Sept. 17, 2017 The Stone of Stumbling by Pastor Josh Sheldon

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Sept. 17, 2017 The Stone of Stumbling Romans 9:30-33 Pastor Josh Sheldon

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And I'll turn, if you would, to the book of Romans chapter 9.
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I will read verses 30 to 33, which will be the text for this morning's message.
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And God willing, as I go through, you will see why I selected the texts to be read to you from Isaiah 65 and then from Luke chapter 20.
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But this morning, we'll attend ourselves to Romans 9 verses 30 to 33.
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What shall we say then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it.
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That is, a righteousness that is by faith. But that Israel, who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness, did not succeed in reaching that law.
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Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works.
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They have stumbled over the stumbling stone. As it is written, behold,
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I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. And whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.
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May God bless us as we read and as we hear his word. So here we come to the apostle, the last few verses of this chapter, chapter 9 of Romans.
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And the chapter sort of ends where he began with Israel, with this question, this 800 -pound gorilla sitting on the table as he's been going through, speaking of the salvation that Jesus Christ has procured, that God by his grace in sending his son has designed for us.
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And the 800 -pound gorilla that Paul's been dealing with in this chapter is, what about Israel?
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Well, Paul, if all these promises are so good, if God is as reliable as you say, if all these things be true, then why do his people not believe?
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How am I to put my faith, my hope, my trust, my eternal soul in his care, unless I can be absolutely sure that his promises are good, that he will keep his word?
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What about Israel? And that's really been sort of the subject, the topic, the thing that Paul's been arguing for.
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God is faithful. God is reliable. He did keep his promises. They were misunderstood, though they were plainly revealed in word, accomplished in history.
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God did keep his word. God is sovereign. God chooses who he will. And God acts as he will and always in a just and right and merciful and compassionate way.
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Sort of been his argument as he's coming down to the end of this chapter. He began with Israel.
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I am speaking the truth in Christ. I am not lying. My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.
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And for whom? For his fellow Israelites, for those who are from the same stock as he according to the flesh and yet don't believe in the
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Lord Jesus Christ. So in chapter 9 of Romans, he's been expositing.
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He's been making us understand the sovereignty and the goodness and the mercy and the compassion and the reliability of God.
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He raises up kings like Pharaoh, has showcases for his power. He casts them down as it pleases him, as it accomplishes his purposes.
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He makes one vessel. You remember the whole passage about the vessels, some for honorable, some for dishonorable use?
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He says to one, I made you this way for this purpose and to another, he says, but I made you that way for this other purpose.
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But all of it, God's purpose. Far from proving him harsh or merciless,
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Paul cites the prophets who shows that he did always prophesy that there were to be this people, this people who do not come from the stock of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, i .e.
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physically Israel. There would be this people who he would call my people, a people upon whom there wasn't mercy.
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He would say, now you have had mercy, a people he would call beloved and sons of the living
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God. Speaking, of course, of the gospel, wherein
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God opens his arms to everyone, be they male, female, Jew, Greek, slave, or free.
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For in Christ and he alone, there is no such distinction as we all come to salvation in him by the same faith that God gives us to believe in him, irrespective of anything in us, be it male, female,
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Jew, Greek, and all the rest of the distinctions that we could possibly multiply. Question here is, why did
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Israel fail? Why did Israel fail? Why does anyone fail?
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And failure here in the context of the gospel. Why did Israel, with all the advantages that they had, fail to see
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Jesus Christ as the sum and the total of it all? God willing, when we get to chapter 10,
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Christ is the end of the law. We're going to have to deal with this again and again. Christ is the sum and total of everything that God has been saying since Genesis 1 .1.
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And crescendoing to the cross, why did Israel, with all they had, fail to see it?
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Why does anyone, why do your children, why do you children who have unbelieving parents, why do we who have unbelieving neighbors, co -workers, how do we attribute their failure to understand this gospel that we almost plead with them to believe, that we try to live out before them?
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Why does anyone fail to come to the Lord Jesus Christ? Well, we can have a lot of reasons.
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Pride, arrogance, love of sin, and all these things would be true. Israel failed because they sought the right thing, that being the righteousness of God, the wrong way.
