If you'll open your Bibles to
the book of Numbers, chapter 15. All right, let's seek the
Lord in prayer. Lord Jesus, thank you for these
hymns we've been able to sing. What a blessing they are to our
soul. We pray they've been an honor
to your name. And our Lord Jesus, we're so glad that we're under
your blood, that our sins have been covered that the blood is on the door.
And when God goes through this world in judgment, he'll pass
over us. And no matter what happens in
this world, it will be well with us. May we see this truth laid out
in this scripture before us this evening. Bless it to our hearts. For Jesus' sake we pray. Amen. Now we need to read about half
of this chapter, beginning at verse 22. Now, if you unintentionally
fail to keep any of the commands the Lord gave Moses, any of the
Lord's commands to you through him from the day the Lord gave
them and continuing through the generations to come, and if this
is done unintentionally without the community being aware of
it, then the whole community is to offer a young bull for
a burnt offering as an aroma pleasing to the Lord. along with
its prescribed grain offering and drink offering, and a male
goat for a sin offering. The priest is to make atonement
for the whole Israelite community, and they will be forgiven, for
it was not intentional, and they have brought to the Lord for
their wrong an offering made by fire and a sin offering. The
whole Israelite community and the aliens living among them
will be forgiven, because all the people were involved in the
unintentional wrong. But if just one person sins unintentionally,
he must bring a year-old female goat for a sin offering. The
priest is to make atonement before the Lord for the one who erred
by sinning unintentionally. And when atonement has been made
for him, he will be forgiven. One and the same law applies
to everyone who sins unintentionally, whether he is a native-born Israelite
or an alien. But anyone who sins defiantly
whether native-born or alien, blasphemes the Lord, and that
person must be cut off from his people. Because he has despised
the Lord's word and broken his command, that person must surely
be cut off. His guilt remains on him. While the Israelites were in
the desert, a man was found gathering wood on the Sabbath day. Those who found him gathering
wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly.
And they kept him in custody because it was not clear what
should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses,
the man must die. The whole assembly must stone
him outside the camp. So the assembly took him outside
the camp and stoned him to death as the Lord commanded Moses.
The Lord said to Moses, speak to the Israelites and say to
them throughout all the generations to come, You are to make tassels
on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel.
You will have these tassels to look at, and so you will remember
all the commands of the Lord, that you may obey them, and not
prostitute yourselves by going after the lusts of your own hearts
and eyes. Then you will remember to obey
all my commands, and will be consecrated to your God. I am
the Lord your God. who brought you up out of Egypt
to be your God. I am the Lord your God. Now if
you hold your finger there and turn over to Hebrews chapter
10 verse 26, I believe that what we just read there in the book
of Numbers is the background or the context of what the writer
of Hebrews tells us when he says here, beginning in verse 26,
If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge
of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left but only a fearful
expectation of judgment and a raging fire that will consume the enemies
of God. Anyone who rejected the law of
Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you
think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God
underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of
the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the
Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, It
is mine to avenge, I will repay. And again, the Lord will judge
his people. It is a dreadful thing to fall
into the hands of an angry God. Now, that scripture there in
Hebrews has been a troublesome scripture to many, myself included. Do we not all sin willfully and
intentionally? We all do. Now, if we take that
scripture out of its context, as many do, what does that say? It would say that every last
one of us is lost and without hope. If sinning intentionally,
as is in Hebrews, simply means that we, with purpose and premeditation,
commit some transgression against God's ways, that we have no sacrifice
for sins. And brethren, we have no sacrifice
for sins. Not all my sins are accidental.
In fact, I think I could call very few of them accidental.
