A Right View of False Religion #2

Welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. It is our joy to continue our commitment to teaching God's people God's Word. Today Don is continuing with the second part of a message we started last time.

So let's get right to it. Open your Bible as we join Don now in The Truth Pulpit. Now secondly, a second principle for you to have in mind is that false religion is sinful. False religion is sinful. It is not a matter of moral neutrality. It is not something that is just an innocent mistake. It is sinful. And in a pluralistic society like ours, this is not a popular view to maintain. This is not something that is permitted to be said in polite company. You know, you have your truth, I have my truth, we can all just get along.

No, that's not the case. Our duty is to honor God. And when I say our duty, what I mean by that is that we in the true church of Christ, we're not at freedom to be accommodating to false religion and to act as though it doesn't matter.

Because our duty within the church is to honor God, to honor his truth, to honor our Lord above all things, and not to let fear of man or fear of family interfere with our duty to honor God and to speak the truth. Now, God revealed his opinion of false religion in the very first commandment of the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20, when he said, you shall have no other gods before me. Now, I say things like this from time to time, and just in pronouncing that commandment, I feel a weight of sobriety and seriousness and the sober nature of the things that we're talking about. The God of truth, the God of creation, the ruler of the universe has declared, I am the one and only true God and you, it's an individual you, meaning there's personal responsibility for this, you shall have no other gods before me.

Now, if you missed our series on the Ten Commandment, you can find those online and find messages that I preached on the first commandment. When God says you shall have no other gods before me, it means you shall not bring them before my face, in my presence, in my sight. I should not look on you and see you accommodating or worshiping or following any God but me is the idea. God is a jealous God.

He does not tolerate rivals in any manner, shape, or form. And so, beloved, it's not simply that God requires men to have him first among other gods, it means that no other gods are tolerable to him at all. And so to propose, to teach a God other than the triune God of the Bible, to teach a system of polytheism of multiple gods, to teach that there is no God and that everything just emanated from an impersonal big bang and to follow a theory of evolution that is a denial of the creator God and the exercise of his providence, all of that the exercise of his providence, all of that is a violation of the first commandment. And to break a commandment is to commit a sin.

And to commit a sin is to bring eternal guilt onto your head. When men and women teach, proclaim, and follow false gods, among many other things, I'm really oversimplifying the issues here in this point, but they are violating the first commandment. They are breaking the first and foremost fundamental commandment of Scripture. They are violating what Jesus said is the greatest commandment, to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And if someone is not doing that, they are a sinner of the worst stripe, no matter how outwardly moral and pleasant and accommodating they may seem to men. We have to view this from God's perspective, not from ours.

We can't measure this by our broken yardsticks of what the standard of truth is. God has given us a true yardstick of true holiness, and he says, I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me. And only when that standard is put forth and put down in a straight line do we see the crookedness and the evil and the sinfulness of disobeying God on his most fundamental cornerstone commandment of them all. We have to view these things from God's perspective.

And what false religions do is they offer and proclaim false gods, false deities, false deities, false ways to know God, false ways to be reconciled to God. And all of that is a violation of the first commandment. And in breaking the first commandment, they are guilty of fundamental sin. And the letter of James in the New Testament says, you know, if you've broken one commandment, you've broken them all. The law is a unit.

It is a unified whole. And you can no more break one commandment and keep the other nine than you could have a coat on your back and tear it and rip it and think that you still had a full garment in front of you. It's not like that. But if I can put it another way, kind of in a very colloquial, popular way, the idea that God is like an indulgent grandfather who just casually overlooks disobedience and spoils the children without correcting them in their sin, that's lethal.

That is utterly lethal. It is a denial of the holiness of God. It is a denial of the justice of God. It is a denial of the righteousness of God that says that all sin must be punished. And when you realize that false religion and false gods are sinful, then you start to grasp a little bit.

Your mind is starting to go down the correct path of rightly understanding, having a right view of false religion. Let me ask you a question. You don't have to answer out loud. I'd prefer that you didn't in a setting like this.