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They stumbled. That's the word Paul uses, and he takes it from the prophets. They stumbled. They were on a path.
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They were on a highway. They were following after something, which is the righteousness that was promised in the law of Moses.
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That was their cherished monument to their special place in God's eyes, to have that Mosaic law before them.
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And they were striving after the righteousness that it promised. And they stumbled.
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They stumbled over a stumbling stone that was set in place, that was set in their way by God himself.
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And where did they stumble? Over faith. They stumbled over faith, over a repudiation, a complete renouncing of self -reliance.
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And we speak of this in context of the gospel of salvation. What do we mean by self -reliance?
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We mean faith in Christ and faith alone, in Christ alone. Because there's no other way you can be saved.
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There's no other name given to men under heaven by which you must be saved.
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Faith. Israel proves to you that you cannot do it.
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That's the lesson, really. That's the stumbling stone over which they stumbled. Paul writes about the
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Gentiles. Gentiles, meaning it's just a catch -all that means all who are separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise.
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In other words, not having any of those advantages that Israel had. They did not pursue this righteousness.
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They have it. They fell upon it, as it were. They weren't pursuing it.
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And you could ask, how could they have? They knew nothing of it. Romans chapter 1, verses 18 to 25.
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It's been a few months since we were in there. But you recall how it rebukes them. It actually rebukes all mankind because enough is revealed of God in nature to dispel your ignorance.
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Enough there is to halt your waywardness. And so that if you have not faith, you will be held rightly and justly accountable before God in that great day.
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The Gentiles here, they're in the position of a man who, while walking by the way, while minding his own business, he stumbles upon, let's say, a pearl.
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A pearl, shall we say, of great price. Now, he wasn't looking for it. He was off to work.
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He was going on about his business. He had no affinity for pearls. He's single and he has no wife to surprise with such a gift.
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Maybe he's a strict Orthodox Jew and would rather avoid the product of an unclean bottom dweller.
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But then along comes another man who sees what he has and he convinces him that what he has discovered is of inestimable worth.
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Like if we put that in a more modern context. If you tripped and fell upon a lottery ticket and happened to have the numbers on, you're ready to throw it out and somebody comes along and says, hey,
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I just looked on my smartphone and those are the numbers. Somebody comes along and tells him what this thing is worth.
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Well, this man believes. He gives up everything to have this thing that he stumbled upon, that he wasn't looking for.
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Now, the allusion to Jesus' parable of the pearl of great price is obvious. But it makes a point.
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And what Paul's saying there in the last few verses of Romans chapter nine is that Gentiles, compared to Israel, had no idea what they were missing.
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They're ignorant of God's demands. They're ignorant of God himself, much less his righteousness. The best they could claim was a mere civic righteousness, that which is implanted in every human.
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Not pursuing. Now, pursuing, this word's gonna be used again in regards to Israel. The Gentiles were not pursuing.
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And we'll come to Israel who was pursuing something. I want you to know what this word pursue is about.
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It comes up a couple times here. This word is actually sometimes translated as persecute.
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To persecute someone. It denotes a determined and constant effort towards an objective.
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And we might immediately think of our author of this book of Romans, Paul the Apostle. Because when he was
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Saul the Pharisee, he persecuted the church. It's the same exact word that we have here.
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With determined effort, with zeal and energy, going to accomplish a purpose, which is the destruction of the church, he organized all his effort and focused it in that way.
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This is the word we have. The Gentiles were not doing that. These Gentiles, and who does
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Paul mean? He's talking about Gentiles who are saved. He is writing to Gentiles in the Roman church 2 ,000 years ago.
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They were not organized towards an effort. They were not focused towards the gospel. They had no regard for God.
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They were looking at their idols. They were ignoring God's revelation of himself in the heavens.
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The firmament shows forth his handiwork. They saw nothing. They're just going on about their business, not persecuting towards anything.
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Israel, remember, persecuting very energetically towards this goal.
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They attained what they weren't looking for. The Gentiles were not pursuing righteousness. Attained it.
