Sin, It's Nature and History - Part 2 — Paris Reidhead

The Great Commandment and the Law

But when the Pharisees—and I begin reading, by the way, with verse 34—but when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting, testing him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. It's that fortieth verse that I call to your attention particularly. As a door swings with two hinges, so the door of understanding of the message of the prophets and the place and importance and meaning of the law, these two commandments.

These are the hinges. And you'll understand what was meant by the law, and you'll understand the message of the prophets. So you're told, to the degree to which you ponder and meditate and understand these two commandments.

It has this kind of importance attached to it, ought to demand and receive a great deal of our attention. And yet I find that very frequently we rather slide by this without examining it in the detail, the intensity that it deserves.

Sin's Origin in the Garden

Let's go back in our thinking to where we were last evening when we closed. That God, object of his love, receive his love, enjoy it in a fashion that would be acceptable to God and satisfy the ancient longing in the heart of God.

Man was made to be the object of God's love. Now we find that the event that occurred in the garden had to do with this. The basis of the relationship was that God poured his love upon man, woman, and they received it and were completed by it, returned their love to him, and thus satisfied his heart.

But something happened. When Mother Eve listened to the seduction of our ancient foe and made her choice. But it was essentially this that heralded from God's sin. Without defining it adequately, and we must define it if we're to understand what we're talking about.

Biblical Love as a Command of the Will

The love of the Bible is not to be confused with the love in common parlance. In modern music, or even in much of our hymnody, implies that love is an emotion, a feeling, a sensibility. And here is in the imperative moods, under the command and the control of your will, to convey sensibility and feeling.

Put us on the drawing board again and reconstruct us capable of controlling our emotions by our will. Any particular thing about which you might feel righteous indignation and anger, I'm going to appeal directly.

Count of three. If you've got an eager speaker, you still will be able to cooperate. Control. Do about stopping the fans in the country church. All the time. Will you do me a favor? Will you go to our triangle here and put an arrow at the end of mental.

This way? That's right. No, just pointing toward the apex of the triangle. That's right. Now there you go. Now come down the other side with a shorter arrow. This way? That's right. Now come there. Right.

Now come over there. Control what you feel. Control what you feel. I can control what you choose. Reverse the process. That way. For sensibility, it has to be of the will. Commitment of the will. Joy and satisfaction of the beloved.

He is happy with you. To his heart. Satisfaction and fulfillment and happiness of your neighbor. How does love thyself? Coordinate and improper. There's a proper self-love. Blessedness and joy and happiness and well-being and fulfillment of yourself.

To seek the highest joy and happiness and blessedness and satisfaction of God. And to seek the highest joy and blessedness and satisfaction and fulfillment and well-being of your neighbor. You put self-love into that.

It becomes ordinate. It becomes proper. It becomes right. Now the way some people seem to feel about themselves, I hope I never become their neighbor. Because it would be a wretched thing to be treated by them the way they seem to be content to treat themselves.

Human Worth, the Law, and Grace

To despise themselves. To have no sense of their value, their worth, their importance. We as evangelicals have contributed to that. We have taken the idea that in order to prepare people for grace, we've got to take the sledgehammer of the law and reduce man down to a worm in the dust.

The only problem is after he's put his faith and trust in Christ, we've never quite understood how to bring him back to being a human being again. Many times after they've been forgiven and pardoned, they seem to go right on as worms in the dust.

And I believe it's dishonoring to the Lord for that to be the case. Because for all he loved us, himself for us, worth and value and importance in you, and it's not improper for you to see worth and value and importance in yourself.

So what we're trying to do is not to destroy personality and personal sense of worth and value, but to bring it into the right relationship. Now what happened back there in the garden is what we've all done.

What was it that took place? Well, Mother Eve, whose heart had been fixed and set to please God, listened to the seduction of the ancient foe, and her intention and commitment to please God and satisfy his heart, turned away and she made the supreme commitment of her will to please herself at the expense of God, without regard for his interest, without regard for his pleasure and his joy in her, and the consequence?

The consequence was that, and so did Father Adam, and so did you, and so did I. Understand the law, understand that the intent and the purpose of the law was to protect God's interests, God's interests about you and around you, and deprive you of those rights, privileges, God had intended you to have and to experience.

