Session 4: An Unfaithful People

Kootenai Church

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I love to tell this story about the great Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi back in the 50s and 60s.

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And there was a young man who played for him from Sandpoint, Idaho, named

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Jerry Kramer. In my opinion, the greatest offensive guard the game has ever known.

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Lombardi had been an assistant with the New York Giants when he got the job at Green Bay. Green Bay was the worst football team in the professional ranks.

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So he called a team meeting for Tuesday morning at nine o 'clock. At 10 minutes to nine,

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Paul Horning and Max McGee came in and sat down. Lombardi fined him $500 for being late for a meeting.

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Coach, we were here at 10 minutes to nine. We're early. Gentlemen, you're on Lombardi time now.

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If you're 10 minutes early, you're already five minutes late, $500 each. I'm a stickler for being on time.

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Now having said that, I'll probably be late for the next session. Turn to Psalm 106, please.

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It's a rather lengthy chapter, so we're not going to read the whole thing. And be glad I'm not preaching from Psalm 119.

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O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endures forever.

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Who can utter the mighty acts of the Lord? Who can declare all his praise? Blessed are those who keep justice, and he who does righteousness at all times.

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Remember me, O Lord, with the favor you have toward your people. Visit me with your salvation, that I may see the benefit of your chosen ones, that I may rejoice in the gladness of your nation, that I may glory with your inheritance.

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We have sinned with our fathers. We have committed iniquity. We have done wickedly.

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Our fathers in Egypt did not understand your wonders. They did not remember the multitude of your mercies, but rebelled by the sea.

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Nevertheless, he saved them for his name's sake, that he might make his mighty power known.

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He rebuked the Red Sea also, and it dried up, so he led them through the depths, as through the wilderness.

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He saved them from the hand of him who hated them, and redeemed them from the hand of the enemy. The waters covered their enemies.

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There was not one of them left. Then they believed his words. They sang his praise.

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They soon forgot his works. They did not wait for his counsel, but lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tested

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God in the desert. And he gave them their request, but sent leanness into their souls.

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Drop down to verse 19. They made a calf in Horeb, and worshipped the molded image.

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They changed their glory into the image of an ox that eats grass. They forgot

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God, their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt, wondrous works in the land of Ham, awesome things by the

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Red Sea. Therefore, he said he would destroy them, had not Moses. His chosen one stood before him in the breach to turn away his wrath, lest he destroy them.

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Verse 28 says, They joined themselves to Baal of Peor, and ate sacrifices made to the dead.

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In this confession of sin, the psalmist explains why the people had been so unfaithful to their covenant

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God. He not only admits his sin, in verse 6, we have sinned like our fathers, we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly.

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But then he explains how it could happen. Verse 7, first they did not understand

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God's wondrous acts. Second, they did not remember the multitude of God's loving kindnesses.

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Then they rebelled. They didn't understand, they didn't remember, then they rebelled.

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I used to see, this was in San Diego, I'd see a bumper sticker on cars that said, if you love

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Jesus, honk. That's the biblical evidence of loving Jesus, you toot your horn,

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I guess. I have long thought that most people who profess to be

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Christians know just enough theology to be dangerous with it. So I had bumper stickers made up,

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I couldn't sell any of them, if you love Jesus, please shut up. I don't know why anybody would want to put that on their car.

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The first problem God's rebellious people have is a lack of understanding. Because they don't understand, they forget.

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They'll say, this is too hard, this is only for preachers. And because they forget, they rebel.

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But their problem is not initially or ultimately their rebellion, but their lack of understanding leading to a dangerous, destructive forgetfulness.

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And yet look how God deals with these people, verse 8, nevertheless, but God, nevertheless, he saved them for the sake of his name, that he might make his power known.

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You know, that's why God does anything for his name's sake. He leaves us beside still waters.

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For what reason? For his name's sake. You and I are not the reason

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God does anything. God is the reason God does everything. MacArthur once preached a

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Christmas sermon rebuking the statement that Jesus is the reason for the season.