You know, we can look at it this way, you know. Do you believe that Jesus is Lord? Do you believe that Jesus tells the truth? Do you believe that we should think like Jesus does? And believe what Jesus says?

Well, I know that you do, at least at some level, or, you know, I wouldn't expect you to be in this room at this time. But in the context of what we're talking about here, that false religion is satanic, false religion is sinful, and that the consequences of this are infinite, not minor. These are major consequences, not incidental ones to following false religion. Well, let's just think about what Jesus said in a very, you know, a verse that all of you should know. When he said in John 14, 6, I am the way and the truth and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me. Scripture presents God as an exclusive God, and Christ as the exclusive way to God, and to propose a different Christ, one who is not fully God, in human flesh, is to propose a different Savior. And to propose a different Savior is by definition to propose a different salvation. You can't have it both ways. You can't have Christ and call him Lord and know what he says about his exclusive life.

You can't have it both ways. And call him Lord and know what he says about his exclusivity, and then have accommodating thoughts in your mind to religions that contradict that very truth that he set forth. And so, as we'll see in just a moment, false religion and those who follow false religion are doomed to destruction. False religion is a sin from which men must repent.

And this is, you know, we're not used to thinking like that. You know, if I come up and preach about repenting from sin and things like that, you know, I know that most people are going to be processing that in terms of sinful things they do, sins of the flesh, sins of drunkenness, sins of lying, perhaps. I mean, these days you can't even assume that people think drunkenness is a sin, which is ridiculous in light of Scripture.

You know, but we think about it in human terms. But the first table of the Ten Commandments are vertical. The greatest commandment is to love God as he is and according to whom he has revealed himself to be. And so, when we talk about repentance and faith, which we're going to do soon also after I finish the Sermon on the Mount on Sundays, we have to understand that the beginning of sin, the fundamental root of sin is a vertical rebellion against God himself.

The fleshly things that we often think about are symptoms of a greater disease. Yes, they must be repented of, but they are connected to vertical sins of far greater import. You know, and you say, well, I don't know, maybe you're skeptical about that, but Jesus looked at the Pharisees who were purveyors of false religion in their own right with all of their traditions and legal things, and Jesus told them the tax collectors and prostitutes will enter heaven before you do. And so false religion is sinful. It is a sin from which men must repent. So we've seen that it's satanic. We've seen reasons to understand why it is sinful.

That brings us to our third point. We'll look at a few more passages of Scripture in this third point. Thirdly, false religion is sentenced.

It is sentenced, which is not a very easy word to say apparently, but it illiterates, and so I needed to use it. What I mean by that point, that false religion is sentenced, is that false religion is under judgment. God condemns false religion, and he condemns it in the most severe terms possible for us to contemplate. We're going to see that he was severe in his condemnation of false religion in the Old Testament, and he is severe.

You could easily argue that he's even more severe in the New Testament against false gospels. Let's look at some passages in the Old Testament. You can turn to the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy chapter 13. False religion is under condemnation.

It is sentenced to judgment, you could say. Deuteronomy 13, beginning in verse one. If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, let us go after other gods which you have not known, and let us serve them, what shall you do? Verse three. You shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams, for the Lord your God is testing you to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

Do you see how the things that we've been discussing here tonight are all woven together? God is testing you when you see a prophet saying things or doing things and says, now follow after a different God. God is testing you, he told the people of Israel, to see whether you're really going to follow him with all your heart or not.

Verse four. You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice, and you shall serve him and hold fast to him. But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has taught rebellion against the Lord your God. Because he has taught rebellion against the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you out of the house of slavery, to make you leave the way in which the Lord your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. God condemned these false prophets, condemned those who would lead people away from the true God.

He says that it is evil in your midst, it is rebellion, and the penalty for that rebellion was the death penalty. Now in like similar manner turn to Deuteronomy 18. Deuteronomy 18 verse 20. You know I just as strong as scripture is on this, my heart rejoices as I stand before you at how clear scripture is about this.

