How to Think and Act in Evil Days, Part 2

There's only one question and that's this, how do I escape hell and get to heaven? That's the only question that is crucial for eternity. How do I escape hell and get to heaven? Any religion has the wrong answer, has to be discarded, cannot be tolerated. Well that brings it down to the gospel, doesn't it? There's no salvation in any other than the name of Jesus Christ. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. As one theologian puts it, for a moral revolution to take place, what was condemned has to be celebrated, and what was celebrated has to be condemned. And that's a pretty good summary of what we've seen take place in the world, and especially here in the United States. If you hold to the biblical views of marriage and sexuality, abortion, or simply even gender, you are sure to raise eyebrows, if not face harsh condemnation. So in this world that just keeps getting darker, what does the Lord expect from you? And how should you treat those who are hostile to what you believe? John MacArthur delves into those issues today as he shows you how to think and act in evil days.

That's the title of his current series. Now John will be in the gospel of Matthew, so if you have your Bible, turn there now. You know, it's always sort of a divine appointment for me when I stand up to preach, and I'm always amazed as to how the Lord begins to put things together. Changed what I was going to say this morning. Started thinking about it a little differently last night. Set aside some things that I had planned to do, and just kind of being open to the Lord and waiting for some kind of direction in my own thinking. No voices from heaven have ever spoken to me, but I get these ideas and impulses, and so I thought, well, you know, I think I'm going to do this, and then this morning I woke up and it was kind of confirmed, and then I came here, and all the Scripture that you put up there was about love. It was all about love, and that was exactly what I decided to talk about. And in fact, the very emphasis was on the Second Commandment, love your neighbor as yourself, and that even more specifically was what I wanted to talk about. So kind of like a little bit of affirmation for me. And that means that I am here with the Lord's full knowledge.

He's just sort of surrounded me with the truths that you should be thinking about for us to consider this portion of Scripture. We live in a world where people are lost and they're on their way to judgment. They're going to perish. They're going to perish forever in hell.

That's inevitable. They're going to die, and they don't know when. They're going to die, and they're not in control of their death. In Luke 13 when the question came up about the Galileans who were offering sacrifices in the temple, and Pilate's men came in and sliced and diced them, slaughtered them, and their own blood was mingled with the blood of the sacrifice. What a horrific thing that Pilate's men would slaughter these Jews from Galilee while they were offering their Passover sacrifices. And the question in the minds of the people who were very aware of that was, why did that happen? Were they worse than other sinners? Are calamities God's way of killing the really bad people and leaving the better people and the good people? And Jesus picked up on that and said, well, what about the tower in Siloam that fell over and crushed 18 people?

In the first case, you have people obeying God, doing what they were prescribed to do. In the second, you have innocent bystanders just standing there in some scaffolding, maybe for the building of the Roman aqueduct in that area, collapsed on them and killed them. They were just innocent bystanders.

And the question came up, are they worse than anybody else? Do the people who die in the tsunami die because that's a divine judgment and the people who float to some high place and survive are better people? Do calamities kill just the bad people? And we answered that question, no, the message to give. It was the same message that we give in every occasion like that, whether it's a natural disaster, or whether it's an act of war, or whatever it is. It might be an incidental death like we saw just the other day when seven of our Marines died in an explosion. Were they the worst of the people who were on that base? Is that why they died?

And the answer is no. The answer is everybody deserves to die. We deserve to die after we've taken our first breath because in sin we were conceived, we were born sinners.

God would have a right to take our lives. The soul that sins shall die, the wages of sin is death. But that is not how to view calamity. Calamity happens to relatively good people and bad people.

It happens to believers and unbelievers alike. The message of calamity, the message of disasters in the world, the message is simple. Everybody's going to die. You're not in control of when you're going to die. You don't know when that is going to happen.

It could happen in a very unexpected way very soon. You had better be ready, or you will perish. That's what Jesus is saying.

And then it was followed up, remember, by the parable of the fig tree which basically said the Lord is extending time, let it alone for a year, to see if it will bear fruit before you chop it down. So here we are in a world of people who are dying and they're all headed to eternal judgment and hell. They're going to perish and they're all living on borrowed time.

All of them could die in any moment and God would be just in taking their lives because the wages of sin is death. He lets them live. He extends grace to them. He gives them time to repent.

The patience of God, Romans 2 says, is intended to lead them to repentance. We have a responsibility then, living in a world of dying people on borrowed time, to communicate the gospel to them. That's why we're here.

