Myths Christians Are Tempted To Believe (part 3)

I told you the story, once I preached, and I asked the pastor how long I should preach for, and he said, one flip of the cassette.

I said, well, how long is the cassette? He said, it's 92 minutes, so you've got 46 minutes on both sides.

When you see him flip it, just pause for a minute, he'll flip it, put it in, push record, and you preach for 92 minutes.

I said, well, how long do you normally preach? He said, 90 minutes. I said, okay, so I preach 90 minutes. But I won't preach that long.

Charles Spurgeon said, if you can't get what you need to get said in 45 minutes, then you can't say it if you had an hour or two.

Mythbusters part three, common misconceptions Christians have. I deal with a lot of Christian folks in different environments, and many of you probably don't have these misconceptions, but you'll probably run into some people that do.

And so this is kind of apologetics, kind of we just do a lot of Q &A, a lot of interaction, and I think it's fast -paced, and things that people misconceive about Christianity, whether believers or unbelievers, but specifically tonight, believers.

There's a difference, first one tonight, there's a difference between the Old Testament God and the New Testament God. I hear it all the time.

Well, how would you respond if someone said to you, someone on Fox News said, well, there's a difference between Old Testament God and New Testament God.

What do you end up saying? Say a lot of things, but what would you say?

Okay, Austin Johansson, what would you say? Okay, they are the same

God, good, that settles it. God said it, that settles it. Okay, good, what else? God is unchangeable, right?

Yes, He's immutable, right? Whenever I say to the kids, He is immutable, and they're like, well, what is immutability?

I said, think of the root word, and they say mute. He doesn't talk, no, mute like He doesn't change.

Down the street from our home in California, 20 years ago, there was the actor who worked for the

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so He changed into those kind of things, and so God doesn't change.

I'm the Lord, you're God, and I change not. Hebrews 13, Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

He is essentially the same. Yes, Bruce. Excellent, God may change

His operations, but He Himself doesn't change. Why do you think people say the

Old Testament God is different from the New Testament God? What is it about the Old Testament revelation of God that might make people say that?

Yes, okay, fair enough.

Is it true, and I'll repeat it for the sake of the tape, is it true that the Old Testament reveals a God who judges and a

God who has wrath? Can you think of some pretty big instances where that happens? The worldwide flood, for instance.

You would have to say that God is showing forth His justice on a worldwide level.

He killed everyone, short of those, how many people? Who just said seven?

The perfect number, seven, I'm just kidding, I didn't hear, don't answer. Eight people, everyone else, grandmothers, people who couldn't walk and they had some kind of crutch, it didn't matter, every person died.

How about Sodom and Gomorrah, right? There are huge instances and illustrations of God's just judgment in the

Old Testament. What about when God says, I don't want this nation to corrupt you and so go kill everyone, destroy the nation, destroy the children, destroy everyone else.

People could say, you know what, that shows God's wrath. But can you think of, oh no, let's keep going, let's do this logically before we get to the passage

I want to take you to. How about the New Testament? Why do people say the New Testament shows a God of love? Why do they say that?

And of course it does show that. But why do they say the New Testament shows

God as love? Well, they have a distorted view of the gospel, but is it true,

Mark, that Jesus regularly talked about love? Yeah, love the Lord your God, love your neighbors yourself,

God is love. Yes, okay. So there is a lot of love in the New Testament, yes.

Okay, excellent, I like that. Can you think of Old Testament illustrations of the love of God?

And can you think of New Testament illustrations of the wrath of God? What would the New Testament illustration of the wrath of God be,

Eric? Okay, Ananias and Sapphira, judgment for lying to the

Holy Spirit. Okay, good. Vincent, did you raise your hand or no? That's what you were going to say, Jonathan?

Okay, Judas, just. How about the doctrine of hell? The doctrine of hell is certainly a biblical concept, but you don't see it fleshed out very much in the

Old Testament, short of Daniel 12, verse 2. But who talks about hell more than anyone else? Where is the doctrine of hell coming from in bulk?

