This sermon was preached on Sunday
morning, August 14, 1988, at the Trinity Baptist Church in
Montville, New Jersey. In our consecutive reading of
the Word of God, we read this morning that when the word of
prophecy comes by the Spirit into a congregation of God's
people, that one of the results of that is accurate and an almost
threatening sense of self-knowledge. Paul said, If all prophesy, then
the hearts of men are laid bare, and they will cry out, God is
of a truth among them. And as we come to the ministry
of the Word this morning, one of the great burdens of that
ministry is that God would indeed give to each one of us accurate
self-knowledge this morning. To that end, let us cry to Him
that He would, by the Spirit, through the word of prophecy
that is contained in the words of Scripture, would draw near
and minister to us. Let us seek the face of God together. Our Father, we thank you for
your kind providence that has brought us in our regular consecutive
reading of the New Testament to this fresh reminder that when
your word comes with power and with accuracy by the power and
ministry of the Holy Spirit, one of its blessed fruits is
to bring us to accurate self-knowledge. as well as to an awesome sense
of the livingness of your presence. And we pray that those two great
realities will be our portion this morning, that we will know
you to be here, and that we will know ourselves. Hear our cry
and come with power, we plead through Christ our Lord. Amen. Almighty God, the Creator of
heaven and earth, has chosen to display the godness and the
glory of His being in the vast, varied, and immense realm of
all that He has created. In Psalm 19, the psalmist celebrates
this fact by exclaiming, with the burning heart of an adoring
worshiper, The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament
shows forth His handiwork. The Apostle Paul, speaking in
a similar way but in a different context, says that from the very
creation that is about us, men know something of God's almighty
power and of His God-ness. But the sad thing is that the
vast majority of men live with little or no recognition of God's
glory in His own creative handiwork. There are multitudes who go week
after week, month after month, and year after year, and never
experience what it is. to look up into the vastness
of the heavens on a clear night and feel something of the breathless
wonder that impresses itself upon the soul of every man who
beholds the heavens in their vastness and in their glory. There are multitudes who never
know any wide-eyed wonder, no exclamation when they look fall
into the intricacy of a beautiful flower. The heavens do declare
God's glory. All that He has made is smothered
with His fingerprints of majesty and power, and yet precious few
people ever consider that manifestation of His glory. And that's sad. For God has revealed His glory
that it might be appreciated and might come in returns of
praise and adoration to Himself. But there is a fact that is vastly
more sad, and it is this. This same God has made an even
majestically more glorious revelation of who He is, particularly as
a God of love, of justice and of pardoning mercy. And this
revelation He has made in the sending of His only begotten
Son into the world to do what was necessary in order to extend
the blessings of salvation from sin to lost mankind. And in that act of sending His
Son, in the identity of the Son, in the life, the death, the resurrection
of the Son, in the blessings that are held forth to sinners
on the basis of who Christ is and what He has done, God has
made the most full, the most glorious, the most brilliant
display of His glory as God. But as there are few who contemplate
the lesser glory of God's self-disclosure in the heavens above and in the
earth about us, there are fewer yet who consider the greater
glory of God's self-disclosure in the redemption of sinners.
Now when we ask the $64 question, why? Why should men be indifferent
to such a display of God's glory and majesty, especially when
that greater display of His glory and majesty in the person and
work of His Son touches upon our own highest self-interest
and even our own preservation from the flames of hell forever? Why should men be indifferent
to that display of God's glory? Well, the fundamental answer
to that question is this. The vast majority of men and
women are pathetically ignorant of their true spiritual state
and condition before God. It is men's ignorance of what
they are that lies at the root of their indifference to what
God has done in manifesting His glory in the person and work
of His Son. Were men and women to see themselves
as they really are, with biblically based, accurate self-knowledge,
they would of necessity be pressed to consider the manifestation
of God's glory in the gift of His only begotten Son, Jesus
Christ our Lord. Therefore, this morning, as one
who is jealous that God's glory in the person and work of Christ
should be appreciated and loved and adored by all of this congregation,
As one who is deeply concerned that you may possess personally
the priceless blessings of grace, life, and salvation which accompany
the believing appreciation of this manifestation of God's glory,
I have one central driving burden in the preaching of the Word
this morning. And I'll tell you up front what
that burden is. You won't need to wait until
half or two-thirds of the way through the sermon to wonder,
what is the preacher driving at? What is he about this morning? I'm telling you on the very threshold
of our meditation this morning that my central concern is to
lead you by the hand of Scripture to an accurate self-knowledge
that will bring you to a serious consideration of God's glory
revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. More specifically, it
is my aim to bring you to see that you and all men by nature
are nothing less than haters of God. in my general concern to bring
you to a biblically-based, accurate self-knowledge that you might
have an appreciation for the person and work of Jesus Christ
and the glory of God revealed therein, I am especially and
pointedly pressing home this one aspect of biblical truth
I want to demonstrate to you from the Word of God that you
and all men by nature are haters of God. Now I can almost hear
the objections that are being voiced in your minds, albeit
silently, as to your lips. Preacher, I followed you up till
now, but really, You've lost me because you've overstated
the case so far beyond reality at the very beginning that you
have given up any right to be seriously considered. If you
had said it was your purpose to prove that people like Madeleine
Murray O'Hare are haters of God, Then I could follow you. And
if you said it was your purpose to demonstrate that men of the
ilk of Hitler and Stalin and Mao Tse Tung are haters of God,
then surely you would have my conscience on your side. But
preacher, when you say you are setting out to prove that I am
a hater of God, I know you to be wrong before you even open
your mouth. You see, that's just the problem.
