Turn with me in your Bibles to
the thirteenth chapter of the Revelation. Revelation chapter
13, and I'll read these first ten verses. And I stood upon
the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea,
having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns,
and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which
I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet
of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion, And the dragon
gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. And I saw
one of his heads, as it were, wounded to death, and his deadly
wound was healed, and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshipped the dragon
which gave power unto the beast, and they worshipped the beast,
saying, Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war
with him? And there was given unto him
a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies, and power was
given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened
his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name and
his tabernacle and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given
unto him to make war with the saints and to overcome them. And power was given him over
all kindreds and tongues and nations. And all that dwell upon
the earth shall worship him whose names are not written in the
book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. If any man have an ear, let him
hear. He that leadeth into captivity
shall go into captivity. He that killeth with the sword
must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the
faith of the saints." Now, the beast that is spoken of here
is simply symbolic of false religion. Symbolic of false religion with
its many heads. And I want you to notice here,
first of all, where this beast, this many-headed beast gets his
power from. If you look in verse 2, It says,
"...the dragon gave him his power and his seat and great authority."
The dragon being that name used to represent the devil himself,
Satan, the deceiver. And so this beast that rises
up from the people, from this sea as it were, is this many-headed
creature. And this beast gets all its power
from the dragon. If you remember the words of
the Lord Jesus Christ to the Pharisees, He said to them, You
are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father you
will do, He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not
in the truth, because there is no truth in him. And when he speaks a lie, he
speaks of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it."
So what we find in these verses is, to worship any of these many
heads of this same beast, to worship any of these various
false religions, which all are based upon one thing, and that
is the works and the will of man. To do so is to actually
worship the devil himself. Is that right? Look down in verse
4. It says, "...and they worshipped
the dragon which gave power unto the beast." They worshipped the
beast. And therefore, in worshiping
this beast that spakes great blasphemies against God, in doing
so, men worship the devil. And this is the character, or
this is the way that he betrays himself. Look down in verse 5. and there was given unto him
a mouth." Do you see that? He betrays himself for what he
really is by what he says. And there was given unto him
a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies, and power was
given unto him to continue forty and two months. He is enabled
to do this for a set period of time, a period of time set by
God Himself. It says, "...and he opened his
mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his
tabernacle, which simply represented the person and the work of the
Lord Jesus Christ, the gospel, and them that dwell in heaven. In other words, he has things
to say. He has a message to present. He has words to say about God,
but in what he says, he actually blasphemes God. When the Apostle Paul writes
to Timothy in this warning and description of such who do so,
He speaks of them saying, of this sort are they which creep
into houses and lead captive silly women laden with sins,
led away with diverse lusts. In other words, by deception,
by misrepresentation, by speaking great and blasphemous things
against God, He actually leads these individuals into captivity. And He does so because He has
great power to deceive. Look down in verse 7. And it
was given unto him to make war with the saints and to overcome
them. That is, his work will, as far
as number is concerned, have ultimately and finally a greater
influence over more people even than the saints of God. That's
what all a false religion lives for mostly, its numbers and its
strength by numbers. And power was given him over
all kindreds and tongues and nations, and all that dwell upon
the earth shall worship Him." In other words, He has power
to deceive and persuade and convince many men and women from every
nation, kindred, and tribe, and tongue to deceive them whose
names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world." In other words, he tells us,
as he does in so many places in this book, that all men and
women will be deceived by one of these various heads of this
same beast, empowered and enabled of the devil himself, except
for a people. Who are they? All the world will
worship the beast. through one of these many heads,
one of these many isms that we hear spoken of, one of these
many denominations or whatever it is, except those whose names
were written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation
of the world. As a matter of fact, our Lord
says this in Matthew 24. He says, "...and many false prophets
shall rise and shall deceive many." He says, "...for there
shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall show
great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it were possible," bless
God for those few words, "...so much so that, if it were possible,
they should deceive the very elect." But by God's grace and
by God's great power, they will not be deceived. He says here, if any man has
an ear, let him hear. And God will give to each of
His people, these given to His Son, these whose names were written
in the Lamb's book of life before the world began, He will give
them an ear to hear the truth as it is in Christ Jesus." Here
is a powerful figure. Here is the great deception. Here is a multi-headed figure,
beast described as it is by the Spirit of God, deceiving the
multitudes, overpowering, convincing, except the people of God. But what I want you to notice
this morning is this. And that is what he says in describing
the end of the devil and his angels and all of these who hear
the false prophet, all of these who are deceived and deceiving. Look at what it says in verse
10. He says, that leadeth into captivity
shall go into captivity." Do you see that? What he describes
here are all these who are represented by this beast, the dragon himself,
those who worship the dragon, the beast, And he says concerning
the whole shooting match, as we say, he that leads into captivity
shall go into captivity. Now you think about that statement. Because actually, that statement
and the principle that is stated therein is found in a number
of places in the Bible. Let me read you this out of Jeremiah. He says, "...and it shall come
to pass, if they say unto thee, Whither shall we go forth? Then thou shalt tell them, Thus
saith the Lord, such as are for death, to death, and such as
are for the sword, to the sword, and such as are for the famine,
to the famine, and such as are for the captivity to the captivity."