I sin for the same reason you do. There's a part of me that
really likes it. The scriptures did not say to
avoid the awfulness of sin and the pain of sin. It said avoid
the pleasures of sin. If sin wasn't enjoyable, we wouldn't
do it. But because it is, we actually
commit it. We do so thinking ahead about
it. We do it knowing we're going to do it. We do it knowing that
it's wrong to do it, and we do it anyway. Everybody does. And if I had any concern, and
as I studied this scripture and found out what this willful sin
is, I would have more concern about
someone who thought they didn't sin willfully. I had a brother-in-law that got
all religious at one point. He's gotten all religious on
several occasions. He's got this get in trouble, get religious,
get in trouble, get religious. And he got real religious one
time and he told me two things. He said, I don't have a problem
with women anymore. Which told me what his problem
was before. And of course, my immediate thought was, give it
some time, bud. It'll be back. And secondly, he said, I don't
sin willfully anymore. Both of them were lies. And that
attitude was a revelation that he had no clue what the gospel
is. Does this text of scripture mean
that if we commit any sin on purpose, that there's no sacrifice
for sin and that the blood of Christ will not cover it? No,
it does not mean that. This passage here in Numbers
teaches us what this text in Hebrews means. That gives you
a basic overview of this, what we just read here in Numbers.
First of all, there is some instruction about what kind of sacrifice
should be offered. for unintentional sin. Secondly,
there's instruction that there is no sacrifice to be offered
for intentional sin. And thirdly, then, it gives us
an example of this intentional sin and what it means by it.
This man gathering sticks on the Sabbath. And fourthly, it
shows us a way to help us avoid even the unintentional sins mentioned
here. Now, the first point is this.
The sins in question are not simply moral failures, but sins
against the terms of God's covenant. Now, look at verse 22 in Numbers
15. Now, if you intentionally fail to keep any of these commands,
the Lord gave Moses. Now, we've got to dispense with
the idea that when God spoke on Mount Sinai, He was speaking
to everybody. He wasn't. He spoke to Moses
directly. And what Moses heard, he was
to tell to the people of Israel. Now, people get themselves in
a mess when they look upon God's word spoken to Moses on Mount
Sinai is the universal law for all men for all time. That what
God told Moses, what is called the law in the scriptures, was
a covenant between God and the descendants of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob. God established a covenantal
relationship with Israel on that day. This covenant had terms,
as all covenants or contracts do. The Jews were supposed to
do some things, and if they would do those things, then God would
do some things in return. It was exactly like when you
go to your job, you make a covenant with your employer. The covenant
is basically this, if you'll come in and put in your time
and do your job, he will write you a check at the end of the
week. And basically what God said on Mount Sinai to those
Israels, here's the work you must do and here's what I will
give you if you do that work. There were things that a person
must do in order to gain the blessings promised. And this
is what the Ten Commandments are. along with all the regulations
attached to those commandments. You had the ten basic commandments
and then after that they had a lot of details about how those
ten commandments were supposed to be carried out. Now that's
what they were supposed to do in order to obtain the blessing.
And then secondly, there were regulations given to them about
how they were to approach and worship God and what they were
supposed to do if they violated any of the terms of that covenant. And that's the whole Levitical
law. That's the law of the tabernacles, the law of the sacrifices, the
law of the feasts, all that. And so you had those terms laid
down for them, and then a remedy for violating those terms. Now,
let's note this second. What did he mean? by the intentional
sin. If we'll square that away first,
it'll be easy to understand what the unintentional sin is. This man, after he'd heard the
law, after it had been told to him clearly, decided that he
wanted none of it. And God, he broke just one of
the particular commands, but the one he broke was symbolic
of the entire covenant. Because God promised his people
rest, and he refused it. That Sabbath day law, of all
the laws of the Ten Commandments, there doesn't seem to be any
moral element to it. You know, a day's a day. But
God set up that law for the Jews at that time, that they should
observe it as a token of all the blessings he would give them.
Rest. The land was supposed to be rest. And the day was rest. And this man went out, and this
word here, when it talks about sinning defiantly, it means with
an open hand. A high-handed sin against God.
Knowing that it was wrong, and it wasn't just a violation of
one particular matter. In the law, this man utterly
rejected God's covenant by what he did. And he knew what he was
doing. God says, I give you rest. He
says, I want none of it. And he went out there on the
Sabbath day and he gathered wood. He pulled stubble. One commentator
said it was just whatever was around to make a fire on the
Sabbath day. Now, it seems a minor issue,
doesn't it? But you know something? It was
a minor issue so far as the actual thing done. When Eve took that
fruit and ate it, who of you would send anyone to hell for
stealing a piece of fruit? But you see, there was much more
in that act than stealing a piece of fruit. That was the agreement. That was the covenant between
God and Adam and Eve. He said, I give you everything
except that. And that stands as a symbol of
my authority over you. Some commentators even believe
that in due time he would have given them that. There was a
time when that fruit would have been given to them. But we are
never to take that which is not given to us. That's what David
did with Bathsheba. God gave David lots of wives.
