Oct. 15, 2017 The Remnant – A Testament to Gods Faithfulness by Pastor Josh Sheldon

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Oct. 15, 2017 The Remnant – A Testament to God’s Faithfulness Romans 11:1-10 Pastor Josh Sheldon

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Well, as you turn in your Bibles to Romans 11, our passage this morning will be the first ten verses.
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Before I read that, I had neglected to mention a few moments ago to tell you that tomorrow morning,
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God willing, I will be driving down to Moore Park, California with Pastor Mike Phillips. He and I are going together to the fire conference that will be hosted at Grace Baptist Church of Moore Park, and so you can pray for our traveling mercies and for good fellowship as we spend something close to six hours together in a car driving down there.
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And also, again, God willing, Tuesday morning I will be preaching that morning's message to the pastors who are coming to that, so you can pray for that for me too.
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I would very much covet and appreciate those prayers on my behalf. For this morning,
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Romans chapter 11, verses 1 through 10, the
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Apostle Paul writes, I ask then, has God rejected his people?
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By no means. For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.
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God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah?
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How he appeals to God against Israel? Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.
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But what is God's reply to him? I have kept for myself 7 ,000 men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.
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So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace would no longer be grace.
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What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened.
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As it is written, God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear, down to this very day.
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And David says, let the table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution for them.
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Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and bend their backs forevermore.
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This is the word of the Lord, and this, God willing, we will look at this morning.
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What we have before us is the Apostle Paul continuing to discuss the faithfulness of God, and that especially in relation to Israel.
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Israel's general and continual disbelief, though not all of them, but in general, their disbelief is in a flashpoint.
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For Paul to answer this question, he has like an imaginary dialogue partner, what we call a diatribe.
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And he is presuming this question would be asked from years of preaching and church founding.
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I believe he's been asked this question before, so he's addressing it preemptively, as it were. And the question is something sort of like this.
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Well, if this gospel is so wonderful, and this God is so faithful, as you're telling us,
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Paul, and if I'm as secure in him as most of chapter 8 would say
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I am, what about Israel? If God gave him their promises, if they were his elect people, if God put his grace upon them and drew them out of Egypt, made these promises to them, and yet now we see they don't believe, what,
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Paul, does that say to us about our security in the Lord? What does that say about the truth and the faithfulness and the power of God's promises to his people?
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The question is sort of, if we can put it just bluntly, why should I trust this gospel?
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Israel is the flashpoint for this, because by and large, Israel doesn't believe.
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And I say doesn't in the current, present tense. Because they don't now, by and large, believe, though many do.
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And they didn't, by and large, in the first century when Paul wrote this, believe. And so then, what does that say about God's promises?
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And what does that say about this Savior that you, Paul, would have me fall down before and repent of my sins and worship him and trust him for my eternal soul?
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That's sort of the question behind all this. It's a matter of security.
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It's a matter of knowing that God's promises are true. It's a matter of knowing that if God has put his spirit upon me, and I can affirm that Jesus is
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Lord and God raised him from the dead, that I am indeed secure in him.
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And Israel's unbelief would seem to give the apostle Paul this catalyst, this flashpoint, this leaping off point to say, hold on a second, we need to understand what
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God actually said. And that his promises were true. And it wasn't subterfuge.
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It wasn't tricky. It didn't take a scholar to take it all apart. It was right there. And God fulfilled every word of it all along the way.
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The message this morning is about security. The message this morning is about you being secure if you have proclaimed your faith in Lord Jesus Christ by the converting power of the
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Holy Spirit, giving you a new heart, that you believe he is Lord, believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.
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As Paul said earlier, you are indeed saved. The apostle
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Paul makes two major points here in these verses I read. And between these two major points, there's sort of a conclusion.
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What I mean by that is that in verses 1 through 4, he makes the case that God has not rejected his four known people.
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And at the end of it, verses 7 through 10, he shows how the scriptures prophesied God's current and past workings.
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And between these two, verses 5 and 6, is a return to this theme of the nature of God by which anyone at all is saved.