Now, what we have there is another expression of this same principle. He says, those that are for captivity
shall go into captivity. Listen again a little later in
Jeremiah. And when he comes, he shall smite
the land of Egypt, and deliver such as are for death to death,
and such as are for captivity to captivity." In other words,
God had pledged to go to those who sought to make captives there
in Egypt of His people, and He would bring those very ones to
captivity themselves. You see, God's elect, are oftentimes
in the Scriptures referred to as the captives. Turn over to Luke's Gospel just
a minute and listen to the Lord as He stands there in Luke 4
in the synagogue of Nazareth. And he reads a passage from Isaiah,
and he says after he reads it, that this has been fulfilled
in your sight this day. Luke 4 and verse 18. It says, reading from the book
of Isaiah, he says, "...the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because
He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted,
to preach deliverance to the captives." You see that? Christ Jesus came, and He not
only was deliverance, but He brought in and proclaimed the
gospel, which is a message of deliverance. To who? The captives, whom He describes
in another place as those who are prisoners, but they are prisoners
of hope. He came to proclaim deliverance
to the captives. And what we find in this book
is that captivity was a judgment for sin in Israel. They went into Egyptian captivity. They went into Babylonian captivity
and more. And God used men and nations,
the devil himself, to execute these judgments, to bring them
into captivity and bondage. He raised up nations. They conquered
them. They went into bondage. He raised
up at a later time another nation, another individual, a king, whatever,
and He overcame these Israelites again and put them into bondage. But Christ, now I want you to
listen to this one, Christ came to liberate. Now that's just
the way it is. Christ came to proclaim deliverance
and to set His people free. You just might as well hear this
and listen to this because it is a fact that is stated again
and again and pictured again and again in so many ways. Let me read you a verse from
Ephesians. Paul, writing to the church at
Ephesus in that fourth chapter, he refers to himself as the prisoner
of the Lord. Now, I don't think it's hard
to see at all When he was persecuting the church, when he was doing
everything he could do in the name of God to get rid of Christ
and the gospel and those who believed it, he was acting at
that time as a prisoner of the devil, as a captive, was he not? But now he refers to himself
like this, I therefore the prisoner of the Lord. beseech you that
you walk worthy of the vocation or calling wherewith you were
called." In other words, what he's talking about here is that
you are to conduct yourselves and believe and walk as those
who have been delivered and set free by the Lord Jesus Christ. And guess what he makes reference
to? He says, but unto every one of us is given grace. Do you see that? He's writing
to believers. He's writing to God's people
in every age since then. He says, but unto every one of
us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore He saith, or this is
why He said, When He ascended up on high, He led captivity
captive and gave gifts unto men." Now, what happened when Christ
came into this world? Well, these who are described
as captives, These who He came to proclaim this message of good
news and hope, He came to deliver them, and in His life and in
His death on that cross and resurrection, in what He accomplished for them
in the matter of their sin through His life and death and resurrection,
He led that captivity on high and made
them His captives. Now there's a big difference.