He said, I've given you lots of wives. I gave you the wives
of your predecessor. But you took one I didn't give
you. And he took something God didn't give him. And this man
took something God didn't give him. And with that, he denied
the entire covenant. That's why in Hebrews it says,
if we sin willfully after we receive the knowledge of the
truth, there remains no sacrifice for sin. It says, if those who
despised the law of Moses, It wasn't just someone who broke
it. It wasn't just someone who sinned. It wasn't just someone
who either accidentally or whatever had just done the wrong thing.
This man knew what he was doing. And with his actions, he rejected
the whole of what God had said. Therefore, he was cut off from
the people because they were the people of the covenant. And
there was only one way to cut him off. They took him outside
the camp and they stoned him. Doesn't that seem pretty harsh
for picking up sticks on a Sabbath day? If that's all it was, friends,
then that's too harsh. But that's not all this man did.
He despised the covenant of God. And therefore he despised all
the blessings that came with it. And one of the blessings
that came with the covenant was life. And in as much as he
rejected the covenant, life was taken from him. Now, then how
can you do that unintentionally? How could anybody ever break
a law unintentionally? Not realizing what day it is. Not being taught properly. Getting distracted. Forgetting that it's Passover
day and you don't observe the feast according to the law. Simply being unable to carry
it out. All kinds of ways that there
could have been an unintentional violation of the covenant. For
70 years, the Israelites were in captivity. They could not
observe one point. of the ceremonial covenant while
they were in Babylon. Not one. Seventy years with no
Day of Atonement. Seventy years with no Passover.
Seventy years with no Feast of Tabernacles. Seventy years with
no sacrifice at all. It's not what they wanted, it's
not what they intended, but that's what happened. For such sins as that, there
was a sacrifice to be made. And all their failures under
the covenant were covered. Now how does that apply to you
and me? It's not difficult to see. God has made a covenant,
another covenant, which the old covenant was a shadow of. Now
we call it the old covenant and the new covenant, but the fact
is what is called the new covenant is really the oldest of the covenants.
For it is the only covenant by which anyone has ever been brought
in the right relationship to God. The law, the old covenant,
was a shadow of the good things that were coming. And as someone
pointed out, there never is a shadow unless the reality is already
there. You can't cast a shadow unless the reality is already
present. Long before God ever spoke on
Mount Sinai, He spoke on Mount Moriah to Abraham and said, I
will provide. The sacrifice. Abraham saw Christ's
day. In his day, he saw Christ's day. Certain aspects of the gospel
covenant were not put in place until after Christ died, but
the basics of it were always there. That Jesus Christ would
be the substitute for sinners, and all who looked to Him would
have salvation in the end. It didn't matter whether you
were a Jew or a Gentile. Now, for the most part, the Gentiles
lived in darkness during the days of the Old Covenant. But
I say, for the most part, there were some who believed, and they
may have never heard of Moses. Abraham wasn't the only believer
in his day that I know of. He just happened to be the one
that God chose to give birth, so to speak, to that chosen nation,
and in particular, that seed of Christ Jesus. But we have this gospel covenant. And in this gospel covenant,
great blessings are given to us. And we are called on to believe
it and to call upon the name of the Lord. But you and I sin against that
covenant. We do so on a regular basis.
