Our God reigns. Salvation is of the Lord. How much of salvation is of the
Lord? Where do you have to go to learn that? Jonah had to spend
those days in the whale's belly. Those are the words from Jonah
chapter two, verse nine. Salvation is of the Lord. How much of it? It's a challenging question because
throughout the Scriptures we are confronted with the reality
of the difference between law and grace, between works, a covenant
of works unto which we are all born and the covenant of grace
which is the eternal covenant in the blood of the Lord Jesus
Christ and all of God's people. All of God's people are saved
in exactly the same way. All of God's people are saved
under exactly the same covenant. The religion of this world, and
really at the end of the day, it doesn't matter a whole lot
what name you give it. It doesn't matter what ism is
attached to the end of the word. All of them All of them that
put man to doing rather than man to resting in God's doing. All of them, all of them fundamentally
are denying the very character of God. It's a common thing for us to
hear again and again that God's love is a common love. God's desire for the salvation
of all people is a common love. And that the blood of the Lord
Jesus Christ is a common blood. And the gospel that is proclaimed
So-called gospel, which is proclaimed throughout this world, is a gospel
where continually we're being told God has done all of these
things. God the Father has done the best
He can. He sent His Son. God the Son
has done the best He can. He's died and He's shed His precious
blood. And God the Holy Spirit wants
to save everyone. And He'll save you. He'll save
you if you do something. Listen to how our sovereign God
spoke. Those words are in Jeremiah 31,
they're in Hebrew chapter 8, and they are repeated again and
again throughout the scriptures. It is the passage of scripture,
I suppose if there was a passage of scripture, that caused me
to contemplate why I was involved in a religion that didn't seem
to fit together with the Bible and didn't seem to fit together
with the promises of God. Listen to Ezekiel 36. We've read
this many times, but just listen with me. Listen to the wills
of God. Listen to the promises of God.
Then will I sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean
from all your filthiness, and from all your idols will I cleanse
you. A new heart also will I give
you, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away
the stony heart out of your flesh. and I will give you a heart of
flesh, and I will put my spirit within you. And listen to what
he goes on to, this is his promise, isn't it? This is where the Lord
Jesus Christ took Nicodemus, in that memorable meeting in
John chapter, recorded for us in John chapter three. But listen
to what he says, I will put my spirit within you. and cause
you to walk in my statutes, and you shall keep my judgments and
do them. And you shall dwell in the land
that I gave your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I
will be your God. I will be your God. And Jeremiah
in Hebrews 8 is reminding us of this same everlasting covenant,
isn't it? This is the covenant that I will
make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord.
I will put my law in their inward parts and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they
shall be my people. They shall teach no more every
man his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, Know the
Lord. For they shall all know me from the least of them unto
the greatest, saith the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity,
and I will remember their sin no more. So you'll know him. You really only know him when
you have no sin. You really only know him as that
glorious Redeemer. This is the promise and the prayer and the fulfilled promise that
has been the case wherever the true gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ has been proclaimed in this last 2,000 years. All of God's servers, he says
in 2 Corinthians 3, verse 6, We don't have any sufficiency
of ourselves. I don't have any sufficiency
of myself to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency
is of God. My help comes from God. The only
hope for your salvation is that God does the work. Our sufficiency
is of God who hath also made us able ministers of the new able
ministers of the new covenant. If God makes a minister, the
minister he makes is a minister of the new covenant. He's a minister
of the eternal covenant. He's a minister of the covenant
of grace. He's a minister of the covenant
of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. He's a minister of that
covenant, not of the letter. The letter, of course, is a reference
to the law. It's a reference to that Mosaic
