Dr. James White: Righteousness Exalts A Nation

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If you'll turn your Bibles with me, please, to the book of Proverbs, chapter 14.

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Book of Proverbs, chapter 14. I don't believe that I have been one of those who has participated in the

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Proverbs study thus far, but here we are.

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And I would appreciate your prayers. I leave next week, again, only been home for two and a half weeks, well, a week and a half, actually.

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So we're going to, my family's going to do Thanksgiving early this year because Thanksgiving is so stinking late this year.

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And so we're going to do Thanksgiving and then I'm going to be in Pryor, Oklahoma with a dear church family there.

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I've been going there for years now. And so I get two Thanksgivings this year. I'm pretty excited about that.

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That's going to be sort of unusual. I'm going to sort of feel like I'm invading their space a little bit, but they're very welcoming folks there in Oklahoma and I'm looking forward to that.

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But then going to Covenant of Grace Church. And if you want to pray for a church, why don't you pray for Covenant of Grace Church.

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This is, this year will be the 24th year in a row that this poor church has had me in to speak.

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What is wrong with these people? I keep telling them they need to find a younger, better looking, more exciting person to have come speak, but they keep having me back every year.

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And so we'll be back there again. And I will be speaking on God's response to the

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LGBTQ revolution, so that might prove to be an interesting time.

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We'll see if we have any interruptions or protesters outside or anything like that.

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We will see. But as most of you know, I travel with an

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RV now, and so it's a drive out and it's a drive back. And so your prayers will be appreciated for that trip as well.

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So Proverbs chapter 14, before we look at God's word, let's pray that he would bless our time together.

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Father, we do ask that you would be with us now during this time, even though we recognize that the vast majority of our church body is not here today.

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We pray that you would bless them, bless them as some have the opportunity of watching and listening to the sermon, but we know that they're definitely missed in our presence.

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But be with us even in this brief time that we might focus upon your truth. Minister to us by your spirit, we pray in Christ's name, amen.

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We have entered into a segment, I'm sure that you will recall that when we began the study in Proverbs, you would have entire chapters dedicated to a particular topic.

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And you would have, you know, the wisdom sections and you could work through multiple verses that were in the same context.

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But what you need to understand is the book of Proverbs has different sections to it.

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And we have now entered into the section that is, in essence, a collection of sayings.

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And there are other collections of sayings in the ancient world, obviously most of them have passed away.

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But we have found some, for example, down in Egypt, where you have selections of sayings of wise men that have been collected together.

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And in essence, we've entered into that section of Proverbs where you have these pithy little statements, but there's no context.

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You can't start at the beginning of chapter 15 and walk through chapter 15 and establish a context.

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What you have are collections of short statements. And that makes it very, very difficult to preach through.

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You certainly, you really can't preach through verse by verse. All you can do at that moment is possibly tie together various of these statements from different portions in the latter parts of Proverbs into a coherent whole, or just make comments on one verse, then a completely different topic in the next, so on and so forth.

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So it's really a challenge, and personally, that's one of the main reasons I've let

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Jeff do it, because I don't think I can pull it off. So it is very, very hard to do that.

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And so it's also important for us to recognize that we are looking at what is called poetry.

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Now, sometimes, at least in my youth, when you would think about poetry, you automatically sort of put it on a different plane as far as authority was concerned.

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When you look at Romans, and you've got a thought -out argument, and there's some real authority there.

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We can dig into that. But what do you do with poetry? I mean, you know, poetry is a special section you did in English class, and some people liked it and some people didn't.

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But it rhymes sometimes, and it has different forms, and you have to sort of dig into that kind of stuff.

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And can you really communicate much in the way of theological truth in poetry?

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But I want to remind you of something. The Psalter is poetic as well. A large portion of the texts that are cited in the

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New Testament, a large portion of what Jesus quotes to us, comes from the poetic sections of the

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Old Testament. So we have to be careful to turn off that little switch in our mind that automatically lowers the level of authority of poetic material.

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Because God has given that to His people, the Psalter, the hymn book of God's ancient people, the book of Proverbs, again, a collection in different forms of God's wisdom given to God's people, and it's in a poetic form.

