"The
Exceeding Heinousness of Sin"
The
Lord's Day, April 30, 2000
|
The ECF Pulpit |
If you would open your Bibles with me this morning to
Matthew 12, we're continuing in our study in the person and
work of Christ. I'll confess to you as I come to this
passage, though, this morning, and what I believe we need to
examine, I come with a great deal of fear, trepidation; and
I would ask extra prayer that we might be able to speak what
needs to be said.
I'm a little bit reminded of what happened with a little kid who got sent off to Sunday school, to church, without his parents, and the people lived in the hill country, and when he got back from church, you know kids are people of few words; they said well, "What did the preacher preach on today?" The little boy looked up, and he said, "Sin." They said "And what did the preacher say about sin?" And he said, "He's against it." That was pretty much it. We don't preach about sin a lot anymore. Sin's not a popular topic. Last I knew, it didn't hit the top ten list of things people like to hear on a Sunday--"Oh boy, we get to come to church and get beat up again." And I hope that we won't be doing that again this morning, and yet, at the place where we are in this text, it is vitally important that we gain the perspective that's needed to understand what's really going on here; and in order to do that, we are going to spend some time this morning on the topic of sin.
And you know that we're looking at these Sabbath controversies. We're in the midst of them. We've looked at three of them in great detail thus far. This is a fourth, and this one is pivotal in Jesus' ministry; and it's pivotal because of what we read in verse 14. It was after this controversy that there was a decided change in the way that everyone dealt with Him, for we read there, "But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him as to how they might destroy Him." It's from this point on, and it's over this issue, that the Pharisees had determined Jesus had to die. That's why it becomes so important. This becomes the motivation within them. This is the fire in their belly to crucify Christ. And it's interesting that it's over this topic of the Sabbath; but it's even more interesting, I think, as Jesus pulls back the veil and reveals that it isn't the Sabbath at all that's the issue, but something else entirely.
Well, looking at the text itself, we read in verse 9 that "Departing from there, He went into their synagogue." You would get the impression from Matthew that this happened immediately after the verses that went above; however, we know if we were to jump over to Luke, in 6:6, we would know that this was another Sabbath, but he was leaving that region; and so Matthew doesn't make it abundantly clear, but Luke does. So this was another time, another place, and another controversy. It didn't happen right on its heels, but it certainly happened within close proximity and within a short period of time. And He entered that synagogue, "And a man was there whose hand was withered. And they questioned Jesus, asking, 'Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?'" I've mentioned a number of times before that one of the problems we can have is that we might be found asking the wrong question. And this is a case where, in fact, they were asking the wrong question; and Jesus is going to correct them so that He gets His point across, but it's a critical thing that happens. They wanted to know if it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath, and I don't think anyone thought that anywhere in the Old Testament there was some stricture that said "Thou shalt not heal on the Sabbath." There was no commandment to that effect; so they're asking a deeper question about the Law--does the Law make provision for this, is this something that God permits?
Jesus isn't exactly pleased with their response, and we're going to be looking at this passage again next week where we'll really deal with three things that emerge from this and the same account that's given to us in Mark, chapter 3. And that is, first of all, that they had a distorted and devalued view of human life. And legalism, which is what He's dealing with here, always produces a distorted and devalued concept of human life. Because the precept, or the law, or the individual commandment becomes more important than the individual to whom the commandment was given. That's always a problem that we have that we make the institution greater than the one for whom it was instituted. We dealt with that in a lot of detail before.
The second thing that they do is that they divorce the letter of the law from the spirit of the law, and that always gets us in trouble whether we're on one side of that fence or on the other. If we divorce the letter of the law from the spirit of the law and take only the letter, we become strict legalists; we become uniformitarians; we become those who rule only by law and only by stricture. But if we go the other way, and we don't have the letter of the law, then we have very little rule at all. And order goes out the window, too. But the Spirit never leads to disorder; the Spirit only speaks that which is in accordance with the holy ordinances of God. That's always His approach. But, nonetheless, we can divorce the two--we'll see how they approach that, I think, next week.
