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Who Can Be Right With God? Part 2 B

Grace To You / John MacArthur
The Truth Network Radio
January 9, 2025 3:00 am

Who Can Be Right With God? Part 2 B

Grace To You / John MacArthur

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January 9, 2025 3:00 am

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Jesus, God in human flesh, says that in one moment an extreme sinner can be pronounced instantly righteous without any works, without any merit, without any worthiness, without any law keeping, without any moral achievement, religious achievement, spiritual accomplishment or ritual. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. You've probably heard it said that all religions are the same. You just believe in a higher power, try to be a good person, and you'll get to heaven.

Well, you may know that's not true. That's not the gospel. But if someone asked you exactly what is the gospel, what sets Christianity apart from other religions, would you know what to say? John MacArthur will help you with that today as he continues his study, Who Can Be Right with God? But before today's lesson, John, you have a few thoughts for some people who share our passion for the unvarnished Word of God and who did something extraordinary to help keep the teaching of God's Word available on radio stations like this in the coming year. Yeah, and what we mean by that is when we came back a few days ago to Grace to You and saw the mountain of mail and began to pore over it and read the letters and open the envelopes, I can say this. The outpouring of support for this ministry was beyond generous.

It was thrilling. We know it was sacrificial. And obviously, year-end giving is a significant portion of our annual budget, and it enables us to do what we do through radio, books, CDs, the internet, and television. And all of those ministries are a reflection of people's generosity to us.

It's really simple. We teach the Bible, and we have about 60 to 70 employees who enable us to produce the radio, the television, the books, and all the other resources here. It's really a small core of people who are a team that are committed to the love of the truth and to love one another. And together, we're able to spread the Word of God amazingly across the face of the entire earth in multiple languages and multiple formats. And the reason we're able to do that is because of the amazing commitment of support that we get from folks like you.

What it says to us is you love God's Word. You believe in its power to transform lives. You trust us to use your gifts with integrity, and you're depending on us for continued spiritual instruction. So we receive that message, and we are so profoundly grateful. Thanks for caring about the spiritual needs of your community as well and helping us launch into this new year on a firm footing.

So it's our joy to put your investments to work. And on behalf of all the people who will be reached this year, thank you from the bottom of our heart. Yes, friend, thank you for all you've done to help bring biblical truth to God's people, including through this daily radio broadcast. And with that, to continue his series called Who Can Be Right with God, here again is John MacArthur. Let's open the Word of God to the 18th chapter of Luke's Gospel, Luke chapter 18, and we are looking at a beloved and familiar parable which our Lord taught, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. This was certainly a jolting, stunning idea conveyed by the Lord Jesus in this story. When He came to the punch line and said the tax collector went down to His house justified and not the Pharisee, He put Himself 180 degrees away from the prevailing Jewish theology of salvation.

And for that matter, the theology of all world religion. Jesus was saying, it is not the man who is good who is justified, but the man who knows he is wicked that is justified. That poses the question then of who gets into the Kingdom and how do they get in? The conventional answer is not what our Lord says. They couldn't be more different.

They are polar opposites. The Pharisee is the most religious, the most respectable, the most honored, revered man. And the tax collector is the most hated, the most despised, the one who would be treated with the utmost contempt. One the Pharisee is a self-confessed righteous man. The other the tax collector is a self-confessed unrighteous man. Now the story changes and we get to the serious realities that our Lord wants us to understand in verse 13 when we meet the second character in the story. But the tax gatherer standing some distance away was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast saying, God, be merciful to me, the sinner.

There is a very different approach, very different. First of all, his location, verse 13, standing some distance away. He is Makarothon, he is way off on the fringe on the outer edge.

Why? Because he knows he doesn't deserve to be in the presence of God or even the presence of those who are righteous. But secondly, it's revealed also in his posture. Please notice, he was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven. He is overwhelmed with guilt. He is overwhelmed with shame and it shows up in his posture. Thirdly, so does his behavior.

His behavior is frankly quite unique. It says he was beating his breast, or beating his chest. It is interesting to study history and to find that this gesture common in the past and common in the present is rarely done by men...rarely done by men. It is a female gesture. Men are permitted to show this kind of profound anguish.