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By grace you have been saved through faith. Verses 5 and 6 sandwich these two major points by showing it's all of grace.
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The elect are elect by grace. The remnant is chosen by grace. God in his grace has always had a people in mind on whom he would bestow saving faith.
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Now we all have certain ailments of the soul, if you will. Things which have been brought upon us in various ways.
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And for many of us, it is the insecurity that we have in our relationships. We have a fear of rejection.
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We have a fear of being set aside. We have things that have happened in our lives that make us unwilling to trust another's love.
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To fully trust it, I should say. We hold back so that when this person, be it a parent or a wife or a husband, when they finally fulfill our self -imposed expectation and say they've had enough of us, then there's less of ourselves invested to feel the harm caused by that breach.
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And if you're one who feels like this because of upbringing, environment, I want you to hear this well this morning.
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Because if you have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, if God has put his Spirit upon you, given you a new heart to believe, and drawn you to himself by the peace that he has with you, by the cross of his
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Son, Jesus Christ, if that be the case with you, know that your eternal security has been decided not by what you do, not by the wealth or the quality of your deeds, but by the wealth and the quality of Christ's cross by which he made peace with God and secured your position in him with the
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Father. God in his grace has always had a people in mind on whom he would bestow this saving faith.
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We speak now of the God who said, I will never leave you or forsake you. And here is the question
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Paul asks that gives me an avenue to set foot on this path to explore our fear of rejection. In verse 1 of the 11th chapter of this book, which
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I just read, this is what Paul needs to set aside, the fear that God is a rejecting
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God. That his demands, when not met, turn love to hate, turn joy to sorrow, and acceptance to the dissolution of the bonds of love.
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And I would use the Apostle Paul's word and say, may it never be.
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Because God does not renege on his promises. If Israel has been rejected, why should
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I trust that I'll not be? The answer is in the first four verses. I ask then, has God rejected his people?
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Paul recoils at the thought of it. By no means. Other translations, may it never be.
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God has not forsaken his people whom he foreknew. Now, there should be a comma after his people, so that whom he foreknew is not about the people, but is about God and how he remains faithful in the face of rampant unbelief.
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Now, how can we prove this? Am I just saying this? Is it just a theological, a philosophical construct?
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Do I just want you to feel happy when you leave here? Can we prove this? Well, Paul's first proof is himself.
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He is of the very stock that his questioner has suggested has been set aside by God.
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Paul goes from the lesser himself to the greater. God's people whom he foreknew.
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If God rejected the nation of Israel, then Paul seems to say, what am I doing here?
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Because I am of that nation. So, if God rejected all of Israel, then
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I am rejected, then all my prayers, all my life, my conversion on the road to Damascus, the churches
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I've planted has all been some sort of subterfuge. It's been phony. Because if all
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Israel's rejected, I have to be with them, being of the stock of Benjamin and a child of Abraham.
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So, here he is. And none would doubt, I should think, that Paul was indeed a
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Christian, that he was indeed saved out of the world as a
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Benjamite from the tribe of Israel. See, the foreknowledge of God means his choice of a people.
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Now, the argument here is still in favor of God choosing individuals, God choosing me. Ephesians 1 .3
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teaches us, just as God chose us to be in Christ before the foundation of the world.
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This is an individual choosing before the foundation of the world. Are we fearing rejection because of what
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I did? What did you do before the foundation of the world? What did any of us do? And yet God chose at that point, before the foundation, whenever that was, certainly before we were.
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It's confirmed by Galatians 2 .20. The apostle speaks of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.
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And even with that, the irrevocable calling brings the one called into community with the called.
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Did you hear what I just said? We're saying it's individual. You are called individually. You get your own heart.
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And yet as one called, you are called into community with the rest of the called. No lone rangers, no lone wolves.
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We together are the body of Christ. I don't mean that we here in Sunnyvale at this one place are the sole and exclusive body of Christ.
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I'm speaking in the ubiquitous sense. Paul's first evidence that Israel hasn't been rejected is his own life, his own testimony about Jesus.
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And it's the same for any of us. You know, it's not circular reasoning to say I'm saved because I'm saved.
