Now, I have two messages that
I'm going to bring from Exodus 20, and I've entitled both messages,
Christ, the End of the Law. Now, that may sound strange to
some people, you know, well, here we are in Exodus 20, and
this is where you have the listing of the 10 commandments that God
gave Moses on Mount Sinai. But if you want some good New
Testament commentary on the giving of the law, and the purpose of
the law. And we're gonna look at probably
two of these. Galatians chapter three is a
good commentary on it. And second Corinthians chapter
three. Both are good commentaries on
the issues of the 10 commandments, the tables of stone, tablets
of stone, the law. And shows us that the purpose
of the law was to show them their sinfulness and their need of
God's grace. And if you understand that, it'll
help you to understand how we're to relate to the Ten Commandments.
Now let me say this at the outset. The moral precepts that are codified
in the Ten Commandments were moral precepts that were enforced
since the beginning. When God says here, thou shalt
not kill, Well, it was just as wrong for the man Cain to kill
Abel, murder him back then, even before Sinai, as it was when
this law was given. So understand that this is nothing
new. The only thing really new in
it is the law of the Sabbath. But we're going to talk about
that mainly at the end of this lesson That's where we're going
to conclude because I'm going to do This is where the Lord
God brought the people of Israel from Egypt across the Red Sea
and here to Mount Sinai and He's going to give them the law, but
not just the Ten Commandments. He's going to give them the law
covenant and which would be binding upon this nation until the time
of the Messiah. And when Christ would come and
do his great work of redemption for God's true chosen people,
spiritual Israel, chosen of God out of every tribe, kindred,
tongue, and nation. And it's here we see how God
gave the Ten Commandments to show mainly the people how desperately
they needed God. how desperately they were in
need of His grace and His mercy for salvation and for righteousness.
And one of the things over in Exodus 19, look over at Exodus
19 and verse 12. God set a boundary around this
mountain to show the people that their sin separated them from
God. What is it that separates us
naturally from God? It's sin. And look at verse 12,
it says, God telling Moses here, thou shalt set bounds or boundaries
unto the people round about saying, take heed to yourselves that
you go not up into the mount or touch the border of it. Whosoever
touches the mount shall be surely put to death. Now that's like
a preview of what's coming, a preview of coming attractions showing
that the law, or what Paul calls in 2 Corinthians 3, the letter,
the written law, killeth, he says. And he calls this the ministry
of condemnation in the ministry of death. Verse 13 of Exodus
19 says, there shall not in hand touch it. But he shall surely
be stoned and shot through, that is, with a spear or an arrow.
Whether it be a beast or man, it shall not live. When the trumpet
soundeth long, they shall come up to the mount. Now, in other
words, when the trumpet sounded, the people were to come up to
the mount, but there was still that borderline that they could
not cross. And what God is showing here,
now, this is God the judge, the righteous giver of the law. You understand? And even in Exodus
19 there, he tells Moses, you tell the people to wash their
clothes. And that's an illustration that
becomes later on ceremonial washings that illustrate how a person
had to be cleansed from all filth to meet God, cleansed from sin.
Now, that physical washing of their bodies and their clothes
could never put away sin, but that's a picture of the washing
of the water of the word and the blood of Christ. But that's
what God is illustrating here. These are lessons. What we're
going to see actually in a lot of this as it's fulfilled in
Christ is the gospel and how God saves sinners. So Moses was
called by God to go up into the mountain to receive the law.
He came down and he told the people what God had told him.
And in Exodus 19 and verse eight, Listen to this. This is where
the people vowed to obey the law of God. Look at verse eight
of Exodus 19. And all the people answered together and said, all
that the Lord hath spoken, we will do. And Moses returned the
words of the people unto the Lord. They said, well, we'll
do that, Moses. We'll keep the law. But I want
to tell you something. Religious people have been saying
that ever since. And it didn't take the Israelites
long to break their vow. Didn't take them long at all.
They had already broken the vow. They'd broken it back before
they crossed the Red Sea, complaining and murmuring against Moses and
against the Lord. But you know what happens when
Moses goes up and gets the tablets and he comes back down, what
does he find the people doing? Keeping the law? No, they're
worshiping an idol. So it didn't take them long.
