April 9, 2017 In Defense Of God by Pastor Josh Sheldon

I'll turn please in your Bibles to the book of Romans in chapter 7 as we continue in this series on the book of Romans.

This morning's text is chapter 7 verses 7 through 12. Let me read these to you.

What shall we say then? Excuse me, let me try again. What then shall we say? That the law is sin?

Sin? By no means, yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.

I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, you shall not covet. But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.

Apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive, and I died.

The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.

So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, and righteous, and good.

May God bless the hearing and the preaching this morning of his holy word to us.

Now, as we've been going through this book of Romans, you may have noticed that the Apostle Paul has been doing something at kind of a steady rate here.

He's been steadily stripping us of something. Stripping us of all hope that we may have of becoming right before God by any means other than faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ. This is it. Everything else is being stripped away. It's the rubbish that Paul speaks of in Philippians chapter 3.

Your effort to make yourself holy is futile. Your effort to become right before God by following his holy, and righteous, and good law just is futile.

Not that there's anything wrong with the law, as we will discover as we go through these verses, nothing at all wrong with the law.

What's the problem? The problem is us. As the law accomplishes its purposes in us, it shows us our need to step away from the law and flee to what?

Jesus Christ. Him alone. Paul has left us bereft of any hope other than him.

What God the Father has done in him, the Son Jesus Christ, to satisfy his demands by his law on us.

Satisfied in Christ. And that's the only hope we have. And we can't move forward in this book of Romans and understand chapter 8, or 9, or 10, or 11, or any of it, if we get not this.

In chapter 3 he described our hopelessness outside of Christ by telling us that we have sinned, each and every one of us, without exception, all having fallen short of the glory of God.

He's proven that faith superseded the law as the means of attaining this righteousness by showing how

Abraham was reckoned, was imputed with righteousness centuries before the law. Chapter 5 was about our representative heads, this federal idea that we worked on,

Adam in whom we all sin, Christ in whom we are made righteous. And then chapter 6, in the first part of this chapter, chapter 7, they told us how we are no longer bound to the law because in Christ we have died to it.

Now if it sounds to you as if Paul has been denigrating the law of God, if your ear hears him saying that there's some inherent fault in the law itself,

I can only tell you that you're not alone. You're not alone if you're thinking that way, having gone through Romans with us.

Paul's first readers some 2 ,000 years ago seemed to have thought the same sort of thing.

Because Paul is anticipating this question. They say to him, Paul, did you just say that the law to which

I have died and am no longer bound, are you saying that there's something wrong with the law itself? Was that the defective thing?

Is the law sin to them and to us and to any and all who think there's something wrong with any jot or tittle anywhere in God's law, the answer is immediate, the answer is unequivocal.

By no means. By no means. This echoes chapter 6, verse 2, where the same response is given to whether sin is acceptable because it magnifies

God's grace. By no means. Or chapter 6, verse 15, where that is the answer to whether we might sin because grace has overruled the law.

Shall we sin because we're under the grace and not the law? By no means.

One might say, heaven forbid. Some translations well say, may it never be.

Nothing could be further from the truth than to suppose that Paul has placed an equal sign between God's law and sin, which is the way the original text would have it.

Law, sin. Law, equal, sin. May it never be.

By no means. Heaven forbid. Drive the thought from your mind. Nothing could be further from the truth than that.

The law reflects the nature of him who gave it. And it is, as Paul concludes at the end of this short section, holy and righteous and good.

Sin, in every way imaginable, is none of those things. In fact, the two are quite the opposite of one another.

Now, Paul hasn't quite arrived yet at the topic we call sanctification, the process whereby the

Christian grows in holiness and righteousness, becoming more and more conformed to the image of Christ.

He's still in the category, the theological category of justification, a one -time act whereby sins are forgiven and the sinner who flees in faith to Christ, having repented of his sins, is forgiven and by that faith declared righteous by God.

That's justification. And this is what Paul is still speaking of, justification.