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Salvation should be able to be seen by outsiders. That's true. I mean, Jesus would have his people be that beacon on a hill.
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Yet we know that spiritual truths, salvation itself being the ultimate spiritual truth, these are spiritually discerned truths.
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Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2 .14, the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for they are folly to him.
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He is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. But Paul's writing in the first century to spiritual people, to people like us, to people with houses to go home to in the evening and make dinner, jobs to go to on Monday to make money to put food on the table, people with stresses in relationships, people with trouble at work, people who are worried about the economy, same people just like us.
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If God had rejected Israel and he had plenty of cause, he even now has plenty of cause to cast you and me aside this moment, but what keeps us here?
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God's promise. The blood of his son Jesus Christ shed on the cross for that people whom he foreknew.
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Listen, folks. If God casts aside unworthy people, then he's got to cast us all aside.
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If my worth brought me to Christ, then my lack of worth can take me away, but it was never about me, my accomplishments, you, and the things that you can get done, your talents, your skills, your brains, or lack thereof.
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It was never about any of that. It was God who chose the remnant of Israel by grace, and the remnant is just a smaller subset within the larger set of the elect.
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Are you a Gentile? And you believe in Jesus Christ? We would call you elect. Are you a
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Jew like me? And you came to Jesus Christ? You would call it remnant. But a remnant is no different than elect because God chooses individually.
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The remnant is just the word we use for those within Israel. And yet, if chosen by God, if converted by his
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Spirit, an individual from the elect group or an individual from the remnant group, whichever it is, are put in Christ and they're put together in the church.
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It's not about our worth. This comes up again and again. We need to hammer this point home because we all need to have our pride crushed by this.
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It's not about our qualities, our worth, or our accomplishments. It's about Jesus Christ.
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That's it. Well, his next proof is historical. If the first proof is himself, the next is historical.
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God does not cast aside people. God never cast aside anyone whom he chose. We find the next part of Paul's argument in this exchange between God and Elijah.
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You might want to turn there. Actually, I do want you to turn there. 1 Kings 19. And I forgot to tell you, when you turn to 1
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Kings 19, keep a thumb in Romans 11 because we're going to flip back there pretty soon. But I want you to be able to see both of them pretty quickly.
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But right now, 1 Kings 19. We're going to come upon Elijah as he comes to Mount Horeb to meet with God.
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And he was sent there by God. He said, you go to this mountain. There I will meet with you. You remember several months ago, we went through a preaching series on the prophetic cycle of Elijah, Elisha.
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And I made the point then, I want you to remember this when I read what Paul has for us in Romans 11, but in referring back to 1
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Kings 19. As I read that, remember the point that we made months ago that is thought by many, and I agree with this, that the place where Elijah was at this moment is the same cleft in the rock where Moses was.
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When God put his hand over Moses' eyes and didn't remove him until most of him had passed by, and he declared his name, and Moses saw his glory, many think that that was the same spot.
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Certainly Mount Horeb is the same mountain. I think Elijah was right there.
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And in verse 10, he makes this appeal to God. This accusation, if you will, against Israel.
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Verse 10, I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword.
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And I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life to take it away.
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It's as if he's saying that out of all Israel, there's only one survivor. Himself.
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He's the last one. Now look down at verse 18.
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Still in 1 Kings 19. Here's God's reply to him. Yet I will leave 7 ,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.
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You recall that Baal, B -A -A -L, that's the name of the pagan god that the
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Canaanites used to worship. And it was brought into Israel's worship there in 1
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Kings. I don't want to take 7 ,000 too literally, as if a census would have given us exactly that, many true believers.
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If you believe it was 7 ,000 to the man, I have no objection. I don't think anybody has any real objection.
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I don't make much out of the fact that seven's the perfect number, though it could be. I think what is being said here to Elijah is that there are those, albeit small compared to the overall population, a small percentage, but there are those,
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Elijah, whom I have reserved to me. I think that's the point. Though it's small, though its composition is ultimately a mystery to we who are mere mortals,
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God is determined to keep as his own this fixed set of people and has done all that is needed to preserve them.
