Sermon: The Need For National Righteousness

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Zachary Conover preaches on Proverbs 14:34. Be sure to like, share, and comment on this video. You can get more at http://apologiastudios.com : You can partner with us by signing up for All Access. When you do you make everything we do possible and you also get exclusive content like Collision, The Aftershow, Ask Me Anything w/ Jeff Durbin and The Academy, etc. You can also sign up for a free account to receive access to Bahnsen U. We are re-mastering all the audio and video from the Greg L. Bahnsen PH.D catalogue of resources. This is a seminary education at the highest level for free. #ApologiaStudios Follow us on social media here: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ApologiaStudios/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/apologiastudios/?hl=en Check out our online store here: https://shop.apologiastudios.com/

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Good afternoon, Church. It's an honor to be here with you today. Please turn with me in God's Word to Proverbs in the 14th chapter.
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Proverbs in the 14th chapter, verse 34.
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This is the Word of the Lord. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.
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Thus far as the reading of God's Word, please join me in prayer. Our Heavenly Father, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.
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Now, Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight.
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O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. And it's in the name of Jesus that we pray.
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Amen. We've been progressing through the book of Proverbs, our study, throughout this incredible book.
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It's truly been a blessing to prepare for these messages and to take a small part in the teaching ministry of the
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Church. We've titled this series, Wisdom from Above.
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And we've been looking at the implications of wisdom, the demands of wisdom for individual context, for the family.
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And in Proverbs chapter 14, we have something here that expands out the need for divine wisdom from above into the realm, into the sphere, if you will, of nations.
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And as we've seen, the Proverbs are for knowing wisdom, to have skill in living.
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And receiving, according to chapter 1 in the third verse, instruction in righteousness, justice, and equity.
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And then in verse 7, of course, we're given the thesis of the entire book, as Pastor Jeff preached on last week, which is the fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom.
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It's the beginning of knowledge. But fools despise wisdom and instruction. And you have to remember,
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I want to recall us here to the premise of the book here, and in that opening address to, presumably, the youth.
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They are being drawn into and being exhorted to join in the participation of a wise community.
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The youth is encouraged to join into the community of the wise.
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He is enticed to do so, and he is exhorted to leave his naive, his inexperienced, his unseasoned and immature ways, and take his place among his people, making judgments.
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And in order to do that, he needs instruction. In order to not be gullible, he needs to know wisdom.
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He needs to be experienced in this, and in order to have any basis for that whatsoever, that requires the fear of the
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Lord. The ultimate priority of Yahweh, the reality of his word and his law being the first thing, the bedrock principle of his entire life.
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Because as a king, as we are kings and queens, sons and daughters of the
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Most High God, our lives require us to rule God's dominion, the area of his domain, with wisdom.
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And that involves the implementation of justice, righteousness, equity.
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And what strikes me about that passage so much at the beginning there is that the fear of the Lord is intimately connected to the administration of justice.
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So if you want a harmonious social order, not just between individuals, not just at the community level, but even at the realm of a nation, a divinely ordained border that God has allotted and placed us all in together, in order to administer justice, in order to have righteousness, which in the scriptures those two words are very, very closely related, they're almost the same, in order to have a just social order, in order to have a harmonious society, it can't be had apart from the fear of the
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Lord. And our text today gives us that great antithesis that we keep seeing over and over and over again.
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Wisdom is covenantal. It is communal. And here we are presented in chapter 14, verse 34, this reality, yet again it's inescapable.
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The choice is between righteousness or sin. Those are the two options.
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One path, you have blessing, you have safety, you have prosperity for an entire nation, or you have sin, which leads to disgrace and reproach and calamity and ruin, and things going downhill very, very quickly until an entire people are left in utter contempt, forsaken and condemned and judged by God.
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So there's no middle ground here. Righteousness is what lifts up an entire nation, not just individuals.
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And likewise, or conversely, sin will tear it down. This is the key to Proverbs in all of life.
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If you reject God's word and go your own way, you get folly.
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That's true at the individual level, and it's true at the national level. If you attempt to operate apart from God's creational norms and His structures and seek to cast off the cords of His authority and His word, you will not get flourishing, you will get folly.
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Those are the options. Do you want folly, or do you want flourishing? That's the choice of every nation.
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Which way, America? Which way, Great Britain? Which way,
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China? Which way, South America? The choice is clear, righteousness or sin.
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This teaching in which we are to grow in the context of family instruction, as the youth is encouraged to join in, finds its basis in God's law.
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That's what Proverbs is, really. You have, of course, the Decalogue, the law of God, the Pentateuch.
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You have the application of the moral principles and precepts in the case law examples that are presented there.
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And then you have wisdom literature, like Proverbs, which is really just an exposition of the law of God.
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The two are intimately connected. You cannot have wisdom without the law.
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They're intimately related together. And righteousness, what
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I would define, going back to the distinction between righteousness and justice, righteousness is that pattern of life or that disposition of character that conforms to the law of God and teaches us to live in His structures.
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That's where we get the term instruction, by the way. Teaching, Torah, in structure.
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God wants us to live in His moral normativity, in His structure, in His creational laws and ordinances.
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How do we know this? Because sin is a reproach to any people. That's what the text tells us.
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And so, contrary to what you would hear from the world, our problem as a nation, our problem as an entire people, is not a lack of education.
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It is not a lack of programs and social therapies. It is not a lack of environmental control or some other external circumstance.
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It's sin that brings shame. It is the moral and ethical condition of the people that reside within a nation.
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The transgression of God's law brings reproach, ruin, and ultimately destruction on entire nations.