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Also, we need to, as English Bible readers, look at how this form of poetry functions.

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And I think it'll help us a lot, because the text we want to look at today, which is

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Proverbs 14, 34, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.

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Now what would be the normal way of handling something like this? Well, you would read that text, maybe we'd make some examples, we could talk about some examples from our society today, and recent elections, and things like that.

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And then you'd pretty much leave this text and go someplace else. And you'd camp in Romans 13, and places like that, and drawing things together to come up with sort of a whole topic discussion.

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But I want you to notice something. Let's look at a couple of verses, and just see how this kind of Hebrew poetry functions.

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So for example, back in verse 27, the fear of Yahweh is a fountain of life, to turn aside from the snares of death.

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Okay, so when we read our text, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people, okay, you have two lines, they're fairly short, they're related to one another, but, as you can see, this is two different forms, just within a few verses.

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Why? Well, in verse 34, you have a contrasting statement.

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You have a contrasting statement. Righteousness is contrasted with sin, exalts is contrasted with is a disgrace, and then you have a nation and a people.

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So those are your poetic forms, and they're related to one another in our verse, as a positive statement, followed by a negative statement that is to be interpreted in light of the positive statement.

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But in verse 27, the fear of Yahweh is a fountain of life, is the positive assertion, to turn aside from the snares of death is a continuation of that, it's an expansion of that, it's an explanation of that.

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Verse 28, in a multitude of people is a king's splendor, but in the dearth of people is a prince's ruin.

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And so now you have a positive, but then sort of a negative warning that comes after that, in the dearth of people is a prince's ruin.

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And so it's not a complete negation, but it is a warning that if the first is not fulfilled, then the second would come from that.

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Verse 29, he who is slow to anger has great discernment, but he who is quick -tempered raises up folly.

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So here you have a very, very common form in the Proverbs, where you have an assertion being made, he who is slow to anger has great discernment, but he who is quick -tempered raises up folly.

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So you have the slow to anger individual is being contrasted with the quick -tempered individual, and the first has great discernment, but the second man raises up folly through his quick -temperedness and his anger.

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And so you see, well, in verse 30, a tranquil heart is life to the body, but jealousy is rottenness to the bones.

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Now, a tranquil heart could be contrasted with all sorts of things, but in this particular verse, it's being contrasted with jealousy, a very strong emotion that eats at a person's heart.

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So a tranquil heart, life to the body, you know, you could probably expand upon that one for a long time, all the studies that have demonstrated the great health benefits of having a tranquil heart, of being an individual who is trusting in God over against an individual that the jealousy is rottenness to the bones.

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It results in a lack of health that literally impacts our bodies.

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Now, they couldn't do double -blind studies in those days and things like that, but you have this kind of wisdom that has been confirmed in our own day by methods that certainly no one who collected these sayings together could have ever even imagined would be applied.

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But the point is that a tranquil heart could be contrasted with an angry person, with a discontent person, there's all sorts of things it could be contrasted with.

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And that's what you'll find in the rest of Proverbs, is you'll find portions of these wisdom snippets, these wisdom statements repeated with a different application made, with a different contrast made.

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That's what the collection is intended to give to us. And so one of the problems, well,

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I'll tell you a story. Years and years ago, Kelly and I, well, we met at a very, very large

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Southern Baptist church, and it was, you know,

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I'm very thankful for my time there. Kelly and I got to sing in a singing group there and travel around and do things like that.

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That was great when you're, you know, teenagers to have that kind of church and had that kind of ministry and stuff like that.

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And I learned a lot there, but it was a big church.

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It's still, well, it's physically a big church today. It's not so much a big church.

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In fact, my understanding is they actually meet in the chapel anymore. They can't afford to turn on the air conditioning in the big, huge building that seats over 4 ,500 people because they don't have that many people attending.

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But back then we did, and in fact, when we were there, there were 20 ,000 members in that church.

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You could never find more than 7 ,000 of them at any given Sunday, I can assure you of that. So it was a very large place.

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And so it had a big budget, big, big budget, and was greatly in debt as far as, you know, building those buildings and bonds and all the rest of that stuff.