You see, like us, they were sinners. And they could not live up to
their vow to keep the perfection of the law. And like I said,
people ever since, the natural man has always vowed to keep
the law, but he breaks it, and then he vows to do his best.
Because he thinks, well, that's got to be good enough. I preached
on this last Sunday at Brother Wormack's and at Grace Baptist's
about the sliding scale of judgment. He says that's one of the main
false doctrines of false Christianity. And they don't put it like that,
but everything's on a sliding scale. But the law is not a sliding
scale. The law is the perfection of
righteousness that God requires in order to have fellowship with
people. And that's the whole thing. The
law demands perfect righteousness and no sinner can do that. There's
none righteous, no not one. That's not talking about other
people, that's talking about us by nature. There's none that
doeth good, there's none that even seeketh after God. You see,
what does that tell us? It tells us that we don't have
the perfection that God requires, and we don't want it God's way.
We want it our way like the people of Israel. Oh, we'll keep it
all, and if I break some here and there, I'll try, I'll do
my best. That ought to be good enough.
There's that sliding scale. Over in Galatians chapter three, that I told you about that is
a good commentary on the giving of the law. Listen to this. This is Galatians chapter three
and verse 10. It says, for as many as are of
the works of the law are under the curse. What does it mean,
those who are of the works of the law? Those who are trying
to make themselves righteous and fit and qualified for fellowship
with God by their works. If that's what you're doing,
you're of the works of the law and you're under a curse. Why?
For it's written, cursed is everyone that continues not in, underline
this, all things which are written in the book of the law to do
them. And so we understand that all things means all things in
deed, all things in heart and mind, We're gonna learn that. So look back at Exodus 20 here. Christ alone is the perfection,
the perfect fulfiller of the law. He told them on the sermon,
I didn't come to break the law, I came to keep it. I came to
fulfill every jot and tittle. And there's no sliding scale,
he said. Those who say it's okay to do
this and not do that and come out thinking that you've kept
the law, if you don't keep the law every jot and tittle, you're
under the curse. That's what he said. And that's
why he told them, your righteousness has to exceed the righteousness
of the scribes and the Pharisees. So he's the one and only righteousness
of his people. Now this is what this law shows.
because his righteousness imputed to us exceeds any human efforts
to produce righteousness. It must exceed the righteousness
of the scribes and the Pharisees. Christ and his obedience unto
death is the very righteousness of God imputed, charged, accounted
to his people, and that which God brings his people to believe
by God-given faith. And so therefore, that's why
I titled this message and next week's Christ the end, the finishing,
fulfilling, perfection of the law for righteousness to everyone
that believeth. That's what that means. Now in
the 10 commandments here, the first four commandments have
to do with man's relationship to God. And the first four, they
can be summed up in love, God, Perfectly, that's what that,
you remember the lawyer who asked Christ, which is the first law? He said, the law summed up, love
God perfectly. Love God with all your heart,
soul, mind and body and strength. Love God perfectly. And then
the last six commandments have to do with man's relationship
to each other. Love your neighbor as yourself,
perfectly. So the law requires perfection,
the perfection of the law. So let's look at it, look at
verses one and two. And God spoke all these words
saying, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Now what he's
saying, God is establishing, the first thing he establishes
is his sovereign right to give the law. And he's establishing
that our relationship in the law is to be measured by the
nature and holiness of God. And you know, that was established
back in the Garden of Eden in the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil. That tree, I believe, represented God's sovereign right
to give the law, to say God is the measure of right and wrong. The only way that we can truly
measure what is righteous and what is sinful is as we measure
it according to the nature and holiness and justice of God.
And if we do it any other way, we've dropped down to that sliding
scale of false religion. And that's where people come
up with these ideas of progressive holiness and progressive sanctification
as if, well, if I improve myself on any given day, that means
I'm sinning less and I'm more righteous than I was. Well, who
you measuring by there? How you compare to each other?
Well, Paul says if you do that, you are not wise. Second Corinthians
10. Who you measuring it by? I'll
tell you who you need to measure it by. Measure it by Christ. If I do improve today, how do
I measure up with Him? I still fall short. I still fall
short of the glory of God. What does that tell me? Should
I improve myself? Should I try to be a better person?
Yes! But I can't measure myself on that sliding scale and think
I come out more righteous and less sinful than I was before.