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And I just wanna slow down for a second and tell you what attained means, because it doesn't just mean that I came upon it.
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Attained means to get a hold of something, to make it your own.
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It's almost as intense as the word for persecute. If to persecute, to pursue something, is to put all your energy focused on this one goal.
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To attain it is to grab onto something, to take it from where it is and bring it to yourself, to hide it in your bosom as it were, which is a good metaphor because it's in the heart where the gospel must reside.
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They attained. They made it their own. They apprehended this thing, this gospel, this righteousness of God.
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Faith in Jesus, you see. Faith in Jesus is something that I cannot give you.
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I can proclaim it to you. I can plead with you to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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I can beg you to repent of your sin and to believe that Jesus Christ on the cross paid the price for your sin.
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But I cannot give you faith. I cannot plead to God on your behalf in that sense.
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Not in any way this efficacious. I can ask God to save you. And we do pray for those who come to this place that if you know not
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Jesus Christ, you will be saved by hearing his word, but you must make this faith your own.
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If you came in here this morning unaware of the claims of Jesus Christ upon your eternal soul, if you were not pursuing this, then perhaps this day you will attain to something that you weren't looking for.
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You will stumble somehow onto this pearl of great price, this gospel of salvation.
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You will be able to say with the apostle that the Son of God who loved me gave himself for me.
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And this is what it means to attain. The Gentiles were not pursuing this, says Paul. Yet they attained it.
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They made it their own. They latched onto it, they grabbed it, they put it in their bosom, they sold all they had to have this land where the treasure was written.
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We can multiply the parables. It's worth everything. He speaks of the
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Gentiles, happy in their oblivious ways, content with their version of fulfillment, morality. They attained and apprehended and made their own this righteousness which is synonymous with this gospel.
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And this is just what Paul promised in the two verses of chapter one that are the theme of this whole letter.
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You remember how this letter started? For I'm not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the
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Jews first and also for the Gentile. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.
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Faith that God gives as a gift for by grace you've been saved through faith. It is the gift of God.
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We can go on for the wages of sin is death but the gift of, the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our
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Lord. This is what the Gentiles attained. Stumbled onto, falling on this stone which we're gonna talk about a little bit later at the end of this message.
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They fell on it and in that stone and falling and making this stumble.
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They came away with this gospel. But what of Israel?
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What of Israel? Israel's going to be front and center in chapters 10 and 11 too as well.
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So what of Israel? What of that nation who held custody of the oracles of God? Chapter three verse two tells us.
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Or chapter nine verse four where they had the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law.
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They had the worship, they had the promises. The nation to whom the prophets went. What about them?
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You see, they did pursue, they persecuted if you will, this law that would lead to righteousness.
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They did expend constant effort and determination. I mean think of this for a moment.
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Even Jesus said that they counted individual cumin seeds in order to fulfill the law to the letter.
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And in that, trying to attain unto the righteousness of God that the law would promise.
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But Jesus says they didn't succeed. Paul says they didn't succeed. They didn't come to or arrive at this particular seed.
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This particular state that they were looking for. If you think of what
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I alluded to there when Jesus rebukes the Pharisee for counting the seeds, counting out individual seeds to make sure
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God gets his one and I get my nine. He says, but you should have looked to the way to your things of the law.
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What about mercy? What about justice? What about compassion? You should have kept the one, obedience to the law, but not ignored the other.
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Which is everything the law should have pointed you to. And by going there, perhaps might have stumbled into the righteousness that the law spoke of and prophesied.
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It should sound sort of exemplary to us, shouldn't it? That we be so careful. That everything that we achieve in life, we give glory and credit to God, and then we would like the
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Pharisee, make sure that God gets the tithe, that we take the one out of the 10. Now Jesus does tell the parable of the two sons.
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The one who said he would do as his father asked, but then he didn't do it. And the other said he would not do as his father asked, and then he repented and did it.
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And this is the Jews and the Gentiles, isn't it? The Jews said, all that the Lord has commanded us by his servant
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Moses, we will do. They say this in the book of Exodus and the book of Deuteronomy.
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Signing on the dotted line as it were. That son who said, we will do as he commanded, but then what happened?
