crowd out this evening. I can
see everybody. I appreciate y'all showing up.
Remember those who requested prayer. There's several prayers,
several people have been added to the prayer list last Sunday. They'll be in the, I can't read
my own writing, but they'll be in the new bulletin on Sunday
so you can read what they are. But remember those folks you
prayed. Debbie's brother came through the operation. It's got
a half of his pancreas and his spleen. And it was a long operation,
from what I understand, eight hours. They did it arthroscopically,
so they didn't make the big cut. They did it with the three little
cuts, so that's probably why it took so long, you know, to
take out, because those are fairly good-sized organs they were taking
out. Who? Oh, really? Well, if it
goes well, she'll feel a lot better. okay let's begin our worship
service by the way sunday eleven o'clock service only brother
uh... sam be preaching hymn number
one oh worship the king oh worship the king O glorious
above, and gratefully seeing his power and his love, I shield
and defender be. ancient of days, pavilion in
splendor and girded with praise. O tell of his might, O sing of
his grace, whose robe is the light, whose canopy space is
chariots of wrath, the deep thunderclouds form, and dark is his path on
the wings of the storm. Thy bountiful care. What tongue can recite? It breathes in the air. It shines in the light. It streams from the hills. It descends to the plain. And sweetly distills in the dew
and the rain. ? Frail children of dust and
feeble as frail ? ? In thee do we trust nor find thee to fail
? ? Thy mercy's how tender, how firm to the end ? ? Our Maker
defends thee ? You have your Bibles turn with me
to Exodus chapter 32. I'm just going to read one verse of Scripture,
verse 1. And when the people saw that
Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered
themselves together unto Aaron and said unto him, Up, make us
gods which shall go before us. For as for this Moses, the man
that brought us out of Egypt, or out of the land of Egypt,
we want not what is become of him. Let us pray. Our Father
in heaven, We thank you and bless you for
your word, which is a lamp unto our feet, a light unto our path,
which is the food of our soul. We thank you, Father, for the
gospel of Jesus Christ that revealed us what we are by nature, and who you are, and what you
have done for us by your spirit through the word. You have made us new creatures
in Jesus Christ. Old things have passed away.
Behold, all things have become new. We are your creation from beginning
to end. We pray for those of our company
who are away from us. We pray you watch over them.
Arlene, if she's in a foreign country, we pray you bring her
home safely. She's out west that you'd bring him home safely.
Pray, Lord, for those of our company who are going through
trials and tribulations in most every case. Pray for Lindsey,
she's going to have this operation. We thank you for the good news
of Randy's operation. It went well. Father, we pray
for the others who requested prayer. We ask, Lord, your help
for them, for those families of awful loved ones and those
families who've been diagnosed with diseases. You know every
case. We pray, Father, that through
this they might look to Christ and realize this body fades away
as all things on this earth are temporal and soon to pass off
the scene. That eternal life is the thing
that's worthwhile, to know Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Father,
help us tonight to worship you as we consider this passage of
Scripture and what it means. We pray in Jesus Christ's name,
Amen. As I was reading this chapter,
pondering on it, it seemed to me to be such a strange
thing that the people who had experienced such manifold displays
of God's blessings and God's power and God's mercy would so
readily desire to make a false god and fall down and worship
it and claim that that god would be the one that they made would
be the one to lead them to the promised land. And of course
we know that the carnal mind is always ready to embrace any
god that it can imagine. But there were clearly times
when the people showed allegiance to God in Israel. It has not
been long since they were delivered from Egypt, a few months at most,
since they walked across the Red Sea and took this short journey
to the base of Sinai. Their deliverance had been executed
while they were safe in their houses. They didn't see anything,
didn't know anything what was going on outside, so they weren't
aware and didn't partake in their deliverance. They saw nothing
that night and only had the word of God that promised to pass
over them when God saw the blood of the lamb on the doorposts
and lentils. Then a verse came to my mind that set me on the
course of this message. That verse was Proverbs 29, 18.
