Rebellion Against God’s Authority

Transcript

GRM 1242
06/07/2020
Rebellion Against God’s Authority
Isaiah 40; Selected Verses
Gil Rugh

We’ve been looking into some of the Psalms. We’re going to take a little break from that, I got a little diverted, in fact, it started when I was going to do an introduction to a psalm and I got to looking into some of the matters. And I just want to review some of the basic matters that I think relate to what is going on in our day as we see some of the turmoil taking place in the world. Our particular interest is in our own country, it’s disappointing, but it should not be surprising. I’m just going to walk through some of the basics that remind us of why things deteriorate the way they do. We would say, well, it’s because of sin. That’s true and what is sin? It is basically rebellion against God, who He is and what He does. So we’re going to walk through first some just basic passages and I’ve selected the ones we normally use because I like to have some of these passages fixed in your mind, marked in your Bible.

The best place to start is Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 and that’s easy to find, Genesis 1 chapter 1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” That’s the foundational verse for all the rest of the Bible. If you don’t begin there, if you don’t believe that, then everything else makes no sense, everything else begins to unravel. Some people read the first verse of the Bible but they really don’t believe it. We even have evangelicals, they claim to be evangelicals, but do not believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Well, maybe God started it all. Well, if you can’t trust the opening of the Bible, if you can’t take it for what it says, I’m off to a poor start. We’re going to jump from Genesis 1, and we will come back to these opening chapters of Genesis but you don’t have to mark those.

We’re going to the book of Isaiah, Isaiah, just see the connection as time has gone by. The nation Israel was chosen by God to be His chosen nation. Empires come and go. Isaiah’s writing in anticipation of the destruction that will come, the Assyrians will come to carry away the northern kingdom, the Babylonians will then come later and carry away the southern kingdom, and then the Persians will come and take over the Babylonian Empire. Isaiah addresses that when you come to Isaiah chapter 40. We’re in the middle of this long prophecy of Isaiah. Look down to verse 12, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and marked off the heavens by the span, and calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, and weighed the mountains in a balance and the hills in a pair of scales?” Now this is talking about the creative work of God. How can we even get a grasp of that? That count the dust of the earth? Give me a break, let’s start with something reasonable. This is about the greatness of our God because the chapter started out this Creator God who has sovereign, complete control and power and authority over all His creation is promising that He will restore Israel when all’s said and done and He’s going to send Messiah, Savior. It becomes part of Isaiah and Isaiah will move on to talk in those closing chapters about the glorious kingdom that will someday be established on this earth that will encompass all the nations. To appreciate and understand you have to understand God is the Creator, the God of the Bible is the Creator of all things. Verse 13, “Who has directed the Spirit of the LORD or as His counselor has informed Him?” I mean, it would take someone greater than God, someone that could calculate the dust of the earth, measure, give us a count, who could weigh the mountains, the spread out of the heavens, the vastness of it that we still seem to find more and more. Who could give God advice on how to do it? Now that it’s done we can’t even get our arms around it even in our day with all our technology and all we do. We back up amazed. I saw on the news something else they discovered out there, and the immensity of it! What do you mean you just found it? It’s big enough you ought to find it. What have you been doing? But in the immensity of what God has created, no, we just can’t get to it all.

“With whom did He consult and who gave Him understanding? Who taught Him in the path of justice and taught Him knowledge and informed Him of the way of understanding? Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, are regarded as a speck of dust on the scales.”(verse 14) Now that speck of dust on the scale, it doesn’t move the scale. Now we’ve got a lot in the news about the nations Russia and China and the United States, Europe and these are big things. You know God’s not up there trying to figure out how He’s going to get it all worked out, that’s how big and great, powerful and awesome He is. The point is He is a God to be recognized, a God to be honored, a God who must be obeyed. “Behold, He lifts up the islands like fine dust.” Verse 17, “All the nations are nothing before Him, they are regarded by Him as less than nothing and meaningless,” (Blowing sound) and they’re gone. We think, boy, what are we going to do? Boy, this nation is going to… they’re moving in and they’re undermining our nation, this nation, if we’re not careful… One thing as we as believers who claim to believe the Bible and its authority, this is the God that we worship, this is the God in whose presence we gathered to offer Him worship today. Turn over to chapter 42 verse 5, “Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and its offspring, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it.” Verse 8, “I am the Lord, that is my name; I will not give My glory to another, nor My praise to graven images.” You see He’s a God to be honored. When He is not honored, when He is not worshiped, when He is not obeyed, the patience that He shows sometimes is taken to mean He’s not there or if He’s there He’s just that grandfatherly figure in the sky who understands and just patiently waiting it out. That’s not the God of the Bible, this is the God who is a jealous God. I will not give My glory to another and the gods that others create to worship is a direct offense and an attack against Me.