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God says, I have reserved. And actually I said it wrong. I will.
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I will leave 7 ,000. And here's another point that we can stop and we can consider and meditate upon.
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As we, who are secure by nature, could become more secure in you who are afraid of abandonment, who think that it depends upon you to do anything, who feel this insecurity in relationships generally and therefore that transfers to how you feel about your relationship with God.
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Hear this carefully. God has done all that is needed to preserve the people he has determined.
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God has done it all. He will reserve for himself those whom he has chosen to reserve.
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From the point you were born to the point where God gave you the joy of believing in the
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Lord Jesus Christ, do you know why you survived from birth to that point?
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Because God preserved you. Because God before all time had chosen you by name.
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And so before your conception, as it were, he was preserving you. He's doing all that needs to be done to bring you to that point that he in his sovereign grace had determined you would come to, which is to believe in the
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Lord Jesus Christ. God does it all. God says to Elijah, yet I will keep these for myself.
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God's done it all. The reason I ask you to keep your finger on Romans 11 is
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I want you to see a difference between what I read in the two books, 1 Kings 19 and Romans 11.
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In Romans 11, you look there again, please. This is
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Paul. But what is God's reply? I have kept for myself 7 ,000.
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Now I don't want to make too much of this, but there's a change in the verbs. And this is something
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Paul doesn't do very often. And I couldn't find very quickly an instance where he did this, changing the ancient
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Hebrew or the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew, what we call the Septuagint, to some different use.
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Sometimes he applies it in ways that are a little surprising to us, and it opens our eyes to a better hermeneutic, a better understanding of how the
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Scripture should be understood by us. But here, that change in the verb tense really caught my eye.
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What does he say to Elijah? Back in his day. Yet I will leave.
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That's sort of a future. In the ancient Greek and in the original Hebrew, I will leave.
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It has that future feel to it. And what does he say in Romans?
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I have kept. I have done it. I have accomplished what I told
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Elijah. I can't make too much of it. It really caught my eye. A remnant was there in Elijah's day.
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There could be no doubt, in our day following the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, he in whom all
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God's promises are yes and amen, Paul can say what? God has kept.
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God has kept. This is the God who says to you, I will never leave you or forsake you.
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I have kept you. God from beginning to end, doing all that is needed for that keeping.
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And again I say, if you say Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
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God has kept you so that your mouth can make that confession from the overflow of your heart.
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If Israel has rejected God, then has God rejected them? The apostle again in the strongest terms, by no means.
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If that were possible, then no one could be saved. Why is that? Because if rejecters were to be left in that state, all of them, without exception, then all of us are in a boat sailing over the waterfall to destruction.
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If God rejected his enemies, he rejects us all.
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None could stand. While we were still weak, at the right time,
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Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person. This is Romans 5, 6 through 9.
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Though perhaps for a good person one would dare to die, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners,
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Christ died for us. While you were a sinner, knowing you were a sinner,
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Christ died for you. Now if God rejected those who rejected him,
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Romans 14 says, God looks down from heaven to see if there's any righteous, any who does good, any who seeks after him.
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What does he find? No, not one. And if God didn't choose some from out of that, no, not one, none would be chosen.
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If God rejected sinners, we all have to be rejected. No one could stand.
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Romans 11, 1 through 4 tell of a remnant chosen and preserved by God. Then verses 5 and 6, they tell us simply that this is by his grace, by grace you've been saved through faith.
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Only grace moves a perfectly holy God, one who can abide nothing unclean to be in his presence, to have anything at all to do with sinners.
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Much less mark out a remnant of sinners from among sinners, much less to safeguard them until faith is granted, much less to send his son to die for their sins, much less to declare them righteous and justified, and then so much as to break the impregnable barrier of sin between him and them.
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Think of what God has done. If we ever wonder if God will leave me or forsake you, think of what
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God has done. Think of all the things that could have happened between your birth and the inception of faith within you.
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I shudder sometimes to think of how close to actual physical death I was so many times.
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I forgot to jot them down. I thought they'd never leave my head. I give you a few examples.
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I shudder sometimes. Why did I survive my idiocies?
