For This Cause — Chuck Smith

Psalm 81: Hearing God’s Call to Worship

Let's turn now in our Bibles to Psalm 81 for our scripture reading this morning. I'll read the first, the unnumbered verses and Pastor Brian will lead the congregation in the even-numbered verses and shall we stand as we read God's Word.

Sing aloud unto God our strength, make a joyful noise unto the God of Jacob. Take a psalm and bring hither the timbrel, the pleasant harp with the psaltery. And blow up the trumpet in the new moon and the time appointed on our solemn feast day.

For this was a statute for Israel and a law of the God of Jacob. And this he ordained in Joseph for a testimony when he went out through the land of Egypt where I heard a language that I understood not.

I removed his shoulder from the burden, his hands were delivered from the pots. Thou callest in trouble and I delivered thee. I answered thee in the secret place of thunder. I proved thee at the waters of Meribah.

Here, O my people, and I will testify unto thee, O Israel, if thou wilt hearken unto me. There shall no strange God be in thee, neither shalt thou worship any strange God. I am the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the land of Egypt.

Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it. But my people would not hearken to my voice and Israel would have none of me. So I gave them up unto their own lusts and they walked in their own counsels. O that my people had hearkened unto me and Israel had walked in my ways.

I should soon have subdued their enemies and turned my hand against their adversaries. The haters of the Lord should have submitted themselves unto him, but their time should have endured forever. He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee.

Prayer and the Promise of God’s Goodness

Let's pray. Father, we thank you that in this psalm you exposed your heart. The things that you were longing to do for your people. The love that you had stored up that you wanted to lavish upon them, but they turned their backs on you.

They worshiped and served other gods and instead of conquering over their enemies, they were conquered by their enemies and destroyed out of the land that you had given to them. O Lord, you have been so good to us.

We pray, Father, that we would not turn our backs on you, but that always our hearts will be inclined towards you and the things of the Spirit that you might, Lord, do all of those things that you are wanting to do for us because of your immense love for each of us.

Teach us out of your word this day as we look to you now in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. Second Kings chapters 16 through 18 this week and that is what we will be studying tonight as we gather again for a through the Bible understanding of what God has to say to us in these days.

So we encourage you to read Second Kings 16 through 18 and then join with us tonight as we journey through the word. This morning we'd like to draw your attention to Second Kings chapter 17 and verse 6.

Israel’s Captivity and the Consequences of Forsaking God

In the ninth year of Hosea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away into Assyria and placed them in Hattah and in Habar by the River of Gozan and in the city of the Medes. In the ninth year of King Hosea, Assyria took Samaria and the people were taken from the land that God had given to them.

The land that God had promised to their father Abraham. In a few short words, the writer gives us the history of the death of the nation. The northern kingdom of Israel is no more. Why would God forsake his people?

Why would he allow their enemies to triumph over them? The writer is careful to give to us the reasons why they were forsaken by God and went into captivity. In verse 7, we read that the children of Israel sinned against Jehovah, their God.

Their sin was manifested in their fear and reverence of other gods. God's first commandment to them was, thou shalt love the Lord thy God and thou shalt have no other gods before me. But Israel had turned to other gods.

God had a place in their lives but it wasn't the first place in their life. Like so many people today, there is a place for God in their lives. But it isn't the place that God wants. God wants first place in each of our hearts and lives.

So many people give God a hour and a half or so on Sunday morning and that's about it. A place for God. The rest of the week they're pursuing their own pleasures, their own welfare. But they have a place for God but it isn't the place that God wants because God wants first place in each of our lives.

A place above all others. And then it says they set up images to Asherah or the word grove is the Hebrew Asherah and it is actually a idol of the female goddess Ashtar. And they had set up these idols of Ashtar, the female goddess.

The second commandment was, thou shalt not make any graven image to bow down to them. And Asherah was a graven image. We read in verse 11, they did wicked things that provoked the Lord to anger. They would not listen to the warnings that were brought to them by the messengers of God.

They rejected the covenant that God had made with them. Note, God didn't reject the covenant. They were the ones that broke covenant with God. God had given to them his law. God had given to them the warnings of the law in Leviticus.

