The Lessons of the Past

1 Corinthians chapter 10, verses 1 through 13.

Now I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

They all ate the same spiritual food. They all drank the same spiritual drink.

For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them. And that rock was

Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, since they were struck down in the wilderness.

Now these things took place as examples for us, so that we will not desire evil things as they did.

Don't become idolaters as some of them were. As it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink and got up to party.

Let us not commit sexual immorality as some of them did. And in a single day, 23 ,000 people died.

Let us not test Christ as some of them did, and were destroyed by snakes.

And don't complain as some of them did, and were killed by the destroyer.

These things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our instruction, on whom the ends of the ages have come.

So whoever thinks he stands must be careful not to fall.

No temptation has come upon you except what is common to humanity.

But God is faithful. He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able.

But with the temptation, He will also provide a way out, so that you may be able to bear it.

Let's pray. Father, what consumes us at this moment is

Your faithfulness. Great is Your faithfulness, Lord, unto us.

Morning by morning, new mercies we see. Great is Your faithfulness to us.

Lord, give us wisdom to pay attention to the ones who've gone before us, and to the times to be still and know that You are

God, and to trust implicitly in You, and to count on You to direct our paths.

Give us wisdom, I pray, Lord. Anoint Your messenger today, Lord, and Spirit of the living

God fall fresh on us. Have Your way with us this day. In Christ's name. It was common as I was growing up to drive by churches, and they would proudly have on the display outside,

We are a New Testament church. Something along those lines. There's nothing explicitly wrong with that.

However, I think what many of us mean today is wrong. And that is something that the church at Corinth and any of the churches that we read about in the

New Testament would have not even understood. Because their lessons were from the Old Scripture. In fact, some of the letters were passing around between churches, but at the time of Corinth, this is one of the early letters of the

New Testament, and their scripture was entirely the Old Testament. And so, what

Paul is doing here is he is making a pivot. And the pivot is this, is we have seen from the beginning of 1

Corinthians, we have seen explicitly that the church at Corinth has tolerated evil in their midst.

They have tolerated a man who has had a sexual affair with a stepmother. They have allowed people to sue one another, to grow their standing in the civil courts.

They have allowed all kinds of evil in their midst, all the while listening to voices that would overthrow

Paul's apostleship. And we see that more clearly in 2 Corinthians, just like the rebellion of Korah.

And so, what Paul wants to do is he is making the turn, and he is going to try to tell them, how can you be unified as a church?

And the answer is counterintuitive to us as the presentists that we are, that the answer is in the past.

So, if you need definitions, presentism is the idea that pervades America today, and that is the idea that we are smarter than we've ever been before.

No one can touch our ingenuity and wisdom today. Now, this is a paper -thin idea that is based largely on the presence of big screen

TVs, artificial intelligence, and cell phones. But if you start to actually read people who wrote hundreds of years ago, then you start to sound and kind of feel like a brain -dead idiot, or at least

I do. And then when you look and you read something like the Federalist Papers, and you realize something like, this guy was 17 when he wrote this?

Man, what have I done with my life? But see, we are not immune from presentism in the church.

We often think that we have figured out doctrines that no one had figured out before, that we have found a way.

Listen, Americans, here's what we've done. The disciples couldn't do it. Corinth couldn't do it.

But we have found a way to worship Jesus Christ without the world hating us. We figured it out.

We did it. And the reason why we have done that is because many times we have committed the same sins that those who wandered in exile in the wilderness after leaving

Egypt committed. And so Paul gives a stern reminder here that we are to look and learn from our fathers, not despise them, but learn from them, not make fun of them, but understand that even their suffering was for our benefit.

For wrath and for mercy, our forefathers are for our good.

They are a cloud of witnesses, both on God's judgment and destruction, but also

His great mercy and compassion. So I've broken this sermon into three parts, three lessons that have several miniature lessons in them that we must learn.

And the first lesson might be the most important one, and that is the lesson of nourishment. Why is the lesson of nourishment the most important?

Because quite simply, if you are not nourished, you will die. It is primal.

It is basic. We know as teachers, we get inundated with the idea that people can't learn academic skills if they're starving to death or if they're afraid somebody's going to beat them.