So what does the law do? After all these verses, all these passages, driving us away from the law, what does the law do?

Well, it defines sin. It defines sin. And sin, once defined, takes form in our actions.

And this is what the law highlights. This is what the law actually does. This is the agency of it. The law makes you aware of your sin, proving that it, the law, is good, and sin, the opposite of the law, is evil.

Is that simple for you? What does the law do when you read Psalm 119 and read about all the glories of God's law?

If you look in Exodus and Leviticus and those sorts of books and read the precepts of God's law, what's the purpose for you today?

To become aware of your sin. And becoming aware of your sin by looking at God's good and holy law, you see how good it is and how bad sin is.

Our passage begins with the question, is the law sin? And there's two answers to it that Paul actually gives.

He answers the same question twice. He begins, is the law sin? The first answer is the last part of that verse seven.

For if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. And then, quickly, the example of covetousness.

The second answer, that's the first answer. The second answer is the last verse.

It's verse 12. So the law is holy and righteous and good. So very simple outline for these verses.

First, the law's work in exposing sin. And second, sin's work in exposing our nature.

And third, the conclusion of the matter. Now there is one piece of housekeeping

I need to deal with up front. We need to determine, we need to define, who is

I? What is meant by I? And it begins very quickly in here, yet if it had not been for the law,

I would not have known sin. It produced in me.

I was once alive, and so forth. Who is I? Who does the

Apostle Paul mean? Commentators are divided as to whether he means himself.

Is he giving us an autobiography? Is he speaking of his personal experience? And if it's his personal experience, is he speaking of himself before or after he was converted?

Which I is that if it's Paul? Or is it a royal, an inclusive sort of I, the royal we as we say?

In casual discussions with many of you, we're almost as divided as the commentators are.

This is important. And we're preaching, we're not giving you a lecture, so we're not going to devolve into a lecture on this.

But this is important because the answer here needs to carry us through the rest of this chapter and really beyond that.

So you need to know my conclusion. For those of you who are very familiar with this book and the controversy around who is

I and the importance of determining who that I actually is, I'll tell you in just a moment who

I think I is, but I'm not going to prove it at length here.

This is not a lecture. We're preaching the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. My job to you is to have a biblical reason for what

I think. And knowing that this is a fairly controversial idea, that there's very good men on both sides of this issue, then my job for you, my task in preaching, is to tell you what

I think briefly, why I think, and I say briefly because we've got a gospel to preach, but you need to know where I'm going with this.

And when I get to the rest of chapter 7 and chapter 8 and chapter 9,

I need to be consistent. So I've concluded that I is

Paul's inclusion of himself in Israel's corporate experience with the law.

He's speaking of himself and he's imbuing himself or immersing himself, as it were, in Israel's experience.

It's I, but it's us together. And it's that experience with the law. When I come back to Romans, not next week but the week after, this is going to be really important.

It's who is this I and at which point in Paul's spiritual journey is he speaking? But going all the way back to chapter 4,

Paul's opening questions, as it was here in chapter 7, verse 7, are corporate. They're statements or they're corporate questions.

What then shall we say was gained by Abraham? Therefore, chapter 5, verse 1, since we have been justified by faith.

Chapter 6, verse 1, what shall we say then? Chapter 6, verse 15, what then are we to sin?

And now chapter 7, what then shall we say? And he goes on in the first person singular to spell it out for us.

That was chapter 7, verse 1. Now we'll move on quickly here, but many of you think differently than this.

And as I said, my job is to tell you plainly what I think, briefly why I think it, and then to consistently preach that way.

If you disagree with me when we're done, and I don't mean these few verses, I mean really the book.

If you still disagree with me when I'm done, then I can only say that you have good evidence, evidence to support your position, and some of the greatest minds in the church agree with you.

And I can tell you that I have good reason for my position, and there's some pretty bright scholars on my side as well.

There's not something to divide over. I hold myself accountable to you to have a biblical reason for my position, and to keep it consistently, and to be open to correction, as we all must be.

