Sins in the Name of God

Humanity wants to research and use embryonic stem cells.

They want to harvest and sell and develop bodies of aborted babies and use their tissue for medical purposes. Their argument, consider the cure that will come. This will make it possible for others to be cured, for others to live, for those who have died.

Who would argue that there are those that now will be able to live, there are others who will be able to be cured. It's right to do wrong so that something good can happen. Paul answers. He just simply says at the end of verse 8, the condemnation is just. It's one thing to justify sin, which our culture is constantly in the habit of doing. But it's another thing to justify sin in the name of God. Many people rationalize their sins by saying things like, well, God made me this way or certainly God wants me to be happy. What they're essentially doing is putting responsibility for their actions on God. Today, Stephen reminds us in this message that when the day of judgment comes, God won't be standing on trial.

We will. Welcome to Wisdom for the Heart. Stephen Davey has a sermon for you entitled, Sins in the Name of God.

Open your Bible to Romans 3 as we get started. Haddon Robinson wrote in Focal Point about the world's most complicated clock which stands in the town hall in Copenhagen. It took 40 years to build.

It cost more than a million dollars. It has 15,000 moving parts, 10 faces. The clock computes the time of day as well as the days of the week, the month, the years and the movements of major planets for 2,500 years. Some parts of this clock will not move until the 25th century. The intriguing thing Robinson wrote was that the clock is still not accurate. It loses two-fifths of a second every 300 years.

My wife's from Walmart does the same thing. He goes on to say, like all clocks made by human hands, this timepiece in Copenhagen must be regulated by the most precise clock known to mankind, the universe itself. The astronomical clock made by the hands of God with its billions of moving parts from atoms to stars keep the most precise time and has never lost even one-fifth of a second, never even in a century of time. So reliable are the movements of the universe that all time on earth can be measured against it. In other words, God's created world is the standard of time. When I read that I couldn't help but think of God's inspired word which is the standard for all of life.

Life itself as we have discussed can be measured by the canon, the measuring reed of Holy Scripture. It is never out of date. It is never out of step.

It is never out of time. The Apostle Paul has declared the Jewish nation in Romans chapter 3 verses 1 and 2 that their highest privilege has been to be the recipient of this holy canon, the holy words of God. However, Paul had explained in previous verses, primarily in the latter part of chapter 2, that even though the nation of Jews received the words of God, they were not exempt from obeying those words. Even though they were sons of Abraham, they were still bound to keep the law.

I like the way one commentator illustrated this truth. He told the story of a 21-year-old son of a European ambassador to the United States. The young man was in repeated trouble with the law. In fact, on one occasion he was driving his car and he struck a pedestrian and killed her and he was charged with vehicular homicide, at least initially he was. But when he claimed diplomatic immunity, proved who his father was, the charges were dropped. He was arrested four times in the space of about two years. But each time he claimed diplomatic immunity and was released.

Because the young man's father was an ambassador, he could not be brought to judgment in this country for these offenses. Paul has been delivering the verdict of guilty to people who assume that in the end, they would be protected by virtue of who their father was, Abraham. They were sons of the covenant, sons of Abraham. Therefore, even if guilty of sin, they could claim this spiritual immunity from the charges and the charges by God would be dropped. And the apostle Paul has now for these chapters been delivering the shocking news that the immoral man and the moral man and the religious man and the Jewish man are all alike. They are all guilty.

It doesn't matter who they belong to, where they've come from, it's a matter of the heart and everyone's heart is guilty. And he will keep moving until he arrives at verse 23, where he will summarize it all and say, for all have sinned and all fall short of the glory of God. He moves us toward that end in verse 23 of chapter 3.

Well, he's not quite there yet and neither are we. In the next few verses, very important verses, the apostle anticipates and he voices three more objectives that would come from his audience and he states them in the form of questions. There are about eight or nine questions in this paragraph.

We'll deal or sort of summarize them into three. Let me give you the first question and then we'll look at the text. If God is going to judge the Jew, does that mean he isn't keeping his covenant with Israel, thereby breaking his word? Now look at chapter 3, verse 3.

What then? If some did not believe, their unbelief will not nullify the faithfulness of God, will it? In other words, he's asking if God judges us, he's asking on behalf of his audience, if he judges us, then would he be unfaithful to his promises? Would he be lying when he said, I will never cast you away? How could he then send any of us to hell? He said that we were his people.