And thirdly, when we become legalists, we will eventually get a defective view of Christ because we won't understand what the atonement was for. If all we're looking for is someone who will, kind of, make enough nice that we can get through, we're going to be sadly mistaken on the Judgment Day. But the key to all of this discussion as it opens up before us in this place, and what's going to halt out attention this morning is this question, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?"
Jesus answers. "And He said to them, 'What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out?" In fact, after this, it's interesting, after this account, there were, in fact, laws enacted by the rabbinic scholars--we read this in Moses Maimonides, we don't read it this early, but a few hundred years later--that this became such a question of contention, as to whether or not you could even help your mule out of a hole if it had fallen into on a Sabbath day, that the rabbis had ruled this way--if your animal has fallen into a pit, you can go out and you can go out and put a pillow under its head and you can give it water to drink, but you can't help it out. That's labor. And if, in fact, in the process of not helping it out it dies, well I guess that's too bad. In fact, their legalism had led them to such extremes that in the Talmud we read very strange and superstitious notions of observing the Sabbath, to the place that some rabbis claim that they had very Sabbath-keeping donkeys, who wouldn't eat on the Sabbath--so that their masters wouldn't have to feed them. We all know that's a little bit stupid, but, that's okay. Sometimes, we get pretty stupid.
The other thing I want to make clear before we go too far is, you have to remember the generation just prior to this one. We don't get that in much of our history, but when the Israelites came back from the Babylonian captivity and they began to reestablish themselves and they began to go back to teaching and preaching the Word of God and trying to get the nation back into its spiritual fervor, it was the Pharisees who were the prime "evangelicals" of their day. These were the good guys. They were the ones who really wanted the nation called back to some sort of spiritual vitality. These were the men who were serious about the things of God. They were the ones who went to the Bible studies, and the ones who made sure that they were in church when they ought to be. They were the ones who read the Scriptures on their own, and they got together and they talked about them; and they were the ones who we would consider today the real up and coming evangelicals, the ones who were really plugged in, those guys who had a living, vital faith; and yet, only a few generations later, we find that it is this same group of "evangelicals" that has slipped into this brand of legalism, and the danger for you and me is that we'll go in the same direction. As a matter of fact, Luther was convinced that that would be the primary thing right after the Reformation--is that we would forget that it's justification by faith alone, and in losing that we would go back under a legalistic bondage and end up, once again, in terrible straits. That's where these guys were. But they didn't start off that way; they started off good.
So He confronts them with this, and the answer was obvious--a sheep was too valuable to lose. Another farm animal was too valuable to lose, if it fell into a hole on the Sabbath day, you pulled it out because you didn't want to lose the bucks you had invested in that particular animal. Jesus, knowing that, turns to them then and says, "How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath." And this is the key to the passage--that he makes the contrast between their question, "Is it lawful to heal?" and He says, "No, wrong question. The question is, is it lawful to do good?" Doing good before God is always lawful. You want to draw it down to if I dot the "i" or cross the "t", and it's a matter of the heart, not a question of a single act. That's what becomes so important to them here.
But of course then, that betrays the thought, and something that is definitely true in our society today, that we view sin the same way we view crime. And as great as the justice system is in America today, we have a severe problem that the Scripture guarded against, certainly under the old covenant, but [that], in our modern society, has really warped our thinking. For instance, if you, God forbid, were to go home this afternoon, and someone were to enter your home and murder your spouse or one of your children, immediately as the police would respond and the criminal was apprehended and put on trial, they would be put on trial not for a crime committed against you or committed against your child, they would be put on trial for breaking the law regarding murder. Because we can divorce crime from the reality of what it is, and this is where we have to go with this this morning because this is where their thinking had gone, and so often this is where ours goes. And that is that we lose the reality that sin is a personal affront against God. If all we think of is in terms of, "Did I keep the law?", we've missed it entirely. For the question is, "Who is this one I am sinning against?", not "What law am I breaking?" But in a nation of "Lex Rex," where law rules, we think in those terms. We have crimes against the State. We have crimes against the community. We have crimes against the law. But the truth is, folks, when we sin, we sin against a person. We sin against God. And it is the person and the personal nature of sin that makes it so heinous.