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So at least once a year, you had to have the big tithing push, the big push to, you know, keep that budget rolling and keep things operating.

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And it was in that context once that I heard the pastor who had always preached from the time that I first started attending there in 1977 or 78,

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I think it was 78. From the time I started attending there, he had always used the

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New American Standard Bible. And so one

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Sunday night, as a part of the stewardship emphasis type stuff, he gets up and he says, and if I recall correctly,

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I didn't look it back up again, but I think it was in Psalm 78, he says, and I will be reading from the

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King James version of the Bible. And I was like, okay. And so he gets to the verse that he's going to focus on.

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And the reading of the King James is very, very different than the NASB.

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And his whole sermon was based on that differing reading in one line of Hebrew poetry.

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And if you looked at the NASB, it didn't make the point that the whole sermon was on. The whole sermon ended up being, don't steal from God.

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But the actual meaning was, don't tempt God. It didn't fit. But he went to a translation that would substantiate the argument that he wanted to make, and that is you all need to be turning in your tithing cards and that kind of a situation.

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And so I have seen how Hebrew poetry, how verses that, when we look at verse 34, when we look at our particular verse for today, the verse before and the verse after do not provide a running context for the verse we're looking at.

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And so there's a danger. When you want to go looking for a verse to substantiate a sermon you want to preach,

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Proverbs is your place to go, because you're going to be able to find that kind of a verse someplace.

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And since there's no wider context, you can sort of go, well, hey, it says it right there.

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Does that make all of this unuseful? No, of course not. When we look at what verse 34 says, we want to put it into a broad biblical context and category.

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But we also need to be careful that we don't press the text beyond what it itself is saying.

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Because the problem is you then end up with people who can come back and push back and say, ah, but here's an example from Scripture where your application is not necessarily true.

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And so you have to be very, very careful in being fair and honest in handling this kind of text and not turn it into your own personal plaything.

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If the application is not firmly rooted in what you find outside of Proverbs, what you find in other texts of Scripture, well, then you need to be somewhat careful in your application and how you're using these types of texts.

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So how would we recognize that? Well, for example, he who is slow to anger has great discernment.

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He who is quick -tempered raises a fault. He who is slow to anger has great discernment. Well, there's a specific term that is used that you can write down.

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And if you're playing Scrabble during Thanksgiving or Christmas season, you can get some extra points for this one.

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But it is a gnomic truth, a gnomic truth, G -N -O -M -I -C, if you're taking notes, a gnomic truth, a general statement that is being made.

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And is it not true that you could contradict that statement?

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Could you not find a mass murderer someplace who was very slow to anger but had no discernment?

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Well, yeah, obviously. If you're looking to find some way of contradicting, finding a contradiction in Scripture, what you do is you find a general statement, and then you point to a contradiction.

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So, you know, the wicked is thrust down by his own evil.

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Well, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, isn't there an entire psalm about how the wicked prosper and their death is easy?

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And we see it all the time. We see people, we can think of names right now, of very, very evil people who have used the governor,

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I could get in trouble with this, the governor of the state of Illinois, J .B. Pritzker, billionaire, has announced that with the incoming administration that his state is going to remain a safe place for the mutilation of children.

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Now, he didn't say the mutilation of children, did he? No, they will always use some kind of other language.

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They will use euphemisms. And let me just say this in passing, a society that can be satisfied by meaningless euphemisms is a society that is degrading right before our eyes.

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We saw that, we see that with reproductive rights all the time. And when you call abortion health care, that makes as much sense as saying carpet bombing is urban renewal, okay?

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It's absurd on its face, and yet a large portion of our leaders on both sides of the political aisle traffic in that kind of meaningless verbiage.

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And they, so, and unfortunately, the next, our youngest generation has heard it so much that they don't even recognize that they're the ones being abused by it.

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They are the ones being abused by it. So, keep that, I just, that was not part of my thinking before we started this, but I just can't help but think how often language is used as a weapon in our day and we just sit idly by and don't say much about it.

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We can't do that. So, the point is, when we look at gnomic truths as we have in the text of Proverbs, we need to recognize that it would be very easy to create alleged contradictions rather than taking these gnomic truths and bringing them together into an entire worldview.