Paul rejoices here. He delights in this passage to
refer to himself as the prisoner of the Lord. That's right. Because Christ had set him free
from the bondage of sin and Satan, and he delighted in being what
he himself called the bondservant of Jesus Christ. Christ had set him free. Christ had delivered him from
that bondage of sin. And this is pictured in the Old
Testament time and time again, but never better than when in
the year of the Jubilee. All those Israelites who had
been sold, or sold themselves into slavery and bondage, when
that end of seven years, times seven years, had come to pass,
and the trumpet was sounded in the year of the Jubilee, all
these Jewish slaves were to go free. And what they would do
is they would sound out on that day with a trumpet which was
actually the shofar or a ram's horn, which pictured sacrifice
and salvation by blood, redemption by the sacrifice God had ordained,
they would sound out that sound And every Hebrew slave was to
go free. You ought to go and read about
that. And he was, in that year, to go out being free from the
dominion, and free from the commands, and free from the servitude of
his master. Because he'd been set free. What
was that? That was a picture of what Christ
in His gospel does for us in delivering us and setting us
free never to be in that bondage again. Now why was He set free? Because God said especially in
that hour when they were all set free, the command was to
every Israelite who had one of these slaves, He said, you set
them free because they're My servant. My servant. He's free
to serve Me. Turn over to Leviticus chapter
25. Leviticus chapter 25, and look
down in verse 42. He said these have got poor and
had to go into slavery or whatever the situation was, they were
to be set free. And the Lord says in verse 42
of Leviticus 25, "'For they are My servants which I brought forth
out of the land of Egypt. They shall not be sold as bondmen.'"
Thou shalt not rule over him with vigor, but thou shalt fear
thy God." They were told not to treat these as servants and
bondmen, not to keep them in bondage, but they were to be
set free. And that's the case with every
believer. with everyone that is saved in
Christ, saved by His bloodshed for them as their substitute,
everyone who is made the righteousness of God in Him, everyone that
He has redeemed, everyone who hears that gospel. And God makes them to know that
He has in Christ set them free. Now look over in John chapter
8. Now I'm just going to ask you,
is this true? Is this true or is it not true? Now you listen. John chapter
8 and verse 31. John 8 and verse 31. Then said
Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If you continue in my
word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and ye shall know the
truth. Now what was the result? of those who heard the great
words, who listened to the mouth of the beast, the blasphemy spoken."
They were taken in bondage. But what about those who hear
the gospel of Christ, who hear the true gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ, the gospel of God? He says, "...and ye shall know
the truth, And that's what the gospel is called in one place,
the word of the truth. And the truth shall make you
free. Well, these that he had been
talking to, these Pharisees, who always sought to bring others
into bondage, who taught for doctrine the commandments of
men, And who were, as a consequence of that, in bondage to themselves,
listen to what they say. And they answered him, We be
Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man. They were in bondage to the Romans
right then. Oh, we're Abraham's seed, we're
a free people, we've never been in bondage to anyone. How sayest
thou, ye shall be made free? And Jesus answered them, barely,
barely, I say unto you, whosoever committeth sin is the servant
of sin. And I believe he's talking about
that particular sin. not believing the gospel. And
the servant abideth not in the house forever, but the Son abideth
ever. If the Son therefore shall make
you free, ye shall be free indeed. Now, is that true or not? If
the Son, if the Son of God, if the Lord Jesus Christ, make you
free, you shall be free indeed. You shall not be under bondage. You shall know the truth. So that not only will you know
that God Himself has liberated you in Jesus Christ, but know
the truth so that no one else can ever come along and bring
you under bondage. What is the truth? Well, Christ
Himself is said to be the truth. But I don't know how many people
I've seen who had bumper stickers and quotes and everything else
that said, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and
they didn't have a clue of who and how He was the truth. You
see, the truth is that God has saved a people through and by
the Lord Jesus Christ, and He has done it all of His grace. Grace. And we are in bondage
until He brings us to see that salvation is all from head to
toe, A to Z, Alpha to Omega, in Jesus Christ by the grace
of God. You see, if you ever believe
that salvation, if you can be convinced, and you don't have
to be convinced much because it's natural to us, if you can
be convinced that what you do or don't do has any part of the
foundation and basis of your salvation before God, You're in bondage right then.