I've got to look to Christ for righteousness, for hope. He's
the end of the law for righteousness. Well, then he begins to give
the commandments. Look at verse three. Thou shalt have no other
gods before me. There is one God, one mediator
between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. There are not many
gods. as the heathens say. God the
creator, the deliverer of Israel. God who justifies the ungodly. There's one. We worship one God
who subsists in three distinct persons. That's not three, the
Trinity is not three gods. The Trinity is one God who subsists
in three distinct persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that's
not as the Muslims accuse us of, of worshiping many gods.
We have one God. And that one God who reveals
himself in the person and finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In that lesson, if you look at your lesson there, about the
middle of that paragraph, Exodus 20 and verse 3, I have a sentence
that says, sinful people have no knowledge of the true God
and no, and that word's K-N-O-W, it should be N-O. So you might
want to mark that down. And no desire to worship him
until the Holy Spirit reveals Christ. Understand now. Man, by nature, wants to worship
something greater, he sees as greater than himself. But he
does not want to worship, seeking to worship the true and living
God of the Bible, by nature. He wants to seek and worship
a God who is likened to himself. He's by nature an idolater. That's
what I was before God brought me to a saving knowledge of himself
in Christ. I was an idolater. Now I would
have said, oh yeah, we worship one God. And I would have said
it's the God of the Bible, but my thoughts and my views of God
were idolatrous because I didn't know the true and living God.
You don't know the true and living God until he's revealed to you
by Christ over in the book of Matthew chapter 11. Christ said
this, verse 27. He says, all things are delivered
unto me of my Father, and listen to it now, and no man knoweth
the Son but the Father. In other words, if you're gonna
know Christ, the Son of God, as Savior, Redeemer, God's gonna
have to reveal Him to you. You're not gonna find Him on
your own searching down in this veil of tears. So no man knoweth
the Son but the Father, but look on, neither knoweth any man the
Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal
him. You're not gonna know God as
your heavenly Father truly until Christ reveals him to you by
the Spirit. And that's what it means in John
6 45 when it says, he that heareth, and hath learned of the Father,
cometh unto me, cometh unto Christ. And what do we learn of the Father?
We learn how God can be both a just God and a Savior. How he can be both a righteous
judge, as well as a loving Father, upon the one ground of the blood
of Jesus Christ. The one ground of his righteousness
imputed. And then, what Jim preached last
week in two messages, then we can call God Abba Father. Then we know the one true and
living God who justifies his people. All other gods, all other gods are idols. And whenever a man stands behind
a pulpit and preaches that God saves sinners based upon anything
other than his sovereign electing grace through the blood and righteousness
of the Lord Jesus Christ, that person is preaching an idol.
There's one God. Thou shalt have no other gods
before me. Now go to the second commandment.
Here's verse four. This is in verse four through
six. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any
likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in
the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
You see, God knew man's tendency to put spiritual significance
on physical things that he makes. That's man's tendency. You see,
you got a picture of Jesus, and that has some special significance
to you, spiritually speaking. That picture is what he's talking
about. That's a graven image. You don't
know what Jesus looked like. If you wanna know Jesus, read
God's word. The glorious person in the finished
work of Christ. He's God manifest in the flesh.
You can't draw his picture. You can't fashion him out of
marble and stone and clay. And I guarantee you, man has
that tendency now that once they do that, there's some spiritual
significance. And look at the Catholic Church.
Look at all their icons and their idols. People going up to these
things, praying for miracles of healing and stuff like that.
He goes on, verse five, thou shalt not bow down thyself to
them, nor serve them, these idols, these graven images, for I, the
Lord thy God, am a jealous God. This is a holy jealousy, wherein
God will not share his glory with anyone or anything. Visiting
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and to the third
and fourth generation of them that hate me. That hatred, that
idolatrous, that goes through families. I heard of a man who had a statue,
a little statue of Jesus that his grandmother gave him. Boy,
you get that away from him, he'd just about kill you. You see,
it's got double meanings to it. But God says in verse six, look
here, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me
and keep my commandments. Well, who's he talking about
there? He's talking about his people whom he saves by his grace. You see, the whole law is summarized
in two commandments, love God perfectly, love your neighbor
as yourself. And if we love God and keep his commandments in
any way, it's the product of his grace given us in and by
the Lord Jesus Christ. Now no sinner can say that we
love God perfectly and that we keep his commandments perfectly.