If it was just an ordinance, if it was just a law, we might say, "Who cares?" We might justify it to a certain extent, and, in fact, I think they did that to a certain extent, and I think we do. We, in the back of our minds, often think, in terms of sin, "Well, I'm not breaking any one of the big ten. I'm not doing anything that I know is specifically not written down." And never once thinking about, what does this mean as I stand in the presence of God, recognizing that all sin is personal against him? This was driven home to my own heart and mind a number of years ago when I heard John MacArthur preaching on 1st John. He was preaching on the passage having to do with, "If we walk in the light, as He is in the light," there is continual cleansing. We all like that notion. We want continual cleansing; that's a good thing. And he said, you need to understand something, that when a Christian sins, he never sins in darkness. A Christian sins in the light. What that means is, literally, every word we speak, every harsh thought we think, everything that we do that is contrary to God, we do not as though we do it in a back room, but as though we are standing before His throne, straight before His court and saying, "Look at me, this is what I think." Sin is not a simple act of transgression; it's an affront, a personal affront to a living God. And when we lose the reality of that, we lose Him.
Now it is that, in at least four ways, that we want to examine just quickly this morning. But before we even enter into those, would you turn with me to the passage that Jeff already read for us this morning in Psalm 51. I want you to see how this works out first of all in Scripture. We see it modeled for us so wonderfully in this amazing passage of Psalm 51. And if somewhere in the back of your head, you are saying, "He's trying to make us uncomfortable with our sin," then you're getting the message early. You know the setting of Psalm 51, it was after David had been rebuked by Nathan for his adulterous affair with Bathsheba and the resulting murder of her husband--legal matters. Murder was an offense against the law, as was adultery. And now that he's been convinced and reproved of his sin, we hear his prayer of agony as he comes before the throne of God. He isn't embarrassed that he's been caught; he's pierced through with the reality of what he has done before God. Folks, we aren't in touch with our sin until it bothers us that we have sinned against Him. "Be gracious to me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; According to the greatness of your compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity." You hear in his voice that sense that his sin permeates his whole being, and he needs [to be] cleansed from head to foot. "Cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, And my sin is ever before me." But here's the bottom line--"Against You, and You only, have I sinned And done what is evil in Your sight." Yes, I've broken the law; but the more important thing, the thing that bears down upon his soul is that it is before his own God that he has done this. It's against you that I have committed this act. Yes, men have paid the price. This man, Uriah, this innocent, this good, this upright man has died in the process. Yes, Bathsheba grieves both the loss of her husband and the thing that she did in betraying his trust. Yes, even the child has passed away. But all those things are nothing compared to this one thing--"Against Thee, and Thee only have I sinned." That sin has gripped his soul, and he knows it's God that he has sinned against, let all the law be set aside. That's the truth!
That isn't the way we pray--"God I've done thus and such, forgive me." As though it's just kind of passed off. That old perversion of the hymn that one prankster wrote years ago--"Free from the Law, O blessed condition, Free now to sin And still have remission." That's not the truth. But we can get there. We can get there very easily when we don't understand the true heinousness, the true vileness, the true depths of what sin is.