You say, what do you mean? I mean because you begin to feel
that need and that pressure to act and to do like a slave at
a grinding mill for fear of displeasing, for fear of losing, for fear
of not attaining. You see, We have to be saved
by the grace of God alone, and in the Lord Jesus Christ alone,
in order to worship and serve God. That's right. And we'll
say this again in a minute, but I'll say it right now. Only free
men and women in this sense truly worship God. Right? Do you remember what God says
to Moses as a part of what He is to tell Pharaoh? We always
remember what He says in one part. He said, you go and tell
Pharaoh to let My people go. That wasn't all he said. He said,
let my people go so they might go out into the wilderness and
serve me, worship me. They can't worship me here. They
can't worship me as men and women who are slaves and in bondage
My people are a people liberated and set free to serve me in love. There's a big difference. Tomorrow
morning I could go down to the dry cleaners, the laundry, take
all my clothes, and see the lady there at the counter, pay her
some money, she'll wash my clothes. Somebody said, well, she must
love you. No, she doesn't. She's doing it for the gain.
But at the same time, my wife might get up in the morning,
take all my clothes and wash them, and me not give her a penny
for doing it. So why would she do it? She does
it out of love. There's a whole different principle
and point of motivation. That's what I'm saying here.
In Jesus Christ, all His people have been set free, delivered
from bondage in order to serve Him out of a heart of love and
thanksgiving and worship Him because they love Him. Paul writes
to Titus and he says this, "...not by works of righteousness which
we have done, but according to His mercy He hath saved us."
You see, if He has saved us, if we are brought to believe
that He actually did in His life and death and purpose actually
save us, And nobody can come along and say, if you want to
be saved, you need to do this, and if you don't do this, you
won't be saved, you'll be lost. Nobody can come along and say
that. If I know that everything I have and everything that God
gives as a gift of grace and mercy in Christ, if I know and
am assured and believe what He says, that He has freely given
me all things, that He has blessed me with all spiritual blessings
in Christ, You can't come along and promise me a reward for this
or that and the other if I'll do this or that or the other.
And if you could, you'd put me in bondage again. That's right. You see, when Paul talked to
Timothy about preaching and what the preacher was to do to preach
the gospel, he said that he is in meekness to teach what God
says He's to do so in meekness, teach men and women that they
may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil who are
taken captive by him at his will. He takes men and women captive
at his will. But it's not nearly so ugly as
it sounds, as it happens. because he brings them into captivity
with this cunning, with this blasphemous mouth speaking things
that are not true about God. He didn't come in, break the
door down on their house, point a gun at their head. No, he didn't
do that. He put some silver-tongued preacher
who speaks lies against God and His holiness who tells them just
what they want to hear by nature, that their works in some way
have a part in this business of salvation, that if they want
God to really bless them, they need to do some things. It's
like he snaps the handcuffs off. That's where most folks in this
world are right now. But Christ, He is that liberator. And in Him and by Him we're set
free from the bondage of sin and from the curse of the law. Paul says, we're dead to it. Now how does anything have a
claim on a person that's dead? You walk up to a man and say,
the speed limit is 55 out there on the highway. What does he
care? He's dead. Mr., do you know you
owe a hundred dollars down there at the bank?" What does he care? He's dead. And through the death
of Christ, our being by God's grace put in Christ, chosen in
Him, and having come and died in Him, we're free. What happened to Abigail who
was Nabob? She had a bad marriage, that
woman did. I know some other women like that too. He was a
bitter, grumpy, foul man, this man Nabal. And the Scripture
says that God killed him. And what happened? She was free
to be married to David. She was free from him. Why? Because he was dead. And that's
what Paul says about the law. Now I want you to listen to this.