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This is the teaching of Scripture. Now, in the West today, and particularly in modern evangelicalism, we lack this view of history, generally speaking.
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We lack a view of history that is covenantal. And what I mean by that is we lack a view of history in which
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God is the imminent Lord, not only the transcendent God, who is holy and other than us, but He's also imminent.
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He draws near to His creatures for judgment. And I do not just mean in the eternal sense, on the final day, when we stand before Him to face that judgment.
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I mean, and the Scriptures, I believe, communicate that this is also true in a temporal sense.
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God is the covenant Lord of history. He draws near for judgment, and He rewards obedience with blessing, and He rewards disobedience with the sanctions of His law, with curses, with calamity.
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We don't really have that view in the modern church today in the West. We think that was something for Israel.
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That was something that God did then, but God still doesn't hold nations accountable.
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He doesn't draw near to judge actual entire groups of people. That was something for Israel.
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That's not something that we do now. That's not a view that we hold today in the modern
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West in an evangelical context. But that would make a mockery out of what we see in the biblical revelation.
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First, we see that nationhood is ordained by God. Acts 17 tells us that.
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Paul at the Areopagus at Mars Hill, what does he say? He says, from one man came what?
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All the nations. And what did God do? He divinely apportioned and allotted them the boundaries of their habitation and their dwellings.
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So, the ordaining of nations, the borders, which without borders you don't have a nation.
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Without these things, there is no nationhood. It's something ordained by God.
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Jurisdiction, territory, and with that you have a form of government that administers public justice.
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There has to be rule. There has to be dominion over a domain.
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An area allotted by God to exercise that type of authority. So, nationhood is something ordained by God.
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And there is such a view, as Jerry just read at the beginning, Psalm 33, there is such a thing as a nation for whom the
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Lord is God. There is such a teaching in Scripture as biblical nationhood.
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And it has to do, not necessarily with the relationship of church and state.
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We don't want to get too far into the waters there. It has to do with the authority of God's Word being accepted in every sphere of life within a nation.
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Whether that be the family, whether that be the institutional church, whether that be the vocations, art, architecture, industry, or whether that be the realm of civil government.
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Now, I want to distinguish. There's a reason I'm distinguishing these things here. There is a great debate happening right now online regarding Christian nationalism.
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It is quite ugly to see brothers and sisters treat each other the way that they are over this subject right now.
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And I think that there's a lot of talking past one another in terms of definitions and what we mean by what we're saying and what the
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Bible clearly teaches. So, I would say that the Bible teaches biblical nationhood and that as we recognize these proper roles of the spheres, right, and how they have jobs to do under the
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Lord and under His authority, the ultimate thing in all of this is the kingdom of God. That is the ultimate reality.
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That is the ultimate principle. The kingdom of God, His rule, His reign over all of the cosmos is the central thing.
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So, it's the kingdom that's central. And by the kingdom,
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I mean anywhere that the authority of God and His word is recognized. The Bible would say, wherever that happens, in any sphere of life, in any realm of human activity, in any territory under the sun, wherever the authority of God and His word is acknowledged and the lordship of Christ is professed, there the kingdom is.
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There the rule and the reign of God is. And that has to be distinguished, of course, from the institutional church itself, right?
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You have some apostate churches right now that exist with drag queens preaching in the pulpits.
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That is not a manifestation of the kingdom of light. Amen? It's a manifestation of the kingdom of darkness.
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So, we have to be careful to draw the proper distinctions here between what we're talking about and provide the necessary definitions.
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So, when we say nationalism, anytime you put an ism on the end of something, you make the thing that came before it the ultimate.
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Right? In other words, it's all about this thing. This is the guiding principle or controlling reality.
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This is what the thing is all about. But the Bible would not put the family at that place of primary ultimacy.
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Neither would it even put the institutional church or the civil government. The reality is the kingdom of God.
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That's the center. So, I say that to say the nation is not the main thing. Okay?
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It's about the kingdom of God in all the nations. It's about a kingdom of priests in every nation.
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Now, Scripture makes this line of thinking in regards to not believing that God has anything to say to the nations today, that he won't judge them in a temporal sense.
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Scripture has a great refutation for these things, several in fact. But if you look with me at Leviticus chapter 18, we ask the question, well, what about those nations that are pagan?
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What about the unbelieving nations? What does Scripture tell us about this? And if we turn to Leviticus chapter 18, verse 26, here's what we find.
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This is God, before he gives the people of Israel the promised land, and he is steering them in the direction of his covenant -keeping obedience to his law.
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And this is what he says in verse 26. Now, note, everything that came before this, all the national sins, if you will, and yes, there are such a thing as national sins.
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It's sins practiced, behaviors condoned, and championed by entire nations. He says in verse 26,
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But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you.
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For the people of the land who were before you did all these abominations, so that the land became unclean, lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.
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Did you catch what was just said there at the end? He's about to give Israel the promised land, and give them blessing and favor to conquer all of their enemies, and this is what he said to them.
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All of these sins for which I am driving out these pagan nations, and you go back there in the text and you read what they are, things ranging from bestiality to child sacrifice and the worship of Malak, men lying with men as with a woman, all of those sins, you trace them through, those national sins, and what he's saying to Israel is, if you do the things that these pagan nations are doing,
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I'm going to do to you what I did to them, and the land is actually going to spit you out.
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What does that tell us? It tells us that God has one standard. He has one law.
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Exodus chapter 12 tells us that there is one law for the native and the stranger.
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There is one standard, and God holds unbelieving people, unbelieving nations even, accountable to his law.