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He said, no, sin is the reason for the season. That's why there's a Christmas. Everything God does is for God's sake.

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That would have been a truth that would have been helpful for the Old Testament people to remember. It's a truth that would be helpful for us to remember.

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I spoke at a conference in Johnstown, Pennsylvania once where a name that all of you would remember, who's big for writing books on counseling, made this statement.

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I'm sitting right behind him. Couldn't believe what I heard. God created man because he was lonely.

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Are you kidding me? First of all, that would suggest that there's some kind of a deficiency in God that only you and I could make up.

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Secondly, the fellowship of the Son and the Holy Spirit was deficient. So God said to himself,

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I'm lonesome. Here's what I'll do. I'll create people who never think

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I'm doing enough and who most of the time think I don't know what I'm doing and who hardly ever say thank you.

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That'll make me feel better. Why is the church in such anemic shape today as regards the gospel?

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Why is it that we are now entering into unholy alliances that we see now? Not only

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Romanists are considered Christians, but now Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and a host of other groups as well that deny the gospel.

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I think the answer is the same as was given to us by the psalmist. We don't understand the gospel. We haven't remembered the gospel.

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And now we've rebelled against the gospel, at least passively, if not actively.

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God saved his people from the hand of one who hated them. Verse 10, he redeemed them from the hand of the enemy.

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And verse 12 says, then they believed his words. They sang his praise. There. Finally, the issue is settled.

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Now God's people can move on, right? No. Verse 13, they soon forgot his works.

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That's what Paul said to the Galatians. I just left. How is it you are so quickly snatched away from the gospel?

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I was just there. How could you let this happen? Verse 13, they soon forgot his works.

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They did not wait for his counsel. And the result of that forgetfulness is given to us in verses 14 to 19.

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We don't need to read again. We've already read it once. They made that calf in Horeb and worshiped the golden image, the molded image.

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They exchanged their glory into the image of an ox that eats grass. What all this means is capsulized for us in verse 21.

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They forgot God, their savior, who had done great things in Egypt, wonders in the land of Ham and awesome things by the

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Red Sea. God was going to destroy these people, but Moses interceded for them and turned away

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God's wrath. I bet they're grateful now, right? No. Verses 24 and 25, they despised the pleasant land.

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They did not believe in his word, but grumbled in their tents. They did not listen to the voice of the

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Lord. Notice the contrast there. They didn't believe, but grumbled. Jeremiah Burroughs is most famous for a book called

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The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. It's a little paperback you can get from the Banner of Truth. And he says that complaining is the worst sin a

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Christian could commit, because you're saying one of two things to God, either you could have done more or you could have done better.

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And God's incapable of either one of those atrocities. They didn't believe, but grumbled.

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I want you to see the progression given to us there. First they didn't believe, and then they grumbled, and then they didn't listen to the voice of the

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Lord at all. You probably can't hear God's voice when the only one you hear is your voice complaining.

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If we go back to verse 7, they didn't understand, they didn't remember, and then they rebelled. And verse 13 says they soon forgot.

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Verse 20 says they forgot God, and here we're told they didn't believe, but grumbled.

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They wouldn't listen to the voice of the Lord. Now what else really needs to be said? Well obviously more does need to be said, because the psalmist keeps writing.

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Verse 28, they joined themselves also to Baal Peor and ate sacrifices offered to the dead.

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What are we seeing here but unholy alliances? The people of God had committed numerous sins in this psalm.

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First of all, they were ungrateful. Then they were impatient. Then they were guilty of insurrection against their superiors.

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Then they worshipped a golden calf. Then they rebelled against the report of the spies, and here they took to the worship of Baal.

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They were worshipping the Moabite god. This had largely to do with the worship of Baal, which was temple prostitution.

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There's a surefire church growth movement. Offer people who come sects.

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In San Francisco, I went up there one time, and there was a sect, a cult, passing out flyers in the park.