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And recognizing that, yes, there are times when, in God's providence, he allows very wicked men to live in the lap of luxury.

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I'm sure Pritzker has, doesn't have to worry about anything, he's a billionaire. And yet he's using that wealth to promote the destruction of God's creation and he's doing it purposefully.

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It is direct rebellion. And I hope there is somebody that would be in his life that would warn him as to what is coming for him.

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And sadly, I'll just mention this in passing as well, when I was in the milieu of Christianity in which

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I was raised in, in more of a fundamentalist arena, I would hear people,

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I remember clearly my mom taking me to a church once where there was a guy who did an entire sermon on the evil of pantsuits.

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I'm looking at you ladies, no. That was the whole sermon.

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And in those churches, that was perfectly fine. That was sort of considered being prophetic, to speak against the degradation of our society is to speak against pantsuits.

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But the idea of standing behind a pulpit and saying to the governor of a state that you will be held accountable by God for what you do as governor of that state was unthinkable.

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It was unthinkable. You weren't to do that. Why? Because that's transgressing the boundaries.

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The pantsuits are what's going in the church, so we're good at going after that. But the idea of saying to the magistrate, you will be judged by God for what you do as the magistrate, ooh, now you've become a radical when you do something like that.

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But that's exactly what we need to be doing. And I certainly hope that there is someone,

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I know the ears are often closed, but that doesn't change the reality that we are called to be faithful and to give a prophetic word to those who have been placed in positions of authority that a day of judgment is coming.

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And they will be judged on the basis of what God has revealed. So anyway, two mini sermons there that you're getting for free.

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So when we look at these general statements, we need to make application and recognition that you can find an exception.

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We read the one about in a multitude of people, verse 28, in a multitude of people is a king's splendor but in the dearth of people is a prince's ruin.

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But there have been godly princes and kings who were godly princes and kings over a small people.

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So you go, oh, see, no, there's a general idea that a king who rules over a mighty nation is going to have more splendor than one who has a poor, impoverished, and small nation.

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That's the general idea that is being applied. And so what we have to do when we look at verse 34, which let's be honest, is a verse that you have heard cited over and over and over again.

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And you might go, you know, I've never heard it cited in context. Well, let's be honest, there isn't any context to cite.

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It's one of those general statements because, you know, you look at the preceding verse, wisdom rests in the heart of one who has understanding, but in the midst of fools is merely made known.

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There is no meaningful, you're trying to make something up if you try to create a meaningful connection between verses 33 and 34.

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Likewise, verse 35, the king's favor is toward a servant who acts insightfully, but his fury is toward him who acts shamefully.

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These are gnomic statements that have been put together, and they have not been put together to try to force us to come up with some zany idea of what the context is.

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We'll leave that for the folks on TBN, okay? We'll let that... You know, it's funny, that used to get more laughs.

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I don't think anybody listens much anymore to that. That's sort of...

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I used to be able to say the channel between 20 and 22, and everybody in Phoenix would go Mm -hmm, mm -hmm.

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And now everybody's like, what? What's... Channel? What? What do you... What's a channel? I don't...

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UHF? No? Let's see. Wow. We used to...

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Oh, never mind. It's just so sad anymore when

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I start talking about stuff from my youth and everybody's just sitting there going, well, the old man's wandering down memory lane again, you know.

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And my family does that, too. That's the hard part. Jeff used to do that, but he's getting up there now, man,

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I'm going to tell you. In fact, I've got to tell you. I'm going to get to the texture eventually, but I've got to tell you.

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Last week, they were in Germany, and the church they were at there in Frankfurt is a church that I used to visit pretty much yearly for a number of years while I was traveling over there.

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And so I know them really well, and I speak... I actually speak

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German, unlike Jeff, who doesn't. And so they had me...

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They were speaking there, and then they had me come in via Zoom to do a little short 15, 20 -minute thing at the end of one of the evenings.

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And so I started off my talk with a little

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German, where I asked the people, please do not point out how much white

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Brother Jeff has in his beard, because it might make him a little traurig, a little sad.