You think that your assessment of what you are reflects the
reality of what you are. Sin has so deluded and blinded
you that you not only have no appreciation of who Christ is,
you have no sure and certain knowledge of who you are. For
you see, it is not this creature who in an attempt to drive at
a given goal, albeit noble, has overstated the case as far as
reality is concerned. But it is Almighty God Himself
who describes you and me and every man or woman by nature
as a hater of God. And I would ask you to turn to
Paul's letter to the Romans The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans
and chapter 8. Chapter 8 and our text will be verse 7. Romans 8 and verse 7. Because the carnal mind or the
mind of the flesh is enmity, or it could be translated, as
this very word is translated at least one other time in the
New Testament, because the mind of the flesh is hatred against
God. For it is not subject to the
law of God, neither indeed can it be, and they that are in the
flesh cannot please God. Now let me say just a word about
the setting in which this statement comes to us. Paul is in the midst
of describing by the guidance of the Spirit the great blessings
which come to those who are in union with Jesus Christ. Chapter 8 and verse 1. There
is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. And as he begins to unfold some
of the glorious blessings that are the possession of those who
are in union with Christ, savingly united to God's Son, the gift
of His love, He begins to contrast such people as are in Christ,
true believers, real Christians, with those who are out of Christ,
not believers, not real Christians. And he does so in terms of this
contrast, those that are after the Spirit, that's the term to
describe true Christians, those who are in Christ, real believers,
And those who are after the flesh is his phrase to describe those
who are not believers, who are not in Christ, who are not true
Christians. All of us, by nature, are in
the category of after the flesh. Some, by grace, have come into
the category after the Spirit. Now in the midst of contrasting
their condition, their state, and what we would call the psychology
of their basic perspective on life, he says in verse 7, the
mind of the flesh, that is, the governing principle of the whole
inner disposition, of everyone who is not a true Christian,
who is not in Christ, who is not a believer, the mind of the
flesh, the carnal mind is enmity or hatred against God. So you see this phrase, hatred
against God. is the Spirit-inspired description
of the very essence of the inner disposition of every man, every
woman, every boy, every girl, in every place, in every age,
in every culture, in any country, apart from the grace of God. And so I want to take this text
having demonstrated that we are not pushing some unusual pressure
or putting some unusual and unwarranted pressure to extract this principle,
and demonstrate to you this morning that you are, by nature, a hater
of God. that you were conceived and born
and you exist to this hour unless the grace of God has transformed
you by the power of the Spirit, you exist in this condition as
one whose whole inner governing principle of life is enmity or
hatred itself against God. And I want to demonstrate that
in three specific areas. First of all, you hate God as
a lawgiver. Then we shall see, secondly,
that you hate God as a sovereign. And thirdly, you hate God as
a dispenser of grace and mercy. First of all, you hate God as
a lawgiver. Look at the language of the text.