Look at this in four ways, will you. First, I'm convinced that when we stop and we examine our sin, first and foremost we sin against someone who has been good to us. We don't sin against a nonexistent entity. We don't sin against just some statute. We sin against one who has been good to us. In Psalm 103:10, we read that He has not dealt with us according to our sins or rewarded us according to our iniquities. In Matthew 5:44, Jesus says, "But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous." Let me speak to you Christian, for just a moment, because it's to Christians that we need to address our remarks mostly. Yes, for those of you who don't know Christ, these doubly apply as well, but especially for the child of God. We read it in Psalm 145 this morning. What has God ever done to you that He deserves your response in sin? How has he ever slighted you or me? What has He ever said against us or done against us? What has He ever caused to happen that you and I have a right to stand in his face and say, "I know what you want, but I want something else, and too bad about you." Because that's what sin is. It's "in your face." It's never done in private; it's never done behind the barn. It's always done immediately in His presence, and it's always done with an impudent face. And we're always saying to Him, "Yes, you've been good to me, but I don't care! I want something else instead--I want what I want, not what you want!" And yet, who's the one who has fed us, and who's the one that has clothed us, and who's the one that has kept us, and who is the one that has forgiven us, and who is the one that has provided for us; who is the one that has arranged all situations and given us the promise that "All things work together for the good to those who love God and to them that are the called according to his purpose."? Who's the one who has given us His Word? Who's the one who causes that sun to rise every morning and to set every night and to give us the seasons and to give us the love and the families that we enjoy? Who is it that's given us all things in this life to indulge in to great delight, to enjoy our food, to enjoy our music, to enjoy all the pleasures that we have of friends and family and life? And yet when we sin, folks, never forget it, we sin against Him who is constantly giving to us out of His goodness, and we're sinning against Him personally! We're saying, "Your goodness isn't good enough." You read that passage in Psalm 145 this morning. Can't you imagine God saying to Israel--He did at times, through the prophets--"I led you through the wilderness; I delivered you from Egypt; I gave you manna to eat; I broke open a rock which poured out water to follow you through the wilderness. When you didn't' want that, I let the quails come down. I provided for you so that your clothes didn't wear out, so that you didn't grow weary in the wilderness. And when you sinned, I always forgave you; I always turned around." And yet, when we sin, we're sinning against that One who has never acted any way toward us, but in goodness. We sin against a good God.
When we watch movies, we like it when the bad guy loses. We like it when he gets his come-uppance. I like that movie "Tombstone", because in the end, Doc Holiday blows the bad guys away, and there's a sense of justice there. But there's never justice in sin. And when we allow ourselves to detach the reality of our sin being a personal affront to Him and to His goodness to us--His constant, daily provision and care, we become religionists and not Christians.
Secondly, and I'll do this a little more briefly, is that we sin against His character. I know we like to excuse our sin lightly. I do, too. I like to look at somebody else and say, "That's not so bad compared to them. I haven't done that really wicked thing yet." As a matter of fact, we'll look at some others and we'll say, "I wouldn't be caught dead doing that." It may be just the way you're caught. In that petition in our daily prayers, when's the last time that the sense of our sins has caused us to break and to weep before God? When's the last time it has pierced our heart through so deeply that like Ezra, when the people have come back from the captivity, raises up his hands and says, "Lord, our iniquities have risen up above our heads, and even when you've given us a nail in this place of space of reviving and of goodness, still we've done this horrible thing in your sight."? It would be enough if we sinned against His goodness, but we sin against who He is in His very person. Don't turn there, let me just read it for you quickly. In Exodus 34, you remember this well, it's when Moses reascends the mountain to get the Law from God the second time. Because when he received the law the first time, there was no promise of grace; there was no promise of mercy. But this time He hides Moses in the cleft of the rock and places his hand over him, so that after He passes by he'll be able to see something of the hinder parts of God as He trails off. And then it says, "And then the Lord passed by in front of him, and he proclaimed." This is what the Lord proclaimed to Moses, just a few short weeks after Moses had smashed the Ten Commandments and the children of Israel were caught in the midst of their idolatrous revelry with the golden calf that Aaron had crafted for them--"the Lord God compassionate, and gracious, and slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth, who keeps lovingkindnesses for thousands, and who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin." It's one thing to sin against someone who, in the back of our heads we can say, "has is coming to them." But how is it that we so lightly sin against One who has never held anything toward His love ones but grace, and mercy, and compassion, and lovingkindness, and goodness? How is it that sin doesn't pierce us through, when He's that way toward us? How is it that we enter so lightly into the things that we know are contrary to the very characteristics we just read, and don't even give it a second thought? Why we can harbor anger and unforgiveness against people for years. We can continue and perpetuate sins against one another without end. We can treat our fellow human being, and especially fellow Christians, as though they're nothing at all. We can look at their pain and their difficulty and never lift a finger to help like these did as they sat in the synagogue that day and said, "Wait twelve hours, and heal him then when it's not the Sabbath." What kind of hearts do we have who confront a God, like we sang this morning, "Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes," in that incredible majesty, that perfect character? And yet I say before the day is out, some of us will be ticked off at somebody else, and we'll make sure they know it. We'll gossip no sooner than we're two feet out the door. We'll spread the news about somebody's failing or somebody's sin under the auspices of saying, "We need to pray for them." We'll neglect the Bible, and somehow find a way to justify it. We'll forget all about prayer, but after all, God knows that He's in my thoughts. This gracious One, this loving One, this compassionate One, we sin against His character. We sin against Him.