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It was basically saying, I'm not paraphrasing much, come to our worship service.

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There are girls who will take care of you. I'm being very non -graphic on purpose.

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Church was full of unbelievers. The eating of sacrifices to the dead has to do with eating of food offered to idols who are dead beings.

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Now, an unholy alliance is a grievous sin, right? How'd they get to that place? Notice it doesn't come out of nowhere.

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It never does. It was the result of a lengthy process of smaller sins that led to much greater ones.

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That's almost always the way it works. Satan can get us to do the biggies.

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So, he gets us to do smaller, more quote, insignificant sins.

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Some guy just wrote a book called Three Free Sins, and it's a thing as a free sin.

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But these almost always lead us to greater sins. I mean, the first thing mentioned is not understanding. Not understanding isn't a sin, is it?

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Well, it could be if we could understand something and just didn't work to understand it. You are responsible to God for what you could know, not for what you do know.

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Person who lives right across the street from this church is not going to get off saying I didn't go to church. Was there one you could have gone to?

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Well, yeah, right across the street. He's accountable for that. Okay.

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They didn't understand. And then they didn't remember. Is forgetfulness a bad thing? If it is, people my age are in real trouble.

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Friend came up and says, do you remember so and so? That's 50 years ago. I don't even remember my name half the time.

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But not understanding and not remembering lead to rebellion. And now we're in a bad place. And their rebellion grew into sinful forgetfulness, then unbelief, then complaining, and then just stop listening at all.

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And all of a sudden, here we are engaging in unholy alliances with people who engage in sexual intercourse in the temple and call it worship.

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Israel had sinned by their lack of understanding and their lack of remembering. It might interest you to know that in Psalm 103, which was written just three chapters before Psalm 106,

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David says, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget what? None of his benefits.

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So forgetfulness is a sin. That's a command. Now, I found that I do forget if I don't write things down.

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I have to make a list every day, even if it's the same thing that I had to do yesterday. And I do. I write them down.

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And when I can check the list off, it's been a good day. Thomas Watson, one of the greatest of the

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Puritans, read that verse and said, that's a command. And he said,

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I like to take a positive command, a negative command, and turn it into a positive one.

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So if it's forget none of his benefits, what's the positive command? Remember all his benefits.

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That's a command. And Watson said, I can't do that unless I write them down.

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So at the end of every day, he would write down in his journal all of God's benefits to him that day.

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That's a great practice. How about if you hit the light green? Something as mundane as that.

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How about if you have lunch at a Mexican restaurant with the pastor and two hours later, you're not sorry?

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That has nothing to do with the pastor. So Watson kept doing this, and he found it to be a wonderful apologetic tool.

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So he's witnessing this. Somebody saw the Lord was so good to me today, and the guy, yeah, okay, that was one thing.

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One thing? Come over here to the fireplace. He reached up over the mantle and took down volume 19 of God's benefits.

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He turned to it. See this? See this? See this? That's not one thing. So he said, we all ought to keep a benefits book.

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And wouldn't that help you to be grateful if every day at the end of the day, you wrote down all the nice things God did for you?

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So here's the progression so far. They didn't understand. They didn't remember. They rebelled.

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They quickly forgot. They wouldn't wait for him. They tempted God and they turned to other gods. So what does the scripture say about that?

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Verse 20, they changed their glory into the image of an ox that eats grass. The effect of people's sin was not the effect it had on God.

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It was the devastating effect on them. Your sin doesn't affect God in any way. God's not affected by anything.

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I was flipping channels one day and I came across my favorite heretic, Robert Tilton out of Dallas, Texas.

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And he was plugging for money and things like that. And then he said, well, our time's up for today.

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So I'll say goodbye. See you tomorrow. Now go out and help God to have a good day. I don't want that kind of pressure.

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I don't want God's having a good day to have anything to do with me. Fortunately, it doesn't.

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God has a good day every day. God was not affected.

