Sunday Night, October 21, 2018 PM

Yes, so the mark on Cain. Cain kills his brother. To end the cycle of violence, God places a mark on Cain so that anybody who sees that mark will not kill Cain because of the threat of vengeance sevenfold.

By this we learn that God is ultimately the judge. I don't know how you can kill someone seven times over. This is obviously a threat of God's personal vengeance on whoever would kill Cain and continue this cycle of violence.

And so God puts a mark upon Cain and ensures that Cain will be wandering about, exiled from his own family because of his murder of his brother. It does not say what the mark looks like, but I have in my translation, verse 15 of Genesis 4, so the Lord said to him, therefore whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold.

And the Lord appointed a sign or set a mark on Cain so that no one finding him would slay him. And so we're not told. We're not told what that mark looked like, but apparently this would be a sign that anyone would immediately recognize and then not attack Cain and kill Cain.

That's going to be a pretty effective sign, you know, but it would have to be something that they would universally recognize. So the, I mean, the men of old lived a very long time, so multiple generations may have encountered Cain at different times, but that mark would be on him and thus people would be reminded of Cain as a murderer and don't perpetuate violence.

I don't know what that mark looked like, you know, but it's not, it wouldn't be very difficult for God to appoint a sign that everyone could understand. He put a cherubim at the east, at the entrance of Eden with a flaming sword turning every direction.

And, you know, oh, that's a no-go zone. I mean, that's pretty clear, you know, and today our symbol is this, right? You know, that's the circle slash. Everybody gets that. So there's some kind of mark that says, do not kill him.

But it's kind of fun to use our imagination to say, hey, well, what could have it been that would have gotten such a good, such a drastic attention? I was like, well, well, I mean, for kids, I mean, what would that be, you know?

A Prophet's Sign and Ahab's Judgment

So, yes, Miss GM. First Kings 20. Okay, so we are in First Kings chapter 20. And beginning in what verse do you have? 35. Okay. So First Kings chapter 20, verse 35. Now a certain man of the sons of the prophet said to another by the word of the Lord, please strike me.

Prophets are prone to do odd things from time to time. Apparently, God told this guy, have somebody hit you. It's going to be part of the message you have to give. So the man refused to strike him. So what this man did was he disobeyed God's word.

And so notice that it was a certain man was the son of the prophet said to another, meaning the idea of someone with him in the school of the prophets do this, he disobeyed God. So he said to him, because you have not listened to the voice of the Lord, behold, as soon as you have departed from me, a lion will kill you.

And as soon as he had departed from him, a lion found him and killed him. Then he found another man and said, please strike me. And this guy was smarter than the first one. And the man struck him wounding him.

And so he's got this wound on. Now he doesn't look the same that he usually does. So the prophet departed and waited for the king by the way, and disguised himself with a bandage over his eyes. So here's this beat up guy with a bandage over his eyes.

And the king passed by. He cried to the king and said, your servant went out into the midst of the battle and behold, a man turned aside and brought a man to me and said, guard this man. If for any reason he is missing, then your life shall be for his life, or else you shall pay a talent of silver.

While your servant was busy here and there, he was gone. And the king of Israel said to him, so shall your judgment be. You yourself have decided it. Then hastily took off the bandage from his eyes. And the king of Israel recognized him that he was from the prophets.

And he said to him, thus says the Lord, because you have let go out of your hand, the man whom I devoted to destruction. Therefore, your life shall go for his life and your people for his people. So the king of Israel went to his house, sullen and vexed and came to Samaria.

So for King Ahab, this is kind of like his Saul and Agag moment where Samuel confronts Saul, you're supposed to kill all the Amalekites and all of their flocks and herds and to kill the King Agag. And Saul had left him alive and Samuel confronts him and says, because you did not obey God's word, you're going to lose the kingdom.

This is like Nathan confronting David with a story about the poor man with just the one lamb and the rich man with many sheep. And basically gets David to incriminate himself. You see, and so the prophet is doing this to Ahab, setting Ahab up to essentially pass judgment upon himself for what he did.

What did he do wrong? Well, when we back up to the previous passage, there is a King of Aram named Ben-Hadad. So in verse 13, a prophet approached Ahab, King of Israel and said, thus says the Lord, have you seen all this great multitude?

Behold, I will deliver them into your hands a day and you shall know that I am the Lord. Ahab said, by whom? So he said, thus says the Lord, by the young men of the rulers of the provinces. Then he said, who shall begin the battle?

And he answered, you. Then he mustered the young men of the rulers of the provinces. And there were 232. And after them, he mustered all the people, even the sons of Israel, 7 ,000. Now, Ahab is under instruction all the way back to what they're supposed to be doing in the land.

