After Darkness, Light (Part 2)

Thanks for tuning in to No Compromise Radio with pastor and author Dr. Mike Abendroth. Today on No Compromise Radio we'll be hearing Pastor Mike open the Word of God in a recent message he preached at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

Now let's join Pastor Mike in progress as he preaches through the scriptures verse by verse with No Compromise.

The Root Cause of Sin and the Law’s Purpose

I read this week that in the last 4 ,000 years of human history there have been but 286 years of peace despite more than 8 ,000 peace treaties. No wonder because Isaiah says there's no peace for the...

Well those are all effects. You want to know what the cause is? Verse 18. Here's the root cause of why people sin. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Psalm 36. Why does Paul go to these great lengths to talk like this?

We see the answer in verse 19. Now we know that whatever the law says, he's speaking about all the Old Testament there, the things that he just quoted, says it speaks to those who are under the law what?

The purpose? So that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God. So that every mouth may be closed. When you evangelize, that is your goal. So the person on the other end says, I'm guilty.

I have no defense. What's true of my life? True in the Bible. What the Bible says, I am. I have no excuse. I'm not going to say it's a Twinkie defense, I spanked when I was a kid, there could be a thousand excuses people use now.

It's true. Everything that you say there God is true of me. And by the way, until you do that, you have no need to have a Savior, kind of a buddy Jesus to come along with you. What you need to do is say, Sir, I'm completely guilty.

This language is, you're at the bar of justice in a courtroom and God shows you who you are as it were, and you just have to say yes. When I get pulled over by the police, it doesn't happen that often, but when I do, I'm telling you what I do every single time.

Mark it well. Hands at the 10 and 2 position. Officer comes up, male or female, and rolled down your window, yes sir or yes ma 'am. Did you know you were going 49 in a 20 zone? Officer I could give you all kinds of excuses, but I'm completely guilty.

They don't give me the ticket. Why? Because people don't say that today. I'm guilty. I did it all. I'm not going to say I was on the phone or this, that or the other, I didn't know. I'm totally guilty.

That's why when you go to people, they don't know the gravity and the depth of their sin. It does no good to say come to Jesus and He'll fix your marriage. Come to Jesus and you'll have a wonderful life.

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. No, when you hear the sound of silence, that's when you show them who Jesus is. That's what Paul's doing here. Martin Lloyd-Jones says, you do not begin to be a Christian until your mouth is shut, is stopped, and you are speechless and have nothing to say.

You put up your arguments and produce all your righteousness, then the law speaks and it withers to nothing. It becomes filthy rags and dung and you have nothing to say. It reminds me of Job before God, behold I am insignificant, what can I reply to you?

I lay my hand on my mouth. Verse 20, for by works of the law, no human being, not Jew, not Gentile, not boy, not girl, not man or woman, not anybody here, will be justified, declared righteous before God's court in His sight.

Oh, you might be righteous in front of other people. Might not be as bad as your friends, might not be as bad as people on Jerry Springer, but in God's sight, the one that it counts for, on that day you'll die and you surely will die, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

You try to do good things in the law and the only thing that does you is to show you how far you fall short. It's not the purpose of the law to save anybody. It's the purpose of God's law, whether it's love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength in the neighbor as yourself or any other law of God so that you say I'm corrupt, I'm defiled, I'm depraved and I deserve to go to hell.

It's exactly what Paul is trying to get you to admit. And you know what? If God was only just, that's where it would end. For the angels, no plan B, no salvation. But now the very next word, it isn't and, and God killed them all.

It isn't therefore, therefore God wiped them out, flood of fire. We move to the next word and it's a great word found in verse 21 which gives us the third no that I'd like to try to weld to your mind through Romans 3.

No objection holds water, no one keeps all of God's law and number 3, no one but God could save sinners. Finally, we, we have some good news here. We don't deserve it, but God's gracious, God's merciful.

God’s Rescue in Christ and the Righteousness of God

I went to Warwick Castle in England. Anybody been to Warwick Castle in England? What do, at least a man with his young boy at the time, what do they want to do? We want to go down past the torture chamber.

That one thing I thought was interesting, it's a big helmet that goes on your face and it sticks a big thing in your tongue and if you gossiped and slandered, you'd have to wear that for a few days. Wow.

And you go past all of these instruments of torture and then you go to the dungeon. And I'm talking, it was a black dungeon, a dark dungeon and you imagine the king could just say, put the person in the dungeon for the next 30 years, they're never going to get out.