Come over to chapter 43 verse 10 and He’s talking to Israel. Israel was drawn by God to be a light in the darkness. We’re going to talk about light and darkness. In the darkness of a fallen, sinful world, Israel was to be a light among the nations. He says in verse 10… look at how verse 1 started out maybe first, “But now, thus says the Lord,” note this, “your Creator, O Jacob,” which is another name for Israel, remember Jacob’s name was changed to Israel or given as another name. “He who formed you, O Israel, ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine!’ ” You see it’s His sovereignty and that is in the context things are not going to go well for Israel down to our day. Assyrians carry away the northern tribes, Babylonians carry away the southern tribes, when they are restored it won’t be the same but God’s sovereign in it. Verse 7 “Everyone who is called by My name, and whom I have created for My glory, whom I have formed, even whom I have made.” Verse 10 “ ‘You are My witnesses,’ declares the Lord, ‘And My servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe Me and understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, and there will be none after Me. I, even I, am the LORD, there is no savior besides Me.’ ” Verse 13 “Even from eternity I am He, there is none who can deliver out of My hand; I act and who can reverse it?” You see the emphasis on His sovereignty, He’s the Creator God, it’s all His, He has authority over it all down to the minutest detail.

Come over to chapter 44, I’ve just limited these to Isaiah in these basic chapters so we’re not moving around a lot. Chapter 44 verse 24 and I encourage you to sit down and read these chapters, these chapters we’re just touching in, and remind yourself, you get the full impact of it. Verse 24 of chapter 44, “Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb.” You note the connection goes together, He’s the Redeemer, He’s the Savior, He’s the Creator, they have to go together. Salvation can come from no one else, from nowhere else. It comes from the living Creator God, your Redeemer, the one who formed you from the womb. “I, the Lord, am the maker of all things.”

You know, you cannot go to any public school and be taught that today, you cannot bring God into the picture, it’s not scientific. We teach the lie, there’s no room for God in our system, we have to teach without any reference to God and who He is. And this backed up into the evangelical world so now we get some kind of mixture called “theistic evolution” like, well, maybe God started it. When I read the Bible, I find out He’s the God who created the details of it, He is sovereign over it and the very foundation. When we reject Him as the Creator where we started in the first verse of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” I reject that. Well, when that’s the attitude, we start out with our rebellion against God, where do we go from that? We go from bad to worse and the impacts and affects of that spread into every area of life, as we’ll just glimpse. “The maker of all things,” verse 24 said, “stretching out the heavens by Myself,” He didn’t need any help. You can’t even count all the stars on the clearest night and with all our technology we are… I didn’t need any help, spreading out the earth all alone, who was with Me? God did it! You see Him trying to drive home His greatness, His sovereignty. He is a God to be honored, and if He’s not obeyed there is a terrible price that will be paid.

One more chapter, chapter 45, and God operates sovereignly. This will be in our study in chapter 9 (Romans) later today. Verse 4 “For the sake of Jacob My servant, Israel My chosen one” you see, we have been in Romans 9, the interchange of the name Israel and Jacob, because Israel descends from the twelve sons of Jacob, the twelve tribes. “I have also called you by your name; I have given you a title of honor though you have not known Me.” And you go back up here, He’s talking at the end of chapter 44 verse 28, “It is I who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd!’ “ You know who Cyrus is, he’s going to come after the Assyrians, after the Babylonians, he’s the one who will dry up the water and come into Babylon to end the Babylonian Empire.