It's a good question, by the way. Did God erase his covenant with Israel because there were those who didn't believe in Christ as Messiah? Will he in fact carry on as he promised and eventually restore the throne of David and the land of the people and the kingdom on earth where he will sit on that throne and reign in that kingdom and beyond forever?

Is he going to do that? Will the promise come true that the prophet Zachariah declared in chapter 12, verse 10, where he said, quoting God, I will one day pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplication so that they will look on me whom they have pierced. This hasn't happened yet. And this can't happen to the church either. We're not in the house of David and we're not in Jerusalem. So the Jew is asking Paul, look, if we're going to be judged by God, is God then casting us off? And if he's going to cast us off, how can he restore the throne and the people to the land?

Let me pause long enough to say a few words in addressing this question. We'll deal with it extensively later in Romans chapter 11, where Paul begins that chapter with the question, has God rejected? Has God cast off? Has God abandoned his people?

And he says, God forbid. You might wonder, are all Jews individually saved then for all time because of those promises? Does the Jewish man or woman need to be saved through faith and in Christ today is his special covenant relationship through these prophetic prophecies as a nation is that sort of overriding his need for Christ? Well, that was the confusion set up by chapter two of Romans that they now ask in chapter three. If the Jew is guilty, what does God say of all his other promises?

Certainly we will be all right. We belong to Abraham. So the question remains if the Jew today could be sent to hell along with the Gentile, then is God discarding his future promise to restore Israel? Let me answer that by first of all bringing to your attention something you need to understand, and that is the difference between the future national salvation of Israel and the current present salvation of a Jewish person. The national salvation of the Jewish nation which will occur in the future is different than the salvation of the Jewish person today while God in the future will indeed establish the throne and the kingdom and the land and revive the nation. He will do that in the future beginning with the tribulation. He is in this what we call dispensation of grace, this age of the church. He is requiring faith of all people in Christ, the one who was pierced. The Jew must be saved today just as the Gentile must be saved today, and that is by faith in Christ, and that is Paul's point in verse nine. Look there of Romans chapter three.

He says, What then? Are we better than they? Is a Jew better than a Greek or a Gentile? Not at all, for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin. Skip ahead to verse 21.

Look there. But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe. For there is no distinction.

What does he mean? There's no distinction. He's saying there's no distinction between Gentile and Jew. There is no distinction for all have sinned and all implied their fall short of the glory of God. Will God break his word?

Go back to Romans three and look at verse four. Paul says, May it never be. My translation reads it. You can translate it no way. That's impossible.

That couldn't happen. Maybe your translation reads God forbid. Now notice what Paul says next in verse four. Rather, let God be found true, though every man be found a liar. Literally, let God be discovered as true. Let God be revealed as true, even though every man be discovered a liar, as it is written that you may be justified in your words and prevail when you are judged. In other words, if all of humanity somehow gathered together and were able to vote on the character of God and all of humanity unanimously said, God doesn't keep his word, all of humanity will be found out to be lying. And God will be the only one who will tell the truth.

Here's the point to their first question in Paul's first answer. The faithlessness of Jew and Gentile alike reveals the faithfulness of God. That leads us to the next objection that Paul anticipates in verse five. But if our unrighteousness demonstrates or reveals the righteousness of God, what shall we say? The God who inflicts wrath is not unrighteous, is he? In other words, if the disobedience of the Jews reveals the character of God, if the faithlessness of the Jew reveals the faithfulness of God, why would God turn around and judge those that have simply revealed him to be faithful? That doesn't sound fair.

That's their point. Paul goes on to say, I am speaking in human terms that as I am speaking now from the vantage point of your own argument, here it is, may it never be. For otherwise, how will God judge the world? Now every Jew believed that God would judge the world. Paul says, if you say that since sin reveals the perfection of God, and the Jews should go free, then God would have to let every sinner go what?

Go free. He would be unjust to allow some to go free and not sinners. He would be unjust to punish some sinners and not all sinners. Since God will not do that with the world, he will not do that with those that even the nation would want to see judged like Antiochus Epiphanes on down through Hitler, those who hate the Jews. Certainly God would have to render just judgment in declaring all sin to be wrong. Then Paul in verse 7 encounters another argument.