Some sin against it intentionally. Who are they? Well, they're just
like this man who went out and worked on a Sabbath day. In the
book of Hebrews, the general theme was this. Those Jews were
suffering persecution because of the gospel that they believed,
and some of them were being tempted to go back into the religion
of works. They were being tempted to go
back and just do a few ceremonies, because, you know, as Paul says,
if we were preaching circumcision, we wouldn't be suffering. If
we just add a little bit of works, we wouldn't be suffering. But
if we add works to the gospel, we have sinned intentionally
and with a high hand against the gospel. Over in Hebrews chapter
4, and this is so good, you know, God was so wise in And given
an example of this intentional sin by Sabbath breaking. And then we go over here to Hebrews
chapter four. And it says in verse nine, there
remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for anyone
who enters God's rest also rest from his own work, just as God
did from his. Now, that doesn't mean that you
and I on Sunday don't do anything. Now, we live in a community where
there's a good many of them that are sensitive about menial labor
on Sunday, so as not, therefore, so as not to offend them and
create a needless scandal to the gospel, we generally restrain
ourselves from doing things that they don't think ought to be
done on Sunday. But brethren, we do not rest on Sunday in order
to gain a righteousness with God. In fact, if we did that,
we will have violated the gospel. We will have sinned intentionally.
against the covenant of God's grace in Christ. Is it not interesting that the
application of Numbers 15 in sinning intentionally, often
the way men do that is by trying to drag that very law into the
gospel. Now that doesn't mean that everybody
who scrupulously observes what they consider to be a Sabbath
day that they have sinned against or intentionally sinned against
the covenant, so long as they don't seek any righteousness
in it. So as long as they don't think that that's going to commend
them to God, then they're free to do it. Paul said so. One man
esteems a day above another. Another esteems all days the
same. He said they both do it under the Lord. Let them go.
Leave it be. But if a man thinks that by his
Sabbath keeping, He has moved himself into a better relationship
with God, has somehow or another improved his condition in the
sight of God, the judge of all. Such a man has violated the gospel
covenant. He has utterly broken it. He
has utterly cast it off. And that goes for any of them.
A man may clean all the idols out of his house and do so thinking
that God is more pleased with him that way. and more likely
to show him goodness. He has violated the covenant
of the gospel. Good thing to get all the idols of your house,
I'll tell you that. I mean, if you've got any idols in there. But if you think by removing
idols, or by zipping your lip and never taking God's name in
vain, or by being good boys and girls and always doing what your
mommy and daddy says, or by withholding your hand from stealing, if you
think by any of those things, that you have increased God's
delight in you. You have violated the covenant.
For those who are of the covenant of grace do enter God's rest. There is a Sabbath rest to the
people of God. In our day and the day in which
you live, there's still a Sabbath rest. But there's no Sabbath
day. That Sabbath rest is Christ.
We enter into Christ, and in Him we do no labor. We're not
working to gain the smile of God. By faith we believe that through
Jesus Christ we have all we need for life and godliness. That
by His blood and righteousness all of our sins have been put
away and our souls have been made right in the sight of God.
There's nothing to add to that. To try to add to that by doing
work is just like under the old covenant to go out and pick up
sticks on the Sabbath. And the only The end of that,
the only result of that is to be put out from the people. Now,
everybody starts out as a gospel Sabbath breaker. That's why it
says, if we sin willfully after we receive the knowledge of the
truth. He's talking here about going back. Why, before Mount
Sinai, there's a lot of people picked up sticks on the Sabbath
day. Or any other day of the week. I mean, you know, it meant
nothing, but once it was out there, once it had been told
to them, then it became an issue. Now, the gospel is preached,
and we train our children in all that, and they're going to
go right on with their spiritual Sabbath breaking. They're going
to go right on working to gain the favor of God. They'll do
that until the truth is made clear to them. But I have seen
people, not many, but I have seen some, who have embraced
the gospel for all we could tell. They heard it, they understood
in it, stood it, they rejoiced in it, and they walked with the
people of the gospel for a long time, and then something happened.
I got one man in mind now from way back in my days in Ashland.
He was even one of the preachers in the preacher's class. He went
out and filled pulpits. I heard him preach, and he could
tell the truth, and he could tell it right, and he said he
believed it. He got caught in the wrong bed. Now, that was while it was on
purpose. He didn't get in bed on accident.
That was on purpose. But that's just a moral failure.
There's a way to take care of that. But here's what he did
in response to it when he got caught. He ran to the law. He blamed his sin on the preacher,
saying if the preacher had been preaching the law, he'd have
never done that. He tried to put everybody else
under the law. He became a Sabbath day keeper. And eventually he
left that church and joined a church where they do that kind of stuff.
