The title for this morning's
message I've set in the form of a question. It goes like this.
Your God, dead or alive? And as you turn there, let me
just make a few comments by way of introduction to this message.
I'm fully aware that almost anyone who hears this message, who has
any religious interest whatsoever, That upon hearing that question,
is your God dead or alive? The immediate response in all
of our minds is, well, of course my God is alive. Because see,
no one knowingly would worship a dead God. If so, you would
repent of that, would you not? So the presumption by all is
that their God lives. In other words, he is real. He's
not a false God. In John 17, Christ said in his
high priestly prayer, He said, This is life eternal, that they
might know thee, the only true God. And this only true God and
Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. And this only true God is depicted
in Scripture often as the living God. I looked up that phrase,
just those two words, living God, and found that it appeared
30 times in the Scriptures. And that doesn't include the
times where it would say the living and true God, for example. And most often when you find
that phrase, God is set forth in contrast to a dead God or
an idol, something not true. So as we enter today's message
in hopes of encouraging you to seriously consider what the Scripture
says about who God is and how God saves sinners, that you'll
take that question seriously, that we'll all ask, is the God
we worship truly the real God, the one and true and living God
of the Bible. If you consider that and then
you take into consideration also that the Bible calls for men,
all men everywhere, to repent. There in Hebrews 9 and verse
14 we read, ìHow much more shall the blood of Christ, who through
the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, Purge your
conscience. That is, rid your conscience
completely of something. What does that? The blood of
Christ. The fruit and effect of what
Christ accomplished in each generation shall, by the power of God's
Holy Spirit, purge the conscience to do what? It purges it from
something, from dead works. That is, any notion that salvation
is by works, what the Bible calls fruit unto death. Any idea that
salvation is conditioned on me, the sinner, in any way, to any
degree whatsoever. And what does it say? It says,
that blood will purge your conscience from dead works to serve the
living God. There's that phrase again. The
clear implication being that we all enter into this world,
the scripture says, in darkness, dead in our trespasses and sin.
all have gone out of the way. There is none righteous, no,
not one. The way that seemeth right to
a man is the way that ends in death. We all enter in at enmity
with God, and here when God's Spirit comes and gives life to
all of those for whom Christ died, whose blood he pays for
with his blood, he comes along and says, now they turn and serve
the living God, whereas they must have been serving a dead
God. My point to you is to emphasize
that we are all idolaters. How many people who claim to
be believers, look back and say, I once was an active idolater. Not very many. And yet that is
what the scriptures teach us. Now, in light of that, it's important
that we consider, seriously, this question, is your God the
one and true and living God? Is he dead or is he alive? In
Acts 17, Paul on Mars Hill, he said he's called on men everywhere
to repent. Because he's going to judge the
world and the righteousness that Christ established at the cross.
In 1 Thessalonians chapter 1, Paul is addressing the church
there at Thessalonica. And he says, I know of your election. That is, he knows that they are
those that God chose before the world began. He's speaking to
believers. And how does he know that? The
evidence he gives in verse 9 of that chapter is how ye turn to
God from idols to serve, the phrase again, the living and
true God. Well, with that in mind, I want
us to look here in Deuteronomy chapter 4 and verse 28. We'll start just in verse 27. This is God speaking to the Israelites. through Moses, or actually Moses
speaking to them based on what God had told him to tell them. And he says in verse 27, ìAnd
the Lord shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be
left few in number among the heathen, whither the Lord shall
lead you. And there, when ye are scattered, ye shall serve
God, the work of menís hands, wood and stone, which neither
see nor hear nor eat nor smell.î Literally, he's telling them
that they would go and worship God that were truly carved out
of wood and out of stone. And so all who hear this message,
they will. Yeah, I'm my God's alive. I don't worship. I don't know
anyone that's ever worshiped that sort of thing where they
actually thought their God was a piece of wood or a graven image. And yet you notice that that
God here instructs Moses, God the Holy Spirit, inspiring these
very words to say about these things they worship that were
wood and stone. He went further and said, but
they don't see, they don't hear, they don't eat, they don't smell. Why would that be necessary?