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Because God had chosen me and God preserved me through all that to the point that he determined that he would give me faith to repent and believe.
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And it's the same for any, it's the same for any of us. God has done it all.
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Many of us have what I'm going to call performance issues. We act as though our salvation and then our preservation depends on me, on my performance.
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But remember that it's God who chooses, that it's God who preserves those he chooses. Let us remember that God through his
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Son transformed the remnant, that's you, that's me, that's countless others, from bell worshipers in Elijah's day into saints today.
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Let us remember as we do all things as unto the Lord, as we spare no effort to do excellently, that our performance gained us nothing in the beginning, but only
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Jesus' performance gains us anything. Excuse me.
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It all depends on him. You know, if the quality of performance were in view, then nothing is acceptable.
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Isn't that true? This message I'm preaching, I tell you,
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I prepare these messages and I do the best I'm able. Whatever that level of best is, whether it's mediocre compared to others or excellent or not even so good,
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I do my best. But what does it depend upon? Not me, but the
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Christ who I proclaim. Excuse me. It's no less true for any of you, for any of us.
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It's God through his Son who selects and transforms this remnant.
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Remember that the well -done, good and faithful servant is to those whose offerings were not the best of anybody else, not something that is in and of itself excellent.
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It's because they were done by faith in his Son and through the power of his
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Holy Spirit. If quality performance were in view, it would be just like God selecting or being unwilling to select sinners.
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We'd never get chosen because we're all sinners. That's what we're chosen from. And if we were performance, we'd all get cast back out, wouldn't we?
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Because our performance, who can match up to Jesus, which is the standard? No, God in his grace keeps us.
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Verses one through four are of the remnant, the Israel within Israel marked out for salvation. They tell us that God's plan of salvation has not changed, that Israel's sin did not cause a change, of course.
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There is none, there never has been a plan B, as though disobedience confounds the
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Almighty and forces him to rethink his ways. So now look at Romans 11, seven through 10, because there they join in and they keep all the initiatives with God.
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There we have two quotes from the Old Testament. I know there's been a lot of them since we started chapter nine.
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The first, verse eight in Romans 11, that combines Deuteronomy 24 with Isaiah 29 .10.
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And the second quote, verses nine through 10 in Romans 11, those are both from Psalm 69.
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Deuteronomy 29 .4, has Moses explained to Israel why it is that they cannot fully comprehend or appreciate the great acts of God that they had witnessed the past 40 years.
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This is Moses before he leaves them to go to Canaan. Of course, he wasn't allowed to go because of his sin.
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What does he tell them? Why can't they understand what God has done for them? But to this day, the
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Lord has not given you a heart to understand or ears to see, or eyes to see, excuse me, or ears to hear.
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Now, Paul changes it again, sort of like he did with the other reference that we had. He changes has not given to has given them.
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He has given them. In the original has not given, he says now he has. It makes little difference whether it's
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God giving stupor or not taking away, but either way, all the initiative is God's.
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The more we keep it there, brethren, the more sure we will leave this place that God in Christ indeed has saved me.
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The more we keep the initiative with God, it's what some call monergism, that new life comes solely, mono, through the regeneration of God.
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All this in his sovereignty. So again, we flee to Jesus and his intercession for us.
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By faith and the power of the Holy Spirit, we have been given a heart that understands. We have been given eyes that see.
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We have been given ears that actually hear. Think of how all this has turned around in the
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Lord Jesus. The don't have eyes, don't have ears, don't have mouths, don't have anything that can do anything centered on the gospel.
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Think of how it's all turned around in Jesus Christ. By faith, we have a heart that understands the mighty works of God on our behalf.
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What mightier work is there than for him to show a sinner his sin, than to give him faith to believe and repent?
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Well, I know one mightier work, the cross of Jesus Christ and his resurrection, which proves the validity of what
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I just said. What power to overcome the sin, the determined sin of a committed sinner.
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But he's done it. He has done that. He's given a new heart. Ephesians 119 speaks of the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead.