Repentance as a Change of Mind and Will

The text tells us that God has established the law, quoted by Christ from the Old Testament, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy strength, your total being focused, this commitment of the will, this supreme choice governing principle of the life, to please God, and I trust you with me, to understand this as a mental concept, to understand this as a biblical principle or a biblical truth.

One can give assent to it, as being taught in the scripture, quality experience, that's what we're talking about, totality experience, mental understanding, clear understanding, emotional stimulation and desire, and a volitional choice, only then does it become an experiential reality.

The experiential reality of the sinner is quite the reverse of what we've been talking about. The sinner has listened to the beguiling lies of the enemy, he shall be as God. The soliloquy of the sinner is, I'm going to do and satisfy my urges, and fulfill all these propensities that I have.

Teacher, preacher, I don't want anybody telling me I'm going to do what I want to do with my soul. We have those popular songs, I did it, most supporting. Commitment of the will to the principle of pleasing self.

Sarah's Disobedience and the First Choice to Please Self

Begins early, begins so early that third child, education and administrative responsibilities in Virginia school system, was then just under four. The living room and saw my daughter who looked so much like me that when I would carry her and her face was next to mine, I'd hear people murmuring peep and repeat, or something like that.

And she had a lot of other things in common, I guess, but at any rate, my study was in our bedroom, this plant, we had a beautiful Florida plant. She had taken off a leaf, I saw her take it, knew it wasn't that important, I saw her pull it.

And she took that leaf and looked at it, didn't know what to do with it, and she tore it in two. She looked at the edges and smiled a little bit, pretty proud of herself, and she took those two pieces and fitted them together, and then she took it and tore it again.

And she liked what she was doing, and it kind of held good. So she put those four pieces together and she tore it again, but it was a little hard, so she took those pieces and wondered what to do, and she held them up like this and watched them fall one at a time and drift to the floor.

I couldn't do anything about that leaf, could I? I lost the plant. And I wanted to see what she was going to do, so I just stood there and watched her reach to take another leaf. And she looked around, and she saw me, and I said, Sarah, don't touch that plant again.

And kept moving. I said, Sarah, do you know what she did? That sweet little image in her head, and she said, that's what my little Sarah did, that's what your mental decision is in satisfaction of God, upon ourselves.

It was just a toy from a slip and grown it to be what it was. The difference to her, it was for her to tear it up. She was governing her life, seeking to use. That's exactly what you did, and that's exactly what I did.

The Nature of Sin and Repentance

In fact, the scripture says, sin. At some point in time, every one of us made that governmental choice. The principle and the policy and the practice of pleasing ourselves. The Lord Jesus said to the Pharisees, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and on another occasion, with all thy strength.

Something they could do. They made a choice to please themselves. They hadn't lost their ability to choose. It's not because they can't repent. It's not because they lack any ability to repent. They won't repent is because they won't repent.

They can't repent. A change of mind. There was repentance. She changed her mind about living to please God and make Him happy, and it was a 180 degree turn to live to please herself and make herself happy at the expense of God.

It was a change of mind from that which she'd set. Now, she had to repent. She had to change her mind. We get the idea that to repent feels sorry. No. Or to have emotion. No. Repentance is a change of mind, a change of will, a change of purpose, a change of governmental principle.

And so, what she has done, what we have here, is the Lord Jesus saying to His generation, the Lord thy God, this is a principle that shall govern your life, to please God in everything, to seek the highest good of your neighbors, even as you would your own.

The Law as the Schoolmaster Bringing Sinners to Christ

For that to be implemented, it's going to require something happen. Now comes the function and the use of the law. We're fixing our love upon ourselves. Pharisees. Pharisee was trying to test Christ by asking, which is the great commandment?

And you say to him, Mr. Pharisee, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, and you are casting pearls before swine. In this world, that message can have any meaning, whatever. He already has his own plan of salvation.

Casting is a part of the Pharisee's life. He talks in his theology because he's not a Sadducee. The Sadducee did not believe in the inspiration of the Torah. The Sadducee did not believe in life after death.

The Sadducee did not believe in the necessity of blood atonement. The Sadducee didn't believe in the existence of angels. The Pharisee is orthodox in the inspiration of the Torah, why he even believes in the inspiration of the Talmud.

The Talmud was the Old Testament version of the scopial notes. I mean, it was there as part of the heritage of the people, and it was given almost the same degree of inspiration as the Torah. And so, he believed in the Torah, but he also believed very early in the Talmud as well.

