A Greater Sickness IV: Against God | Behold Your God Podcast

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Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie. I'm here with Dr. John Snyder, author of the

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Behold Your God study series and pastor of Christ Church, New Albany. Right now, our world is in the middle of a pandemic and it seems like it just takes over everything.

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And so if you're just popping into the podcast, let me go ahead and tell you that while the coronavirus is the backdrop for what we're talking about, it's certainly not the focus.

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In fact, John, the focus of what we're talking about is the greater plague of sin.

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So a few weeks ago, we started talking about that, about sin and how it is the greatest plague.

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Where are we going right now? Well, today we wanna look at some definitions of sin and particularly how the

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Bible describes sin in action. And I think that's probably the most helpful aspect.

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Yeah, now as usual, we always like to look to old writers for help.

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And this particular episode, we're looking at a book by Ralph Venning. Today it's published under the name,

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The Sinfulness of Sin, but originally it was published as sin, the plague of plagues or the just vindication of the law of God and no less just accusation and condemnation of the sin of man.

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Now, if you didn't get all that, it's okay. We're gonna have a link to it in the show notes at mediagratia .org. What's amazing is that he wrote this book in 1600s, four years after the great plague had entered

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London and caused all kinds of havoc. But I love the quote that we have from him about this work.

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He says, as to the sinfulness of sin, I have indeed handled it most fully as it is against man's good and happiness.

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Yeah, it's really a great book and it's not a discouraging or dark book at all.

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Let's start with the definition. One of the simple definitions that we find in scripture is in 1

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John 3 and verse four. And John writes this, everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness and sin is lawlessness.

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So there's a very simple definition. Sin is breaking the law of God. It's going beyond where God tells us to go or not doing what

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God tells us to do. One of the most helpful descriptions, collections of definitions of sin though,

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I think is the one that we find by an archbishop, an Anglican named R .C.

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Trench, born in 1807, died in 1886. So this is Charles Spurgeon kind of period.

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And Trench was a solid guy and he came up with, he did a book on biblical synonyms.

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And in the book, we find the synonyms for sin in the Bible and he gives us eight of those.

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So TJ, why don't you run through those? Yeah, I just want to run through these really quick. So first is missing the mark, faulty aim.

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So think of it as God has placed a target on your lives to hit the bullseye and we always miss the bullseye.

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The second is transgression. So God has given us a line saying this far, no further, you may not cross it.

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We cross it, we sin. Disobedience to his voice, God has spoken. He's told us all that is required of us.

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And so every act of disobedience to the voice of God is found in the Bible is sin. A failure to stand when we should stand.

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So a grievous sin is being committed. We ought to stand against it, we don't, that's a sin. Ignorance of what we should have known.

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So we know that God has given us the law and when we disobey it, even without knowing it, that's no excuse, it's sin.

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Number six, withholding that which should have been given in full measure.

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So we only do half of what God deserves in whole. Number seven, iniquity or lawlessness.

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It's a non -observance or a rejection of the law. And lastly, sin is discord in the harmonies of nature.

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So this is probably the one we see most common. This is the one that causes disharmony among relationships, but more importantly, disharmony between us and God.

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Now, if you missed any of those, cause I was going pretty fast, we're gonna list all of them with the descriptions at mediagratia .org.

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So make sure you click the link in the description. Now, we wanna talk really today about the way that sin shows itself in its activity.

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What are the symptoms of it? And that's, I mean, if you think about physical illnesses, that's how we notice them.

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If you were to ask me what a scientific or medical name for the virus that causes a stomach bug,

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I wouldn't know what it was. But if someone says, I have a stomach virus, then I know exactly what they're talking about. It hits them in the stomach.

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I have a headache. Okay, well, I know what that is. But if you ask me for the scientific reasons behind it, I wouldn't know.

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So we want to look at sin as it's acting in two general areas.

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We'll only be able to get to the first one today. We'll have to save the second one for later. And the first general area is how sin is actively opposing

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God in a number of different ways. So when sin is a part of my life, sin expresses itself through me so that I am opposing

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God. Sin is against God. I live, when I live for myself, I'm living against God.