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And notice that the reason he drives them out is not just for second table offenses, not just for offenses against the last of the commandments, having to do with loving neighbor, but also for offenses against the first table of the law.
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Isn't that interesting? What is Malak? Worship, sacrificing your child to a false god, both committing murder, a violation of the second table of the law, and worship of a false god, which
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God says you will only worship me. If not, a violation of both tables of the law.
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God holds the nations accountable for those things. So the moral law of God is universal in its application to all peoples.
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And by the way, this is where our legal tradition and our history in the West, where we derive the concept of the rule of law, this equality of treatment under the law for all persons.
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Right? Atheism, secularism, agnosticism, those worldviews did not give us that rich legal inheritance in that tradition.
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It was the biblical worldview, actually, that provided us with equality under the law.
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That's why you see Moses in the center on the Supreme Court with the Ten Commandments, and then you have the inscription there.
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Equality under the law. Equal protection under the law. There is a just standard for everyone, and everyone is accountable to that same standard.
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It's not a nation or a jurisdiction that is governed by private landowners and barons and lords with their own little station of laws over here and these rules that govern this specific group and this clan.
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It's one standard for everybody that everybody is accountable to. And it's a matter of public justice.
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A little bit more support on this. The book of Amos is full of Yahweh pronouncing judgments against other nations surrounding
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Israel for various sins. At the end of Amos, in chapter 6, this is what we're told.
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Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel comes.
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Pass over to Chalme and see, and from there go to Hamath the great. Then go down to Gath of the
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Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms? You see how God is holding everybody to the same standard and saying, are you better than these kingdoms?
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When we know that the Bible teaches very clearly that the reason God chose Israel is not because they were better,
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Deuteronomy chapter 7. It wasn't because they were more numerous than any of the other peoples. It wasn't because they had tremendous military prowess or skill in living.
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No, God gave them all of those things. And he says, O you who put far away the disaster and bring near the seed of violence, woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the midst of the stall, who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David invent for themselves instruments of music, who drink wine and bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph.
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So you have believing nation and unbelieving nation condemned alongside one another.
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The prophet Isaiah tells us in chapter 24, verse 5,
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The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants, for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.
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Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt.
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So it's not just one group of people that have broken God's law. It's all the nations that stand accountable under his law to, of course, the first table of the law.
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Because what is the first table about? It's about giving God justice. Commandments 1 through 4.
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No other gods. Don't come and worship the true God in a way that he is not prescribed.
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Don't make oaths in another's name. Blasphemy. Honor the
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Sabbath and keep it holy, the first table. And then the second table is about giving neighbors justice.
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And the prophet Isaiah tells us that all the nations have broken God's everlasting covenant. They are under his law.
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But wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. But these nations don't have God's word. They've never received a page of scripture.
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How can you say that they are accountable to God? Well, I'm glad that you asked, because I'd love to share with you why.
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The Bible teaches, in Romans chapter 3, you recall it very well, the apostle
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Paul has just finished universally indicting all of humanity. Gentile nations, runaway pagan nations, and then in Romans chapter 2, he turns his attention to the
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Jewish peoples to show what? Romans chapter 3, verse 19. Whatever the law speaks, it speaks to those who are under the law.
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Who's that? Who is under the law? Jew and Gentile. That about covers everybody, right?
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Whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that what? Every mouth may be stopped and the whole world accountable to God.
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Everybody. But what about Romans chapter 2?
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Doesn't it say that pagans and unbelievers, they occasionally get things right every now and then, don't they?
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Because they have the work of God's law written on their hearts. So really, all of us have this sense of the divine.
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We all have this general allegiance to principles of right and wrong. And yeah, it might be abstract.
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It's not like God's revelation or anything. But it's just this natural principle.
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It's this common ground, neutral area that we all have. That's what people will say, right? But even though pagans occasionally get things right because they're in God's image, the reason for that is they're
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God's creatures. It's just that. They're in God's image. They are his creatures with his norms and creational structures written upon them.
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Now, that's different than the promise of the covenant, where the law is actually put on the hearts of God's people and his spirit taking up residence within them to empower them to keep the law.
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It's talking about Psalm 19, the creation testifying the existence of God. Unbelievers know that.
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They know about God's creational structures. They know God exists and they know that they should worship him, according to Romans 1.
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There's no escaping that. There's no escaping that accountability. That revelation is not only given clearly, the
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Bible says, but it is perceived clearly. It gets through to the unbeliever.
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The problem with it is this. Their consciences are seared, right? Paul's not saying in that passage in Romans 2, well, they have their conscience, that's enough.
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That's enough. They don't need God's word. They don't need God's law. They don't need special revelation from Scripture.
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They have their conscience. The Bible teaches that the conscience is seared, seared by sin.
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The mind darkened by sin. And appealing to a vague sense of abstract moral good really isn't enough.
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And that's why God saw fit to republish his law in the pages of Scripture.
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He saw fit to put it here. Because our consciences are seared.
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And the law is laid down for the lawless. And so, when a people rebel against God's purpose, what do we see?
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What are we increasingly seeing in our society today? We're seeing Romans 1 come to life, aren't we?
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We're seeing a reversion, in many ways, of this runaway pagan culture of old that destroyed all of the great nations in history that took it upon themselves to define good, evil, right, and wrong apart from God.
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And yes, they were vast. Yes, they had military might.
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Yes, they had skilled leadership. And they fell.
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They were brought to ruin because Proverbs chapter 14, verse 34 teaches us that sin is a reproach to any people.
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And as in our culture, the worship that is due to God is transferred to false gods, and the claims of Christianity are relativized.
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One faith among many, just sitting right there in the marketplace of ideas, coexisting peacefully among everyone else.