This one will develop into true evil in its thought. Verse 7, but if through my lie, you say, the truth of God abounded to his glory, why am I still being judged as a sinner? In other words, since sinning makes the glory of God more wonderfully apparent, why not sin all the more? If sin highlights the grace of God, then let's live in sin so we can highlight the grace of God. Verse 8, why not say as we are slanderously reported into some claim that we say, let us do evil, that good may come. Paul was actually accused of teaching this as he taught that salvation was by faith alone independent of good works. They said, oh, well, you just want to live in sin. So you're teaching people that by living in sin that this free gift is just a measure of God's wonderful grace, so go out and sin. This gave rise to the heresy called ananomianism, that is the belief that you just sin more so that God can forgive more. And by sinning more, God forgives more and God's glory is revealed more. But in that foolish thinking, in other words, if God is able to take our sin and bring good out of evil, do we then give him all the evil we can and say now we're just going to watch and see what God does good?

Wouldn't it be foolish to do something evil and wicked just so you could experience something good? Imagine coming home from work, your wife says, honey, how did the day go? Well, it started out kind of bad. Well, why is that? Well, I killed my boss.

But coming home, I asked God to forgive me and oh, the sense of forgiveness that was so wonderful. Flawed logic, isn't it? Humanity wants to research and use embryonic stem cells. They want to harvest and sell the developed bodies of aborted babies and use their tissue for medical purposes. Their argument, consider the cure that will come. This will make it possible for others to be cured, for others to live, for those who've died. Who would argue that there are those that now will be able to live? There are others who will be able to be cured.

It's right to do wrong so that something good can happen. A few years ago, I read of a man in Europe. It's already happened in some stages. He was dying of kidney failure. They artificially inseminated his 16-year-old daughter with the help of her physician seven months into her pregnancy. The child was taken by C-section.

Its kidneys were moved and transplanted into the father and the infant was left to die of uremic poisoning. It's interesting that of all of the arguments that Paul answers, he doesn't answer this one. He just simply says at the end of verse 8, their condemnation is what?

Their condemnation is just. I personally believe that this passage teaches a number of things about the nature of man before we put it away and next Lord's Day get into the description of human nature as Paul describes it as he moves toward the climax of telling us how to be saved from who we are. I believe the paragraph we've just looked at implies several things about the nature of man. First of all, the mind of man creatively justifies his sin rather than admit his guilt. It's amazing how we as human beings have the ingenious ability to defend and rationalize our sin.

Every one of us. So one believing man creatively justifies sinfulness rather than admit his guilt. I recently heard a female rock star who was asked about the way she dressed or the lack thereof and how it may be affecting young girls who idolize her. She responded by saying my mother taught me that God gave me my body and that I'm not to be ashamed of it. It's clever but it's wicked. And it's doubly wicked because she has attached the name of God to her sensuality. The mind of man is extremely creative in coming up with things to justify sin. Another observation from this paragraph is this.

The heart of man goes further. It develops reasons to sin rather than reasons not to. Not only is man able to defend the sin that he's done, he's able to come up with reasons why he ought to do more.

Read the newspaper. Look at what lengths mankind goes to in order to justify and continue in his sin. Third, the verdict of man would find God guilty of sin rather than acknowledge his own guilt. If we're put into a corner and we're asked for a reason and we know we can't get away with anything, well then that's the way God made me. It's God's fault. God did it. God opened this door. It's God's problem, not mine. You ever heard anybody say that's the way God made me?

It's God's fault. I listened a couple of months ago to one actress who was being interviewed and she used this kind of argument. She said she had great passion.

She just was so upset. She said it was so cruel for God to create something so beautiful as sexual intimacy between two people who love each other but then created diseases to accompany it. That's the logic of the world. They won't admit their sinfulness. What they're doing is sinful and then when they admit they might be sinners, after all, they need somebody to blame and sometimes they will even blame God.

That's what they do here. What can the believer glean from this paragraph? Is there anything for us? There's a lot. Let me summarize by giving you three warnings that I have gleaned from this. Three warnings for the believer. Number one, be careful not to use God's grace to justify your lack of conviction and holy living. Just because you became a Christian doesn't mean that you no longer have the urge to sin and beyond that the urge to find excuses for it. How many times have you heard a believer say that's the way God made me? I'm Irish.

I am and that's mine. In the book of Jude, the writer says that the believers were caught up in what theologians call this antinomianism, the belief that sin reveals God's glory. It had crept into the church and Jude is writing in one attempt to get rid of it. They were believing that you're to sin all that you want, forget conviction, forget holy living, that sin glorifies God and of course it's false teaching that pandered to the nature of man. It's sort of like the contemporary teaching today of health and wealth. Go after money.