It's the New Testament, yes? Looking to the

New Testament to see the epitome of the wrath of God, here we have the sinless Son bearing the sins of all those who would ever believe, assuaging the wrath of God.

Excellent. Okay, well, let's keep going. How about the love of God in the

Old Testament? Does God love anybody in the Old Testament? And by the way, if God is a different God from the

Old and the New, that means He's getting better. That means He's evolving. He used to be this

God of the Middle East and the Near East, and then now He's this kinder, gentler

God. Could God get better? Can God become more loving? Somebody raised their hand.

Who was it? Yes, Amelia. Ezekiel 16? What a great illustration of the love of God when you think about childbirth and the nation of Israel.

Excellent. What else? It's not the one I had, so we're not going to turn there, but that's a good one. Yes? How about Nineveh and Jonah?

Who said that? Are you supposed to talk in church? Yeah, that's excellent.

Nineveh and Jonah. The compassion of God and the grace of God. You really want me to go wipe out all those people?

Jonah knew it. I knew you were a compassionate and gracious God. Good. Yes, Jonathan?

The compassion of God and the goodness bringing the Israelites out of Egypt. I like it.

Why don't we just turn to a passage for a second since I am thinking about that. Deuteronomy 7. Here's what we obviously know.

We don't have to reconcile the God of the Old Testament who destroys nations with Jesus, the

God of the New Testament who gives love because we have one God. And God shows

His favor in the Old and in the New, and He shows His wrath in the Old and the New. And I love

Deuteronomy for lots of reasons. And Deuteronomy, the second law, deutero for two, and then nam for law.

Deuteronomy 7. I just want to give you some highlights of how God's character shows up.

What we would call positive character, if we're not really thinking well.

Deuteronomy 7. 7. It was not because you were more in number than any other people.

He's talking about His chosen people, Israel. That the Lord, Yahweh, set His love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples.

But it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that He swore to your fathers that the

Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.

Exactly what Jonathan was talking about. Know, therefore, that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love

Him and keep His commandments to a thousand generations. Turn with me, if you would, to Isaiah 63 .9

for a second. And we're not doing verse -by -verse exposition tonight, but just a few myths that people can buy into if they're not thinking properly.

Deuteronomy 7. Now we go to Isaiah 63 .9. Someone gave me a

Bible one time and it didn't hardly have any markings in the entire Bible. It was really a nice Bible, calf -skin

Bible, New American Standard. I really appreciated it. And they said they didn't have need for it anymore and so they gave it to me and I opened it up to Isaiah 63 .9

and out of all the stuff that was underlined in the Bible, hardly anything was this was underlined.

In their affliction He was afflicted and the angel of His presence saved them.

In His love and in His pity He redeemed them. He lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.

While we're in the prophets, go to Hosea, please. Hosea chapter 14. Just hitting a few highlights of the character of the mercy and grace and love of God.

I'm going to try to find Hosea myself. Do you have those little things in your

Bible that have the tabs? Is it a sin to have Bible tabs for Bible books? I always thought it was.

I thought it was a crutch. Just like in seminary they say that you're not allowed to have an interlinear translation with the

Hebrew and then the English or the Greek and the English. I didn't really like that rule and I always thought that the tab things didn't work too well until I was a janitor at Grace Community Church and I went and cleaned

MacArthur's office and he has tabs on his Bible so I figured I was okay. Pardon me?

Hosea chapter 14. Maybe one of my favorite Bible verses because there's so many doctrines that just jam here together.

Hosea, isn't this a neat illustration? The book of Hosea in total for the love of God.

That would show the mercy and kindness and patience of God in Hosea. And here highlighted in Hosea 14 .4,

a verse that's just sometimes forgotten. I will heal their apostasy. I will love them freely.

The free, sovereign, distinguishing love of God. Why does God love anyone?

He wants to. The free love of God. The forgiveness and patience of God in the book of Hosea.

This man's life, a metaphor for God's relationship to Israel. Alright, the main passage

I want to look at and then we need to get to the next myth is Exodus chapter 34. When I was taking some classes at Southern Seminary, the

Southern Baptist Seminary, I had a professor named Daniel Block. How many people remember Daniel Block who came here and did a conference?