He was also, as I said, evangelistic in his zeal. It was said he would circle the world to make one proselyte. I mean, there wasn't any limits to which he would go to get people to turn to Judaism. ...three times a day, and the shortest of the prayers would be twelve minutes, unless you really rushed it.

Pharisaic Religion and Self-Made Salvation

...everything, even down to the mint you put in your tea, and the anise to flavor your cookies, and the cumin, which was so valueless only the poorest of the poor used it, you wouldn't even stoop to pick it up, like our pennies and nickels are now.

What can you buy with a nickel, my grandchild said, when I gave it away. He couldn't buy anything anymore with a nickel. This money, if someone said, here, Mr. Pharisee, here's some mint I picked off the wall, and the big Pharisee would count it out, ten piles, and give one to the Lord, keep nine for himself.

He tithed, he prayed, he fasted one day out of the week, not swallowing his fiddle from sunup till sundown. Gypsy Smith went to him and said, are you saved? And he looked at him, he said, listen, I'm a member of three ledges and four churches, and you ask, am I saved?

Well, the Pharisees were. That was how they were. And they had another element in their armor, their equipment. They were premillennial in their hope. Personal of Messiah, to set up the throne of David was a first and great commandment.

And you come to him and you say, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and he said, well, I got a whole box full of it. And you ask him, what do you mean? That's unnecessary. Yeah, have you ever met a sinner who didn't have a plan of salvation?

I never have. He has his own plan. Some of them say there isn't any God. Well, that's a cheap way out. But if there isn't, and there isn't any hell, that's another cheap way out. Some of them say, well, if there's a God, he's got a big scale in the sky and he's putting my good deeds on one side and my bad deeds on the other, and before I die, I'll put some more good deeds up there so that I'll tip the balance and I'll make him.

When you start to talk with him as a plan of salvation. Now, what's a sinner? Well, first she died. She came under the sentence of physical death. I believe that physical death is an absolute insult to the Creator.

The Threefold Death of the Sinner

We're made so that every cell in our body is replaced by another cell quite frequently. Some as often as every seven days, and even the enamel on our teeth, we're told, every seven years. So, God made us so we'd just stay perpetually young until he had to bring another principle in because we were capable of so much mischief that he couldn't let trust us to live longer than first 900 years, then 120 years, and that was too long, and then he broke it down to 70 per chance 80, and he figured that if he got over 70, you were going to be tottering around anyway, so he couldn't do too much damage.

But he couldn't trust us with what we were capable of. We could have gone on living indefinitely as long as Methuselah wasn't for evil. Now, physical death was one of the consequences, and legal death, as Harry pointed out this morning, lost all legal claim on God.

The only thing a sinner can demand of God is that God is just in his judgment, but precious little comfort he's going to get out of that. And the other, we also began to die spiritually. No fellowship with God.

Why? The sinner is as close to God geographically as the holiest saint, and he will never move and have our being. But what happened with man's sin was that God just broke the connections in his little radio that tuned in on God, and so his set's dead.

He's dead in trespass and sin. That doesn't mean he's gone down to a pile of rust. That just means that the connection's broken. And he lives and moves and has his being in God, but he doesn't have any contact with him.

He produced death, soul, and sin. What's involved in it? Well, first, it's treason. It's betrayal of just and proper government. The sinner is a traitor against just government, against God, who governs justly with moral law and imposes moral obligation.

And thus, as a traitor, having betrayed government, just and proper government, that's a capital crime. He's under the sentence of death. Secondly, it's not just an act of treason, but it's a lifetime of rebellion.

Open rebellion against the rules and the regulations of God for the protection of others. The sinner is a rebel. And then we find that he is also a transgressor. When God's law comes between him and anything he wants to gratify his appetites and satisfy his desires, he cuts a cross.

And then it is also that he's an anarchist. The only government that he has is the one that my little four-year-old tried to impose. I'll do what I want to do. I won't do what you want me to do. Anarchy.

And, of course, the worst insult of all is that the sinner is an enemy of God. He's not the enemy of the sinner. The carnal mind is enmity against God. It's not subject to the law of God. A need indeed it cannot be because of what it is.

What is the carnal mind? The carnal mind is I'm going to do what I want to do. An academic question. Do you think that a person who is a traitor and a transgressor, a traitor and harassed for pardon, God were to pardon and forgive those who hold in their heart the purpose to continue in their treason, rebellion, their anarchy, their transgression, and their enmity, God would destroy all foundation for his government.