covenant that was given at Mount Sinai to the people of God. A
covenant that put them under a curse. Do this and live. Do this and
live is imbued into the very hearts of
all of Adam's children. This New Covenant, this New Testament,
is not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter killeth,
that's what the letter does, the letter killeth, but the Spirit
giveth life. The question for us We find in the Eternal Covenant
all of our comfort and all of our joy and all of our security. It's the rock and it speaks of
the rock. So the New Covenant is just declaring
that God is God. is declaring that God the Father
gave to the Son a bride from all eternity. And when the Son
saw the bride, he thought, wow, isn't she amazing? And he took,
at that moment, he took absolutely full responsibility for bringing
her to Him. Listen to what Colossians, I
quote Colossians 2.22 often because I love it so much. This is the
promise that God the Son made before the foundation of the
world to present you holy, unblameable, and unreprovable in his sight. That's the work of God the Son,
isn't it? To present you, to present the
likes of you and I, brothers and sisters in Christ, to present
you wholly unblameable and unreprovable. I'll blame myself for all sorts
of things and I'll be reproved by all sorts of people for all
sorts of things. God doesn't see me that complete in him. Now if God declares
me to be complete in him, is he telling the truth? Is it on
the basis of some evidence that he sees? It sure is. It's on the basis of what he
sees in his son, because his son is united to all these people. At the heart of the matter to
declare to declare the eternal covenant of grace, the eternal
covenant of love, the eternal covenant in the elect one of
God. is to declare the very person of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don't have time to look at
the verse, but if you go to Isaiah chapter 42 and Isaiah 49 and
read, you'll find that the covenant is a person. He is a person. We are describing the Lord Jesus
Christ. And that's why the new covenant
speaks of God's faithfulness. He's faithful, isn't He? Our
God is faithful. The New Covenant speaks of His
absolute sovereignty. God is God, and He's absolutely
sovereign over all things. The New Covenant, the Eternal
Covenant, is a covenant in the grace of God. What a comfort
to the people of God, that God accepts us into His presence,
not on the basis of anything that we do, but on the basis
of what the Lord Jesus Christ has done. If you've seen your
works for what they are, you'll find this covenant the most glorious
rejoicing. The new covenant speaks of God's
electing love and we sing with joy over it. This new covenant
is the only possible remedy. for someone who is dead, for
someone who is depraved, for someone who is unable to do something
for themselves. The covenant of works is saying
that God's activities will be brought to fruition if you do
something. There's a huge problem with that,
isn't there? You're dead. You're dead until
God gives you life. There's a cemetery just four
or five hundred meters up the road there, isn't it? You can
go up there and preach all day and say, there's a party down
here and now we've got beautiful cherries and we're declaring
the wonders and glories of God. Are they going to come? They're
dead. They are given life by God to
come. They are energized by Him. The
only remedy is the eternal covenant in the love and the grace And
only that eternal covenant can save a wretch like me. The eternal
covenant speaks of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. What
love, what redeeming love. The effectual blood redemption. It speaks of God's irresistible
grace. It speaks of God working in the
hearts of his people to draw them to himself. What we read
in Ezekiel 36, he causes you. He puts his new spirit within
you. He causes you to walk in his
ways. That's why when we are preaching
the gospel, we do as the Lord Jesus Christ did. He said, I've
come to set the prisoners free. The spirit of the Lord is upon
me because he's anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the
captives, the recovery of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty
them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. What's the acceptable year of
the Lord? What a glorious, glorious picture
of the redemption of our Lord Jesus Christ. The year of Jubilee
came at the end of the seven times seven years. On the 50th
year, there was a year of Jubilee, and you sounded a trumpet. And
if you had lost everything, and you were sold into slavery, and
you had debts that you couldn't pay, Everyone was set free. It's a
joyful sound, wasn't it? Wouldn't it have been a joyful
sound? To whom? To whom was it a joyful sound?