Men are not, I guess it's not manly. One writer says, after twenty years of observation, I have found only one occasion in which Middle Eastern men are accustomed to beat on their chest. This is at the Asura ritual of Shiite Islam. This ritual is a reenactment of the murder of Hussein, the son of Ali, the son of Mohammed.

And when they reenact the murder scene, they do so in a dramatic way. The men lacerate their shaved heads with knives and razors in a demonstration of intense anguish, he writes, as they recollect this event. At this ritual, the men beat on their chests.

This writer says women customarily beat on their chests at funerals, but men do not. For men it is a gesture of extreme sorrow and anguish, almost never used. It is little wonder that in all of biblical literature we find this particular gesture mentioned only in the account of this parable and at the cross. And then he closes his paragraph by saying, it takes something of the magnitude of Golgotha to evoke this gesture from Middle Eastern men. So here is a man doing a gesture that demonstrates extreme anguish. And why his chest?

Why not pound somewhere else on the body? An old Jewish commentary says, and I quote, Why do the righteous beat on their heart as though to say all is there? The righteous beat their heart because the heart is the source of all evil longing. This is a recognition of what our Lord taught, that it's out of the heart that all evil comes. You remember the words of our Lord Jesus, Mark 7.21 and Matthew 15, 19 parallel passages. Let me read you Matthew 15, 19 and 20.

Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man. He understands, this is a man who understands his own sinfulness. His location demonstrates it. His posture demonstrates it.

His behavior demonstrates it. He knows what's in his heart. He knows that what Jeremiah said is true, that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. He is anguished over his guilt. He is broken over his shame, his unworthiness. He is crushed and humbled and it comes out in everything about him. And even in his words, he says, God and he is truly talking to God.

That's just not doing what is expected. He is talking to God. Be merciful to me, the sinner. Those are the words of a true penitent. Start with the sinner, not a sinner. To hamartolo, definite article, the sinner, like Paul in 1 Timothy 1.15, for I am the chief of sinners. This is an unequivocal confession of his extreme and supreme sinfulness and there's no comparing him with others. He is the worst sinner and that is a legitimate response because of all the sinners in the world. He knows himself to be the worst because no sinner knows so much about himself as the individual himself. He knows about other sinners but he knows his own heart better than he knows anybody else. Who knows the spirit of a man but the spirit of the man that is in him, says the Scripture. He is the worst sinner in the world as far as his personal knowledge is concerned.

Now at this point, I just want to interject a very critical understanding. The Pharisee and the tax collector, they agreed on a lot of things. They both understood the Old Testament to be the revelation of God. They were committed to Judaism. They believed in the God of the Old Testament, the Creator God of the Old Testament, the God who drowned the world in the days of Noah. They believed in the God who revealed His Law on Mount Sinai to Moses. They believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and then the God of Moses and they believed in the God of David. And they believed in the God of the prophets. They believed in the God of the Psalmist. They believed in the God of the Old Testament. They believed in the God that had revealed Himself to Moses as gracious, merciful, compassionate, tender-hearted. They believed in the God who was merciful, the God who was righteous and holy. They believed in the Scripture. They believed in the religious system that had been revealed in the Old Testament, the system of sacrifice and priesthood. So we could say that they believed. See they believed the same thing, the same God, the same authoritative Scripture.

And I'll tell you something else. The Pharisee had faith in God. He believed in God. He believed in the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He believed in the God who was the Savior God.

He believed in the sacrificial system. He believed in atonement for sin. He believed in God's forgiveness. You say, you mean He really did believe in God's forgiveness?

Sure. The Pharisee didn't believe that he never committed any sin ever in his entire life. He just believed that he had earned the right to be forgiven.

The Pharisee just thought he had earned forgiveness. He thought for sure his sins were covered by the atoning sacrifices. For sure he was going to receive the full forgiveness of God. He was a part of the Kingdom of God. So he believed in the true God. He believed in the Scripture. He believed in the sacrifice, the atonement that God was gracious to him and God was kind to him and God would forgive him because he earned it. It's the way religious people think. It isn't that the world is full of people who don't think they've ever done anything wrong, it's just that they think they have not done as much wrong as they have done right. And so they've tipped the scales in their favor and God is going to forgive the stuff that they've done because they've earned it.