By himself. What we have to ask is this. Are we going to prepare, are we going to prepare them for grace? All the law, the New Testament teaches us that God hates sin. Those neighbors that for 120 years have taunted and mocked Noah as he built the ark slip from anything they would have to hold them as the waters continue to rise and the ark with the water.

Judgment from Noah to Babel

And as the last of that generation sink beneath the soot-seed foam, one message is clear. Choice to rebel is choice to continue in defiance of God's just and proper government continues and there is one called a mighty hunter before the Lord Nimrod ought to be a mighty rebel before the Lord.

He was going to make a temple that would dethrone God. Actually there is some evidence that he was building it to go to the heavens to tear God out of the heavens. And so he built that temple. The world was of one language, one culture, and they all rallied around him in their defiance of God, not his own mother as his wife in a semi-incestuous relationship.

Semiramis, he enthroned her as the goddess of heaven. Nations from the throne at the top of the tower to sanction and cover and protection for every kind of sexual indulgence and abuse. And as you see they began to wander to wander out from to the north and to the east and the south and the west.

Their tongues confused no longer able to understand one another just a few here and a few there with some common language. And as they slip away lost to each other God is judging the world saying you can't trust them to be together.

One language, one culture, one people are too capable of evil. Never again shall they so be joined. And we who've been trained as linguists and have gone to the countries where we found every one little hill in the Sudan just a small hill no more than 1 ,600 feet high and no more than its base looked like an old volcano cone on the sides of that hill were three small tribal groups to all together no more than 250 people.

And we found that they still treasured that language because it was the rule and the heart of their culture. And the people living here might know a little, a few words of the language of the people whose hut they could see but only a few.

They stayed away from each other because they were the last remnants of great tribes that had once inhabited the land that had been pushed by their enemies up onto this hill and now afflicted 98 of them with venereal disease.

That generation would be the last generation that tribes would exist. And you understand how thoroughly God can fuse the tongues. And every time you find a group of people like that the testimony is God hates sin.

Sodom, Conscience, and Universal Moral Law

Come with me again and go down there to that little village on the plain in the sight of the Dead Sea. They gave themselves up to all kinds of immorality and uncleanness and there were 10 men that gave up good fine to stand between God and His wrath.

He rains down from Heaven upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah. God's wife turns to look and see the devastation. She becomes a pillar of salt. The smoldering ruins have but one testimony. You believe traitors and rebels and transgressors and anarchists and enemies to retain those attitudes and that dorbent and direction and be pardoned while still continuing to live?

Treason! God will indeed no longer be worthy of worship. You have to make the newest generation into Sodom and Gomorrah. They have sinned just before God but the doers of the law shall be justified. ...the things contained in himself written in their hearts also bearing witness and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing which show the work of the law written in...

Everyone who breathes the breath of human life has inscribed on the fleshly tables of his heart, his conscience I don't know what you want to call it but it's immaterial to me. Here it says the heart.

...some, certainly not all but I have read many others who have had wider experience in mind. ...contact with the... ...finger that traced and etched into a piece of stone the Ten Commandments wrote upon the fleshly tables of the heart wrong to commit adultery, yes!

Wrong to kill, yes! We want to... We're not blaming anyone. ...themselves. We're simply stating because we want to do it. That's the answer. That's the proper answer. That's why everybody who does anything does it because he wants to and because he feels that in his circumstances because his circumstances are unique.

It is right. Did you know that everyone who commits a crime does it believing that with his provocation and with... ...for him to do... ...only do that which is in our eyes right. We justify our... ...wrong for others but it's all right for me.

My situation is so different. We know it's wrong but to them it's right and they do that which in their own eyes they excuse themselves by saying well, even God wouldn't hold this against me after all he knows what my provocations are.

Knowing it's wrong but excusing himself because in his case. So surprised when they're caught to think that the others didn't realize that how right and how intrinsically right it was for them to do it.

Well, it was a wrong one but not for me. Mr. Marcos is having a terrible shock to understand why the world is so critical of stealing 24 billion dollars. I mean after all what's a little bit of money down there?

I mean one billion here another there mounts up to quite a bit of money after a while and so why should anybody think it's strange? He's not the only one. Many others have done the same but in their eyes they're justified.