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They didn't. There that son says, yes, father, I will obey you. As soon as the father's back is turned, they don't.
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The Gentiles said, in a manner of speaking, who is the
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Lord that I should obey his voice? Who is this God you Jews follow? We don't know who he is, neither will
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I obey his voice. To kind of piggyback on Pharaoh and his arrogance.
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But then what did they do? They repented and obeyed.
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They repented and believed the gospel. This is the difference between these two great houses.
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The Jews or Israel, really. And as we follow Paul in these chapters, when he speaks of Israel, he's speaking about that nation as a whole.
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When he speaks of Jews, it's more of an individual kind of a context. These two great houses.
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The one with all the advantage, who didn't attain unto, who didn't grab onto what those advantages were offering to them.
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And the others, happy, carefree, looking for nothing, and yet God grabbed hold of them and gave them what they knew not.
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And they attained, they apprehended, they latched onto it and made it their own. The obvious question is the one that Paul asks next.
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Why? Why? I mean, to move to the answer of why, it must first be agreed that Israel on the whole did not gain what they had pursued.
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Some of them did. Paul was an example of that. So are Peter and the other disciples,
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Jews who apprehended this gospel. I would say that, for that matter, so am
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I. Having been raised and born Jewish. But they misconstrued the point, the
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Jews, they misconstrued the point of all their advantages nationally and personally. And so the answer, if we ask why, if we go with Paul and say, why didn't they get it?
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Remember, if we're asking that question and we're flabbergasted, then God willing, you're flabbergasted because God has given you faith to believe and you see the truth.
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And so you're looking back with new covenant eyes, you're looking back with eyes of faith, you're looking back as Jesus would, so to speak.
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And so it's hard to understand why they would miss all that. The answer, so simple, because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works.
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Looking for the right thing, the righteousness of God, trying to accomplish it in a manner that the law that promised the righteousness that they were striving to obey would never have endorsed.
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They thought they could do it themselves. You know, when I was a
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Boy Scout, I sort of reveled in the doing. I mean, I did the stuff because it got me the merit badge.
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And you got the merit badge when you went to the scout meeting. And then they called you up and there was a great ceremony and they would tell all the great things that you did and they'd give you the merit badge.
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And you'd say, yes, I did it and I have the badge to prove it. But years later,
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I look back and I can see that I largely missed the whole point. You see,
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Boy Scouting was about being. The merit badges, the community projects, all that was a means to an end and that end was to produce a responsible, civic -minded man out of an irascible boy.
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The motto is, on my honor, I'll do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the scout law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight, to become something.
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As I look back, I realize that I reduced that vision to projects, to projects that got me badges, badges that were awarded to me at a ceremony where my name was called out and my accomplishments were spoken over the loudspeaker, into the microphone.
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They say, look what Joshua James Sheldon did, look what John Smith did and they together get these merit badges and they put them and I'm so proud to be able to go home and my mom would sew it onto my shirt and look what
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I did. And I never realized that the whole thing was about being something. You see, the law could never produce the righteousness that it promised.
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That's really the whole point of Romans seven where we were several weeks ago. The law cannot produce the righteousness that it promises.
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Over and over again in Deuteronomy, where the law is repeated to Israel, to God's people and where it's agreed to in Deuteronomy itself, the
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Lord warns them to do all the words of this law. Do it. Be careful to obey all the words that I've given you.
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Let none of them fall to the ground. And over and over again, when they hear this charge,
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Israel says all that the Lord has commanded by his servant Moses, we will do.
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Well, James in the New Testament has exactly this in mind when he writes, for whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.
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If you would gain the righteousness of God through the law, give it all you got, persecute, prosecute, pursue that with all your soul, with all your might, with everything you've got.
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Keep it all and you'll have that righteousness. That's the promise of the Bible. The warning is if you fail to give to God one cumin seed, you failed in the whole thing.
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You may as well not have started in the first place. Well, of course, it's an impossible challenge, isn't it?
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There's one who obeyed the law. There's one who never failed as he walked on this earth to at every point follow
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God's law, not break any of it. And that, of course, is Jesus Christ.