Safety and nourishment. You need that in order to have arts and academics and all of this sort of thing.

The people of Israel were no different. And they, in an object lesson to us, and in a display of glory the likes of which we can scarce believe, all of their needs were provided visibly by a

God who is spirit. And that is what Paul wants to remind the Corinthians of.

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers. He's making fun of them. Catch it. He's making fun of them.

I don't want you to be unaware. What are they unaware of? They are unaware of the foundation of their

Christianity. Remember what their scriptures are. They are discerning Christ through the

Old Testament, and specifically through the law. That's why the New Testament authors reference back to the law so often.

It's because it is the foundation of our faith. I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud and passed through the sea.

So the first thing we see, and the first lesson that we are going to learn, is that they were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

What does that mean? It's really poetic, is it not? And we are brought to mind three events.

And really, I would extend it to four events. So we have God as the slaves of Egypt, as Pharaoh finally lets them go, but then he chases them down.

They are protected by day by an enveloping cloud of the presence of God. This had to have been terrifying for all the people who wished them ill, is that there was this supernatural cloud billowing down, protecting and covering this people as they wandered through the wilderness.

Can you imagine seeing that? It would not have been like some puffy cumulus clouds in the sky.

It would have been like a torrent, a billowing mist, that was following this people, covering them.

The protection of God. And if that wasn't enough, because you couldn't see the mist at night, when the night came around, an even more glorious display, as though the

God of all creation shows his dominance even over the darkness, is that a pillar of fire comes out of the heavens and surrounds this people.

This is what they are seeing. As they leave and the oppressor chases them, fire from heaven comes down.

And we are to remember things, and we are to be connecting the dots. I want you to think about this, because we are going to tie it all together.

And then they come to this great barrier, the sea.

How are we going to get across here? As Pharaoh bears down on them, and they come to the waters, and the waters part.

Can you imagine seeing this? If you've been and seen the sea, even if you've seen

Beaver Lake, which is much smaller, much, much, much smaller, could you imagine the water parting with the wind and becoming walls on both sides, so that you could walk through the center of it?

And we think to ourselves wrongly, if I had ever seen that, there is no way I would ever question my

God again. Friends, we've seen greater wonders. And so they were baptized on dry land, through the

Red Sea, and then as they wander in the wilderness for 40 years, because of their sins, and a generation dies out, then there's a fourth event, that they are saved into the

Promised Land by crossing the Jordan in the same way, where the waters part. And they walk on dry land across into the

Promised Land, and they bring with them this time stones to set up so that they would remember what God had done.

Do they remember? No. And I ask this question, do the

Corinthians remember? No. Do you remember?

Every person here, and this is what you would see in this passage, is that in this old covenant reality, every person participated in the blessings of God.

Every person. This was a national identity, and these people all, whether they hated

God or loved God, whether they were faithless or faithful, they all crossed through the waters, they were all protected by the cloud, and they were all protected by the fire.

And so God was not pleased, because in the midst of this people, there was evil.

In fact, there was mostly evil. So every week, every week here, the table is open, the doors are open, there is ministry here, there is spiritual food and drink, there is the protection of God through the

Holy Spirit. Think about it, the fire coming down, do you remember other fire coming down? Yeah, the

Holy Spirit came down in fire to anoint the apostles that are the forerunners and the forefathers of what we have here this morning.

And we all experience the same joy and the same ministry, and what we don't want to do is to tolerate evil in our midst, just like they did, so that God would bring destruction on the people.

Because when those who follow God tolerate evil in their assembly, then they bring on the judgment of God for the whole assembly.

This is the lesson we are learning. Beware, beware, beware of tolerating evil and learn the lesson.

God gave them light, God gave them protection, and we know that the sun and the light shines on the good and the wicked, and today we sit in the greatest light of revelation that you can imagine.

Every commentary ever written is compiled in one computer program. You can ask artificial intelligence to sum up and give you quotations for all of the church fathers for basically any spiritual question you can ask.

You can have the Bible systematized, summarized from several different Christian perspectives all in the matter of 30 seconds.

And then you can read it with the device that's in your pocket. And we make fun of the

Hebrews. There's never been such light of revelation.