God just doesn’t make a good guess even about the future, well, I can see power is rising here. I’m even going to tell you what is the name of the king. Well, who’s worried about Persia, we’ve got Assyria on the screen or you know, what about Babylon? Yeah, but you know, I’ve got that all taken care of, you know what? Cyrus will be My shepherd, he’ll perform all My desire. Cyrus by the testimony of scripture and by records of history was a pagan worshiper. But he’s going to do My will. Because He controls everything, He’s sovereign over all. Chapter 45 opens up, “Thus says the Lord to Cyrus His anointed.”
Some of you probably have a reference Bible that draws attention that’s the same word used of the Messiah, the Anointed. Because Cyrus is the one appointed by God on that occasion to accomplish God’s will and bringing defeat to Babylon and open the way for Israel to return to the land from which they have been exiled. This is the sovereign God we serve we in the world seemed to go into turmoil. As believers we can relax. Remember Ecclesiastes, we can’t change yesterday, we can’t control tomorrow. But that’s all right, I serve the Lord today and I rest confident in His control of all things and my tomorrow is in His hands. This is the point where here Cyrus was chosen for the sake of God’s people Israel even though the end of verse 4 He says, “You haven’t known Me” and he never will know the God of Israel in a saving way as far as any record we have in scripture or otherwise. God says, “You haven’t known Me,” that’s all right, I’m still sovereign. Nebuchadnezzar the same thing. “I am the Lord, there is no other,” verse 5, “besides Me there is no God. I will gird you, though you have not known Me.” You see that repeated about Cyrus, directed to Cyrus even though he’s a 150 years or so away. I’m telling you what you’re like, I’m telling you what you’re going to do, but you won’t know Me. You know about the God of Israel and give instructions but didn’t become a worshiper there. “That men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun that there is no one besides Me. I am the Lord, there is no other,” now note this, “the One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity.”

Now the Lord is not to blame for all these things but He brings the consequences that are proper for man’s rebellion against Him and calamity, suffering, disaster, so you know where it comes from ultimately. Man thinks, well, God wouldn’t do bad things. He does bad things to bad people. People who are in rebellion of Him, against Him, must receive their due which is right. We have a world in rebellion, that’s what He’s talking about here. This, I am the Lord, who does all these things. Verse 9 “Woe to the one who quarrels with his Maker—an earthenware vessel among the vessels of earth! Will the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you doing?’ or the thing you are making say, ‘He has no hands’?“ What? Am I to challenge the living God, who am I to challenge the living God? What is the ruler of an empire compared to the Almighty God? It’s nothing, the mightiest empire in the world, says it’s not a speck of dust on the scale, it’s insignificant to God.

Oh, how’s He going to do… what’s going to happen? What’s happening to our country, what’s going to take place? Exactly what God has determined. Well then, am I upset with God? No. Am I glad to see the consequences of man’s rebellion? I’m saddened to see man’s rebellion and then we have to realize the Bible talks about it. What do we do with what we know? We know the creating God who is the Savior. I see the world deteriorating, moving toward judgment. I’m to be a light in the darkness, as we’ll see, because I serve this living God. Verse 12, “It is I who made the earth, and created man upon it. I stretched out the heavens with My hands and I ordained all their host.” You see, He keeps coming back to this because man puffs himself up in his own importance, and thinks he’s someone big and significant. And I have to realize before the holy God I am nothing, it’s only by His grace I can take my next breath. Remember the king who reached out his hand against the prophet at the false altar of the northern kingdom and it immediately just withered and he begs the prophet “Oh please, pray for me,” like that’s how strong God is. It’s nothing, I can turn your hand into a withered piece of wood. What… how powerful are You? This is the God that is presented in the scripture. If we could just do this for the rest of the hour and it would be profitable, read the scripture. Come down to verse 18, “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens, (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited), “ ‘I am the LORD, there is none else.’ ”

You know, you see the deterioration that goes on, like I say your kids can’t go to school and be taught this. They can’t go to the university and be taught it. Why? We don’t bring God into the picture. Well then, we have to come up to an alternative to God, which basically becomes another god. We call our god maybe science, what we find, what we decide. If we’re not careful, these things begin to intrude upon us. This is why when we get to Romans 12 after talking about God and His power and the salvation in brings He warns those He saves, do not be conformed to this world, but we adopt the wisdom of the world. In Evangelicalism, we have “evangelical Bible-believing Christians” who will not physically discipline their children because… Well, wait, do I get my wisdom from the world or do I get my wisdom from the Bible? Well, I read about this God and we all say Amen! Then we get down to what He says and how things are to be conducted and foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child but the rod of discipline… Well, we have witch doctors who tell us different, we don’t call them witch doctors, we call them psychologists, and they know better than the Bible.

Well, where does that take us? But we’re Bible-believing Christians, we believe in the sovereign God. What is wrong with the world, why don’t they believe? Well, there are parts of it I think the world’s wisdom overrules God’s wisdom. I want to be careful! That’s where we begin to get conformed to the world and more and more we become like the world. There are many other passages, we could go on, John’s Gospel starts out by telling us that Jesus was involved in creating the world. It was the Father, the Son who is Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, He created all things and without Him not anything came into existence that exists, so you know many other… Colossians 1, but we have to move on.