So all that because I know that I, in chapter 7 of Romans, is a very important I, and we need to know what we think and why.

And if you disagree with me, and if we, at the end of all this, still disagree, at least I've been consistent as I go through.

And neither of us, I will tell you up front, are heretics, and nor, as much as is in my power, will I allow this to become a divisive point between any two people, or even within the church.

That's all I have to say about I. The first question, verse 7, is the law sin?

No, says Paul, it is so much not sin that the very knowledge of it is what both defines and exposes sin.

If not for the law, he says, I would not have known sin. And he goes on to the example of coveting.

I would not have known not to covet. I wouldn't have known what it is had not the law said don't do this.

Jewish doctrine and theology at that time held that the tenth command, you shall not covet, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his house, or his donkey, or his ass, or anything that is his, they felt that that tenth command was the summary of all the commandments.

Much the same way Jesus said that Deuteronomy 6 .4, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, he said that that was the greatest command, in that sense it encompassed all of the commandments of God.

Paul would say in Galatians 5, verse 14, that all the law is fulfilled, is summarized, is emblemized by this one word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

And in the same way, the Jews in Paul's day felt that the tenth command was the word that summarized all ten of them.

What he's saying here is that the law has done something with sin.

It has laid it bare. It has exposed it. Now we don't need a law, do we?

We don't need a law that tells us coveting is wrong. We really don't.

Cain coveted his brother's favor with God long before the law was set in stone, pun intended. The unhappy bitterness that coveting wells up within us makes it obvious to us that it's wrong.

It's sinful. What did the law do? Well, the law defined it.

The law gave it a name. Coveting isn't just something that makes you unhappy. Coveting isn't just a snarky attitude that tomorrow you might conquer and feel better.

What is coveting? It's sin. If we don't call it sin, then coveting is something that we will give a different name to.

I was just angry. I was just feeling this poor attitude. I need a good night's sleep.

I need to have a better dinner, and I'll feel better in the morning, and it'll be over. No, no, no, no, no. The law doesn't allow us to get off that easily.

The law exposes it for what it is. It's sin. Coveting is that.

The law says so. It is sin. Coveting is against God because sin is against God.

The law, Paul says, made him know this intellectually. He knows this now.

You can't read the law and come away and say other than that, that this thing is sin. We can go on in reading.

What does David say? Against you, you only have I sinned. Sin is against God, and the law gives it a name, coveting, as I've been arguing.

We can't just call it a bad attitude. Coveting.

This is what God calls it. The law has a way of doing this, doesn't it?

Giving things a name, things that maybe we don't want to name. It might be sort of moldering there in our spirit.

Something we know is wrong, but we won't call it what it is. We don't have the courage to call it what it is.

Read the law. Read the law and see what it says. If you read the law in the

Sermon on the Mount, then you know what adultery is. Now, we men, we turn our head and we look lustfully, even for a moment.

We might say, well, I was just appreciating her beauty from a safe distance, and God made her beautiful, and I was just appreciating that.

I have a roving eye. No, this is not what the law calls it.

When Jesus Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, says, you have committed adultery in your heart, we must call it what it is.

Murder. Calling your brother a fool. Hating your brother in the heart. We can call it all kinds of things.

We have all kinds of excuses. I'm not even going to try and think of examples of the excuses we make, because we're great factories of excuses, as Calvin told us, as he wrote.

But if you read the Sermon on the Mount, you read the law that the lawgiver gave in the

Sermon on the Mount, well, you can't call it anything other than murder or false oaths. They're not just peccadillos.

They are sin. The Bible has a way of doing this. Paul speaks of the

Mosaic Law, and then just one of the Ten Commandments, but the principle applies very broadly. Pulling no punches, having no fear of our opinions, the

Scripture calls any and all untruth a lie. If you say yes, but you don't mean yes, what does

Jesus say? It's not a mistake. It's a lie. If you say no, and you didn't mean no if we're equivocating, what does

Jesus say? You have lied. This is what the law does. It uncovers our sin, and it gives it a name.