It was excellent. I remember Daniel Block for lots of reasons. I was super sick that Sunday. And I remember

I had asked him, do you want me to take you around to some of the places in New England to see where David Brainerd's tombstone is, to see where Cotton Mather was buried, to see where George Whitefield preached.

I don't know, to go see Ralph Waldo Emerson's house. What would you like to go see? And he said, I don't really want to do any of that.

I said, well, what would you like to do? And he said, I like to garden. That's what I like to do. I said, well,

I don't have a garden. You want to garden in my house? He said, I would love to. So I'm super sick.

He gets done preaching. We go to our home. And I just said,

Dr. Block, my wife and kids are here to attend to you and have lunch and all that stuff.

I'm just so sick, I have to go to bed. I'm just out. And the window was open. It was a fall day, if I recall right.

And Dr. Block was out in our front yard gardening with the kids as I was laying there super sick.

I thought, that's kind of nice when the guest speaker comes and serves the pastor's front yard.

So there's my Dr. Block story. Dr. Block in school, he was a man who was super kind and grandfatherly, but he also had a masculine edge to him.

He required so much work at the seminary class. He wanted to be not a doctor of ministry class, but like a

Ph .D. work level, that Rick Holland said that he almost had to drop out of the class, and he's an associate pastor, or was at the time, under MacArthur.

So I knew ahead of time that this was a tough class, and so I did all my homework ahead of time. Well, some of the students didn't like the workload and started complaining to Dr.

Block in class, after class, before class. Second day of class,

Dr. Block came up. I mean, we really had to do, I don't know how many hundreds of pages I had to do and write in Hebrew.

Dr. Block said, everybody, men, turn off your cassette recorders. And he said, I'd like to address the class.

There are seven of us in the room. He said, you know, all along,

I thought the Lord had equipped me and given me this opportunity to train and raise men for gospel ministry, not babysit complainers.

If I hear one more complaint from you men about workload, you're out of the course.

Let's open our Bibles a second. I just thought, I'm never going to forget that as long as I live, complaining about the workload of Scripture in seminary at a doctoral level.

He said something else that week that I've never forgotten. This is good for an illustration with kids especially.

Get a big pie chart on a graph, piece of paper, on a whiteboard, on a chalkboard, and cut that pie piece into eight sections.

Pretty easy. When we have pizza at our house, eight is the magic number. Right? Try to cut them just perfectly.

We have a deal at our house that if you're the cutter, then the other kids get the first slices.

So you have two options, either equity or optical illusions. So you have to know what to do because the other kids get first dibs if you're the cutter.

Dr. Block said, tell me some of the attributes of God. I need eight of them that you think the

Old Testament emphasizes. Now you already know where I'm going because I've tipped my hand.

But we started doing the whole judgment, righteousness, wrath, holiness, otherness.

And he said, take a look at the pie revealed in Exodus 34 verse 1.

This is who God is. This isn't the God of the Old Testament. This is God.

And let me just read it and then we'll talk about these just for a moment. Then the Lord said to Moses, cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you broke.

Be ready in morning and come up in the mountain to Mount Sinai in the morning and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain.

No one shall come up with you and let no one be seen throughout all the mountain. Let no flocks or herds graze opposite that mountain.

So Moses cut the two tablets of stone like the first and he rose early in the morning and went up to Mount Sinai or went up on Mount Sinai as the

Lord had commanded him and took in his hand two tablets of stone. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed the name of the

Lord. Here's the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, the

Lord, the Lord, a God merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, look at how this pie chart is being filled up, and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation.

And look at how Moses responded. And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.

That's quite a pie chart. Look at what some of these words mean.

What's the first one mean? God is merciful. You know what that word means? That comes from the tender compassion of a mother's womb.

This is a word that means there's an inferior being and a superior being and the superior being has pity and mercy on the inferior being.

Sees some distress in the inferior being and says, I want to help. In my notes as I worked through this a long time ago,

I know it's not a one -to -one correspondence, so please no letters. I have this question written in my notes.