It says, Where there is no vision, The people perish, but he that
keepeth the law happy is he. The law is the word of God, and
so is the word vision. It means a word from God. I began to think of this nation
in reference to the word of God. In these early days of their
history, God's word came by the patriarchs. That's what the Lord
said in Hebrews when he said, In these last days we've spoken
to us. He speaks to his people by his
son. But he said in former days, in the early days, he didn't
speak to his people that way. It said, God who at sundry times
and in divers manner spaking times passed unto the fathers
by the prophets hath in these last days spoken to us in his
son. Now at this time there were no prophets, just one among them
named Moses who was the prophet of God. But there were no prophets
appointed to the people yet. And when Israel went into Egypt,
they consisted of 11 families, the heads of those families named
the tribes of Israel. At the time of our entrance into
Goshen, they were not great in number, but grew into a great
nation. In the four centuries that they dwelt there, one son,
Joseph, was already in Egypt. And we know he was there to save
much people alive. He was the one that interpreted
the dream of Pharaoh with seven fat kind and seven thin kind. told Pharaoh that because they
would have seven years of plenty they must store up much corn
and grain because they were going to have seven years of famine.
Then that famine came and Jacob and his sons were forced to go
to Egypt to eat. They did not have any food and
they stayed there because when they went there the viceroy or
the second in charge under the Pharaoh was their brother. who
they had sold into slavery. His name was Joseph. His name
was Joseph and he was there, he said, to save much people
alive. There was one patriarch for this
family, his name was Jacob, and this man had the word of God
for the tribes when they wanted to hear from God or when God
spoke to them, he spoke to them through the head of the family.
These were the tribes of Jacob, the twelve sons of Jacob. Now he received the word of God
in visions and in dreams and visitations from God. Seventeen
years after the entrance into Egypt, Jacob died. There was no father, so there
was no word. There was no word. and where
there is no vision, the people perish. Where there is no word
from God, the people perish. Though they grew in numbers,
that during the following years they adopted the religions of
their captors. When they went out of Egypt,
they did carry the elements of the tabernacle. They did carry
the Ark of the Covenant. but they also carried bale and
bale peel wrapped in blankets too. So the idolatry was part
and parcel with their worship as they lived 400 years in Egypt. Things went well for them until
Joseph died and for the next four centuries their lives however
began to tank. Eighty years prior to their deliverance
Moses was born put in an ark of reeds and put in a river and
he floated down and was adopted by Pharaoh's daughter. For 40 years Moses was a part
of Egypt's body politic but after he slew an Egyptian he fled Egypt
and stayed gone for 40 years. When he was 80 years old the
Lord spoke to him out of a burning bush and he was told to deliver
Israel from Egypt and take them to the land of promise, Canaan. And the time of the plagues and
deliverance was about four to five months. And from Goshen
to Sinai was about 47 days. So after four centuries without
God's word, they had Moses who spoke for God. And for six and
a half months they had God's word. Moses then went up to the
mount to receive the written law of God and remained there
forty days. Though Aaron would later be named
the high priest, he was among the people during this time.
He did not receive God's word. God spoke to Moses, not to Aaron. Moses perhaps had a stammer or
a stutter for he had spoken of In writing in the book of Isaiah,
it talks about speaking to folks with the stammering lips and
another tongue. Paul talked about his own weakness
and frailty in speaking. He couldn't speak with great
swelling words of man's wisdom. So Aaron interpreted, as it were,
from Moses when Moses spoke to the people. For forty days and
nights the people were without the Word of God. Again, they're
without the Word of God. And where there is no word, the
people perish. So we come to that truth in the
first chapter, or the first verse of chapter 32. What happens when the Word of God is gone?
When they don't have the man that speaks the Word of God?
And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out
of the mount, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron
and said unto him, Up, make us gods which shall go before us. For as for this Moses, the man
that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we want not what
has become of him. I think the sudden plunge into
idolatry is summed up in the attitude of the words spoken
about him who has the word of God for these people. They said,
ask for this man Moses. It was Moses who led them out
of that land of Egypt. It was Moses who led them out
of slavery. It was Moses who called for the
plagues of Egypt. It was Moses who stood at the
Red Sea and said, stand still and see the salvation of the
Lord. It was Moses who had loved and cared for these people who
delivered them. It was Moses whom they asked
to deliver them when he came and said to Pharaoh, let my people
go. They did not remember that God
sent the plagues and that the plagues not one of them had touched
them. The dogs in Egypt were not even
allowed to bark against an Israelite. The murrain that was upon the
cattle went upon all the cattle of Egypt, but never crossed the
border of Goshen to be on one cow among the Jews. They did not remember that not
one of their firstborn was slain on the night of terror. This
has all been forgotten in just a few days, just a few days. They did not here remember, they
did not remember hearing Moses say stand still and see the salvation
of God. as God divided the Red Sea and
they walked across on dry land. They did not remember when they
cried for salvation under the duress of great slavery. They
did not remember that the Lord sent Moses with His Word. They
didn't remember any of that. How can that happen? The man
who has the Word of God is not there. And when the Word is not
there, the people perish. That's what the scriptures say.