The carnal mind is enmity or hatred against God for, and here
is Paul's concentrated point of emphasis, for it is not subject
to the law of God, neither indeed can it be. In this particular
setting, Paul says that the clear proof that all men by nature
are haters of God is that as long as they are governed by
the carnal mind, they are not subject to the law of God. In other words, they hate God
as a lawgiver and the law which He has given. Now, if we are
to understand the profound significance of this in coming to accurate
self-knowledge, we must go all the way back to creation, as
it is recorded for us in Genesis chapters 1 and 2, and see this
simple truth, that God created man to be governed
by God the Creator. Very simple truth. God created
man to be governed by God, the Creator. He was not to be governed
by himself and his impulses. He was certainly not to be governed
by the stars and become his own astrologer. He was made by God
to be governed by God, his Creator. And notice how clearly this is
stamped on the face of the creation account. Genesis 1 and verse
27, And God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him, male and female created he them, and God blessed
them. God conferred His goodwill upon
them. God endowed them with all that
was necessary to please Him. His blessing was both an expression
of His goodwill and a conferral of all the good things needed
to please Him. But now notice, The next thing
he does after blessing them, disclosing the fullness of his
good will toward them, is he starts barking orders. And God
said unto them, and there follow a string of commands, be fruitful
and multiply, and replenish the earth. and subdue it, and have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the
heavens, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. Now you see, set in the closest
relationship is God creating them, blessing them, and commanding
them. What does that tell us? It tells
us that God created man to be governed by God the Creator,
and that was not to cramp his style. That was in order that
he might attain to the blessedness that was conferred upon him by
the God who made him. And we see the same emphasis
in chapter 2 where we have the zoom lens account. of creation, chapter 2 and verse
15, and the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden
of Eden to dress it and to keep it, and the Lord God commanded
the man, saying, and so as God puts Adam into that setting in
which he is to glorify God by the work of his hands, The first
expression of his mind to Adam is that of an imperative. He commands the man's saying. And then according to Romans
2 verses 14 and 15, he also wrote upon Adam's heart the summary
of all of his duty in what later became known as the Ten Commandments. that summary of moral law given
by the voice of God upon Sinai, written by the finger of God
in tables of stone, underscoring this tremendous fact that from
the very creation, man was made to be governed by God the Creator. But sadly, chapter 3 of Genesis
records man's defection and apostasy from God, and from the moment
that Adam cast off the yoke of obedience to God. And according
to Romans 5, the essence of his sin was that of disobedience. It was this throwing off of the
posture of an obedient subject. From that moment on, every person
conceived, every person in this room, conceived in his or her
mother's womb, was conceived a creature whose disposition
by nature is in its very essence one of enmity or hatred to God
as a lawgiver. And the great proof of that is
simply to bring one's thoughts, one's attitudes, one's motives,
one's desires into close proximity to the full light of God's holy
law, the Ten Commandments, realizing that those Ten Commandments address
not merely where we go with our feet, what we touch with our
hands, what we may put into our mouths, where we may go, and
what we may contact with our bodies. But God's holy law touches
the motions and desires of the heart. the thoughts of the mind,
the hidden motions and springs of desire and impulse, that the
law of God touches the home of our being from the deepest recesses
inward to the farthest extent of our actions and their impingement
upon others outwardly. And so when we come to those
ten words of Moses, Ten words of God through Moses. Do you
see how they reveal that we are naturally haters of God as a
lawgiver? For what does God say in that
first commandment? He demands unrivaled, whole-souled
love and worship. Thou shalt have no other gods
before me. He demands that He have all of
our hearts. And we say, no, it's not fair
that God should have unqualified, absolute, totalitarian rights
over me. Give me a little reed and broom
to brutally breathe. I'll have a God who's there to
stroke me when I scrape my knee in life's journey. I'll have
a God who throws some shekels at me when I'm in need, and I'll
have a God who'll cradle me in His breast when I need comfort.
But a God that demands that I love Him with all my heart, all my
mind, all my soul, all my strength, all my days, every moment of
every waking hour? You don't like a God like that. We find that cramps us. We want
a little room to breathe. What we think is the rarefied
air of doing our own thing. Since we see that we hate that
God whose law demands such allegiance. In the second commandment, He
demands that His worship be pure and unmixed worship, that we
are not free to choose how we shall worship Him. He dictates
how we shall be worshiped, and He abominates anything less than
the worship He demands, and He curses the bringing of worship
that He does not mandate. In the third commandment, He
desires sincere, non-hypocritical worship, He will not accept the
body plunked down in the pew, the eyes on the preacher, but
the mind on the girl four pews ahead and three seats over. He
looks upon that and he abominates it. He doesn't accept it. He
does not accept the lips that mouth the hymn while the heart
is off on tomorrow's vacation or last week's pleasures. He says, this people draws near
to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. We take
His name in vain when we worship insincerely and hypocritically,
and then He demands that His worship be stated, concentrated,
periodic worship on a whole day set apart unto Him. He says,
remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. And the fact that a
whole day is God's day in a unique way, and He set His claims upon
it, we see that we are haters of God. We don't like the thought
that we are not free to do what we think we would like to do
on His day. But we are to do what He commands
us, and we show that we hate God as a lawgiver who would have
the nerve to intrude into our weekly calendar, and before we
even sit down and mark out the activities, He puts a big red
X over His day and says, Mine! You hate a God like that. And
the way you've profaned his Sabbath through all your years is an
indication you hate God as a lawgiver. And then when we turn to the
last six commandments, You see, the case becomes all the more
convincing if you're honest before God this morning. He says we
are to keep sacred the authority of our parents, honor thy father
and thy mother, that that authority is delegated by God. And yet
one of the first things we did by instinct was to learn how
to con our parents, try to manipulate our parents. Buck against our
parents. Disobey our parents. Lie to our
parents. Why? We are haters of the God
who said, Honor thy father and thy mother. And then how little
we have placed worth upon the gift of life. We have acted as
though life was something we were free to do with. There are
some of you sitting here who have blown your mind. That precious
gift of God on booze and drugs. You've drugged your mind by hours
of inordinate, mindless TV watching that has been a disgrace to the
nobility and dignity of your life as a creature made in the
image of God. You may have slain a life within
your womb because that baby didn't fit into your convenient plans.