They're the heads of state. It was in Africa where I've been so burdened and worked so hard for so many years in development. Why it was that leaders could take 50 to 90 percent of all the foreign aid that came into the country and the people didn't get incensed about it.

Back under the tribal life the big chief owned everybody and everything and when you've got a nation and he's the big chief of the nation doesn't he own everything? Isn't it all his? Aren't we his? The people in the villages say but you see they've been misled and the people that are in those positions have enthroned themselves in the place of God and they think it's all right.

The Law Prepares the Self-Justifying Sinner for Grace

How are you going to possibly ever prepare such people with such concepts for grace? How are you going to do it? How are you going to go to somebody whose conduct in his own eyes is perfectly right and convince him it's wrong?

You're going to say what you're doing is wrong? Big deal. What do you know about potpourri was this little boy? If that was wrong you shouldn't have done that. It has a means. Now remember what I said.

Here on the heart is written the law. Human spirit is caught. It's going to begin to grind. It's going to grind. Tells us that by the law is the knowledge of sin. Master to bring us to Christ and the only tool with which God ever armed himself to prepare sinners for grace was the law.

Hands off. Because some very smart teachers in England stole a monograph prepared by a Spanish Jesuit in Spain in which he made the thesis that presented the thesis that the absence of the supernatural was due to the fact that God deals with each generation in a different way.

He coined the metaphor dispensations. That Spanish monograph fell into the hands of J .M. Darby in Plymouth, England and he got it translated and it became the foundation of what he was later to call dispensationalism.

Annual 70th week. You take every section of the Bible and put it into its little airtight compartment so that when you got down to this period now called the time era and so you went to sinners who were traitors and rebels and transgressors and if they would just believe that God loved the world and gave his son they would be saved.

They didn't need to repent and there was no place for the preaching of the law. Ancient enemy of grace from the arsenal of God with only tools and weapons that he'd ever used ever prepared to bring men to grace.

Repentance, the Law, and True Evangelism

Prepare them for grace. Bible school. Saint Paris who better think about this subject of repentance again. I said now listen I've gone with you when it came to the matter of the baptism of the spirit but I'm not going to go that far.

Know that repentance is Jewish and it has no place in this age of grace. And he said and not only must we restudy and rethink repentance we've also got to stop to start thinking about the right use of the law in preparing men for grace.

And now I said you've gone too far boy. This is the end of it. You go your way I'm going mine. The law is Jewish and it has no place in this time no reason for it to be taught it has nothing to do with us today.

That's mean. My Bible was the size of a Sunday school quarter. The people that were to come around as though I were seeing it afresh that there was absolutely nothing anywhere that had improved on the fact that the law is the schoolmaster.

The law begins to grind. The Holy Spirit causes the millstone to grind and the human spirit that's been crusted over with its sophisticated rationalization is scraped down to the brick. ...vision of the gospel ...salesman of evil.

...shoddy evangelist. ...products of my zealous ignorant evangelism to flee from the wrath. ...words in his diary of one that's almost impossible to get except from a library ...one is good but so much of it's cut out.

But in the original as it came from the pen of Jonathan Edwards as he had taken the diary of Brainerd's life when ministering to the Indian tribes in New Jersey he recorded on a Sunday night today as I have had services in the morning in such and such a village and in the evening in this such and another village I have had the joy of seeing seven in the morning and five this evening that have testified to good faith in Christ my heart rejoices that after these years of labor I'm beginning to see some fruit but the next day he writes throughout the night coughs spitting blood for he was tubercular.

I could not sleep because whereas when I had completed my writing flush of sleep I awakened coughing hearing God speak to my heart saying what if those in whom you found such joy had mistaken the comforts that you gave to the believers as applying to them in their impenitent state falsely assuming themselves to be children of God he said today I must go to all the seven of the morning and the five of the evening and talk with each one of them personally.

And that night's note said fears were realized of the seven of the morning the three that had grounds for good there was only one and they had gone on in the assumptions that they made. And in that last day from the lake of fire would accuse me before the throne of almighty God of being a faithless deceived them about the most important sensitive many would say it's good you don't preaching of the gospel of sinners of telling them how to be saved before they have any knowledge as to where from what they these dumb skills may be riveted to our minds to our hearts to our spirits is of thee and from thee will be remembered by us and what is not will be quickly forgotten be our father that something that will endure to the eternal glory of Christ what's been said and done.