Thirdly, we sin against His nature. He is a holy God. And when we stand before Him and do and say the things we do, what, in fact, we are often doing is offending Him with the worst, vile, and profane thing. What does it say in 1st John 1:5?--"This is the message we heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all." In Habakkuk 1:13, we say that His eyes are too pure to approve of evil, He can't countenance it. You cannot look upon wickedness with favor. In Titus 1:2, we're told that we have the hope of eternal life in this God who cannot lie, this One, who in His perfect holiness, in His absolute righteousness. It is as though, when we do the things we do...I'll never forget, years ago when the quartet was together and we went to Washington, DC, and there as we got to the center of town where you've got the Capitol on one side, all of those great buildings and monuments, and we stood just down at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, and I was awestruck! But it was nothing more than stone. It was just a man's comprehension of something great. We started to walk up those steps, and here was sitting on this huge chair the figure of this man who had been so great in our country's history. And just that simple human thing started to overwhelm me with a sense of awe. But if that was God, and you were approaching His throne, and you were halfway up the steps, is it there that you'd stop and watch your pornographic movie while He could watch? Is it there that you'd stop and tell that horrible secret about your neighbor? Is it their that you would bring your illicit love affair and commit indecent acts right there on the steps ten feet from His feet? Is it there that you would let Him know how disappointed you've been with the way He's administrated the universe? Is it there that you would let rise up within you the anger and the unforgiveness that you've had against everybody else and tell Him flat out, "You know, I've got a better way. Folks, that's exactly what we do when we sin every day. We are that much in His presence, and every sin is that much a personal affront to His holiness. In Him in whom is no darkness at all, and yet we would approach and bring our darkness right up before Him. These men as they stood in that synagogue that day, didn't care about this man with the withered hand and said, "So what if it's another few hours?" Had they thought for a moment they were standing before God, would they have said, "God, let him just go for right now. After all, we need to make sure we keep the rules. They sinned against Him the way we sin against Him.
And the last one is found, I think, the most condemning of all. The truth is that we not only sin personally against Him and that we sin against His goodness; we sin against His character; we sin against His nature. But folks, every time we sin, we sin against His love. And that's only spelled one way--betrayal. To sin against someone's love is to betray them. Some of you in this room know what betrayal is like. You've given your heart to another; you've been in that place where you committed yourself to them; you opened yourself to them; you were as vulnerable as you could possibly be; you were empty and undone; you were, as the Scripture says, "naked and unashamed." And they took that love and treated as though it was no love at all and betrayed you at the deepest level of human pain.
"In this was manifested the love of God toward us--because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him." The Father in His goodness sends the Son into the vineyard that He has let out to the husbandmen, and they beat Him , and they killed Him, and they said let us take it for ourselves; they betrayed the Father's love--the way we do it every time we sin. "Hereby," John continues, "perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us." There's a place that I think just brings this out in amazing reality. It's Ephesians chapter 2. In the first verse it says, "And you"--that's you and me--"you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them, too, we all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest." Catch this verse 4, will you; just catch the superlatives--"But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,"--He didn't just love us, but in rich mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, "even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ, and He raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in heavenly places, so that in the ages to come, He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus."