Or you thought, well, you could go ahead and have sex without
the commitments of marriage and just be careful. And you weren't
careful enough. But you took care of that little
slip by a trip to the abortion clinic and flew the life that
God had implanted in the womb. And Jesus said, when you entertain
thoughts of ill will, they are of the very essence of murder.
And when that ill will breaks out in terms of calling someone
stupid, stupid jerk. You use terminology that demeans
the fellow man or woman or boy or girl as an image bearer of
God. Jesus said that's in the direction
of the violation of the sixth commandment. And then what should
we say of the seventh commandment with its demands for the sanctity
of sex? Our sexual capacities and appetites
are not our own. They were designed and given
by God, and they stand under the pressure of the law of God.
Thou shalt not commit adultery. And according to our Lord again,
that commandment touches the look of the eyes, the desire
of the heart, as well as what I touch with my hands and what
I may do with my genitals. Almighty God has sovereign rights
over your genitals, over your breasts. Sovereign rights! over your thoughts and what you
look upon that is erotically stimulating, you show yourself
to be a hater of God. You say, who's got to mess around
with something so personal and private as my sex life? I'll
tell you who He is. He's your Creator, who designed
and made you a sexual being. You're a hater of God. If you
could, you'd love to rip out that seventh commandment and
have total liberty to do what your base's impulses move you
to do. And then the sanctity of property
thou shalt not steal. How many times have we shown
ourselves to be haters of God by our indifference to the property
rights of others, by stealing when we were children, In things
that we were told, oh, every kid goes through a period. It's
innocent. Is it innocent when God says, Thou shalt not steal,
that I shall recognize the sanctity of another's property as God
has sovereignly deposited it in his hands and in his possession?
And the sanctity of truth lying, the Scripture says, is native
to human beings. They go astray from the womb
speaking lies. and the sanctity of a heart content
with the will and with the gifts of God, thou shalt not covet.
Why do we find all of those commandments so irksome? Listen to the text. The carnal mind is hatred against
God, for it is not subject to the law of God. My friend, listen. I said at the outset I wanted
to help you to accurate self-knowledge. For without it, you will go on
despising and being indifferent to Jesus Christ and his work
for sinners. Hear me now. The word of God
describes you as a hater of God. First of all, in this particular,
you hate God as a lawgiver. When we come to understand that
God rightfully commands these things to be kept perfectly,
continually, and from the heart, then surely we will begin to
understand what Paul meant when he said in the previous chapter
of Romans, and I direct your attention there, chapter 7, beginning
with verse 7, listen to his own testimony. He despised Christ
because he had no accurate knowledge of himself. But that all changed. What shall we say then, Romans
7, 7? Is the law sin? God forbid. Howbeit, I had not known sin
except through the law, for I had not known coveting except the
law said, Thou shalt not covet, but sin finding occasion through
the commandment. All manner of, I'm sorry, for
sin finding occasion wrought in me through the commandment,
all manner of coveting, for apart from the law, sin is dead, and
I was alive apart from the law once. But when the commandment
came, sin revived and I died. And the commandment which was
unto life, I found to be unto death. What is he doing? Talking
double talk? No, this is what he's saying.
He said, I actually thought I had eternal life based on my keeping
God's law. I thought that I was a lover
of God and therefore showed my love of God by loving His law. Until he said, by the operation
of the Holy Spirit, I came to understand the meaning of the
tenth commandment. And it was the peculiar inwardness
of the tenth commandment. Thou shalt not covet that, as
it were, broke open the secret of all the other commandments.