There's just no way out. If you read it with open eyes, idols are not just images.

Idols are anything we place higher than God, and on it goes. The covetor may have known by his inbred conscience that it was wrong or at least not good, but the law calls it what it is.

Now you know. Now you know. And that's the first part of Paul's answer here.

The law isn't sin. May it never be. Sin is what the law exposes. Sin is what the law names.

So far is the law from sin that by the very difference, it exposes sin.

Next in verses 8 through 11, there's this extended proof of just how sin does its work.

Once exposed, once we become aware of it, once it's now in our face, as we might say today.

Verses 8 through 11, sin's work in exposing our nature. When we hear

God's good and holy and righteous and just and perfect law, what does sin do with it?

It makes us want to do exactly what the law says not to do. Or not do what the law says to do. He who knows the good to do and does not do it, it is sin.

And we could turn that around just as easily as a mathematical formula, and it still works just as well. Verses 8 through 11, sin's work in exposing our nature.

Now here we have that corporate and personal I. It is we he is addressing about an experience that's common to us all.

Before we go through these though, I want to make at least one observation about these verses. Verses 8 through 11. So I'm going to read them again.

But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produces to me all kinds of covetousness.

Apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive, and I died.

The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.

For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.

What we have here is sin personified as this living, breathing thing, seeming to have a life of its own.

It's sort of the way James portrays it in James 1, verse 15. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.

Think all the way back to Genesis 4. Cain was told that sin is crouching at the door.

Here in Romans 7, sin seizes. Sin produces.

Sin comes alive. Sin kills. Sin deceives. The standard way of illustrating all this is the old wet paint sign.

And you've heard it all before. I'm not so conceited as to think that I have to think of something new and innovative every time

I preach, or even a few times I preach. But the old wet paint sign, you see that sign and you immediately wonder, is it true?

Is the paint really wet? I mean, it's shiny, but maybe it's high -gloss paint.

And it's meant to be shiny. And I don't see anyone actually painting. And maybe it's been done hours or even days before.

And I'm in a county park, and you know how efficient our local government is. I'm smarter than that dumb old sign.

And then you lay your hand on it or just a finger, and lo and behold, the paint is wet, and you have sort of a mark of cane.

You are a transgressor, wondering if the sign meant anything. But if you hadn't seen the sign, you may have had no interest at all in that bench or the paint on it.

The sign just makes you want to test it. Other signs are ignored to much greater peril. Again, I've used this illustration before, and I'll use it again because I've actually been there several times.

At Nevada Falls in Yosemite, there's a place when you get up there, you've been climbing and climbing and climbing, and there's this nice outcropping of granite into the

Merced River. And it's just a good place to kick off your shoes, take a drink of water, and relax before you finish the hike and have the joy of going up to Half Dome.

Just downstream from that outcropping is Nevada Falls. And there's sort of a fence that's not very obtrusive.

And on the fence is a sign in many languages. And it says, in essence, something like this. Don't go in the water.

You won't get away with it. You will go over the falls. You cannot come back. You will die. And it says it in many languages.

You cannot survive it. And after services, after services, you can look up on your smartphones how many people disbelieved that sign and died because they don't come back.

You see, there's a desire to test the limits, to see if the sign is true, like the wet paint. There's more than curiosity, but there's this out -and -out disbelief.

You say, well, the water looks so inviting. I surely won't die. I can swim back. And sin is like that.

Crouching at the door, looking for an opportunity. This living, breathing thing.

This organism that seems to have an intellect to it. Looking for a chance to pounce on you.

Opportunity is a very interesting word. It's used only seven times in the New Testament, all of them by our author, the

Apostle Paul. It's a military term. And it means something like a bridgehead, a base or a circumstance from which other action becomes possible.

And just what is that bridgehead? What is that opportunity? Remember, it's sin that has the opportunity. It's sin that took the opportunity, that found the bridgehead.