There is no mistaking this. What we do with it may be another matter, but what scripture says about it is crystal clear, and there can be no mistaking it. Deuteronomy 18 verse 20. But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.

He is sentenced to death. And if you say in your heart, how may we know that the word that the Lord has not spoken? Verse 22, when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously.

You need not be afraid of him. And it would be a whole sermon on applying that to the false claims by charismatic teachers who easily excuse their false prophecies. Scripture has none of it. If you do not speak a prophecy in the name of the Lord, it better be right. And if it is not, in the Old Testament, you were to die.

Now we do not practice that death penalty in the New Testament age, but we see the principle in how God views it, and we will see more in just a moment. Now before we turn to the New Testament to see this principle in New Testament terms, let me just read to you from the book of Zechariah chapter 13 as it looks forward to the millennial age. And what happens in the millennium after Israel has repented?

What happens and how is false religion viewed in that context? Well Zechariah 13, on that day there shall be a fountain open for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness. God will send a spirit of revival on national Israel and there will be widespread repentance as he gathers in Israel after having set them aside during the period of the New Testament in which we now live.

That's for another time. Verse two, and on that day, declares the Lord of hosts, I will cut off the names of the idols from the land so that they shall be remembered no more. And also I will remove from the land the prophets and the spirit of uncleanness. And if anyone again prophesies, watch this.

Talk about family set against family. His father and mother who bore him will say to him, you shall not live for you speak lies in the name of the Lord and his father and mother who bore him shall pierce him through when he prophesies. So zealous and jealous is God of his truth that even in that day if a man would presume to prophesy in the name of the Lord when he had not been sent the death penalty is sentenced upon him. That's a glimpse into the Old Testament picture of it.

Now as serious and severe as that is and shocking to our flabby moral sensibilities and the extent to which we are shocked and perhaps even a bit offended that God would presume to do that to men just over a little religious matter shows us how far we have drifted away from seeing things through the mind and eyes of God. But you don't escape this reality at all when you go to the New Testament. Turn to the book of Galatians chapter one. Galatians chapter one. I would be so bold as to say that the New Testament is more strongly sentencing against false religion than the Old Testament is and I say that based on Galatians chapter one verse six and it's encouraging to see that that even in even in in the time of the apostle Paul and people that had been under his teaching there were those who departed away from it so it certainly wasn't any defect in Paul or the defect in the gospel that he preached that caused people to to leave. Paul dispenses with his ordinary affirmations and and pastoral courtesies in the book of Galatians and he goes immediately to the issue in verse six.

