Now if you would, I'd like for
you to take your Bibles. Turn with me to John chapter
3. John chapter 3. We've been looking
at this and studying this for some time now. But this morning
I want us to look at verses 17 through 21. And this struck me while I was
preaching last week, but I didn't want to get sidetracked with the message
that we had last week about it. And I mentioned some of it toward
the end of the message. But what struck me from these
verses is this thought sent from God. He says in verse 16, "...for
God so loved that He gave." God gave. And then in the very next
verse, he says, and God sent not His Son into the world to
condemn the world, but He was sent into the world that the
world through Him might be saved. And I tried as best I could last
week. We looked at John 3.16, and there's a word there, world,
And in what sense that word, world, is to be understood? Today, religion tells us that
this verse means every man without exception. Any man, woman, child
without exception, God gave His Son for them. That cannot be. And I tried last week and labored
last week as best I can to show you that that word, world, cannot
mean all men without exception. And I gave you three or four
reasons. The first of those reasons is this, because it's not in
harmony with the rest of the Scriptures. God cannot have and
elect certain individuals and promises that talk about Christ
dying for those that He chose and then turn right around in
another Scripture and tell us that Christ died for all men. It's not in harmony. You see
what I'm saying? It's not in harmony with the
Word of God. It's not in harmony with the
rest of the Scriptures. So where is the fault? Is the fault in the Scriptures?
No, the fault is in my understanding of the Word. We are to view all things in
the Word of God. We're never to take something
isolated and then try to build a doctrine around it. We're to
take that thing, as the old pastor used to tell me, and set it on
the fence and take the Word of God and see if you can knock
it off. If you can knock it off, it's not in harmony with the
rest of the Scriptures. If that thing will stand the
test of being in harmony, then you have a right understanding
of the Word. And the word world cannot mean
every individual without exception because it's not in harmony with
the rest of the Word of God. And then secondly, I told you
this because it's contrary to the Gospel of God. Our Lord,
how many times and how many occasions did He tell His disciples, you
have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you? How many times did
He tell His disciples On one occasion they asked him, they
said, why do you speak in parables? Why don't you just come out and
say, I'm the Christ? Why do you talk in these parables? Why do you talk in these illustrations
of things? Why do you talk so mysteriously?
And he said, because it's given unto you to know the mystery
of the kingdom of God, but unto them it's not given. In his high
priestly prayer, he said, I pray not for the world, but for those
which thou hast given me. So to understand this word world
in the context that it means every individual without exception
is contrary to the gospel of God. And because it makes the
glory of God of none effect, The glory of God is the reason
God saves sinners. God purposed before the foundation
of the world to save a people for His glory. That's why He
did it. That's why He created the world.
That's why He allowed men to fall. That's why He purposed
the giving of His Son and the death of His Son and the salvation
of His elect. It's to show His glory. to make
known who He is, His sovereignty, and His majesty, and His justice,
and His mercy, and His love, and all those things. He purposed
to manifest that glory. But if Christ died for all men,
and all men are not redeemed, don't that destroy the glory
of God? It defeats His purpose. You see
what I'm saying? So it cannot be because it defeats
the glory of God, and it cannot be because it makes of none effect
the sacrifice of Christ. If Christ died for a people,
and those people are not effectually redeemed, then His death was
in vain. It was just a vain effort. No
better than the best efforts of men, if that can be so. And it cannot be so, and I'm
not going to spend any more time trying to defend these things
or try to explain these things, these things have to be revealed
anyway. But this verse is to be understood
in the light of the mystery of the Gentiles. Up until the coming
of Christ, no one else in the world had any idea who God was
except Israel. Paul talks about it in his message
in Acts chapter 17, where he stood on Mars Hill and talked
to those Greek philosophers, those heathen philosophers. And
he told them there that at the times of this ignorance, God
winked at it. that he overlooked their sins,
what it means is that he closed his eyes to them. He had no dealings
with them. He ignored them completely. If I'm trying to say something
and somebody's over here yipping and yacking and carrying on,
I blot him out of my mind as best I can because I'm saying
something here. And because of the importance
of what I'm saying and who I'm saying it to, I will ignore what's
going on over here. That's the sense in which he
winked at those things. He closed his eyes to the ignorance
and idolatry of the Gentiles in order to make his glory known
to Israel. And as far as the world was concerned,
nobody else had any dealings with God, and up to this day,
You go in any church in the land, and they'll tell you in a heartbeat
that Israel, that's the elect of God. That's the chosen of
God. Everybody knew it. God established that. But behind
that, they were a typical nation. They were set as a picture. They were set as a pattern of
things to come, Paul said. They were a typical people and
all the things that happened to them were patterns and pictures
of God's spiritual Israel. And spiritual Israel is in every
nation, kindred, tribe, and tongue under heaven. God has a people. He has a people. In Colossians chapter 1 verse
25, Paul said he was made a minister according to the dispensation
of God, this time that God had set apart. He said, which is
given me for you. Now, he is talking to a Gentile
people here. To fulfill the Word of God, even
the mystery which hath been hid from ages and generations, but
now is made manifest to his saints. to whom God would make known
what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles."