What's our rebellious curiosity about the sign? It's reading God's law against coveting, murder, adultery, and wondering just how much of that I can get away with it.

How many excuses I can make that keep me in good graces with my friends, if not God. It's that desire to test the limits, to see if that sign that's put there for our safety, that can be proven over time if you take a minute to look, was accurate and the warnings were real.

And we just want to test it out. We just want to know. Surely my perception of the pleasure of that water is more accurate than that silly sign.

Sin, crouching at the door, jumps into action. It's not willing to let the opportunity pass. It found its bridgehead, this military term, this base of operations.

And it produces in us the very desire to do what is prohibited.

Excuse me. The last few words of verse 8 are, apart from the law, sin lies dead.

Dead here means something more like dormant. Much like Ephesians 2, verse 1, where Paul writes, you are dead in trespass and sins.

Not literally dead, but spiritually dead. Sin is like that.

It exists, but it's in sort of a dormant state. It's not dead, it's watching.

Not impotent, but waiting for its chance. It's looking for a favorable circumstance from which and on which to pounce.

It's the roaring lion of 1 Peter 5, verse 8. And look here.

What does it see? It sees the law of God. A law intended to give life to all who will hear it and do what it says.

Sin, like this living, breathing, intelligent, malevolent monster, hides away until our spirit is awakened by God's word, and then it strikes.

Did God really say? Is the paint really wet?

Is the water really that dangerous? And God, by His Spirit, in all

He's given us in His word, fairly screams at us, yes, it is that dangerous. Yes, the water, it will suck you away and kill you.

Yes, the paint will leave a mark on you. Believe me. And not the sign at Nevada Falls on Yosemite.

Not the wet paint sign. God's word. Not just going down a falls.

We're speaking eternal life here. We're speaking matters of eternal import. Did God really say?

Yes, He did say. Paul is taking us all the way back to Adam and the garden here.

Just as he had in chapter 5, verses 12 to 21, where he explained how we all died in Adam. In Adam, in the garden.

When Adam sinned, we all sinned in him. He was our representative, our federal head. And why are we born tainted with sin?

Why are we conceived in sin, as the psalmist says in Psalm 51? Because of Adam.

Because we were in him. Because he federally represented all who were in him.

That's the garden. And now we know how.

Look again, please, at verse 9. There in Romans 7. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.

Sin came alive and I died. The commandment is what he's talking about. The one given to Adam and through him to us all.

The commandment. The one unique command that he had. The only prohibition he had.

And what did we learn earlier in this book of Romans? When he, when Adam disobeyed, I disobeyed.

We all disobeyed because we were in Adam. Look again, please, at verse 10.

The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. It proved to be death because that threat was part of the commandment.

For the day you will eat of it, the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. You shall surely die.

In the Hebrew, mot to mot. In the Hebrew it means something like in dying you will die. There's no other choice here.

There's no other way. This is the commandment of God and this is the threat, or we could say promise, attached to it.

Had Adam not taken from that tree, he would have lived forever and we with him because we were in him.

Had he not, we would not. But he did, so we did. You see, there's nothing wrong with God's law.

Far from it. We can't add up quickly enough. We don't have paper enough for the superlatives to describe

God's law. The longest psalm in the whole Psalter is all about God's law. Psalm 119.

There's nothing wrong with it. It's not just a collection of aphorisms, little truths that you can kind of sort through and pick the one that fits you today.

It's more than a manual on how to live a more fulfilling life. What it promises, whether by way of blessing for obedience or punishment for disobedience, what it promises, it accomplishes.

Better to say God accomplishes because that word comes from God. God does do what the law says he will do.

Speaking recently, there's an episode in the old Happy Days series where there's this character, the local thug.

No, not a thug. He's kind of a tough guy. He's a nice way named the Fonz. He's telling not -so -tough

Richie how to scare off some guys who were bullying him at school. He's showing how to just give him a quick punch in the nose.