He is supposed to he is supposed to kill the enemy. See, and I think I'm assuming that there's a specific instruction to kill the enemy king. I'm thinking it's yes. Okay. So in verse 26, Ben-Hadad is continuing the fight.

In verse 28, that a man of God came near and spoke to the King of Israel and said, thus says the Lord, because the Arameans have said, the Lord is a God of the mountains, but he is not a God of the valleys.

Therefore, I will give all this great multitude into your hand and you shall know that I am the Lord. So he would give all these. So he is. So Ahab has been entrusted with a task of destroying the idolatrous Ben-Hadad and his armies.

And what does he do? He lets Ben-Hadad live. Okay. That's what happens in verses 31 through 34. Ben-Hadad, you know, basically says, pity me. Look at me. I'm sympathetic. Let me live. And Ahab says, oh, shucks, I can't kill you.

Go on. He makes a covenant with him, an agreement with him. And this is basically like David feeling sorry for Goliath after Goliath has profaned the Lord. Right. David didn't have any mercy or compassion on Goliath.

Ahab says, oh, well, you know. So you'll notice that, you know, Ahab's not known for being, you know, a stellar king or anything. And but we see that when you start reading from, you know, the whole chapter, you see that the Lord arranged these things, gave Ahab instructions, gave him opportunity, gave him the victory with far less people than the enemy had.

And Ahab had the opportunity to do the Lord's work. And he didn't. So the prophet to confront Ahab goes through this whole, goes through this whole effort. And the little story about the one guy didn't strike him, so a lion ate him, is the story within the story of do what God tells you.

Right. Ahab didn't do what God told him and this other prophet didn't do what God told him. And that's like the story within the story. Yeah, it all goes back to the, you know, several verses before, you know, to see what, why is a way out?

Why is this prophet confronting Ahab? And yes, sir. Yes, I do not. Excellent. Excellent. Yes. R .G. Lee. Yeah. I think Ahab had a lot of those moments where he was confronted and exposed for his sin time and time again.

And in that sense, Ahab is a bit of a foil for the whole nation of Israel being confronted time and again and called to repentance. So. Yes, Miss Laurie. Yeah. So we can go to Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5, either one, and take a look at the Ten Commandments.

And if you are a Roman Catholic, the first two are the same. Okay. So they don't split the first two commandments for obvious reasons. Because the thing about the graven images and worshiping graven images, they subset to, you shall know their gods before me.

And so they do have graven images that they venerate. But they say, it's not a God whom we venerate. Therefore, we're not breaking the first commandment. And then thou shalt not take the Lord, the name of the Lord thy God in vain is the second commandment for Roman Catholics.

And then they go on. And then the coveting, they split into two commandments. And that's how they get the ten. But it's important that they are distinct. They're distinct in the text. In Exodus 20, it says, Then God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of slavery, you shall have no other gods before me.

So that's the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me. So we think about, you know, these Israelites, what are the gods would they have known about? These are the original hearers of the commandment.

What are the heard about? What are the gods might they soon learn about? Baal, Molech, Marduk, Chemosh, all the Egyptian gods that were systematically shown as false through the plagues in Egypt. You shall have no other gods before me.

Now, this commandment, of course, for the Israelites, they would be probably associating an image with that false god. And maybe not even an image, but an area of the created order. They would see a river and think of a river god.

They would see the moon and think of a moon god. They would see the sun and think of a sun god and so on and so forth. And so the different gods have their different areas of influence in the created order, supposedly.

So they should have no other gods before the one true god. So when they look at the river, they think God made that river and fills it up with fish. When they see the light, see the sun, God made the greater light to rule over the day.

See, when they look around, they see all these things around them. They should be thinking, God made this and then thanking God, God gave us this. And so the very first commandment, you see, is so primary to our every waking moment.

Everywhere we look, you know, if we are in the case of the Israelites and the case of the people living in the ancient Near East, you're supposed to look around and see everything in the created order and think of a god here and a god there and a goddess there and a goddess there.

No, you should have no other gods. God made all of this and thank you God for giving us this, you see. So that is, that commandment, you would say, this is about how we worship. And the second commandment is how we get ready to worship.

Okay, so let's look at the second commandment. You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven or above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them nor serve them for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children and the third and the fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing loving kindness to thousands and to those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not make for yourself an idol to worship. Right, now how's that different? How's that different than you shall have no other gods before me? I saw a video not long ago in California, where else?

They got married to the ocean. Well, I've heard of tree huggers, I didn't know about ocean, ocean lovers, okay. Yeah, so when it says you shall have no other gods before me, this doesn't mean all other gods have to be, you know, put in their proper place beneath me.