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We were at a rally for end abortion now in Ohio, and we were told by the former director of communications for Ohio Right to Life, Lizzie Marbach, who's a
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Christian, she got let go for her brave and courageous stand. She was told by the governor there was an event in which he had a
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Christian pastor come and pray at the Capitol, but he was cited.
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There were other leaders there who were offering prayers as a Hindu, as a Muslim, and there was the coexistence peacefully of all the different religions over which the state presides and says, that's acceptable, this is acceptable, that's not acceptable.
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That's what I mean by relativizing the claims of the Christian faith, not making it exclusive, not saying that Jesus is
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Lord and there is no other, but as that worship that's due to God is transferred to false gods, what happens?
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You have people and their autonomy, their desire to exist apart from God, apart from his norms, apart from his structures, and embodied most clearly and most absolutely in the state, stepping in to be the source of law and take the place of God, a divine state.
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Redefining even God's institutions. What's marriage? Well, marriage is what we say it is.
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What's a family? Well, a family is what we say it is. Well, what's a man or a woman?
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Well, a man or a woman is what we say it is. The ability to define, the assumption that anyone or any group of people can become the source of law is a claim to divinity.
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If you look at any society and you point and you ask the question and you say, what is the source of law in that society?
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Where does their law come from? You will point to the God of that society. Because we're talking about ultimate authority here.
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We're talking about the ability to coerce. We're talking about ultimate commitments. Who gets to define?
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Who gets to say? Who says what's right and wrong? Does God? Does his word define those things?
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Does God have the power to command these things? Does he have the right and the authority? Or does someone else?
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Does the state? Does man? Our nation right now is answering that question with the religion of self, with that power embodied in the hands of a lawless state.
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And why do we have such an increasingly lawless nation? Why is our nation increasingly lawless?
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Why is criminal activity on the rise and getting worse?
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Why is justice being perverted? Why is justice not being done in our courts? Why do we have an out -of -control beast exercising tyranny by the death of a small thousand cuts?
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The answer really forces us to look inward. We have a lawless society. We have a lawless state, a lawless civil government, primarily because we have a lawless church.
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We have had. In the modern context and evangelicalism in the West, we have had a church that is filled with preaching about grace, but little to no preaching about the law of God.
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer called that cheap grace, didn't he? This idea that God loves you, and he's always going to forgive you no matter what you do.
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You could walk into the bank, rip it off, blow the head off the cashier because God will forgive me.
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A woman can walk into a death pit and pay someone to kill her baby and assure herself very mildly and very resolutely.
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God's never going to stop loving me. You have cheap grace that has been preached so long by a lawless church.
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Is it any surprise that what we're seeing today at a national level, at a federal level, at a state level, at a local level, is lawlessness in our courts and in our justice system?
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Christ died for the lawless. He died for covenant breakers, to satisfy justice for God and give us the basis to do justice to others.
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And when we reject his word, when we do not preach God's justice, when we just preach grace, when we take the proclamation and the reality of hell out of our message, is it any wonder that justice leaves the justice system along with that?
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You see, cheap grace calls forth expensive law.
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Because we won't do justice as a society, because we've had a lawless church, and by implication and necessarily a lawless system of government, a lawless public administration of justice in many ways, because we won't punish lawbreakers, what are we left with?
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We're left with scientific planners and philosopher priest kings and elites trying to manipulate the environment of sick animals and save them from a chaotic cosmos that threatens to destroy us.
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Isn't that what the last few years were all about? A group of elite philosophers and social planners doing what?
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Trying to save us. Trying to become the source of law, the source of definition, the source of provision and welfare.
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And where is that leaving things like our justice system and our economy?
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Anyone want to show their grocery bill? This is where even the idea of our correctional system, our prison system, right, which is meant to be what?
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The administration of public justice outside the court system. This is why we have the system of corrections that we do.
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This is why the word penitentiary is from penitent.
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Because we are seeking, by behavioral modification, and even some cases sense deprivation, right?
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That's what solitary confinement is all about in prison. There's a worldview underneath that. You deprive people of light, you deprive people of their senses, and ultimately the philosophy, the idea is you will reset their system and they will be able to be integrated back into society again as rehabilitated.
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Through the social programs, through therapies. All of those things are based on a worldview.
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Instead of justice being done, restitution being made for victims, and restoration, harmony being brought into society again, which is what justice is all about.
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If righteousness is that disposition of character that's steeped in the fear of the
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Lord, that's always seeking to bring about harmony in the community, it's that attitude that the people of God are called to exemplify, then justice is about, okay, well what happens when the harmony of the community is violated and there needs to be wholeness reestablished again?
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That's what justice is about. And the point of it is, there's a standard for how we administer that justice.
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What's the standard going to be? Whose law are we going to point to? Who's the source of authority?
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Because if it's not God and it's not His law and the administration of public justice, then guess what?
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Cheap grace brings costly law. The cost of keeping a lawless society at bay goes through the roof.
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How much money are we pouring into our correctional institutions and our prison systems and our justice systems and our therapy programs?
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Here's the real question. Is it successfully producing rehabilitation? Or, as criminals are released back into society again, are they, like the data shows, actually committing the very same crimes once again?
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Because nothing has changed. These signs, among others, are part of a nation that is in declension.
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As man invents morality apart from God, as marriage and family deteriorates, as all manner of sexual immorality proliferates, theft, murder, as we continue to print a bunch of fake money and steal from our grandchildren, these are signs of a nation experiencing the just covenantal sanctions of God's law.
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Sinners are reproached to any people. And listen, I need to define this here.