It was scary. I thought I would freak out in there. But what must I think if I'm in the dungeon and it's 20 years later and all of a sudden the light cracks a little bit, it's blinding my eyes because I'm not used to the light and someone comes in and says, you're free.

That's this kind of language. Christ does for sinful man and woman what they can't do for themselves. That's why if you come here on Sunday, I'm going to talk about Jesus and if you're bored with that and you want stories, I don't know what to tell you.

It's like Adoniram Judson, after 30 years being in the jungle, he came back to a church to speak for 20 minutes and they said, we want to hear about snakes and lizards and other stories. He said, I have one thing to tell you.

Here's who Jesus is. Verse 21, but finally God to the rescue, like when Wilbur said, God, deliver me from myself. God's merciful. God's gracious. There's help in time of need. But now the righteousness of God, see we're unrighteous, has been manifested apart from the law.

Can't do it earning it yourself, but it's right there in the Old Testament, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it. We're going to learn here that God just doesn't say like a grandma or grandpa, no big deal that you sinned.

God keeps his holy law. He doesn't lower the demands of his righteousness at the expense of justice because of what Jesus did. This next section, Leon Morris calls possibly the most important single paragraph ever written.

One man called this the desert island passage. Luther said this is the chief point and the very central place of the epistle and of the whole Bible. Stott said there was no ray of light, no flicker of hope, no prospect of rescue, but I know something about every unbeliever and I hope there are no unbelievers here, but if you are, I know something about you.

You have a personal relationship with God right now and it's one of mortal enemy. Say, I'm not mad at God. Well, he's mad at you because of your sin, because of who you are. He created you and he expects you to honor him and to obey him.

So how do we go from an enemy to a friend and how can God do that with just keeping his laws here? I mean, I can just tell you, I forgive you if you sin against me, but God can't do that because he has laws.

Now I love the song, Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so. These next verses parse that exact song out. You want to know how exactly Jesus loves you? It's going to be good. And I like to think of this as a, as a Polaroid camera.

Sorry you young people maybe don't know what they are. You have digital cameras and you can take pictures of everything at any time. The Polaroids, weren't they good? All the gray haired people are like, yes, because at the time when we had Polaroids or before Polaroids, you have to take a picture and then go give it to the guy to see what it was like or the lady there at the shop and then wait, you know, two weeks and they had like overnight stuff that you get, you have to pay for, but the Polaroid, you take the picture and I would become this piece of white paper and it was just white paper.

Slowly develop over time, filling in and do all these things to speed it up. Come on, I got to go. So here with Romans, you get like one hue in this verse, it gets a little darker and by the time you get to the end of Romans three, you're like, here's who the Lord is.

Even though I was that bad. You might save your wife from a bridge and pull her out of the car like my grandfather did. I don't know if you're going to pull out somebody who murdered your own kid, but God do.

What must God do? Because we can't do anything. We deserve wrath, but now we deserve doom, but now we deserve the lake of fire, but now we deserve execution. But now, and we can't give the antidote to ourselves because we're dead.

God has expected us to perfectly obey him. Do this and live and we can't perfectly do it. We need somebody to perfectly live the law for us. This is all driving to what Jesus did on the cross. We don't contribute anything to when Jesus says it is finished.

We don't say, yeah, you did 90 and my faith is worth 10. You did 80 of my baptism is worth 20. You did like 70%, 99 of me coming to church and reading my Bible and do all these other things. My dad's a pastor.

No, when Jesus says it is finished, it's finished because all our works are tainted like filthy rags. You can't add anything to the work of God. You can't get to heaven by keeping the law because the law's purpose was to condemn.

But it's in the Old Testament, verse 21 says, the law and the prophets testified at that. Even David said in Psalm 32, how blessed is he whose transgression is covered, are forgiven. And how do you get it?

You know, you're guilty. You know, you'll stand before God and you have no righteousness, but you want righteousness. How do you get it? What does the text say? Verse 22, the righteousness of God through faith, mark that it's not because of faith.

It's not on account of faith. It's through faith in not Buddha, not Allah, not in yourself, not in psychology, not in the pastor, not in the Pope, in Jesus Christ. Through faith, that means to say what Jesus did in his life and his death confirmed by the resurrection.