What are you going to do with it? Learn the lesson. God gave them a salvific dry baptism that was a marker and a forerunner of something much greater.

Understand that the people of God, some good, mostly wicked, walked through dry land by a miracle of God into salvation, and today as Jesus was baptized by John the

Baptist, as he opened the new covenant, he did not pass through dry land, but instead he went into the midst of the waters and he was dunked underneath the waters to show that today to enter into the kingdom of God, you don't pass alive on dry land, you must die and live again.

That is the promise of what Jesus has provided and what we specifically looked at last week.

You have been baptized. You have been saved. You have died and have been made a new creation.

God has hidden you in his protection. He will not lose a single one of you out of his hand.

Do you remember? Do you think about it? When you start to look out amongst the congregation, when you start to look out amongst other churches and other congregations, and you think to yourself,

I have the doctrine lined up. My life is better than theirs. Have you learned the basis by which all of your hope is built?

Learn the lesson. Now we move on into the nourishment itself. We've done with the protection.

We've done with life -saving. And now he says that they all ate the same spiritual food and the same spiritual drink.

And we think this is curious. You should think immediately, did they not eat physical food? Because it was manna, right?

And it was real water out of the real rock. But Paul says that they ate the same spiritual food.

Why? Why? Because God provided the manna, it says in Exodus 16, to test them.

Understand that God could have fed them in any way. Right? He could have made pizza appear on their plates.

They would have been confused at first, but then they would have rejoiced greatly and exceedingly.

But he provided manna every day to test them so that they would gather the amount for that day and no more, and they would gather the amount for two days before the

Sabbath and no more because to gather more would be to not trust God and to be wicked.

And did the people obey this? No, they did not. Because the primary thing is,

Deuteronomy tells us through the pen of Moses, Deuteronomy 8 .3, says that we do not live by bread alone, but by the

Word of God. That's a New Testament quotation of the law.

And we think to ourselves, that's the law? No, the law never changed, friends. The Old Testament is not a different story.

It is a foundation. And it was cloaked in shadows where the light has come on and we understand it now.

And so Paul wants the church at Corinth to remember the basics. Friends, if this sounds a little esoteric, when we start getting into the judgments on Israel and we think to ourselves, whoa, that's interesting to know.

Friends, that is the basics of the Christian faith. Do you see how out of order we are?

We have to study. We have to understand who has come before us. We all eat the same spiritual food.

And understand this, this is critical. When you come to this table and you eat the spiritual food, just as those who wandered in the wilderness and ate the manna from heaven every day, the manna was not the food.

The test was the food. Because if you die without bread, that's of little importance next to dying without the word of God.

The bread increased the condemnation for the many. To take

God's bread, to take his word delivered on tablets at Sinai, delivered through the hand of Moses as he gave condescension of all the laws of God and God's character to the people.

And when they ate of it, they ate of the word of God. They had it, they heard it, they listened to it.

They even swore by it and then they disobeyed it. And in doing that, they increased their condemnation and so it is with the cross today.

Jesus has died and risen again. Jesus did pay for sins. But if you look at that and you think, no,

I have to add something to it, I don't need to believe that, I don't need to obey him, then what you have done is you have taken the word of God, you have ingested it, and you have increased your condemnation.

Learn the lesson. There is righteous dependence on the word of God from the few, always has been.

Do you really love the word of God? Or is it a trifling thing?

Is it a fun little thing that's a trivia? Or is it your life? Let's amp up the stakes.

They drank spiritual drink. We know that drink is even more important than food, is it not?

It is. And the word of God is vital. We can't live without it. But friends, we really can't live without water.

And we all need to know, like the woman at the well, that none of us will live without living water.

The water that makes us never thirst again. And that water never changed because, interestingly,

Paul says that this water they drank came from a rock, and that rock was Jesus. How does that work?

Well, we know from multiple scriptures that God is described over and over again as a rock, as our fortress, which means that he does not change.

It means that he is strong, impenetrable. It means that things break against him, that sort of thing.

But we also know that because Christ is the rock, and this rock was not like any rock that has a spring welling up in it.

This rock, like as Jesus described to the woman at the well, this rock had limitless water.