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The other area is that sin is actively opposing the good of man, which you mentioned from Binning's book, where he really just excels in laying out the true nature of sin, like scripture does, in how clearly sin, which promises me so much happiness, actually only and always comes to steal, to destroy, to kill.

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So when we talk about sin as actively opposing God, let's just take four categories.

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Sin is against God's rule. Sin is against God's promises and threats.

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Sin is against God's character. And sin is against God's existence.

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Now, these are all taken from Ralph Vinning. I do want us to notice before we kind of cover these, there is an increasing degree of heinousness.

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There is an increasing degree of darkness as we move down this list. It's one thing to oppose

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God's rules. I want to live for myself. God says I should obey him. It's quite another thing.

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It's even worse to reject the kind promises that God gives to rule breakers or the warnings.

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It's even worse to reject the character of this God himself, and ultimately, sin being against the existence of God.

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So let's take a quick look at these. I'll give the first. Sin is against God's rule or God's rules, his commands.

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Now, immediately, sin being a thing that masks itself so well, every one of us is ready to start right at the beginning and say, not me.

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I'm not against God's rule. But which God are we talking about? Are you talking about the

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God that America has offered you? Are you talking about the God that maybe that church tradition has offered you?

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It is possible that we have a God in our mind that really is more imagination than truth.

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And so you can have a God that you kind of have fashioned out of part Bible verses, part culture, part the way you grew up, part your own desires.

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And so you have a God that you've kind of made, and that God is not against what you want.

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You know, he's adapted. And so you're not against him. You're not against his rule, his rules.

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But when you read the scriptures and you see that there is a God and he is the king, and what he's written in this book is unshiftingly the rule for our life, and we have no right to argue against that.

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And when we read his rules and they cross some area of my life where I want to rule myself, my free time, my money, my relationships, romance, whatever, then we find that actually sin rises up.

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And when I live for myself, I am actively opposing the rule of God.

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Now that's so clearly seen in Psalm 2, where all the leaders of the world are gathered together and they're coming up with this futile idea.

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And it's expressed in Psalm 2 this way. It says they're raging against God and what they want to do is throw

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God's fetters, his restrictions off. So let's get rid of God's rules. Now the Hebrew word there, really interesting.

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It's the word that the Hebrews used for the stuff that's on the bottom of the ocean, which when everything is calm, the weather's nice, the ocean looks, the beach is beautiful and clean and the ocean's calm.

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But when there's a storm, the debris on the bottom of the ocean floor, close to shore is thrown up on the shore.

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If you ever go down to the beach after a storm, all the seaweed and stuff. So that's the word that God chose to describe us.

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When life is going the way I like it and I think that I'm in charge, then everything's really beautiful and on the surface, it's all nice and calm.

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But let God tell me that I have to obey him and I don't have a right to do what I want to do in an area and suddenly, all this ugly rebellion rises up and it's all over my life and it's a bit shocking to us.

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But that's just the first way that sin is against God. Yeah, and the second way is that sin is against, this is kind of surprising, that sin is against God's promises and warnings.

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You could see it being against his warnings but against his promises as well. We see this, think of a virus that attacks not just the body but also attacks the mind.

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I've been through this, the lady in the church I grew up with, the lady in the church where I grew up, she had a sickness where her mental, she just had paranoia.

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And so imagine that you have a sickness that makes you not trust anybody, including those who are caring the most for you, including your doctor or your husband, your spouse, your parents.

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And whatever they say, look, don't do this. If you do this, you will come to harm. And you say, no, that's what

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I want to do. I think I'll be safe. Or if they say, okay, doing this will help you and you say, no, I refuse to do that.

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Would be like going to a doctor and you have paranoia, you don't trust them and he says, okay, you have this sickness.

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I don't really believe I have that sickness. Okay, well, you have this sickness and this medication will help.

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Well, I don't believe I have a sickness and I don't think the medicine you give me is gonna help. Well, that's kind of what sin does.

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It goes against both the promises and the warnings of God. Think about some of these promises in particular.

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Matthew 11, 28, come to me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.

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Sin has so morphed our understanding of God that we see the law of God as a heavy burden.

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We see the character of God as something that is heavy for us to carry rather than a delight.