And I want to suggest to you that even because the Bible is
full of passages where men, in fact, did worship such idols. And I want to suggest to you
this. Is it possible that anyone truly
worships that which they think doesn't possess some animate
quality, something that's real, that is worthy of their worship,
and in turn can provide for them some blessing? And that may seem
strange to us, but I don't think it's so strange when you consider
Other ways that the Bible depicts idolatry, even here in chapter
29, chapter 4, excuse me, of Deuteronomy. If you go back to
verse 15, he says, take heed, take you therefore good heed
unto yourselves. And in verse 16, he says, lest you corrupt
yourselves and make you a graven image. And he calls it there
the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female. Then he goes on, the likeness
of any beast. And he goes on in verse 18, the
likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground. And if you skip
over to verse 23, he says, Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye
forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with
you. That's the Abrahamic covenant that he made with them to keep
that nation together, to give them the promised land and bring
the promised Messiah through them until he would abolish that
covenant by way of fulfillment. And he said, Take heed, lest
ye forget that which he made with you, and make you a graven
image, or the likeness of anything which the Lord thy God hath forbidden
thee. And then we see that same phrase
in verse 25, when he says, You may corrupt yourselves and make
a graven image, or the likeness of anything. Not only that, but
we also, so here, first of all, we see that, you know, beasts
and animals and things that creep, those are animate objects that
do see and hear and eat and smell. And yet he was referring to making
likenesses of them. And then not only that, what
we find, be turning to Deuteronomy chapter 29, that often in scriptures
we see idolatry depicted in a different way. See, idolatry is the worship
of a dead or false God by one who does not perceive that to
be the case. And that's an important distinction
for us to make. The presumption is that we are
worshiping as the first religious indication, inclination, I should
say, that any of us have. We're going to worship an idol.
We must change God. You see, and what happens is,
the presumption is, is that we're worshiping a God that truly lives.
But he only lives in the figment of our own imagination. Look
in Deuteronomy 29, verse 18. Here we read, "...lest there
should be among you a man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose
heart turneth away this day from the Lord our God, to go and serve
the gods of these nations. Lest there should be among you
a root that beareth gall and wormwood." That's the curse.
And it come to pass when he hears the words of this curse, when
one hears that, that he blessed himself in his heart, saying,
I shall have peace. No, don't tell me that the God
I worship, I know that my profession was real back here. Don't tell
me that I was worshiping an idol. No, I'll say in my heart, I'm
okay. No, And that's what all will
say by nature. And he says, Though I walk in
the imagination of mine heart. You see, if we walk in the imagination
of our hearts, that's a heart that the scripture tells us,
as we heard during the 10 o'clock hour, is desperately wicked.
That's to worship an idol. So if we worship a God that is
altogether consistent with what seemeth right to us when some
preacher or somebody came along and we got interested in religion.
If that's the God we worship, you see, then it's of the imagination
of our own heart if we can't identify a time where our eyes
were opened in regeneration and conversion and we saw something
that a dead person can't see. A dead person, spiritually dead,
has no spiritual eyes, no spiritual ears. They must be made alive. And in being made alive, they
behold God in the face or the person of Jesus Christ. So my
point is this, and look at the last phrase of that verse 19. They'll say, I'll have peace,
I'll walk in the imagination of my own heart. And what do
they do? To add drunkenness to thirst. You see, this is someone
who's interested in religion. They want to go to heaven. They
believe there's a creator, a supreme being. They believe there's a
God, but the devils believe there's a God. And they believe, but
they want to be blessed by this God. They have a thirst. But
if they walk after the persuasion, their natural persuasion of our
own heart, that persuasion of dead works, that is to imagine
that salvation is based on something I do or done in me, conditioned
on me, the sinner. something I'm unable to do, then
all I do is imagine that they've quenched their thirst when in
fact they're just in a big fog. They're still in darkness, still
blind, religiously drunk. Well, how do we distinguish then
the truth from the false? Well, the entire testimony of
this Bible teaches us that, in fact, God reveals who he is uniquely
in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ said
that himself in Matthew 11, when he said, Neither knoweth any
man the Father, save or except the Son, and he to whomsoever
the Son will reveal him. You remember when the disciples,
after the resurrection, and Christ was with them, and it said he
opened their eyes and taught them how to see the Old Testament
scriptures that they had and how they all spoke of him. This
whole book will direct us to Christ and what he accomplished
at the cross of Calvary. But this morning, in order to
distinguish in that way, we're not going to have time to do
a full survey of the Bible, so we're going to zero in on Deuteronomy
chapter 4. At those faculties of life, and
are those activities of life that God mentions there that
distinguish a dead God from a living God. That is the seeing, the
hearing, the eating, the smelling. So turn to Isaiah chapter 53.