This is Romans 7 and verse 6. But now we are delivered from
the law. But now we have been delivered
from the law. Now I don't know how many times
people would have to hear that. and not still run after this
law preacher. It's so many-headed. This beast
has got so many heads. It's all different, but it's
all the same. I heard a preacher recently, and this is what he
said. This is how he described the gospel. He said, in the gospel,
God tells us how to live and how to die. Is that right? I'll tell you what that told
me. It told me he knew nothing about the gospel, how to live
and how to die. He says, but now we are delivered
from the law that being dead wherein we were held that we
should serve in newness of spirit and not in the oldness of the
letter. Does he say there that in our
liberty we're just set footloose and fancy free as we say to sin
all we want to? I'll tell you this, a person
who's been set free by Christ, their problem is they sin more
than they want to. That's right. And because He
has set them free, while they do grieve over their own natural
sinfulness, they rejoice to know as far as the penalty and the
power He has set them free. That we should serve in newness
of spirit and not in the oldness of the letter. And though we
are, as He says, not under law, we are not lawless, but under
the law of liberty to Christ. James describes a man who looks
in a mirror. And when a lost man, a lost religious
man or woman, when they look in the mirror, they see themselves,
and they're real pleased with it. But in the mirror of the
Gospel, the believer sees the Lord Jesus Christ. And he sees
one in him that God is pleased with, and therefore, he's pleased
with. James said, but whoso looketh
into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being
not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be
blessed in his deed. Now there in Jeremiah, where
God was talking about how they received this instruction, they
had a problem. When there was a covenant made
and it's restated, you can turn to Jeremiah chapter 34. Because the people were reminded
again of what God said about the Hebrew servants. That at
that time they were to be set free, they were not to be kept
in bondage or brought back into bondage, they were to be set
free. Now listen. Verse 8 says, "...this is the
word of the Lord that came unto Jeremiah from the Lord, after
the king Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people which were
at Jerusalem to proclaim liberty unto them." These people agreed
with the king to proclaim liberty to all these servants. that every
man should let his manservant, and every man his maidservant,
being in Hebrew, or in Hebrewness, go free, that none should serve
himself of them to wit of a Jew his brother. Now when all the
princes, all the people, which had entered into the covenant,
heard that everyone should let his manservant and everyone his
maidservant go free, that none should serve themselves of them
any more, then they obeyed and let them go." This reminds me
of preachers. What's the next word? But. You see, salvation is easily
spoken of as being by grace. They say, yes, you're saved by
grace. But, folks, there is no but after
grace. There is no grace plus. There is no mixture of works
and grace. And something is wrong when preachers
stand and what they have to say is much more about law and works
than it is grace. Paul exalts the grace of God
in Christ. He warns against the law. So here are these folks, they
say, yeah, we'll set them free. We believe God. We're going to
do this. We're going to set them free. But afterward, they turned
and caused the servants and the handmaids whom they had let go
free to return and brought them into subjection for servants
and handmaids. They couldn't stand for them
to have that liberty. They couldn't use them anymore.
That's what most of these preachers are about. They're users. They
like the power over people. They like the manipulation of
people. They like what they can get out
of people. They like to use people. They
like to count people. How could we ever count? It's
all of grace. Therefore the word of the Lord
came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Thus saith the Lord the
God of Israel, I made a covenant with your fathers in the day
that I brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, out of
the house of Bondman, saying, At the end of seven years, Let
ye go every man his brother in Hebrew, which had been sold unto
thee, and when he hath served thee six years, thou shalt let
him go free from thee. But your fathers hearken not
unto me, neither incline their ear. And you are now turned and
have done right in my sight in proclaiming liberty every man
to his neighbor, and you have made a covenant before me in
the house which is called by my name. But you turned and polluted
my name, and caused every man his servant, and every man his
handmaid, whom ye had set at liberty at their pleasure, to
return, and brought them into subjection, to be unto you for
servant and for handmaid." He said, you set them free and then
you ran right back out there and you made them your servants
again. He goes on to say, since this
is what you've done now, since you have been for captivity,
since you have led them back into captivity, I will even give
them into..." He says, "...you say to them, Jeremiah, that I'll
give you into the hand of your enemies and into the hand of
them that seek your life, and your dead bodies shall be for
me unto the fowls of the heaven and to the beasts of the earth."