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John 7, 37, if anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Sin would say, I don't trust, one, that you would provide the drink, but two,

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I don't trust that what you would give me to drink would be good for me, would be my benefit. Isaiah 1, 18, come now, let us reason together, says the

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Lord. Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool.

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Imagine hearing that promise from the one God who has never lied, there's not a shadow of deception anywhere in his history, and yet we can look to him and say,

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I don't believe that you can forgive all of my sin. And this is particularly personal to me.

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I fought with this for a long time. God, can you forgive even the sin as me?

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And sin will whisper, no, he can't. Yeah, I mean, the proof that sin rises up and actively opposes the promises of God is that we can read those things.

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And apart from a miraculous work of God in our heart, we remain unmoved. Like a person who doubts their doctor because of dementia, we think there's a trick in it, that God's out to get us.

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And it's the same thing with the warnings. We hear the warnings. The warnings are from a

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God of mercy and pity, but we just keep heading down the road of selfishness, living for myself.

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And we think, well, I will be the first person in the history of humanity to live for myself, reject

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God's warnings, and it's all gonna turn out really good for me. And we ignore them.

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Listen to this passage from Isaiah 65, verse two and three. God says to his people who are doing just that, says,

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I have spread out my hands all day long to a rebellious people who walk in the way which is not good, following their own thoughts, a people who continually provoke me to my face.

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So here's a group of people who in their sin are constantly provoking God to anger, and yet he stretches out his hand, he pleads with them, and they put their fingers in their ears, so to speak, and just continue down the same path.

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Living for self ultimately must demonstrate itself. One of the symptoms will be not just that you're against God's commands, you doubt his promises, you ignore his warnings, and you destroy yourself.

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Yeah, as you mentioned previously, each of these characteristics of sin does become progressively darker and darker.

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And here we see quite a jump that sin is against the very character of God.

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You know, it's one thing if you work with someone who's just really not likable, right?

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So he never does the work that he's asked to do, he's unreliable, shows up late, just generally is rude to you.

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It's very easy to not like that person, but when we're talking about opposing the character of God, this is the

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God who is infinitely kind, infinitely loving, infinitely, he only hates what is evil and only loves what is good.

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There is nothing unlovely about God, and yet sin opposes his very character.

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Yeah, let's think through some examples of this, because it may not be really clear. Think of the omniscience of God.

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The Bible clearly teaches that God is the only being who knows all things. And he knows them all because that's who he is, not because he studied, not because he struggles to recall with perfect memory, but it is essential to God, just like humanness is essential to us.

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I wake up today human, whether I try or not, God exists right now, omniscient, all knowing.

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Sin rises up and opposes that and denies that. We act as if God doesn't really know what we're doing, as if God can't see us, you know?

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So the Bible gives a lot of passages that describes the way sin rejects that quality in God. Let me give you just a couple.

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Psalm 10, verse 11. He has said, the sinner has said in his heart,

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God has forgotten. He hides his face. He will never see. I mean, every sin ultimately says that.

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You think, what are you doing? And on the inside, you think God has forgotten.

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God doesn't see. He'll never know about this. Hosea chapter seven, verse two. God says of those who sin, they do not consider in their hearts that I remember all their wickedness.

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Now their own deeds have surrounded them. They are before my face. So to take another example is

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God's immutability. God never changes. We wanna think that God would change in the way that I change.

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So if I say, maybe years ago where I was really hard and I was really fastidious with my study and I said,

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I know this is sin, but now it doesn't quite look so bad. We think God would change with me and come to embrace the things that I've embraced.

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But he doesn't. God is unchanging in what is right and what is wrong. Yeah, one popular way that this shows up is that sin lies to us about God's immutability in this way.

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It says, well, the God of the Old Testament was really, really intensely serious about holiness.

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But the God of the covenant of grace is kind of a God that's matured and mellowed a little.

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And he's a God that's not that holy or not that concerned about holiness.

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And the psalmist said, Psalm 50, God says to the people, you've been sinning like this.

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And he gives a long list and he says, but he mentions the fact that he'd been patient. He hadn't done anything about it yet.