Get all the money you can get because God wants you to have all the money you can have. And that's a popular message as deceptive and wrong as antinomianism. Jude reads this, for certain people have crept into the church unnoticed those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation. Ungodly people who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness.

There's a long word. Licentiousness is basically the opposite of legalism. Both are devastating to any church. Legalism on one hand has a long list of dos and don'ts.

You do those, you don't do those, you can come here. Licentiousness on the other hand has thrown all the lists away. There are no convictions, no standards, not even any preferences. And Paul in Romans 3 would be addressing the licentious crowd. They have nothing to offer the world because they would be so much like it.

The more like the world you are, as one man used to say, the less you will impact it. How many Christians would never do the big three? How many Christians would never do the dirty dozen but will live on the edge of a non-distinctive compromising life?

And if they're ever held accountable or questioned by it, they will say, you must be a legalist. I'm under grace. How many in the church will watch ungodly movies and television? How many will surf the internet for places they don't belong? How many Christian men will drink smoke with a crowd? How many Christian women will dress immodestly in a way they know will get attention when they go to school or to work or even to church? How many Christians will swear along with the crowd? How many will laugh or even tell the dirty jokes?

How many will spend all their money on themselves and live for their next possession? How many when confronted with this would think we got a legalist in our midst? I'm under grace. My friend, you just might be ungodly and under grace at the same time.

Is that what you want? Don't use God's grace to justify your lack of holy distinctive living, your lack of conviction. Be careful. Second of all, be careful not to use God's patience as an excuse for disobedience. Are you living for Jesus Christ?

Is there something you should be doing, something you should be saying, something you could be changing? You know, God wants you to do it, to say it, to change it, to begin it. But you say, oh, I'm just so glad that God is patient with me. And I am, by the way. I don't want you to misunderstand me.

He's patient with me. But is that an excuse for disobedience? Be careful. Finally, be careful not to use God's forgiveness as a reason to embrace sin. How often have you been tempted to sin and the thought has crossed your mind?

Maybe it's a little one if there's ever such a thing. A little sin and the thought has crossed your mind. Well, I know God will forgive me.

I know He will forgive me later. My friend, all you're doing is sinning in the name of God. And to attach God's name to your sin, to your rebellion, to your stubbornness, to your immodesty, to your lack of character, to your lack of conviction is to muddy the holy name of God and ultimately discredit His calls on earth, the church of our Lord Jesus Christ. Don't drag God's name into it. Don't use His forgiveness as a reason to overlook sin.

I was talking to a couple that had recently come to Christ and she was expressing how sensitive she was becoming to even the smallest of sins, which is a wonderful thing to discover about yourself, right? She gave one illustration. She said, you know, the phone rang. She said, I was just getting ready to get into the shower and my husband called from the other room and said, honey, the phone's for you.

She said, the thought occurred to me. What do I tell him? I can't tell him like I used to. Well, I'm in the I'm in the shower because I haven't stepped in yet.

Do I go ahead and step in and then tell him I'm not available or stay out and take the phone call? And I told her, I love the dilemma in our lives. It comes when we are sensitive to anything that might not be a reflection of the holiness and purity and honesty and character and righteousness of Christ. Peter wrote, you church, you are a chosen generation. You church are a royal priesthood. You church are a special people belonging to him that you might proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of dark living, darkness, that lifestyle into a marvelous light. How different is your life from the darkness you left to the light you're in? You notice Peter would not say you're a special people. So go live like you want to live.

Now he said, you're a special people. And the high and holy calling is that now you show forth the praises of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. So you live it, you speak it, you walk it, you share it, you wear it, you do all of this to the glory of God, the one ladies and gentlemen who perfectly ordered the universe to help us keep time and to keep our clocks synchronized with the heavens. So much more so desires that we synchronize our lives to the purposes of heaven. That is our high and holy calling. Don't sin in the name of God serve in his name live honor uphold the wonderful righteous name of God. And by so doing, reflect his character to a world that is excusing their sin and heading for condemnation. And we have the answer. Today's message is entitled sins in the name of God.

It comes from a series out of Romans three called the depravity of man, the deliverance of God. This is wisdom for the heart with Stephen Davey. Our office is closed today. If you need to interact with us, please visit us online at wisdom online.org. Most of the information you might need is on that website. You can replay today's lesson, order the CD series, access the digital download, or you can visit our online resource center.

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