I'm only a sinner saved by grace. Only a sinner saved by grace.
But here's the thing, if we're saved by His grace, we can say
we love God. We love God because He first
loved us. That love is a gift and grace
of the Holy Spirit that draws us to Him as our Abba Father,
as the adopted and redeemed children of God. He saved me by His grace. He had mercy on me. He's my heavenly
Father. He's justified me by His grace
through Christ. I stand before Him in the righteousness
of another, and He's given me spiritual life. But here's the
thing. The only way that we as sinners
saved by grace can say we keep the commandments of God is as
we look to Christ and plead His righteousness. That's right,
as we have the life of Christ within us that turns our eyes
and our minds and our hearts toward him to see him, Christ
is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believe it.
If you look to yourself to find any assurance of law keeping,
you're looking in a wrong place. Look unto Christ. He's our hope. He's the well of mercy for God's people. But these graven images that
people put significance on, even if it's just a little significance,
it's forbidden. Not just under the Ten Commandments,
but under the New Testament too. Somebody might say, well now,
we're not under the Ten Commandments. Not as a moral code as given
to this nation in the covenant. But there are moral precepts
that are in play even before the Ten Commandments and they'll
never change. It's just as wrong to kill somebody today as it
was back then. You understand that? But this
is what God has given to this nation for a purpose. to show them their sin. Now look
at verse seven. Here's the third commandment.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,
for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name
in vain. Well, what he's doing here, he's forbidding taking
the name of God and using it for any purpose without truth
and without fear and reverence. That's what he's forbidding.
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Every
time a false preacher, now when we hear that don't take the name
of the Lord in vain, we think about cuss words, like GD and
stuff like that. And that's certainly wrong. And we're all guilty of it. In
some way or another, just like I was telling about all these
HGTV programs you watch, the first thing they come in, they
see that old house, which they pay for, and they say, oh my. And that's wrong. Now, there's
nothing wrong with thanking God, saying thank God for this, if
God has given us even material pleasures. Well, we thank the
Lord. As I've told you a lot of times, we thank the Lord for
the very next breath we take, don't we? Nothing wrong with
thanking the Lord for the food on our table. We're not to make
a public spectacle of ourselves and that's what the Lord told
us, but we thank him. I was eating lunch with a fellow
one time. He said, aren't you going to bless the food? I said,
no, I'm not going to bless it. God's already done that. And
he said, aren't you going to thank him for it? I said, I already
have. And you didn't see it, I told him. And that's the way
it should be. That's right. Because see, those
things aren't our witness for God. The gospel is our witness.
All right. But every time a false preacher
ascends a pulpit and preaches a false gospel of salvation conditioned
on sinners, he tells a lie about God and takes God's name in vain.
Did you know that? Taking God's name in vain. They're
also engaging in idolatry by telling sinners of a God who
will save them and receive them and bless them if they'll do
their part. That's not the God of the Bible.
You see, this misrepresents the true and living God. So understand
that. Now look at verses eight through
11. This is where we'll conclude with the fourth commandment.
Then we'll pick up next week with the rest of them. But this
is the Sabbath commandment. Remember the Sabbath day and
keep it holy. That means set it apart for something
special. Somebody said every day is holy. Well, under the old covenant,
the seventh day here was set apart from the other six. He says in verse nine, six days
shalt thou labor and do all thy work, but the seventh day is
the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. The word Sabbath means rest. Rest from your labors. In it
thou shalt not do any work, thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter,
thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger,
that is a foreigner, and that is within thy gates. In other
words, what he's saying here, it's not right for you to say,
well, I'm resting, but I'm gonna put my servants to work. No. That's not what you're to do.
Verse 11, for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the
sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day, wherefore
the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it, even in
creation. Showing there that the work was
done in six days and then the Lord was satisfied. Well, this
concerns the Sabbath day under the old covenant. And so after
six days of working, they were to set this aside and honor the
seventh day by not doing any physical labor. And there were
other commandments that were connected with this Sabbath day
that kind of hedged them about. In fact, it was a real burden.