You see in isolation again as you turn there, keep in mind
all of us, everyone naturally assumes they're God's real. So
we assume he does see, he does hear. We wouldn't pray to a God
that doesn't hear our prayers, would we? That he does have those
faculties that are true of a living God. So how are we going to distinguish? Well, what I want to do today
is let's look at what his word tells us of himself by seeing
what God sees. What God hears, what God eats,
what God smells. In Isaiah chapter 53, we're going
to look at what does God, the true and living God of this Bible,
what does he see? In verse 10, we read of the suffering
servant, this is a prophecy of the death that Jesus Christ would
die. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him, he hath put him
to grief. When thou shalt make his soul
an offering for sin, he shall see something, he shall see his
seed. That is, he'll see all of those that God the Father
gave to him, chose before the world began, and gave to Christ
to come as their representative and substitute, his elect. He shall prolong his days, and
the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. It shall
succeed if you'll just put your hand out to receive it and know
it's going to be all of his hand. He shall see of the travail of
his soul, and shall be satisfied. By his knowledge shall my righteous
servant justify many. How? For he shall bear their
iniquities." Well, the true and living God sees complete and
total satisfaction in what Christ did at the cross of Calvary.
Is that true of your God? It wasn't true of the God I once
worshipped. You see, I believed in the God of this Bible. I believed
all of the historical accounts. I believed it to be the Word
of God. God created the world. That's the God I thought I worshipped.
And yet I imagined that many of those for whom Christ lived
and died perished. Now, how can that be if God was
completely and totally satisfied with what Christ did at the cross?
Now, I looked, I said, oh, well, you must believe there remaining
something to be done that would make the ultimate difference
in whether I would be eternally blessed or not. And you see,
so satisfaction wasn't made. He saw satisfaction in my faith
is what I imagine. And so do countless others still
today. That's that is another God. You see, for as we'll show in
a moment, it really denies everything that I thought was true of God. Just as I imagined that He could
see and hear that He was the real God, I also imagined that
He was a God of omnipotence and omniscience and justice and love
and mercy. But being mistaken, see, about
what took place in the person and work of Christ actually negated
all of those assumptions that I had about the true and living
God. about my false god in contrast
to the true and living God. Well, is that what your God sees? Hearing, be turning to Luke chapter
18. What does your God hear? The
fact that God hears is indisputable. That's why men pray to their
God. They believe that God hears.
The scriptures replete with numerous examples of passages that say,
Call on the name of the Lord, and I shall be saved. Romans
10 says, Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall
be saved. And so you might say, OK, good. That's because I do
that. And so I pray to God. So therefore, my God must be
real. No, we know better than that for those preachers in Matthew
7 who said, Lord, Lord, weren't they calling on his name? They
prayed to someone they called God. It's not just a moniker,
see. His name is what really and truly identifies him. As
Jeremiah said, using the Hebrew, Jehovah Sidkanu, the Lord, our
righteousness. His name, see, what identifies
God is seeing him as he's revealed in the sun by what Jesus accomplished
on the cross of Calvary. So how do we know if the God
we worship is the God that hears? What does he hear? Well, we could
go many places, by the way, on each of these faculties of life,
and I've just chosen one example because we'd be here forever.
But the passage that came to my mind was this parable that
we've looked at often between the Pharisee and the publican.
And here's what we see is the God of this Bible. He hears the
plea for mercy as it's portrayed here. If you look in verse nine,
Christ says, and it says of Christ, he spake this parable unto certain
which trusted in themselves that they were righteous. They trusted
that they they met the condition required for entrance into heaven,
righteousness itself, the satisfaction before a holy and just God they
found within themselves. And so they despised others.