I don't remember exactly how the scene works. But it's basically a bluff. And Richie goes, and he acts tough, and he gives the bluff, and he comes to Fonzie at the end of the day and shows him his black eye.

He says, What happened? I did everything you said. He says, Oh, I forgot to tell you, Richie. For this to work, at some point in your life, you have to have punched somebody.

You have to have actually done it. Much more seriously than that, for example, our president took us quickly from threats of what we'll do if the

Syrians continue to gas their own people to actually doing something about it. At some point, you have to do what you say you will do.

And more seriously even than that, God carried out the threat embedded in the commandment.

Adam died. And when he died, we died. I died when sin came alive and exacted what

God had warned. God does carry out His word. Look please at verse 11.

Here again, for sin seizing an opportunity through the commandment deceived me and through it killed me. Where verse 8 said,

Sin seized the opportunity provided by the commandment to produce in us exactly what the commandment forbids, now sin deceives and kills.

And deceives, of course, is another clue that Paul is taking us back to the garden. The serpent deceived me, and I ate.

He deceived me. He gave me wrong thoughts to think about something.

I want to spend just a very short amount of time on this word for deceived because deceived in the Greek is apotao.

Apotao just means to deceive, to mislead. When Paul uses it here in Romans 7 verse 11, sin deceived me.

It's that same word apotao, but there's an ex as it were in front of it.

There's a short prefix. If deception is to make someone think wrongly, this compound word has more of a sense to seduce wholly or entirely.

I think Paul uses it here because it indicates that man was wholly, completely, entirely seduced by the temptation.

The effect was to bring death to the body, Adam died, and death to the spirit.

He was banished from the temple of God's immediate presence. Now, I'm not going to devolve into a lecture in Calvinism and its banner, tulip, but there's some support here in this word that he uses for deceived for our

T in tulip, total depravity. The doctrine that man as a result of the first sin and his transmission to all who followed is pervasively, is wholly, is totally affected by sin.

It's pervasive in us. No part of us is excluded from the inheritance of sin through Adam.

We're thoroughly tainted and affected at various levels, but in all our parts influenced by that first deception, wholly seduced.

So what do we learn here? What does the Christian take away here?

Well, think of sin as an organism of sorts. Think of sin as a living thing with intellect that can plan something that seizes and produces, something that lies dormant, and then when it has opportunity, when it sees the bridgehead, it comes alive.

And when it comes alive, what does it do? It deceives you. It makes you think wrong thoughts. It makes you say, well,

I just have that roving eye. No, no, no, no, no. That's deception. It makes you say, well, I'm just a little angry at my brother.

No. You've been deceived. It twists what is good so that by the time it's done, we can't even remember where we started.

We don't know what the original intent was. Have you ever been in an argument like that where you know you're right and the person you're debating, even if it's a good -natured debate, the arguments that come at you are so convoluted, but they sound so smart, and at the end of it you go, well,

I know you're wrong, and I know I'm right, but I can't prove it, so can we just stop and have a cup of coffee and be friends somehow?

Have you ever been in a situation like that? This is what sin does. It convolutes things to the point that you don't even really know where you started.

Wait a second. Yeah, God did say that. Wait, but I don't know anymore, and I'm so confused. There's so many factors you threw in there.

Your arguments are so other. I don't even know where we started.

Sin's like a cancer. Once awakened, it replicates itself. It grows. It spreads everywhere.

It finds weak defenses. And what do we find? We find excuses coming more easily.

We find that we give different names to things that the Bible gives plain names to, and we give softer, gentler names to them.

Compromise flowing more freely from us. One of the best self -tests we can do to see if this is us or you is to look for this symptom.

How do you respond, for example, when a brother or sister confronts you? Does it make you angry? Does it make you defensive? Do you criticize them?

Do you question their motive? Find another friend? Do you find a church that's more accepting, more loving?

I'd say beware. The cancer of sin may have taken opportunity and taken more control of you than you realize.

What does the Scripture call it if a brother or sister confronts you? It calls it edification.