God said, if you will not hearken to me, then I will do all of and do all of my commandments. And if you shall despise my statutes, and if your soul abhors my judgments, so that you will not obey all my commandments, but you break my covenant.

And so in verse 15 we read, and they rejected his statutes, his covenant that he made with their fathers, his testimonies, which he testified against them. They had done just the things that were described there in Leviticus.

God said, I also will do this unto you. I will set my face against you, and you will be slain before your enemies, and they that hate you will reign over you. And this is exactly what has happened in the seventh year of King Hoshea.

The Assyrians came, they conquered Samaria, and they took the people away captive. The people surely could not plead ignorance, nor could they deny that God had not warned them of what would happen if they would forsake his statutes, his judgments, his commandments, if they would break his covenant.

The Emptiness of Idolatry and the Human Thirst for God

We read in verse 15 that they pursued after emptiness, and they became empty. God has put in the heart of every man a need and a thirst for God. David said, My soul thirsteth after the living God. And he is expressing what is true of all man.

God has put in us this thirst for God. But the tragedy is in the things that man seeks to satisfy or to slake this thirst that is in him. He is pursuing after things that are empty, and the consequence is an emptiness in his life.

You can't fill that empty void with emptiness. Man pursues after pleasure, hoping that pleasure will fill that void, but pleasure is empty. They amass all kinds of things in order to fill that emptiness, and their motto is, the man who dies with the most toys wins.

Not so. And these empty things can never fill the void that is in your life that was created by God for God. Only God can fill that void. Through it, we read after the ways of the heathen that were round about them.

Rather than bringing the heathen to the truth, they degraded themselves to the heathen practices. A few years ago, we did a series of videos titled, Pagan Invasion, in which we sought to show how that America has been invaded by pagan religions.

And for the most part, America is a pagan nation. Not a Christian nation, but a pagan nation. The New Age movement is not new. It's an ancient Hinduism in a new garb. The worship of Mother Earth and the forces of nature is nothing more than animism which you find in the primitive cultures in the jungles of South America and Africa and Borneo.

As men worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed. We read they set up this grove or this idol of Ashtoreth, actually, or Asherah. And the idol is pornographic. When you read of them worshipping in the grove or making a grove, it's a reference to the making of these pornographic likenesses of the goddess Ashtoreth.

And they are really designed to sort of arouse sexual passions. We find that people today have turned to pornography, which is a modern form of the grove. It is a modern form of the worship of the female body and the arousing of sexual passions through pornography.

And people are becoming very highly stimulated sexually. But what happens to a society that is exposed to seductive pictures and becomes highly sexually aroused? The Bible warns us that if we sow to our flesh, then of our flesh will we reap corruption.

Sexual Immorality, Abortion, and Pagan Sacrifice

When people make sex their god, sex outside of marriage becomes a common expected practice. And suddenly, when this happens, you have many unwanted pregnancies. Now you have a real social problem. What do you do with all of the unwanted babies?

You have men who have fathered the child but want no responsibility for that child. Their sexual activities were not really an expression of love, but only self-gratification. And rather than turning to the commandments of God and ceasing such activities, you find people now advocating the right of the mother to end the life of her unwanted child.

And politicians who make that one of their chief planks in their appeal to the people to be elected to office, that they support the right of a mother to choose concerning whether or not to murder the child in her womb.

In those days, they did not have abortion clinics. They didn't have the morning after pill. So they had to carry the baby full term and give birth to the child. But they didn't want the child, and so they would build great bonfires.

And they would have these worship services where they worship Baal or Molech, their god of pleasure. And they would take their little infants and throw them into the fire. And that's what is referred to here as they cause their children to pass through the fire.

Now these are God's people. These are the people that God had made a covenant with them. And yet they have rejected that covenant. God had set statutes and ordinances against such things. But now they are violating the law of God as they are destroying their babies, offering them as sacrifices to the pagan gods of the day.

This was the final stage of their rebellion against the laws of God. It is at this point that God said, it's enough. And in the seventh year of Hosea, the king of Assyria came against Samaria, and he conquered Samaria, and the nation died, and the people were taken away captive into the enemy's lands.