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But look what these people did to themselves. They exchanged their glory for an image of a grass eating cow.

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What's that all about? It refers back to Deuteronomy. They exchanged the glory of God for a golden calf.

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In sinning against God, they gave up the one thing that gave them dignity, that gave them worth, that gave them identity, the fact that God was their

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God. And instead of that, they decided to worship a cow. They gave up their glory for a

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Guernsey. If you ever raised cows, you know what that is. They exchanged their creator for a cow,

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Jehovah for a jersey. By the way, cows eat grass or hay.

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And the idea of meditation in the Bible, the biblical picture is of a cow chewing cud.

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I don't know if you've ever seen that. It's gross. The closest thing in our day is teenagers chewing gum.

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So a cow takes a mouthful of grass and he chews it up, mixes it with his saliva, and then it gets into a little green ball and he swallows it for a while.

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Then he regurgitates it, and he chews it some more. And then he swallows it for a while.

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He brings it back up. That's the biblical picture of meditation. And by the way, that's how you get milk.

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I was telling the pastor how

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I went to church camp up at Hume Lake, and we sat around the breakfast table the first morning, and he said, okay, tell who you are, who you're from, what do you do?

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And he got to me, and I said, my name's Don, I live in Los Banos, and we have a dairy farm. Well, what do you do there?

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We milk cows. For what? To eat and drink with it. Well, I would never drink milk that came out of a cow.

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I says, where do you think the milk you get comes from? He goes, from a bottle on the front porch. Jeremiah 2 .11

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says this, my people have changed their glory for what does not profit. God's speaking there of himself.

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He had done great things in Egypt, in the land of Ham, by the Red Sea. What had this cow ever done for them?

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How we degrade ourselves with our unfaithfulness, how we exchange our glory for something cheap and tawdry with our sin, how we denigrate his majesty when we do not hold firm to our confession of the truth.

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How many golden calves have we erected by not holding fast to the truth of the gospel and defending it with our words and with our lives?

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And after this, they joined themselves to Baal. This was the ultimate rejection of God.

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Verse 35 says, then they mingled with the Gentiles, and they served their idols, and then they sacrificed their sons and daughters to demons.

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And verse 39 says, they were defiled by their own works. They became unfaithful by their own deeds.

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People defile themselves, they became unfaithful by their deeds, they were brought low for their iniquity.

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Isn't that always what Satan attempted to do with Christ when he tempted him? All this will

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I give to you if you will cast yourself down. That's what every temptation to sin is.

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Cast yourself down. And when you do, you see you're worshiping him, not

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Christ anymore. I'm not a

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Civil War buff across the board. I am very interested in the

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Battle of Gettysburg. And in that battle, there was the

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Battle of Little Round Top. If you ever get a chance to go there, you should. And hire a guy to ride along in the car with you, because that'll save you the cost of buying all the tourist books.

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He's already memorized all those. Well, the Battle of Little Round Top, there was Big Round Top and Little Round Top.

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And Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who was an ordained Congregational Calvinistic minister, went on to serve four terms as governor of Maine, was given the assignment, you must hold this hill to the last.

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You cannot give up the high ground. What he didn't know was that the

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Confederates had a letter of surrender ready to put on Lincoln's desk.

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And after the Hill of Little Round Top, there was nothing but flat land between them and Washington.

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If they get by Chamberlain and his troops, Civil War is over. Although I was in Virginia once, and an old gentleman said, there was nothing civil about that wall.

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You mean the wall of northern aggression? They don't call it the

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Civil War because they didn't think it was civil. Anyway, Chamberlain's Maine troops were given this spot on Little Round Top.

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The last thing they heard was, you cannot surrender. You cannot give up this ground.

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And then that guy left and he was shot soon afterwards. Here come the Confederate troops up the hill, straight up, right into bullets.

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They're falling. Here comes another round, guys. They get shot. Here comes a third round. And Chamberlain's assistant comes to him and says, sir, we're almost out of ammunition.