In fact, Psalm 78, 15, says that that rock had water that was as limitless as the ocean.

There is no end to the water that came from this rock. To be near the presence of this rock was to never worry about hydration again.

And the water was life for all, all the people. But it was life unto death for the many who drank from the rock but despised the rock of the gushing water.

Do we have the water of Jesus Christ today? No, we've amped it up. What is the spiritual drink today? It's the blood of Christ.

So we not only drink from the well that never ends, but we take on the very life of Christ through drinking his blood as often as we gather.

Have you thought about it? Have you thought about the danger of the condemnation?

And Paul urges, learn the lesson. Learn the lesson. The water is free for those who have faith.

The water is nourishment for those who have faith. The blood is life for those who have faith.

But to those who do not have faith, the blood is severe judgment, wrath, death.

And then he moves on and he tells us after the spiritual food and the spiritual drink, he goes on and he says, with most of them

God was not well pleased for they were struck down in the wilderness. Now these things happened as examples for us so that we would not crave evil things as they also craved.

They put the Lord their God to the test over and over again. See, we have to remember like they did that God is the light and the protection of the people.

You are exposed without him because the light shines no matter what. We know this from John 3, right?

That the light of God has come to man and he has exposed the works of everyone. And those who do evil hate the light because it exposes their wicked works.

But for those who are children of the light, we love the light because it exposes the works which are Jesus' works.

Glory to him. We're adding nothing to it. Any good thing you do is because of the power of the

Holy Spirit that wells up in you, remembers, reminds you that you are regenerate, that you are a new creature saved unto good works.

Not saved unto evil. Saved unto good works. God has no use for the wicked except as vessels of his destruction and wrath.

You're exposed to be within here. This is the lesson that Paul wants them to remember in the church at Corinth.

To be within the church and to despise him. You are open to the awful and terrifying judgment of the living

God. It would be better for you to never have come in. It would be better for you to never hear preaching.

To never even play around with Christian stuff. Far better for you to be ignorant and blind than to listen, partake, and despise.

That's the lesson. Remember every day, just as those in the desert, they were told, tested by God, to go out and gather the manna every day.

Enough for their daily portion. Every single day. Friends, do you remember where your life comes from?

We go and we gather our portion every day. Man does not live by bread alone, but from every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

Always been the case. Always will be the case. Do you think that we will be glorified someday in the presence of God and that we won't gather daily bread?

We will always gather daily bread. We will love to gather daily bread and we will live on it and we will glorify

God because of what he said. These words are no mere trifle. They are your life.

Obey them and you will live in the land. Remember, drink of the well of living water daily and keep drinking.

Take it all the way down and rejoice in it. What does it mean to drink from the well of the living water?

We saw it, didn't we? Jesus said that she would never thirst again. She would never have to gather the water.

What did that mean? She needed to repent of her sins and place her faith in the one who is the rock.

And that's what she did. And what was the reaction to the woman at the well? She went and told everybody, didn't she?

And they probably thought she was a religious nut. The first thing they thought was that she was a whore.

And then they thought she was a religious zealot. But what they couldn't deny was that she was a new creation.

Because the living water doesn't leave you the way it is. It either condemns you or it brings you into regeneration.

We need to remember, friends, that baptism is salvation. I'm not afraid of that. The Apostle Peter says it.

Baptism saves you. What does that mean? That's what's important. That baptism is salvation, whether dry or wet.

Because the idea of the situation is that you must be immersed into Christ.

You must be baptized, dipped, cleansed by Christ to have life.

If you do not have the Holy Spirit, you are dead. We are baptized into the

Holy Spirit. But if we cling to the symbol of baptism, if we cling to the symbol of it without the substance behind it, then we blaspheme the name of Christ and He will take

His vengeance on us with no mediator whatsoever. See, what you claim through the sacraments is what you're going to bring on to yourself.

Life for the faithful. Death for the faithless. And many, many, many people today who have no regard for God's commands, no regard for what

Christ has said, no desire to gather daily bread, no desire to drink of the living water, will cling to a moment in their past when they had a water baptism.