He willfully and with a high hand rejected God's rest in Christ. And here is the sobering truth. For such an act, there is no
sacrifice. I have never seen anyone come
back from that. But you know something? What
that man did intentionally, you and I do unintentionally. There
is in every one of us a fleshly principle of self-righteousness
that we wrestle with all the time, and it wins from time to
time. Peter did. He went down there
to Antioch. And he was having a good time
with all the Gentiles down there until some fellows from James
showed up. The big shots from the Jerusalem
church who were all Jews and who were all still kind of half
and half. There was a transitional period
there where God tolerated those Jewish believers still clinging
to some of the old covenant practices. They were still very austere
and they still had this idea that they shouldn't get too close
to the Gentiles. Now, the gospel, God had told
Peter that part and parcel of the gospel is that God is no
respecter of persons, that he is Lord over all. And it didn't
matter whether a man was a Jew or a Gentile. He's gracious to
all who call upon his name. He showed that to Peter in the
matter with Cornelius. And that's what Peter told everybody
else. He said, we can't reject these men. God gave them the
Holy Spirit just like he did us. Peter knew all that. But he went
down there to Antioch, had a good time with the Gentiles, until
the big shots from Jerusalem showed up. And what did he do?
He pulled away from those Gentiles. Wouldn't sit at their table anymore,
because you know, Jews aren't supposed to eat with Gentiles.
He went over to the Jew table. And he sat down with them, and
Paul saw it. And Paul did not say, now, Peter,
that's really not very nice. He said, Paul made this comment,
he said, when I saw that he did not walk according to the gospel. What Peter did was no small affair.
But you know something? He really did not intend to send
the message that he sent. He's just like you and me. We can be intimidated by other
people and we can be intimidated into doing things we know better
than to do. We can look down our nose at
a brother for what he does, and even to the point that we may
not consider him a brother or not as good a brother as we are.
Friends, that's contrary to the gospel, but we do it. We're not
intending to overthrow the gospel. We're not intending to reject
the gospel, but that's what our actions are doing. That's an
unintentional violation. And you know what the remedy
for that is? A sacrifice. In other words, we go right back
to Christ. And in going back to Christ,
that our unintentional sin be put away, we are reminded of
what we are. I think my brother's not as good
as me. Well, I've just proven that I
need a sacrifice to make me right with God, just like he does.
Just like he does. People in times of stress, in
times of distress, will say things contrary to the gospel. And I've
heard some preachers be awful rough on them, and I've probably
done so in my own mind. But you know, a fellow, and I've
used this illustration before, but in a funeral, and there's
his mama in the casket. That's tough. Now, I admit it.
I say it's tough, I say that by what I hear from other people.
So far, I've never experienced the death of anybody close to
me, biologically. As you well know, both my parents
are still alive. But I love them enough, I know that it's going
to be tough when they're gone. And you know, I love my mama
dearly. I don't know what I'm going to
think when When if she goes before me and she likely will, and I
go there, you know, I hope that I don't say something contrary
to the gospel. But a man just might say something, you know,
if anybody gets to heaven, she will. That's so contrary to the
gospel. It's based on the idea that good
people go to heaven. My friend, that's just an unintentional
violation of the gospel. And we don't need to beat up
on people when they do things like that. Any more than God
beats up on them. We can get wrapped up in our
pride and go off in some kind of theological expedition and
come up with some nonsense that's a violation of the gospel. But
somebody comes and corrects us and says, you know, you're right,
that was wrong. There's a remedy for it. You go back to Christ,
you go back to his sacrifice, and it's all alright. Sometimes
we violate the gospel by cutting off people that we should not
have cut off. And sometimes we violate the
gospel by taking into our embrace those who we never should have.