So what is the difference then between these two? The difference is as simple as this, repentance. Faith is a given...faith is a given.

And ladies and gentlemen, I'm telling you, this is the heart and soul of where gospel ministry has to go. You find a lot of people who believe things that are biblical, believe in the Jesus of the New Testament, believe in the New Testament to one degree or another, believe in the cross, believe in the resurrection. The element of faith so often in the Bible, so often in the gospels, the element of faith is sort of a given that they believe in God and the God who's revealed in Scripture, etc., etc. The issue comes down to whether or not they will repent of sin in a true and genuine act of penitence. The defining distinction here is that the first man has nothing for which to what? He's like the rich young ruler who says, I've kept everything since my youth, I can't find anything I need to confess or repent of.

That is the issue. There is no possibility of salvation apart from this kind of repentance because this is the defining element. Now notice what he says, be merciful to me. The Greek is a very important phrase, hilasthiti moi...hilasthiti moi...hilasthiti is not to show mercy.

That's a different word. If you go down to verse 38, Jesus meets a blind man in verse 38 of this chapter and the blind man calls out and says, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. That is a true translation of eleisonme, different word from the verb eleo which means to show mercy. That's exactly what that means, to show mercy. Hilasthiti moi comes from the Greek verb hilaskomai which means to propitiate, to appease, to make propitiation, to make satisfaction.

And every word attached to that verb root, hilas, whether it's hilasmos, hilasterios, hileos, they all have to do with the same idea. This is what He said, God be propitious to Me. God be appeased toward Me.

What is He saying? He's saying this, God, please apply the atonement to Me. He understood the theology of atonement. He understood that the wages of sin is death, the soul that sins it shall die. He understood all the way back to the wonderful story of Abraham and Isaac that God would provide a sacrifice that would satisfy Himself and would satisfy His justice, a substitute.

He understood that the millions of animals that had been offered throughout all of Jewish history were symbolic of the fact that God could be appeased by a sacrifice, though none of those sacrifices ever gave the final appeasement to God, otherwise they would have ceased. He's talking atonement language here. This is not a general plea for mercy. And this needs to be expressed clearly because sometimes when we present the gospel, all we want to do is say God loves you and has this wonderful purpose for your life and God wants you to have the joy and happiness and all of this and if you just ask Him, He'll be merciful to you. That's not what He's saying. He is saying, I am a wretched sinner, I am unworthy to stand near you, I am unworthy to look up toward you, I am in profound agony and anguish over My wretchedness, I need an atonement for My sins to be applied to Me.

That's what He's saying. This is about sin and atonement. This verb is only used two times in the New Testament, one here and the second use in Hebrews 2 17 where it says concerning Jesus Christ that He is a faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God to make propitiation for the sins of His people, to make satisfaction, to satisfy the wrath of God, to satisfy the justice and holiness and vengeance of God and that's what this man is crying for. O God, please apply the atonement to me. Make atonement for me that very day a sacrifice had been made on that altar.

He pleads that it would apply to Him. He understood the theology of substitution, imputation and atonement. They knew that there would come one day a son of David, a root out of Jesse, Isaiah 53, and He would bear our iniquities and He would die in our place. That's what Isaiah 53 says, He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities and by His sacrifice we have peace with God. Please, O God, please make the atonement apply to me. May Your anger with me be over. That's the plea of a penitent sinner. O God, cease being justifiably, righteously angry with me. May Your justice be satisfied through atonement.

One historian says this, one can almost smell the pungent incense, hear the loud clash of ceremonial symbols, see the great cloud of dense smoke rising from the burnt offering and the tax collector is there, stands afar off anxious not to be seen, sensing his unworthiness to stand with the participants. In brokenness he longs to be a part of it all. He yearns that he might stand with the righteous. In deep remorse he pounds his chest and cries out in repentance and hope, O God, let it be for me, make an atonement for me a sinner.

There in the temple, this humble man aware of his own sin and unworthiness with no merit of his own to commend him longs that the great dramatic atonement sacrifice might be applied to him. Now you might think that these two people weren't that far apart theologically. They both believed in the same God, the same authoritative document, the Old Testament, the same Judaistic religion. They both understood the sacrificial system. They both believed in atonement. There's just one fine difference and it's what divides everybody on the planet. It is that one of them thought he could please God on his own, the other one knew he couldn't.