It calls it brotherly love and concern. It calls it we need to grow together into the image of Christ who saved us.

Jesus Christ tells us to confront one another in Matthew 18, 15, and all the rest of it, 18, 15 through 22.

And what do we say? Well, you're just being judgmental. No, that's not what the Scripture says, though. That's a deception. Ask yourself, how do we respond to these things?

Just one sign I could think of that the sin is in there and is looking for this opportunity to say, yes, there's defensive pride.

I can do something with that because I can get this person to call it judgmentalism when really what you're receiving is true brotherly love according to the

Scripture. Just one example. The correction actually is fairly simple.

Not simple to do, but simple to state. Repent. Go back to the one whose love for you overcame their fear of confronting you.

Ask God to show you any wicked ways within you. Pray to the Lord to forgive and renew and go restore the fellowship.

Just as that one example, that one way to look in yourself and see if sin is deceiving you.

I can't give all the examples, but ask yourself in your attitude, what do you call it?

Whatever this attitude is, what's the name you give it? Now look in the Scripture. See what is the name God gives it.

If they line up, hallelujah, praise God, bless you. If they don't line up, repent and call it what

God does in each case. To borrow from Isaiah chapter 5, sin entices us to believe what

God says is good is actually evil. And to believe that what God says is light is actually darkness and vice versa.

And this is what I was talking about before. Sometimes these arguments come at us and they're so cogent and they're so well thought out that you just can't take them apart anymore.

I can't anyway. Let's not cluck our tongues as we apply this idea of things being misnamed.

Let's not just go tsk, tsk, tsk about that world out there and apply it to abortion, same -sex marriage and the like.

We should instead think of all the ways that we've let ourselves be deceived, ourselves be seduced.

Think of the examples. God gave man work. Work is a blessing. Work is dignifying.

I had a man in here once several years ago. I think it was the second or third time he was here.

And he actually told me, I need to go to another church because you didn't rebuke me for the kind of work I do.

I said, what? I was just stunned. He said, what do you do? He says, well,

I work at a Chili's or a Chevy's. I forget which one it was. And I make those animals out of balloons for the kids.

I said, well, do you do it well? He said, yes. Do you do it hardly as unto the Lord? Yes. Do you earn your pay?

I said, that in itself is a blessing from God and that is dignifying. I can't myself judge for you or rebuke you for the type of job you do.

But this is the kind of deception. God gave us work. Work is dignifying.

Work is a blessing. Work is how we take care of ourselves, our families, our church. What do we do with it, though?

We turn it into not just a means of providing for ourselves, our families, our churches. We make it an obsession.

We got to get ahead. It becomes all. We work how many hours a day?

How many days a week? How often does work take priority over times of prayer for ourselves, our families, in the church?

That's just one short example. God gave men and women the joy of cleaving together and becoming one flesh.

We turned it into exploitation. We turned it into self -gratification. In all these and others,

I'm going to leave you to ponder and pray on your own. But in all these sorts of things, we're deceived, holy and completely.

Sin, seizing this opportunity and using what was meant for good, and it becomes death.

Well, Paul concludes in verse 12. Paul concludes verse 12, so the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

The first answer was that the law exposes sin. If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.

I wouldn't have known what it is to covet if the law hadn't given its name. If we name things as the

Scripture names them, we run out of excuses very quickly. Verses 8 through 11 proved that premise.

And the second answer here is the conclusion of the matter. So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

Was the law sin? No, the law isn't sin. The law, by its very difference from sin, defines sin.

And that's what he proved. The conclusion now is unavoidable. It's inarguable. The law of God promises life.

It is the defect in us, inherited from Adam, which brings about the threats rather than the promises.

Sin, not the law, but sin is to be blamed for death. Spiritual death and literal physical death.

Our weakness. Our weakness. Not deficiency or clarity or power in the law.

Us. We. I. You. That's the problem.

The law is holy. Everything God says, everything God does is a complete and perfect reflection of this, his core nature, his holiness.