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And then I asked Tobias, who was translating me, who would be translating me from English into German, not to translate that part.

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Unfortunately, Jeff was sitting next to someone who violated my desires, and they translated that for me, for him.

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But even from here, Jeff, it is amazing. You're right behind me. Wisdom, yes, yes, yes.

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If you want to say that's what it is, that's cool. All right. I think it's just getting old, that's all. So anyhow, that was a lot of fun.

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And do pray for them over there, believe you me. I was... I've been...

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I haven't done it now for about six months, but I've been teaching church history for them for a number of years. And so I was teaching church history for them when they were going through the

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COVID stuff. And man, they had it really hard over there, and they could again in the future.

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So trying to do abortion ministry there, yeah, it is a tremendous challenge.

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Pray for them. Okay, so with all that said, am I saying or am

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I even suggesting that it has been inappropriate for Christians for many, many years to quote

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Proverbs 14, 34, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.

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Let me give you an example. When the term

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Christian nationalism started floating around, mainly thanks in our circles, in Reformed circles, to the publication of Stephen Wolf's book by Canon Press.

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As you know, Canon Press, Moscow, Idaho, Christ Church, Douglas Wilson, controversial figure, you know that we have very good relationships with all the people.

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I just spoke at the Fight, Laugh, Feast conference in Fort Worth about two and a half weeks ago.

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Was there with Doug and Toby and Chocolate Knox and Gabe and all the guys.

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And we have good relationships with those folks. But they published this book.

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And so some of you have seen that I have done a series, and we haven't ended the series, it's just Doug's really busy and I'm really busy, and we will be doing it again, called

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Sweater Vest Dialogues, where Doug and I would discuss things, frequently we would discuss things where we have what seemed to be disagreements, and then discover by the end of our conversation the disagreements were not nearly as broad or as deep as it might have seemed.

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But when that book came out, we did two Sweater Vest Dialogues, and in both of them my expressed concern about the book was something called sacralism.

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It is a confusion of the state and the church and the family. It's a violation of the separate spheres of sovereignty that those entities are to possess.

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It is a description of how Rome existed prior to the

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Reformation, and the Reformers were sacralists, they really were, but moved away from it, and the question would be why did they move away from that, and people would give different answers.

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Anyway, one of the first things that I said when this topic came up was, look, if all you're talking about when you talk about Christian nationalism is, blessed is the nation whose

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God is Yahweh, and righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.

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So I was quoting this text from Proverbs. If all you're saying is that, sign me up, because that's a general truth.

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If a nation exists on God's world that He made,

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He created it, He made us, He made mankind, as Jesus taught in Matthew chapter 19, from the beginning

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God made them, what, male and female, and He establishes the family, He begins that social order that's there, and if we want

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God's blessing, then we need to seek God's way, we need to rule, and we need to do law as would honor

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God in light of the fact that we live on His planet, in His world.

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That seems sort of basic, but important, and so what

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I would do in that first nine months or so, ten months after it came out, is

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I would say, look, if all we're saying is, blessed is the nation whose

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God is Yahweh, do we want God's blessing? I remember as a child, okay, let me just,

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I need to find my peeps here. Kate Smith, yes or no?

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Who knows Kate Smith? One, two, three, four, oh, thank you very much, thank you, there's some of my peeps.

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Kate Smith was a large woman, okay, she was a big lady, and what she was known for, especially in the 1940s, and you go, you weren't born in the 1940s, that's true, but let me remind you, what was my first job?

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Maybe you don't know. I was a radio announcer on KWAO Radio in Sun City, Arizona, so guess what music

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I played on a turntable. Yes, the music was on a vinyl 33

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RPM, sometimes even a 45 RPM record. It was from the big band era, sometimes the late 1920s all the way through the 30s into the 40s, and sometimes we'd, you know, do something for the really young kids and do something out of the early 50s, but Kate Smith, Kate Smith was very well known in the

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United States during World War II for singing God Bless America.

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If you've ever heard a woman belting out God Bless America, you were probably listening to Kate Smith, and I grew up knowing that song.