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Romans 10 .9, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
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If you believe that, it is because God's given you a heart to believe. Moses told
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Israel, God gave you a spirit of stupor. He didn't give you these things, but God has, by faith in his
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Son, given you this. Do your eyes see Jesus? We walk by faith, not by sight.
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2 Corinthians 4 .4, Paul writes of how the God of this age prevents people from seeing Jesus, and so he does, and so we are consigned to the darkness of this present evil age, except for, except for this mighty working of God's power giving us eyes to see beyond this temporary realm.
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Colossians 1 .9, Paul prays that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.
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Think of Jesus touching the deaf man in Mark 7 .34, and what did he say to his ear?
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Be opened. And from that day he heard, so also your ears, hearing the same words as anyone else, when they hear
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God's truth, they recognize it as just that. All this by faith, all this by faith alone, all this by God and his predetermined will to save you.
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They had the same chance to believe as any other. Speaking of Israel, who
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Moses was speaking to there, I don't speak here of predestination. I don't speak of single or double predestination.
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Does God predestine you to salvation? Does he also predestine you to damnation? That would be double predestination.
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I'm not speaking of those here. I don't address them because Paul doesn't. I speak rather of a people who together saw and heard the same things.
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This is Israel. They're 40 years in the desert. To the members of the elect, Israel, yet by God's design not of the remnant, the whole nation being elect, they were simply great deeds done on their behalf.
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Almost a flippant sort of thing. Isn't that cool? The water's staying back so that we can get away from that Egyptian army.
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To the others, the remnant within, the elect, they were the wondrous works of a gracious God done for undeserving sinners.
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That's eyes to see. That's ears to hear. That's a mouth that speaks. That's a heart that understands.
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This is what God has given you.
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If you can make that simple confession that we spoke of earlier from Romans, that Jesus is
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Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead. Now in verses 9 and 10, we go to David, and David says, let their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution for them.
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Let their eyes be darkened so they cannot see and bend their backs forever. From Psalm 69, what we call an imprecatory psalm.
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In these sorts of psalms, the author most of the time, David, he seeks God's retributive justice against his enemies.
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It's a sort of prayer Nehemiah prayed when he said, remember Tobiah and Sambalat, oh my God, according to these things that they did and also the prophetess,
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Noah, Deliah and the rest of the prophets who wanted to make me afraid. Remember them and give them their just due.
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Or even Paul in 2 Timothy 4, Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm.
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The Lord will repay him according to his deeds. Now Paul's use of Psalm 69 in Romans 11 is admittedly a little tough to figure out.
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Some commentators think he's referring to the sacrificial system. Others think he's referring to Israel's dependence on the law for gaining righteousness.
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And I pondered this quite a bit and I don't want anyone to think that I've stepped out up to the plate and I found the one answer that solves all the difficulties.
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But I think I have an explanation. It's not 100 % ironclad but I do think I have an explanation for Paul's use of Psalm 69 here.
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I mean we start with the opening premise that this is inspired by the Holy Spirit and it was
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God who would have this in here. But Psalm 69 is an interesting one. Jesus referred to it verse 4 of Psalm 69 when he explained the hatred against him in John 15, 25.
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I'm going a little fast so you don't have to turn there. But Psalm 69 verse 4 used by Jesus in John 15, 25.
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But the word that is written in their law must be fulfilled. They hated me without a cause.
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Peter quoted Psalm 69 verse 25 to explain Judas' demise and the need to replace him for it is written in the book of Psalms.
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Here's Psalm 69. May his camp become desolate and let there be no one to dwell in it and let another take his office.
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And finally all four gospels refer to this psalm Psalm 69 verse 21 when they refer to the gall and the sour wine that was given
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Jesus at the cross. They gave me poison for food and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.
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So what's the point here? Those who are determined to follow their own way fall into their own snare.
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Our own pride, our own ego, our own agendas, our own table to use the word of Psalm 69 becomes that very thing that entraps us.
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Will their own table become a snare? A snare is to make fast. It's an old word for traps for birds. In the context of the psalm it is a call to God that their unjustified hatred be brought down upon their own heads.
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Verse 21 speaks of the poison for food, the gall and the bitter wine that Jesus was given at the cross.