He is hot. He is unhappy with them and he is strongly rebuking them for the sake of them for going back and and contemplating a return to judaistic practices, Jewish practices and returning to a system of works righteousness and he is hot and he says in Galatians chapter one verse six, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. See I framed this at the beginning different God, different gospel, different Christ. I'm shocked that you're turning to a different gospel not that there is another one but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. Verse eight but even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you let him be accursed anathema upon him and he repeats himself he's he's so agitated in a righteous way that he can't just say it once he repeats himself as we have said before so now I say again if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received let him be accursed a curse from God be upon his head for teaching a gospel contrary to the one true apostolic gospel. Paul says rhetorically am I seeking the approval of man now or of God or am I trying to please man if I were still trying to please man I would not be a servant of Christ. The New Testament pronounces damnation on those who preach a false gospel. This is profoundly serious and if you go to the end of your bibles in Revelation 21 the end of the written scripture text Revelation 21 verse 8 we read but as for the cowardly the faithless the detestable as for murderers the sexually immoral sorcerers idolaters and all liars their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur which is the second death and then in the final chapter of the bible revelation 22 verse 15 we read outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood it's not simply about telling falsehoods man to man it's about telling falsehoods about the truth about God about authority about sin and about salvation and about Christ and so let's gather all of these things up tonight and kind of tonight and kind of bring it to a conclusion for this evening realizing that we're going to speak more about this in future weeks what is the right view of false religion how shall we think about it false religion is satanic it is sinful and it is sentenced to death that is so vital for how we think and how we talk and how we act it's it's it's it's vital for how we approach evangelism it's vital for how we interact with others about their religion it's vital for the way that we conduct ourselves now but let me just close with this verse from hebrews in terms of how we how we think about this and how we respond to it a beloved God has blessed us greatly by bringing his word to us in our lives revealing his word bringing it to us having put us in a position where in the past we've been under pastors or friendships or relationships that have have brought the truth to us lovingly patiently instructing us to be brought the truth to us lovingly patiently instructed us in the truth parents friends co-workers you know that that God did something in your life to bring you out from false religion bring you out from spiritual death and to bring you under the truth of God the truth of scripture the truth about Christ the truth about true salvation and you know if you've been born again and the Lord has truly saved you then your response to this reality that false religion is satanic it is sinful and it is sentenced to death both you know it is sentenced ultimately to eternal death then the serious nature of these issues brings us to what the writer of hebrews said in chapter 2 verse 1 therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard lest we drift away from it we have to cling to the truth we have to expose ourselves to it on a consistent regular basis in our own bible reading we need to be under the teaching of the word of God on a consistent regular basis not hit and miss come once every three four five weeks and act like it's no big deal to miss on extended times when you know there aren't extenuating circumstances like illness or whatever but to realize that it is urgent for us to know the truth to place ourselves under the truth to follow the truth to learn the truth to speak the truth because outside the circle of the truth is this realm of satanic sinful condemned error that we don't want to drift into for the sake of our own souls and for the sake of those that would look to us for an understanding and so it's it's vital for us to take false religion seriously and the other side of that coin is to take the truth seriously enough to devote ourselves to it with our lives with our thoughts and with all of our hearts let's pray together dear lord while we sometimes are staggered by the weight of the issues that scripture presents us that scripture presents to our minds we're thankful for at least two things here this evening we're thankful that it's clear and that you have helped us to see and granted us a measure of discernment on these matters we're thankful for the clarity of scripture and father we're certainly grateful for our salvation having delivered us not only from the guilt of our own personal sin but having delivered us from that whole realm of evil and lies and the dominating dark influence of satan you have delivered us who are christians from the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of your beloved son out of darkness and into the light out from under satan and now under christ who is a loving benevolent savior and a good shepherd who does not lose any of his sheep and so father out of out of an appropriate sense of gratitude help us to renew renew our hearts and commitments tonight to pursue truth with every with every opportunity that you give to us to learn it and to be protected from error and to become reliable guides to others around us who need to be led out of darkness and into the light themselves thank you father for those dear men those dear women perhaps in our past who loved us enough to tell us the truth to tell us hard things and how you used their faithfulness to work in our hearts father help us to carry that forward help us to be faithful that you would use us in the hearts in the hearts of those who come after us that there might be an extension of your kingdom within the realm of the influence that you've given to us each one of us we pray these things in jesus name amen well my friend there is no substitute for reading the word of god for yourself and spending the time day by day going through the bible in a systematic way so that you have a full exposure to everything that the word of god says it's remarkable the way the spirit of god works through the word to minister to our hearts in that way and to help you do that we have a couple of different bible reading plans available on our website thetruthpulpit.com if you would go to thetruthpulpit.com click on the link that says about you'll find a sublink there that takes you to two different bible reading plans that you can choose from it's free it's there available to help you in your reading of god's word and i know that the spirit of god will use that in your life if you're not used to reading god's word on a regular systematic basis make this the day that you start something new and move in that direction and join us again next time here on the truth pulpit as we continue teaching god's people god's word that's don green founding pastor of truth community church in cincinnati ohio thank you so much for listening to the truth pulpit join us next time for more as we continue teaching god's people god's word