That's what separates everybody, absolutely everybody. And we move from the comprehensive audience and the contrasting analogy to the confounding answer, stunning. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other. Judikaiomenos, justified, perfect passive participle having been justified, done with permanent results, permanently right with God, stunning, absolutely shattering their theological sensibilities.

This would draw gasps from the legalists. Think of it, Jesus, God in human flesh, the Holy One, the perfect sinless one says that in one moment an extreme sinner can be pronounced instantly righteous without any works, without any merit, without any worthiness, without any law keeping, without any moral achievement, religious achievement, spiritual accomplishment or ritual. No time lapse, no penance, no works, no ceremony, no sacrament, no meritorious activity. Whatsoever, nothing to do, instant declaration of justification, on the spot, permanent.

Wow! How can it be? Because the only righteousness that God will accept is perfect righteousness and since you can't earn it, He gives it as a gift to the penitent who put their trust in Him. That's the gospel. Here is the brokenhearted, self-confessed sinner, humble, unworthy, trusting only in God's atonement, pleading that God would apply it to him who is instantaneously made perfect before God, as perfect as God for the righteousness of God is credited to him. So the listening crowd who heard Jesus say this and anybody who reads it is forced to reassess how a person enters the Kingdom of God. It's not by human morality, goodness or religion, but by repentance and conviction of sin and a plea for atoning sacrifice. The only sacrifice that pleases God is the sacrifice of Christ, right? Therefore it wasn't the sacrifice of the animal that would be applied to this man's account, it would be the sacrifice of Christ pictured in the sacrifice of the animal. There is no righteousness apart from the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. God is satisfied only with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ cause it was God who made him who knew no sin to be sin for us. This is the only place in the teaching of Jesus where you have this explicit instruction.

It is here that the foundations for the teaching of Paul are found. Christ becomes that sacrifice. The Lord ends this amazing story with what I'll call the central axiom. The audience, the analogy, the answer, the central axiom in verse 14, this is a truism, a proverb, for everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, but he who humbles himself shall be exalted. But here is a synonym for salvation, a synonym for righteousness.

It's used in an Old Testament sense. In the Old Testament only God is truly exalted and only God can exalt men. Men can't exalt themselves successfully to His level. So this refers to spiritual salvation, reconciliation, righteousness, justification, being in the Kingdom.

All efforts to do that on your own are going to leave you humiliated. Anyone who exalts himself, that is tries to save himself or make himself righteous, shall be humbled in the severest sense of the word, crushed in eternal loss and punishment. The path of self-exaltation ends up in eternal judgment. God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble.

On the other hand, all who humble themselves, confessing they cannot do anything to save themselves will be lifted high into eternal glory. The damned think they're good. The saved know they're wicked. The damned believe the Kingdom of God is for those worthy of it. The saved know the Kingdom of God is for those who know they're unworthy of it. The damned believe eternal life is earned. The saved know it's a gift. The damned seek God's commendation. The saved seek His forgiveness.

You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, as he helps answer the critical question, who can be right with God? Now friend, let me remind you that if broadcasts like today are helping you better understand scripture and the implications it has for your life, we'd love to hear from you. Your letters always encourage us. So to share your story, get in touch today. Mail your letter to Grace to You, PO Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. You can also email your story to letters at gty.org.

That's our email address. One more time, letters at gty.org. And be sure to visit gty.org. Take advantage of the thousands of free resources we offer on our website. Check out the timely articles on the Grace to You blog and come back often.

The blog has new posts every week. You can also watch video from John's television and conference appearances. You can read daily devotionals written by John and you can access John's entire sermon archive. That's more than 3,600 sermons, including John's current series, Who Can Be Right With God?

All free to download in MP3 and transcript format. Our website again, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson with a question for you. How many ways can you miss out on heaven? John has four that you need to consider. So be here tomorrow to learn what they are, how to avoid them, and how you can help others avoid them as well. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
Whisper: medium.en / 2025-01-09 05:57:59 / 2025-01-09 06:08:18 / 10

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