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He hasn't yet responded. And it says, therefore, you thought I was altogether like yourself.

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You thought I changed. So sin opposes the truth that God is immutable.

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One more, God is infinite. That is, everything about God, every perfection about God is beyond our measurement and has no boundary, no limit.

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So if you pick the biggest descriptions of God that you can think of when we're describing any aspect of God's perfect character, however large you describe that, you're like a little kid that has tried to sketch out something and God just overflows every edge of that description.

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He's infinite. When we sin, we're really saying

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God isn't enough. Okay, so God says that through the finished work of Christ, I can have him,

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I am my beloved and he is mine. But that's good for church. But on Monday morning at work,

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I need Jesus plus. You know, when I'm having trouble in my marriage, I need Jesus plus.

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And it's a denial of God's infinite fullness. Sin is rising up within us, constantly opposing the truth about God's attributes.

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Let me give you the last one. Sin is against God's existence. And of course, this is the height of sin's sinfulness.

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It's heinousness, it's ugliness. That it is against the existence of the one infinitely perfect, altogether lovely being.

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And this is where we like the idea of being an enemy of God. We find this hard to say, well, yeah, that's me.

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Okay, sometimes I don't like God's rule. Sometimes I don't pay attention to his warnings. But I don't ever want

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God to cease to exist. The old writers used to call sin, God murder.

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We wish that if we could have God in our hands, we would just snuff him out. We would cause him to cease to exist so that we could be

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God. Think of it in the most open and ugly way.

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Well, atheism. Psalm 14, verse one. The fool has said in his heart, there is no God, or literally, no

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God. So there's the picture. Sin makes us fools.

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In rising up within us and through us, it makes us its vehicle. And we are living as if God doesn't exist.

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Right, but you don't have to have open atheism. There's also something called practical atheism. And that's something,

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John, you've talked about in a couple of the studies, but also here in the podcast, we've mentioned a few times. So practical atheism is not going on to a stage and debating with theists that does a

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God exist or not, but rather it's living a life as though what

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God has said is not true. And so if God has said, this is sin, or if God has said, this is holy and this is not, it's like saying, okay,

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I know those are words that you've said, but they're words that don't have any meaning in any application. And so practical atheism is living as though God is not the way he has described himself to be in the

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Bible. Yeah, and practical atheism flourishes in some environments we wouldn't expect it to see.

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I mean, some places we expect to see it. So you go to the secular university and you go to the philosophy or even the religion department and you hear a lot of stuff that says, look, if there is a

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God, he's not the way he's described in that book that you've got back home. Practical atheism.

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You go to a mosque and the Muslim teacher says, well, actually there is a God, but he's not the way that you've read that he is.

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But you don't expect to find that in a homeschool home, but it is there.

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Living as if God doesn't exist in our practical little choices. Practicing life as if God is a little different than he says he is in the

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Bible. And it flourishes in every church and every type of theology,

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Arminian, Calvin, doesn't matter. Practical atheism is in grandparents, grandchildren.

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It's just everywhere. So I wanna stop right here for just a minute, John, and just say, for someone who is listening to the podcast and right now they're wondering, am

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I a practical atheist? Am I? I mean, I see places in my life where I live as though God is not who he says he is.

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How can someone identify practical atheism in their life and what does repentance look like? I think one of the early steps, one of the first choices you would need to make is,

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I would just go to the scripture and say to God, to be very honest with God and say,

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God, I fear that I am really, unknowingly,

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I'm adjusting you to fit me. And so you go to scripture and say to God, who are you?

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And let him describe himself as you're reading and start to write those things down and then ask yourself, do

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I live according to this reality? You'll never live perfectly. I mean, it would be sinless to have no practical atheism, but God will teach us.

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If we think about what practical atheism does to us, it does ultimately make us, it puts us in the camp of God's enemies.

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And we see that in scripture. It's a shocking word for us, but enemy is just someone who's constantly opposing.

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So we feel like I'm not opposing God until God's word goes against, directly against the grain of something you think,

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I have to have this. And God says, I'm not allowed to have this, but I have to have this to be happy. So I'm sorry,

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God, but on this one, I'm gonna go against you. And you are in the camp of enemy.

