Welcome, friends, to another
broadcast of Morsels for Zion's Poor. The absolute unbending
justice of a holy God is quite a foreign consideration in the
minds of the multitude who profess faith in Christ. It has been
replaced with a consideration of the Lord of Heaven as being
something of a pathetic would-be benefactor who desires to do
more than he is allowed to do by the very creation which his
own hands have made. He is presented as one who is
helplessly standing by as men determine whether or not he can
save them and bless them or even be their God apart from their
permission. He is believed by many to have his hands completely
tied by the free will of his own creation. Yet he is that
one whom the singers of the song of Moses and the Lamb described
this way. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord,
and glorify thy name? For thou only art holy, for all
nations shall come and worship before thee, for thy judgments
are made manifest. He is that one whom John saw
and testified. And I saw a great white throne,
and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the
heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them. Come
behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made
in the earth. He is the Lord our God, his judgments
are in all the earth. God is fundamentally just, will
not wink at sin, hates the workers of iniquity, and will uphold
his justice in the destruction of the wicked. Moses was called
by the Lord to behold a burning bush which was not consumed,
and was inhabited by him who is a consuming fire. Later on
he appeared to Moses on a mountain that was filled with fire and
smoke, giving to Moses a law which promised cursing and destruction
upon all who would stray from it. Moses asked the Lord for
a glimpse of his glory. Surely Moses must have expected
some conflagration of terror to be set forth. We can only
imagine the consternation that must have gripped him in heart
and mind when the Lord said, I will make all my goodness pass
before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee,
and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will
show mercy on whom I will show mercy. Thus we are made to understand
that the glory of the Lord is in His goodness and His mercy,
which He is pleased to show to the sons of men in the Lord Jesus
Christ, who is the fullness of the Godhead bodily, the express
image of His person. It is in Christ that all of the
knowledge of God, which is possible for men to grasp, is found. But
it is impossible that sinful men could begin to have a true
appreciation of this revelation until they are made to see the
dire condition they are in as aliens from the commonwealth
of Israel, being rebel sinners whose fists are raised against
the Lord of glory. By nature, men will not bow the
knee to a sovereign God who dispenses mercy as He alone sees fit. They will worship the gods of
their own imagination. They will assume that He can
be reasoned with according to their own standard of justice
and righteousness. The natural man finds no wonder
in the mercy of God, because he thinks that God should show
mercy to him and that the Lord regards sin as lightly as He
does. Yet when a man is born again by the Spirit of God in
the time and place of God's own choosing, he is made to shudder
before a broken law and to tremble at the prospect of standing before
the judge of all the earth, covered from head to foot in filthy rags.
He is slain before God, as Paul describes, for I was alive without
the law once, that is, he was in ignorance of the true holiness
of the law. But when the commandment came, that is, when a true revelation
of the law and the lawgiver came, sin revived. That is, I saw myself
be a condemned sinner and I died. That is, I fell at his feet as
a dead man. And the commandment which was ordained to life I
found to be unto death. That same spirit granting the
gift of faith to those so slain overwhelms them with the wonder
of his mercy and the taste of his forgiveness, striking in
them an abiding sense of awe that he would take them in his
arms and love them who had willingly disobeyed him without true regard
to his holiness. As the psalmist says, there is
forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared. This fear of
God causes them to desire to depart from evil, which thing
the terrors of the law could never do. By mercy and truth,
iniquity is purged, and by the fear of the Lord, men depart
from evil. For the law of the Spirit of
life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and
death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through
the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful
flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh. Do you fear
him who is a consuming fire? For a free CD containing 15 of
these radio broadcasts, send an email to forthepoor at windstream.net.