Up until then, Paul thought of the commandments in terms of
external behavior. He had never risen up and spit
in his mother's eyes, slapped his father's face. He had never
had illicit intercourse with the neighbor's daughter, the
neighbor's wife, and he thought those commandments were fully
kept by him. But when under the illumination
of the Spirit he came to the tenth commandment, thou shalt
not covet, he asked the question, does one covet with his feet?
Does one covet with his hands? With what organs of the body
does one covet? Well, you see, coveting is a
wholly inward disposition of the heart. And he said, when
I came to that discovery, then, as it were, the hard shell of
my ignorance of what I was was broken. And when the shell was
broken, I saw myself to be a veritable pussack of uncleanness and sin
and a hater of My friend, if you don't come
to see that that's what you are, you will never appreciate the
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. It's tragic that you
don't appreciate the glory of God in His handiwork. But oh,
how tragic that you see nothing glorious in the gift of God's
Son. You see nothing glorious in His
perfect life, lived in humiliation and independence upon the Father. You see nothing glorious in His
agonizing bloodletting upon a cruel Roman gibbet, buried beneath
the billows of divine wrath. You see nothing glorious in that.
Why? because the shell of your heart
remains uncracked. You've never seen yourself as
a hater of God, but that you are. And specifically, you hate
God as a lawgiver. But secondly, you hate God as
a sovereign. You hate God as a sovereign. You say, Pastor Martin, what
do you mean by a sovereign? Well, a sovereign is one who
is supreme and independent in his authority. In other words,
a sovereign is someone who sits on a throne, a throne of real
power and real authority, and there is no throne next to his
with whom he shares that authority and power. There is no council
chamber on the same level with whom he consults before he can
exercise that power. To be a sovereign is to sit upon
a solitary throne, exalted above all other sources of authority. That's exactly how Isaiah saw
the Lord. In the year that King Uzziah
died, he says in Isaiah 6, I saw the Lord high and lifted up,
sitting upon a throne. There he was in solitary, exalted
splendor as the sovereign of heaven and earth. He consults
with no one but himself when he wills and when he acts and
when he plans and when he purposes. When God created man and created
the world, everything He created was but the expression of His
actions as a sovereign. This is celebrated in that well-known
text in Revelation 4 and verse 11. The four and twenty elders
fall before Him that sits upon the throne, and they worship
Him. And listen to the essence of their worship. Worthy art
Thou, our Lord and our God. to receive the glory and the
honor and the power, for you did create all things, and because
of your will they were and were created. They worshiped God as
a sovereign who willed to create and who created what he willed,
and none was there to guide his hand. None was there to change
His plans. He did not send His drawings
to the local planning board for approval. He didn't send them
to any board of standards to see if they met code. God planned,
God spoke, God created, and all things are what they are because
of His sovereign will. Now from the very first act of
disobedience, what was a delight to Adam before his sin is now
a source of hatred in man's heart. Having sought to usurp the throne
of God by refusing to obey the mandate of God with respect to
that special tree, mankind having fallen in Adam Every individual
one of us is conceived with a disposition that is described in Romans 8,
7. Haters of God, not only haters of God as a sovereign, but we
are haters of God as a lawgiver, but we hate Him as a sovereign. Many will tolerate a God who
sits in the wings waiting to patch up our messes when we get
in trouble. They'll have a God like that.
They don't want a God who vacates his universe. They want him in
the wings, within earshot, so that when things get rough and
they say, hey God, I'm in a mess, come help me. He'll be close
enough to come and patch up the mess and then go off to his benign
distance and leave us alone to do our own thing in the meantime
till the next mess and then we can call out. They will tolerate
a God in the wings waiting to come and patch up our messes.
They'll tolerate a God who in life's crises will be there to
somehow sort out the mess or close enough to blame and say,
if there's a God, how come this happened to me? But a God who
orders and governs and disposes all things, hear me now, who
orders and governs and disposes all things from the internal
energy of every single atom out to the mighty light and size
and mass of the largest star in the farthest galaxy, of a
God who controls the energy of the internal segment of the atom,
to the farthest reaches of the most extant galaxy. Men don't want a God like that
who controls everything from there to there and in between
without exception. A God who does according to His
will in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of
men. The God of whom the psalmist
spoke when he said, Our God is in the heavens. He has done whatsoever
He has pleased. And it's interesting that in
this very epistle, Paul shows that men hate a God who is sovereign
even when that God would be merciful to the creatures who hate him.