Where we come to this is man… Come back to Genesis 1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and note, we just read He created everything on them including man. When you come down to verse 26 of Genesis 1, “God said,” in this process of creating, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, ” and we will find those words used different times in scripture of man as in the image and likeness of God. “And let them rule” and one of the characteristics of man in the image of God is he has rule, authority, delegated by the One who created him to rule under God over creation, the different life styles that are created. Then verse 27, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them said; and God said to them, “Be fruitful multiply, and fill the earth.” Mankind flows from this creation. Man is in the image of God. Now that doesn’t mean man is God. Man is created to serve the living God and to rule the creation that God rules over under the authority of God, it’s a delegated authority.

Man in the image of God. Down in chapter 2 you get the details of the creation and you see it didn’t evolve. What is theistic evolution? It’s an oxymoron, it’s a cover for a lie. Here the Bible tells you how He did it. Well, you know we have other creation accounts from, you know, secular writings and this is a way they wrote their creation accounts. No, they’re all lies, this is the true one. How did He create? This is the account of the earth. What He’s going to do now in chapter 2, it’s not a separate creation, He’s going to unfold the details of verses 26 and 27 basically since man is the epitome of the creation. The animals weren’t created in the image of God, man was and here you get the details and even man is male and female. The distinction from the beginning is recognized.

God made the man from the dust and here’s the account, verse 7, “The Lord formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. “Then He said, “It’s not good for man to be alone; I’m will make him a helper.” That’s not popular today either. Paul emphasizes it when he writes to the Corinthians when he says the man was not made for the woman but the woman was made for the man. Try to teach that in our schools today. Verse 18, “The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I’ll make him a helper suitable for him” and there’s no helper suitable for him in the animal world, so the Lord God verse 21 caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs,” out of his side part, so the woman is made to be the complement to man and in that sense to complete him. God fashioned the woman from the rib “and brought her to the man. The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Then you have the establishing of marriage.

Of course that’s not in the purview anymore either because marriage is an optional thing. In fact, it gets in the way and now we promote its fine. Sometimes Marilyn and I as I’ve shared, I do it just to comfort her, we watch the house program, you know, people buy houses. You’ve got these young couples; they’ve been living together for 30 years. Now they’re going to take the next step in their relationship and buy a house. So they’ve lived together. What about marriage? Well, the next step is to buy a house and then we’ll see where we go. Well, what do you mean here’s God’s plan? Well, God can’t come in the picture. So you see it begins to permeate, once you’ve rejected God it just permeates out. Oh, well, we’d never go there. Now we can’t say what a man and a woman is, you can’t go to the creation account that God created them to be different, to complement one another but to be different, and He created an order, a man and a woman. We can’t even keep that going in a church to recognize the authority of God. And then we say, what’s happening to the world? And then it begins to infiltrate, these details.

God is sovereign, that’s why we went to Isaiah to see. You know, He just didn’t record this account of creation and then we go on with life. This controls everything in our life from now on. He’s the God who created it all, He’s the God who has authority over it all. If I can use this respectfully, He is Boss, He’s in charge, there’s no one above Him and anyone that He’s appointed under Him has a responsibility to Him. But He appoints even godless men for the carrying out of His purpose, so Jeremiah the prophet will tell the Jews you better submit to Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, it will go much better for you. So it will be for Cyrus. We recognize that what? Those in power are put there by God, there is a respect of that. So He’s created man and woman, man in His image, that becomes important later.

Come over to Genesis 9, after the flood. You know, the value of a human being is he’s created in the image of God. That’s true of every human being, we are all descendants of Adam, we studied that in Romans 5. In the image of God, that image is passed on, that’s what makes man of unique value. You watch commercials on TV and they draw tears to your eyes because of the suffering animals, and the Bible does say you ought to treat your animals and the law and that but really. You know, we murder the kids with abortion but you should give all of your money to take care of the animals. Where does the world get so confused? The value of a human being is he is created in the image of God. You come to Genesis chapter 9 the flood occurs. Noah moves on so we’re all descendants of Adam through Noah because everyone was destroyed in the flood but Noah and his family, so the image of God passed on to us through Noah.