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Him alone, he who comes as true Israel to accomplish all that Israel is supposed to be striving after.
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So while I could put this challenge to you and I could point to Bible verses that would support me and challenge me and say, if you want that righteousness, follow the law, all of it.
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No, by the way, if you're an adult, you've got a lot of years behind you where you didn't follow the law, so you're disqualified already.
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It's impossible, it's impossible. The law can't do it. The righteousness prophesied in the law was and is impossible to gain by the doing because if you don't do one piece, no matter how small, no matter how innocuous you might think it is, it doesn't matter what you or I think is innocuous or small or a minor little peccadillo, as we like to call them, that doesn't matter a bit.
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It matters what God says. And God says you shall follow it all. This should have driven them to desperation.
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And I think this absolute inability to do the law which they committed to should have driven them to desperation.
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It should have made them desperate. It should have made them completely despair of their own ability.
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Should have forced their knees to bend and their spirits to sag. If you've tried to make yourself right with God by your own effort, let your knees bend now and your spirits sag this moment because it's not going to happen.
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It's not going to happen. There's only one whose righteousness means anything before God. And that's
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Christ Jesus and him alone. It didn't for Israel.
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It didn't force their knees to bend. It didn't make them desperate. They missed the whole idea of it and so made worthless all those centuries of effort.
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We could call out with the prophet. But have you not heard? Have you not known? Did you not have enough to tell you that this righteousness is only a gift from God as he attributes to you by faith the righteousness that is
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Christ's? Did you not in your very history have enough revelation from God in the acts that he performed to show you that you cannot do these things?
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Israel once stood on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea and there in the distance came death.
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They saw chariots, pharaohs coming to avenge their firstborn who weren't even buried yet. And what do you do?
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You need to be saved. You're going to die. What to do?
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Moses told them. How did Israel miss this? How did they forget? So many Psalms recount this.
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Fear not, stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord which he will work for you today.
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For the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you and you have only to be silent.
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Fear not, stand firm, be silent. It is said by some that not a single sound could be heard as they obeyed and crossed on dry land.
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And how did they arrive? They arrived safely. They arrived dry. They arrived on the other side free of slavery and done with Egypt.
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How were they able to go forward with that wall of water on each side? Not by their works,
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I'll tell you that. Not by works. They weren't holding it back. They were believing that God had held it back and was holding it back by faith.
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They're very history. Have they not heard? Have they not seen? How could they have missed all this?
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If they're very history, the event, the defining event as they crossed the Red Sea, what are they told?
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Just believe that God will see you safe to the other side.
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Just believe that God now is holding that water back. And because he said he will bring you through, he will bring you through.
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Just believe. That's the righteousness of God. They did this by faith.
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Their righteousness, their deliverance by faith. I mean, read Hebrews 11, see what great deeds were done by means of faith.
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Read the Gospels and see what great deeds we might do by faith. Read Acts and see what the apostles by faith actually did.
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They forgot that lesson. 40 years after the Red Sea, the children remembered that kind of a lesson.
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They shouted and what happened? The mighty walls of Jericho fell down. Well, then came the judges and their sad history and faith withered.
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How do we attain to this righteousness of God? How do we have God see us with the righteousness of Christ?
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It's the same as asking, how must I be saved? It's faith. Faith in Christ, him alone.
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That's what Paul's pushing us to. So I'm begging you for this morning, faith. It's a hard master.
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Faith is not an easy ruler. It's hard because it makes no demand except that you believe.
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It's hard because if you believe that God will hold back the waters, you must also believe that only he can.
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It's hard because you must see the danger of not moving ahead. It's hard because this cannot be apprehended.
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It cannot be made your own without humility, without a renunciation of self and a recourse to Christ and him alone.
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It's hard because pride is so insidious and it creeps in in such subtle ways.
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Faith, this hard master, faith is where Israel stumbled. The end of verse 33 in Romans nine and the end of our message really is this, the stone of stumbling.
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Paul says, why did they? Because they stumbled on that stone. What stone? As it is written, behold,
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I'm laying in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.