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When I'm talking about covenant, God's law is given in the framework of covenant, what
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I mean by that is this. God is the one who has to condescend to reveal himself to us, otherwise we would have no knowledge of who he is.
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Amen? He must reveal himself to us. But when he does, he enters into solemn agreements.
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He sets terms for the interaction and the relationship, and then he actually gives and enforces sanctions for violating that relationship.
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But then, in Scripture and in history, you also see not just God instituting covenants with individuals and nations, but you also see people and nations responding by making covenants with Yahweh.
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You see this in Kings and Chronicles, the kings of Judah. What happens after God gets done disciplining a nation?
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Well, sometimes what happens is leadership repents. Sometimes what happens is that the people cry out for mercy, and God actually hears them, and he relents from sending calamity upon them as a people.
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And then what happens? Well, you have a time of great weeping and mourning and repenting and sackcloth and ashes, and then you have a time of usually great religious reform where idolatry is purged from the land.
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You have all of the high places being brought down and burned and all the idols being torn down. And then you have fruit in keeping with that repentance and with that mourning and with that languishing and that lamentation over sin against God.
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And then you have a nation recommitting itself to Yahweh and his covenant law.
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That's what Israel promised to do. They were the prototype of biblical nationhood.
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They were the OG biblical nation, weren't they? We know that from Deuteronomy chapter 4.
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Will you turn with me there real fast? Deuteronomy chapter 4. Deuteronomy chapter 4 verses 5 through 8.
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This is what God says to Israel. See, I have taught you statutes and rules, as the
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Lord my God commanded me, that you should do them in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. Keep them and do them, for that will be your...
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What is it? Wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples.
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Do you see the connection between law and wisdom? God's law and wisdom? And your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say,
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Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what great nation is there that has a
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God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us, whenever we call upon him? And what great nation is there that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today?
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Israel was to live by these statutes, and in so doing they would become the envy of the nations.
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The nations would look from the outside in and say, What kind of a law is this that is so just?
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What kind of a God is this that he hears when his people call to him? They were to be the envy of the surrounding peoples.
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The nations were to look in from the outside and start asking questions. And Israel pledged their obedience to Yahweh corporately.
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All that the Lord has spoken, we will do. All that the Lord has spoken, we will do.
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So you have examples in Scripture of not only God covenanting with people, but them, nations, covenanting back with him, pledging their obedience to his lordship and to his word and to the law of the covenant.
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And oh my, isn't that the basis for the entire history of our nation and the
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Western tradition for that matter? Basically all the nations in the Anglosphere, right? Every nation where there are oaths sworn and allegiance is given, what is being signified there?
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What's being signified is that there's an authority higher than the king to which he is accountable, and if he breaks covenant, if he violates his oath, then guess what?
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He is subject to the enforcement of divine sanctions. And we see that in Deuteronomy chapters 27 and 28.
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You have the blessings for obedience and you have the curses for disobedience right there. And isn't this incredible?
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At the end of that section, in Deuteronomy 28, Yahweh says to Israel, as part of the curses, the covenantal curses, that if they disobey, he would make them a byword.
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One translation says, a byword for the other nations, or more aptly put, a proverb.
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If they disobey his covenant law, he will make them a cautionary tale for the rest of the nations.
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Whereas their calling was missional, right? The nations were to look in from the outside and say, that's righteous.
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We want those standards from their obedience, but their disobedience would actually cause them to be a warning.
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This is what happens when a nation forgets God. Be warned. Learn from the proverb.
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This is what happens. And we see that this is true, this even in the context of different covenants.
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How about marriage? There's a covenant. Do we really expect that when a husband or a wife takes a lifelong vow,
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I almost said a lifelong vow of celibacy, but that wouldn't make sense, would it? When a husband or a wife makes a lifelong commitment and they pledge themselves to each other for life, making that commitment before God, taking those oaths, and one of them violates the terms of that covenant, do we really think that there won't be judgment on that couple, on that marriage, on that family even, by implication?
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How about a church covenant? How about when the leadership of a church takes an oath to uphold the doctrines of true religion and the teaching of Scripture and not depart from Him, and they lead that congregation into apostasy?
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Is it any wonder that in our nation that what we've seen with so many denominations, oath -breaking pastors and leaders and conventions end up leading entire denominations into apostasy because they violated the terms of their covenant oath?
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All of the nations in the West that were evangelized, so the UK, Canada, United States, recognized that if they wanted to have blessing, protection and prosperity, righteousness was essential.
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You have to have righteousness, which means you have to have wisdom, which means you have to have
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God's law. And this is why the laws of the colonies in New England were fashioned according to the
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Decalogue and God's moral laws, including the case law. This is why the presidential oath of office was taken in our nation with a right hand on the
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Bible, not a closed Bible, an open Bible. And what was the passage that the president used to swear his oath on?
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Deuteronomy 27 and 28, the curses of the covenant. What's he saying by making that oath?
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He's saying that if I disobey God, may His curse be upon this nation. It's why, as I said, the image of Moses holding the
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Ten Commandments still sits atop the center of the Supreme Court. It's why John Jay, the first Supreme Court justice, quoted copiously from the
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Pentateuch in his legal proceedings. It's why the coronation ceremony for the Queen of England includes explicit reference to the laws of God and the true profession of the gospel, citing the
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Bible as the rule for government and the basis for the Queen's authority to arrest the progress of evil and promotion of true religion and the establishment of that religion.
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What is that religion? It's Christianity. It's why
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Oliver Cromwell rebuked Parliament for not prescribing penalties that fit the crimes of those being convicted under the law, because that's the biblical principle of lex talionis, the crime shall fit the punishment.