And that is, by itself, a disobedience of the Ten Commandments. You are blaspheming the

Lord and taking His name in vain. See, due to the faithlessness of the people, their grumbling, their ingratitude, their rebellion, and the failure of their leader, who is the most humble man who ever lived,

Moses, he failed because in his anger he unrighteously struck the rock, which is

Christ, and God pronounced judgment. God struck them down. Numbers 14 tells us, Surely you shall not come into the land in which

I swore to make you dwell, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun.

Your little ones, however, who you said would become plunder, I will bring them in, so that they will know the land which you have rejected.

But as for you, your corpses will fall in the wilderness, and your sons shall be shepherds for forty years in the wilderness, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness until your corpses come to an end in the wilderness.

Isn't there a... There should be a word that jumps out there. Corpses. Dead bodies.

It is a dangerous thing to fall into the hands of a living God. He is a consuming fire. Understand this in the church in America today, what we see.

We see our kids being plundered. Don't we? But I think we might be at the turning of this.

Where those who are young today and have faith, they might have to shepherd in the wilderness for a time until God brings people back into right relationship with Him.

What did Joshua and Caleb do? Did they do anything special? No, they trusted the promises of God.

They went and they spied out the land, and they saw giants, and they saw military fortresses, and their response to what they saw with their eyes was, this is going to be amazing when

God gives us these fully developed fortresses. We're going to be so powerful.

But all of the other spies who were faithless, who were emblems of the people who were faithless and had taken all of these miracles and despised the giver of the miracles, they looked and they said, we can never take them.

And what they were really saying is, our God is impotent at best and doesn't exist at worst. They saw the sea parted.

What have you seen? Have you seen lives changed? Have you seen people nourished? Have you seen the growth of Christendom in the church?

We live on all of the fruits of it today. We live in a nation that was established by Protestant belief.

We live in a place where Christianity dominated the culture. And what we did was we got rich, and we got happy, and we got healthy, and we forgot where it all came from.

And today, we are struck down and we wander in the wilderness because we think that God is impotent at best and doesn't exist at worst.

And Christians live this way. It should not be so. Remember the lesson.

That's what Paul is telling the church at Corinth. You need to remember what they did to understand that to grumble against God will lead to your death and hardship for your family.

Remember the lesson. Do not complain about your job. Do not complain about your house. Do not complain about the work you have to do.

Do not complain about your kids. They see it. They're listening. And God will judge you because when we grumble about our circumstances, what we say is,

God's not in control of this. He doesn't know what's going on. He said that he was going to do things for my good, but he obviously lied about it.

And you just blaspheme the living God, and you will suffer for it. It's an awful sin to grumble against God.

It's their greatest sin in the desert is grumbling. It's the one that God would not abide, and he struck them down.

See, Corinth, the church there, they are baptized. They are provided for.

They are given spiritual food and drink that they are gluttoning in their selfishness.

But they have forgotten the provision of God and thought themselves to be wise and powerful. That's the story of the first half of Corinthians, is it not?

They are so wise. They're so powerful. They've forgotten. Learn the lesson. Do not crave the evil things that they did, which is all of the blessing with none of the faith.

If you really want to boil down what the Israelites did, they wanted all of the blessing with none of the faith.

We want to just waltz in and take it. And they would have, and they did, when they believed in the one who promised it in the first place.

That is the story of Joshua. Is it about his military prowess at Jericho? No, they blew some horns and the walls fell down.

Who won the victory? Church, we look out and we see wars and we see the most black -hearted evil in our country that you can possibly imagine.

And we start thinking to ourselves, what are we going to do? And we've forgotten. This is for your good.

Remember the lesson. Don't grumble. And definitely in here, do not tolerate evil in our midst.

We turn to the lesson of idolatry and sexual immorality. Do not be idolaters as some of them were.

As it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink and stood up to play. This story should scare you to death.

It should. What happened? Moses is on Sinai, hearing from God with thunderclaps and clouds and the people were afraid to step foot on the mountain.

They were terrified to step foot on the mountain. And even while that's going on, they appeal to Aaron to say, hey,

Aaron, Moses isn't coming back. Would you make us something that we can worship

God with? We'll give you all our gold. You know, they were afraid of the

God who delivered the law on Sinai. So what they wanted to do was they wanted to craft a

God that they can understand a little bit better while naming him the same thing as the God on Sinai.