You know, I used to sing this song when I grew up called, I
Surrender All of Him. I'm sure many of you. And I really,
when I would sing that song, I thought I had truly humbled
myself to the call of God and the command to believe by my
act of faith. And I thought it was a true example
of humility. I had surrendered all. And you
know, all the while, I imagined that I would go to heaven because
I surrendered all I thought. And this one over here that showed
no religious interest whatsoever would perish in hell, even though
I thought Christ died for him. You see, I really unwittingly,
I despised him. I saw something good in here.
that this one didn't have, in spite of the scripture that levels
us all and says there's none of us righteous. No, not one. It's just one lowlife sinner
comparing himself to another one. Anyway, I didn't mean to
get off on track there, but that just struck me. Two men, it says,
went up to the temple, the parable here, to pray, the one a Pharisee
and the other a Republican. The Pharisee stood and prayed
thus with himself. God, I thank thee." He gave credit
to God that I'm not as other men are, extortioners, unjust,
adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week. I give
tithes of all that I possess. I go way beyond the law. And
the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as
his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God,
be merciful to me, a sinner. I tell you, this man went down
to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone
that exalted himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth
himself shall be exalted." You'll recall when we studied this that
that plea for mercy there, that word mercy, is the same word
that's translated propitiation in Romans chapter 3. He's saying,
God be propitious to me. That means, God, show me unmerited
favor, that is, unmerited by me, the sinner. I must have your
blessing, God, that I cannot merit. But it's merited, for
it's merited by the satisfaction made by Jesus Christ on the cross
of Calvary. You see, it's the appeasement,
full and complete, of God's wrath that this one was pleading when
he pleads for mercy. You say, well, okay, just tell
me how to pray that prayer, and I'll check that off so I can
get in too, right? No, you see, he's not blessed
of God because he pled mercy. No, because God had blessed him
in Christ, his conscience was purged from dead works to serve
the true and living God so that he could plead mercy. You see, if salvation is in your
hand, if it's on the shelf, and all you have to do is what your
prescribed religion or denomination tells you to do, then you don't
really need mercy. You may call it mercy all day
long, but you don't need it. Now, the God of this Bible, what
does he hear? He hears the plea for that unmerited
favor based on perfect satisfaction that Christ made at the cross.
What about eating? You know, literally, God's Spirit,
when we think of God eating, we need to be reminded He doesn't
have physical ears that He hears with or physical eyes that He
sees with in the way that we do. And yet, He relates who He
is and what He is like by speaking to us with regards to such faculties
of life. And so, I think it might be helpful
if we'll think about the fact that eating and drinking is the
consumption on our part of those things that are necessary for
us to sustain life for us. We physically sustain life. Look,
we're here today worshiping because those with spiritual life, we
need spiritual food and we need it for our sustenance. Well,
it's what's necessary for us. And I think if we'll think in
those terms, we'll see what God had to consume in the second
person of the Godhead that God incarnate, the son of God, in
consuming God's wrath on the cross. You know, the Bible uses
some language like this in Hebrews two nine. Christ talks about
tasting death in Matthew twenty six. When Christ was in the garden
of Gethsemane, you may recall he said, let this cup that he
would have to drink pass from me, even so not my will but thine
be done." So from the whole of scriptures we see that Christ
truly drank damnation dry as he consumed the very just wrath
of God against sin on the cross of Calvary, and he completely
digested it. The Bible says our sins were
taken away as far as the east is from the west. Now is that
true of your God? Was the wrath of your God fully
consumed by the doing and dying of the Lord Jesus Christ? Or
is there something left to be done in order for God's wrath
to be removed from you? Turn to Ephesians chapter 5. What does your God smell? Ephesians
5. Paul speaking here to the Ephesians
says in verse 1, Be ye therefore followers of God as dear children,
and walk in love as Christ also hath loved us, who the dear children,
and hath given himself for us, who the dear children, is thee,
he hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to
God for a sweet-smelling savour. Now, are you a sweet-smelling
saver unto God when you believe, when you make some profession,
when you walk the mile, when you do whatever it is that you
think, imagine, acquires, procures, or contributes to God's eternal
blessing on you? Well, that's not what this says,