If you were a slave, if you'd lost everything on account of
your sinfulness, if you were in bondage, What a glorious sound. Imagine that. That trumpet sounded
and all of your debts were cancelled. That trumpet sounded and you
who were a slave were set free. That trumpet sounded and all
of the lands and the house and everything that you'd lost was
restored to you. And you were set free by God's
command. That's the Jubilee trumpet. Do
you reckon it was ever sounded in Israel? Your answer is no, and the answer
to the why is really simple, isn't it? If you owned the slaves
and you were in charge, and you were in charge of the religion,
would you let that jubilee trumpet be sounded? The other thing that
happened on that jubilee year was you had a year off. You were
a slave before the trumpet sounded, and when the trumpet sounded,
you had a year's holiday. A year's holiday. Don't lift
a finger. God will provide. God will provide. A whole year where you didn't
have to do anything. It was never sounded because
it pictures the Lord Jesus Christ. And the religious of the day
boasted in their ability to do things. But they actually took
those people and they kept them captive, didn't they? And they
wouldn't let them go, ever. So, to go back to Hebrews chapter
8, we speak again and again and again, and I pray the Lord causes
you to hear these words as gospel. Because Paul heard them as gospel,
and Christ preached them as gospel. And it declares God's eternal
covenant of grace. And it has seven joyful sounds. It's the sounding of this gospel
trumpet. I will put my law in their mind. I will write them
on their hearts. I will be their God. I will be
their God. They shall be my people. They shall know me. I will be
merciful to their unrighteousness. Their sins and iniquities will
I remember no more. Why doesn't he remember them? Does he have a poor memory, God?
He says about his people he remembers their sins no more. Why does
he remember their sins no more? because they are gone, brothers
and sisters. That's what it is to be justified,
according to the Bible, is for your sins to be gone. A justified
person is a person who has never sinned in the sight of God. Because
all my sins were laid on the Lord Jesus Christ and he was
a lamb slain from the foundation of the world. I see them and
I grieve over them and you won't have to spend much time with
me and you'll see them and be horrified. But God says, I remember
them no more. To go back to where I started,
these days, again and again and again, is preached this common
love, this common desire, this common blood, this common grace. And it's not ever, ever proclaimed
in the scriptures that way, ever. God's done everything he can
do. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Now
it's up to you to perform your part. Sinner, you just do this
and you can fill in the blanks. I remember one of the moving
things in my life, and I've had many of them, but one of the
moving things in my religious life was I was at a what they
used to call evangelistic services. So what you had in normal church,
what you had each week is that you were told what to do, and
you were told again and again and again what to do. And then,
on a very special occasion, you get a special speaker down from
Sydney or somewhere, someone that was a great orator, and
he'd tell wonderful stories, and he'd convict you of the depths
of sin, and then you'd pray the sinner's prayer, and you'd sign
a decision. You ever been there, sign a decision card? Anyway,
I was in church, and the hook had been baited, Lime had been
reeled in and there was one person, one young man in that church
and he signed the decision card and the associate pastor was
just jumping for joy and he was just so excited that he's got
someone saved and he brought him over to me at the back of
the church and so we could talk some more to him. And it took me years to understand
what God was saying to me, but we were like multitudes of others
saying, this man's saved on the basis of this decision he made.
And if the floor could have opened up and swallowed me, I would
have been pleased to escape because I felt the most strong conviction
ever. You are lying to this young man. You are lying to him. I didn't
know the depths of that lie, But I knew I was, and I couldn't
wait to get away from it. I couldn't wait to get away from
the scene. And the Spirit reminded me again
and again that He's gracious to those who are being taught.
Where was that man next week, and the week after, and the week
after? Never seen again. The modern gospel says that if
you have fulfilled certain conditions, you will be saved. You will be
saved if you fulfill certain conditions. Turn with me to Acts
chapter 15. The one time the church gathered
as a body to discuss The great challenge
to the character of God as proclaimed by them. The great challenge
to the character of God. The great challenge to the security
and the safety of the saints of God was in Acts chapter 15.