It's no other gods besides me at all, that's the whole idea. And then when it comes to crafting a graven image, you can do that with your hands, you can do that with your mind, okay. And so I think the distinction between who we worship and how we worship is helpful.

I think that's a great way to look at first and second commandment, but we have to recognize that, you know, if someone's breaking the first commandment, if someone's breaking the first commandment, how did they get there, right?

How did they start worshiping a god besides the one true God? It's because they've broken the second commandment and they have crafted for themselves a god that they want to worship, even if they've done so with their own minds, you see.

So I was listening to a story about a world religions person and he had been brought up something Protestant, but then he was enlightened and so he went all over the world learning about different religions and different ways that they worship.

There's a company that will sell you your furniture, but you have to build it yourself. Anybody know what that is? Ikea. That's right. And he said that he came to realize that everybody really makes their own gods and constructs their own, the Ikea god.

You select from a catalog what you want and then you build it yourself. Okay, he thought that was a good idea. And he's very accurate in observing that that's usually what happens. And for instance, what kind of a god do North Americans like to worship?

How about a god who's all about money and materialism in your life? That's right. Yeah. There've been a lot of studies on this, but let me see if I get it right. I'm probably gonna get this wrong. So if I get it wrong and someone knows, and please correct me, I think it's called warm-heartedness.

I'm not sure about that term. Anybody know? You've heard this? That basically the consensus about the god that people think about when they see on the coin in God We Trust and say the Pledge of Allegiance, One Nation Under God, when people answer the survey and say, I believe in God, what is the god that they believe in?

They believe in a deist kind of god. A deist is a god who basically winds up the clock of the universe and lets it go. And a warm deist says he gets involved sometimes, every once in a while, and do a little bit here and there to tweak what he's got running, but he's not going to interfere in general.

Okay. And the therapeutic deism is all about, you know, so because everything about God is about how to solve your problems, whatever those are. So God is an avenue of therapy, right? And this is what has been, in general, taught in most seminaries about how preaching ought to be done.

So you identify what the major problems of people are, whatever your context is and your people, you identify what those problems are. And they're usually in psychological categories. If you take psychology, the categories, you're identifying them in those kinds of categories.

You discover what that is, and then you use the scripture to basically do counseling from the pulpit. Okay. So you have a big group therapy session. And that's really where most preaching is today. Okay.

So that's why it's, you know, six keys to stop feeling, you know, stop your indigestion or whatever it is, you know. And that's so, because that's what people expect. Right. Now, when we read through the scripture, we find out, you know, that God does have a concern for the broken hearted, and that he is concerned, obviously, about sin, sanctification, holiness, wisdom, how we're supposed to live our lives.

But the emphasis, time and again, is not about all about us, right? All about fixing our problems. There's the revelation of God and Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We're called to repentance and faith, that our lives will become both a verbal and an active confession of who God is, that we're in agreement with him.

Will that make our lives run smoother? Oh, sometimes. Sometimes it makes our lives run into a buzzsaw called persecution. But God's worth it. He's worthy. He's all glorious. And so people can create their own God while I feel comfortable worshiping.

And this happens over time, and it happens in a kind of a general consensus of what are we okay saying about God nowadays. I was interviewed not too long ago on a podcast I listened to, and the guy wrote a book called, oh, it was something about re-speaking God, or figuring out how to talk God again, because it doesn't work anymore.

His whole point is it doesn't work using the old language. We talk about heaven and hell, salvation, forgiveness, so on and so forth, that nobody understands these things, and we have to find out different words to speak about God now.

And so basically, the whole matrix of language that we have been given, the faith, once we're all handed down to the saints, we can't use those words anymore. His reason why? It doesn't work, right? I can't get people to agree with me.

So many different words. So if the primary motivation is what works, so the guys interviewing him were like, okay, so we got to talk different to people. Okay, so let's pretend I'm Donald Trump. How would you talk to me?

You want people to know God, you want them to be saved, so how do you use your new words to talk to Donald Trump? He's like, well, can we talk to somebody else? He said, no, no, no, no, no. Talk to Donald Trump.

He's got all sorts of problems. He's a good, and the person wasn't really comfortable doing that. He said, well, hey, listen, does Donald Trump, does he need propitiation? Does he need God's justice to be satisfied so he can be forgiven?

And the guy didn't like that word. They were like, do you need propitiation? But there's no willingness to talk about sin or forgiveness or the judgment of God, and so basically there's a great unwillingness to, so everyone's just taking the pulse, right?

So what's okay? Check with Google, check with Facebook. What's okay to say about God these days? And we'll check in with everybody, and then once we got our answer, then that's how we'll talk about God now.