is it? The God of this Bible, it says here, He, the sweet-smelling
savor, that savor is fragrance or odor. It means He's totally
pleased with His offering and sacrifice of our substitute,
the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, how about your God? Does
that describe Him? We turn back to Deuteronomy chapter 4, and
I'm sure you see the common thread here. If we can only know the
Father by the Son, as the Scriptures tell us, we better understand
who the Son is and what he accomplished at the cross of Calvary. We better
see that perfect satisfaction that was made there. Does your
God see? Does he see the travail of his
soul and find complete and total satisfaction there? Does he hear
the plea for God's unmerited favor by way of satisfaction
that Christ made to the exclusion of anything else? Does your God
eat with the wrath of God fully consumed by the God-man on the
cross of Calvary? Does your God smell? Does he
smell the sweet-smelling savor of the sacrifice that Christ
made that would demand life for all of those whose sins he bore
there on the tree? Well, if we look here at the
end of our passage, beginning in verse 29, He had just said,
you're going to serve these gods that need to see, hear, eat,
or smell. And he says, but if from thence,
there we have it. In other words, he's telling
them, if you'll turn from that, if from thence thou shalt seek
the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him. if I seek him with
all thy heart and with all thy soul." That is, not if you just
give mental agreement. Okay, Randy, I see that God here
sees and hears and eats and smells all of that that pertains to
the satisfaction Christ made at the cross. No, but there's
a love for the truth, as Paul wrote to the Thessalonians. No,
he said, if you love that with your heart, you're going to find
that. For the Lord thy God," in verse 31, he says, "...is
a merciful God. He will not forsake thee, neither
destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers, which
he sware unto them." Again, he's speaking of the covenant he made
with Abraham to give them the promised land to preserve them
under that old covenant economy. Now, if he wouldn't forget that
covenant, that temporal covenant he made with them that pointed
to Christ, who came under the terms of the everlasting covenant
of grace, God giving him a people, Christ, the God-man, agreeing
to come and perfectly satisfy everything that was needed. How
dare we imagine that anything else could remain to be done?
But he is, as it says there, he's a merciful God. But as we've
seen, that's mercy, that's favor by way of satisfaction that Jesus
Christ made. You see, this morning I've spoken
a lot about repentance because we all must come to repentance.
And that repentance that I'm speaking of, we know there's
an ongoing repentance. That we continually repent, we're
sorry over our sins, that as we grow in grace and knowledge,
That as error is dispelled and we learn truth, we repent of
the error, and we'll continue to do that to the day we die.
But the repentance I'm speaking of today is that initial repentance
that accompanies God-given faith, whereby we turn from our idols
along with those saints that Paul wrote of in Thessalonica,
and thereby we manifest that we are the election of God. We turn from them to serve the
true and living God as we see what Christ accomplished on the
cross of Calvary. You see, it's a vital question.
You can't turn from an idol until God has been pleased to grant
you spiritual life so that you can, in faith and repentance,
see that what you thought was right, the way that seemed right
to you, the God you worshipped, was really not the real, true
and living God at all, but a figment of your imagination. I mentioned
earlier, and I'll go back to that, that I would say something
about those attributes. Just using my own concept of
the God that I once worshipped, I can show you that I imagined,
like most of Christendom, that He was indeed all-powerful, all-knowing,
all-loving, that He was just, That he was that he was all of
the attributes that you can name about God. I imagine to be so.
But not seeing the Lord Jesus Christ and what he accomplished
actually undermines each and every one of those. It's to be
drunk religiously as we read so that I just think it's just
like I think he hears, sees and eats and so forth. I thought
he was omnipotent, but the God that I worshiped, I said loved
everyone. And yet, his love was so worthless
that he would not intervene to overcome their free will in order
to secure their eternal well-being. And some might say, well, no,
no, no. He loved them. He just, God just
couldn't do that. Well, he's really not omnipotent
then. He's really not all-powerful, is he? Or maybe he's just omniscient. He can't foresee the obstacles
that must be overcome. He certainly wasn't just He was
a monster if he killed Christ on the cross of Calvary for sins
and then sent some of those sinners for whom Christ died to hell
anyway. What kind of unjust monster would
that be? And yet, in my religious drunkenness,
I saw it not. Well, how does God reveal to
us his truth? through his word, and I pray he'll do that today
for you. How about now? Is your God dead or alive?