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We can't hold them out much longer. You know that. We have to give up. No, here they come again.

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And they use up the last of their ammunitions. And the guy says, we're out of bullets. What do you want us to do?

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We've got to leave. He says, no, we can't leave. We cannot surrender this place.

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Everything depends on us. So he said, fix bayonets. What? We're going to charge.

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And they charged down the hill and as so through the Confederates off, they turned and ran. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain saved the

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Union that day because he would not surrender. You know where I'm going with this story?

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We can't surrender either. We can't compromise the gospel just to get along with people who don't believe it.

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And have you noticed that compromise is always from the top down? It's never from the bottom up.

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The low end never says, well, all right, we'll do that to get along with you guys up there. No, no, no, no, no.

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It's always us compromising to get along with them. Unity that is not based on truth is not unity.

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It's compromise. It's an unholy alliance. It is damnable cowardice.

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Where the people will stand up and say, that's not different. It's wrong. Today, it seems like you can be for anything, no matter how bizarre.

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You just can't be against anything, no matter how bizarre. I mean, if a guy was to go over here to your big lake with a white robe on and say, my name is

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Moses, he'd have 100 people following him and giving him money in no time. If you had the audacity to go up and say, excuse me, you're not

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Moses, and this is not a church. They wouldn't say you. Oh, thank you for setting this.

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Who are you to judge another man's religion? He's not wrong. He's just different.

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It's like the scripture says, the last days, people will think they're doing God a favor when they kill you. It's a paramount importance that we understand

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God's truth. The first time I preached at Grace Community Church, I have this thing, if I'm only going to get one shot at a group of people,

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I'm going to give them the gospel. Because I don't assume that anybody out there is saved, much less everybody.

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So I preached a strong evangelistic message. And afterwards,

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John was out of town. He came back and he called me and he says, how did it go? I said, well,

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I never know. I think it went okay. They didn't walk out in groups. One guy came up to me afterwards and said, you seem to have forgotten where you are.

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This is John MacArthur's church. You just give us the information. We'll know what to do with it.

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So I repeated that to John. He says, well, his first mistake is it's not my church. This is Christ's church.

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He says, and that reaction says that what you did was exactly what needed to happen. That man needs to hear the gospel.

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And I said, so you're okay with it? He says, well, my kids like it and that's all I care about. Essential doctrine is being compromised at every turn.

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And the word essential here is very important. Charles Hodge once said, there ought to be things a man's willing to die for, but there shouldn't be so many of them.

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We have to pick our battles carefully. For me personally, I'll argue with anybody.

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If it's a matter of salvation, if it's a matter of if he believes this, he's going to hell.

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Nobody's going to hell because they get the end times wrong. Good and godly men differ on that.

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Nobody's going to hell because they baptize professed believers only or infants. Unless they're convinced the

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Bible says don't do it and they do it anyway. Well, then they are going to hell. Nobody's going to hell because they have a congregational church as opposed to a

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Presbyterian rule. But if somebody doesn't have the gospel right, that's worth fighting for.

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There are errors, there are serious errors, and there are fatal errors.

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I prefer to fight my theological battles only over the fatal errors. Others who have more energy and more conviction and more time to fight all these other things, more power to them.

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But I believe the main point we ought to take with us today is that small sins lead to bigger ones, and tiny compromises invariably will lead to unholy alliances.

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David's sin with Bathsheba began with a glance. Israel's sin with idolatry began with ignorance.

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May God help us to see the need to understand, to remember, and to obey, and thereby to be his faithful people who understand his ways, who listen to his counsel, who trust in his word, and who remain true so that they contend for the faith that's once for all delivered to the saints.

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You cannot surrender. You cannot compromise. The gospel and people's souls are at stake.

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Let's pray. Father, may we take this seriously because you take it seriously.

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And may we be brave soldiers, not timid cowards.

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And may the gospel be evident in our lips and in our lives. For Jesus' sake, amen.