That's crafting an idol. That's crafting an idol, and we've been given a clear word. That's why it's offensive, because it's clear, okay, and it cuts deep, and it rubs the wrong way. It always has in every single generation.

This was out of fashion 100 years ago. It's out of fashion 1 ,000 years ago. It's out of fashion 3 ,000 years ago. It was never in vogue. It was never the fashion of the day, and so that's the concern, is that we should have known the gods before or besides the one true God, but how do we end up with a different God?

Because we make that God in our own image, or however we like him, and when people start saying things like, well, God would never fill in the blank, we should be saying, well, the scriptures say, it is written, yes, the Bible says, which, by the way, is anathema to Andy Stanley, and he said he's never going to say the Bible says again.

That's right. Thereafter, he decided that Moses was never coming back, and then he found Aaron and said, hey, we need you to make us some images, and then when he made the images, he fell down and worshiped these images, and he said, these are the gods who led you out of Egypt.

Okay, they're worshiping images, and they're going to offer a sacrifice to him and have a feast about him, but they're that's right, and that's not the one true God, and you remember what Aaron said to Moses when he got confronted?

You remember what he said? They brought all this gold, I threw it in the fire, and this thing came out. That is the testimony of every idol, okay? It works. It came out all right. Look at the impact, right?

When we stop talking about the unpleasant aspects of the Bible, and when we stop talking about these parts about God that we've never really been comfortable with, guess what? Look at what comes out. Look at the results, right?

That's what Aaron said, right? So, yes, we can't worship God through images, through idols. Absolutely. Well, that's the best way it works, is syncretism, is when they were mixing Yahweh and Baal. They were mixing the worship of the Lord with all these other gods.

It was custom, it was, which, I forget, which king of Israel was it? They went to Damascus. They saw an altar there. No, this is, yes, to put that pagan altar inside the temple courts, because he liked how it looked.

You know, oh, that really works well. Let's get one of those. You know, things haven't changed all that much. So, yes, Ms. Jill. Well, for a lot of people, they would be venerating those images if they come out of a Roman Catholic or a Greek Orthodox background.

They would be venerating and they would be very prone to venerate those images. There's an artist on YouTube. Well, he has his own site. It's called Full of Eyes, and he has a disclaimer, usually, at the front of each one of his art projects saying, this is not for, you know, worship.

This is to draw your attention to this passage of Scripture, and he has to put that in front, because his stuff goes out to Brazil and to South America, and they're very prone to worship images. But is that bad if we have, like in a Bible story, in a little children's storybook, a picture of Jesus and so on?

And these are matters of conviction. However, it's important to remember that we are not monophysites. Good news, right? We're not monophysites. Good. In the 6th century, they were trying to clarify, once again, the nature of Christ, fully God and fully man.

And they wanted to emphasize that the humanity of Christ, that which was seen on the outside, was fully human. He has a fully human nature, and he also has a fully divine nature. And the divine nature does not leak into the humanity, and the humanity does not spoil the divinity.

But they are, in and of themselves, full, two different natures in one person. So that if you look upon the human side of Jesus and draw a picture of the human Jesus, you are not trying to create divinity.

It's a fine point, but it's there. And most people are a little cautious about it. Monophysitism. So there was concern that they wanted to talk about Christ as God to the detriment of his humanity, that somehow his divinity improved his humanity, like he was Superman.

But then he's not us. He was fully human. He was fully human. So we'll probably have to have a class on that. Yes, Ms. Wylene? Yes, and I think the point behind that even is this. If someone is a complete atheist, and they're totally a rejection of God, and they're just saying, you know, this is what I live for, yes.

More often the case, we find people who are, they say, I'm a Christian, or I'm a believer in God, and so on and so forth, and their whole world revolves around one of those things you just mentioned. What they're saying about God is that God's all about that, too, and wants me to have all of that.

So God is just a reflection of what they already think. First John ends this way, little children, guard yourselves from idols. That's how First John ends, because there were people who were contemporaries of the Apostle John who were saying things about Jesus Christ that were not true, saying things about God that were not true.

And why were they saying these things? Well, Jesus Christ can't be like that. That makes no sense to me, right? Meaning, if it doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy, I can't believe it. And so, you know, snowflakes were alive and well back then, too.

Since May, really, really, people here don't come to church to talk about ballgames. Amazing. Oh, we have to be on guard, right? This is guard yourselves from idol, right? We got to be on guard, don't we?

We do. All right, well, let's go ahead and close by saying the doxology, and then we might sneak down to the auditorium and see how the stage looks, huh? Praise God for...