So Aaron crafts one. He declares it to be God. The first high priest declares this calf to be

God, the God who delivered them from Egypt. He says it by name. He burnt offerings to this

God and he declares a feast day to the Lord with this golden calf. And what this false worship leads to, which it always does, is an extravagant party.

See, they ate and drank spiritual food and then they partied to a God that they could manage and understand.

Friends, if that doesn't define the church in America, then I don't know what does. We are afraid of the living

God and so we fashion talisman gods that have his name but have less stringent commands and demands on us and we wonder where the zeal is.

We're not zealous to make disciples because we don't really believe God is powerful. That's what we do.

That cannot be us in here. We have to remember the lesson. We have to.

See, there's only one way to worship God and that is the way that he prescribes. No other way.

God will kill you for that. Do you understand? And then we get this picture.

It's incredible. I'm going to read it in a little bit of length here because you need to hear it. Moses intercedes on behalf of his people.

Moses stood at the gate of the camp and said, Whoever is for the Lord, come to me. And all the sons of Levi gathered together to him and he said to them,

Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, Every man among you, put his sword upon his thigh and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp and kill every man his brother and every man his friend and every man his neighbor.

So the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses and about three thousand men of the people fell that day.

Moving on. Then Moses returned to the Lord and said, Alas, this people has committed a great sin and they have made a god of gold for themselves but now if you will forgive their sin and if not, please blot me out from your book which you have written.

The Lord said to Moses, Whoever has sinned against me I will blot him out of my book.

See when we reimagine God and we play a god to our own senses and we use him as a talisman or as a funny idea as a name that we ascribe to anything that we're doing which is what is going on right now we say we do things in the name of Jesus and Jesus has nothing to do with any of it.

When we do that, our destruction is near. Learn the lesson. Learn the lesson.

Can you imagine getting that command? You're going to be right with God you're going to have to take out your sword and you're going to have to kill your friend and you're going to have to kill your brother.

See we think the God of the Old Testament was a big meanie and that something changed.

No, what's Paul doing? Is he not, is he saying here Hey, remember these fun stories church at Corinth.

No, he's saying don't forget. Why? Because God is the same God and if you play with this especially in the religious situation when you call yourselves

God's people and you don't obey him when you don't love him the destructor is close.

Do not make idols. And then we have the lesson of sexual immorality. I'm going to be shorter here because we've talked about this recently but I want to say this you cannot join with the sexually immoral.

You cannot tolerate it. Israel played the harlot with Moab. They worshiped the Baals and a plague struck them down by thousands and Moses commanded the death of all the leaders as God had instructed.

That's because they were worshiping the fertility God. Sexual immorality. See the

Corinthians had this immorality running amok at their feasts. It was cultural and it was lethal.

And today church it is cultural to be sexually immoral. You can see it on your television.

Your internet is flooded with it. They say 10 % of women aged 18 to 25 today have an

OnlyFans account. We live in the midst of the greatest sexual immorality.

We would make Sodom and Gomorrah blush with what we do. They never even thought about the stuff we do.

It can't be tolerated in the church. It cannot. We cannot play with it. We cannot accommodate it.

We cannot give quarter to it. We cannot allow people to feel okay about it by saying, well, we all struggle with that brother as long as you're transparent.

No, that's bull crap. You have to call it out as the lethal thing that it is.

It's killing people. And it's killing the church. Because we have too long been afraid to call out the frat boy who was whooping it up being sexually immoral on Saturday night and coming in and taking communion on Sunday.

We can't do it. That's what the people of Israel did. They said that they were following God while they were tolerating all of this in their midst.

Learn the lesson. Then we have the lesson of grumbling and rebellion. Numbers 21. And the people spoke against God and against Moses.

Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? He's been feeding them the whole time. There is no food and no water and we loathe this miserable food.

Oh man. God, you're giving us meat to eat.

You are delivering bread from the heavens. And you're giving us clean water out of the rock and we hate this food.

So the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people so that many people of Israel died.

There's the destroyer in multiple rebellions. The destroyer who killed

Pharaoh's people in Egypt. We know that there was a man named Korah who led a rebellion against Moses.