He said, you wanted to lead into captivity. Now you're going to
go into captivity. Do you understand what I'm trying
to say this morning? He that leads into captivity
shall go into captivity. And those who are for, or who
seek to lead the people of God into bondage, into captivity,
they're going to go into it themselves. They may call me an antinomian.
Did you realize that there was a time when rather than being
snickered at, or immediately labeled as such, that there were
men who wore that as a badge of honor. Antinomian. The word means against law. And if that be what it actually
means, as far as it being any part of our salvation, or requiring
anything of us now, if we have died in Christ, call me one. Here I am. Label my gospel as
antinomianism. Let me hear what the Apostle
says. You are not under law. Let them search the Scriptures
and find one place where it says that a man is commanded to preach
law and not the gospel. Somebody said, well, you've got
to take them to Sinai before you can take them to Calvary.
Show it to me. That's all I ask. Show it to
me. If we find any place in this book where salvation is anything
other than through and by one who did it all outside of ourselves,
the Lord Jesus Christ, and who gives it as a free gift of grace
to us, I want to be like my Savior. If I'm going to preach the gospel,
I'm to preach deliverance to the captives. How many warnings
in this book are there where Paul warns and others warn about
men gaining control over you by their words and their various
things that they try to bring you under? Salvation is by grace. By grace. And Paul is led by
the Spirit of God to write the whole book of Galatians warning
men and women, warning us, that a mixture of grace and law is
not grace at all. A mixture of grace and works
is nothing but poison. Suppose I come in here and I
bring you a glass of Pepsi. I'm going to bring you a glass
of Pepsi. As I'm bringing it in, you see
me take a bottle of strychnine and a medicine dropper, and I
just put one little drop of that strychnine in that Pepsi. And
I hand it to you. And you say, I'm not drinking
that. Well, why not? It's mostly Pepsi. Oh, they got a lot of truth.
No, it's the truth or it's error. That's not to say that I don't
have my own errors, that I don't make mistakes. But there cannot
be any mistake in the fact here that salvation is all of God's
grace in Jesus Christ through His blood shed, His righteousness
imputed to us, And there's no middle ground there. Turn over
to Galatians. I don't have time to do what
I wanted to do. But look here in Galatians 1.
Paul speaks of Christ in this way. Galatians 1 and verse 4. He says, He gave Himself for
our sins that He might deliver us from this present evil world
according to the will of God and our Father. That's what He
came for. That's what he did. So Paul says
immediately in that sixth verse, I marvel that you are so soon
removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ
unto another gospel. If you didn't know what the gospel
was anywhere else, it's either the grace of Christ or another
gospel. He said, there's not really another
gospel. But there are some who would
pervert the gospel of Christ. And when they pervert the gospel
of Christ, he said, they do so by adding something to Christ. What was going on here? There
were these preachers who had come in and who were trying to
get them back under the Jewish law by telling some that they
had to be circumcised. My, my. Well, that's not a big
deal, is it? Absolutely. It was such a big
deal that in another place here in Galatians, when Paul ran up
with Peter at Jerusalem, and he saw that Peter had been, because
of some of the Jewish Disciples who'd come from James, because
Peter now, who had been eaten with these Gentiles, when these
fellows got there, he didn't eat with those Gentiles anymore.
He wasn't free to eat with those Gentiles. He's a Jew. Why? Because of the law. They were
using the law to still influence him. to make him feel this bondage
that he couldn't really do that, have liberty to go sit down with
a Gentile. Paul said, I withstood him to
the face because he was to be blamed. Because he was acting,
conducting himself in what he did in a way contrary to the
gospel of grace. He goes all through this book.
Go home and read it. He goes all through this book.