We read, therefore, the Lord was very angry with Israel, and he removed them out of his sight. I see a very startling similarity between the nation of Israel and the United States. God had brought the nation out of the bondage of Egypt into a land where they were free to worship God.

America’s Founding, Religious Liberty, and Moral Decline

But even as God has brought the pilgrim fathers out of the bondage of England, where they were forced to worship in the state church, and could not worship God after the conscience of their own heart.

They established a new nation. A nation established on the laws of God. It was to be a nation that recognized and honored God. It's one of the founding fathers of the new nation of Israel. Joshua said to the people, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

And you can read of our early founding fathers and of their testimonies of the necessity of our nation to keep God at the center and to honor God. Our founding fathers saw that the strength of the nation was in proportion to its relationship with God, and they sought to incorporate into the Constitution those provisions that would guarantee the freedom of man to worship God after the dictates of his own heart.

In the Constitution, the freedom of religion was never intended to be freedom from religion. The whole idea was the freedom of not having a state church and being forced to go to one church, the state church, or to support the one church.

A man would be free to attend any church he wanted. But look how the decisions of the Supreme Court have slowly corrupted our nation, eroded the moral planks upon which the nation was built, and has brought us to the verge of destruction.

The decision that the Constitution guaranteed a person freedom from religion, and thus restricting any positive instruction of our children in the public schools from any moral values that might be based upon biblical principles.

They ordered the removal of the Ten Commandments from the classrooms. As a result of their decisions, no more baccalaureate services for the graduating seniors. No singing of Christmas carols. In fact, no mention of Christmas.

It's now called the winter break. No mention of Easter. It's now called the spring break, because they don't want to speak of words that might talk about the birth of Christ or his resurrection. But just look what is happening now on spring breaks.

Drunken sexual orgies leading to more unwanted pregnancies and more business for the abortion mills. This Friday, in the USA Today edition, talked about how our leaders are recognizing the problems that we have with children engaging in sexual relations.

And so they were developing a program designed for 7th graders to warn about dangers that can come through sexual relationships in order to encourage a safe sex. But in developing the program for the 7th graders, they discovered that children at 9 years old are now beginning to participate in sex.

And so they've redesigned the program to teach the 9 year olds the lessons that they were intending to teach to the 7th graders. Next, our Supreme Court, under the guise of and their interpretation of freedom of speech, they opened the doors for a flood of pornography to fill our land.

Because they were unable to define obscenity, nothing became obscene. And we are an anything goes society in the guise of freedom of speech. And then the Supreme Court removed laws that would restrict sexual activity among consenting adults.

So that again, we're free to do whatever our fantasies might dictate. Now this is what was happening in Israel. They were gradually going downhill, turning from the commandments of God, the statutes of God, the judgments of God.

They were distorting. And they were now worshiping sex. Ashtar became the major goddess, along with Molech, the god of pleasure. We have the same result here in the United States. A society where sex has become God.

A Culture Saturated with Sexual Imagery

And we have sex being pushed on us from every quarter. Billboards, magazines. You can hardly watch a news program anymore without them injecting some sexual titillating kind of thing that isn't really news, but is introduced to just excite and arouse sexually.

And then the advertisements on the news programs. I find that I have to turn away from a lot of the ads that they have. And one third of the time of a half hour, take a half hour news program, 10 minutes is devoted to advertisement, 20 minutes to news.

We're living in a nation that is in a state of high sexual arousal and the laws granting the freedom to explore as we please. The result is we again have a plethora of unwanted pregnancies. Thus, it was important to go back to the Supreme Court to get a decision on Roe versus Wade so that abortion can be a chosen option for any woman who does not want to carry her unwanted child full term.

The law has become the shame of the nation and some 40 million babies have suffered as a result. About the only difference between us and the ancient Israelites is that we burned the babies to death with the saline solution while still in the womb, while they carried the baby full term and then burned it in the bonfire.

You can be certain that the righteous God who judged Israel and punished Israel gave them over to be ruled by their enemies will not spare our nation from the judgments to come. But I would like to point out that the Supreme Court is wrongly titled because it is not the Supreme Court.