Turn to Romans chapter 9 and listen to the language of this
irritation of hatred against God as sovereign in Romans chapter
9. The apostle is demonstrating
that God's promises to save Israel have not failed, but those promises
were not to be fulfilled in just the literal, physical seed of
Abraham, but fulfilled in an elect seed. chosen from among
the literal seed of Abraham, yes, but also chosen from the
vast hordes of the Gentiles, so that God's promise to save
Israel will come to expression in the salvation of all whom
He has sovereignly marked out to be the recipients of His salvation. Verse 11, for the children being
not yet born, neither having done anything good or bad, that
the purpose of God according to election might stand, not
of works, but of him that calls it was said unto her, the elder
shall serve the younger. Even as it is written, Jacob
I loved, but Esau I hated. Now look at man's response. What
shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with
God? That's not right. It's not right for God to be
a sovereign in the exercise of His mercy. It's not right for
God to say, I choose to set my love upon Jacob. Though he by
nature is a sinner, though by nature he hates my law, though
by nature he hates my sovereign rule, I nonetheless set my love
upon him to change him by my grace. He saw, he is conceived,
he is born a sinner. He also hates me as a lawgiver. He hates me as a sovereign, and
I choose to leave him. to bear the just deserts of that
state of mind and heart and to perish in his sin. I choose to
set my redemptive love upon Jacob. I choose not to set it upon Esau. And men say, well, that's not
right. Verse 15, For he saith unto Moses, I will have mercy
on whom I will have mercy. And I will have compassion on
whom I have compassion. So then it is not of him who
wills, nor of him who runs, but of God that has mercy. Verse
18, So he has mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardens. Paul answers the objection by
saying God has a right to be sovereign even in the dispensing
of His mercy. But then men, showing their hatred
to God's sovereignty, look at verse 19. Thou wilt say unto
me, Why don't they still find fault? For who has resisted His
will? Paul, if you've got a God like
that, He sits on the throne and He orders everything, even the
ultimate destinies of men. How can a God like that find
fault? We're just caught in the jaws
of this horrible God who runs everything. That's Paul's answer. He says, But nay, O man, who
are you to reply against God? He doesn't say, Oh, you misunderstood
me. I wasn't saying that God sovereignly chose some and bypassed
others. You misunderstood me. I wasn't
saying that God's free to show mercy to some and not to others.
They did understand. And they understood so well that
they objected and showed their hatred to God as sovereign. And
Paul's answer is not to water down the reality of God's sovereignty,
but to whittle man down to size. He says, Who are you, O man?
To reply against God shall the thing formed say to him who formed
it, Why have you made me thus? In other words, the only place
for a creature in the presence of a sovereign is with his head
bowed and his mouth shut, bowed on his face. But you see, that's not where
you are, is it? You hear about a God like that? Why does God
allow the tragedies that caused the bodies of little babies to
be mangled and burnt in the horrors of the Vietnam War? Why does
God this, and why does God that? As though the sovereign of the
universe is answerable to you, that your hatred to God is suffering,
rather than putting your hand upon your mouth and saying, There
is much that perplexes me, much that disturbs, much that I cannot
reconcile with what you've revealed of who you are. You are God and
I am the creature. O Lord, subdue and slay and consume
within my breast every question mark that would be raised about
your rights to be God. No. You'd rather stand back and
rear back on your hind legs and make God accountable to you.
My friend, that's what Paul meant when he said the carnal mind
is hatred against God. You not only hate God as a lawgiver,
you hate God as a sovereign. But thirdly and finally, you
hate God as a God of grace. You say, wait a minute, Pastor,
you really have left me now. All men are glad that God is
a forgiving and a merciful God. You didn't hear me. I said you
hate God as a God of grace. You know what the word grace
means? Grace speaks of God's unmerited
kindness to the ill-deserving. And grace throbs through God's
salvation from its top roots in election to its full flowering
in glorification. It is a salvation of the unmerited
favor of God to the ill-deserving from beginning to end, so much
so that the Scripture says, You have been saved, as though
grace itself were the Savior. Well, we know grace is not the
Savior. Christ is the Savior. The Holy Spirit applies the salvation. The Savior was sent from the
Father. The Father, the Son, and the
Spirit are the Savior. The text says, by grace you have
been saved. Why? Not that Paul would substitute
Christ and the Spirit and the Father with the commodity called
grace. But the Father and the Son and
the Spirit are so motivated by grace in the procurement and
the application of salvation that it is not stretching reality
to say, by grace. You have been saved. Grace has
effected a method of salvation in which there is a way of just
forgiveness, righteous acceptance, a lawful attainment of heaven
by hell-deserving sinners. And you see, all of us by nature
hate a God of grace for two basic reasons. Follow closely now as
I try to bring this to a pinpoint conclusion. You see, in a salvation
that is all of grace, that is, God is conferring upon sinners
exactly the opposite of what they deserve for nothing in them,
solely for things in himself. That being so, then the sinner
must take the whole crown with every last jewel that God has
placed upon his head and put it at the feet of his Savior
and say, Not unto me, but unto you be praise and honor and glory
for conferring upon me, for no cause in me, but for reasons
and causes and motives exclusively in yourself. You see, a salvation
that is wholly gratuitous, all of grace, forces its recipient
to glory only in the giver of that salvation. The Scripture
says in 1 Corinthians 1, 30 and 31, But of him are you in Christ
Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification,
and redemption, that according as it is written, He that glorieth,
let him glory in the Lord. Why? Because the salvation is
all of grace. And you see, the human heart
doesn't want to be in a posture where it gives all the credit
down to the last one millionth of a grand to a source outside
itself. It wants to leave a little room
for my mourning, my prayers, my decision, my going forward,
my saying a prayer, my getting my act together, my this, my
that, my this, my that. No! And this is why you hate
a God of grace by nature, because a God of grace is a God who will
secure from everyone who embraces His gracious salvation the sole
credit for what they possess. And man, the creature, doesn't
want God to have the sole credit. But then secondly, because the
salvation is all of grace, to those who deserve the opposite,
listen, The perception of grace is always the pressure of unqualified
obligation to the giver of grace. The pressure of grace is always
the pressure of unqualified obligation to the one who gives the grace.