And what was the issue? The issue was simply that there
was a mixture, a mixing of that covenant of works and the covenant
of grace. You must do something. And the apostles made allegations
against these false teachers. They heard them and they heard
them for some time and there was much discussion. And I just love what Peter said
in response to these. And these are the charges. I've
just read seven glorious sounds of the gospel trumpets, the I
wills of God and the they shalls of the I wills. Mounir in Acts
chapter 15, the apostles charged these men in verse 24 with lying. They charged them with troubling
the churches. They charged them with subverting
souls. Subverting souls. Undoing the
faith of God's elect. No wonder Paul writes in such
strong terms in Galatians, if someone brings another gospel,
if someone brings another gospel to you, let him be anathema. Let him be anathema, the strongest
language possible. They said to these people in
verse 10, he says, now why therefore tempt ye God? That's to test
him. Why are you testing God? It's
exactly the same word that is used of Satan when he tempted
the Lord Jesus Christ. You put a yoke, a yoke, a yoke
of bondage of doing upon the neck of the disciples, which
neither our fathers nor we were able to bear. And they did it
because, in verse five, they were preaching law. They are
preaching works. It's needful to circumcise them
and command them to keep the law of Moses. The one time the
church came together, but listen to Peter's response to these
people who are saying that it's all about your doing. Peter rose
up, verse seven, and said unto them, men and brethren, We know
that how, you know how, a good while ago, God made a choice
among us that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word
of the gospel and believe. And God which knoweth the hearts,
bear them witness, giving them the Holy Ghost even as he did
unto us. The apostles and the us all have
a common faith. putting no difference between
us and them, putting no difference between someone who has been
rare to Jew and someone who has been rare to Gentile in the gutters
of Corinth or somewhere, putting no difference between us and
them, purifying their hearts. God purifies the hearts of his
people. by faith, purifies their hearts
by faith. Now, therefore, why tempt ye
God to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither
our fathers nor we were able to bear? You cannot bear the
burden of any doing whatsoever for you to be in the presence
of God. You cannot bear the burden of obeying the law of Moses.
All the law of Moses says is that you are guilty, you are
guilty. We believe, we believe, this is a confession of faith
of the apostles, isn't it, in this glorious meeting. We believe
that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we, we apostles
here meeting in conference in Jerusalem, we apostles, shall
be saved even as the Galatians, even as those in western Turkey. There is no place in the covenant
of grace upon which to build the lie of human ability. The glory of the covenant It's
the covenant in which the Lord Jesus Christ gets all the glory
due his holy name. It's the covenant in which the
name of God, the character of God is revealed. And he says,
whosoever calleth on the name of the Lord, on the character
of God, shall be saved. And if you've called on His name,
you're calling on Him as absolutely sovereign. You're calling on
Him who makes covenants and is faithful to those covenants.
You're calling on Him who signed and sealed that covenant in the
blood of His precious Son and not one single person for whom
He died can possibly, under the justice and the faithfulness
and the holiness of God, ever be anything but saved. Their
sins and iniquities will I remember no more. Why? Because they're
on the Lord Jesus Christ and they've been punished by God
the Father and they're gone. Calling on the name of the Lord
is something that begins our salvation and it continues. It continues our sanctification.
We're just calling on him again, aren't we? I'm calling on him.
I'm away for the next week and Norm and Simon are preaching
for you and you pray that they'll preach the new covenant to you.
You pray that they'll preach the Lord Jesus Christ in faithfulness
to you. And I'll be in New Zealand rejoicing.
to hear the Lord Jesus Christ proclaim. It doesn't matter where
he's proclaimed, as long as he's proclaimed for who he is and
for what he's done. The notion that he can try and
fail is a denial of his deity. He can't fail, brothers and sisters. He can't fail. He alone kept
the law and he alone does all of these things, but he doesn't
leave us alone. That's what Ezekiel 36 and that's
what Jeremiah are saying. God says that he will do things,
he will do things in the hearts of his people and he'll draw
them to himself and he'll draw them to love him and to love
one another. That's his work of grace in our
hearts, to see him as he is. We can't, in faithfulness to
God, mix the works of man with the works of God, ever. And we can't, in faithfulness
to God, do that and glorify him. We can't, in faithfulness to
that, do that and call upon his name. Just let me read this glorious
declaration of this gospel. It comes from the very lips of
the blessed Holy Spirit yet again. This is the covenant that I will
make up with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord.
I will put my laws into their mind and write them in their
hearts. I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people.
And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every
man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for all shall know
me. What's salvation according to
the Lord Jesus Christ? What's salvation? John chapter
17 verse 3. Salvation is knowing God. Salvation
is knowing Him. Knowing Him as He is. Knowing
Him in His true character as it's revealed in the scriptures.
They shall all know me from the least to the greatest, for I
will be merciful to their unrighteousness and their sins and iniquities
will I remember no more. In that he saith the new covenant,
he has made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth
old is ready to vanish it away. It vanishes away in the glory
of the redeeming love of our Lord Jesus Christ.