That's what we want you to do for the rest of your life, whatever profession you follow. Wherever you end up on this planet, you're going to be there for this sole purpose. And that is because you alone have the answers that every eternal soul needs regarding their eternal destiny. You know the truth. You know the gospel. Only Christians know it. False religions don't know it. And that, by the way, is the question religion must ask and answer. There's only one question and that's this. How do I escape hell and get to heaven? That's the only question that is crucial for eternity. How do I escape hell and get to heaven?

Any religion has the wrong answer, has to be discarded, cannot be tolerated. Well, that brings it down to the gospel, doesn't it? There's no salvation in any other than the name of Jesus Christ. I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No man comes to the Father but by Me. We know that. That's the message we know, we believe, and we must proclaim to a world of people living on borrowed time, all of whom will die, and most of them in an unexpected way. Now, I ended up talking a little bit about the fact that the world in which we live is not only dying, but it is increasingly hostile to Christianity.

Probably you've been following in the news a pastor who was arrested, a Christian pastor, and held a prisoner in the Middle East, and they don't want to release him. We know about Christians being persecuted. And you could say the enemy is getting more powerful, and more powerful, and more powerful all the time, the enemy that could be labeled anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Scripture, anti-salvation, pro-Satanic system, growing at a massive, massive speed.

It's a frightening future. And, of course, along the way, not only does it have its own worlds to conquer, but it wants to silence Christianity. Obviously Satan sets everything against the Christian message, and so we think in the future Christians, outspoken Christians, are going to be persecuted.

We talked about that last time. First, there will be a rejection of the Bible as a standard. That's happened in our country. Then morality will be turned on its head, and everybody will advocate immorality, fornication, adultery is fine. Morality is completely turned on its head. Then it calls for tolerance for that, and then it turns to intolerance for the people who aren't tolerant, and then that turns to persecution.

And that's the flow. It's very likely that the world in which you live a few years after you're out of school is going to be a world in which Christians will be persecuted. They will be persecuted. And there's a great danger in this. And the great danger in this is that all of a sudden the mission field, this world of dying people caught up in false religious systems, all living on borrowed time, about to perish, becomes the enemy. That they become the enemy rather than the mission field.

That's the danger. That as the hostility ramps up toward Christianity, toward Christians, and it could come from your family. Jesus said He came to bring a sword inside a family.

It could come from your environment, that is to say your workplace, or wherever it is that you are, your associations. It could come and it will come from your governments, and it will also come from massive forces, anti-God false religious forces. So the assumption could be that there's going to be an amping up of persecution and hostility and intolerance of the Christian message and the Christian gospel. And that poses the danger that all of a sudden we start seeing these people as our enemy, and we get caught up in this sort of defense of Christianity as if it were some entity to be protected, circle the wagons kind of mentality. That would be completely opposite to what we're called to do, which is to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature because it's the only hope they have for eternal salvation.

So we can't turn our enemy, no matter how volatile and vicious the enemy is, we can't turn the enemy into an object of hatred. Now with that in mind, I want you to turn to Matthew chapter 5 because here is the companion. This is the underlying attitude that puts us in a position to do evangelistic work, which we're called to do, around the world no matter how the world treats us. Matthew 5 is in the Sermon on the Mount. The Lord gave that sermon to the leaders of Israel in particular to dismantle their false religious system and expose them to how God thought. And there are a series of things that are said here which our Lord directs at the Jews, and He does it in quite an interesting way, starting in verse 21, He says, you have heard, and then verse 27, you have heard, and then in verse 31, it was said, and then in verse 33, again you have heard, and then in verse 38, you have heard, and then in verse 43, you have heard.

Now what He's talking about is their theology that had been taught to them by the rabbis. You have heard, you have heard, you have heard, you have heard. You've heard such and such about murder. You've heard such and such about sexual immorality.

You've heard such and such about divorce. You've heard this about oaths and vows. You've heard this about retaliation, eye for an eye, tooth for tooth.

You've heard this about how you deal with your enemies. This is your theology. This is the rabbinic extant theology that gripped the populace of Israel at the time of our Lord. In contrast to that, He says in verse 22, but I say, verse 28, but I say, verse 32, but I say, verse 34, but I say, verse 39, but I say, verse 44, but I say. I'm giving you a new theology here. We're overturning your conventional thinking. You have heard, but I say. You have heard, but I say. Now let's just go to the final one of these comparisons down in verse 43.

Let me just read it to you and then we'll talk about it. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven for He causes His Son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?

Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the pagans do the same? Therefore you're to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Now Jesus gets to the end of this discussion comparing traditional apostate Judaism, the morality of traditional apostate Judaism with the heart of God. And He lands on the second great commandment. The first great commandment, according to Matthew chapter 22, is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And the second, like unto it, is to do what? Love your neighbor as yourself.

When you think about that, that is putting that attitude into a very high category of responsibility. I mean, we all understand love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And the second, right behind it, love your neighbor as yourself. In fact, in Romans 13, Paul essentially says love is the fulfilling of the whole law. The first half of the Ten Commandments are about God. If you love God, you won't break those. The second half of the Ten Commandments are about man.

If you love man, you won't break those. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the whole law. You can say to someone, look, forget the Ten Commandments, love the Lord your God with all your being and all your powers and love your neighbor as yourself and that's all you need. I don't have a sign in the kitchen that says, one, don't swear at your wife. Two, don't hit her with anything. Three, answer her when she talks to you. Four, don't be rude.

Why do I need that? I just have one law in my heart that says love your wife. Now I don't need rules because love controls that relationship.

And that's exactly what you have here. And we are commanded in this second commandment, the second most important commandment. First one, love God. Second one, love neighbors...neighbors.

And neighbors distances the reality from family, beyond the people that you normally love in your intimate circle. Now as we look at this text, I just want to show you three things, okay? Number one is the tradition of the Jews and then the teaching of the Old Testament and then the final truth from our Lord, the tradition of the Jews. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. By the way, that command, love your neighbor, appears originally in Leviticus 19. Leviticus 19, 17 and 18, it's verbatim, love your neighbor.

That's where it comes from, the Mosaic Scripture. You have heard that it was said, that's the familiar phrase that introduces the teaching of the rabbis that developed into their traditional morality and was passed down as the acceptable standard. Their tradition then was very simple, love your neighbor. And they added, hate your enemy. Love your neighbor, hate your enemy.

Now they conveniently omitted something. They omitted love your neighbor as yourself. So they diminished the requirement of that love, love your neighbor. But of course, you don't want to love your neighbor like you love yourself because you're far more important than your neighbor. You deserve more love than your neighbor. That would define the culture in which you're living right today, the self-centered, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandizing, self-esteem mentality. But the Old Testament says, love your neighbor as yourself.

What does it mean? It's not a command to love yourself. Please, I've heard people preach on that, you're to love yourself. No you're not. You're not commanded to love yourself.

You already do that. That's built into your fallenness. That's part of your depravity, is an inordinate love for yourself.

You need to be cured of that. No, I mean, I'm not talking about self-preservation and I'm not talking about failing to comb your hair. I'm not talking about failing to feed yourself. What I am talking about is that it is part of being human to care for yourself.

It is part of being sinful to overdo that preoccupation with yourself. We love ourselves in an unfeigned, fervent, habitual way. We love ourselves. We meet our needs. We meet our wants. We attend to our interests. We fulfill our desires, our hopes, and our ambitions, occupy us. We are more interested in what we say in a conversation than what somebody else is saying.

That's why it's so hard to be a good listener. We do everything we possibly can to secure our own happiness, our own well-being, our own satisfaction, to make ourselves welcome and comfortable, and to fulfill our interests, to seek our own pleasure and fulfillment. And we are really good at forgiving ourselves for all our failures and all our weaknesses. Well, that's exactly how you should love your neighbor. That's exactly how you should love your neighbor. Well, they left that part out because they weren't really prepared to take the command that far. But anyway, they did say, you're to love your neighbor.

And oh, by the way, they not only admitted the part, they added something. And by the way, hate your enemy...hate your enemy. Your enemy then is not your neighbor. They have just qualified neighbor as non-enemy, okay? Narrowly defining neighbor. It would be a Jew, of course, for them because they resented the Gentiles. But not every Jew because tax collectors were not acceptable to them and neither was the common rabble in John 7, 49, the leaders of Israel declared the common people were cursed. So they had narrowed down neighbor to exclude enemies and to even exclude people they thought were lower than themselves, sociologically or economically. They had a very narrow definition of neighbor. They would have done well to go back to Leviticus 19 and verse 34 and read, "'The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you and you shall love him as yourself.'" Stranger, somebody you never met. Or they might have read Exodus 12, 49, "'There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you.'" You're loving your neighbor really has no limits.

It can be a total stranger. In the Qumran community, the Essenes were a very sort of monastic cult within Judaism. They had some very interesting statements.

Here are a few of them. They mirrored the attitude of the Jews in the time of our Lord on this issue. Quote, "'Love all that God has chosen and hate all that He has rejected.'" Here's another one. "'Love all the sons of light, each according to His lot in God's community, and hate all the sons of darkness.'"