If I deserve to be burning in hell, And yet God, for reasons
wholly in Himself, due to nothing in me that He saw before, or
at, or after my conversion, was pleased to save me with a salvation,
all of grace. Then what limits dare I place
upon my obligations to such a God? That's why Paul said the love
of Christ constrains us because we thus judge. that if one died
for all, then all died, and they who live should no longer henceforth
live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them and rose
again." My friend, listen. The greatest proof that you've
been taught the doctrine of a gracious salvation is not that you can
parrot the words. It's that your heart has felt
this pressure. of the unqualified response of
whole-souled abandonment to Jesus Christ that is always the constraint
of grace. You see, you hate the God of
grace because you hate the thought of giving your life to another,
lock, stock and barrel. That's why you hate the God of
grace, because you don't want to lay all the laurels at his
feet and say, worthy is the land that was slain to receive blessing
and glory and honor and power and salvation. It's very interesting
we don't have time to open up the passage. But in Romans 10,
1-4, Paul describes how his own countrymen hated the God of grace
and would not submit to the righteousness that grace provided. And they
went about to work out their own righteousness so they could
pat themselves on the back. God will not have it so. The
cause of his salvation is sovereign mercy. The grounds of his salvation
are all in the work of Christ. And therefore, the praise for
that salvation is due to Christ and Christ alone. Now, my unconverted
friend, listen, we come around full circle to where we began.
I said the reason so many put so little value and appreciate
so little the glory of God revealed in the person and work of Christ
is they don't know themselves. If you came in here this morning
thinking, I love God a little bit. Oh yeah, I love myself a
little bit, I love God a little bit. And you sat there, and God
has cracked the shell of your heart. And you said, well, if
for no one else, surely that sermon was for me, oh God. It's
true. I do hate you as a lawgiver,
and up till this morning I thought I loved you. I do hate you as
a sovereign, and up till now I thought I loved you. And I
do hate you, O God of grace! O God, you've cracked the shell! I see the horrible mass of sinful
pus that is my human heart. Ah, my friend, this is good news
that I have. God so loved the world that He
came as only begotten Son. Jesus came for sinners just like
you. For sinners like you He was willing
to go to the confines of Mary's womb and there to develop as
any ordinary fetus for nine months. For you He was willing to be
expelled amidst her groans and cries of birthbangs. For you He was willing to be
wrapped in swaddling clothes. For sinners the likes of us,
He was willing to be reared in poverty, to be humiliated, the
infinite God of all wisdom, having to learn His ABCs, to tie His
shoes, to button His shirt, living that life of self-imposed humiliation. For you and for me, sinners the
likes of us, He was willing to bear the scorn and the reproach
of men. pray until sweat drops of blood
ooze from his brow and fell to the ground. For sinners like
us willing to go to the judgment hall and be spat upon and mocked
and clogged and whipped and hung between earth and heaven until
the Father shrouds the heavens in inky black darkness, as one
black poet described it, darker than a hundred midnights down
in a cypress shrouded the heavens in blackness, while He poured
out His wrath unmixed with mercy upon His Son, until it rung from
His holy heart the cry, My God, My God, why have You forsaken
Me? And then the cry of triumph,
Tetelestai, it has finished, it has been, it stands accomplished
to yield up His Spirit. to have his body carried and
placed in a tomb. The third day to rise from the
dead, to go back to the right hand of the Father. Listen, my
friend, all of that was done that sinners who are haters of
God like you and me might have all the expressions of that hatred
of God in all of their details of thought and word and deed,
all of those sins and transgressions and iniquities, the full mountain
of them leveled by the blood and the perfect righteousness
of Jesus Christ. Jesus did all of those things
that we sinners might have a refuge from the wrath of God we deserve
for our sins. He lives to send His Holy Spirit
into our hearts, to break the chains that bind us, to give
us eyes to perceive spiritual realities through the Word, to
give us hearts to love spiritual realities through the Word, to
give us wills to follow in the ways of God. My friend, when
we talk about Jesus and salvation and the Savior, that's what we're
talking about. I ask you, my unsaved friend,
have you come to see that you do hate God? The Scripture says
Christ died for His people while they were enemies. Go to Christ. Tell Him what you are. Tell Him
what you've seen yourself to be. Your sin is not too great
to keep you from Christ. It's your pride and your lack
of appreciation of what a sinner you are that keeps you from Christ.