Are there any dog rescuers out there in the congregation? Cat rescuers?

Because that's the word. I'm not saying people are dogs. Actually, if I were going to say something,

Jonathan Gershner one time, I think at Master's Seminary, got up and said, people are worse than rats because rats were made to act radishly and we expect rats to act the way they do and they do everything

God wants them to do. They act like rats. But God made people to worship Him and they don't do it at all.

People sometimes aren't as good as rats. But anyway, this has to do with mercy.

This has to do with a father sees a child in distress, feelings of love.

What's the next word? You probably know this word. He's gracious. This is occurring often with Yahweh the

Lord as subject. Used 13 times in the

Old Testament, 11 times with the combination of compassionate. This is a free favor of a superior one giving to someone who is undeserving.

He is slow to anger. Now, if I had some kids here, here's how

I would talk about this. Kids. Andresa kids. God has a really long nose.

No, He's not Pinocchio. What could it mean that God has a really long nose?

They're looking at me like, Dad, Pastor Mike's off the reservation. He is so far gone.

The literal word is He's long nostriled. And so if you've got a long nostril, it means it takes a long time for the anger that's built up to come out.

I mean, for some people, the impression of the Old Testament God is, I can't wait to wipe those people out.

But when God shows Himself to Moses, He doesn't show that at all.

God's patience in dealing with those whose sins justly arouse

His wrath. How many years did it take for God to wipe out the world in Noah's day?

Would you think that was just a knee -jerk thing? How many years? Someone? 120 years.

He's slow to anger. When I was a kid,

I was afraid of moms. Not Crock -Pot. It's hard to be afraid of a

Crock -Pot. Isn't it? Anybody here? Crock -Pot -ophobia? But I was afraid of the pressure cooker.

I heard some stories, you know, maybe apocryphal stories about, could turn into a hand grenade, and don't push this down, it's going to explode.

People dying in their kitchen. Who's heard that before? I'm still afraid of them. And using the word, like,

God isn't like this pressure cooker. God is wrathful, but it's slowly burning like a

Crock -Pot. One day, probably will turn into a pressure cooker, of course. Jeroboam set up calves in 931

B .C., but God didn't punish until 722

B .C. What else does it say? Abounding in loving kindness.

That's marriage language. That's covenant faithfulness. That's loving kindness.

Has said, steadfast love. Abounding in truth.

Who keeps loving kindness for thousands. And what does He do? I am super thankful for this, aren't you?

For giving iniquity, verse 7, and transgression, and sin. Why does it say iniquity, transgression, and sin?

Well, because if you want to highlight something in the Old Testament, what do you say? Holy, holy, holy. You say the same thing three times, or you say three synonyms that are almost the exact same.

He gets rid of iniquity, our twistedness, our transgression, rebellion, and our missing the mark.

Okay. Number two. Alright, this is a fun one. I think there's a few.

I could pick the guys who are going to like this one, and ladies. Number two. Second myth for tonight.

First one took too long, but that's alright. Can you talk about the Lord too much? I don't think so.

Myth number two, you can understand God's agape love apart from propitiation. You can understand

God's agape love apart from propitiation. In other words, you can't understand the love of God unless you understand propitiation.

Let's turn our Bibles to 1 John 4. You need to understand propitiation if you'd like to understand

God's love. We live in a sentimentalized love age, emotional love age, sexual love age.

But what does it mean to be propitiated? I bet you

Bruce Binning knows the answer. How many times is propitiation in the New Testament? Can you think? Okay, at least twice.

Hebrews 9, Romans 3, 1 John 2, and 1 John 4. Four times the word propitiation.

How many did you say? What silly book?

Oh, okay. Sorry, that silly book. I thought you were talking about the ESV Study Bible or something. I didn't know what you were talking about.

We think of love too often wrongly. Now, building up to 1

John 4, verses 7 to 12, we need to understand that God is wrathful justly against sin.

580 times Leon Morris said, the Bible speaks of God's wrath.