Here's another one. "'The Levites curse all the sons of Belial.'" In other words, anybody who's not in our group is a cursed son of Belial.

So in the tradition that had developed, the command to love your neighbor as yourself became a license to hate because they defined neighbor more narrowly and narrowly and narrowly until it excluded anybody outside their group and certainly excluded enemies. Here's a maxim of the Pharisees. Quote, "'If a Jew sees a Gentile fallen into the sea, let him by no means lift him out of there, for it is written, Thou shalt not rise up against the blood of thy neighbor, but this man is not thy neighbor.'" End quote.

Let him drown. I don't think Pharisees would have made good lifeguards or firemen or first responders or...it's a small wonder that the Romans charged...this is true...small wonder that the Romans charged the Jews with hatred of the human race. Hatred of the human race? What an attitude. So here is...this is the existing theology of Israel. Hate your enemies.

An enemy is anybody who's not a neighbor and a neighbor has been so narrowly defined that it's this small little group of people that would be considered your friends and relatives. That's the tradition. Father, we thank You this morning for the...just the joy and the richness of being together and thank You for all these blessed and privileged young people who are in a very unique sense enjoying Your loving kindness by being here at the Master's College. We know that there are many, many tens of thousands who would wish to have this experience. But this is Your goodness to these young people and to all of us who are here. What a wonder, what a kindness.

Help them to make the most of it and prepare them to go into a dying world and do all they can to love those people the way You love Your enemies, which we once were. And You loved us into Your kingdom. May You use us to love others into that kingdom as well. We thank You in Christ's name.

Amen. Now, John made it clear today that Christian love should control our relationships and extend to everyone around us—friends, enemies, everyone. And in fact, that principle has led many of us to support all sorts of charitable organizations, ones that focus on giving food and clothing and shelter to people in need.

So what about that, John? Does meeting those kinds of practical needs qualify as showing Christian love to our neighbors? Well, Jesus even said, �Take no thought for what you shall eat or drink or what you shall wear, but seek first the kingdom, and all these things shall be added.� I think that's a gospel mandate.

It's fine to care for poor people, and we should do that. And Jesus did that in His ministry, and we're called to do that in both the Old and the New Testament. But everything is simply an opening or an entree to gospel ministry.

We cannot be satisfied with just charity. I mean, if people are going to go to hell, it doesn't matter whether they go to hell well-clothed or well-fed. It only matters that they go to hell. And I think it's easy to feel somewhat righteous about doing what is easy, like giving money to a poor person or giving something physical to them. It's much more challenging to confront people with their lostness, their sinfulness, the threat and reality of divine judgment and eternal hell, and come to them with the saving gospel of Jesus Christ. Because while at the front end, of course, giving them food, giving them clothing, that is an act of love which they will receive. Giving them the gospel is very likely the greater act of love which they will reject.

And our Lord said that to the disciples. You know, you're going to go and preach, and what are they going to do? They're going to persecute you. They're going to put you in jail. They're going to arrest you. They're going to kill you and think they do God a service.

So it's easy to do the easy things, and we need to do those things. Those are right things to do. The hard thing to do is be faithful to the proclamation of the gospel on a one-to-one basis. But that is the most loving thing that a Christian can do, to love someone enough to warn them about the inevitability of eternal judgment, eternal punishment in hell, and to bring them the saving message of Christ.

Thank you, Jon. And friend, a great tool for equipping yourself to proclaim the saving message of Christ's love is John MacArthur's classic book called The Gospel According to Jesus. It can really fine-tune your understanding of what it means to submit to Christ and follow him. Order your copy today. This hardcover book is available for $15 and shipping is free. To order The Gospel According to Jesus, call us toll-free at 800-55-GRACE or visit our website, GTY.org. Let me also recommend John's book called The Gospel According to God.

It shows you how the Old Testament prophesied the work of salvation that Christ fulfilled in the New Testament. Again, to order either book, The Gospel According to Jesus and The Gospel According to God, you can do that when you call us at 800-55-GRACE, or you can shop online at GTY.org. And while you're online, take advantage of all the free Bible study tools you'll find at our website. We have thousands of free resources available on issues like growing in faith, or God's design for the family, the life of Christ, and other vital topics. You can read blog articles, you can download any of John's more than 3,500 sermons, and much more. And again, all of those resources are free at GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur and the staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Keep in mind you can watch Grace to You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, or check your local listings, and be here tomorrow for another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.