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And a simple test is this. When you read the scriptures and that book goes against what you want, what you feel you deserve, what you feel like you have to have to make it in life, who gets adjusted?

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The book? Do you say, well, I don't think it really means that. I think that there's different interpretations and you adjust the book to fit you.

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Or do you adjust you? Do you say to God, God, whatever I read here, if you'll help me,

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I will adapt myself to what you say. And so, it is much more common than we imagine that we are trying to adjust

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God because we are enemies or we are opposing what God is, what he's said.

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Or as Ralph Benning in The Sinfulness of Sin would say, we are trying to un -God

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God, which in effect is to put ourselves on the throne of the universe, or at least of our lives, but really we're trying to do it on the throne of the universe.

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And so, any time where we're making ourselves the center, the point of it all, whether that's in our marriage, in our family, in our churches, even our job, which

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I think is easy to do where we can make it all about us and our work and our successes and energies.

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Anytime we're making ourselves the center of it all, we are un -Godding

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God, if that were possible. Yeah, and Paul describes this in a number of places. T .J.,

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why don't you read us? We have three passages where, why don't you give us the first two where Paul describes this hostility.

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Yeah, so Colossians 1 .21, and although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, and Romans 8 .7,

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because the mind set on flesh is hostile toward God, for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so.

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Yeah, so in both of those descriptions, humanity, apart from that miraculous invasion of the soul by the spirit of God, giving us the new birth, changing us, but even after we're believers, still the remnants of sin, we can find in us something that seems so constantly hostile to God.

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And apart from the work of the spirit, it's so hostile that we're not even capable of surrendering to the

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God that we're reading about in the Bible, because we are so addicted to this fiction that we can be king.

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Right, but there's hope, and Paul talks about it in Romans 5 .10. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.

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Yeah, and we're gonna talk about that in the coming weeks when we talk about the cure.

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But before we close down today, just to kind of give some counsel, what do we do with this?

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Well, look at those four things we mentioned. Sin is against God's rule, sin is against God's promises and warnings, sin is against God's character, and sin is against God's existence.

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What if you were to take those four things and just look at your life honestly, ask God to search you, to help you to see the truth, and lay those things before God and say to Him, my only hope is that Christ on the cross, you punished

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Him for this very thing, and yet you have made a way for sinners to be washed from these very sins.

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And do not leave God alone until that great transaction, till you quit trusting in anything else and you have committed yourself to Christ, He can have all of me and I take all of Him by faith, based on what

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He says in the scriptures. And you are amazed at grace, whether it's the first time, because you're coming to Him the first time, or whether as a believer it's the 10 ,000th time, that again, you are amazed at what grace really is.

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The name Charles Spurgeon can evoke countless stories and quotes, but how much do you know about the man himself?

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In the feature length documentary, Through the Eyes of Spurgeon, get to know the man many consider the best preacher of the 19th century.

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My text should be, unto you therefore, which believe he is precious, and I would trust the

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Lord to open my mouth in honor of his dear son. He seemed a great risk and serious trial, but depending upon the power of the

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Holy Ghost, I would at least tell out the story of the cross and not allow the people to go home without a word.

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To learn more about Through the Eyes of Spurgeon, visit mediagrazie .org or click the link in the description of this episode.

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Well, we wanna close with a prayer by Isaac Watts. Isaac Watts, we know him as the great hymn writer, but actually he was also a pastor and an educator of ministers, really close friend with Philip Doddridge, and we read his prayer previously, a

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Congregationalist minister and one who wanted to promote vital religion and the great awakening.

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He was connected with things with Jonathan Edwards. So we wanna read one of his prayers.

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Lord of all power and might, soften and break this hard heart. Give me a contrite spirit.

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There is mercy with you. There is forgiveness with you. Oh, may your great mercy be displayed towards me in pardoning all my sins and in renewing my soul.

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Give me penitence, faith, and self -denial. Bestow on me the graces of sincerity, humility, and love.

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May the love of Christ be more known and felt by me and let it constrain me to live not to myself, but to him that died for me.

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Grant me your Holy Spirit, teaching those things of Christ to show them unto me and daily sanctifying my heart.