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It's why John Knox and the Scottish Covenanters rejected religious pluralism in their land and used social covenanting, a .k
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.a. national covenanting, to reform their societies, leading to things like the
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Solemn League and Covenant Oath with Great Britain and Ireland. It's why the Lord's Day Act in Canada was on the books for 80 years, prohibiting commercial activity on Sundays.
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Now, however you feel about that application of Sabbath and the Fourth Commandment in society, what matters is this.
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The Bible was informing the sense of public morality and the administration of justice in the land of Canada for 80 years before that was repealed.
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80 years. And it's also why Christianity was required to be taught in the public schools in Canada.
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My, how far they've fallen. You see, once upon a time, we understood that righteousness exalts a nation.
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This brought blessing and tremendous liberty. And our passage today reminds us of this.
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It's righteousness or sin. It's exaltation or disgrace and ruin. Whether or not a nation professes religion.
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Very important. We don't believe in God here. And they think somehow that that will excuse them from God enforcing the terms of His covenant.
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Every nation has a source of law, of sovereignty. And the source of law in any nation is the
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God in that society, which is why what you've seen and what we've seen over the course of the past couple generations here in our nation and in the
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West, with the change of law, necessarily comes a change in religion. Our religion is shifting.
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In case you haven't noticed. As we cast off the glory of our Christian inheritance, as we cast it aside, as we continue to still run on the fumes of it, right, on the fruit of a
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Christian culture and a society heavily evangelized and impacted by the kingdom of God being pressed into the farthest corners, as we continue to run on the fruit without the root, what we're seeing now, in the midst of us coming away from this illusion of common ground and neutrality where we all just kind of have a vague sense of agreement about what's right and wrong, what we're seeing now is a degradation back to the runaway pagan culture of Romans 1.
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That's what we're seeing. Because either the source of sovereignty is God and His Word, or it's some other source of authority.
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Now I want to do something here just for a moment. I want to sketch something for us here from the book of Proverbs.
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And this is by no means exhaustive, but these are just some things from my own observations in the book of Proverbs, because I asked myself the question, and we should be asking ourselves the question, in light of divine wisdom from above, what does a righteous nation look like?
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What would a righteous nation look like according to the book of wisdom? Let me provide you with some examples here.
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A righteous nation balances maximum individual freedom and social harmony in the community.
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Proverbs 1 .3 A righteous nation calls its youth to mature and provides the means for it to happen through the teaching of the family.
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Proverbs 1 .8 -9 A righteous nation hates greed, cutting corners and unjust gain taken from the innocent.
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Proverbs 1 .10 A righteous nation shuns being a slave to one's lusts, adultery, unfaithfulness, sexual immorality, and anything that provides instant gratification over hard -won pleasures gained by diligent patience.
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Chapters 2 -7 A righteous nation is a nation where people own what's theirs instead of being perpetually indebted and enslaved to a lender.
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Chapter 6, verse 1 A righteous nation is funded by the tithe.
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Proverbs 3 .9 A righteous nation has integrity and rejects double standards.
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Proverbs 11 .2 A righteous nation is filled with people who give and share and don't exploit the poor.
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Chapter 11 .24 A righteous nation is generationally minded, leaving an inheritance to its children's children.
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Chapter 13 .22 A righteous nation prays to the God of the Bible and worships
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Him. Chapter 15 .22 A righteous nation has leaders with divine oracles on their lips.
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Chapter 16 .10 A righteous nation is one where its leaders don't take bribes, acquit the wicked, or show partiality.
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14 .15, 17 .15, 18 .5 A righteous nation is one that knows being righteous is more important than looking righteous.
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Chapter 21 .3 A righteous nation honors previous generations.
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Chapter 22 .28 A righteous nation is not drunk on comfort and convenience.
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Chapter 23 .1 -3 It does not exploit the fatherless.
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Chapter 23 .10 -11 Also, Chapter 24 .10 -12 A righteous nation does not give way and crumble and compromise before the wicked.
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Chapter 25 .26 A righteous nation has few rulers because its citizens are able to govern themselves.
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Chapter 28 .2 A righteous nation honors fathers, mothers, and the elderly.
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Chapter 29 .11 -12 A righteous nation is one where its people speak and act on behalf of the vulnerable.
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A righteous nation is one where the office of a woman is valued and highly praised. Chapter 31 .10
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A righteous nation fears the Lord. Chapter 1 .7
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Now that's not exhaustive. It would take a lot more trips through the book of Proverbs to glean all and mine all of the riches of God's beautiful and glorious wisdom about how we, not just as individuals, not just as families, not just as the church, but as a nation, the kind of principles that garner
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God's blessings in righteousness. If you recall, it was
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John Adams who famously said about our Constitution and our land that it was a document suited only for a moral and religious people.
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And what morality and what religion was he talking about, brothers and sisters? He was talking about the Christian faith.
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It's indisputable. And that that Constitution was inadequate to govern any other.
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So you need a moral and religious people. In other words, you need a righteous people. You need a people in whom righteousness dwells to have a righteous nation.
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Because a righteous people cry out for just law. A righteous people cry out for just law.
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Now, obviously, there's some interplay between those two. I think there's an interaction between the relationship of the people under the government and the leadership of that government.
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Sometimes God brings these things about, of course, through the transformation that happens among the people and the leaders repent.
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But also, I believe that it's the case that leaders can also repent, and that can have a very effective, dare
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I say, sanctifying effect for a Christian culture and the expansion of the kingdom of God amongst the people and the citizens of a nation.