He said that Moses was hard on the people and Aaron wasn't a very good priest and so Moses brings him out in really shades of what

Elijah would do later and he says, offer your incense Korah and we'll offer ours and we see what the

Lord says. And what happened is the ground opened up and it swallowed every priest of Korah. They fell into a hole like on the

Lord of the Rings when all the orchards fall on the ground. It's crazy. Can you imagine seeing that?

But what happened? Did all the people go, oh sackcloth and ashes I can't believe Korah would do this we repent, we follow you.

No. They were still angry with Moses and so God killed 14 ,000 of them. They didn't learn the lesson of the earth opening up and killing the rebel.

They all joined the rebel. Remember the lesson. To grumble against God is to put him to the test and doubt his goodness.

You do not want to test God except in what he tells you to test him in, which is his generosity.

What is the conclusion to these lessons? We have to destroy idols, not erect them. We don't respect idols.

We do not suffer them in our midst. A guy that I respect a lot, Tucker Carlson, this week he said that people who are

Christians, people who are good, decent people, do not make fun of other religions.

Friends, that's foolish. That's foolish. There is no biblical warrant for that.

The scripture is constantly seeing the men of God making fun of other religions because the other religions are sending people to hell.

We have big problems in this world but the biggest problem that we have is a type of Christianity who does not see the stakes for what they are.

Political stuff's important. Your family is very important. But the most important thing possible to every person in this room is to be faithful to Christ.

Everything else follows that. God will supply your riches and needs according to his riches and glory.

He wants your heart. He wants your faithfulness. See, we have to not respect false gods.

We have some that are very easy for us to not respect. I don't know of many Christians who really love

Allah. And we do make fun of him. We make fun of the Hindu statues.

We make fun of their inability to eat beef because of their religious beliefs, which is one of the craziest things

I've ever heard. How can anybody be a Hindu? They've never had a steak. We make fun of Mormons.

We make fun of Jehovah's Witnesses. We make fun of the Church of Scientology.

Friends, are you ready to make fun of Judaism yet? It's the oldest one in the book.

God does not respect their rabbinic Talmudic nonsense. It is anti -Christ.

Always has been. Always will be. That one gets the room quiet.

Do you see the tension that we already have? There's some culturally acceptable things to make fun of.

And then there's other things that are not fun to make fun of at all. And it's what the world values.

There is one way to please God, and that is through His Son. That's it.

One way. See, we have to praise the Lord. We have to give thanks.

We have to respect godly leaders, not like Korah, who serve as though they must give an account. To forget all of these lessons of grumbling, of idolatry, of sexual immorality, of throwing off hierarchy, all of these things.

If we forget them, then we're going to die, and it's happening all around us all the time.

Churches are being snuffed out. People are apostatizing, and the reason why they're doing it is because they are not learning the lessons that our fathers taught us a long time ago that are for our good.

So let's end it here. What is the lesson we are really supposed to learn? It is the lesson of humility. Let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall.

That should be the live verse of every pastor. It really should. If you think you stand, if you think you're righteous, if you think you have the market cornered on godliness, if you think you have wisdom, if you think you have power, take heed lest you fall.

Because all of that stuff is through the Holy Spirit. There is no boasting that's found except boasting in what

God has done. That's not a pious thing to do. It's the true thing to do.

There is no temptation that has overtaken you but such as common to man. God is faithful.

God is faithful. Isn't that the point of this whole thing? God saved a remnant every single time.

Wouldn't you have just stomped them all out? Of course you would have. But God didn't because he was not only blessing a remnant back thousands of years ago in the wilderness of Sinai.

Not only was he protecting a remnant there, he was teaching you today an object lesson about how you can please him.

What an amazing God that we have. See, we have a few things that are awful results of self -sufficiency.

We forget that we are fed daily and watered daily. We forget how to rightly worship God. We forget that we have to depend on God for needs and through that comes the fall of the proud.

If you think you're doing it, take heed lest you should fall. Remember who you are.

We forget often. We are rebel sinners. We did not have a thought in our mind for serving the living

God and yet he saved us. Remember who you are. We will make excuses in our self -sufficiency. We will say that God made me do it.