Among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
So John 3, 16 and 17, and these various other passages that I
read to you last week and gave to you to look at, are to be
understood by the bias of this Rabbi Pharisee, this Jew, This
self-righteous Jew that was standing before Christ, Nicodemus. And his words were exposing this
man's utter ignorance. An inability to perceive. He
stopped Nicodemus. Nicodemus began by telling him
what he knew. We know you're a teacher come
from God. I know, I know, I know. You go
to tell somebody something today, what do they tell you? I know.
They can't hardly let you talk for telling you what they already
know. And the Lord just stopped him and said, Nicodemus, except
you be born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God. The word
is perceive. You can't even perceive what's
going on. Apart from regeneration, you
have no perception of this kingdom because this kingdom is spiritual.
It's invisible. You can't see it. It's so invisible
and so unattuned to our vision that the Lord tells us not to
try to separate sheep from goats, believers from unbelievers. Don't
do it, He said. Because you'll go out and pull
up the wheat. You'll pull up the wrong thing. You'll take
the tares and put them in with the good seed, and you'll pull
up the good seed and feed it to the goats. This thing is spiritual. It's
invisible. The kingdom of God cometh not
with observation, he said. And so you remember who he's
talking to in the Scriptures when we look at things. Always
remember to look and see who he's talking to. And then look
at the subject and see what it is he's trying to convey, what
it is he's saying. And he's talking to this self-righteous
Jewish rabbi, this man who was so confident that he knew all
these things concerning God and he didn't know any of them. And
so he uses the word world because that word was so totally Alien
to him, the idea of salvation to someone other than a Jew. And sometimes we have to do that.
We have to say things in such a manner as to shock men into
listening. Otherwise, they don't even hear
what you're saying. I want him to hear what you're saying. And
so he uses it. For God so loved the world. Don't
you know that turned that Jewish rabbi upside down when he heard
that? Turned him upside down. And let me say this. It's our religious presumptions
that blind us from the truth. They blind us from the truth.
Paul said, if our gospel be hid, it's hid to the lost in whom
the God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe
not. How does he do that? By making them think they already
know. That's how you blind your mind.
That's how you blind your mind. You already know. I remember
the time and the place. You know, you go to tell somebody,
well, I know, I know, I know. But they don't know. They don't
know. Blinded the minds of them which
believe not lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ
who is the image of God should shine unto them. And the reality,
the reality of why he was here. See, this is what Nicodemus came
for. He heard that this man was the
Christ. And he came, he along with the
rest of the Jews, the rest of the Sanhedrin and all the others,
they came to investigate this man and see if there was any
truth to the rumor that this man was the Christ. And Nicodemus
came and he saw the miracles that Christ performed. Men are
blind to the spiritual kingdom, they're blind to certain things,
but you have natural eyes, and these natural eyes watched him
call a dead man out of a grave. They watched him heal a leper
who was covered and his face rotten right off the bone. They
watched him cleanse this man right before their eyes. They
watched Him take a blind man who was blind from birth. Never,
He said, has it ever been heard anywhere in the earth, anywhere
in history, that one blind from birth was made to see. But Christ
made him to see. He gave him eyes to see. And
you can just go on and on. He cast out demons. He done all
these things. He took that woman with the issue
of blood and dried up that issue of blood. And you can go on and
on and on with these miracles. Later on in the book of Acts,
Peter stands before the people and he said, Jesus of Nazareth,
a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs
which God did by him in your midst. That's how you knew who
he was. And that's what Nicodemus was
doing here. We know thou art a teacher come from God because
no man can do the things that you do except they be given him
of God. And so he just stopped that old
man right there. And he said, here's the first thing we're
going to do. We're going to get rid of your religious history. That's
the first thing I'm going to do. I'm going to show you that
you can't go to school and you can't learn a doctrine and you
can't learn this and learn that and observe this and observe
that and do this and do that and will this and will that and
come into this kingdom. The only way you can get into
this kingdom is for God to put you in this kingdom. And that
is what this Messiah is all about. This Messiah did not come to
reform your religion. The Messiah is not sent of God
here to do your bidding. The Messiah is not sent here
to revive your spirit and get you excited and raise your zeal. That is not why the Messiah is
coming. He is not coming to establish a kingdom for this little nation
over here in the Middle East called Jews. That is not why
He came. Not why He came. He came to save. To save. God sent not His Son
into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through
Him might be saved. He's a Savior. I preach a Savior
that came to save. He came to save. That's why He's
not here to condemn. See, this is what Nicodemus was
totally ignorant of. He didn't come to condemn. He
said, you're condemned already. Folks, you're ignorant of that. I tell you, I'm almost in the
place where I'm not going to preach these things anymore.