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Couple things I want to observe here in this verse. The word for stumbling is skandalon where we get the word scandal.
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It means a cause for stumbling which is as we might expect. More formally, it means an action or circumstance that causes one to act contrary to a set of beliefs.
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Remember that. It's something that causes you to act contrary to a set of beliefs, that's a stumbling.
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In Matthew chapter 16 verse 22, Peter having just heard from Jesus himself about the cross that is coming, he's talking about how he'll be handed over to the
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Gentiles and be crucified and Peter comes to him and says, far be it from you, oh Lord, that shall never happen to you.
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And what does Jesus answer? Get behind me, Satan. You are a hindrance, and that word hindrance, you are a scandal to me.
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You are that which is trying to stumble me off the path upon which I'm set. You're trying to make me act contrary to my beliefs, my purpose, which is to fulfill
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God's word to save even you, Peter, who's trying to drive me off that path. You are a scandal, you are a hindrance, you are a stumbling block to me would be a fair way to translate that.
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He says you're not setting your mind on the things of God but on the things of man. This word is used in 1
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Corinthians 1 .23. But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block, a scandalon, a hindrance to Jews and a folly to Gentiles.
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That's stumbling. And the other word I want us to get a little bit of a grip on is shame.
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Whoever believes in him, this stumbling stone, this rock of offense, whoever believes in him, because it's not a rock, it's a person, whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.
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It's from the same word group we had from Romans 1 .16, for I'm not ashamed of the gospel.
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And what this means is that your faith, your trust, your confidence, your hope has been properly placed.
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You will not be put to shame. You will actually be vindicated on that great day because if your hope, your faith, your trust is in Christ Jesus, there will be no shame.
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But the salvation that he promised, the salvation that you have believed in will be seen by all humanity as they stand before the great judgment seat of Christ.
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All of us. There will be no shame. You will be vindicated. And what this means is your hope, your confidence has been properly placed.
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That's what that word means. The promises of God will all be fulfilled.
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So this stumbling stone, this stone of stumbling, we need to understand it didn't just happen.
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How did it get in their way? Israel's going along this path, they're believing that they can attain unto righteousness by their own work, by their own effort, by following the law, and all of a sudden there's this stone in the way and they trip on it.
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What's it doing there? It's trying to get them off these things that they believe. This course that they were on.
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It was trying to get them to be contrary to their set of beliefs. What was it trying to get them to be contrary to?
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Believing that they could do it themselves. That's what it was trying to do.
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That's why God, read the prophets, it's Yahweh who puts the stone in their way.
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Now we think stumbling, okay, he's gonna try and trip. You remember this when you're grade school? At least when I was in grade school, it was great fun to trip somebody.
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They're walking along or they're running, you stick your foot out there and you trip, and the harder they trip, the harder you laugh.
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We think, well, that sounds wrong. Why would God want to stumble someone? Why would God want to trip someone?
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Why does he want them to trip on a stone that's going to hurt? It's an act of mercy.
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Because the beliefs that they had are beliefs that they should have been contrary to.
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Very simply, just this, this belief that I can do it myself. If you believe you can attain to the righteousness of God, if you believe that God is going to save you because of anything in you, any good deed you've done, any morality that you yourself have, if you believe that,
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I want to put a stone in stumbling, and I want you to trip hard on it. And I want you to be contrary to that belief before you leave here this day.
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The stone didn't just happen. Paul put,
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God put it there. Paul, when he gives this to us, he conflates a couple of different passages from Isaiah.
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The first is Isaiah 8, chapter 14. If you want to turn there, I'll read from Isaiah 8, 13.
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I'll read 13 to 14. And keep your finger in Isaiah because next we're gonna go to Isaiah 28.
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But Isaiah 8, beginning at 13, the prophet says, but the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy.
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Let him be your fear and let him be your dread. And he will become a sanctuary and a stone of offense and a rock of stumbling to both houses of Israel, a trap and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
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And many shall stumble on it. They shall fall and be broken.
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They shall be snared and taken. Now flip over, if you would, to Isaiah 28.