In chapter 9 verse 6 as they come off the ark God enters into an agreement with Noah with a covenant and now Noah is the representative here of the human race because the race will descend from him. They are told to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” verse 1, now that was given to Adam and Eve. The two times that commandment is given is when in the garden there are only two people, Adam and Eve and here there’s only Noah, his wife, and his children and their wives. Now the earth has to be repopulated and then there are governing instructions, verse 6, for our time. “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man.” That’s the foundation for capital punishment, when you strike the image of God you have struck at God. Now not that man is God but he’s made in the image of God and the reason for the ultimate penalty, the taking of that life, is because you struck at the image of God, that’s the ultimate offense here.

That’s capital punishment, we diminish this, we’ve done away with that a long time ago, but now we’re having conflicts and so we created hate crime. Now if I shoot you and kill you because I want your money, well, maybe I ought to get five years in prison, but if I kill you because you’re of a different religion or you’re of a different race, ah, you hated them! You see we’ve moved from what a man is, in the image of God, what’s important is the feeling you had. Hate is a feeling. We moved it from the sin striking at God in His image to the feeling you have, and if you don’t have that feeling, killing the person isn’t near as bad. We’ve diminished the human being and we ought to see this is why there can be respect, even though the nations are divided in the next chapter of the Bible. Because of sin, they get together for the wrong reasons and rebel against God in their unity, which will come together ultimately as we’ve seen in Revelation chapters 12 and 13 under the Antichrist. But there is respect whatever the race, whatever the position, and a man may be the king and a man may be the slave but there is value in that both of them are in the image of God and that’s the uniqueness of it. If we don’t have that then it all gets divided up among, so life is of value, life is important, human life.

I mean we’ve got more money being poured out into animals. I’m glad you love your animals, I love them because they’re yours, but Paul brings this up. We don’t have time to go there because I want to do other things in Acts 17, but come over to James and as you come to James, I’ll just tell you. In Acts 17 Paul is addressing the philosophers on Mars Hill in Greece. And he says we have been created by God, in that sense we are the children of God, so don’t think of God as a stone or a metal image that you’ve made. We’re in the image of God. He’s a living being, we are living, so he does bring that in, even the creation. They’re talking about unbelievers and they’re worshiping idols and temples made to idols and you made all this, but He can’t be made with hands.

When you come into James, this has to do with the way we talk in James 3 verse 8, “No one can tame the tongue; it is a restless evil full of deadly poison,” but “no one can tame the tongue; it is a restless evil full of deadly poison.” What’s the point? Look, “with it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God.” Now wait a minute, I have to be careful what I say about another human being, he’s in the likeness of God even in his fallen state. Remember Titus, even as we have been redeemed we have to remember we were once just like them. Recognizing the value of human life, showing respect to that even in the way we speak about other people. They’re not talked about and to be treated like an animal because they are not, we don’t show them that kind of disrespect. Now there is order established and King David had slaves that served him but even the Bible there… in slavery you’re not to dehumanize people, so that respectability. That crosses races, that was done before races existed.

Tragedy those kinds of corrupted thinking. I have some theology books written and they’ve been republished, not because the publisher would agree with everything but they were well-respected theologians, multi-volumes. I was going to bring one and read you what they wrote about differences in the races but I thought it’s embarrassing, and it just would not be proper the way they talk about other races. These are evangelical churches and why they couldn’t be in a position and they couldn’t have that because it’s… they talk about the other races like they’re animals. How did that get into the church, how did that kind of thinking take hold? This is the most respected speaker in the Southern Presbyterian Church, got four volumes of his works, been republished and he’s not the only one. I said where’d they get this, what happened to the Bible in this? Well, what’s going on in the world begins to take control of the thinking of people. Now we look and we say what were they thinking? They weren’t thinking biblically. That is why now we are caught in the turmoil and then the pressure and all that’s going on. If we’re not careful we become inconsistent with the Word. What does that do to our testimony? Its ability to shine gets smothered because we’re not in obedience to the Word.

How do I tell other people the greatness of God and He requires that we bow before Him and obey Him but I don’t have to do it? Israel got into that position thinking they were just special because they were Israel. People go to church and think they’re just special because they go to church. God is looking at the heart not whether we physically take up a spot. All right, that’s man in the image of God, with all this turmoil we have going on, that’s all that has nothing to do with anything. If we carried out our law, if we respected the Bible things would be clear, you take a life you will give your life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re red and yellow, black and white, they’re all precious in His sight as we teach the kids. But why? Well, they were created in the image of God and God in love provided a Savior. It doesn’t have anything to do with your race, it doesn’t have anything to do with your position, it doesn’t have anything to do with your money. We disregard these things and then confusion comes, it’s a result of sin.