I'm just going to preach and talk about sin. Because that's
what men are ignorant of. They're ignorant of the sins.
If you was a sinner and you knew you was a sinner, you'd cry out
to God. That's what He tells them. This
is condemnation. What? Light has come into the
world, and men love darkness rather than light. You're so
in love with your religion, Nicodemus. You're so in love with your religion
that you don't want anything to do with the light. See, Nicodemus thought he could
come. He was a good man as far as men compared to men. He was
a good man. He came there because the Sanhedrin and all the Jewish
hierarchy was against Christ. And they were coming out, and
he knew something about their power and influence over Israel.
And he knew that this was going to wind up in this man's death,
and yet he feared this man because he saw this man do things that
only God could do. And so he'd come as a peacemaker.
He'd come and he was going to try to butter the bread a little
bit. He was going to come and get everything together and kind
of ease things over and kind of lessen the tensions a little
bit and kind of just ease the tensions, get rid of the offense. And Christ said, He said, naked
damnedness, He said, you can't even perceive the kingdom. You're
in here trying to make peace and trying to teach and trying
to ease things and trying to do things, and you can't even
see it, let alone enter into it. Except you be born again,
you cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. You're not even in the
Kingdom of God, Nicodemus. Not only don't you know anything
about it, you're not in it. And you can't be in it unless
I put you in it. And then he tells this man something
that was very familiar to him. He took him back to that spot
in the wilderness. He took him back there where
God rained down fiery serpents on the people, and the people
were bitten, and the people died. And nobody could escape them.
They were under the curse of God. They were under the condemnation
of God. And those serpents came right
into their midst and began to bite them, and they began to
die. One at the first, and then three, and then twelve, and then
twenty-five, and after a while they were just Bodies everywhere,
all over. Two and a half million people
there. Serpents all out in their midst, biting. People dying.
Children dying. Fathers dying. Mothers dying.
Granddaughters dying. Everybody's dying. Death is in
the land. The serpents biting and they're
dying by the thousands, laying on the ground. And he said, Moses,
God commanded Moses to make a serpent of brass and put it on a pole
and raise it up. Whether he stood it in the midst
and commanded everybody to look, or whether he carried it around,
I don't know. I don't know. But that serpent of brass was
lifted up on a pole, and he said, Behold, when a man is bitten,
he's dying, and he knows he's dying. The serpent bites you. The poison enters into the veins,
and you feel its venom, and the numbness begins to grab hold,
and the convulsions begin to come. You know you're dying.
He said, when he looks, he'll live. And he said, even as that
serpent was raised up in the wilderness, this is what the
Messiah is all about, even so must the Son of God be lifted
up. Why? Because everybody is dead
and dying. That's why. Because that old
serpent bit Adam, and the venom entered into his veins, and sin
entered into the world by one man, and so death passed upon
all men. Why? Where's the evidence? They
all died. Find me a live man. You can't
find one. Find me somebody who loves Christ.
You can't find one. Huh? You can't find one. We come
forth from the womb speaking lies, don't we? That's exactly
right. Take a little child. We love
to talk about their innocence. Take that little child in a room.
Put every toy known to man around here on the floor. Got an empty
closet over there, nothing in it. Tell them they can have everything
in the room, but don't go in that door. Go outside and look
through the window and see where to go first. To the door. Why? Why? Because we're born in iniquity.
That's why. Baby cries. You go in there,
well, check his diaper. It's not wet. Must be hungry. You feed it. Keeps on crying.
Why is it crying? Because it's a liar. It comes
forth from the womb speaking lies. That's why. Ain't nothing
wrong with it. It just wants what it wants.
That same rig we keep right on crying all the way through our
adult life. We just cry and cry. I used to get so angry at Israel
going through the wilderness. Just, God, He'd give them something
and they'd whine. And He'd give them something
and they'd whine. And I thought, why do they do that? And then
I found out I do the same thing. That's exactly right. Why do
we do that? Because sin entered into the world and death by sin. And we're dead and dying. We're
spiritually dead and we're dying physically. And when we're done
dying physically, we're going to die eternally unless God raises
Christ up on a cross. And we look at Him and look to
Him and live. That's what he told Nicodemus.