Or if we're a little bit more wary from being in the church, we'll say this. The temptation was just too strong.

I just fell again. I fell into temptation. And all the while what you use is churchy sounding words to make the sin acceptable.

I fell again. I'm so sorry. You're not sorry. Repentance is about hating the sin and loving the

Lord. Worldly sorrow leads to death. I'm sorry I got caught again. I'm sorry

I have a bad story to tell. It's not about your bad stories. It's not about glorying in your past sin.

What it's about is glorying in the Lord and we follow Him. See, God tells us explicitly here that that's not an excuse for us.

There is no temptation that's too great. He always provides a way out. That applies to the Israelites in the

Sinai wilderness. There was a way out and the way out was always to be in sackcloth and ashes, take the correct amount of manna every day, trust the water from the rock, and trust that the

Lord would give them the promised land. And there were two guys who did it. Two! Did God give them the promised land based on the faith of two men?

Yes, He did. Christians, that should give you hope today. He has done far more with far less in the past.

There is always a way to escape. If that's you this morning, if you're struggling, if you're in sin and you think that you've been fighting it and it keeps armbarring you and taking you down, understand this, you are blind.

You're not seeing it the right way. You're not seeing who God is. You're not fearing Him rightly. You're not seeing the ugliness of what your self -sufficiency, your pride, and your love of your sin is doing to you.

And what I would tell you this morning is cry out to God that He would remove the scales from your eye, that you would see how you were offending a holy

God, and that you would see the glorious light and protection and nourishment of God, and that you would turn to Him and that sin would have no good taste for you anymore.

Your sin is vomit on the floor that you have been tricked into thinking is chocolate so that you would lap it up.

I know it's vivid, but it's true. And what we do is we look in the past and we look at these

Hebrews and we go, idiots. So dumb. Is your sin okay?

Do you have more revelation than them? What are you doing today? See, they did not have the vivid picture of the cross before them.

They had shadows. Today, we see as those who have had the lights turned on, and yet we still go back to our sin.

Remember the lesson. Paul is about to get very pointed with the Corinthians. There's disorder in the church, and the root of their disorder is their pride.

They think that they're wise and they think that they're holy and they are a gut pile. God's not impressed with your so -called holiness.

God's impressed by your faith that you should not get proud about because he gave it to you in the first place.

Learn the lesson of the people. Are you going to be one who is constantly chiding against God's commands?

Or are you going to be one who is using the weapons to fight the temptation and are you going to endure in steadfast faith like Joshua and Caleb?

Same spirit. Did you know that? Joshua and Caleb were not superheroes. They were men who trusted in the

Holy Spirit. They were men who trusted in the Word of God. May there be many such men today.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we are so fickle.

So fickle. I know throughout my life I've read the stories of the

Pentateuch and I have seen the stories of the Israelites and I've questioned how in the world could they have done that?

And Lord, you pierce me and I pray that you pierce us to the heart as we have revelations and glories that make the

Red Sea look like child's play. You reverse death itself. You have given us the symbol of baptism.

You have invited us to your table every week. Lord, you've given us the fully canonized, printed

Word of God. You have given us thousands and thousands of reams of commentary to tell us what all of it means.

Where in Ezra and Nehemiah they were depending on a man to make sense of it for them. Lord, you have given us tons of fathers and clouds of witnesses to make sense of all of it and yet we sin and we return to the same pile of refuse over and over again.

Lord, would you break our hearts over this? Would you expose our sin and give us conviction for sin that leads to repentance?

And then Lord, would you give us the mighty spiritual gift of repentance in this place?

That we would see you for who you are. That we would see our sin for what it is.

And we would learn the lessons of our fathers. Some who came into the promised land and are heroes to us today and some who languished in the wilderness and were killed out so that their sons would endure hardship before they would see the glory of your promises fulfilled.

Lord, help us. Help us to quit playing games. Help us to understand and help us to remember and not act as though we're the first people who ever tried to do this.

Lord, we trust in you. We know that we can do nothing without you. We depend on your grace to give us this kind of faith.

The only kind of thing that pleases you at all. Lord, give us fruit.

Give us repentance. And give us steadfastness. We glorify your name anyway and in every situation because you love your people so we can love you.