Let me speak guardedly, but straightforwardly. Every act of sin is an act of adultery against our betrothed. Every act of sin is a betrayal of His perfect love. Every act of sin is throwing back into His teeth what He sent His Son to do on our behalf. Sin is not just transgressing some law. It is violating the sanctity and the purity and the holiness and the love and the goodness and the sweetness and the wonder of this God who has given His own Son to purchase us with His blood. That's what sin is. And we barely find time most days to say, "God, forgive me." You tell me what kind of a response that is. Or are we more like the Pharisees than we'd like to believe? As long as it hasn't hit our list, as long as we haven't struck out on one of the things that we have on that note that's superimposed in the back of our minds that says, "If I don't do this, I'm okay."--regardless of where our hearts are, regardless of where our attitudes are, regardless of where our affections are. But, you see, that's what sin is. We can whitewash it; we can soft-sell it; we can tone it down; we can say, "Oh well, that's just my old man kicking up." We can say, "Oh, that's just one of those things I'm still dealing with," casually and cavalierly. And if that's the truth, then we haven't for a moment realized that we've sinned against Him. And is it any wonder, then, that He seems so distant?
All that having been said, all of the weight of the heinousness of what sin really is, and believe me, we've only begun to scratch the surface, all of what it really imports when we talk about sinning against God, all of that He comprehends--now this is love--in the sacrifice of His Son, and says, "every offense, all of that attitude, all of that vileness, all of that malignancy, all of that grotesque, black perversion, I lay upon Him at Calvary, and I take all of His purity, and I lay it upon you, and I call you my child." That's the wonder of the gospel. When we think lightly of sin, we think lightly of the sacrifice. When we think lightly of sin, then the atonement doesn't mean all that much. After all, I'm not Jeffrey Dahmer; I didn't murder fourteen people and eat parts of them. I'm not Hitler; I didn't send millions to be gassed in the furnaces. I'm not Attila the Hun; I didn't rape and pillage across the countryside. But every sin we've committed is just as vile, and we've done it before His very face. But the grace and the mercy and the love and the compassion of our Father is that for such as we are, He sends His Son and His blood is sufficient to atone for that kind of sin. It kind of makes the question of whether or not it's lawful to heal on the Sabbath pretty moot, doesn't it?
May I ask, in closing, then, what sin it is of someone else's that you're still holding against them, when your sin appears like this before the Father, too? Where's that this morning? Or are you saying, "Wait twelve hours, you can heal him when the Sabbath's over."? Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, there are times when your Word pierces through with such difficulty that we scarce maintain our breath. I confess, Father, that I would rather not preach a single sermon like I just have. It would be my own desire only to speak of your grace and only of your mercy, but the truth is we never know the extent of your grace and your mercy until we see the heinousness of our sin fully unmasked. Forgive us for trying to whitewash it all the time. Forgive us for being so hard on one another when our personal sin is so great against you. Forgive us, Father, for not being pierced through with the reality of our sin for sloughing it off. I daresay, Father, for myself and for others here, days go by before we're truly pierced through, at times, with sin and falling upon our faces and asking forgiveness. We grow so cold to your goodness. You have been so good to us, so constantly, so long, that we take it as though this is simply the way it ought to be; we deserve it--and that's a lie. And that lie, Father, has led us to be hard-hearted and cold, and we've not seen our sin as sin against you. We've not understood the impact of it. Do forgive us this morning as a congregation, as individual Christians. Thank you that we can come to you this morning and that we do know that the blood of Christ atones. We would not make more of our sin than of the grace that is given to overcome it. But at the same time, we would not make light of our sin, lest we make light of the grace that does overcome it. Father, drive it home to our hearts, lest we, too, become "technical" in our service to you, rather than living in that vital reality of the joy of your presence and of walking with you. Make us like Christ; make us like Christ; make us like Christ. In His precious name we pray. Amen.
Transcribed by Brad Hansen
Copyright © 2000 Reid A. Ferguson. Permission granted to quote in context.