And I'm talking here about various religious people and preachers
and stuff like that. Some folks get so worried about
who they're going to associate with and they'll cut off faithful
men because they don't like one little item that they said or
some conclusion that can be drawn from some little item a guy said
during his You know, the Internet can be a good thing and a bad
thing, but I've noticed one bad thing that's come out of it is
everybody knows what everybody's saying and what everybody's doing,
and it becomes a wonderful religious gossip channel in which preachers
pound on one another for little missteps. Blow them
out of proportion. You know, it's a violation of
the gospel. To be so hard on people that
you're just looking for a preacher to say one word wrong. So you
go, all right, I told you he's a false prophet. And then sometimes,
and probably I tend to be more this direction, I might put my
arm around a preacher that maybe he isn't preaching the gospel. You know something? Neither the
overly strict one nor the overly lenient one intends to overthrow
the gospel by what he does. It's unintentional. Every one
of our moral failures is somehow or another a strike at the gospel. But that's not what we're intending
to do. And there's a sacrifice for every one of them in Christ.
And then there's something else, too, in Christ. Going back to Numbers chapter
15. After the instruction about unintentional and intentional
sins And in this Sabbath breaker put to death, he says now. To Moses, he says, you tell the
congregation this when you make up your garments. And their garments
were very simple, they were pretty much what we would call a poncho,
big square piece of cloth with a hole cut out for the head to
go through. And on the corners of their garments, the men were
to put tassels. And if I understand it, You know
how a tassel is made. You've got several cords and
then you bind them together at the top. And that which bound
them together at the top was to be a blue cord. It doesn't say anything that
I know of about what color the tassels themselves were supposed
to be. They're supposed to be bound together by a blue cord.
Now I did a search on my computer for every time the word blue
shows up. And I made a good list of them and left it at home.
So I'm going to have to try to do this from memory. Do you know
where blue shows up? Blue shows up in the curtains,
the hangings that made up the tabernacle in the wilderness.
Especially does it show up. It said they're supposed to be
made out of ten curtains and you'd put five of them together
and on the ends of that five together you were to make a special
set of attachments out of blue fabric, solid blue fabric. The
curtain itself was a mixture of blue and scarlet and one other
color, I can't remember, and gold threads through. But this
one thing is all blue. And when they hang it up, those
attachments is what bound it all together into one piece. And it is our Lord Jesus Christ
who binds all the things of God together in one perfect unity
and holds all things together. Here's where else that blue showed
up. It was one of the prominent colors In the curtain. At the front of that tabernacle
and in the curtain that separated the holy place from the most
holy place. That shields the center from
the white hot presence of a holy God. You know. Nobody but the high priest ever
went back there into the holy place and he only did that once
a year and only with blood. Other than that, no one dared
look upon the Ark of the Covenant where God was, lest he die. And
friends, you and I, in our sins, to come before the presence of
God is spiritual suicide. Someone must come between us
and God. That's Christ. Here's another thing I found
very interesting. The priests, the garments of
the high priest, so much of what he wore was made
out of blue. There were ropes made out of
blue that would connect the various parts of the priest's garments. Remember, he had a turban, and
on that turban was a gold plate with holiness to the Lord. And
that gold plate would be attached to the turban with a blue cord.
And it said this, right when it tells about that blue cord
attaching that golden plate with holiness to the Lord, it says,
Aaron shall bear the sin of the people before the Lord with that
plate tied to his turban by a blue cord. There's only one way, only
one way that the sin of men and holiness unto the Lord ever came
together. They were tied together in the
person of Christ. He died on the cross. Our sins were laid
on Him, and He bore our sins in the presence of the Lord.
But He was the Holy One of God. He came before the Lord both
as the Holy One and the Unrighteous One. Only Christ could do that. When they would move the tabernacle,
all of the furnishings of the tabernacle, If they would get
in particularly the Ark of the Covenant, it says when the priest
would go in there and they'd take that curtain, they didn't
take it down, they kind of pushed it over on top of that Ark of
the Covenant. They never saw it. And then there
were other coverings for it, and finally the whole thing was
covered with a solid blue cloth. That's Christ. Over the table of showbread,
in our translation called the table of presents, which is really
a more accurate translation. It represented the presence of
God among them. It was in that outer court or
in the holy place. But when they moved that, they
covered it with a blue covering. Christ is God's presence among
us. They covered the lampstand with
a blue cloth. Christ is the light of the world.