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Everybody in the society, if you started singing God Bless America, everyone would be able to pick up.

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I'm not sure that that would be able to be the case any longer. I don't think it really would be, but no one was embarrassed when you said

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God Bless America. I have a

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New Testament. I should have brought it with me. I have a New Testament from World War II. I bought it on eBay because I saw one that my fellow elder at my previous church had from his dad, who was part of the

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D -Day invasion, and it used to be our government would pay to print the

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New Testament and give it to all of our soldiers, and in the front there was a message from the then president, who was president for a very long time by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a message from President Roosevelt recommending to all members of the military that they read the

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New Testament and believe what was found in the pages of that New Testament. Can you believe we did that?

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Well, yeah, that's how things were done for a long, long time. When the D -Day invasion took place in 1944, the president called for prayer and fasting for the success of the invasion.

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Can you imagine that happening today? Don't think so. And so that kind of you know,

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God bless America, that was basic in the 1960s and 70s, and then everything started changing.

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Well, when we say God bless America, when 9 -11 took place, at least we're getting a little bit closer to modern history now when we talk about 9 -11, even though how many of you in this room were not born when 9 -11 took place?

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Wow. It's amazing. It's amazing. It seems like yesterday to me.

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It really does. And it's hard to explain to you younger folks the kick in the gut that 9 -11 was and how this nation, at least for a couple of weeks, seemed to be very unified.

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Seemed to be very unified. Well, at least until the Diamondbacks beat the Yankees in the World Series that year, so that sort of divided things up a little bit, but seemed to be really unified.

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You can go back, because we still have these recordings. Back then we recorded them on cassette tapes.

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But yeah, I know, the DVDs, or the CDs had come out, but it was still easier to use tapes.

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You can go back to September 13th, 2001, to the dividing line.

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First dividing line we did after the attack on the Twin Towers.

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And what I said then is what I would say, I would continue to say today. I talked about our nation.

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I talked about people talking about God's blessing, things like that.

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And I said, look, the only prayer we can honestly ask in light of our love of abortion and homosexuality, and think of all the stuff that's happened since then.

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We have gone way down the road since then. But I said the only blessing we can pray for is not blessing the military and blessing the economy and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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It's the blessing of repentance. Bless this nation with repentance.

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And you would be able to see that over the coming years afterwards if repentance really was what was taking place.

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But that's not what was taking place. Cause people to get hurt in the wallet, and they'll sound like they want to do the right thing until the money starts coming in again, and then forget that.

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God bless America with repentance. Blessed is the nation whose

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God is Yahweh. How many of you from Phoenix remember Channel 10?

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Few of you. Few of you. I got to tell the rest of you, when I moved here, and I've lived in Phoenix now for more than 50 years, when we moved here, there was a,

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Channel 10 was the CBS affiliate back then. And at the top of every hour, you heard the same words.

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Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. KOLTV, Channel 10, Phoenix.

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Can you imagine that now? Not going to happen. Not going to happen. But, that kind of blessing, that's what, from my perspective, blessed is the nation whose

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God is the Lord. Righteousness exalts the nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people. You can put those two together and make a coherent, biblical argument for what a nation should be striving for, to be successful and blessed by God.

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Most definitely. But, is there more to it than that?

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Well, yeah. So when we look at this verse, righteousness exalts the nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people, we want to listen to what it says, we want to be honest with the words, and we want to take it as a general truth, and then make application from there.

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So, the term righteousness is the Hebrew term zedekah. Zedekah, it's a beautiful term.

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It is used throughout the Old Testament, and it is used both in the context of being in right relationship to God, as well as in the context of moral uprightness.

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Righteousness. Zedekah is said to be the foundation of all of Yahweh's throne in the psalter.

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Righteousness and justice, they go hand in hand. God loves justice.

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God loves righteousness. All His actions are done in righteousness. There is a broad use of that term in the

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Old Testament that must be recognized. Righteousness lifts up.

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The translation I have here says exalts, but if you look at the underlying Hebrew term, the term ram simply means that I am right now exalting my right hand.

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Any kind of lifting up, and so you can lift up strife.

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You can raise up strife and anger. There's all sorts of uses of that term. And so, we want to be careful.

