, O harlot, hear the word of the Lord. Here comes judgment. Thus says the Lord God, because your lewdness was poured out, your nakedness uncovered through your harlotries with your lovers and all your detestable idols, and because of the blood of your sons which you gave to idols, therefore, behold, I shall gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, even all those whom you loved and all those whom you hated, so I shall gather them against you from every direction and expose your nakedness to them that they may see all your nakedness. Thus I shall judge you like women who commit adultery or shed blood or judge, and I shall bring on you the blood of wrath and jealousy. I shall also give you into the hands of your lovers, and they will tear down your shrines, demolish your high places, strip you of your clothing, take away your jewels, leave you naked and bare. They will incite a crowd against you. They will stone you, cut you to pieces with their swords.

They will burn your houses with fire, execute judgments on you in the sight of many women. I shall stop you from playing the harlot, and you will no longer pay your lovers. I shall calm my fury against you. My jealousy will depart from you. I shall be pacified and angry no more because you have not remembered the days of your youth but have enraged me by all these things. Behold, I in turn will bring your conduct down on your head, declares the Lord God, so that you will not commit this lewdness on top of all your other abominations."

What's that? The Babylonian captivity. That is a direct prophecy of 586 B.C., started actually a few years before that when Israel was destroyed by the Babylonians. They were massacred, they were slaughtered, their cities and towns were plundered and burned. And God says, I'm going to bring this about and you're going to be hauled off into captivity and that is exactly what happened in the Babylonian captivity. Ezekiel is predicting 586 B.C. when Israel was destroyed and the whole nation massacred and the remaining living people carried off into the Babylonian culture to be refined.

Then notice what comes next. Verse 44, everyone who quotes Proverbs will quote this Proverb concerning you saying, like mother, like daughter. What does that mean? Her mother was the Hittite and the Amorite and she's acting like her mother. You are the daughter of your mother, verse 45, who loathes her husband and children. You are the sister of your sisters who loathe their husbands and children. Your mother was a Hittite, your father was an Amorite.

In other words, you're just living out what you were. You've gone back in spite of my love, in spite of my love. I won't take the time to read all of it, but in verse 46 to 59 is an incredible section. He says your older sister in verse 46 is Samaria who's north of you, your younger sister who's south of you is Sodom. You're acting like Samaria and Sodom, Sodom which was consumed once by fire and brimstone and now has come back and been repopulated with paganism. Samaria judged by God and now has come back in paganism. Verse 47, yet you have not merely walked in their ways or done according to their abominations, but as if that were too little, you acted more corruptly in all your conduct than they. You are worse than Samaria, you are worse than Sodom.

You're obviously the daughter of your mother and father, the Amorites and the Hittites. You are pagan and to a degree beyond Sodom and beyond Samaria. Your abominations are worse and you're going to be more humiliated than Samaria and Sodom who are your sisters, for they too were born of the Amorites and the Hittites. In fact, verse 57 says, you have become the reproach of the daughters of Edom and of all who are around her, of the daughters of the Philistines, those surrounding you who despise you. Everybody sees how corrupt you are, even the pagans. Verse 59, thus says the Lord God, I will also do with you as you have done, you who have despised the oath by breaking the covenant. Is it any wonder that the rabbis don't like to have that read?

All that, an unbelievable indictment. Ending in the Babylonian captivity, ending in the pagan world looking at the lewdness of Israel and thinking them to be worse than they were when in fact that is exactly the case. Listen, they were less lovable in the beginning and they were more wretched after God made them His bride than any of the people around. They started out being the least.

They ended up being the worst. And that's why the end of the chapter is so utterly shocking. Verse 60, nevertheless, God doesn't say I will hate you with a holy hatred. I will despise you. He says, nevertheless, I will remember My covenant with you in the days of your youth and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you. Verse 62, thus I will establish My covenant with you and you shall know that I am the Lord. In order, here it comes, in order that you may remember and be ashamed and never open your mouth anymore because of your humiliation when I have what? Forgiven you for all that you have done, the Lord God declares.