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The next verse asks for their own table to become their trap. The way birds are lured unwittingly to a trap to their destruction, so let the bounty they enjoyed while hounding out cruelty to those who did them no harm but only good, let that be their own trap.
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God gives the desires of our hearts, doesn't he? At some point he takes his hand, his restraining hand off and lets us go where we will.
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That's way back in Romans 1, 18 to 25. But Psalm 37, 4 then says that when we delight ourselves in the
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Lord, when we take pleasure in his ways, when he is our desire, then we will have it.
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Others, those determined to ignore him, go to the bounty they think they've gotten for themselves. Here are self -defined, self -attained, self -glorifying righteousness whose end is destruction.
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What they planned for others, the sour wine and gall, comes back upon them. It's Deuteronomy 18, verses 18 to 19, where the law of Moses says that if you make a false accusation against someone, when it's proven that your accusation was false, you're going to receive the punishment that they would have received had your false accusation be thought of and prosecuted as true.
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It's really what it means for your own table to become a snare to you. So what do we take from all this?
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What do we take from all this? The simplest lesson is the best is sinners get what they deserved. The entire nation of Israel saw the same mighty works of God, yet declined to believe what their eyes were able to convey to themselves.
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We can stay with Israel's wanderings to explain it. Everyone woke to find the man at each morning.
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It fed the whole elect nation that had been redeemed out of Egypt. And some said, oh good, we get to eat again.
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Others said, thank you, Lord, for your grace and your undeserved mercy.
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Because no one deserved the man and yet all partook. All the bodies were fed, but only some spirits.
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A nation was elect, but a remnant within was saved as it is today. Do you ever worry that God will turn from you?
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Early in my Christian life, I had a friend at our old church who was from the church of the Nazarene and they're very determined that your salvation is a moment -by -moment experience.
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That the ifs in the Bible where Paul says, if you continue, mean that the moment you don't continue, you're no longer saved and somehow have to get resaved or something like that.
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Do you ever fear like that? Let me declare to you that God the
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Father might just as well turn away from His own Son than to turn away from you if you are in His Son.
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Because if you are in His Son, read John 17, and the unity you have with God the
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Father because you are in His Son by faith. What does
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Jesus say? The love that God the Father has for Him as God the Son, He has for those that are in Him, in Jesus.
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God doesn't turn away from such. In Elijah's dark day, there was by the grace of God a faithful remnant whose knees the
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Lord of hosts had kept from bending. In 2 Kings 8 .16, we read of a king descended from David, Jehoram, who did evil in the sight of the
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Lord in tandem with his wife who was Ahab's daughter. He was so wicked that the whole Davidic line seemed to be at risk.
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But hear what God did. Hear what God says in 2 Kings 8 .19. Yet the
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Lord was not willing to destroy Judah for the sake of David, His servant, since He promised to give a lamp to him and to his sons forever.
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Security in God's Word. Secure eternally by the faith you have in the
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Lord Jesus Christ. Brethren, we need to be faithful. We need to obey. We need to confess our failings.
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We need to always have in mind that it is Christ's, not our performance that gains anything. All of that.
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To Paul's opening question, has God rejected His people whom He foreknew? No. May it never be.
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Far from rejecting, He is lovingly preserved. And if you can think of the time from where you were born to the time you confessed the
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Lord Jesus Christ and look back and see God's preserving, loving, kind, sovereign hand bringing you through all of that and preserving you for that day when faith suddenly bursts out of your heart and mouth, that God will never turn from you.
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If you today know the Lord Jesus Christ by faith in His finished work at the cross, then you are joined together with those saved from that nation, that remnant, and they with you.
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And I close from Ephesians 4. There is one body and one spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one
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Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
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Amen? Heavenly Father, we thank You again for the day that You've given us. We thank You, Father, for these words from the
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Apostle Paul that You gave him to give to us, that we can know that when we are saved, when you give faith,
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Lord, it is not something You take back. You do not renege on Your promises, but this remnant, this elect, we individually and brought together as a body,
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Lord, chosen by You, forever secure in You because of what You have done for us in Your Son, the