In his down under way, he said, so that it cannot be said to be an occasional topic.

The wrath of God is not an occasional topic. Pagans knew the gods were mad at them because they had a conscience, but they never knew why.

Why is God mad at me? Why are the gods mad at me? But the Hebrews knew for sure.

How do you know God's wrathful? Because mankind is sinful. There was no doubt about it that the

Jews knew for sure that what aroused God's anger was disobedience.

And here we have the apostle of love, John, writing 1 John 4, verses 7 to 12,

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God. Whoever loves has been born of God and knows

God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. Now, one of the things

I want you to remember is, of course God is love, but He is going to further describe what that love is, and so I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever want you to just stop in verse 8.

God is love. Yes, that's true. In this verse 9, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent

His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love.

You want the definition? Here comes the definition. In this is love. Not that we have loved

God. That's sure what it seems like, if we're not thinking rightly. But that He loved us and sent

His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought to love one another.

No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.

S. Lewis Johnson said, we talk about love, and if we think of love as being sentimental love, romantic love, like the love of a man for his wife or a wife of her husband, and if we leave it at that, we have not spoken of biblical love.

The Apostle John, Dr. Johnson says, speaks about propitiation, and he speaks about love.

In fact, he puts them together. John rises above all kinds of comparisons we might make to an absolute point of view at which propitiation and love become ideas which explain each other.

In other words, if you want to know what propitiation is, and you come to know it, then you know what love is.

And if you want to know what love is, you don't know what love really is until you see it in the light of propitiation.

James Denny said, so true, if you could just get one thing, one thing as Christians from me,

I want it to be this, for the Apostle to say God is love is exactly the same as to say

God the Son has made propitiation for our sins. That's what the love of God is.

No wonder Luther wrote, did we in our own strength confide our striving would be losing.

We're not the right man on our side, the man of God's own choosing. Propitiation.

Look in chapter 2 of the same book, 1 John 2. We're there. We might as well take a look at it. If you'd like to know what love is, it's biblically agape love.

I'm not talking about store gay love or heiress love or Philadelphia love. But here we have the concept of propitiation.

God is propitiating. In the old paganism, we had to make propitiation.

Here, God placates. God satisfies. He loved us when we were still hostile.

My little children, chapter 2, verse 1. I'm writing these things so that you may not sin.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father. Jesus Christ, the righteous.

He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the world.

See, when we think about forgiveness, we just think God says, well, you know what? I forgive.

If you sin against me, I can just say to you, I forgive you. I sin against you, you can just say,

I forgive you. True or false. But God can't say that. He can't only say that because His righteousness and His holy wrath against sin needs to be satisfied before He can forgive.

Well, you know, He just loves more than He hates and therefore He forgives. What's the picture for propitiation?

What do we think of? How would you explain it to a kid? Who can tell me what the mercy seat is?

I want to pick on one of my own kids and ask them, what's the mercy seat? How would the mercy seat help us understand propitiation?

I can imagine one of my kids says the mercy seat is the place where you sit when you don't get a spanking. That's not it.

What's the mercy seat? I should ask one of the seminary students what the mercy seat is. We actually have a

PhD student in here too who's no longer a student. Pradeep, are you hooded yet?

When do you get hooded? December. When they hood you, you become the doctor.

Doctor. Alright. I want to see you get hooded, but just send me a picture.

In paganism, gods have a short temper. They just fly off the handle.

They get mad at stuff. Got to give them some food. Have to give them some children.

Have to give them something to placate the wrath of God. But for the Jew, it was the concept of the mercy seat.

The place of propitiation. What covers the ark of the covenant? It's something called the mercy seat.

And when you study the mercy seat, you'll see that that's where they put the blood. That's where the blood of the sacrifice went.

You've got the angels on the outside pointed in. You've got the blood on top of the lid, the mercy seat.

And what was that to represent? Here's how you teach a kid about propitiation. Propitiation is like the blood on top of the mercy seat.

And why is that propitiation? Luke? Okay, that's alright.

Becky? Okay, something has to die. What was in the ark of the covenant?