No amount of sin can keep a sinner from Christ, for he came to save
us from our sins. Go to him this morning, child
of God, for your comfort. Sitting here this morning, many
of you have been able to say, thank God where once it was true
I hated God as a lawgiver, I can say with Paul in Romans 7, I
now delight in the law of God after the inward parts. Lord,
I love your law. I don't keep it as I ought. I
must confess my need of cleansing every day. But Lord, I love your
total claims over me, and I never feel more safe or happy than
when I'm nestled most fully under the gracious bonds and constraints
of your holy law. Loving you with all my heart,
seeking to keep your worship pure and real and sincere and
stated and periodic on your day, never more blessed and happy
than when, in dependence upon your spirit, I am able to give
that honor due to constituted authority in the home, in the
church, and in society than when I have respect unto life and
the sanctity of sex and property and truth. O Lord, I thank you. I no longer hate you as a lawgiver. Can you say that this morning?
My friend, if you can, it's because by grace you have been saved. Can you say I no longer hate
Him as a sovereign? Some of you sat there this morning
and said, when I described what a sovereign is, and that this
God controls the inner motions of every least atom to the outer
reaches of the farthest galaxy and everything in between, your
heart said, hallelujah, I would have it no other way. My friend,
it's grace that's made you love a God who is sovereign. And if
when we describe God as a God of grace, who has contrived a
salvation that secures all the glory to himself and unlimited
obligations upon its recipients. If you could sit there and say,
Oh God, that's just the salvation I love. Lord, I don't want a
salvation that leaves one little diamond chip in my crown. I want all the chips and all
the parts of the crown to be upon the pierced head of my Savior. upon that brow that was scarred
with thorns. That's where I'd have it to be.
And you could sit there and say, oh, Lord, my only grief is not
that you have total claims over me, but that I so feebly render
to you the claims which are your rightful due. Could you say those
things inwardly as I preached? Then, my friend, why in the world
are you doubting you're a Christian? Only Almighty God by sovereign
grace makes men lovers of himself as lawgiver, as sovereign, and
as a God of grace. And remember this, Christian.
Though the dominion of sin has been broken, you're no longer
fundamentally a hater of God. Remaining sin will strike again
and again at those three areas. And your remaining sin, fueled
by the pressure of the world and the subtle work of the devil,
will constantly fight to stir up controversies within you to
God as a lawgiver, God as a sovereign, and God as a God of grace. And
you will make progress in the Christian life in direct proportion
to your ability to maintain, by the grace of God, a comfortable
relationship to God as lawgiver, sovereign, and gracious. Let us pray. Oh, our Father, many of us have felt
even in the preaching of your word the sense of shame and horror
that we would have, some of us for many years, hated you. You're
a God worthy of being adored and worshipped and loved and
honored and obeyed. And we regarded you in such an
unworthy light. Oh, Father, remember not against
us the sins of our youth. Many of us can confess that by
your grace we do love you. We love you for who you are.
We would not change you. We love you as lawgiver. We love you as sovereign. We
love you as gracious. But for those who cannot say
that, oh God, may that accurate self-knowledge be given even
now. May they in brokenness of heart
cry out to you for mercy. May they find themselves ere
they pillow their heads this night as those who do indeed
love you. Use your word. Use the proclamation
of your gospel. Use the proclamation of your
law to effect saving mercy in the hearts of many. May your
blessing rest upon us as we leave this place. May the enemy of
our souls not come like the fowls of the air who follow the farmer
and pluck up the seed that is sown. But may that seed be enfolded
in our hearts and bring forth fruit unto everlasting life.
we ask in Jesus' name, Amen.