I just take God at his word. I wasn't there 2000 years ago. I don't have eyewitness accounts of it that I personally know who are alive today. I mean, we have eyewitness accounts in scripture and I'm just going to take God at his word.

I take God at his word that I offer nothing to salvation except my sin. Through faith in Christ Jesus, Christ was the one faithful to the law. I'm not. I'm just going to believe God. I'm going to trust in that and it's open to anyone.

By the way, I don't care what your religious background is. I don't care if you're circumcised, uncircumcised, you're from this country or not. What does the text say? For there's no distinction. For all have sinned, point in time, probably referring to Adam's transgression, and continually fall short of the glory of God.

There's no difference in the sight of God between Hitler and you or me. Find yourself an abortion doctor murderer and find yourself the most sophisticated Harvard professor of both sinners. When your goal is to get to Pluto by jumping, I don't care if you're standing on Everest or standing on the Dead Sea bottom, you fall short.

See, this is the lie of Satan in our own flesh. Well, there are a lot of other people worse than I am. Well, that's true. But in his sight, we move into the courtroom, verse 24. So glad with all the psychological counseling, and do you feel well, and how do you feel about this?

And when I went to Vienna recently, I wanted to go to Sigmund Freud's house and just see the couch because I like Sigmund Freud in psychology. No, because I hate it, but I want to just see what I hate so I know what I love, right?

It's interesting. And you go there, the couch isn't in Freud's house anymore, although all kinds of other things are because the Brits stole it and it's in some museum in London. We're moving out of that couch.

This is why I do it. It's, you know, I blow, I have temper because that's my Italian heritage and, you know, the devil made me do it. That's the modern evangelical thing. All these other, no, you're standing before God and he's going to declare that you're either guilty.

You sin one sin. I said to Grace the other day, how many sins does it take you to go to hell? I said, why? When you sin against God, one sin. So how are you going to go into the court of God? And he calls you, defendant needs to rise, and what is it going to take for him to say not guilty when you are guilty?

This word here explains it and are justified by his grace as a gift, full vindication. The gavel comes down and based on Christ's work as a substitute, not guilty. Justification means this, Jesus lived a perfect life, obeying the law, and God puts that to your spiritual bank account.

When you believe you've sinned against the law with your heart, soul, mind, and strength and God credited that to Jesus' account on Calvary and treated him as if he were a sinner, deemed him as a sinner, even though he wasn't.

And that substitution worked because God raised Jesus from the dead. Justified. A legal term, a pronouncement, standing before the law as innocent. I am so guilty before God from all my sins and because of what Jesus did, you know what?

I stand before God positionally as not. And if you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, the same goes true for you. How can that be? No guilt in me? Not a smidgen? You know, it's like when you go to the fair and you shoot those stars with that pneumatic gun and you have to get every little piece out of the star so you can get the prize, but whenever they reel it in and they look at it and they're like, Oh, I see there's a little tiny piece there you missed.

Christ's death covered everything. We are not liable to pay for the penalty because Jesus paid it. Hoyt said, It's vastly more than being pardoned. It's a thousand times more than forgiveness. You may wrong me and then come to me and I may say I forgive you, but I have not justified you.

I cannot justify you. But when God justifies a man, He says, I pronounce you a righteous man. Amazing. No wonder there's no condemnation. The opposite of justification for those who are in Christ Jesus.

We need perfect sinlessness. Jesus earned that for us. Do this and live. He did. People say, well, justification is just as if I never sin. Now, if I'm kind of in the no compromise mode, I go, Yeah, that's a kind of a lame answer.

But if I'm pastoral mode, I say, At least you're on the right track. Just as if I never sin. And just as if I perfectly kept the law. And Jesus is treated just as if he did sin, even though he didn't.

Just as if I perfectly obeyed the law. Past, present, and future. It has nothing to do with becoming righteous. This is being declared righteous. Christ's perfect sinless life. Credited to our account.

Our life of sin imputed to Christ's account. Jesus redeems us. We move from courtroom to slave market. Look at verse 24. And are justified by his grace as a gift. Remember, if you're Jewish, you're going to be thinking about Egypt.

Through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. A flood of things would come to your mind if you were Jewish. Redeemed. Slave market. This is real redemption. I'm studying the Civil War now. And when the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, that's about all it was.

It was an announcement. But this isn't just an announcement. Free from the slave market of sin. Liberated from the vice grip of sin. The penalty of sin. And one day, the very presence of sin. No wonder they sing in heaven.