Okay, let's put aside for a second. What are the other two things? I used to say to my kids, if you can tell me all three things, I'll give you two dollars.

Aaron's rod, some manna, and the law. Okay? So, here's the picture.

Here's the picture of propitiation. I deserve to die. Sacrifice has been made in my place.

The blood sprinkled on top of the ark, on top of the box, on top of this holy thing, representing

God. And when God sees the blood,

He doesn't see the broken commandments anymore, because the blood's been paid. It's like He sees all these commandments, we've broken them all, but He doesn't see them broken anymore because He sees the blood of the substitute.

That's the picture of the mercy seat. High priest sprinkling the blood of the slaughtered animal on the day of the atonement for the sins of the people.

James Boyce said, as God looks down from between the outstretched wings of the cherubim,

He does not see the law of Moses that we have broken, but instead sees the blood of the innocent victim.

He sees that punishment has been meted out. Propitiation has been made.

Isn't that good? Do you realize, friend, that every sin ever committed will be punished, and will either be punished on Jesus, or be punished by people in hell forever?

John Owen said, if He fulfilled not justice, I must. If He underwent not wrath,

I must to eternity. And then you realize, the

Son propitiated the Father's wrath that I deserved. Then you think, you know what?

Then I'm ready to serve. You say, well, what drives you to serve? What drives you to ministry? I'll tell you there's different ways that I can get people to serve.

One is brute strength. One is guilt, guilty feelings.

Another is manipulation. But how about since the Lord did that for you, how could you not respond to serve people?

No wonder Spurgeon said, with maybe my all -time Spurgeon favorite quote, when I thought

God was hard, I found it easy to sin. But when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion,

I smote upon my breast to think that I could ever have rebelled against the one who loved me so and sought my good.

And if God loves like that, then I want to serve Him, whether in full -time ministry or part -time, secular, sacred, whatever bifurcation you want.

Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned He stood, sealed my pardon with His blood.

That's pretty good for the New England crowd. Hallelujah, what a sinner. Ah, you sinned against me.

Let bygones be bygones, says God. I don't think so. Okay, I have a bunch more to do, but I don't know if this one is going to take too long.

You guys look like you're zoning out. I know it's a sin to make the Bible boring.

It's also a sin to look bored when the Bible is being taught. Did I just say that? I can't believe

I just said that. Myth number three. We're going to make this snappy, okay? Let's go. Myth number three. Satan is the opposite of God.

In other words, Satan and God, we'll use some big words, we live in a dualistic world, kind of Taoism.

You have to type that in your computer. What's Taoism? True or false?

Satan has equal power to God. False. Satan is a created being.

True. Of course, he's a created being. He's not the exact counterpart.

This is not Ying Yang. When I was a kid, they had different spooky shows on TV about evil twins.

Right? So one person was an outstanding citizen, but he got caught doing some bad things, but it wasn't him, it was his evil twin.

So God is really good, but the evil twin Satan has the exact same power. You've seen those shows too, haven't you?

No, God alone exists eternally. There will be an end to Satan in terms of his doom.

Evil does not have an eternal existence in heaven. Only God, from everlasting to everlasting.

You are God. Psalm 90. I love it that Luther called

Satan God's what? Anybody? You get ice cream first if you can answer this question.

What did Luther call Satan? Yes. He might have said that, but that's not the one

I'm after. That's close. You get some free toppings. Okay, he called him that too, but I'm thinking of an animal.

Close. God's ape.

The ape of God doing only what God has ordained. He is God's hardest working servant even though he has bad motives.

Only God is omniscient. Psalm 94. The Lord knows our thoughts. Let's turn to 1

Peter 5 and I think we're going to wrap it up here just to talk about Satan just for a minute. God only knows the future.

Satan doesn't know the future. Frankly, friends, I think we give Satan way too much credit. If you've got trouble in your life and you're blaming it on Satan, would you please stop doing that?

Because I don't think it's probably Satan. I'm not saying he can't influence. I'm not saying he can't tempt. But most of the time, my flesh takes care of me.