And we’ve got to get here, light and darkness. Light and darkness, light and darkness, and man becomes a picture, light and darkness, and in the beginning it’s darkness and then God created light and then it becomes a spiritual metaphor. Darkness involves the inability to see and so the inability to know. Sin brought darkness into the world, spiritual darkness, sometimes pictured as blindness. We all know, we’ll be in a place that has no windows, you know, and they turn off the lights and you start to say it’s a darkness you can feel. And you can’t see anything and if you’ve never been in that room… I mean if we brought a person in here, blindfolded them, they’d never been in this room, never seen anything in this room, then blacked everything out, and they’re blindfolded, then tell them walk around and find your way out. You know, it would become difficult because they don’t know. Well, can you give me a hint? Well yeah, there’s a big hole in the middle of this room, its 200 feet deep, if you fall in you’ll never get out. Well, they would believe the lie because they can’t see, they don’t know, so whatever lie comes along they believe. Oh, be careful you don’t want to go through that door, you’ll be eaten alive, it’s filled with red ants from Africa or whatever, they’ll eat through your skin. Oh, you can create the fear and they don’t know. That’s the picture spiritually of man in his fallen condition. God is light, in Him there is no darkness, to come to the light you must come to the salvation God provides, so that’s the picture that we have in scripture.

I want to jump through a couple of verses here but since you took so long on the other, I can’t do them all. Light and darkness, light and darkness, you know, the prince of darkness is the devil, there’s a ruler the devil, he rules this darkened world, he is sovereign under God. Come to the book of Luke, the book of Luke chapter 4. I’ve combined this, I was going to do these separate, Luke chapter 4, this is the temptation of Christ. You have it recorded in Matthew 4, but we’ll go to Luke 4, we often read Matthew. Luke 4 verse 5, this is when He’s beginning His public ministry and He’s led into the wilderness, and He’s tested by the devil and tempted by the devil. In verse 5 the devil “led Him up and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.” You see something of the power of the devil. I mean, we’ve got a group of spirit beings, angelic, unfallen and fallen, between man and God but look at the power of the devil, he can take Christ up to a high mountain. How did he get Him there? Just like that. You know, they didn’t have motorized or airplane, it just… he takes Him there, they’re there and then he’s able to show Him all the kingdoms in the world from that vantage point. What about the ones on the other side of the globe, he shows Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. Here they go, here they are, and what’s he say? They can all be Yours, verse 6, “the devil said to Him, “I will give You all this domain and its glory,” their glory. Look at this, “for it has been handed over to me,” there’s the catch you see. God has not given up His authority but He has delegated it as a result of the fall to the devil. So now over fallen man is not only the sovereign, supreme God, but there is a spirit being, the devil, and he has authority to dole out his kingdoms and here he offers it to Christ.

“I give it to whomever I wish,” he has a power here, now how we put together with this God’s sovereign and controlling all this I don’t know that we can ultimately. He can give it to who He wished but what he wishes is always consistent and harmonious with what God has planned even for fallen creation and even the demons recognize that. Remember the demons when Christ came and did miracles said, “Have you come to torment us before the time? So the devil and the demons have some understanding of the unfolding of the plan of God. Remember before they fell they served in the presence of God and since the fall, they go back to present themselves in the presence of God from time to time, the opening chapters of Job for one place. But the devil is working in the world under God’s plan and as the devil carries out… The catch here is verse 7, “Therefore if You worship before me, it shall all be Yours,” the catch. You see, what the devil wants is worship, that constant promotion of the rebellion against God. How did he get man entrapped? Did God tell you to do this? Ah, no. He’s just afraid you’ll know as much as Him, I’ll tell you what, disobey Him and do what I tell you then you’ll really be smart.

Isn’t that what they tell you today? The Bibles outdated but that’s… Yeah, believe what we tell you, you’ll really be smart. The line never changes but it’s always effective because it’s dealing with fallen men and we have to be careful. So now we’ve got this going on, we’ve got the ruler of darkness, come over to Ephesians chapter 6, Ephesians chapter 6 and you wouldn’t believe the number of verses I have on this but I want you to come back, so I’ll summarize it and you can look up light and darkness, get a concordance. Picked up an old concordance, Young’s Concordance, it’s from my mother. She wrote in the front her name, saved by grace. Great, now she’s in heaven, saved by grace, it doesn’t get any better than that. That’s the world in which we live. Look at Ephesians 6… shouldn’t bring that up, it gets me emotional.