A month and a week and three days had passed since Moses was
out of their midst and they had forgotten the Word of God and
the God who spoke through Moses. They forgot Him. For there is
no vision, the people perish. The people did not have the Bible. It was not written until many
years later. The written word was what they had was on tables
of stone, two tables of stone, consisting of ten commandments.
That was the written word that they had. And at this point,
they didn't even knew they had that. And when Moses comes down
on the mountain, he's gonna throw that down against a rock and
break it anyway. But they had the man of God,
the one who spoke face to face with God as a friend. Where was
he? He wasn't speaking to them. They perished into idolatry.
I think of the 400 years from Malachi to Matthew when the Lord
did not have a prophet and the people, as far as we know, just
went about the business of religion without any word from God whatsoever. until John the Baptist came on
the scene and began to preach Christ and the coming of the
Messiah, there was no prophet for 400 years. And where there
is no vision, the people perish. What kind of perishing was going
on? When our Lord came into this world, born of a woman, born
under the law to redeem them that are under the law, when
he came on the scene, religion was going fine. It was doing
well. The Pharisees were the leaders
of religion. The Jews were under their rule,
their hard rule of the law. They had men in the temple collecting
money. Everything was going fine. Religion
was going fine. It was a well-oiled machine,
well-oiled machine in Jerusalem. These were God's chosen people.
that they had perished into idolatry. And now these who are God's chosen
people are spoken of in our text. They are about to fall down in
worship of God they're going to make with their own hands
and rely upon that God that they make with their own hands to
lead them to the promised land. It is no wonder that a trip from
Egypt to Canaan An 11-day trip, if you're walking at a regular
pace, took 40 years. It took 40 years. There's another
40 years they're going to spend wandering around in the wilderness.
Oh, they'll be taken care of by God. Read that in Numbers
and Deuteronomy. You'll find that they were taken
care of by God the whole way, but it's going to take them 40
years. Why? Because they never get over this idolatry. Read
the book of Deuteronomy, and the Lord says over and over again,
you're going into a strange land. Do not worship their gods. Do
not marry their women. Don't do any of those things.
And then he ends by saying, but I know you're going to do that.
Why? Because they would be under a
covenant of works that relied upon their obedience in order
to gain the blessing of God, and they never obeyed God. We've
been reading in the Prophet Jeremiah on Sunday afternoons. We find
that they're still there many, many centuries later. They're
still in idolatry. They're still doing the same
thing. Up, they said, make us gods. Make us gods to lead us
to the promised land. And when they heard God's word,
they flourished. But when they didn't hear God's
word, they perished over and over again. And this is written
for our learning. We look at something like this
and we might think about these people and think there ain't
nothing to them. This is written for our learning. The Bible's about
Jesus Christ and it's for Jesus Christ and his people. When talking
about the Word of God in John chapter 20, our Lord said this, In verse 31 it says, But these
are written, now what he's talking about is not the gospel or the
epistles or the book of Revelation. These things are twenty to thirty
years down the road for the first epistle to be written. He's talking
about the Old Testament. These things are written that
ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and
that believing you might have life through His name. This is
the Word. This is what we have. It is the
Word that gives light and understanding. It alone is what we physically
possess that will endure forever. The Word of God endureth forever.