Now Christ set things straight. In any of the laws, man has always
added his codicils to it, called the traditions of men. And Christ,
you remember, he set the Pharisees straight one time. He said, the
Lord never forbade acts of mercy and acts of necessity on the
Sabbath day. Never did. But see, they had
it set to where they could. But the Sabbath was the sign
of the whole old covenant. Did you know that? Now you can
read about that, we won't turn there, in Exodus 31. You know, each covenant had a
sign. For example, the sign of the covenant between Adam and
the Lord before in the garden was the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. The Sabbath, the sign between
Noah and God was the rainbow. The sign of the old covenant
was the Sabbath day. And it tells us that in Exodus
31. But this is why the penalty for
breaking the Sabbath was so severe. It was even death. If you broke
the Sabbath, the sentence of death was upon you. And people
look back and they say, man, that's harsh. Well, that sign,
that Sabbath was a sign of the whole covenant. And when a person
broke that Sabbath, that means he was forsaken the whole covenant.
And you remember over in the book of Numbers chapter 15, when
they caught a man picking up sticks on the Sabbath and they
stoned him? That's the problem, see, that man was forsaking the
whole covenant with God by doing that. And the Sabbath forced
Israel to think about two things every week. First of all, the
Sabbath rest reminded them of what was lost because of our
sin and rebellion, our fallen Adam. For which man was cursed
to do what? To hard labor. Read about it
in Genesis 3, 17, the curse upon the man. You're going to make
your way by the sweat of your brow, thorns and thistles, all
that's going to grow. It's going to be a tough life.
You're going to be a tough life. The life of sweat and tears.
And that's a constant reminder of the joy and the peace that
we lost when Adam fell. And secondly, the Sabbath was
a constant reminder of the promise that one was coming who would
establish a greater Sabbath rest. And that's the Lord Jesus Christ.
A Sabbath rest that could not be broken and destroyed by anything. The Sabbath was a constant reminder
of both the burden of sin and the promise and hope of salvation
by Christ. And as true believers under the
new covenant, our Sabbath is not a day. Now I know people
have a hard time with this, but we shouldn't. Our Sabbath is
not a day. Our Sabbath is Christ. He worked
in Hebrews 4. Now you read Hebrews 4 on this.
There remaineth, even to this day, a Sabbath rest for the people
of God. What is that Sabbath rest according
to Hebrews 4? It's the rest that we enter in when Christ, come
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, I'll give you
rest. So we don't have a Sabbath day under the new covenant. We
have Christ who is the fulfiller of all righteous. He's our Sabbath.
Well, what about Sunday? Well, Sunday was the day that
was set apart by the Lord to his apostles and his church to
set aside as the Lord's day wherein we would come together just like
we are right now to worship the Lord collectively. And we're
to do that. This is not something we can
take or leave. And I'll tell you what now, when a person forsakes
the assembling, you see, think about our worship services say
a lot. We come here, number one, to
worship and glorify God, to be fed by His work, and to fellowship
with His people, but also to identify with His people. We're
making a statement here. I'm gonna talk about that in
the next message a little bit. We're saying that we worship
the true and living God. And though we should worship
Him every day, every day's a day that the Lord made, This is a
special day that we're commanded under the new covenant to come
together and worship the Lord corporately. To express our love
for our Lord and our brethren and our love for his word. That's
what these are for. The book of Hebrews tells us
that forsaking the assembly a lot of times is the first step in
total apostasy. Somebody gets away from you,
they say you get out of the habit. You better get back in the habit,
and that's not a legal threat. That's not a legal threat at
all. Because if you, listen, somebody said, well, I'll be
there, but I don't want to be. Well, you don't have a heart
for it. Now, read in Colossians, I think it's chapter 2, and in
Romans 14, the Lord tells us there not to judge each other
in holy days and feast days and all that. That tells you the
difference between the New Covenant and the Old Covenant. But in
Romans 14, there were some believers who insisted on keeping a Sabbath
day. But you know what Paul calls
them? They're the weaker brethren. They're still bound in their
conscience. They're not doing it in order to be saved. They're
not doing it in order to be righteous. They're doing it because they
just think in their mind and conscience that God still requires
that, but he doesn't. And he says, you be gentle, be
kind. They're weaker. And those who
are stronger in the faith, who are mature, you be kind and you
be gentle and teach them. Don't judge them, but teach them.
Okay, we'll pick up there next week.