Ephesians 6 verse 12, look at what we’re battling against. We have to “put on the full armor of God,” verse 11. Verse 10, “we must be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might,” (verse 12) “for our struggle is not against flesh and blood.” Look what’s going on in the cities, look what’s going on in the world. Look at the things we ought to be concerned about, we’re not battling against flesh and blood “but against the rulers,” note this, “against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness.” You see, the darkness, that’s the spiritual condition that envelops the world, except for those saved by grace they are living in a world of darkness, “against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

My concern all that goes on in the world -- we as believers if we’re not careful get more concerned about our own comfort. Oh, boy, if we don’t get things under control what’s going to happen to our country? Well, maybe it answers the question we’ve asked so many times when we’ve looked into prophecy, what happens to the United States? Maybe it tears itself apart from within, you don’t have to have to have direct war conflict. We’ve gone from pandemic virus where you can’t leave your house to people flooding the streets in violence that you can’t get in their house. You say, well, everything is unraveling. We find governmental leaders that… you know, all that is in the world is the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eyes and the boastful pride of life. Why are we so taken back? You know, I look and see, I can’t believe people would just blatantly lie and not be embarrassed to be caught in their blatant lie.

Well, what do we descend to? A school teacher told me she was told in her class she’s not allowed to refer to boys and girls because you can’t distinguish that way, you can call them students. I pulled out a booklet that was circulated among teachers from the 1980s telling them how they have to condition their kids to accept same sex kind of relationships. Where do we go? Now with the openness we see how defiant man is against God and sometimes where Christians are. I’m shocked, I can’t believe, even unbelievers I didn’t expect would act like this. Paul wasn’t shocked at the Roman Empire. He doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about how shocked I am at the lifestyle of Nero, how shocked I am at the way these Romans live.

Come to Romans chapter 1. I think this is as far as we go. I encourage you just get your concordance out (I got sidetracked with my mother). Look up ‘light,’ look up ‘darkness,’ there’s a lot of verses but mark out the ones then trace them down in your Bible, you’ll see the difference living in light and darkness. I told you to go to Romans 1, we’ve been there if you’ve been in our Sunday night study. This tells you what happens, note how it unfolds. He talks about the gospel, which is man’s salvation. God is light, in Him is no darkness. The word of God is light. Your word is a lamp unto my feet, a light for my path. Why do you think churches progressively move away more and more from the study of the Word less and less? Well, you know, we don’t have Sunday night service anymore. Well, Sunday School… You know, the devil is constantly trying to dampen the light, turn it down. I come to scripture and I want to take more of it, it’s the food; the psalmist says it’s more necessary for me than my food that I eat. It’s more precious to me than gold. Well now, we’re on Sunday morning, I hope we don’t get any longer and back on Sunday night. Getting up early on Sunday morning and then through the week.

What is our life about? If the world takes over… And here we see what happens to the world in its lostness, verse 18, “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven,” Romans 1, “against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth.” This is where they are, they are in active, open rebellion against God. I write in the front of my Bible ‘the story of mankind - relentless rebellion against revelation.’ The God who has revealed Himself made it known, man is in relentless rebellion against it and against the God who gives it. The creation has revealed God, man has rejected that revelation. Verse 21, they’re not innocent people out there, they’re not people who don’t know any better, they are people in purposeful rebellion against God.

You want to find out? Join one of the demonstrations and start sharing the scripture with them. I don’t recommend you do that, it could be unhealthy, but it says in verse 21, “even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks.” There is no excuse, God says the evidence of My power, My sovereignty, and so on, its evident everywhere you look. It’s evident when you get up and look in the mirror in the morning, but they wouldn’t give Him thanks so their hearts darkened. There’s the word ‘darkened,’ that’s where they are spiritually. They are just walking around. Close your eyes look around. What do you see? Nothing, that’s what they see, spiritually nothing, so they’ve created stuff, but it’s not real, but they pretend it is.

There’s a good article, even written by an unbeliever, and there’s a professor that says there, well, this says a man can pretend to be a woman, dress like a woman, act like a woman, but he’s a man pretending to be a woman. A woman can do that and pretend to be a man, dress like a man, but you can’t change a man to a woman or a woman to a man. Things are obvious but they will not take the scripture… it permeates every area, they exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for a form other and then they worship the creation or aspects of it. Science, they call a part of creation, it’s gods of astrology and everything else goes on. They exchange the truth of God for a lie so “God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity” in verse 24.