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But here's the thing. Those laws that a righteous people cry out for, that justice that we want as the people of God, it will only be enforced publicly to the degree that we are enforcing it in our own lives.
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Why do we have lawless leaders right now? We know the
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John Calvin quote. When God wants to judge a nation, he gives them wicked rulers, right? Why do we have that?
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Because our leaders represent us very well. They're our kind of leaders. And they're lawless there because we're lawless.
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And so we need, in our nation, we need national righteousness. We need a righteous people.
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We don't need conservatism. We don't need traditional values.
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We need national righteousness that is derived from God's law and the principles of justice.
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Now, I want to end here on John chapter 11. If you turn there with me,
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John chapter 11, verse 47. I say the word end and everyone says, great, 30 more minutes.
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John chapter 11, verse 47.
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Let's start in verse 45. Many of the Jews, therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him, but some of them went to the
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Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, what are we to do?
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For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him and the
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Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation. So you see the concern here on the part of the high priests and the religious leadership is they are terrified to lose their position.
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They are terrified, and even falsely so because they're so blinded by hatred for Jesus and envy of his righteousness because his righteousness outed their false righteousness, their self -righteousness, to the point where they were willing to assassinate an innocent man and have him killed and condemned.
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Their concern was this, that the Romans would come and take away both our place and our nation.
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They're clamoring for straws. How can we hold on to this? How can we hold on to our heritage?
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How can we make sure we don't lose our inheritance? And even the fear itself wasn't grounded in anything real because with Jesus, the
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Messiah, the fulfillment of all the prophets in the Old Testament, that's the basis for any good nation than any good righteous nation.
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You need Jesus. You need his righteousness. And there they were saying, no, he has to die in order for us to hold on to this.
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But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, you know nothing at all, nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.
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He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation.
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So this was a prophecy given through the lips of a king by God. God ordained that he would say this. 52, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.
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So from that day on, they made plans to put him to death. So the religious leaders believed that it would be most politically expedient to have
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Jesus murdered. This was their belief, to get the Romans off their back. Their motivations were evil, but what they were saying was true.
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They recognized, even through the lips, the oracle that God had given them to say that this was the man that had come to die for the people, for the nation of Israel, and not just for the nation of Israel.
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Oh, no, no, no, no. But look at what the text says. But also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.
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Oh, this is where it gets glorious now. What was the promise of the
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Messiah? What was to be his inheritance? What was prophesied of him in the
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Old Testament? It's that he would get the nations for his inheritance, that the ends of the earth he would have authority and dominion over.
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We talked before about a nation, a domain, a dominion with a king needing to exercise a law.
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Well, how about this? Christ's dominion is not limited to a regional territory.
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His borders of his dominion, of his domain, extend from the river to the ends of the earth.
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The territory that he owns is everything. What is a kingdom without a king?
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And what is that king without a law to give to the people? And that law, the prophet
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Isaiah tells us, is something that the coastlands are waiting for. They're waiting for it.
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They're waiting for God's justice. They're waiting for the proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom, which includes not just forgiveness of sins, but the doing and the establishment of righteousness and justice among all the nations.
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That's where this is going. That's why God judges and disciplines nations.
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That's why he blesses them for righteousness. Because nations and God's economy are central to this plan of his gospel conquering to the ends of the earth.
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That's what the Great Commission is all about. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
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Go, therefore, and disciple nations. Teach them all to obey me.
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Teach them everything I have commanded you. What has God commanded us?
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Righteousness. What does righteousness look like? Justice.
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Jesus says, Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And it might as well say,
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Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice. Justice between God and us, vertically.
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How does that happen? How did God get his justice? At the cross, right?
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God got his justice because he himself came to satisfy it. He himself came to be the sacrificial offering for sinners and to satisfy the demands of divine justice.
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That was taken care of between God and men. But there's this other aspect, you see. Love the
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Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And what? Love your neighbor as yourself.
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Justice for neighbor. Do we think that God is not still concerned with justice for neighbors?
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Justice for victims. The doing of righteousness. In all the nations.
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That's what this kingdom brings. That's why it's our commission. God will have the nations.
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You know, the question that's being tossed around right now is this. Should there be Christian nations?
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Has there been? Have there been Christian nations before? Well, I believe there has.
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I believe we're still waiting on the first truly one. I believe we can do better. But it's not about that.
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It's about this. It's the promise of Scripture that the nations will be Christian.
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They will be. It's a promise. Ask of me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance.
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The very ends of the earth for your possession. That prophecy in Isaiah chapter 2 of the mountain of the house of the
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Lord being established as the highest mountain and what? The nations flowing where? Down or up?
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Up. Flowing up. God drawing the nations to Himself through this Messiah. This banner of Jesse.
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This central figurehead. This redeemer of a new humanity. This Lord.
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This Savior. This King who has commissioned us to be His prophets, priests, and kings.
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A kingdom of priests. And how does this kingdom advance?
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Well, it advances through evangelism and discipleship. Justification and justice. We've done a really good job as the
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Reformed Church for a long time now on proclaiming justification. Where we've gone wrong is that we haven't really proclaimed justice.
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Which is why we need to have those categories. Justice for God. Justice for neighbor.
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Love the Lord. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love God above all and love your neighbor as you love yourself.
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One day, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is
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Lord. To the glory of God the Father. Whether that happens willingly or unwillingly.
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Righteousness is not only what we are because of Christ. We're not just righteous because He gave us
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His righteousness. He credited it to us as a gift. And we lay hold of that through the gifts of faith and repentance.
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And we are counted, declared as righteous. God takes our curse and He turns lawless people.