And he says, I want you to know this, that a man is not justified
by the works of the law, and if he certainly can't be justified
by the works of the law, he can't be sanctified by the works of
the law. The law cannot make him righteous,
and the law cannot make him better. knowing that a man is not justified
by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ. Even we have believed in Jesus
Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not
by the works of the law. For by the works of the law shall
no flesh be justified." And when men go back to the Old Testament,
which we surely ought to do and are doing here every Wednesday
evening, When you go back and you find, like when you go to
the buffet, most of us look like we've been pretty often. But
we go to that buffet and we walk along there and we pick this,
we like this, and we pick that. That's the way people go to the
law. They go to a law that was given to an earthly people, Israel.
And they go like they're going to this smorgasbord. They're
going to pick here and pick that and pick that. We're going to
use this to tell what we're supposed to eat. We're going to use this
one over here to base what we wear on. We're going to go back
here and we're going to find some obscure passage that we
can make to make people think that it's teaching what I want
them to do. And they're in bondage. Our Lord,
He used the Old Testament Scriptures. But He showed the things that
testified of Him. They go back and they divide
it into what they call the ceremonial law and the moral law. I've read
a lot in the Old Testament. But I've never seen in the Old
Testament or the New Testament where any of the apostles or
Christ made that distinction. That law represented in a picture
the principle of doing in order to gain the acceptance and favor
of God. And what did it show? By the
deeds of the law. shall no flesh, Jew or Gentile,
be declared righteous, or earn righteousness, or merit righteousness
in the sight of God." Paul said if righteousness comes by the
law, then Christ died in vain. If you can work out by your obedience
or conformity to any part of the law, then there was no need
for Christ to die. But here's the problem. He said
the law stands perfect and holy. And if you offend in one point,
you're guilty of the whole. Somebody says, well, I just live
by the Ten Commandments. No. you'll die by the Ten Commandments. Because all the law can do is
condemn us and bring us into even greater bondage if we are
enabled to look to it as a part, any part, of our salvation. But I'll just come over here
to Galatians 5. Now he's just given us the illustration.
He's shown in this picture of Ishmael and Isaac how the child
of the bondman or the bondwoman always persecutes the children
of the free woman. And he says in verse 1, "...stand
fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us
free, And be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." Don't
seek in any way salvation by the law, by your obedience to
it, by your improvement through it. It is only in Christ. And don't let anybody. even under
the banner of sovereign grace, lead you into captivity. If that takes place, then both
they and you will go into captivity. You say, preacher, is that really
a problem? It's so subtle and so dangerous. that God leads
the apostle here in Galatians with this whole letter concerning
it. Only free men and women who are
free in Christ truly worship God. And they serve the Lord
with gladness. They don't serve the Lord in
fear that they'll be lost. They don't serve the Lord in
fear that they'll lose a part reward. They don't serve the
Lord being taught by these mercenary preachers, they served the Lord
as the Lord's freemen with gladness. They're like that bond-save,
that willing bond-servant, who when it's time to come to go
free, and he wanted to stay there in his master's house, he went
down and they bored his ear. And that mark in his flesh showed
that even as he served there in his master's house, he served
because he wanted to. He served as a free man. He was a willing bondservant. There's an old hymn, Free from
the law, O happy condition! Jesus hath bled, and there is
remission. Cursed by the law and bruised
by the fall, Christ hath redeemed us once for all. That's what redemption is about.
When Boaz went down there to the city gate and redeemed Ruth,
she was a Moabitess, Gentile woman. Her husband was dead. She'd been reduced to poverty,
following the gleaners, picking up little grains of food just
for her and her poor mother-in-law to survive. Boaz went down to
that city gate. There was one who had a claim
against her, her next of kin, nearest of kin. He satisfied
everything that was against her. You think that Ruth turned and
looked at Boaz and said, No, he redeemed her, and he married
her, and they lived happily ever after. He that leadeth into captivity,
and I take that to myself especially as a preacher, but he that leadeth
into captivity, thou go into captivity. Father, we thank you
this day for true liberty, for true freedom, for true deliverance,
for true release from the bondage of Satan and sin and the law,
that we might serve you in this wilderness, and that we might
enjoy this emancipation for all eternity. Keep us from being
bound. Keep us from being made slaves
by men. And enable us to serve You with
gladness. We pray that You bless Your Word
to our hearts. And we ask everything in the
name of Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.