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8, 14 of Isaiah is part of what Paul uses and here's the rest of it. Therefore, thus says the
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Lord God, behold, I am the one who has laid a foundation stone in Zion a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone of a sure foundation.
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Whoever believes will not be in haste. God laid the stone. God is the stone.
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To not be in haste, what he said there, is simply to not panic. Panic is calmed by faith, by confidence and trust in God's word to extract and preserve a remnant from the coming judgment.
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That's the context of Isaiah 28. The judgment that is coming, he who believes in this word that I will extract and save a remnant, he will not be in haste, he will not be in panic, he will not flee in terror.
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He may get out of there, but in confidence and trust and faith in God and the word he gives of a preservation.
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The point at which they stumbled, the scandal that repelled them, is just that.
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Faith, confidence in God, a complete belief that I am unable and only
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God is able and God has given a provision only in his son Jesus Christ.
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That's where they stumbled. And how often, how often we who know
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God by faith in Christ do just that. We panic. And when we panic, we turn where?
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Where do we turn? We turn to ourselves, we turn to worldly solutions, we turn to our own strength, we work it out for ourselves.
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And even if we do it in a measured and an outwardly calm way, if we don't turn to God's word first,
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I would say it's panic. It's that moment not believing in him and going in haste, not falling back and trusting on God's word, not looking here first by supplication and prayer and surrender to the spirit and being inculcated by his word.
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It's not necessarily screaming in terror like a man with his hair on fire, it's resorting to anything other than God. Like the hymn says, though troubles assail us and dangers of fright, though friends should all fail us and foes all unite, yet one thing secure us, whatever be tied, the promise assures us the
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Lord will provide. Who is that stone that Paul speaks of, drawing it forth from the prophet
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Isaiah and into chapter nine of Romans? The stone is Yahweh. And Paul, fully aware of this, in Romans 10, 11, and you can just look down there for a moment if you will,
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Lord willing, we'll get to that next week ourselves. For the scripture says, everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame, and he sort of repeats himself.
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And in that context of Romans 10, the hymn, the believing in him, is believing in that stone.
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Who is that stone? That stone is Jesus. Paul says explicitly that the stone is
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Jesus, knowing that Isaiah says explicitly that the stone is Yahweh.
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And more than that, that Yahweh put the stone, which is Jesus, in the places
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God who sent his son to be that stumbler for Israel and for you.
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If you believe in anything else, then that stone of stumbling is there to get you to believe something contrary to what you now believe.
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And to change that to believing in Jesus. That's why the stone is there. Paul knows that Isaiah meant it was
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Yahweh. The word of God says it's Yahweh, and he says it's Jesus. We often go to texts like Titus 2 .13,
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our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, for a proof text that Jesus is God. I would say Romans 9 .33
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testifies to the same glorious truth, that Christ is God.
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As much as the Father is God, as much as the Holy Spirit is God, we serve a triune, we say thrice holy
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God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Three persons, one
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God. Romans 9 .33 attests to this for us. So the stone is
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Christ, and what is he doing there right in the way of Israel's progress towards righteousness? God, the merciful
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God, God, the compassionate God, God, the God who earlier in Romans 9,
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Paul goes all the way back to Exodus, and he says the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and compassionate.
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It's he, that Yahweh, the one who pities the poor and has mercy on his children, he's the one who put it there.
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To stumble them, yes. To stumble them, to knock them right on their face, if need be, to knock you right off that path as violently as is needed.
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That's why he's there, to stumble them. The rock of offense. Do you remember what Steve read to you from Luke chapter 20, verse 18?
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Jesus says that this rock of offense, if you fall on it, you'll be broken. And if it falls on you, and of course,
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Jesus is speaking of himself, faith in him. If it falls on you, what will happen?
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You're crushed. Broken or crushed. Why is
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Jesus the one who looks back from the Old Testament, peering mercifully into the eyes of his uninformed readers?
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Why is that Jesus, that rock of offense? To get them off that path, stumble. I would tell you this morning, stumble now on that rock that is
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Christ, because it blocks the wrong path. It's getting you off the wrong way to go.
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You're heading to perdition, you're heading to eternal judgment, you're heading to hell. And the rock, that scandal that is there, that is
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Christ, the cross of Jesus Christ, is there to push you in a different direction altogether.