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That's what sin is. That's what the Bible says about sin. Sin is lawlessness or covenant breaking.
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He takes covenant breaking, lawless people like you and me and He turns us into covenant keeping law keepers.
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Why? Because we've been redeemed by grace. So righteousness is not only what we are, right?
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God speaks over you. His declaration in Christ. You're righteous. But it's also something that we do.
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Righteousness is not just something we are. It's something that we do. As we share this kingdom, as we manifest this kingdom by the way that we live, and the kingdom goes forth, as we experience that reconciliation and relationship with God, as we're transformed, as we're regenerated, as we're sanctified, as we continually bring ourselves back to the joy of our salvation, as we experience that reconciliation not just with God but with one another, our neighbors, right?
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So as we take part in that. But the kingdom also goes forth as we live that life with one another in community in a way that it is alternative to what the world does and how they live, right?
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Think back to Israel now. They're the OG city on a hill.
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What did Jesus say? A city on a hill cannot be what? What can it not be? Hidden.
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Do people light a light and put it under a covering? If the salt loses its savor, will not everything spoil?
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If there's no light, there will just be darkness. And we are to live in such a way as God's people in that community and abolish injustice here first.
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Abolish injustice here. And then we're to call on our authorities and civil rulers to conform our laws to the laws of God because His commandments are not burdensome and they're the only basis of freedom and liberty that a nation will ever experience in its fullest sense.
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And that's what we're doing, by the way, of course, with End Abortion Now because there's a very sobering reality here as we rejoice in our salvation, as we confess our sin, as we're reconciled to God and to one another, as we manifest
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His righteousness in how we live, and as we call on our elected officials to kiss the sun, it may be that as we do that,
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Lord willing, that He will be merciful to us. You have to understand that our nation right now is in a very precarious position.
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And God will not turn a blind eye to all that we've done. Psalm 33 .12
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says, Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, where righteousness exalts that place, but conversely, where sin is a reproach to any people.
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There's a great deal at stake in terms of how we live in our lives as the people of God, our duty toward the public realm of activity, evangelism, discipleship.
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But I want to read to you, and I close with this, the words of William Wilberforce in his letter on the abolition of the slave trade.
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This is in 1807. Of all the motives by which I am prompted to address you, that which operates on me with the greatest force is the consideration of the present state and prospects of our country, and of the duty which at so critical a moment presses imperiously on every member of the community to exert his utmost powers in the public cause that the
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Almighty Creator of the universe governs the world which He has made, that the sufferings of nations are to be regarded as the punishment of national crimes, and their decline and fall as the execution of His sentence.
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Our truths, which I trust, are still generally believed among us. Indeed, to deny them would be directly to contradict the express and repeated declarations of the
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Holy Scriptures. If these truths be admitted, and if it be also true that fraud, oppression, and cruelty are crimes of the blackest dye, and that guilt is aggravated in proportion as the criminal acts in defiance of the clearer light, and of stronger motives to virtue —and these are positions to which we cannot refuse our assent without rejecting the authority not only of revealed, but even of natural religion— have we not abundant cause for serious apprehension?
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The course of public events has, for many years, been such as human wisdom and human force have in vain endeavored to control or resist.
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Though the storm has been raging for many years, yet instead of having ceased, it appears to be now increasing in fury.
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If such be our condition, and if the slave trade be a national crime, declared by every wise and respectable man of all parties, without exception, to be a compound of the grossest wickedness and cruelty, a crime to which we cling in defiance of the clearest light, is not this then a time in which all, who are not perfectly sure that the providence of God is but a fable, should be strenuous in their endeavor to lighten the vessel of the state of such a load of guilt and infamy?
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What was the primary driving theology in William Wilberforce, a man largely responsible for the abolition of the slave trade, as a
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Christian? What was his guiding principle? It was a covenantal view of history in which God held nations accountable for their crimes against him, that he was going to judge them for their unrighteousness.
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And the only, I should say, the central motivation for pursuing the abolition of slavery was the alleviation of national judgment and guilt and infamy.
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God will judge. He is judging us. But he will judge our nation, and it ultimately will lead to our being spewed from the land.
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If we do not act with a sense of conviction and urgency and lead with repentance, our motivation, why we're doing what we're doing with End Abortion Now, and also as the people of God in every other sphere of activity that God has called us to, is admitting that God will judge us, and he will cast us out, because righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.
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America, for all of its blessings, is not special. It will not be excluded from God's covenantal judgment.
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And so our motivation should be to stand in the gap, because God is looking, according to the book of Ezekiel, for a righteous man, just one, to stand in the breach and lift up a banner and be faithful.
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And he may, brothers and sisters, relent from sending calamity upon us. Regardless, he'll still have the victory.
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The nations will still come to him in his time. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the
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Lord as far as the waters cover the sea. It will happen. The nations will come to him.
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But in our moment, at our historical moment, in our cultural moment in history, we have to contend with the fact that the
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Almighty hears the cries of innocent blood. And he will draw near for judgment.
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So join me in prayer as we ask him to be merciful and ask him to show us exactly what our duty would be in light of divine wisdom.
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Amen? Our Heavenly Father, thank you for what went forward today.
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Lord, I know it's a sober message. It's a somber message. But God, I ask that you would help us to feel the weight of these things and consider the glory of our calling and our inheritance as the people of God and our role in this,
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Lord. That you have commissioned us not just to have the forgiveness of sins but to act for justice in the land, for righteousness.
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And I pray that that is something we would both experience and live out in our lives, and in particular, amongst one another.
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Thank you for your spirit being with us. Just pray that this word would find its mark in the hearts of your people today.