You were slain and did purchase for God with your blood from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And looking at you today, we ought to be glad that it just wasn't the Jews. No wonder, Peter says, we're redeemed with precious blood as of a lamb unblemished.

No wonder people love to sing the songs, Redeemed, redeemed by the blood of the lamb. Or redeemed, I love to proclaim it. And then we get another word to help us understand how great salvation was. Verse 25.

Whom God put forward as a propitiation. God had wrath. God poured out His wrath on His Son as a substitute instead of us. By His blood, by His vicious death. To be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness.

He's got to uphold the law. Because in His divine forbearance, He passed over former sins. Now if you have the NAS, it says whom God displayed publicly. ESV says God put forward. This isn't a secret deal.

This was out in public. This wasn't a hidden execution. You know, some people say, well, why don't you come to our place? We've got the masons and we've got the special handshake and the special deal.

And it's only for the insiders and the special club deals. This is public. For everyone. Jew, Gentile, Jesus was crucified. God vindicates Himself. Verse 26. It was to show His righteousness at the present time.

So that He might be just. See, He doesn't wink at sin. He doesn't sweep sin under the table. He doesn't condone it. He doesn't forget it. He doesn't look the other way. No, His justice is satisfied. Because He might be the just and the justifier of the one who has, there it is again, faith in Jesus.

God vindicates Himself. Stifler said, The chief question in saving man is not how the man may be accounted just, but how God may remain so in forgiving sins. And the answer is the cross. The cross. That's why we're going to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified at this church.

There's always more to say about Christ. And what's our response? Verse 27. Then what becomes of our boasting? I got a lot of money. I got a lot of brains. I got a lot of brawn. I got a lot of boasting.

You're meant to boast. I've said this many times. God made you a boaster. God made you a boaster. That's why it's easy for a kid. We always used to have those classes, show and tell. In America, you bring something to class and then you show.

We always called it what instead of show and tell? Bring and brag. That's right. It's easy to teach a kid to do that because it's built in your nature to boast, to brag. But because of the fall, we like to have the boasting come this way.

But if our only contribution to salvation is sin, then we better boast. And who God is. And for the Jew here in context, I'm boasting that I'm circumcised. I'm boasting that I'm a Jew. And for us, I'm boasting that I go to Bethlehem Bible Church.

I go to IBS. No, how about I'm boasting in the cross of Christ Jesus. It is excluded. Verse 27, we've got to wrap this up. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, by the law of faith. Do anything.

If I could do something, I would boast. If I could do something to contribute to my salvation, I'd get to heaven and I would high five God. We did it. I give God a little fist bump right on you and me together.

Solve the problem. Verse 28, the summary. We hold that one is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. For those of you who are alive, if you'd like to get to heaven, it's through the work of Christ.

For those of you who are here and you've lost loved ones, your hope is that Jesus did it for them, not that they were good enough to do it for themselves. They, by faith, just said, I believe what you said.

The Bible says if you believe that he will not cast you out. Faith, friends, doesn't ultimately save anyone as a meritorious thing. Faith didn't live a perfect life. Faith didn't die on the cross. Faith wasn't raised from the dead.

Jesus saves, and it's through faith we get his righteousness. Verse 29, or is God the God of the Jews only? No. Is he not the God of the Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also. Since God is one who will justify the circumcised, the Jews, by faith, and the uncircumcised through faith.

Verse 31, God upholds the just demands of the law. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means. On the contrary, you Jews think we're throwing out the law? We uphold the law because we realize we trust in the one who kept all the law, Christ Jesus.

Hoyt said there's only one religion in all the world that can save men and still establish, exalt, and honor the law. Christianity. All other systems that are based on legality, on salvation by works, dishonor the law.

Because nobody ever kept it. The inevitable result is that they pull down the law a little bit so that man can win his salvation by keeping it. And that's exactly what happens to do. God, you're not so holy, and we're a little less sinful than we thought.

No wonder top lady wrote, nothing in my hands I bring, simply to thy cross I cling. Naked come to thee for dress, helpless look to thee for grace. Foul I to the fountain fly, wash me Savior or I die. Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.

Justification by Faith Apart from Works of the Law

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 8 .30 and 11 a .m. and Sunday evenings at 6 p .m. We're located on Route 110 in West Boylston, Massachusetts. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.