“God gave them over…” in verse 26, they exchanged the natural function of the woman and the man, they abandoned that, so we come to verse 28, “God gave them over to a depraved mind,” that’s God’s judgment, you see the outworking of it, they “do those things which are not proper.” We’ve talked about these vice lists that come up in scripture and they’re not all the same because they’re just examples of all that come out of a depraved heart and mind. They’re “filled,” verse 29, “with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful;” and they know. Do you have that marked? “And although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.”

Now we shouldn’t be surprised what we see going on in our world. You know what’s happened; we’ve diminished in our thinking as Bible-believing Christians the awesomeness of the sovereignty of God and His expectations and requirements and the woeful miserable condition of a world living in darkness. You’d think we’d run out of here and grab on to every unbeliever we see and say I have to tell you there is hope there is life, there is light in this miserable world. We just sort of get a little more concerned about our comfort. And this is the condition of the world, it will get worse. We are moving toward when the devil can put his man in power. You know, all the unrest, all the turmoil, it’s all under control, the riots in the street, man expressing his rebellion against God, you know, that parading. And people, they don’t know, they’re frustrated, they’re upset, they’re angry.

I had some time ago a man in to see me, and his wife had… is leaving me. Why? And we went through scriptures. I don’t know, I’m just frustrated. Why? You know, pretty soon that I have to get myself back. Sometimes you just have to get back. You know, the word of God is the light, don’t think you can get too much light in your life. You know, my eyes dim with age so I have lights around, and I turn them on and then when I turn up my bright light for reading, oh, I see so much clearer. You know why you want more of the light, I want to take in more of the Word, I want it to be more important to me than my food. Why do we give up so easily? Oh, it’s so much trouble. I’m concerned for the evangelical church, it’s to be the pillar and support of the truth, and the truth, that God’s light in the world, but men love the darkness rather than the light, but we’re not of the world. If we say that we love the light and we walk in the darkness, we’re lost, we’re lost. So the truth… we serve Almighty God.

All that’s going on around, you know, you almost feel like I don’t want to watch anymore of the news, you go from one thing to another and it doesn’t seem to get better, and things unravel. Well, it doesn’t surprise me, maybe the Lord is moving. I see we’re going to take troops out of Europe, Europe should defend itself, well, maybe Europe ought to have their own army, well, then maybe the antichrist ought to come up and get things together. What happen to the United States? Oh, it devoured itself and it just sort of went the way they go, collapsed from within. I don’t know, I’m not making a prophecy. That’s why we don’t have a gravel parking lot, you can’t stone the prophet (laughter) and I’m not a prophet. I’m just saying we want to be aware of what the world says, and we want to be lights in this darkness.

We’re not caught up in its turmoil, I’m just a stranger and pilgrim here. I realize all these things are going to be burned up with fire, so don’t hold them precious. But this is precious, we’ve got light, we’ve got the brightest light to shine, I can shine the truth of this light on a life. I was on the phone with a man this week and I said to him, look you need to listen to me here, you’re in a serious condition, you must get right with the Lord, I talked to you about this. Will it work? But I’ve got to give him the light. There’s no hope for him, you die in darkness, you go to the darkness of hell. I’ve shared with you as I close in prayer, I read about a fireman who was going through the test and they put this suit on him and put him into the burning fire. You know what he said about it? He said I thought it would be bright but it was absolute darkness. You’re cast into outer darkness, that’s hell, the outer darkness. People think, well ,I’m going to hell, all my friends will be there. Yeah, but you probably won’t be seeing them. You’re going to be in a terrible condition. We have the light. Shine the light.

Let’s pray. Thank you, Lord, for the riches of Your word, thank you that it is light. And we realize that the devil works to keep the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ from shining into a heart, Lord, but by Your grace that light has come into our lives. Each one of us as believers in Jesus Christ, we can be testimonies of Your grace and we give You thanks for that salvation, so personal and so eternal. And Lord, we would hold this Word which is a revelation You have given of Yourself precious, important. Lord, we would invest our life in it, we would fill our life with it, and Lord, we would live it out wherever we are, whatever we’re doing. Thank you for this time together. Bless us as we go our separate ways, we go to our homes. Bless the afternoon and bless us as we come together again around Your word this evening. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

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