I think Satan's involved with things like Latter -day Saints and Utah and other things.

These days, the Vatican, probably in days past as well.

1 Peter 5. Be of sober spirit, the

NAS says. Be on the alert. Be watchful.

That word, be on the alert, is where we get the word Gregory. Just keep your eyes peeled. Don't sleep on the job.

There's trials all around you. And not just trials, but your adversary, the devil.

See, I just can't write off the devil in every case because right here Peter tells us. Your adversary, the devil.

That word means slander. The slanderer, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.

The adversary. Somebody's going to take you to court. And he's roaring.

That word, to roar there, is onomatopoetic. It's used only here in the

New Testament. But other places, it's used of a lion roaring or a wolf howling.

Now, I know we have Harry here. And Harry, he is a Greek expert, of course, because he's

Greek. But sometimes we don't know exactly how to pronounce

Greek words from the Bible. Different pronunciation than modern Greek.

But I will defer to him. But I love the word here. And this is for the kids because I see the kids kind of nodding off.

Here's the Greek word for roaring lion. Oruramai.

Tracy doesn't look impressed. By the way, I have to tell you that I never talk like that to secretarial helpers, to secretaries, associate pastors.

Oruramai! Doesn't that sound like it though? Micaiah, can you say it? Let me hear you say it.

There you go! That's exactly right. Okay, that's enough.

Calm down. And the text says he's going like this.

When a teacher teaches this way, back and forth, what kind of teaching is it? Pardon me?

Anxious. Distracted.

It's peripatetic. It's walking back and forth. That's what he's doing.

He's walking back and forth. Philosophers were known as peripatetics because they walked back and forth while they taught.

Well, he's not teaching. He's walking around trying to find a place to get in. To devour.

To ruin. To gulp down. So what do we do?

Resist him. That's the response to satanic opposition. Not freaking out.

Not incantations. Not rebuking him to Fitchburg. Poor people in Fitchburg.

Why don't you send him over there to them? Firm in your faith. In light of, because of, through the

Word of God. I know what the Bible says. I know who I can trust. And God's got a long track record of faithfulness.

See Hebrews 11. Knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world.

Other Christians have suffered. God has strengthened them. Other people have been through trials like yours.

Probably worse. God has brought them through it. So if anybody ever tells you

Satan is God's equal, don't you believe it for one minute. He's not my favorite theologian, but he's one of my favorite

English writers. C .S. Lewis said of this very issue.

I have the quote here somewhere. Now if by the devil you mean a power opposite to God and like God, self -existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly no.

There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. No being could attain a perfect badness opposite to the perfect goodness of God.

Now that is insightful. No being could attain a perfect badness opposite to the perfect goodness of God.

For when you take away every kind of good thing, intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself, there would be none of Him left.

Well, okay, 715. I think that's good enough. I was going to talk about bitterness and a few other things, but that is good enough.

Let's go ahead and pray, and we'll have some fellowship. Father, thank You for our time tonight.

We bless Your holy name. Thank You that we can look to the Scriptures and be reminded that You're a great

God who saves to think about maybe the theme tonight, the love of God that propitiates, the love of God that's even found in the

Old Testament for Israel, the love of God that conquers Satan. We're thankful that when we were unlovable,

Your Son loved us. You loved us. The Spirit of God, He loved us. And Father, we want to love other people too, and we want to have just Christian fellowship tonight and friendship and enjoyment, and You have brought us together for one reason and one reason only, and that is we have been the recipients of divine grace and love and mercy found in Christ Jesus our

Lord. I pray for the men, some of the ladies tomorrow that have to go to work. I pray that You just give them boldness.

Give them joy in their toil. Give them opportunities for ministry, witness.

Bless their day. Pray for the moms that wake up at work, and I pray that You would just help them, to the glory of God, love their husbands, love their kids.

Father, in the mundane, in the routine, in the daily same old, same old, would

You give us joy? Would You give us an eye toward we were unlovable yet You loved us?

Everything we have is of grace now. We deserve hell and we get everything. As a good gift from Your hand,