Is that overwhelming? I'm going to silence you. I'm going to reduce you to humiliation. How? By forgiving you. By forgiving you. Why didn't He forgive Sodom?

Didn't choose him. Why didn't He forgive Samaria? Never made a covenant with him. You see, God loves whom He chooses to love, determines to make a covenant with those people. That covenant is the everlasting covenant made in eternity past within the Trinity which works its way out in a redeeming purpose on behalf of those chosen people which redemption cannot be gainsaid nor can it be withheld. Sodom was destroyed and unredeemed, Samaria unredeemed, Israel worse than both and God forgave her. Why is it that God would so forgive?

Because He set His love on Israel, listen to this, and made Israel His own possession. They're mine, He said. And His love for them is very different in degree than that compassionate warning love that He has for the whole world. This love is perfect. This love is comprehensive. This love is complete. This love is saving. This love is eternal. It is this love that caused Him to lay down His life for His own. God's incomparable love. John MacArthur's focus again today on Grace to You as he continued his practical study titled simply The Love of God.

Along with teaching each day on the radio, John also serves as chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. John, you made the point today that God maintained His love for Israel no matter how grossly they sinned, no matter how frequently they apostatized. His love is eternal.

But let me ask, what are we supposed to do with that practically? Is there an application somewhere in there for us in terms of how we should express our love in human relationships? I don't think there's any greater way to express love than forgiveness. Essentially, that's the most God-like thing a human being can do. You're never more like God than when you forgive, when you love your enemies, and you, by loving them, provide forgiveness no matter what they've done to you.

Can you imagine how this society would be dramatically changed if people loved enough to forgive anything and everything? This comes down to the parable that our Lord told about the people who owed the king great debts. And you remember he called them in to pay their debts, and the first guy comes and says, you know, I can't pay. I don't have enough to pay. And the king says, okay, I'll forgive.

I'll forgive you. And forgives him an unpayable debt. I mean, it would have been impossible for him to pay. Then he goes out, the guy who was forgiven, and finds somebody who owes him a pittance and puts him in the debtor's jail because he won't pay the pittance that he owes. And the Lord was furious.

And the Lord, in the story, the lictors, you know, the punishers, the guys with the whips and scourges came out and went after that guy. How could you ever accept forgiveness for an unpayable debt and then go beat somebody or imprison somebody who owed you a minor debt? That is a crushing demonstration of how ludicrous it is to receive the forgiveness of God, having sinned against God, blasphemously, continuously against God. But you won't forgive somebody who sinned against you.

Who do you think you are? All relationships break down at the point where there's not forgiveness. All social relationships break down at the point where there's not forgiveness. All marriages break down at the point where there's not forgiveness.

Because we are not perfect, we desperately need forgiveness. I have a booklet, and here's the good news. It's free to anyone who asks. The booklet title is Answering the Hard Questions About Forgiveness. It's a brief booklet, but it's full of really important truth from Scripture. So get a copy today, free to anyone who asks.

That's right, friend. This booklet is our gift to you. All you have to do is call or go to our website and request it. To get your free copy of Answering the Hard Questions About Forgiveness, contact us today.

Our number here, 800-55-GRACE or go to our website, gty.org. This booklet answers questions like, Does forgiveness require forgetting the offense? How should you handle forgiving a repeat offender?

And what's the difference between true repentance and merely apologizing? Again, we'll send Answering the Hard Questions About Forgiveness to anyone who wants a copy. Just call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org. And while you're online, be sure to download John's current study, The Love of God. All six messages are available free of charge. In fact, you can download any of John's sermons. That's 3,500 of them that will help you dig deeper into God's Word. Our website one more time, gty.org.

Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Look for Grace To You Television this Sunday on DIRECTV Channel 378 or check your local listings for Channel and Times. And then join us next week when John looks at the parable of the prodigal son and what it reveals about God's love for his children. Be here, won't you, for another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Monday's Grace To You.