And I tell you how many times I've told people who poo-poo
the Word of God, and I've just asked them, how many more years
you got to live? I don't have many more. How many
you got to live? Say you got 50 years to live
and then you die. What's going to be around when
you're gone? The Word of God is going to be here. It endures
forever and you have it. You have it, the entire Word
of God. Faith comes by hearing this Word. Faith comes by hearing
and hearing by the Word of God, Scripture says. Even now, without
this Word, The people perish. The people perish. You look at
the state of affairs in this nation today, very few people
have any interest in the Gospel at all. The reason is because
the pulpits for the last 125, 130 years have preached nothing. They've fooled around with the
Bible, but they've not preached the Word of God, because you
can't preach the Word of God unless you preach the Gospel
of the Lord Jesus Christ. Think on this. When I was thinking
on this, I thought of another passage of scripture over in
2 Timothy chapter 4. Paul, the apostle, is speaking
to a young pastor named Timothy. In that second epistle in chapter
4, he says this, It was an admonition to this young pastor. He says,
I charge thee, therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ,
who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing in
his kingdom, preach the word. Be instant, in season and out
of season, when people want to hear it and when they don't want
to hear it. When it's the right time and the wrong time, preach
the word. Reprove, rebuke, and exhort with
all longsuffering and doctrine. Now the preaching of the word
is the reproof. The preaching of the word is
the rebuke. We don't call people out by name and rebuke them.
I know some preachers have done that. That's not what we do.
We preach the gospel, and the gospel is what convicts, the
gospel is what convinces, the gospel is what comforts the soul
of His people. Exhort with all longsuffering.
Don't quit. Never stop doing it. When you
stand up, do it. When you get an opportunity,
do it. With all longsuffering and doctrine, teaching what God
has said. For there comes a time It seems
we're there. There comes a time when men will
not endure sound doctrine. You know, to Timothy and Titus,
to two young pastors, Paul used that phrase, sound doctrine or
sound words, more than 17 times in these three epistles. Over
and over again, he admonished them, stick with sound doctrine. Sound doctrine, the teaching
of God. But after their own lusts, It
means doing what they want to do. They'll heap to themselves
teachers having itching ears. They know what they want to hear. They know what they want to hear
that makes them feel right, feel good, and they're going to hire
the man that's going to take care of that. They shall turn
away their ears from the truth and shall be turned to fables,
which are stories of morality. But watch thou in all things
and endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist. What does
the word evangelist mean? It comes from the word euagnelium,
which means to preach the gospel. The first pro-evangelical word
was found in Genesis chapter 3 and verse 15. The first time
it was called proto-evangelium. When it says the seed of woman
is going to bruise the serpent's head, that's speaking of Jesus
Christ. He was the seed of woman. Paul
determined, we know, and at Corinth not to know anything, but Jesus
Christ did him crucify. And this language reveals to
us the absolute necessity of a redundant rehearsal of the
gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. We do not need self-help lessons.
or boosts to our self-esteem or promises of health and wealth
and happiness. We need to be ever reminded,
ever reminded when we come to this place to join together with
our brothers and sisters, we need to be ever reminded of what
we are by nature, sinners all, and that our only hope is in
this decaying world is Jesus Christ our Lord. We must be constantly
reminded to take up our headquarters in the dust and never graduate
from being a sinner and then lift our eyes to Calvary. Where
there is no vision, the people perish. The believer cannot perish
eternally, but how dreadfully our joy of salvation perishes
when we do not hear the word of God. How easily we resort
to the idols of our flesh, our confidence in ourselves, our
supposed ability and personal merit and judgment of our brethren,
we don't hear the Word of God. Forty days is all it took and
the people created a false god. Forty days. Where there is no
vision, the people perish. The writer of the Proverbs said,
buy the truth and sell it not. That means give whatever you
got to be under the Word of God and don't ever stop doing it.
by the truth and sell it not. Two verses of Scripture and I'll
let you go home. Psalm 119, which is a psalm dedicated to the Word
of God, and it's the longest psalm in the Scripture. It's the longest chapter in the
Scripture. Psalm 119, verse 133 says, Order
my steps in thy word, and let not any iniquity have dominion
over me. Order my steps in thy word."
Then in Psalm 138, verse 2 says, "...I will worship toward thy
holy temple, and praise thy name for thy lovingkindness and for
thy truth. For thou hast magnified thy word
above all thy name." Cherish what you have in your hands,
the Word of God. for where there is no word, the
people perish. Father, bless us to understand
and pray in Christ's name. Amen. All right. God bless you.