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We don't want to do the English speaking thing and go, ah, exaltation.

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Oh, I deal with Mormons all the time. No, no, no. Completely different context. Righteousness, which would be defined in Proverbs as consistency with God's law, walking in wisdom, seeking

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His truth. Righteousness lifts up or exalts a nation.

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Now, the two terms that are used here in verse 34, a nation and a people, is a contrast being made.

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I don't believe so. The goyim and the amim, the peoples,

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I think they're being used parallel in this particular instance. They're simply saying the same thing.

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That a nation that is marked by righteousness, by a consistency with God's truth and God's ways, that nation is lifted up.

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It is raised up by that kind of characteristic.

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Okay? But, in contrast, sin, standard

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Hebrew term for sin, katah, sin is a disgrace to any people.

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Now, if we do have any beginning Hebrew students, you might be really confused right now if you're actually looking at your text.

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It's the term chesed. And chesed normally means loving kindness, covenant faithfulness.

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But, in Hebrew, you can have the exact same consonants and sometimes even the exact same vowels on words that have very different meanings.

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This is an unusual usage in the Old Testament if you're looking at it going, I thought

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I knew that word. Well, you do, but it's a different word. It looks the same, but it's a different word. That's, hey, don't blame the

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Hebrews for that. How many words do we have in English that drive everybody who tries to learn English crazy?

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Because we use them 14 different ways. So, the Hebrews did just a few of them in comparison to how many we do.

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Sin is a disgrace to any people.

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Now, any, that's sort of an editorial addition. It literally is a disgrace to a people.

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Just as righteous, you know, if you're going to be consistent, I suppose, you could do it, righteousness exalts any nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.

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That would be a consistent way of doing it. But, sin, and that is a broad term that is missing the mark.

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It is missing the target. You have the target of God's righteousness and truth, and you've missed that.

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Sin is a disgrace to a people. That term people is often used of people groups and things like that, not just a political nation.

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So, what can we learn by looking at the contrast? Well, the contrast between sin and righteousness.

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And the only way you can define either one of these is by what? By God's law. You have to believe that there is a revelation from God.

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You cannot understand this short proverb without having as the background the recognition that God has spoken.

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And he has spoken, given what's being said here, to mankind in general.

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This is a lot of people who want to limit the moral and ethical impact of God's law to just the people of Israel or to the church or to the church today, even if they want to go there.

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But the reality is the general overarching statement requires us to understand that there is such a thing as righteousness.

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And may I point something out? Over the course of the past,

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I don't know, it seemed like eternity, but it's just the election season. It's hard to believe that was only about 11 months, but over the course of that, one of the most troubling things that I have seen is how many of our fellow citizens think that which is righteous is actually evil and that which is evil is actually righteous and good.

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Again, in my youth, that division was just beginning, but in general, there was a societal consensus about good and evil.

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And today, as we look around us, one of the greatest challenges we have, because if you're going to proclaim the gospel, you can proclaim

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Jesus Christ as the solution to man's sin, you've got to be able to define what sin is.

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And unfortunately, in our day, that is something we have to spend much more time on than we did in my grandparents' generation.

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There was a general understanding of what sin was then. There isn't now. That was a very troubling thing to see people in positions of ultimate political authority, describing as good and righteous things that from God's perspective are absolute abominations.

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That's where we are. But righteousness and sin require the revelation of God's law, and they have to be known.

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And notice, since it doesn't say a specific nation or a specific people, this is a general gnomic assertion that is applicable to all nations and all peoples.

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Any people that wants to be exalted on this world that God made needs to be inquiring as to what is righteousness.

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How can we order our society in such a way as to promote righteousness?

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That should be the interest of all nations of every nation.

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How many nations are concerned about that? How many nations are only focused upon their own self -interest?

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And I include our own. I include our own. How many are concerned to see righteousness flourish amongst the people?

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That is how a nation will be exalted. But how will any people experience disgrace?

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Embarrassment? How will that happen? By being marked by the accepted and regular practice of sin amongst its people.

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When a people is marked by sin, marked by rebellion, marked by a rejection of God's ways, they will be disgraced.