They do not make the final determination of what is right and wrong. The Bible is the one that gives us the final determination of right and wrong. The Bible that they don't want taught in our public schools or any mention of it within our public schools, but it teaches the true laws of God.

And one day those justices who have liberalized men from the laws of God will face the true Supreme Court and will be found guilty. Because it might be the law of the land, it doesn't mean that it is right in the sight of God.

And it is His decision that you need to be concerned about. What does God say about it? What does God think about it? That should be your chief concern, not can we do it legally, but what does God have to say?

And in Matthew 10, Jesus said, Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul, but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. That's the one we need to fear.

That's the one we need to honor. And He is the one whose laws we need to observe. The nation of Israel in the seventh year of King Hoshea, Samaria was conquered, the nation fell and was taken captive away to Assyria.

A Call to National Repentance and Renewed Commitment

How much longer our nation can last in this downward spiral that we are in, only God knows. But we cannot really call upon the blessings of God on our nation until our nation as a nation returns to its commitment unto God and to the covenant that God made with our founding fathers.

September the 11th was a wake-up call. And many people were awakened by the events on that day. But now six months later, they've gone back to the old practices. It's back to business as usual. We're talking about the recovery and just the return to the same things and God is left out again and forgotten again.

Though they may have returned to church for a week or so, soon that wore off and it's back to the same old routine. What will it take? And are we so far gone that there is no turning back? Only God knows.

But as Joshua said to the people, at the end of his life, choose which God you're going to serve. Whether it be the gods that were in Babylon, or the gods that were in Egypt, or the gods that the people worshipped in whose land you now dwell.

But as for me in my house, we will serve the Lord. And it's time that we make that commitment and that decision. I don't know what the world around me is going to do. What gods they might choose. But as for me in my house, we're going to serve the Lord.

Prayer for Holiness and Persevering Faith

Let's pray. Father, we are very concerned as we look at our nation today and the things that are transpiring. We see, Lord, how people have turned from you, forsaken your covenant, are worshipping these gods of the pagans.

Powers of darkness, Lord, seem to be so strong. But we thank you for the power of your Holy Spirit. And greater is he that is in us than he that is in the world. Lord, we pray that you'll give us that strength to stand up against the pressure of the world in which we live.

May we not bow our knee unto Baal or Molech or Ashtoreth. But Lord, may we serve you with our whole heart. Draw us, Lord, unto a renewed commitment. And may we determine and purpose in our hearts that we will not defile ourself with the corruptible things of the world.

Those things that are so corrupting. But Lord, may we keep our hearts pure, centered on thee. May we, Lord, sow to the Spirit, not to our flesh, that we might of the Spirit reap life everlasting. Jesus, we understand now what you meant when you said, when the Son of Man returns to the earth, will he find faith?

We realize, Lord, that the iniquity of the world abounds and the love of many has grown cold. Lord, renew the fire. Renew the fervor in our lives for you, Lord. And may we seek you with our whole heart.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Shall we stand? The Lord said to Jeremiah, tell the people, stand in the ways and observe. Observe what's happening. Just stand still for a minute. Look around. Look at yourself.

Returning to the Old Ways and Walking in Holiness

And then the Lord said, and ask for the old ways, wherein is the good way. And you will find the peace. The rest. Where are you today in your relationship with God? He has a place in your life. That's obvious.

You're here. But what place does he have? Is he top priority? Is he above everything else? That's the place he demands. May we this day be willing to yield to his demand and let him become the Lord of our lives.

The pastors are down here at the front today. They're here to pray for you. It may be that you've been snared by the worldly things. I mean, the power of darkness is so great. And the powers of the flesh are so great.

It's so easy to become a prey and to fall victim. To find yourself snared in the things of the flesh. They're so conveniently available now. It takes a constant battle to fight against these things. And if you've been caught in that trap, God wants to set you free.

God wants you to come back to the covenant and to renew your commitment to him. And I would encourage you, as soon as we're dismissed, come on forward and get right with God. In these last days, how important it is that we walk in holiness and purity before our maker.

May God be with you and may his word minister to your hearts. Check you when you start to make a wrong move and lead you in his path for his glory. Amen.