And the commandment, the discrete and the particular precepts of the law, these two are like the giver of the law.

They are holy as he is holy. They are righteous. They cannot mislead. Brethren, read what

God says in his word. Read what God says in his word. You will never be misled because it is a righteous word that he gives us.

They are good. Everything the Lord says is good and right and desirable and positive.

I hate to say you'd be happier with them, but you will be. Not because it's a how to be happier manual that we have in scripture, but because God is good.

And when he gives a good end to his commandments, this is what will occur. It's for her good.

The law makes us aware of sin. The law proves that it is good by showing how inarguably sin is evil.

So I would ask you, does this make you feel a bit hopeless? I mean,

Paul has stripped away all self -reliance. And he's been doing so for quite a number of chapters in this book of Romans.

So now do you feel hopeless? Do you feel like God has set before you a law that only condemns?

No. The law promises life. Deuteronomy 18, chapter 18, verse 5 says,

Do this and you will live, which our Lord Jesus Christ himself confirmed. Do this and you will live.

And as James confirms, yes, you can live. Do it all. Do it all. Don't fail at one point.

But yes, do it and you will live. But we can't do it any more than Adam could keep from that one tree.

And it's actually better to say we won't do it. We won't do it. We don't want to do it.

We know in our heart that the law is right, but we stick our toe in the water anyway. And we get our toe in the water and it's okay.

Then they wade up to their ankles. And I'm talking about the people who disobeyed that sign that I was talking about. And they said, hmm, it's not so bad.

It's pretty water. And all those people who were not coming in, well, they must be pretty impressed with me.

And they see what's like a little bit further out and it gets up to the knees. And the old backpacker's premise or saying is, you know, when the water hits your hips, you're buoyant.

Let's step out a little further. And next thing we know, we're heading for death.

Just like the sign said. Just like the law of God says. Does it make you feel hopeless?

But here he is. Here's Jesus. Holding out his hand, as it were.

Grabbing us at just the precipice of the fall. Saying what? Saying repent and believe the gospel.

What did Paul say back in Romans chapter 5? Therefore have you been justified by faith, justified against this law, made right according to this law, justified by faith in him who satisfied the law.

Believe in him. Repent and believe this gospel that he paid for your every transgression against God's holy and righteous and good law.

Believe that the sin that it uncovers can be forgiven. That by faith in him,

Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross, his sacrifice. This is faith.

And this is his satisfaction of the law on your behalf. If you will believe and flee to him for forgiveness of your every violation of that law.

Every sin that it uncovered. The same law says believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. The same law that condemns you for your covetousness promises life.

Eternal life. Joy forevermore as the psalmist puts it. If you will but believe this gospel and in him, the

Lord Jesus Christ who is the Lord of this gospel. It's not just sin actually that is this living, breathing thing though.

Not just sin. And I don't want to leave you with this idea that we have this science fiction kind of monster just looking for this chance to slay us.

God's word in Hebrews chapter 4 verse 12 says that his word is what? It's living.

It is active. It is sharper than any two -edged sword. It pierces to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and of marrow.

And it discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart. It discerns your heart.

It knows your heart. It's as living as God is.

It's an active word that has its way according to the power of the spirit that brings it to us.

As menacing as sin is. As menacing, as evil, as malevolent, as powerful as it is.

Even able to use what is good to your harm. God's word is more.

God's word is more. It is, as James puts it, able to save your souls if you will but repent and believe.

Amen? Heavenly Father, we thank you for the day that you've given us. This word that we have before us and by it we are convicted.

And Lord, we are made to know what sin is. And I pray, Father, that we would walk in your ways.

That we would call things what your scripture, what your word, what your good spirit calls them. That we would not blanch at this,

Lord. That you would guide us in your truth and in your ways. And that we would keep Jesus Christ and his sacrifice ever before us.

And knowing, Lord, that in him we have peace with you. We thank you for all this in Jesus' name.