God sent. God, you see, we've been told
since we was this big that anytime we want to be saved, all we got
to do is accept Jesus as our personal Savior. That's the biggest
lie ever invented by man. You'll be saved in God's time. And by God's means, or you won't
be saved at all. You just lay over there in the
venom and die. I guarantee you, anybody that
didn't look at that serpent died. They died. And much people died. That's what it says. Much people
died. Why? Because they wouldn't look
to the serpent. Why are they dying today? And
it's the same reason. They won't look. They'll walk
down an aisle. I guarantee you, I could start
preaching tomorrow. I could start preaching right
here. that for you to accept Jesus as your personal Savior,
and Christ died for all men, and have an altar call, and have
folks come down the aisle, and we'd have put an addition on
this church in two weeks. People come here from everywhere.
They'd come here from everywhere. They'd invite us down to the
First Baptist Church and the United Methodist Church and over
to the Presbyterian Church. We'd be invited here, invited
there, and they'd all be coming. We'd be having international
revivals and all sorts of things would be happening if we preached
the lie. But the problem with the lie
is it won't save anybody. I preach a Christ, a Savior that
saves. If he can't save, then don't
look to him. If he can't redeem, why do we
call him the Redeemer? If his blood means nothing, then
why do we look to it? Why do we sing about it? You
see what I'm saying? That's what he told Nicodemus.
You're dying. You've been bitten. And you're
dying. And unless I be lifted up, that's
why I'm here. I'm here to be lifted up. Over
and over and over he tells his disciples, to this hour came
I into this world to be lifted up. God sent. God loved. God sent. You see what I'm saying? How's
he going to do it? Through the preaching of the
gospel. That's how he's going to do it. Well, what is that
gospel? It's the same gospel that he
was in person. The gospel is a person, the Lord
Jesus Christ. But he's died, he was raised
from the dead, ascended up, God seated him at his own right hand. How is he lifted up now? In the
gospel. We stand here and lift him up
as God testified of him. This is my beloved Son in whom
I am well pleased. Hear ye Him. There you go. Salvation is in the blood. Salvation
is in the Son. Life is in the Son. Look at this
over here in John chapter 3. Look down here at the end of
the chapter what he says. He says in verse 35, "...the
Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hands."
He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he
that believeth not the Son shall not see life. But the wrath of
God abideth on him." Now, I'm telling you this world's ignorant
of that. They think judgment and wrath and all those things
way out here somewhere in the future. And we're in a vacuum. We're in a world that judgment's
not been passed. We're in a world here and we're
just kind of in limbo, kind of like the Catholics interpret
purgatory. Here we are in this world and
if we can do enough and say enough, pay enough, we can be saved.
Because after all, I mean, we've got the ability to accept them
or reject them or do whatever we want. It's all up to our free
will. Our free will, ain't that what
men say? Talk about free will. I went up to visit a fellow.
He used to drive 140 miles one way to hear me preach, and he
did it for the whole time I was down in Louisiana. Brought his
entire family from right up on the Arkansas border all the way
down to Ball, Louisiana to hear me preach every week. Very seldom
ever missed a service. Name was Hiram Green. And I went
up to visit with him, and he had two painters in the house.
They were Pentecostals. And he said, I want you to talk
to these two fellows here. They've got a question they want
to ask you. And so I went over to talk to them, and here's what
they told me. They said, now, preacher, you
do believe that man is a free moral agent. And I said, no,
I don't believe he's free or moral either one. Huh? You can't be free When you're
dying with the venom in your veins, you're not free, you're
dying. You've been bit. You're under the judgment of
God. You're bound by death. Nothing's going to fix you unless
God gives you a remedy. There is no anti-venom for the
fiery serpent. You're going to die. What was
the purpose in sending the serpent? That you die. That was the purpose.
And it accomplished that end. They were dying. They would die.
They had one hope. Lift him up. Lift him up. Now that's what I intend to preach.
That's what I intend to teach. That's where I believe salvation
is. I believe that's how I received it. And that's how I'm going
to declare it. And that's what preaching is anyway. It's a declaration. You can't teach dead men. Moses
didn't run around and say, now let me teach you something here.
Here's what's going to happen. He just raised up the serpent.
You want to know something about the explanation of it and the
end of it and all those things? Look and live first. Look and
live. God gives you life. He may give
you time to learn. He may give you a spirit to learn.
He may give you a spirit to receive. But you're going to look first.
Or you ain't going to look. He'll just let you wander around
in your deadness and ignorance and unbelief until judgment sure
enough comes. God give you the heart to understand
it and receive it. For Christ's sake.