Altar of incense, all of that covered with a blue cloth. And
I found this very interesting note. brazen altar, a purple cloth. I thought, why? Well, how do you make purple?
That's blue and red together. Christ, the blue of his person
and the red of his blood there at that brazen altar. Blue everywhere. What reminds
us of the covenant and what keeps us or protects us from our unintentional
Violations of the covenant? Christ. Ever before us. You can't write enough rules
to keep yourself in line. The Jews have tried, and they
got hundreds and hundreds of them. I mean, there's a bunch
of them that God gave, and the Jewish rabbis have added thousands
more. Trying to figure out when the
Sabbath starts and all that. You know, you can't write enough.
I'll tell you, though, what will keep you from violating the covenant
of the gospel. to keep Christ ever before you.
They tied those tassels to the garments, and they never went
anywhere naked, so they always had a reminder of that covenant.
And we should carry Christ with us at all times, as much as we
can. This morning, I spoke about,
you know, when we were taking the Lord's Table, how when we
think about what Christ did for us, how that puts sin away from
our thoughts. And sin no longer looks so pleasurable. And in the presence of Christ,
I'll tell you something, those men from James could come down
and make Peter move away from the Gentiles and over to the
Jews. But if Christ had walked in, Peter would have never done
that. Oh, we looked at men way too
much and don't look at Christ enough. Now, a couple of things,
a couple of points about this fringe in the New Testament,
these tassels. There were the Pharisees, who
made their phylacteries wide. They had these phylacteries that,
they were little boxes of scripture, and they'd wear them right on
their head, so that, you know, the Word of God was always on
their mind. And they had bigger phylacteries than everybody.
And that fringe, and the Lord rebuked them for this. He says,
you make your phylacteries wide, and you make the fringe big.
Show off. They had their tassels. They had their blue cord. They did not have Christ. Oh,
how a man can be blinded by shadows. That tassel, that was supposed
to remind them and point to the Lord Jesus Christ. And when they
came, their eyes were so full of their tassels, they couldn't
see Christ. And we can get so tied up in
the details of our theology, so wrapped up in the various
distinctives of our church, that we don't see Christ. We forget
that it's all about Him. We have a particular view of
baptism, and I believe it's according to the Scriptures. But it's not
the baptism that we're looking for, it's Christ who's symbolized
in the baptism. We have a particular view about
the observance of the Lord's table, but it's not because we
think that by a particular means of observing it, we gain some
kind of special access to God, but rather because it reveals
Christ. And the same may be said of all
of our doctrines. It's not the doctrine. It's the
one it talks about. That's the issue. And then secondly,
a rather charming illustration. Do you remember that woman with
the issue of blood? And she says that she came to Christ and she
touched him, and King James says, the hem of his garment. Most
commentators believe it was the tassels. She reached out and laid hold
of Christ. The blue thread. And she was
healed. And our Lord said, your faith
has healed you. Her faith exhibited in that grasp
of Christ. There was no virtue in his coat,
no virtue in his robe. The power was in the one represented
by that blue cord in the tassel. And she believed Him, and she
trusted Him. And her body was healed, and
I believe her soul saved. Oh, God, preserve us from intentional
sinning against his covenant, because if we're not preserved
from it, we'll never be saved from it. But I have confidence that's
exactly what he'll do. He'll preserve us from doing
that. But let us also labor not to violate this covenant of the
gospel through carelessness, through being so full of the
things of this world that our eyes are not on Christ. But when
we do, and we will, let us rejoice. There is a sacrifice for that
sin. The blood of the covenant that we violated will put away
the violation of that covenant. Isn't that wonderful? It is for me. I'm sure it is
for you, too. Lord, bless us. Forgive us for all our sins.
Forgive us for disregard of your gospel. for an uncaring attitude
towards it, for carrying around so much self-righteousness that
we deny those things which we believe in the gospel. Lord,
keep us back from a high-handed rejection of your truth. Preserve
us from self-righteousness, lest we, like that man who picked
up sticks on the Sabbath, find ourselves stoned outside the
camp. Lord Jesus, make yourself evident
our hearts in the coming week and bring us back together next
week. We pray in your name. Amen.