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Do you remember Elisha, who prayed for the Syrian army to be blinded?
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That was a scandal. That was a rock of offense, because had the Syrians touched God's prophet, do you remember just before that, the chariots of Israel were surrounding the prophet.
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They would have been wiped out in a second. And he brought them on the right path to safety.
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He delivered them to the king of Israel, and then told the king of Israel not to kill them. He was a stumbling block to them, to get them off what they believed, where they were going, which was terrible, dreadful, danger, which they weren't even aware of.
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Do you remember Balaam, rebuked by his donkey? What stood before him?
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The angel of the Lord, with that sword, which the donkey saw, and Balaam didn't.
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Why was he there? To stumble him, to scandalize him off that wrong path, which of course he didn't.
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He stayed on that path, and he was later executed by Israel. Stone of stumbling was there to drive
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Israel off the course of self -generated righteousness, away from a course that they were sure to miss what they thought to gain.
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So I call on you this morning, I would call on you to fall. I would say fall on that stone.
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Fall on him, he, Jesus, whose beauty of holiness exposes sin the way a CT scan does disease.
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He will break you. If you fall on this stone, you will be broken. He will break you of your self -reliance, your confidence, your works, of anything that will gain you standing before God other than him.
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He will break you of all of that. You will be broken, sometimes with greater violence than with others.
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He stands in your path, beckoning you away from danger. And whatever harm it does to you to fall on that stone, if you break both your legs, an arm, your nose, and a wrist, is of no matter for what you gain in return.
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Stone was placed there by a merciful God who would see you, who would have seen Israel in the arms of his son rather than the pangs of hell.
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So call on him to be broken. Go around the stumbling stone, if you will. Go around that stumbling stone.
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Avoid the scandal of the cross. Continue to believe what you'll believe, and then be crushed.
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A broken sinner, you see, can be put back together. A broken sinner can be put back together, but God, by his
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Spirit, if you will repent and believe, will do just that. But for those who refuse, you'll be crushed.
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You'll be crushed by the same stone that broke me and you if you believe in Jesus Christ.
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But instead of being broken and by God's merciful Spirit reassembled as it were, be crushed.
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And there, what does it speak of? Eternal judgment. When you see
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God in that great day and you stand before the judgment seat of Christ, you have no answer but yourself and you are eternally crushed.
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Your answer must be Christ. So when God looks upon you, he will see the righteousness of his Son, which he imputes to you by his mercy because of the faith that you have in his
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Son, faith which he himself gave you. Let's close with a couple of questions.
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What are you trusting in to bring yourself to God? Are you trusting yourself? Are you trusting your own goodness?
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I say, look at Israel, who for centuries tried that same path. Are you better than they?
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Do you know God's law better than the Pharisees did? Better than Moses did?
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Better than Israel's kings who had to write themselves a copy of the whole law each year? Do you know it better than they?
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Are you more faithful than Israel? 1 Corinthians 10 says that these things were written as a warning to us, an example, so we can look upon their failure and not say, oh, look at them, look how they stumbled.
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No, to say, thank you, Lord, for getting me off that path. And to see their failure as my warning.
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They stumbled over faith. They stumbled over needing to abandon their self -generated righteousness and trust in Christ, that stumbling stone.
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I ask you, what do you trust in? There's a stumbling block in your way if it is not
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Christ. There's a stumbling stone in your way. I pray you'll fall on it, the scandal of the cross that would have you believe something other than what you now believe.
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If it's not Jesus that you do believe, fall on it and be broken.
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Lose all your prideful self -reliance, and then if you'll believe in the person who is that stone, in Christ Jesus our
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Lord, be saved. For all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved.
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Amen? Amen. Heavenly Father, we do thank you for your word and for this day, for the warnings that we gain from scripture.
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And Father, for putting that stone of stumbling in our way, and for breaking and not crushing us, for giving us faith to believe that we might one day come to you in full confidence because not of ourselves, but because of Jesus Christ, your
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Son, in whom we believe and who this day we worship. In his name, amen.