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That people will be disgraced. Before whom? Well, certainly before God, before the angels, before the testimony of heaven, but I would also say, in the long run, history itself, because God's the one who writes it.

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They'll be disgraced. And we look back through history, and we can see this.

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We can see how nations have been raised up by God, and then they fell.

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Why? Very frequently, it's the same cycle. And in all of it, you have sin becoming a normal, regular, accepted part until it becomes the very essence of its leadership as well as those living in the land.

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That becomes disgrace. And so we have to ask any nation, do you wish to be disgraced before God?

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Do you wish to be disgraced before history, before the rest of the world? Then you should not be doing anything that specifically promotes the practice of sin, which again begs the issue, who gets to decide that?

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And once you no longer have a word from God, there's only one group that gets to decide that, the state itself.

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Oh yes, back in the olden days, it was the king. The king got to be the ultimate example.

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Think of the power that Nebuchadnezzar had, for example. And yet God was gracious after some interesting humiliation to reveal to him,

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Daniel chapter 4, no one can turn back the hand of God. He came to understand that he was but a creature.

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But the state, that nameless, faceless entity, if the state does not see itself as being under God's rulership and see itself as having the necessary function of promoting righteousness, that state will become

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God and that state will promote sin unto its own humiliation and disgrace.

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History shows it over and over and over again. And that's what we need to be saying.

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We may have been given a few years here. We may have been given a few years.

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Let me tell you something. Some of you young folks, you go, yeah, four years. Four years is a blink of an eye.

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And I'm not sitting here saying, oh, we've got righteous leadership now. No, we don't. No, we don't.

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And in fact, there's some things that I'm hearing being said that scare me. I'll be honest with you. And when it comes to abortion, oh, my goodness, what a mess.

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What a mess we're facing. But if we have a window, what do we need to be communicating to those around us?

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Well, first of all, we need to communicate to our own families, our own children, our own grandchildren. Yes, most definitely.

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We cannot just assume that. We have to be able to explain to our young people why, for their own benefit, they need to remember

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God's ways and God's law and seek righteousness in their own life. We need to be able to explain that.

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But we need to risk, and maybe it'll be a little bit less risky for four years than it would have been otherwise, but we need to take the risk to communicate to those around us what they need to hear.

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And that is they're living in God's world. They're going to be judged by the one that he has chosen,

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Acts 17 31, and has given evidence to everyone by raising him from the dead that he's going to be the judge.

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And he's going to judge righteously. And you need to know what standard by which he is going to judge.

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You say, that sounds like the guys walking around the sandwich signs saying, you know, Armageddon's going to happen tomorrow.

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No, not really. But I do understand how if the

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Lord does not grant open ears, we will be viewed as the crazy people.

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But when I stand before God, I don't want him asking me, why didn't you testify to what

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I told you? I gave you the very words to speak. Why didn't you do it? Well, I didn't want to look crazy.

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That's not going to fly. That's not going to fly. So it is a general truth.

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Righteousness exalts a nation, lifts it up. If you love your nation, then do everything in your power to promote righteousness in that nation.

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Sin, and only God gets to define it, sin is a disopportunity to be a prophetic voice in our land and encourage all other believers to do the same thing, to testify to this nation.

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God's judgment comes upon any people who become marked by the simple practice of sin.

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And right now, we are marked by that. How long will God's patience endure is the question.

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That's a question this nation and every other nation in the West needs to be asking itself right now.

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Let's pray that God will continue to use us. We have four more years, probably, of pretty much unfettered proclamation, apologia studios, getting the message out.

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Let's not become tired. Let us press forward and be used of God to his honor and glory.

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Amen? Amen. Let's pray. Father, we do ask that you would encourage us, that you would place within us a true desire, not only to experience righteousness in our own life.

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Yes, we know we have the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, but to experience righteous living in our own life.

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But then to use us to bring that message to all around us that righteousness exalts a nation.

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If you want this nation to be exalted, we must seek righteousness, and we must allow you to define what that righteousness is.

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Give us the words to speak in whatever context you place us, that we might be faithful servants of Jesus Christ.